Contracted: Corporate Wife

‘Let’s put it this way,’ said Patrick, pointing a fork at her for emphasis. ‘I can do what I want. I can go where I want, when I want, with whoever I want. You don’t think that makes me happy?’

‘Right.’ Lou nodded understandingly as she buttered another piece of bread. She hoped the food was coming soon. She was starving. ‘So when was the last time you went away? You certainly haven’t been anywhere in the last three months.’

‘I’ve been busy, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ said Patrick, thrown off balance by this new, combative Lou. ‘I had a company to save!’

‘Hey, we managed for years before you came along! We wouldn’t have fallen apart if you’d taken a long weekend. You didn’t even go away at Easter. Don’t you ever wish that you were working for something more than to make more money? That you had someone to go home to at the end of the day?’

‘Aren’t you trying to ask me if I ever get lonely?’ said Patrick sardonically.

‘Well, don’t you?’

‘I don’t need to be on my own if I don’t choose to. I’ve had plenty of relationships, and I’m not short of female company.’

So Lou had gathered from the gossip columns.

Perhaps it was just as well that the food arrived before she had time to frame a tart retort. Patrick had to watch while Lou went through her smiling routine again, and the waiter, this one old enough to have known better, fell over himself to serve her. He picked up her napkin, refilled both of her glasses, offered to fetch her more bread and ground pepper from an extremely suggestive-looking mill.

Extraordinary, thought Patrick. He studied her across the table. She had taken off her jacket and was wearing a simple, silky sort of top with a scoop neck, its plainness set off by a striking silver necklace. OK, she was elegant in a classic way and she had a charming smile—it seemed to work on waiters and barmen, anyway—but there wasn’t anything particularly special about the rest of her.

Well, she had nice eyes, he supposed, amending his opinion slightly, and all the assurance of an older woman, but there was no way you could describe her as beautiful. Not like Ariel, who had all the bloom and radiance of youth. Still, now that he was looking at her properly, he could see that she did have a certain allure with that dark hair and those dark eyes.

Funny, this was the first time he had really been aware of her as a woman. He must have seen the line of her throat and the curve of her mouth almost every day for the last three months, and yet tonight was the first time he had noticed them at all.

Patrick frowned slightly. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to start noticing things like that about Lou. There was something vaguely unsettling about thinking of her as a woman, warm and real, as opposed to the impersonal PA who ran his office so efficiently. About realising how oddly the generous curve of her lips sat with that air of cool competence or the ironic undertone in her voice sometimes.

And there was something very unsettling about noticing the way that top shifted as she leant forward to pick up her glass. The material seemed to slither over her skin, and it was impossible not to wonder how it would feel beneath his hands, how warm and smooth her body would be underneath…

Patrick looked abruptly away. Enough of that.

‘What about you?’ he said, struggling to remember what they had been talking about. She had been making him cross, and that was good. Anything was better than watching that top slip and slide as she breathed. ‘Are you Mrs Happy?’

‘I think I’m pretty happy,’ she said, swirling the wine in her glass as she considered the matter. ‘Content, anyway. I’m not joyously happy the way I was when I was first married, and when Grace and Tom were babies, but I’ve got a lot to be happy about. My children are healthy, I’ve got a dear aunt who’s like a mother to me, I’ve got good friends…It’s just a shame about my awful job. I’ve got this boss who makes my life an absolute misery.’

‘What?’ Patrick did a double take. He had been so busy not noticing what was going on with that damn top—why couldn’t the woman sit still, for God’s sake?—that it took him a moment to realise what she had said.

‘That was a joke,’ said Lou patiently.

‘Oh. Right.’ Patrick was surprised by how relieved he felt. ‘Ha, ha,’ he said morosely, and then was startled when Lou laughed. She had a proper laugh, not a giggle or a simper, and it made her look younger, vibrant, interesting, really quite…sexy. Was that what the waiter had seen too?

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Just checking to see if you were listening!’

Patrick had the alarming feeling that things were slipping out of control and he got a grip of himself with an effort. There must have been something very odd in that champagne. He wasn’t feeling like himself at all.

‘You’re on your own, though.’ That was better; think of her as a sad divorcee. ‘Don’t you get lonely?’

‘When you live in a tiny flat with two growing children, I can tell you that you long for the chance to be lonely sometimes!’ said Lou.

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it,’ he said.

‘No, OK,’ she acknowledged. ‘I miss being married sometimes,’ she said slowly, pushing her plate aside so that she could lean her arms on the table and prop her face in one palm, oblivious to what that did to her cleavage, or what the effect on Patrick might be.

‘It’s hard bringing up children on your own,’ she told him, while he fought to concentrate. ‘There’s no one to talk to in the evening, no one to share your worries with, no one who cares the way you do about their little triumphs.’

She was gazing at the candle flame, miles away with her children, and Patrick wondered if she had forgotten that he was there. If she had, he didn’t like it, he realised.

‘It would just be nice sometimes to have someone to support you when everything seems to be going wrong,’ she said.

‘Someone to hold you?’ he suggested, his voice harder than he had intended, and Lou’s dark eyes flashed up from the candle to meet his for a taut moment while both of them tried not to think about being held.

Her gaze dropped first. ‘Yes, someone to hold me,’ she said quietly. ‘Sometimes.’

Patrick had a sudden memory of Lou walking across the lobby earlier that evening. She had seemed so prim and proper then, so cool and composed. Not appealing at all. He was almost appalled to realise how warm and soft and inviting she looked now, her eyes dark, gleaming pools in the candlelight, and her hair just a little tousled. He wondered what it would be like to touch it, to run his fingers through it and let the dark, silky strands fall back against her cheek.

What had happened? Then the neat suit and the demure top had struck him as merely dull. Now they seemed tantalising, as if they were specifically designed to make him wonder what she might be wearing underneath. If she were warm and willing in his lap, would he be able to slide his hand over her knee and under that businesslike skirt and discover that she was wearing stockings?

Patrick swallowed. God, he had to stop this right now. Talk about inappropriate. He didn’t want Lou to think that he was just another lecherous businessman fantasising about secretaries in tight skirts and stockings and high heels.

Although if the cap fitted…

Picking up his glass, he took a gulp of wine and made a sterling effort to pull himself together.

‘Yes, being held…I do miss that,’ Lou was saying thoughtfully, unaware of Patrick’s confusion. ‘I think what I miss most, though, is the feeling that you don’t have to deal with everything on your own, that someone is interested in you for yourself, and not just because you’re a mother and there to be taken for granted. I don’t mind when the kids do that, I know that’s part of their job, but still…’

She glanced at him, evidently hesitating, and Patrick cleared his throat and nodded encouragingly.

‘Go on, tell me. This is confession time, remember? Nothing to be remembered or held against you tomorrow!’

Lou laughed in spite of herself. ‘OK, then, but you get to tell me an embarrassing fantasy too.’

‘It’s a fantasy? Better and better!’

A slight blush crept up her cheeks, but she hoped the candlelight would disguise it. ‘Mine’s not a very exciting fantasy, I’m afraid. I imagine that I can skip the awkwardness of meeting a man, dating him, getting to know him, all of that. I don’t want the falling-in-love bit again. It’s too consuming, and it hurts too much when you lose it.’

‘So where does the fantasy come in?’

‘I just want to wake up and find myself comfortably married to someone,’ she confessed. ‘Someone nice and…kind. Someone I could lean on when I needed to, and support when he needed it, and the rest of the time we’d be…I don’t know…friends, I suppose.’

‘What’s embarrassing about that?’ asked Patrick, his mind straying distractingly back to Lou’s stockings. If they were stockings. He really, really wanted to know now.

Could he ask her? Patrick wondered, and then caught himself. What was he thinking of? Of course he couldn’t ask his PA if she was wearing stockings. That would be sexual harassment.

‘It’s so politically incorrect,’ said Lou guiltily. ‘I’m a strong, independent woman. I shouldn’t need anyone to look after me. I can look after myself. And I do, most of the time,’ she said, recovering herself. ‘I only think about having someone else when I’m tired, or feeling down, or one of the kids is being difficult.’

Which was a depressing number of times in the week, when she thought about it.

‘It doesn’t sound to me like an impossible fantasy,’ said Patrick carefully. ‘You’ll just have to keep an eye out for someone suitable.’

‘Oh, yes, and there are so many kind, supportive, single men out there!’