Unwilling Surrender. CATHY WILLIAMS
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that this shoot was taking twice as long as it should have?
‘I can rearrange you for next Tuesday,’ she murmured, not wanting to stray on to the subject of the two infernal hounds.
‘And I can always rearrange you, young lady!’ Mrs Molton informed her testily down the line. ‘You’re not the only photographer in the world, you know. My niece may well have recommended you, but that doesn’t mean that I have to employ you. The world,’ she continued in a booming voice that belied her stature, ‘is full of talented photographers. I’ll allow myself and my poopsies to be rearranged just this once, but not again!’
Christina released a long sigh as she replaced the receiver.
Thank you, Adam Palmer, she thought. Now if I lose this job, however unchallenging it may be, I blame you entirely.
She spent a desultory morning throwing things into an overnight bag and lethargically reviewing some negatives for a job which she had undertaken a fortnight previously and which were due for submission to a magazine in a week’s time, but her mind was working overtime.
She kept thinking of Adam. She thought of the way his body moved, the way his eyes were somehow fierce yet coolly mocking at the same time. Had she forgotten all that, she wondered, or had she shoved it to the back of her mind?
These were irritating questions. She was acting like the silly teenager she had been all those years ago. She was no longer a teenager and she liked to think of herself as too clever to let herself be swayed by a man’s appearance. She might not be beautiful, but she was smart enough, and she wasn’t about to abandon her good sense by letting him get under her skin.
She glared at the jumper in her hand and then threw it into the bag.
Weather report or no weather report, she was going to make sure that she travelled with an ample supply of thick clothing.
The man on the radio had self-confidently assured her that there would be no snow in Scotland, although conditions would be freezing, but weathermen had a talent for getting it wrong.
At three in the afternoon Adam called to inform her that they would be leaving in an hour and a half.
‘Meet me at the airport,’ he said in the quick tone of voice which implied that he had better things to do than converse with her over the phone. ‘Take a taxi and charge it to my company.’
‘Yes, my day’s going just fine, thank you for asking,’ Christina said sweetly. ‘Usual sort of problems when one has to postpone commitments, but I won’t bore you with the details. Thank you for asking, though. And yes, I can meet you at the airport for four-thirty. Any specific place, or shall I just aimlessly meander around in the hope that I spot you somewhere?’
She heard the impatient click of his tongue and grinned wickedly down the line. Poor Adam. Not much time for her now that he had got what he wanted. She wondered whether he was looking at his watch and wishing that this silly woman would get off the line. He always did have a restless streak in him that spared little time for what he considered frivolities.
Unless, of course, those frivolities concerned getting a woman into bed. Then he had all the time in the world to play his elaborate games of seduction. Or at least that was what she had gleaned from what she had seen of him in the company of women and from what Fiona had told her. Confidentially.
‘I’m busy,’ he told her bluntly. ‘I don’t have time to waste chatting. I’ll meet you at the check-in counter.’
He promptly hung up with that and she glared at the telephone in her hand.
What manners. He was busy, was he? And what about her? She would have been busy if it weren’t for him. Had he considered that? Fat chance.
She wondered how many of his lady friends were informed by him that he was busy and couldn’t waste time chatting with them, and decided that she preferred his honesty after all. It was always nice knowing where you stood.
She dressed warmly for the trip up: jeans, boots, a jumper with another one in her holdall, and a duffel coat which zipped up the front. The entire outfit made her appear ten pounds heavier than she was and she grimaced at the reflection that stared back at her in the mirror.
There goes one of your few assets, she told the reflection—your figure. No one would guess that you had one under all of this.
But that really didn’t bother her very much. She had become quite accustomed to her appearance and to the fact that she seldom if ever attracted second glances from members of the opposite sex.
Her boyfriends had all been men who had got to know her well before becoming interested in her physically, and frankly she would have preferred their friendship to remain on a platonic basis only most of the time. She disliked fighting off prospective suitors who did nothing to send her blood-pressure soaring.
No one will ever send your blood-pressure soaring, she informed the reflection. She thought about Greg, dashing Greg, who had come the closest to doing something to her blood-pressure. He was the image that she had resolutely shoved to the back of her mind for the past year. Not that she had been in love with him, but she could still taste the ashes in her mouth at his scathing comment when they broke up. Frigid, he had informed her, plain and frigid, a woman who should be grateful to be looked at twice. He had been turned on by her intellect and by the contacts she had had in her job, but, he had told her, stripped of those, she was nothing but a plain Jane without the wherewithal to hold a man’s interest. If she had slept with him, or had introduced him to some useful people, or preferably both, then he might have consented to continue seeing her for a while longer, but in the absence of both these prerequisites she was, he had made it clear, not a very desirable option.
She tightened her lips and forced herself to push that unpleasant scene back into the shadows of her mind, where it belonged, as a silent warning to her.
You’re destined to be a career woman, she told herself. Not that she saw anything wrong with that at all.
She loved what she did, and she considered herself lucky. What had been a teenage hobby had blossomed into a fulfilling profession when, at the age of seventeen, she had entered a photography competition and won a fully paid photography course and some impressive equipment, most of which she still relied on. She enjoyed her work and, if Mr Right didn’t happen to bounce along on his white stallion, then it was hardly the end of the world.
Her mother would be disappointed, of course. She baked bread, made jam and had a desperately old-fashioned outlook on the role of women in society. But Christina could cope with that.
No, the closest she imagined she would get to ardour was watching Fiona’s antics from the sidelines.
She thought of Adam and frowned. Why had his image popped into her head just like that, without warning?
Because, she told herself, it was time to go. She gathered her belongings together, tried one last time to tune in to some weather news and failed, and edgily sat down to await the arrival of the taxi, which arrived promptly.
And Adam, she was heartened to see, was also waiting for her at the check-in counter. He had his back to her, chatting to the woman behind the desk, and she stopped for a few seconds to look at him.
He really was aggressively male, she thought with detachment. All broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, which made him look as though he spent hours working out. If she remembered correctly, though, he exercised very little.
Fate had seen fit to endow him with a body that somehow managed to stay perfectly tuned even if he did nothing about it.
She took a deep breath and walked up to the counter, noticing that the woman to whom he had been chatting, an attractive brunette, impeccably made up and with a hairstyle that looked as though each strand of hair had been individually glued into place, was not quite as warm when her attention was directed towards her as she was when it had been directed towards Adam.
‘I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,’ Christina said, turning to Adam with a polite smile.
‘Ten