Slave To Love
Michelle Reid

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘DADDY’S current bimbo...’

In a room stuffed full of warmly alive, happily partying people Roberta Chandler stood alone, battling to stop herself going white with anger around the edges of her red-faced humiliation, while the person who had just used that cuttingly dismissive description of her moved away from the small group of people she had said it to, without needing to glance Roberta’s way to know that she had been overheard.

Roberta’s heart was pounding, her body trembling with the suppressed desire to retaliate—an urge so strong that she had to force herself to stand very still and stare fixedly at the glass of champagne she was holding to stop herself from doing just that.

Lulu Maclaine would be a much better person if her doting daddy were to wash her nasty mouth out with soap!

What was he? she wondered furiously as the blood continued to pump an angry tattoo inside her burning head. Was he a man at all, or just a pathetic little mouse where his darling Lulu was concerned? Willing to let her behave any way she liked so long as it made her happy?

She glanced up, her glinting green gaze honing directly on to the man who was uppermost in her angry thoughts. He was standing on the other side of the room, talking within a group of people, smiling at some amusing anecdote that one of them was relaying, the corners of his fiercely sensual mouth curved in lazy amusement.

Was he totally unaware of the way she was being treated here tonight? Or just utterly careless of it? Whichever, he was out of order—right out of order—and he was very lucky that her manners were so much better than his daughter’s manners, or he would be tasting a bit of humiliation himself right now!

Damn you, she thought angrily. Damn you to hell for setting me up for all of this!

Laughter rang out, sounding so wickedly amused that it drew Roberta’s gaze because it represented such complete opposition to her own black feelings just now. It was Lulu again. Of course it was Lulu, standing in the middle of another set of guests, holding court in her lovely blue taffeta gown that was such an exact match to her lovely cornflower-blue eyes.

‘Daddy’s bimbo’. Had she just repeated that clever little remark to her new rapt audience to make them laugh like that?

Roberta shuddered, feeling sick. She wouldn’t put it past the vicious witch, since she had been saying that or something like it to anyone who would listen from the moment Roberta had stepped into the house!

And not only Lulu, she reminded herself. Lulu’s mother had behaved no better, offering Roberta the kind of cold shoulder all evening that had been a callous message in itself.

Bitches, both of them. The Maclaine women were nothing but a pair of lousy bitches.

My God! she railed at herself. Why didn’t I listen to my instincts and stay at home tonight, instead of opening myself up for this kind of ridicule?

After all, it was Lulu’s party. Her eighteenth birthday celebration, to be exact, and perhaps the younger girl had a right to enjoy it without having ‘Daddy’s current bimbo’ present to spoil it for her.

Yet she had been invited! Roberta reminded herself fiercely. Mac had done it himself! And, fool that she was, she’d thought, This time—this time perhaps he means to let them all know how much I mean to him!

What a joke! she mocked herself acidly now. You should have known from the moment he palmed you off on his younger brother Joel for the evening that he was going to pretend that you were barely acquainted rather than lovers. Lovers for almost a year now.

And Joel, she thought suddenly, dragging her angry thoughts over to the other important man in her life—Joel being her boss as well as Mac’s brother. Where was he in her hour of need? Chatting up some nubile lady somewhere instead of protecting her from all this flak?

She sparked a hooded glance around the room until she spied him shuffling on the dance-floor with—Lulu’s mother, no less.

The two of them were deep in conversation as they slowly circled the floor. Discussing me, probably, Roberta assumed from the expressions on their faces. Joel would be getting ticked off for bringing her here tonight, and he would be using his sandpaper-dry tongue to deflect the scold.

Delia was not pleased. Lulu was not pleased. The whole darned assembly of close friends and relations were not pleased! And why? Because they were all determined to follow nose to tail on the rudeness of their current leader—Lulu. And even ‘Daddy’ had been very careful to do little more than acknowledge Roberta with one of his benign social smiles so as not to upset his precious daughter!

‘Daddy’s bimbo’. Not to be offered even the barest courtesy.

Roberta quivered on yet another wave of deep, bubbling enmity, and returned her gaze to where Mac was still standing, looking every bit the powerful leader of men he was in his black dinner-suit and white dress shirt.

Mac. Or Solomon Macmillan Hunter Maclaine, to give him his full and most glorious title. A big, strong name for a man born and bred to take on the world—which he did, very successfully most of the time, running the family engineering empire with a crisp, clear foresight that knocked spots off his nearest rivals. It was only when it came to his private life that things around Mac became decidedly shadowy.

Roberta was one of those shadows, she accepted grimly. His lady of the night, not fit to acknowledge away from the bedroom!

Yet, shadowy or not, angry with him or not, she found that the simple act of letting her gaze rest on him was enough to set those tiny muscles deep inside her body stirring in heated recognition of their sensual master.

And she despised herself for it, wondering why it had to be him. All right, she argued with herself, so he possessed the kind of dark good looks most red-blooded women yearned to know intimately. But she’d met other men of his calibre before without falling flat on her face for them. So why him? Why this man who was, on the outside at least, little different from those other high-powered, good-looking men she’d known and repulsed quite easily?

He moved, half turning in her direction, to listen to something someone was saying to him, and those tiny muscles deep down inside her stirred again in eager anticipation of his noticing her. He didn’t, but she got the answer to her question.

Mac stirred her senses like no other man had ever done. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

And it probably had nothing to do with his black-haired, square-chinned solid good looks, but with the inner man, the man she yearned to know, and the one she very rarely got to see, simply because he did not let her—did not let anyone, as far as she could see, except his family, of course.

And Roberta was not and never would be family.

That fact was being patently hammered home to her tonight.

‘Daddy’s bimbo’. Didn’t Lulu see that in calling Roberta that she was also insulting her father?

Look at him! she wanted to yell. Does he look like a man whose tastes in women only stretch as far as empty-headed bimbos?

Who cares if the woman beneath you has a brain or not, a mocking little voice in her head yelled back, when it’s not her brain you’re taking pleasure in?

And more than half the women present in this room would not want Mac for his dynamic brain either, she tightly mocked that voice. Not if they knew him as intimately as I do!

And it was that intimate knowledge of him that she used now cynically to strip away the conventional veneer of elegance and sophistication that he wore so well around himself, to see right through to the naked beauty of the man beneath.

Tall—he was tall—and superbly constructed with it. A lean, lithe, sleek construction of tight, satin-sheened skin stretched tautly over hard, healthy muscle. Wide-shouldered with flat, spare hips, and what came in between was so shockingly desirable that it dried up her mouth just thinking about it. Long limbs, powerfully built. Good hands with a light, knowing, sensitive touch that could—

She stopped, sucking in a careful breath of air then letting it out again slowly. It was best not to think about those hands, she decided grimly, and fixed her attention on his face instead. A lean face, with jet-black hair cut to sweep confidently away from his high, intelligent brow. His eyes, darkly fringed by thick straight brows and softly curling lashes, were a most compelling colour of come-to-bed grey; they drew you towards them like magnets, urging, promising, lazily admiring—

Another stop. And she forced her attention away from the eyes to the mouth. A mouth so rawly sensual that it, too, was dangerous even to look at. Thin but nicely shaped, it was such an experienced, expressive, uninhibited mouth that in intimacy it could be quite ruthless in its efforts to draw the response it required.

And what was that mouth doing now? she wondered, once again curbing her thoughts before they went too far. It was smiling lazily, flashing the odd white-toothed, devilishly infectious grin now and then, fielding witty remarks to return them with interest. Like the man himself, supremely at ease, that quick mind of his ten seconds faster and sharper than anyone else she knew.

Joel teasingly dubbed him ‘Mac the Knife’ because of his sharp wits, but he said it fondly. Joel respected his brother deeply for the way he had taken on the mantle of power very young after their father’s first serious heart attack, which had meant Mac’s growing up a whole lot faster than most young men his age would have been expected to do. Yet he had taken up the challenge with barely a qualm and, although Joel was no small fry in the family firm, he deferred always to Mac’s decree.

Which was why Mac had palmed her off on Joel tonight, of course. He trusted his kid brother to look after his woman for him while he was too busy—or too indifferent—to do it himself!

He happened to glance up and catch her staring at him then, his eyes instantly softening to a warm, smoky grey as he sent her one of those little twists to his mouth meant to be a rueful smile, and tipped his glass at her in acknowledgement. It took all she had in her to return the gesture, though an answering smile she could not manage. She was angry with him and was in no mood to hide the fact. Angry that he could take from her everything she had to offer him, flaunt her unflinchingly around London as his woman yet, when it came to his family, pretend that she meant nothing to him at all!

Just an empty-headed bimbo, too thick to notice how his family saw her as dirt!

Her eyes flashed a sudden bright, menacing green. Mac saw it happen and frowned, a silent question entering his own eyes. Roberta’s chin went up, her defiant expression daring him to come over and find out for himself what the look was for!

Impatience flickered across his face, followed by a frowning look of indecision when she continued to stare at him like that, and the desire to come and find out why she was spitting green daggers at him began to war with his determination to keep as far away from her as he possibly could tonight.

Then, with a small shrug of exasperation, he took a half-step towards her, and her senses began to fizz on a bright clamour of triumph when it looked as though she was going to win this particular battle and he was going to come to her!

But, just at that moment, a flash of blood-red silk caught her eye, and she glanced to one side of him just in time to see Delia wind her arm into the bent crook of his. By the time Roberta looked back at Mac his attention had already withdrawn from her, to be centred indulgently on his wife’s smilingly upturned face.

Ex-wife, she reminded herself as disappointment sent her racing heart plummeting to her feet. Ex damned wife! They had been divorced for almost eight years! Yet to look at them you would think that they couldn’t so much as function without the other close by!

God! Jealousy shot like the hot flame of hell right through her, forcing her to lower her eyes, close them tightly, pretend—pretend for her own sake more than anything else—not to have noticed their easy intimacy.

Solomon Maclaine and Delia Curzon had both been just eighteen years old when they were forced to get married because Lulu was on the way. All in all it had been an acceptable match, linking the Maclaine wealth with the Curzon millions, and generally making both families rather pleased at their siblings’ misdemeanour. But, from the small amount Mac had told her, the marriage had been anything but idyllic. And the long-overdue divorce which took place ten years later had been inevitable—though not so to their staunchly conservative families or their adored daughter.

Hence the show being put on by both Mac and Delia tonight, and the reason why, as usual, Roberta found herself left out in the cold.

‘Had enough yet?’

Starting at the unexpected closeness of Joel’s voice, she lifted her face, the nape-length edges of her softly curling pale blonde hair skimming across the expanse of milk-white skin left exposed by the off-the-shoulder design of her black velvet dress as she turned to look into his sardonically smiling face. But she knew that smile; Joel was angry—the little tic working at the side of his jaw told her so. Whatever Delia had said to him had just about finished him off tonight.

So, ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘I’ve had enough.’ Then, on a sudden burst of grim certainty, she thought, More than enough! and felt a new emotion begin to seethe inside her, one which came from the bitter decay of her own self-respect.

For twelve months she had been playing this game the way Mac wanted it played—being what he wanted her to be when he wanted her to be it. But she was damned if she was going to be marked as ‘the other woman’ by a load of people she could not care less about just because they refused to accept a divorce that had taken place eight years ago!

Being seen as a man’s lover was one thing but being labelled his little bit on the side was very much another!

‘Daddy’s bimbo’. That telling bit of cruelty was, she realised, having a profound effect on her.

And yes, she decided roundly, she’d had enough. She had honestly and finally had enough! Her relationship with Mac was going nowhere and had no hope of doing so while he considered his family more important to him than she was!

All her life she had played second-best to someone—second-best to her parents, who had been rather shocked to find themselves landed with a baby they had never really wanted. Second-best to their dual careers as wildlife experts, which had sent them wandering all over the world studying the habits of one animal or other while this new animal—a human child—was left behind with whoever would have her so long as their lives were not disrupted in any way. And now there was Mac, forcing her to take second place in his life to a family that was obviously so much more important to him.

And there was the rub, she noted rawly. She was not important enough to Mac for him to care what his attitude did to her. And if the last twelve months had not made him care, then nothing would.

She was fighting for a lost cause, and the realisation of it hit her like a runaway train, smack bang in the chest, lifting her perfectly shaped breasts and dropping them again in a single wrenching gasp of pain.

It was time to cut her losses and get out. Where she loved, Mac only desired. And why she had never realised it before was quite beyond her!

‘Uh-oh...’ Joel chanted drily. ‘Those lovely green eyes of yours tell me that trouble is a-brewing!’

You’re not so happy with this situation yourself! she wanted to snap. But, ‘I’m quite ready to leave if you are,’ was all she replied, holding herself stiffly, forcing her face to reveal as little as possible of what was going on inside her. Joel could see that something momentous was, but then he was standing barely a foot away from her, and also Joel knew her perhaps better than anyone else.

‘OK, sweetheart.’ Suddenly the mockery had gone from his voice, and he reached out to take one of her hands, squeezing it gently when he felt how much it trembled. ‘Let’s leave the gracious way, shall we?’ he suggested with false lightness. ‘Through the door with our chins up.’

‘You see too much,’ she muttered as he began leading her through the milling throng and out into the empty hallway of Mac’s elegant country home.

‘And you too little, angel-face,’ he replied rather drily, then with a gentle push, which was almost a gesture of sympathy, sent her towards the stairs. ‘Go get your coat.’

Her slender body was exquisite in the black velvet, and Joel watched her move gracefully up the stairs. She was beautiful; no one could deny that. Mac would not have given her a second glance if she hadn’t been. He liked his women beautiful, blonde, sexy. And Roberta possessed one of the sexiest figures that Joel had ever laid eyes on. She was all soft lines and seductively rounded curves, with skin like milk and hair that bubbled softly around her lovely face. Looking at her, you would be forgiven for mistaking her as the archetypal dumb blonde.

But Roberta Chandler was far from dumb—as those sharply intelligent green eyes would tell you, if you could bring yourself to look that high.

It had been to his advantage that Joel had bothered to look beyond that sizzling sexual allure when she’d come for her interview last year, because it meant that he had got himself the best personal assistant he had ever had, and Mac—by his good fortune of being his brother—had got himself the rarest woman he had ever had.

‘Where’s Roberta?’

Think of the devil, Joel thought drily as he turned around. ‘Fetching her coat,’ he replied.

Mac’s thick black brows took on a downward swoop. ‘So soon? It’s only—’ he glanced at the solid gold watch that he had strapped to his wrist ‘—ten-thirty. The night’s still young.’

‘Is it?’ Joel murmured cryptically. ‘I thought it well and truly done to death, myself.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mac demanded frowningly. ‘You’ve been throwing out sarcasm at me all evening, Joel,’ he grunted. ‘And I would like to know just what the hell you’ve been trying to get at!’

‘Would you?’ Joel just sent him one of his sardonic looks. ‘Put a week or so aside some time, and I’ll take great pleasure in telling you.’

Mac stiffened, the frown becoming more pronounced. ‘What the hell’s got into you?’ he demanded bewilderedly. ‘To listen to you, anyone would think I’d offended you in some way!’

You have, Joel wanted to confirm, but at that moment Roberta appeared at the top of the stairs, with her black velvet evening coat draped across her arm, and Joel lost all Mac’s attention when the other man saw her. Those lazy eyes of his darkened dramatically at the enchanting picture she presented as she paused at the top of the stairs when she saw him, then came gliding downwards, eyes cool, face as inscrutable as a face as sensual as hers ever could be.

‘What’s this?’ Mac murmured huskily when she reached them, his expression so tenderly intimate that her senses quivered. ‘Running out on me with my kid brother?’

She glanced at Joel, wishing in some ways that it were Joel she was involved with. But, although both men were good-looking, smooth, sophisticated, Joel’s wood-ash handsomeness had never attracted her.

‘I’m—tired,’ she answered Mac quietly, the well-modulated tone of her voice like rich cream on honey, giving nothing away of the cold, hard sense of death she was experiencing inside right now. ‘It’s been a long day, all told,’ she added rather drily.

‘The man was in his counting-house, counting out his money,’ Joel put in, smiling as always. ‘Here, give me your coat.’ He took the velvet wrap from her before Mac could grab the honours. ‘Take-over deals take it out of one, don’t you agree, Mac?’

Mac leaned back against the rich mahogany newel-post, sensing no threat in the way that Joel was smoothing fine velvet over Roberta’s shoulders. This was his home and here, where Roberta counted for nothing, he saw Joel as his safe substitute.

‘The Brunner deal.’ He nodded. ‘You clinched it today.’ Not a question but a well-informed statement of fact.

‘Not quite,’ Joel denied, then shifted uncomfortably under Mac’s sudden black frown. After all, brother or not, Mac was also his boss. ‘But all bar the shouting,’ he quickly assured him. ‘I fly out to Zurich on Tuesday to tie it all up.’

‘Is Franc Brunner playing footsie with you?’ Mac asked sharply.

Joel just shrugged. ‘He knows he owns the patent to a very lucrative product if placed in the right hands. I can’t blame him for being cagey.’

‘Well, I can,’ Mac argued. ‘He approached us, not the other way around. What stopped him signing the deal today?’

‘The legal bods his end,’ Joel said drily. ‘Finding problems when none is there.’

‘Deliberately stalling, you mean,’ Mac said, and looked grimly thoughtful. ‘Do you want me to get involved?’ he offered.

‘No, I damned well do not!’ Joel indignantly replied. ‘The Brunner thing isn’t your baby, it’s mine! So keep your nose out, big brother!’

‘Whoops.’ Mac grinned. ‘Hit a raw nerve, did I?’

‘I can handle it,’ Joel said gruffly while Roberta looked down at her feet, too aware of why Joel was getting so hot under the collar to want Mac to see it written in her face.

The trouble with Joel was that he was a hands-on engineer at heart. Show him a revolutionary new product and he tended to go a bit overboard with enthusiasm about it. Hence the ‘footsie’, as Mac had put it, that Franc Brunner was playing with him. He saw too much eagerness to possess in Joel’s manner and had been playing on that by pushing Joel for a better deal ever since.

‘Can’t we, Roberta?’

His long fingers were stroking the rolled collar of her coat around her slender throat. But when she didn’t immediately answer, they paused to chuck her gently beneath her chin, demanding her support.

She gave it. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Nothing daunts the three musketeers.’

‘Three?’ Mac quizzed.

‘Mitzy,’ Joel explained. ‘Our indispensable third arm.’ He meant their shared secretary, and Mac nodded in recognition.

There was no one else wandering around the hallway, and a short silence fell, broken only by the sound of an old-fashioned waltz seeping out from the huge drawing-room to one side of them.

Mac’s eyes were on Roberta, moving with a lazy warmth over her, though he still made no effort to touch her. ‘I’ll see you Monday, hmm?’ he said. His weekend was fully booked up here in Berkshire, playing host to the dynasty.

Joel felt Roberta stiffen slightly, the tension in her so fierce it was threatening to snap. She did not reply, and Mac took the answer as read, the lazy look dying away.

‘Daddy?’ Lulu appeared at the half-open doorway to the drawing-room, her blue eyes narrowing when she saw Roberta. ‘Hello, Uncle Joel.’ She sent him a beatific smile. ‘Leaving already? That doesn’t say much for my birthday party.’

Joel let go of Roberta to turn and smile at his favourite niece. ‘I must be getting old, pug-face,’ Joel apologised drily, opening his arms as Lulu glided towards him. ‘Can’t seem to burn the candle the way I used to.’

‘You and Daddy both, then, since he’s five years older than you.’ She pouted charmingly at both men. ‘Perhaps he should take a leaf out of your book and ease up on life a little.’

It was a direct slight at Roberta, but neither by word nor expression did she show how easily the younger girl had cut. Mac was smiling indulgently, watching his daughter exchange fond kisses with his brother, the remark not bothering him.

Except for the shock of jet-black flowing hair, Lulu was more like her red-haired mother than her father—a wand-slim girl with long, graceful limbs and sapphire-blue eyes. She lived with her mother in their St John’s Wood home for most of the time, but she adored her handsome father to the point of hero-worship. Mac loved and pandered to this adoration as, Roberta supposed, any doting father would.

But sometimes it was so cloying that it stuck in the throat to watch it.

Like now, as Lulu fluttered her long dark lashes and said, ‘Aren’t my diamond earrings wonderful, Uncle Joel?’ She tilted her head slightly for Joel to get a better look at the exquisite diamond droplets dangling from her ears. ‘I think I have the most wonderful daddy in the whole wide world, don’t you?’

‘Wonderful,’ Joel mockingly agreed, observing the simpering sigh and soulful look that Lulu sent her smiling father. Mac had his hands in his jacket pockets, still leaning against the newel-post, looking as he always did—supremely elegant and totally at ease with himself. ‘He spoils you, pug-face,’ Joel censured teasingly. ‘If you’d been my daughter, for your birthday you would have received an envelope with ten quid in it and a letter explaining to you how the magic eighteen means that you go out in the big bad world and make your own way from now on.’

‘Oh, you don’t mean it.’ Flirting outrageously, Lulu pouted at Joel and appealed to her daddy with wide, wounded eyes. Without really having to try very hard she had effectively cut Roberta right out of it all. ‘Daddy, tell Joel he mustn’t be horrid to me on my birthday!’ she demanded.

‘Joel, don’t be horrid to Lulu on her birthday,’ her father obediently complied, laughing through his stern tone. ‘Where’s that besotted young man you’ve had hanging on your arm all night?’ he then asked curiously.

Again Lulu pouted. ‘He’s trying it on with Mummy since he was getting nowhere with me,’ his daughter pertly replied. ‘So if you don’t get back in there quick and do something about it, I can see Mummy taking on a toy-boy, and how will that make you look?’

‘God forbid!’ Mac levered himself away from the newel-post, and Lulu sent Roberta a look of malicious triumph when it looked as though Mac would just walk away without offering Roberta a backward glance.

Then the triumph altered to a glower as Mac paused and turned, his grey gaze colliding with Roberta’s green one. ‘Sorry you had to leave so soon,’ he murmured softly. ‘I was about to ask you to dance.’

‘Shame, then, that you were too late,’ she said, the slight hint of sarcasm in her voice just enough to make his eyes narrow. ‘A nice party, Lulu.’ She turned that hint of sarcasm on Mac’s daughter next. ‘Once again, many happy returns, and I hope you get all you deserve in life.’

Joel choked on a cough, and moved quickly as Lulu’s eyes took on a decidedly vicious glow. ‘Time to go.’ He gave his niece another kiss, then moved back to Roberta’s side, his smile over-bright as he took a firm grip on her arm. ‘Lunch one day, Mac,’ he offered as a parting shot, and began pulling Roberta towards the front door where one of the hired help for the evening was waiting to see them out, their car already called for and purring at the bottom of the steps.

The last thing Roberta saw as she swept out of the door was Mac’s gaze narrowed thoughtfully on her. He wasn’t a fool; he was well aware that her last remark to him had been a reference to the challenge she had thrown out to him with her eyes earlier and which he had decided to refuse.

What he wasn’t aware of, she knew, was how much he had left too late.

‘That wasn’t wise,’ Joel said quietly.

‘Didn’t you know?’ Roberta drawled. ‘I am not a very wise person.’ But I shall learn, she told herself grimly. God help me, I shall learn.

‘Get in the car.’

She got in the car and pulled her coat more firmly around her body, feeling cold when really it was quite warm for a September night.

Joel didn’t move off right away, but sat tapping the steering-wheel with his fingers while he studied her ruthlessly controlled profile. ‘Be careful how you tackle this, Roberta,’ he advised after a moment. ‘My brother is not known for his good temper when things don’t go his way.’

‘There is only one way to tackle it,’ she said, turning her head slightly away from him so that he wouldn’t see the bitterness glowing in her eyes. ‘There is an old saying about flogging a dead horse. And, much to Daddy’s darling daughter’s delight, no doubt, I’ve decided that I’ve flogged this one for quite long enough.’

‘You’ve put up with his outrageous behaviour towards you for the last year,’ he pointed out. ‘So why decide that tonight is the night you’ve had enough?’

‘Put the car in gear, Joel,’ she said, refusing to answer—if she had an answer to give him, that was, which she didn’t. All she did know was that she’d had enough. And that one small but telling little phrase was going around and around inside her head, until she thought she would go mad listening to it.

‘He won’t let you get away with it.’ Joel moved them smoothly away from the house, the headlights spanning out in a wide arc across the moonless blackness of the Maclaine family’s private estate. ‘He wants you too much.’

‘”Want” being the operative word.’

‘He had a hard time of it from the family when he forced that divorce on them,’ he reminded her. ‘Between them and Lulu he’s been made to feel—’

‘Start defending him and I’ll get out and walk,’ she warned.

Joel shook his head, exasperation making him sigh heavily. ‘It’s a damned long way back to Chelsea from here,’ he pointed out. ‘And I wasn’t defending Mac, just explaining why—’

Roberta’s hand went to the door-catch. Joel glanced sharply at her, saw her coldly determined expression and grimaced. ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep stumm and drive you home.’

‘Not home,’ she countered, bringing his gaze swinging right back to her. ‘Take me to Jenny’s instead.’

Joel was silent for a moment, taking in this final piece of information. Then he murmured wearily, ‘Oh, God, Roberta, you’re just begging for trouble if you keep this up.’

Was she? The way Roberta saw it, she was begging for more trouble by letting things go on the way they already were.

It was strange really, she pondered to herself as Joel drove on in grim silence, but if someone had told her twelve months ago that she would find herself in this kind of situation with a man she would have scoffed in their face! She wasn’t the type—had always been determined never to become the type! A life of being shunted from one reluctant relation to another while she was growing up had made her determined that once she had gained her independence she would never make herself vulnerable to another living soul, unless they could prove that they loved and wanted her above everything else in their life.

She’d kept that vow too, right through her college years and on into her first job, accepting dates only with men whose other commitments would mean she was never left waiting for them while something more important held their attention from her. But the trouble with that kind of philosophy was that that type of man usually meant a dead-end man with a dead-end job and a dead-end kind of outlook on life that generally bored her to tears. So her relationships tended to be short and disappointing, never really deepening past the kiss-goodnight-on-the-doorstep stage before she was breaking them off.

Until Mac. When Mac had come into her life, every rule she had stood by had just melted clean away! He was everything she didn’t want in a man. Busy, powerful, with the kind of business and personal responsibilities that meant he had to juggle constantly with time to make room for her. He’d even cancelled their second date because business had taken him out of the country for a week! She should have backed off then—probably could have backed off if it had been their first date—but, even by then, it had been too late for her. Like the fool she had discovered she was, she had fallen hook, line and sinker for him that quickly. And for the first time in her calm, well-ordered adult life she’d found out what it was like to lose total control of her own destiny. Solomon Maclaine had become her master. She didn’t like herself for letting it happen but couldn’t seem to do a single thing about it.

He could fill her with a dark and degrading all too familiar disappointment by letting her down at a moment’s notice when something more important cropped up. Then, when she was determined that it would be the last time he would do that to her, he would do something wonderful, like turning up unexpectedly with his arms full of flowers and a sincere apology on his lips that would have her heart melting all over again.

But not this time, she told herself grimly. This time Mac had gone too far. And the cold, hard feeling of loss she was experiencing inside told her that no amount of apologising was going to change her mind.

She had had enough.

‘Listen.’ Joel turned in his seat to look at her as he drew his car to a stop outside the Victorian town-house where Roberta used to share a flat with Jenny before Mac had taken her to live in his luxurious Chelsea apartment. ‘Use the weekend to think about what you’re going to do,’ he advised. ‘You’re thinking with your emotions right now, but give it a couple of days and you should be using your head again.’

‘It’s my emotions which are involved with Mac, not my brain,’ she drily pointed out. ‘And I’ve been applying common sense and modern social standards to our relationship for a whole year now, and look where it’s got me.’ Branded, she thought bitterly. Branded a bimbo by a set of people that she wouldn’t give the time of day to if they weren’t related to Mac! ‘It’s not me who needs to sort my head out, Joel. It’s Mac!’

‘He cares deeply for you, Roberta,’ he insisted urgently, his mouth twisting when he saw the sudden glint of tears flood her sea-green eyes.

‘But not enough,’ she whispered, not denying that Mac did care for her, in some odd, selfish way. No man could give himself so totally in bed without feeling something for the woman lying beneath him—fleeting though that something was. ‘The trouble with Mac is,’ she added grimly, ‘he wants to eat his cake and keep it. And this cake has gone stale enough to chuck into the rubbish bin.’

‘Mac doesn’t think you’re stale,’ Joel protested.

‘No.’ Her eyes flashed him a hard look. ‘But he’s taken so many bites out of me, Joel, that there really is very little left for me to offer him!’

Joel sighed—the kind of sigh that said he was giving up trying to convince her otherwise. And Roberta sighed—relieved that he was giving up, because she’d taken just about all she could right now.

‘I’ll see you Monday,’ she murmured, opening the car door.

‘And if he calls me up looking for you, what do I tell him?’ he asked heavily as she stepped out of the car.

Roberta bent down to look at him. ‘Do you really think he will?’ she mocked, her mouth twisting bitterly on the answer that Joel didn’t even bother saying out loud. ‘Goodnight, Joel,’ she said wearily, and closed the car door.

CHAPTER TWO

JENNY was surprised to find her old flatmate standing on her doorstep, asking for her old room back. ‘OK,’ she demanded, once she’d ushered Roberta into the small, chunkily familiar sitting-room and pushed a drink of something strong into her hand, ‘what has that selfish rat done to make you refuse the final straw?’

‘Not Mac,’ Roberta huskily denied, defending him even while she knew that he did not deserve it. ‘His family.’ And she told her friend the gist of her sudden decision tonight.

‘How is it,’ Jenny demanded angrily when Roberta had finished, ‘that a man of Solomon Maclaine’s tough character can be so weak where his family is concerned?’

‘He loves them,’ Roberta stated simply. ‘And feels guilty for letting them all down, so he spends his life walking a fine line between pleasing himself and pleasing them.’ Her shrug said just how successfully he managed it most of the time.

‘Which gives you the unappetising role of being piggy in the middle.’ Jenny grimaced distastefully.

‘Gave me,’ Roberta corrected. ‘I’ve just resigned from the position, remember?’

‘You haven’t told him yet,’ Jenny wryly pointed out.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘But I will.’

She had had enough.

‘Actually, I feel quite good!’ she suddenly announced. ‘Beneath the bitterness, of course.’ She acknowledged Jenny’s mocking look. ‘And that’s only there because I felt so humiliated tonight. But, other than that, I feel as if someone has lifted a big lead weight from my shoulders. I am no longer Solomon Maclaine’s hole-and-corner affair!’ she loudly declared. ‘Perhaps now I can begin to get some of my self-respect back.’

‘He’ll be around here looking for you as soon as he finds out you’re not at your flat,’ Jenny warned.

‘His flat,’ Roberta corrected, her soft cupid’s-bow mouth turning down cynically. ‘Mac provided me with that flat because a man of his standing has to maintain certain standards for his illicit affairs!’

‘Plus the fact that having me around here cramped his style!’

Roberta couldn’t help but smile at that. Built on Amazon proportions, with a full figure and the well-toned muscles of a trained physiotherapist, Jenny could frighten off any man with just a certain look!

‘Can I have my old room back?’ she begged her now.

‘Of course you can!’ Instantly Jenny’s softer side was gushing all over her. ‘Do you think you’ll sleep at all?’ she asked concernedly as Roberta got up from the chair.

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll try anyway.’

Surprisingly, she slept quite well. Her head hit the pillow in her old single bed in her old familiar room that possessed none of the luxurious trappings Mac had surrounded her with in his personalised love-nest; his darkly attractive face loomed up into the darkness, wearing that rueful little smile he had offered her before his ex-wife had claimed his attention that evening, and, just as she was conditioning herself for a long night’s battle against the weakening effects of that smile, she dropped asleep and dreamed of nothing.

It was wonderful. Like being set free.

* * *

‘Joel’s been on the phone,’ Jenny informed her when she walked into the small kitchen the next morning dressed in one of Jenny’s tracksuits, a pale blue one with a creamy hood attached to the baggy top. ‘He wanted to warn you that, contrary to your opinion, Mac is on the war-path. He’s already phoned his place asking where you are.’

Roberta paused on a moment’s sharp surprise. So her manner last night had managed to get through to him, or he definitely would not have bothered ringing her.

‘Did he tell him?’ she asked casually, going to check if the coffee-pot was still hot.

Jenny shrugged. ‘He says not. But apparently Mac had been trying your number all night, and he’s gone from the puzzled to the worried to the bloody furious. Joel said he was spitting out all kinds of nasty insinuations that Joel found rather flattering since they seemed to team you and him together. But he swears he played it thick and said nothing other than that he dropped you off last night and that was the last he’d seen of you.’

‘Good old Joel,’ she murmured, thinking, So he’s decided to come down on my side, has he? She had wondered. Joel was Mac’s brother, after all. ‘I could do with a piece of toast,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t eat a single thing at that lousy party last night.’

Jenny made a sound of impatience. ‘He’ll be ringing here at any moment,’ she cried. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Me?’ Roberta paused as she was about to slip two slices of bread into the toaster. ‘I’m going to do nothing,’ she said, feeding the bread into the warming slots. ‘This is your flat. Your phone. You answer it.’

‘In other words, tell him a pack of lies.’

Roberta just shrugged, the strange calmness she had taken into sleep with her the night before still presiding this morning. ‘I thought you might rather enjoy the job,’ she said.

‘Oh, I will,’ Jenny murmured with relish. She had a thing about men of Mac’s calibre, having been heavily involved with one very like him herself once—with similar heartbreaking results. ‘But what if he decides to come barging round here to check?’ she wanted to know.

‘Come off it, Jenny!’ Roberta scoffed. ‘You know as well as I do that he daren’t leave Berkshire until every last one of his guests has left before him! No,’ she said grimly, ‘I’m safe until Monday. Which gives me time to clear my things from the flat before I have to face him.’

The toast popped up, and Roberta pampered herself by spreading a thick layer of butter on it before taking it to the table with her coffee.

‘You’re taking this all very calmly,’ Jenny observed. ‘I mean, Mac is supposed to be the man you fell head over heels in love with—threw all your high-falutin principles away for. Surely you feel some kind of grief for what you’re doing?’

Did she? Roberta bit into her toast while she thought about it. ‘Perhaps I’m suffering from shock,’ she decided finally, discovering that she was still feeling nothing whatsoever except that ice-cold determination which had come with her sudden decision last night.

The telephone began to ring. Something close to terror hit her spine, sending it jerkingly erect. Not so invulnerable, she acknowledged shakily as Jenny moved reluctantly across the kitchen.

‘Shut the door on your way out,’ Roberta called after her, calmly enough, and Jenny sent her a bewildered look before doing as she was told.

The moment the door closed, Roberta darted up and switched on the transistor radio. A Saturday morning pop show blared out, drowning out any hope of overhearing Jenny’s side of the conversation through the thin walls separating the kitchen from the sitting-room. She sat down again, shaking all over.

Feeling nothing, my foot! she scoffed at herself. She was a walking grenade with the pin half out.

But determined, she reminded herself grimly. Damned, wretchedly determined.

Jenny came back. ‘He seems more concerned about you than angry,’ she told her. ‘He can’t understand why you’re not where you’re supposed to be.’

‘So you suggested he look where?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I reminded him that your parents were home and suggested that you could have gone there. He approved of that idea and rang off to check.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Roberta said after a moment. ‘They’ve already left for warmer climes.’

Gone chasing wild dogs across the Serengeti, having been home only five days to dump off the film of their last field-trip—six weeks studying dolphins in the South China Sea.

Five days. She grimaced. Into their early fifties, and still they barely paused for breath between trips. Still they found no time in their packed schedule to do more than allow their only child a conciliatory phone call to offset any disappointment she might feel for their not having time to meet her, if only for a quick lunch.

They lived in a world of their own, which left no room for unimportant things like daughters. So, what’s new? she asked herself as an old bitterness began to boil up inside her. They have a vague idea of what you do for a living, that your birthday is somewhere in the month of October, that you’re not short of funds and are in good health. What more could a girl want?

A bit of tender, loving care, she grimly answered her own mockery. A father to hug and lean on once in a while. A mother to run to at times like these, confide her troubles in.

A bit of what Lulu Maclaine had a lot of.

Wow! Blowing the air out of her lungs, she pushed herself up from the table with that bit of revealing envy niggling at her conscience.

Then, No, she told herself firmly. It wasn’t just a case of her being envious of what Lulu had that she did not. It was simply that she was not going to take second place to anyone else in her life.

And that, she was determined, was that.

Mac rang the flat half a dozen times during the next two days, and by the time Roberta had come back from her final expedition to the Chelsea flat on Sunday evening poor Jenny was looking flustered.

‘He’s bloody furious with you, he’s so worried!’ she said almost accusingly, which wasn’t surprising since it was Jenny who had had to deal with his calls all weekend, and Mac could frazzle anyone’s nerves when he put his mind to it. ‘Don’t you think you should put him out of his misery now and speak to him yourself?’

‘No,’ Roberta stubbornly refused. ‘Mac has put me through twelve months of misery. Two short days of the same goes nowhere near paying him back.’

‘You went into that relationship with your eyes wide open,’ Jenny pointed out.

Yes, thought Roberta on a sigh. Wide open but hopeful. A hope driven by a deep-seated need to be loved and wanted for herself above all others by a man she could love and want above all others herself.

Well, she had found the man she loved and wanted above all others. The only trouble was, he did not love and want her in the same way!

Which, in the end, left her with nothing to be hopeful for.

* * *

Roberta was at her desk on Monday morning, dictating to Mitzy, when Mac came through the door like a bullet.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he barked, striding forward to slam an angry fist down hard on the top of the desk.

Mitzy jumped, startled out of her wits by his forceful entrance. Roberta took her time before reacting, but then she had been prepared for this—poor Mitzy had not.

Still, as with a carefully schooled expression she lifted her attention from the stack of papers she had been working on and levelled her cool green eyes on him she had to quell a quiver of alarm. Jenny was right, she acknowledged; he was furious. His grey eyes had turned silver with it; his mouth pulled so tightly across his teeth that he was snarling with it—like a dog. A big, dark and ravaging bloodthirsty dog.

‘Do you know the kind of trouble you’ve put me through this weekend?’ he demanded harshly when she didn’t reply. ‘I’ve been going out of my mind worrying what could have happened to you!’

‘But not enough to bring you rushing back from Berkshire to check if I was all right,’ she said, and watched him stiffen up like a board at the thrust.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he growled.

‘Nothing.’ Removing her gaze from him, she glanced at Mitzy, who was staring directly ahead doing a good impression of a waxwork dummy, and Roberta took pity on her. ‘We’ll finish this later,’ she told the other girl quietly.

‘Y-yes, of course...’ With a blink and a jerk Mitzy hauled herself out of the chair and squeezed warily past Mac’s taut frame to leave the room quickly.

The ensuing silence thumped like a drum—or was it her pulse? Roberta wondered as she forced herself to remain calmly seated behind her desk, looking her usual coolly immaculate self in a slate-grey worsted suit and neat powder-blue blouse, while inside her everything was beginning to burn up on a mad combination of bitter pique and the usual hot, melting breathlessness she suffered whenever she looked at Mac.

Mitzy’s timely exit had given Mac time to consider just what Roberta had said, and his eyes had narrowed into harshly assessing slits. The anger in him had damped down to a more manageable level, which meant that he was beginning to realise he had a big problem on his hands with her and was responding accordingly—with his razor-sharp brain instead of his emotions.

‘Explain,’ he demanded at last. Nothing more, just that one very economical word which none the less said it all.

She studied him for a moment, completely in control of her outer self except for the slight trembling of her hands, which she clenched together tightly on her lap while she decided how best to tackle this.

He too was dressed for business, she noted inconsequentially, in one of his dark, fashionably cut suits that did so much to add to that air of power and success he carried around with him.

She would have felt much softer towards him if he had come barging in here looking like the devil, in creased clothes and with his silky hair mussed by worried fingers. But he hadn’t. Mac might have been concerned about her, but only in as much as he could not understand what was going on. His concern had not stopped him from having a good night’s sleep or making himself presentable for work this morning.

Which just went to prove how right she was about his feelings for her, she concluded.

‘It’s quite simple, Mac,’ she therefore informed him levelly. ‘I’ve moved out of your flat—’

‘I know that!’ he cut in deridingly. ‘Having arrived there at some ungodly hour this morning to find it strangely lacking any of your personal possessions!’

‘—because,’ she went on, as if he hadn’t interrupted, holding his slicing gaze with her own supremely calm one, ‘I have decided to conclude our relationship.’

He didn’t move for the space of several stuttering heartbeats, his stunned eyes fixed on her lovely composed features. Then, ‘You’ve what?’ he choked, and her stomach turned itself inside out as a strange kind of triumph grabbed hold of her.

She had actually managed to hit him right below the proverbial belt at last!

‘You heard me,’ she answered smoothly enough. ‘It’s over between us.’ Finished, finito, she added to herself cynically. No more.

Mac shook his jet-black head as if he needed to clear it. ‘Bunny...’ he murmured, the husky sound of his very personal pet name for her wrenching at something very vulnerable inside her. ‘What the hell is this?’

Genuine bewilderment had managed to cloud over his anger. His lightly tanned face was suddenly pale with surprise. A tightly clenched fist came out between them, the long, blunt-ended fingers uncurling slowly, as though it took a great effort to make the conciliatory gesture.

‘What have I done to bring this on?’ he asked.

Done? ‘Nothing,’ she said. Exactly nothing. And hardened her heart against the appealing picture he made standing there pleading with her like that. He had used this tactic before when she’d been angry with him—and had always won with it. But not this time. ‘I have simply decided that it is time to get out, Mac. Surely you above all people can understand that?’ It was a pointed dig at the long string of women who had preceded her in and out of his own life.

And he took it, by dropping the open hand, the long fingers clenching up again at the same moment that his mouth clenched also. ‘But why?’ he demanded. ‘And why like this? With no prior warning but just an empty flat for me to walk into!’

Had that hurt? She looked into his hard silver eyes and saw that it had. Mac probably brought the end to a relationship by sending a bunch of roses or a pretty bracelet of diamonds and a thank-you, which meant as little as the relationship itself had meant to him. Did he think that his way was any less hurtful than hers had been?

‘The relationship was going nowhere,’ she told him, ignoring the latter to answer the former because that deserved an answer; the latter did not.

His eyes narrowed assessingly at that. ‘And you—wanted it to go somewhere?’ he murmured softly.

Roberta smiled, seeing the trap even as he set it. ‘Oh, yes,’ she admitted, ever so ruefully. ‘I wanted it to.’

‘But you knew I wasn’t into marriage even before we began.’

‘Yes.’ Her soft blonde head nodded, then stayed lowered, from where she watched her fingers pleat and unpleat themselves on her lap. Yes, she thought heavily. She had known, but she had been foolish enough to hope otherwise.

‘We agreed to live together, nothing else,’ Mac said grimly.

That brought her head shooting back up, green eyes honing on to him. ‘But we didn’t live together, did we?’ she challenged. ‘You have your Berkshire home, where I am not welcome. Your Knightsbridge apartment, where I am not welcome. And you have your Chelsea flat, where I am supposed to know my place and keep to it!’

‘And when do I ever use the Knightsbridge place?’ he demanded furiously. ‘Or spend time in Berkshire, come to that?’ With a raking flick of his hand he dismissed that argument with the contempt he thought it deserved. ‘You know as well as I do,’ he went on gruffly, ‘that where you are is where I want to be, which knocks that excuse right on its crazy head.’

‘Unless you’re entertaining, of course.’ Despite the warming response she had experienced to his gruff confession about wanting to be where she was, Roberta kept her mind firmly fixed on the point in hand. ‘When you suddenly develop amnesia where I am concerned.’

‘Good grief!’ he gasped, eyes widening as understanding suddenly hit. ‘Do you mean to tell me that this is all because of Friday night?’ He made a sound that was both impatient and scornful.

‘The final straw,’ she conceded. ‘That’s all.’

But he wasn’t listening. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he was muttering. ‘You’re just bloody miffed because I didn’t dance attendance on you all night long!’

‘You didn’t dance attendance at all, the way I remember it.’

‘I had other duties to attend to!’ he snapped. ‘It was Lulu’s night. And she, therefore, had first call on my attention!’

‘She got it, Mac,’ Roberta drily assured. ‘She certainly got it! The full, central and undivided attention of most of the room all night—at my damned expense due to your lack of support for me!’

‘Lulu said something to upset you?’ he asked sharply, really beginning to catch on at last. His eyes darkened, the anger leaving him to be replaced with another look of urgent appeal. ‘Listen, Bunny—’ he leaned towards her again ‘—if Lulu—or any of my family—offended you at the party the other night, then I apologise for them. They’re all so damned—’

Roberta suddenly shot to her feet. ‘They didn’t offend me, Mac. You did! You do it every time you pretend I don’t exist as far as they are concerned! If once—just once—you had come to my side, forced them to accept me for what I am supposed to be to you, then they would have done—and you know it!’ She sucked in a short breath, disgusted with him and herself for putting up with it all for so long. ‘Well—’ She tried to put a brake on her temper, but it didn’t work. Now that it had been let loose it did not want to retreat again. ‘I refuse to hide in the cupboard like your guilty skeleton any longer! I have done nothing—nothing—to be ashamed of. Yet your family—through you—’ she angrily made clear ‘—has sunk my self-esteem to such a level that it can’t sink any lower! And yes—’ she nodded tightly ‘—I’ve had enough!’ The lot, everything she had been bottling up all weekend, was spilling out in one furious wave. ‘More than enough! I will not allow myself to be trodden under your rotten family’s feet for another day! So you can take yourself—and your selfish idea of a relationship—and just get out of here!’

‘Finished?’ he clipped.

‘Yes,’ she said, and sat down with a bump, drawing air into her lungs in an effort to control herself. She had been determined not to lose her temper with him, to finish this with all the cool aplomb that a man like Mac would expect from a woman of her supposed sophistication. But that was the trouble, she conceded angrily. She wasn’t really sophisticated at all! She was just a love-vulnerable fool called Roberta Chandler, forced into playing an alien role because she couldn’t control her feelings for this man!

And to have him she’d had to play it his way—right down the damned line!

‘So you want out.’

‘Not want,’ she corrected, ‘I have out.’

‘Or marriage,’ he derided, shoving himself away from the desk.

‘Oh, no.’ She denied that instantly. ‘You see, that was another thing I discovered on Friday night. I discovered that I have no wish to become a member of your rude and selfish family. But I do want marriage!’ she added quickly, when he flashed her a look that said he might be considering throttling her for that particular insult. ‘And since it obviously isn’t going to be to you—’ her slender shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug ‘—then I must cut my losses and look around for someone else.’

‘Even though it’s me you love?’

Oh, that hurt, and it showed in the way she winced. But she lifted her chin to him, green eyes holding on to his. ‘And who do you love, Mac?’ she challenged quietly.

He swung away, obviously not prepared to answer that one. ‘I learned the wedding lesson the first time around,’ he muttered evasively, going to stand at the window with his hands shoved into his trouser pockets. ‘I have no intention of putting myself through that kind of hell again.’

‘I can understand that,’ Roberta acknowledged fairly. ‘But whatever hell your marriage was to you, Mac, you did gain something very precious from it. You gained Lulu, whom you so obviously love and adore—a daughter who loves and adores you in return. Do you think I don’t want to experience that kind of bond with a child of my own?’ she appealed to the rigid set of his back. ‘Do you honestly think that, just because you see your duty to the human race fulfilled in Lulu, I must accept that it can never happen to me because I love you and therefore must concede to your dictum?’

‘You’re jealous of Lulu!’ he swung around to declare.

‘I am not jealous of Lulu!’ she denied, storming to her feet again as the taunt hit a raw nerve. ‘But I am jealous of what you and Lulu have, that I can never have if I don’t cut myself free from you!’

‘But you’re only twenty-five years old, dammit!’ he rasped. ‘You’ve got years ahead of you to plan things like home and family!’

She felt herself go icy cold. ‘Leave it until you decide that you’ve had enough of me, do you mean?’

The colour drained from his face, his thickly curling lashes flickering down to hide his eyes from her as he turned back to the window. And Roberta smiled bleakly to herself as her heart flipped over, then lay struggling like a dying fish in her breast. She had just knocked the nail right on top of its indisputable head.

‘You’ve never so much as hinted to me before that you felt like this,’ Mac muttered after a long, heavy moment.

‘I was waiting for you to show enough interest in my feelings to wonder,’ she murmured shakily. ‘But you never have, have you?’

Even she heard the contempt in her voice, aimed entirely at herself for her own powers of self-delusion, and Mac’s shoulders shifted on a gesture of discomfort as he picked up on it too.

‘But that really is not the main issue here.’ Grimly she shifted things back on to the right track. ‘The issue being that I am no longer willing to have a hole-and-corner affair with a man who can’t even acknowledge me for what I am supposed to be to him, in front of those people he cares for, because he is ashamed of me.’

‘Now that’s a downright bloody lie!’ Mac barked, spinning around to lance her with a murderous look. ‘You know what you are without my having to spell it out for you!’ he bit out angrily. ‘You are beautiful, you are bright, you are enchanting to be with, and you’re damned fantastic in bed! And any man would be proud to call you his—including me! So stop coming on to me as though I treat you like some dirty secret I keep swept beneath the carpet, because it just isn’t true!’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ he growled, advancing on her with wrathful intent gleaming in his eyes. ‘You are the first woman in ten years that I’ve given my complete loyalty to!’ he reminded her as he reached her.

‘But I gave you a whole lot more than that.’ She had been referring to her love but, typical Mac, he completely misunderstood her.

‘Yes!’ he hissed. ‘And I have never ceased to be grateful for the honour of being your first lover!’ he mocked her cuttingly. ‘But if you think I am going to pay for it by being cornered into marrying you, then you have another think coming!’

‘But I told you,’ she reminded him, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’

‘Then what the hell do you want?’ he shouted.

‘Out,’ she said simply. ‘I just want out.’

‘God in heaven, woman—no!’ he rasped, and reached for her, his fingers digging into her shoulders as he tugged her up against him. ‘No,’ he repeated, and brought his mouth down hard upon her own.

She had been doing fine until then, Roberta thought wretchedly as Mac began a ruthless plundering of her mouth. She had been managing to hold all these traitorous feelings right at bay—until he’d touched her. And now—now...

She groaned, trying desperately to pull away from him before her clamouring senses got the better of her. But he was big and strong and hungry, and the angry aggression in him answered a softer feminine need inside her to be mastered by his superior will. Her lips parted to the demanding pressure of his mouth without his having to try hard to make it, and on the sensual caress of his tongue she yielded—yielded like a weak little kitten to the superior dominance of the big, powerful cat.

‘If I’d been here,’ he muttered against her clinging mouth, ‘you wouldn’t have got as far as packing your damned lipstick!’ He moved his hands in a possessive gesture down her body. ‘We would have been doing this in two seconds flat instead, and any talk of leaving me would have flown right out of the nearest window!’

She couldn’t deny it. Her senses were on fire already. He was angry, which only heightened her awareness of him. And he was a little frightened; she could tell by the tremor in his fingers as they moved over her, by the way his voice had deepened into thick huskiness as he spoke, all of which touched that softer part of her that she had tried so hard to lock away.

He kissed her deeply, his body straining against her, moving with a hot and hungry need that made her own flesh burn, her senses throb and the breath leave her lungs on low, anguished little sobs while she tried so hard to fight her own feelings as much as his heated seduction.

But to no avail. And it was Mac who brought it all to an end, pushing her to arm’s length then holding her there while he studied her through hard, narrowed eyes, his own breathing no steadier than her own as she stood there swaying dizzily.

‘Where did you go this weekend?’ he demanded.

‘Jenny’s,’ she answered, having to fight not to fling herself back into his arms.

‘Bitch!’ he rasped. ‘Did Joel take you there?’

‘I...’ She lifted a trembling hand to push her hair away from her face, still too dazed to think clearly. ‘I w-went after he dropped me off,’ she lied, but the hesitation had damned her, and Joel too.

Mac’s face turned to granite. ‘That’s brotherly loyalty for you!’ he muttered tightly.

‘What he did he did for me!’ Roberta insisted. ‘That doesn’t make him disloyal to you.’

‘It doesn’t?’ he jeered. ‘In my book it makes him a bloody traitor!’ Grabbing hold of her chin, he lifted it threateningly. ‘Where else has he been deceiving me, I wonder?’ he grated. ‘With you, perhaps? Has my kid brother been trying his luck with you, Roberta? Is that what this is really all about?’

Angrily she pulled away from him. ‘That is a disgraceful thing to suggest!’

‘No more disgraceful than the insults you’ve been throwing at me since I came in here,’ he defended. ‘Joel fancies you. He always has, and don’t try telling me otherwise.’

‘You’re crazy if you believe that,’ she sighed, shakily trying to pull herself together.

‘Not crazy,’ he denied. ‘Just aware of what’s going on around me. Joel always did want you for himself, and the only reason he has never made a serious move on you before is because I threatened to knock his block off if he ever did.’

‘Then why throw us together the other night, if you really believe that?’ Roberta cried in angry amazement.

‘Because I thought his respect for me meant more to him than his desire for you,’ Mac stated. ‘But I’m beginning to see that I was wrong.’

‘Wrong about a lot of things, if you honestly believe either Joel or myself would do such an underhand thing as to play you false!’ Roberta cried.

‘Whatever.’ Mac just shrugged all of that aside, his attention suddenly fixed on the gold watch gleaming at his wrist. ‘I’ll be putting him straight before too long.’ Grimly he turned and strode towards the door. ‘I’ll come down and collect you after work,’ he informed her curtly. ‘Then we’ll go to Jenny’s together to move your things back to Chelsea.’

‘I’m not coming back to you, Mac,’ she told him, looking pale but adamant.

He turned to lance her with a look, the contempt she read in his eyes totally new to her and hurtful. ‘Do I have to come back there and repeat the lesson?’ he demanded, putting shamed colour into her cheeks as he flicked his eyes insolently over the way she was still standing there, shaking in the aftermath of his last assault. ‘I could take you here and now on this floor if I wanted to, and you know it,’ he jeered, ‘so stop trying to draw things out. You’ve made your protest and it has been duly noted. Now we return to the status quo.’

‘No!’ she protested. ‘Mac—’

‘Six o’clock,’ he clipped out, arrogantly cutting across any protest she had been about to make before he slammed out of the room.

Roberta stood staring at the closed door, bubbling with anger and frustration, wondering just how he had managed to turn the whole thing round to suit himself like that.

Easy, a small voice taunted in her head. You made it easy for him by falling so easily into his arms!

‘Damn,’ she exploded softly, then heard another door beyond her own slam shut, and cursed again.

Joel’s office door. True to his word, Mac had gone to take the rest of his anger out on Joel. Guiltily aware that she had well and truly dropped Joel in it with her stupid tongue, she dropped heavily back into her chair, wondering grimly if she would still have a job by the end of this horrible morning.

CHAPTER THREE

JOEL was waiting for him when Mac strode into his office.

‘Loyal brother you are,’ he barked.

‘Loyal lover are you,’ Joel returned the insult. ‘I wouldn’t subject my worst enemy to what you subjected Roberta to on Friday night, and that’s the truth,’ he said, then lazed back in his chair to watch curiously as two strips of guilty colour washed across Mac’s high cheekbones.

‘Roberta can fight her own battles without your needing to play the shining knight!’ he muttered.

‘Turned my PA to pulp, have we?’ Joel mocked that argument. Roberta could no more fight Mac and win than she could win against a head-on collision with a double-decker bus. ‘So now you thought you’d try pulverising me. Well, sorry, big brother, but I refuse to play. You’re a fool, if you want to hear the truth—which I don’t for one minute think you do. Roberta is one in a million, and you’ve let her slip right through your selfish fingers because you care more for keeping the damned peace on the home front than you care for her.’

‘Don’t sermonise over me,’ Mac grated. ‘Not after the way you’ve played me for a fool all weekend. How many times did I call you up?’

‘Oh, about ten,’ Joel answered carelessly. ‘Pity you didn’t stop phoning and start driving, isn’t it? You might just have caught her between moves then. Ah...’ he breathed as Mac stiffened. ‘So Roberta pointed out the same error, did she? You’ve got to give it to that girl—’ he smiled ‘—she’s honest to the last full-stop.’

‘I had other commitments this weekend,’ Mac defended himself gruffly. ‘She knew that, and if she cared she would have understood.’

‘Like you understood how humiliating it was for her to be palmed off on your kid brother at your daughter’s birthday party?’

‘Oh, go to hell, Joel,’ Mac sighed, running a hand around the back of his neck then throwing himself into a chair. ‘You know how sensitive Lulu is about me and her mother. It was her night; I had to put her feelings first.’

‘Then why invite Roberta at all?’

‘Why did she have to accept?’ Mac shot back, and Joel sucked in a short breath, the handsome lines of his face hardening as he stared at his brother.

‘You bastard,’ he breathed. ‘You were covering yourself! Playing a let’s-keep-everyone-happy game so that Solomon Maclaine could feel comfortable with his conscience! My God,’ he muttered as he threw himself forward in his chair and glared at Mac, ‘you really are a selfish swine, aren’t you?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.