Unchained Destinies. SARA WOOD
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ever before. And that scared her.
‘Sorry. Tell me what colours you want and I’ll do them,’ she said contritely, every inch of her aware of him—and hating the magnetic pull he was exerting over her. ‘It’s a shame,’ she said, struggling for normality. ‘I reckoned my scheme would look terrific——’
‘You reckoned?’ he interrupted sharply. ‘My office manager should have made that kind of decision, not you. Sándor Millassin.’
‘Antal,’ she corrected, watching him closely.
‘Of course,’ he replied, as bland as milk. ‘I forgot.’
She knew that was an out-and-out lie. Vigadó Gabór had the reputation of having a memory like an elephant. He was checking up on her! Must do better she told herself angrily.
‘Look, Antal was in a flap,’ she said, giving him an edited version of the truth. In fact, it was because the manager had been in so much of a flap, with his office in such chaos and the dreaded Vigadó due that month, that her bluff had worked. Antal had swallowed everything she’d told him about ‘Viggy’s’ generosity towards her. ‘Apparently you’d suddenly decided to switch your headquarters to Budapest and he wanted everything to look smart for you. He was far too busy making offers for the building next door and ordering equipment to bother with minor details like colour charts.’
Vigadó wandered to the window and stared out at the broken ice patterning the Danube below. The converted mansion stood high on a dramatic rocky outcrop above the city. Now the blizzard had stopped it was possible to see the whole panorama of the snow-blanketed city across the white-flecked river.
Mariann edged a little closer to glimpse the dazzling beauty of romantic Budapest. Her face softened. There was the vast Gothic parliament building, its severe facade turned into an elaborately decorated wedding-cake by the snow icing. And on its balcony, she mused, a Hungarian Prime Minister had once made a plea for freedom from Soviet occupation. How awful, to have been oppressed—
‘What’s the name of the people you work for?’ asked Vigadó with a sudden verbal lunge.
She blinked, dragging her mind back to a present-day oppressor, and told him. He checked the phone book, wrote down the number on a pad and faced her again, the jet-black hair stark against the leaden skies, his face a dark, unreadable blur in the fading light. ‘I’ll ring them in the morning.’
‘No point. They’ll be here,’ she said, worrying that he’d find out someone had impersonated him.
‘Why aren’t the men working overtime? Why you?’
Suddenly Mariann felt trapped. His body language was telling her that she was being very astutely judged and found wanting. ‘I—I badly need the money,’ she said huskily. ‘I begged and coaxed them to let me carry on.’
‘Clever.’
She thought so. Living on her wits was becoming a way of life and life was a series of opportunities. ‘We’re doing a good job, and doing it fast. We’ll be out of your way before you know it.’ True! He scowled at her and stayed silent. ‘Well?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No, it isn’t “well”. Far from it. Get out of here,’ he said with a sudden, brutal finality. ‘Don’t bother to come back. I’ll get my own man in.’
Mariann stared at him in dismay. Her careful plans, all her work, had come to an abrupt end! She’d failed! Helplessly she watched Vigadó sling his coat over his shoulder and pick up his briefcase. His dark, steely eyes flicked back contemptuously to her as he paused in the door that led to the next office. She froze.
‘I told you to go!’
‘But you can’t mean that! What about my mates?’ she wailed, moving forward to head him off. The image of the open cabinet burned in her mind.
‘For God’s sake!’ he snapped. ‘Don’t you have any sense of self-preservation? Don’t you know what a dangerous man I am?’ His voice became a low, savage growl, his eyes petrified her with their intense black anger. ‘Stay,’ he said menacingly, ‘and you risk more than a little damage to that beautiful face of yours.’
Her eyes flipped automatically to his scar while his glance swept from her toes to her head, slowly, measuring her inch by inch. With every flicker of his thick, dark lashes, Mariann felt weaker, the caress of his eyes on her lips making them part, the contempt, when their eyes finally met, rocking her on her heels. And it was the first time that she’d ever felt so scared for her own safety that she was close to being physically sick.
‘You have ten seconds to move, two minutes to clear the mess!’ rapped Vigadó.
‘Impossible! I need to clean—’
‘Go!’
There was no sense in inviting an explosion of that simmering temper. Mariann sullenly shrugged her shoulders. ‘You’re the boss.’ What on earth was she going to do? ‘I think you’ve dropped your wallet or something,’ she said, pointing back vaguely to her heaped clothes. When he grunted and strode over to check, she slipped past him into the next office and quietly pushed the cabinet shut.
‘Nothing there,’ he said softly, returning. ‘Now what are you doing?’
‘Checking there’s nothing of mine in here,’ she said breathlessly.
Cold and hard, the sinister dark eyes lingered on hers for a few scary seconds. ‘I believe everything in there belongs to me,’ he said tightly, and strode to the desk, sifting through the mail as if she didn’t exist any more.
Thinking savagely that half the authors in that cabinet rightly belonged to their original publishers and not him at all, she stalked out, racking her brains for a way out. It seemed awful just to walk away and admit defeat. He shouldn’t always get whatever he wanted, she thought resentfully. He bullied people, using whatever means he could—power, the that of violence, sex. Angrily she pushed cleaning rags into a carrier bag and wrapped the roller.
She didn’t want him to win. She never abandoned anything she’d set out to do. It had been so easy for him, to arrive, snap out a few questions and decide he didn’t want to be bothered with a perfectly good gang of decorators.
A small voice inside her urged her to go, that arguing with him would be imprudent and staying would be risky. But she’d always been more stubborn than wise, making things work for her. Throughout her life, her policy had always been to go that extra mile, push harder, further than other people to reach her goal and never to show weakness.
That was how, she mused, she had won the reputation of never being troubled, of always being happy and sunny. Even her family believed that. But early on she’d seen that they’d had enough troubles of their own without hearing about hers—and they, like everyone else, had come to see her as the one bright and cheering ray of sunshine in their lives.
Only her younger sister, Sue, knew that there were dark days too. That the constant effort to show the expected sparkling face had become part of a role she didn’t always want to play.
Mariann grimaced and slowly dunked her brushes in the turps jar before suspending them in their clips. Her elder sister Tanya was warm, motherly and deeply committed to them all. John, well, he was a kid brother, eager, enthusiastic, romantic. Sue was sensible and downto-earth.
Smiling, Mariann thought that it was odd how easily she’d drifted into being the glamorous, carefree one. Men went out with her for those qualities—her ability to enjoy life, have fun, make them laugh—and not because she looked homely or could bake feather-light sponges.
Sometimes she wondered if anyone would ever see deeper than the external face she showed the world. But when she’d once revealed some of her real self, everyone had thought she was fooling around and had laughed at her hesitant confidences.
A smile, a quip, a witty remark…they’d never wanted any more. And increasingly everyone had come to think that she was so tough, she could work miracles.