It was gratifying to know that they had been concerned about her. ‘I should have let you know,’ she apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I’d prefer a hotel a bit further away.’
‘As in I might have to put up with you two talking shop during the day, but I want some rest from it in the evenings?’ Chris grinned.
‘Not at all.’ She laughed, and did not have a chance to say anything else because someone was calling her name.
‘Phelix!’ She looked over to where Ross Dawson was making his way over to her. ‘Phelix Bradbury!’ he exclaimed as he reached her.
‘Hello, Ross,’ she replied, and was about to make some comment with regard to his act of being surprised to see her there when, even as Ross kissed her on both cheeks, she caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man standing with a blonde woman and another man. But it was the dark-haired man that held Phelix riveted. She felt a deafening silent thunder in her ears, but even as she tried to deny that he was here after all, it took everything she had to keep her expression composed. She glanced casually away, but not before she noticed that he had been looking at nowhere but her!
Her insides were all of a jangle. She had not seen him in eight years, and only twice before then, but she would know him anywhere! She had been just eighteen then, he twenty-eight. That would make him thirty-six now.
Phelix began to get herself more of one piece when she realised that, thankfully, he could not possibly have recognised her. She was nothing remotely like the awkward and, in her view, late-developing teenager she had been then. But that was it—she was out of here!
But, having grown a veneer of sophistication, even if her insides were now feeling like just so much jelly, Phelix knew she could not just simply cut and run. But she wasn’t staying, that was for sure! As soon as she possibly could, she would tell either Chris or Duncan that she had forgotten something, had a headache, a migraine, athlete’s foot—she didn’t care what—and was going back to her hotel. From there she would make arrangements to fly back to England.
Hoping against hope that he was a figment of her imagination, she found she was irresistibly drawn to glance over to him again. It was him! He was tall, but even so would have stood out from the crowd of people milling around.
She slid her glance from him to the other man standing with him, and on to the close to six feet tall glamorous blonde woman. His girlfriend? Certainly not his wife.
Oh, heavens, he was looking her way again. Phelix flicked her glance from him. She was not unused to men giving her a second look, so knew his second glance was no more than passing interest. But, apart from his female companion, herself and several other women, the conference seemed to be a predominantly male affair.
She tried to tune in to what Ross and the other two were babbling on about, but when she felt as much as surreptitiously glimpsed the man leaving his companions, so her wits seemed to desert her.
But—oh, help—he seemed to be making his way in her direction! Dying a thousand deaths, Phelix prayed that he was making his way elsewhere, or that if he was perhaps coming over to say hello to Ross, that Ross would not think he had to introduce them; the name Phelix was a dead give-away.
He halted as he reached them and her mouth dried and her heart raced like a wild thing. ‘Ross,’ she heard him greet Ross Dawson, and saw him nod to Duncan and Chris. And then he turned his cool grey eyes on her. How she remained outwardly calm as, for the longest second of her life, he studied her, she never knew. And then casually, every bit as if he had seen her every day of his life for the past eight years, ‘How are you, Phelix?’ he asked.
Her throat was so dry she didn’t think she would be able to utter a word. But the poise she had learned since she had last seen him stood her in good stead. ‘Fine, Nathan,’ she murmured. ‘You?’
‘You know each other?’ Ross asked.
‘From way back,’ Nathan Mallory drawled, his eyes still on her. She guessed he couldn’t believe the evidence of his vision; the change in her from the frightened timid mouse she had been eight years previously to the cool, collected and polished woman who stood before him now.
‘You’re here for the conference?’ she enquired, and could have bitten out her tongue for having asked so obvious a question.
‘One of our speakers had to drop out. As I intended coming this way, I thought I might as well come early and fill in for him.’
She smiled, nodded—she knew darn well his name had not been down on the programme as one of the speakers. She, knowing he was likely to be in Davos next week with the other heads of businesses, had scrutinised the list of speakers very thoroughly before at last bowing to her father’s insistence that she come this week as part of the Edward Bradbury Systems entourage.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ she managed, striving with all she had to hold down the dreadful feelings of anxiety that were trying to get a hold—she hadn’t felt like this in years! ‘I think I have to register in.’
Somehow or other she was able to make her legs take her in the direction she wanted them to go. And later, having had no intention of still being there but somehow having been swept along, she was in a seat, listening without taking in a word of what the introductory speaker was droning on about.
She had by then started to recover from seeing Nathan Mallory again after all those years. As well as being tall with dark hair, Nathan was handsome—quite devastatingly so. A man who could have any woman he chose. But Nathan Mallory—she drew a shaky breath—was her husband! She, for all she went by the name Phelix Bradbury, was in actual fact Mrs Nathan Mallory. Phelix Mallory. Oh, my word!
As she twisted her wedding ring on her finger—the marriage band he had put there—her thoughts flew back to more than eight years ago. She ceased to hear the speaker’s voice and was back in the cold, cheerless home she shared with her father in Berkshire. She was no longer in the conference hall, but was in her father’s study, back before she had met Nathan.
Her grandfather, cold and forbidding Edward Bradbury Senior, had died shortly after her mother. Phelix had missed her warm and loving mother so much, and later realised that, perhaps needing warmth and comfort at that time, she had been ready to imagine herself in love when Lee Thompson, their gardener’s son, home on vacation from university.
It seemed as though she had always known Lee. She had always been shy with people, but he’d seemed to understand that as their romance blossomed.
Though he’d left it to her to seek her father out in his study and tell him that she and Lee were going to marry.
‘Marry!’ her father had roared, utterly astounded.
‘We love each other,’ she had explained.
‘You might love him—we’ll see how much he thinks of you!’ Edward Bradbury had retorted dismissively. And that had been the end of the conversation —and the end of her romance.
She had seen neither Lee nor his father again. When Lee had not phoned as he had said he would she had telephoned him, and had learned that his father had been dismissed from his job and that Lee had been bribed—for that was what it amounted to—to sever all contact with her.
She had been too shocked to fully take in what Lee was saying. ‘What do you mean—my father will pay off all your student loans?’ she had protested.
‘Look, Phelix, I’m in hock up to my ears. I was mad to think we could marry and make a go of it. We’d be broke for years! You’re not working and—’
‘I’ll get a job,’ she’d said eagerly.
‘What could you do? You’re trained for nothing. Any money you’d be able to bring in would be nothing at all like as much as we’d need to keep us afloat.’
That was when a pride she hadn’t known she had started to bite, and she