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