Ransacked Heart

Not that there was any real danger of his ever mattering to her. How could he? She hated him.

The dark grey eyes that glanced her way just before they moved across the chaotic intersection seemed to mirror that hatred, and she recoiled slightly.

‘Is it that you can’t think of anything plausible, or simply that you refuse to make excuses for what you are?’ he wondered insultingly. ‘I could almost admire you for it if it’s the latter.’

‘Almost, but not quite,’ she jeered in a brittle voice. ‘Because I’m still what you believe I am, still chasing Florian Jones around the world! Only, again, why does that make me worse than Nicky? As you’ve conceded, Florian’s marriage is no longer a fact except on paper, and Nicky isn’t his wife.’

‘It doesn’t make you worse, it just makes you weak,’ he told her insolently. ‘I’ve never been able to respect people who go back. Going back, starting over, is always either the easy option or a negative step in itself, retrogressive. It’s weakness…But then Florian Jones is your one great weakness, I suppose, since it’s obvious that you haven’t learnt a thing in the years since you first got involved with him. Or is it that your other relationships keep proving unsatisfactory, driving you back to him?’

‘My hundreds of other relationships, don’t you mean, Mr Scott?’ Maria prompted caustically.

In fact, only one serious relationship lay behind her, with a Wellington actor who read news bulletins in order to eat, and it had died owing to lack of feeling, disappointing them both at the time, but Maria had philosophically absorbed the lesson at the heart of the sad experience. She believed in love, but she had been too impatient, her eagerness to experience it persuading her to believe that what she had felt went deeper than liking and a mild physical attraction. In future, she would not go looking for love, or trying to manu-facture it out of other lesser emotions, but she still believed it would find her one day.

‘Hundreds?’ Luke was drily sceptical. ‘How have you found time to make such a success of your career? How many really?’

‘One,’ Maria admitted shortly, despising herself for confiding even that much. ‘It didn’t work out.’

‘Why not? No, don’t tell me. He didn’t measure up to Jones, the affair lacked the romance of having to follow a man around the world—perhaps even the bitter-sweet romance of uncertainty.’

‘There’s nothing romantic about my relationship with Florian,’ Maria asserted abruptly.

‘Wasn’t it a romantic gesture, accepting this job?’ Luke was slowing the car as they arrived at the restaurant, one of the most famous in Taipei, Maria knew, and an immaculately uniformed parking attendant was approaching. ‘And wasn’t he being romantic when he suggested that we consider you for this job? Which of you is responsible for the long periods of separation, or are they merely dictated by your careers?’

‘I’m sure you’ve made up your mind as to the answer to that, along with everything else, Mr Scott,’ she responded levelly, disconcerted by a need to conceal an unexpected surge of bitter frustration.

‘No, I’ve only made a guess,’ he returned coolly.

‘As your guesses instantly become convictions…’ she shrugged, not bothering to complete it, and neither of them spoke again until a commissionaire had ushered them into the foyer of the building housing the restaurant and they were inside a lift.

‘Just one more thing before we become part of a crowd, Maria,’ said Luke as the door slid shut and they began to move smoothly upwards.

‘What?’

The abrupt challenge was distracted because she was struggling to contend with an unexpectedly physical reaction to finding herself alone with him in such a confined space. It had happened before, when they had descended from her apartment, but then the presence of another person had diluted the effect to an extent where she was able to ignore it.

Now she wished fervently for an old-fashioned attendant to match the commissionaire downstairs and the man who had driven Luke’s car away to park it.

She felt panicky, as if something precious deep within her was menaced by his closeness, and once again as shockingly unsure of herself as she had always been in his presence six years ago.

‘I want you to stop calling me Mr Scott,’ he advised her blandly. ‘My name is Luke.’

Maria dragged a breath into her lungs and managed a tight smile.

‘Oh, but people might think there’s something personal between us if I do that,’ she mocked faintly.

The arresting copper-toned features tautened. ‘I’ve said I over-emphasised the need for discretion. Try it, and don’t tell me you’d rather die.’

‘I think I might,’ she retorted.

‘Say it!’ He was insistent, and she stiffened resentfully.

‘Why? Because you know how much I’ll hate it?’

‘Will you?’

Suddenly the tone was velvety. He was half turned towards her, and Maria saw him lift a hand and watched it move towards her, coming to rest against her bare midriff, warm fingers shaping themselves lightly to its gentle curve.

The odd fleeting stasis that gripped her was complete. Breathing and blood were stopped; her mind emptied, muscles went paralysed and even her heart skipped, missing a beat.

Then it was over, replaced by its opposite, restored life an explosion of rioting sensation. Her flesh was vibrantly alert, too sensitive, her heart thudding like a runner’s, wild hot panic flooding her reactivated mind. A single beat of awareness deep, deep in her woman-hood made every muscle clench in frantic denial.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she said tautly through stiff, barely moving lips.

‘Then call me by my name.’

His fingers stirred lazily against her skin, and she clamped her teeth together over a gasp.

‘This is harassment!’

‘It would be if you didn’t owe me,’ Luke conceded indifferently, no trace of compunction there to soften his mercilessly intent expression.

‘Luke, damn it!’

Her mind made the sacrifice for the sake of screaming flesh and she conceded defeat with a blistering fury, rage a fever in her eyes, darkening their colour to sherry.

‘Keep practising,’ Luke quipped amusedly, and with-drew his hand as the lift glided to a halt.

Maria didn’t need to look at his face or see the confident way he carried himself as he stepped out of the lift with her. His subtle satisfaction seemed to permeate the space around them. She could literally feel it, absorbed by her pores and entering her bloodstream, an alien message of warning, invader already and threatening ownership, but the acrid flavour on which she was choking was that of her own resentment.

‘Have you gone speechless on me again?’ he murmured tauntingly as Cavell Fielding came forward from the restaurant’s extravagantly decorative entrance opposite them, a slight widening of her sapphire eyes the only surprise she evinced at seeing them together. ‘The silent nymph you were six years ago fascinated me, but the woman with so much to say for herself is infinitely more stimulating.’

‘I’II think of something.’ Maria’s voice was milky-soft.

Only what? The intensity of her response to him a minute ago filled her with self-loathing, but she was afraid too, because suddenly it seemed as if hatred was no longer enough to counter the threat he presented, and yet it was the only answer she possessed.

Quite deliberately, she summoned the memory of the anguish of six years ago, the job she loved summarily barred to her and her Communications course sacrificed; and she dwelt especially on the dilemma that had torn at her then, the agonising conflict between her obstinate determination to pursue an uninterrupted career in radio at a time when there were no positions to be had in Johannesburg but possibilities in Durban, and a heart-wrenching reluctance to leave her parents alone when advanced emphysema was shortening her father’s life so cruelly.

The hatred was enough, answer to the strange, stifling power that Luke Scott had over her, but now a new suspicion preyed on the edges of her consciousness of it, the shadowy suggestion of a conviction that the hatred had its genesis in something darker and more complex than the realities she was calling to mind.

Six years ago! Luke’s words and their possible implication slammed belatedly into her brain as she was being introduced to the entertainment editor of a local newspaper, but natural incredulity dismissed them as more talk, just words carelessly plucked from an inadequate language. Maria didn’t believe that the child she had been then could have fascinated him. If it were true, he would have done something about it. That was the sort of man he was.

Yes, there was something sexual between the two of them now, but any interest he had felt six years ago would have been connected solely with the phenomenon of the awe he had inspired, so overwhelmingly intense that it had reduced her to awkward, agonised silence every time he was around.

The restaurant that had been chosen to introduce both the radio station’s new programme manager and image to the media was splendidly stylish, opening on to a lantern-illuminated balcony all the way down one side, décor and menu strictly Chinese.

Maria thought the evening went well and could only hope those to whom this launch meant so much were equally pleased with the way she acquitted herself. At her side, introducing her to people, encouraging her to elaborate on some of her ideas for the future, Luke was urbane, expressing only suave approval, and no one could have guessed at the personal contempt he felt for her, not a hint of it—or anything else personal either—allowed to show through his sophisticated public manner.

She herself had not yet fully recovered from the trauma of those moments in the lift, but it probably didn’t matter. Who was there here who knew her well enough to discern and identify any flaws in her own polished public persona? Certainly—she hoped—not Luke himself, and while her acquaintance with Florian Jones went back to their high-school days in South Africa, she knew he was impervious to anything that did not affect him directly.