Ransacked Heart

‘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 was a physical pang, the ensuing denial a wash of red-hot feeling. Never!

The thought was frantic as she dragged a desperate breath into her lungs. She hated Luke Scott, so——

Just say no.

Maria suppressed rising panic that was fatally laced with hysteria. Where had that stupid slogan come from, the facile answer of those who thought there were easy solutions to all the world’s problems? Nothing was that simple.

The way he was looking at her——

‘When I’m so cheap and nasty?’ she jeered, a soft acknowledgement of the contempt with which he was regarding her.

‘Cheap,’ he granted her ruthlessly, and smiled as she glanced in the direction of Florian, who was now dancing energetically with the exotically lovely Nicky Kai. ‘No, Jones won’t be rescuing you, even supposing Nicky is into sharing. He can name his price and I’ll pay it because he’s a brilliant jock, but that’s it and he knows it.’

In a happier moment, Maria might have laughed at the idea of Florian troubling to rescue anyone from anything.

‘I don’t need rescuing.’ She lifted her chin. ‘No one has mistresses any more.’

‘I know, but what other word is there? We’d both balk at “lover”. People just get married or live together,’ Luke went on relentlessly. ‘But those don’t apply to us as they imply a sharing that’s total, and there’s only one area of my life that I can bring myself to share with you.’

The insult enraged her.

‘Unfortunately there isn’t a single square inch of my life I want to share with you,’ she told him levelly, the mad, febrile fluttering of her heart a private weakness.

‘This time I’m not considering you,’ Luke returned callously, and produced a brilliant smile. ‘Come, let me introduce you to people. Who haven’t you met yet?’

As they moved around the room, Luke introducing her to the people with whom she would be working, Maria struggled to put his threats out of her mind and minimise her own reaction to him, both six years ago and now. Whatever she had felt at nineteen, hatred was all that was left now, and hatred ought to impart strength. Luke Scott meant nothing to her; he couldn’t do anything to her if she refused to let him.

But she remained disturbed, acutely aware of him at her side and only grateful that he despised her too much to allow himself to be seen touching her in public.

Even the convention of a hand at her elbow would have been intolerable. That was how much she hated him.

She glanced at him, almost hopefully, but the impact of his virility and arrogance remained undiminished, and her fingers curled into her palms, painted nails slicing the soft skin. He was quite simply devastating, a combination of grace and power, allied to the pride implicit in strong, superb facial bones over which dark coppery skin was stretched tautly. He was clean-shaven, although a faint darkness marked his jaw at this hour; inevitable with his colouring, she knew, her eyes moving upwards to his jet-black hair and then—a betrayal of herself—down to where the open neck of his shirt provided tantalising glimpses of subtly gleaming flesh shadowed by softly curling dark hair, all so emphatically masculine.

It was a dangerous moment, fascination obliterating resentment, but when Luke suddenly turned his eyes her way again, the contempt Maria saw in them restored hatred.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e1f8cd8b-7e4e-5e14-91c8-d0db5ef1e736)

‘CAN we give you a lift?’

Maria flung Luke Scott a hostile look as he and Cavell Fielding appeared just as she was taking her leave of Giles and Ursula Estwick, with Florian and Nicky on either side of her.

‘I’m going home with Florian and Nicky, thanks.’

It was deliberately dismissive, but a scorching anger rose in response to the searingly contemptuous look he gave her.

‘We’ve managed to wangle her an apartment just a floor below Nicky and me,’ Florian volunteered cheerfully. ‘Well, it was Nicky’s influence really, I have to admit. It takes Taipei’s most famous daughter to buck our letting agent’s system of waiting lists like that.’

‘It sounds like a convenient arrangement,’ Luke commented urbanely, and Maria saw his lip curl sar-donically, as if everything he believed of her had just been confirmed.

What did he think they were going to do? Toss a coin to determine on which floor Florian spent the night?