CHAPTER TWO

      PRIDE ALONE KEPT Anna’s shoulders straight and her head high as she left the room, pausing to nod and murmur a thank you to the panel members. Pride, and a grim teeth-clenching determination not to give Cesare Urquart the pleasure of seeing her crumble.

      He didn’t avoid her eyes or attempt to hide the smug smile with the hint of chilling cruelty that pulled the corners of his sensually sculpted mouth upwards. His complacent expression said job well done. The other panel members remained silent, none met her eyes, which was probably just as well as a word of kindness and she would have fallen apart.

      ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’

      This offer definitely wasn’t a kindness so Anna was able to hold it together as she met the stare of her tormentor. Hold it together but not conceal the bewildered hurt in her blue eyes.

      He was the first to lower his gaze, his dark, preposterously long spiky lashes casting a shadow along the razor-sharp edge of his chiselled cheekbones as he picked up his pen, twirling it between long brown fingers before he scribbled something on the sheet of paper that lay on the table, drawing a line figuratively and literally through her name, she speculated bitterly.

      Why had he done it?

      Just because he could?

      Why had she let him?

      In the corridor her courage deserted her and Anna slumped like a puppet whose strings had been cut, clutching her head. She had the beginning of a first-class migraine. She leaned heavily against the wall feeling the cold of the ugly green tiles through her thin jacket.

      Her coat lay folded across the chair in the room she had just left, but pneumonia was an infinitely more attractive option than going back for it.

      The loud tick of the clock on the wall opposite brought her dazed glance to the large clock. Her eyes widened. It had only been five minutes since she had stood there on the brink of being offered her dream job. It had taken Cesare Urquart less than five minutes to make her appear an incompetent idiot.

      Five minutes to reduce her to a stuttering level of incompetence, and she had let him! With a grimace of self-disgust, she straightened up and began to walk down the corridor, her heels beating out an angry tattoo.

      The taxi was waiting for her outside. As she slid inside she could think of any number of responses to his seemingly innocent questions. He’d led her to the edge of a hole but she’d jumped in. And he’d enjoyed it!

      A person who stubbornly clung to the belief that people were basically good, Anna didn’t want to believe that he’d taken pleasure from her distress. But it was true, and probably the worst part of it was the knowledge that behind the bland and beautiful mask he had enjoyed watching her stutter and stumble. It had been clinical and cruel.

      She looked at her hands. They were shaking. She made a decision. They’d arrived at her hotel.

      ‘Do you mind waiting?’ There was no way she was safe to drive her hire car the forty miles back to Inverness. She didn’t actually care what the taxi there cost her: it would be worth it not to stay another second.

      Having reassured the car-hire firm she would be happy to pay the supplementary charge for them to pick up the car, Anna packed her bag in about thirty seconds. She was booked into the hotel overlooking the picturesque working harbour for two nights, but the view had lost its charm, as had the Highlands.

      The thought of all things familiar and safe made her chest ache with longing. Everyone had been right. Moving up here had been a stupid idea, not because, as Rosie had suggested, there were no men—that was fine by Anna—but because there was one man. A man she could not even think about without wanting to break things. His head would be a good start.

      She climbed back into the taxi. She fastened her seat belt and closed the door with a restrained bang. ‘Inverness station, please.’

      Anna was actually in her seat on the train when all passengers were asked to disembark. No trains were running on the line between Inverness and Glasgow due to flooding and stormy weather further down the line.

      ‘Hail the size of golf balls, they say.’

      Those passengers who requested details of bus times were told that bus drivers too were not risking the journey.

      Anna normally maintained a philosophical frame of mind when events were out of her control, but if ever there was a day to respond with anger and frustration this was it.

      Could this day get any worse?

      Of course it could. This was the day that just kept giving and the man who just kept appearing. Twice was not a lot but it felt like more.

      The gleaming car Cesare Urquart stood beside did not suggest he came under the category of traditional impoverished laird. It did not come as a surprise to Anna that having money would be the way he got away with being so totally obnoxious.

      Human nature being what it was, people were prepared to put up with a lot from people who held the purse strings and the power. And what Cesare had done to her was a classic case of an abuse of power. It was inexplicable to Anna, who hated to see anyone unhappy, that a person could take such malicious pleasure out of causing someone pain, presumably just because he could.

      Yet it had felt personal, very personal. That continued to bemuse her; if the man hadn’t been a total stranger she’d have felt the interview had been payback of some sort. Perhaps, she brooded bitterly, he took offence to redheads, who in her opinion got a bad press. Her temper was no fierier than anyone else’s. She pressed her fingers to her drumming temples. She actually considered herself to have quite a placid personality.

      As was appropriate, Cesare had paused to congratulate the successful candidate after the interviews finished. The choice had not seemed difficult to him yet some of the panel had agonised over it and in the end the final decision had not been unanimous, even after a few probing questions where the redhead had become almost incoherent.

      An image of those big, hurt, cobalt-blue eyes formed in his head and he firmly pushed it away. He was sure that the formula had been working all of her life. One look at those expressive eyes...a suggestion of tears bravely blinked away while she channelled inner integrity...had made his jaw tighten. The panel members, who had still stood by their original choice, would have been less disgruntled if they knew what he knew about Miss Henderson.

      ‘So you think it’s a good idea to build an office block