There was something cruel about his smile now. ‘Don’t worry—any more intimate reminiscences escaped me, as I discovered a strong disinclination to hear the sordid details of your relationship.’
‘Then why raise the subject now?’ Maria countered. ‘You can’t have any real scruples about our supposed affair or we wouldn’t be working for you, so I can only assume that you’re making this personal attack for the sheer hell of it, because you once got a kick out of disapproving of me—despising me—and you’re trying to recapture the thrill of it all.’
The grey eyes glittered. ‘You and Florian Jones are employed because you’re both good at what you do——’
‘Thank you,’ she inserted tartly. ‘As it happens, that’s what Flo was referring to when you overheard us, Mr Scott—our professional relationship. So if you don’t mind, let’s keep this conversation equally professional, please.’
‘When what’s between us is so personal?’
The tone was silkily challenging, and Maria’s heart jumped in startled recognition before instinctive denial asserted itself.
‘There’s nothing personal between us.’
‘You owe me, Maria,’ Luke added intently.
‘I owe you nothing!’ she retorted tempestuously. ‘If anything, the reverse is true. You owe me, Mr Scott, except that nothing can ever compensate for what you stole from me six years ago.’
‘I didn’t steal anything from you, and what you lost, you had no right to in the first place.’ He was remorse-less, but his voice had dropped to a silken taunt as he went on, ‘But tell me what you think it is I owe you, Maria. I’m interested to hear.’
‘You’ve got nothing I want.’ Maria was scornful.
His smile was blistering. ‘You want.’
‘Other than this job,’ she added challengingly, some perverse part of her almost wishing he would attempt to deprive her of it so that she would have something real, present and immediate to fight him for.
‘Which you have. This time I’m not letting you off so lightly—which is what I was actually doing when I had you dismissed from that other one,’ he stated outrageously.
‘Hardly!’
‘I could have destroyed you six years ago,’ he continued.
‘And didn’t you just do your best?’ Bitterness rose. ‘My job—’
‘I’m not talking about your dismissal or even the fact that it parted you from Jones, and I think you know it.’ The claim was confident. ‘I’m talking about the way things were between us. As I say, I could have destroyed you, or so I thought at the time, but you’ve turned out to be a lot tougher than I had imagined…not vulnerable or confused at all. This time I don’t have to restrain myself; I don’t have to be merciful. I know what you are and that you can cope.’
‘With what? Being destroyed by you?’ she quipped wildly.
‘Weren’t you listening? I’ve realised that you neither required nor merited consideration. Nor do you now, and this time you won’t get it.’ Luke paused deliber-ately, his eyes holding hers. ‘You’re not stupid and you’re not innocent, Maria. You knew what it was all about six years ago—what was happening.’
It was as if she was bound by silken cords, soft yet irresistibly strong. Maria couldn’t move her head or even lower her eyes, and time had slipped. She was nineteen and choked by the immensity of her reaction to this man, unable to breathe or stir, and panicked by the conviction that Luke was seeing into her secret self, invading, bent on vandalising and stealing. Every time he looked her way, that frightening compulsion went sweeping through her, the urge to let him look, let him absorb her until nothing was left and she no longer existed as a separate, individual entity. She was a confident, outgoing girl who usually interacted quite happily with people of either sex and any age, but she was reduced to silence in Luke Scott’s presence, so deeply did he disturb her.
A trick of time. She was twenty-five, her hormones under control, her identity secure and her spirit her own, safe from thieves. She showed Luke her smile.
‘Weren’t you listening to me earlier? Yes, I know what was happening. You were a romantic figure, come to restore our fortunes. The awe I felt was probably the first phase of hero-worship—the sort of thing some people call a crush. Oh, it was uncomfortable.’ She gestured mockingly. ‘And confusing, since I never reached the stage of identifying my affliction. Maybe I do owe you something after all. If you hadn’t made me hate you, it might have gone on for months.’
‘Ah, hatred.’ Luke was smoothly reflective. ‘Much more comfortable.’
‘And it lasts.’ Maria looked straight at him with hard eyes. ‘I still hate you, Mr Scott.’
‘Then call me Luke, as there’s a certain intimacy to hatred. It’s a very personal thing,’ he taunted. ‘And there you were, insisting that there’s nothing personal between us.’
‘You must have hated me too!’ she flared, caught, and angry enough to show her resentment, past and present. ‘All right, your claim that I was superfluous is probably valid, so why wasn’t I made redundant in the usual way? Let go, as the euphemism has it? There’d have been no comebacks for the station. I didn’t belong to a union, I didn’t know anything about my rights then, and I know now that I didn’t have any in that particular case…But you actively made my dismissal a punishment.’
‘You must have thought you merited punishment, for the idea to have occurred to you at all.’
‘The way I was dismissed ensured that it occurred to me,’ Maria asserted tightly. ‘Except that I had no idea what I was being punished for.’
‘Because you felt no guilt about what you were doing?’ Luke probed inimically.
‘My supposed affair with Florian?’ Maria just man-aged to keep her voice low. ‘Even if you hadn’t been way out there, you had no right to make something from my personal life the grounds for dismissal.’
‘The method of your dismissal,’ he corrected her. ‘You were due to lose that job anyway.’
‘You admit it, then? That it was personal?’
‘We’ve just been agreeing that what’s between us is personal, haven’t we?’
‘Only in the most negative sense, and only then, not now.’ Maria was defiant.
Luke laughed with genuine amusement, but something hard and unyielding still lay behind the surface gleam in his eyes.
‘More than ever now. As I say, you owe me something, and if you’re determined to go on pretending you don’t know that, I’ll be delighted to tell you what it is some time soon, but not right now. We’re attracting too much attention. In fact——’his upper lip curled
fastidiously as he paused thoughtfully ‘—in fact, if we didn’t have our professional connection to serve as camouflage, I don’t think I’d care to be seen with you. It’s just a pity we don’t live in the era when a man could set his mistress up somewhere and know she’d be there waiting for him whenever he felt the urge to see her, but was never, ever seen with her in public.’
Immobile, barely breathing, Maria didn’t speak for several seconds. Then she said tightly, ‘I’m not your mistress.’
‘No, but you’re going to be.’
This time her silence was longer. She had known, hadn’t she? Oh, yes, she had recognised the sexual awareness that was the dark other side of Luke’s hostility—and had tried to ignore it, but it was impossible to go on pretending it didn’t exist now that the preliminary skirmishing was over and he was referring to it openly.
Apprehension