‘I want to get home. It’s late and I don’t need to spend time having this conversation with you. Now, excuse me.’
‘Why don’t you take a taxi to your house?’
‘Because, not that it’s any of your business, I can’t afford the luxury. If I could afford to catch cabs here, there and everywhere, then I wouldn’t be working at a nightclub, would I?’
‘We’re not talking here, there and everywhere. We’re talking at this hour in central London. The underground isn’t a very safe place to be.’ Or so he imagined. He, personally, seldom travelled on the underground. He had a driver so that he could work in the back of the car, and when he didn’t want to use George he drove himself.
‘You would know, would you?’ Mattie snapped, reading his mind with staggering accuracy. ‘When was the last time you went anywhere on the tube?’ She gave a little grunt of pure scorn, at which point his mind told him to just leave the woman alone, to get a grip on himself.
‘I was on my way to the underground myself, as it happens,’ he heard himself saying, beyond all common sense.
‘You’re lying.’
‘So now I’m a liar and a pervert, am I?’
Mattie glared at him for a further few seconds and then dodged around him and began striding towards the illuminated underground entrance.
Dominic fell in line.
What the hell was he doing? he asked himself. What did it matter what a waitress in a nightclub thought of him? So what if she was exciting to look at? At the grand old age of thirty-four he should be over all that by now.
But still he found that he was walking alongside her, feeling her impotent anger simmering from every pore of her body, surreptitiously watching the proud tilt of her head, hands still resolutely thrust into her pockets, her bag, which was no more than a weathered knapsack, casually slung over one shoulder.
‘Well, goodbye.’ Mattie turned to face him as soon as they were in the station, virtually a ghost town at this time in the morning.
It was the first time she was seeing him in light and what she had taken for a good-looking face, not dissimilar to the one that was probably lying, mouth open, empty whisky bottle at the side, waiting for her on the tired sofa in the sitting room, she now realised far exceeded that.
This man, whose name he had not even bothered to tell her because he was, of course, far too high and mighty for such niceties, especially when it came to the fact that he was just out for a good time with a woman he imagined would be an easy lay, went beyond good-looking. He was very firmly placed in the higher regions of staggering.
Faintly olive-skinned, short black hair, eyes that were as dark as midnight and a bone-structure that seemed to have been chiselled lovingly with perfection in mind.
‘What stop are you getting off at?’
‘Not the same as yours,’ Mattie answered smoothly, turning away and slotting her coins into the ticket machine. She always made sure that her change was ready for when she got to the ticket machine. No fumbling in bags. Not very safe.
‘How would you know that?’
‘Because I have eyes in my head.’ To prove her point, she insolently raked her eyes over his immaculately tailored suit, his handmade shoes, the gold watch on his wrist.
‘I’m delivering you to your door,’ Dominic said flatly. There was something about this girl that made him concerned for her safety—her insurgency, perhaps. ‘So we do happen to be travelling to the same stop after all. And you needn’t fear that I shall try and take advantage of you on the way.’
‘I don’t need an escort.’
Green eyes. The purest green he had ever seen. The suggestive lighting in the nightclub had only given him a glimpse of her. Here, her face crystallised into huge, almond-shaped eyes, a nose sprinkled with freckles and a full mouth that was currently down-turned in an expression of fierce disdain.
‘This place is deserted. Or maybe not. Maybe there’ll be a few junkies and drunks waiting to get into the same carriage as you. Am I right?’
‘I’m touched that you care so much about my welfare, but I do happen to do this particular route four nights a week. I think it’s fair to say that I can take care of myself.’ She gave him another scornful once-over. ‘Probably more than you can take care of yourself.’
‘More typecasting?’
‘Look, it’s late,’ Mattie said carefully, meeting his eyes and holding them with difficulty. ‘I didn’t appreciate the way you were looking at me in the nightclub and I don’t appreciate the way you followed me out. Can I make myself any clearer? I need to grab some sleep if I’m not to pass out tomorrow.’
‘Don’t you have all day to catch up on your sleep?’ The dark eyes narrowed speculatively on her face and Mattie felt herself blushing. Blushing like a teenager when in fact she was twenty-three years old and had had enough sobering experiences in her life for a cynical outer shell to be well and truly in place.
‘I happen to have things to do,’ she muttered. ‘The world doesn’t cater for people who sleep by day and work by night, in case it’s missed you. Now, go away.’
‘Fine. But I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow at the club.’
‘Why?’
This was something that was genuinely puzzling her. She had become experienced in a very short space of time in reading the men who patronised the nightclub. They were usually middle-aged, married but not so married that they didn’t still lick their lips at the sight of a pretty girl in next to nothing. Harmless men. Then there were the groups of young, rich yuppies. She personally found them a lot more threatening because there was no wife at home waiting, no kiddies tugging on their consciences.
The man standing in front of her didn’t seem to fall into either category.
In fact, he struck her as the sort who didn’t need to trail behind waitresses in nightclubs or anywhere else for that matter because whatever woman he wanted would come to him with a click of his fingers.
‘Because I don’t particularly like being categorised without an explanation.’ Which beggared the question of why he should give a damn in the first place, but he could tell that that train of thought hadn’t occurred to her from the small frown.
‘Look at it this way,’ he pointed out smoothly, jumping into whatever she had been thinking so that she once more raised her eyes to his. ‘How would you feel if I insulted you by implying that since you were a waitress in a nightclub, willing to dress in next to nothing because the less the clothes, presumably the bigger the tips, you were therefore—’
‘A cheap tart?’ Mattie snapped, interrupting him before he could voice what he had obviously been thinking. ‘A woman of easy virtue? Or maybe a woman of no virtue altogether? A sad loser who has nothing better to do with her life than whistle it down the drain working for tips in a nightclub?’ Yes, they all thought that. All the men who ogled her as she waited their tables. It still got her back up, though.
Not just with him, but with herself because she knew where she was going. She knew why she was doing what she was doing. What did it matter what one passing stranger out of the hundreds thought of her?
‘Like it?’ Dominic murmured lazily. ‘Think you might want to refute it?’
‘I don’t have to refute anything to you, but let me just tell you that I’m not an easy lay.’ Understatement of the century, she was honest enough to think. One lover in all her years. Frankie King, whom she had known since she was sixteen. And she hadn’t even slept with him for…how many months now?
‘So if that’s why you followed me, then you can forget it. I won’t be climbing into your bed,