Takeover Engagement. Elizabeth Duke
Читать онлайн книгу.
a bit today, knowing she was coming into town, instead of wearing her usual working gear: practical skirt with a shirt or sweater, or tailored trousers as she sometimes did.
‘No. I just came into town to meet…my friend. I live and work in the suburbs.’ Now he’ll lose interest, she thought with a tightening of her lips. High-powered city businessmen—and this man looked the epitome of just that—didn’t waste their time on people who didn’t belong to their fast, slick, self-important world, on insignificant nobodies who spent their lives outside the power-hungry city rat-race.
‘Now let me guess,’ he said slowly when she didn’t enlighten him further. ‘You’re in…public relations?’ he hazarded. ‘Finance? Marketing?’ He paused. ‘Am I warm?’
He’s judging me by what I’m wearing now, she thought, her lips curving in a derisive smile.
‘Stone-cold,’ she said. If he wanted to make a game of it, at least it would pass the time. And take his mind off his claustrophobia.
‘Well…let me see.’ He pursed his lips. She found her eyes riveted to his mouth and looked quickly away. ‘Legal work, then? Interior design? Banking?’
She shook her head. ‘These aren’t my usual working clothes,’ she admitted. ‘I normally wear something a bit more practical and comfortable for the kind of work I do.’ Now it should be interesting, she thought, and waited, eyebrows delicately raised.
‘Ah.’ He fingered his jaw with long fingers, at the same time letting his dark gaze roam down her body, seeming to pause at the swell of her breast, and again at her exposed knees, before continuing down her long legs to her slim, well-shaped ankles. She had the sudden hot, uncomfortable feeling that he was mentally undressing her, divesting her of her clothes, imagining what lay underneath.
‘Oh, hell.’ He seemed abruptly to tire of his game. ‘If we go on like this, I’m going to end up insulting you; I can see that. If I say a model or an actress, you’ll turn out to be a brain surgeon or something. You’re not, are you?’
‘Close. But wrong end of the body,’ she quipped. ‘I treat feet, not brains. I’m a podiatrist.’
His dark eyebrows shot up. ‘Well. I never would have picked it in a month of Sundays. I’ve never met a podiatrist before, never been to one. So…you know all about feet and what’s wrong with them, eh? What kind of people come to you mostly? Little old ladies with bunions?’
She gave an ironic half-smile. It was a common misconception. ‘We do get a few, but mostly—in our clinic anyway—we see people with sports injuries. Or problems caused by…flat feet.’ She looked pointedly down at his well-polished shoes. ‘I take it you don’t suffer from that problem?’
‘Not that I’m aware of.’ Amusement flickered in his eyes, revealing that he did have a sense of humour. ‘You work at a hospital?’
‘I used to, when I first started out. But now I’m in private practice. Not on my own. I’m at a foot clinic in Surrey Hills with two other podiatrists—a married guy with a young family, who owns the clinic, and a good friend of mine, Gaby, who went through uni with me.’
‘You like the work?’ he pursued. ‘Get many people coming in with—um—smelly feet?’ His eyes gently mocked her.
She tilted her head at him. ‘You clean your teeth before you go to the dentist, don’t you? Well, most people wash their feet before coming to see me!’
‘Hmm. Good point. You live near the clinic?’
Did he really want to know, she wondered, or was he simply passing the time? ‘Just around the corner, virtually. I share a flat—it’s a house, actually—with Gaby, the other podiatrist.’
‘Ah.’ It wasn’t clear just what he meant by that ‘ah’. Did he think she might have been living with David? ‘And your family? Your parents?’
His eyes were on her face as he asked the question. She flushed faintly under his scrutiny. She had the weirdest feeling that he was waiting intently for her answer. She couldn’t imagine why. He couldn’t seriously be interested in her or her family, surely?
‘My parents are divorced.’
After what she could only describe as a pregnant pause, he said impassively, ‘I’m sorry. You still see both of them?’
A fleeting shadow crossed her face. ‘When I can. My father still lives here in Melbourne. But he…married again a few years ago, so I don’t see him as much as I did before.’
‘You don’t get on with his new wife?’
‘I didn’t at first,’ she admitted. It wasn’t that she’d had anything against Beth personally. It was just that another woman had taken her mother’s place in her father’s life. After all those years! ‘My parents were married for twenty-three years,’ she heard herself telling him. ‘I was twenty when they separated, my brother twenty-two. Neither of us were living at home by then…I think our parents were only waiting until we were off their hands.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘Since then my brother’s been married and divorced as well. Fortunately no children were involved.’
The break-up of her parents’ marriage and then her brother’s, more recently, had made her wary of marriage, cautious of commitment, of rushing into anything permanent before she was completely sure. If her parents’ marriage, which she’d always believed to be happy enough, could fail after twenty-three years…
‘And your mother?’
Again she felt his eyes on her face, and felt the fine hairs at her nape rising in involuntary response. For a stranger, he was showing an unusual interest in her…and in what she had to say. She shook off the thought. She had to remember that he was only making conversation to take his mind off being stuck in this lift. The sensation of being trapped could be a real trauma to someone who was claustrophobic. She had to hand it to him…he was managing to control his fear admirably. The least she could do was encourage him to keep on talking.
‘You live near her?’ he prompted before she could speak, as if he really wanted to know.
She frowned faintly. Why would he want to know? Why would he care? She took a deep breath. Humour him, she thought. Why not? You’ll never see him again, once you’re out of this damned lift.
‘My mother’s moved to Queensland to live. She’s sharing a house in Brisbane with a widowed friend.’ She felt a faint pang as she said it. Her mother had left Melbourne so suddenly and unexpectedly, not long after she’d started going out with David. Charlotte had insisted that it had nothing to do with Lucy’s father and his second wife, who had been married for some time by then. She had sworn that she wished them well, that it was the plight of her old friend that had decided her. Poor Avril had been very lonely since her husband’s death, and needed companionship and support, with her only daughter living overseas.
‘A male widowed friend?’ her companion asked with the ghost of a smile. But there seemed to be more cynicism in the smile than humour.
Faintly puzzled—not that it could be anything personal; he didn’t even know her mother so it had to be women in general—Lucy lifted her gaze to his and met the probing, magnetic force of his dark eyes. At once a veil seemed to come down over them.
Trembling slightly, from confusion more than anything else, she forced an answer. ‘A woman friend. An old friend of my mother’s. They were at school together, and met up again after they were married.’ This man was obviously cynical about all women…that was all it was. What on earth could have happened to him to make him like this?
But the stranger didn’t seem interested in her mother’s friend. ‘And do you get your good looks from your mother…or your father?’ he asked, lifting an eyebrow.
She felt an odd little jolt inside. So he thought she was good-looking, did he? An unexpected ripple of pleasure ran through her, though she had a feeling she should have