She didn’t have to continue. He was already releasing her and stepping back from her. He really was a most despicable man, she reflected, refusing to give in to the craven impulse to look quickly around the bar to see who might have witnessed his unpleasant behaviour. She could only hope that none of their other clients had seen it.
‘If I’d known I was going to have the pleasure of your company I’d have arranged to take you out to dinner. Somewhere very private and very discreet, if you take my meaning.’
Sybilla most certainly did. She made no attempt to hide her revulsion from him as she told him curtly, ‘This is a business lunch, Mr Lewis, nothing more.’
‘Hey, come on, what’s with the “Mr Lewis”? And as for all that crap about business…you and I both know that potentially we’ve got a lot more than business going for us. I like you, Sybilla. I like you one hell of a lot. You’re a very desirable woman. A very successful woman. Some men might find that threatening, but not me. In fact…’ He was reaching out towards her again, and instinctively she stepped backwards, tensing as she bumped into someone.
As she turned her head to apologise to them she heard Ray adding sickeningly, ‘I find it a turn on. I find you a turn on.’
And she knew that the person standing behind her had heard him as well.
Trying not to let either her embarrassment or her anger show, she forced a polite smile to her lips and turned round properly to apologise. And then her face froze as she saw that the man she had bumped into was Gareth Seymour.
Her apology died in her throat. The look he was giving her was contemptuously disdainful, the way he withdrew from any further physical contact with her bringing a hot wash of colour to sting her face.
This was the last person she would have wanted to witness Ray’s unwanted advances towards her. Twice in one day now she had been humiliated in front of Gareth; twice she had been made to feel a fool in front of him.
At her side, Ray was asking her what she wanted to drink. Automatically she told him mineral water, unable to drag her eyes away from Gareth’s face and the cold contempt so plainly portrayed there.
‘Oh, come on. You can have something more exciting than that,’ Ray was pressing her.
She shook her head. She rarely touched alcohol and never when she was involved both in business discussions and driving, but Ray was one of those men who seemed to think it clever to insist on overruling anyone who refused a drink, and she suspected that in the end she would be forced to give in and let him buy her a drink she didn’t want and had no intention of consuming.
‘I know this is supposed to be a business lunch, but there’s no law that says we can’t combine business with pleasure, and you know already how much I’d like to give you pleasure,’ Ray was saying suggestively and far too loudly. Certainly loudly enough for Gareth to have heard him, to judge from the look of distaste that crossed his face.
As she started to turn away from him he said curtly to her, ‘The owner of the shaving-foam, presumably. I can’t say I’m impressed by your choice of…friends these days, Sybilla.’
It was outrageous, unforgivable, and totally and completely uncalled for that he should make such a comment to her. They hadn’t seen one another for ten years; they were virtually strangers to one another, and he had no right, absolutely no right at all to pass criticism on her regarding matters about which he was completely uninformed and completely wrong!
She was halfway to opening her mouth to tell him so when she realised what she was doing. Quarrelling with Gareth, and in public too, was the last thing she needed. Far better to treat his unfounded and ill-judged condemnation of her with the contempt he seemed to think she deserved.
Even so, as she turned away from him she couldn’t resist saying under her breath, ‘Fortunate for me, then, isn’t it, that your opinion of me…or my friends doesn’t rate very highly in my personal scale of life’s vital statistics?’ And then, as she caught sight of the woman she had seen with him earlier in the day coming towards them, she added for good measure, ‘As it happens, I wasn’t too impressed with your friend either. Scarlet nail-polish at nine o’clock in the morning is rather overdoing things a little, isn’t it?’
With that she turned back to Ray and said quickly, ‘I’m rather hungry and short of time. Do you mind if we go straight into the restaurant?’
Before he could object she started to walk towards the restaurant, praying that Ray would follow her.
Of all the people to have run into. And why, oh, why had she allowed herself to be baited into that extraordinary and totally out-of-character bitchiness about his woman friend? It had been completely unnecessary…completely over the top. The smart thing, the sensible thing to do would have been to quietly ignore his gibe and just walk away from him. Instead of which she had had not just to go running headlong into trouble, but to actually verbally invite it. Even in the white heat of her resentment and anger she had been able to see that Gareth hadn’t been too pleased by her attack on his woman friend, and who in his shoes could blame him?
She remembered how overawed and diminished she had felt by the girls he used to bring home, how young and vulnerable she had felt in comparison, and wondered a little grimly if it had been those old memories, memories she ought to have rooted out and destroyed long, long ago, which had been responsible for today’s outburst.
Whatever the cause, it was pointless regretting it now. All she could do was to hope that she and Gareth did not come into contact with one another again.
With a bit of luck they shouldn’t do so. He, after all, couldn’t be staying around for very long. He would doubtless arrange for Thomas’s business to be put up for sale or perhaps even closed down, and he would then return to America, and she doubted that anyone in the town would ever see him again. Over the last few years it had been only his love for his grandfather that had brought him back, and now that Thomas was dead…
Despite the fact that Gareth had refused to join the family business, had wanted to make his own way in life, he and Thomas had always remained close. Always after his visits Thomas was full of what he had done…what he had achieved. Sybilla had nerved herself to listen to Thomas singing his praises because she knew how much he meant to the older man.
After Gareth’s parents had been killed in an accident Thomas had brought him up, and there was a very, very strong bond between them.
Once, naïvely, she had asked Thomas if he had not been upset by Gareth’s decision to branch out on his own, but wisely Thomas had told her that Gareth must have the right to define and shape his own life, and that to try and keep him within the confines of their small town when he wanted to be elsewhere would be to destroy the bonds between them and would eventually destroy their relationship completely.
She hadn’t understood that then, at seventeen, but she did now. She had already heard from those who had been there how grim-faced Gareth had been at the funeral, and how obvious it had been to the onlookers that he was deeply upset by the loss of his grandfather, even though he had kept his emotions under control.
Now she wondered what role his companion played in his life. Over the years Thomas had never talked to her about the women Gareth knew. She knew that Thomas had wanted him to marry…wanted him to have children, but as yet it seemed that he had not found the women with whom he wanted to settle down. Unless…
Gareth’s emotions and future were nothing to do with her, she told herself grimly as the waiter pulled out her chair for her. In fact she had no business thinking about Gareth at all…or admitting him into her mind. By rights she ought to be concentrating on Ray and the new business they hoped to get from him.
That was, after all, why she was here, and the sooner she made that clear to Ray as well as to herself, the better.
Lunch was every bit as difficult as she had envisaged. Several times Ray tried to trick her into accepting a dinner-date with him, but on every occasion she side-stepped the issue, until in the end