The Dark Side of Desire

‘Leon! I must have your opinion!’

Anita’s piercing voice cut across her, demanding his attention. Flavia could have slapped her for it.

He turned towards her again, away from the woman on his right.

‘On what?’ he replied. His voice seemed reserved.

Anita flapped a heavily beringed hand. ‘Don’t you think Flavia looks so much better with her hair loose rather than pinned up the way it was last night?’

Like two burning brands Flavia felt her cheeks flare. Anger and mortification warred within her. She wanted to snap viciously at Anita, but Leon Maranz was replying.

‘Very … uninhibited,’ he drawled, and Flavia could feel, like a physical touch, his eyes working over her.

The brands in her cheeks burnt fiercer.

‘You see?’ Anita’s voice was triumphant. ‘I told you, Flavia. You could look a knock-out if you tried more! I tell you, darling,’ she said, ‘if you can persuade Leon Maranz to admire you, you’ve got it made!’ She gave a gush of laughter as insincere as it was overdone.

Flavia’s expression iced over.

It remained like ice for the whole of the eternally long meal—it was the only way she could get through it.

She was given some mercy—Anita laid off her, and Leon Maranz, when he wasn’t talking to the woman on his right, or to the other guests across the table who seemed keen to engage his attention, talked to her father. Or rather, she realised, her father talked to Leon Maranz. The edginess he’d displayed earlier seemed to have vanished, and now he was in effusive mode, she could tell, mingling loud bonhomie with an eager attentiveness that told Flavia that, whatever potential use Leon Maranz was to him, it was considerable.

Was it reciprocated? she wondered as she steadily ate through the courses, despite a complete lack of appetite. Eating was easier than talking. So was being aware of what her father was doing.

But on what Leon Maranz was doing she was far less clear. There was no evidence of reciprocation, no evidence of anything except the fact that Leon Maranz seemed to prefer her father to do the talking. His laconic answers only seemed to drive her father onward. He was getting more and more exuberant—or, a sudden thought struck her, should that be more and more desperate?

She glanced sideways at her father. He’d loosened his bow tie slightly and his cheeks were reddening, his eyes becoming pouchy. His glass was frequently refilled, and Flavia wondered how much he’d had to drink. Distaste flickered in her face. Thank God she was going back home tomorrow. She couldn’t wait to get away from her father, away from the shallow, money-obsessed life he lived. However worthy the cause of this evening’s function, she didn’t want to be here in this vast ornate banqueting room, with the scent of wine and flowers and expensive perfume everywhere, the glint of jewellery on the women and the sleek, fat-cat look of the men.

She wanted to be at home, at Harford, deep in her beloved countryside. Back with her grandmother in the quiet, familiar world so very dear to her … so very precious …

But for now all she could do was tough it out—get through the evening however long it seemed.

After an interminable length of time the meal and the fund-raising presentations from the charity directors finally drew to a close, with coffeepots and petits-fours and an array of liqueurs being placed on the tables. At the far end of the huge room on a little stage a band had formed, and was starting to strike up.

Flavia closed her eyes, trying to shut it all out. She wanted out of here. Now. But it wasn’t going to happen. She knew that. And she also knew, with a heaviness that was tangible, that Anita and her father were going to head off to the dance floor, and she would be left with Leon Maranz. Unless—dear God, please, she found herself praying—he went off with someone else. But the woman on his other side had got up to dance as well, with her partner, and with a hollowing sensation Flavia realised that she was now sitting next to Leon Maranz with empty seats on either side of them.

Stiffly she reached for the coffeepot.

‘Allow me.’

His hand was before her, lifting the heavy pot as though it weighed nothing and pouring coffee into her empty cup.

‘Cream?’ The drawling voice was solicitous.

She gave a minute shake of her head.

‘Of course—more empty calories,’ he murmured.

She shot him a look. It was a mistake.

A mistake, a mistake, a mistake.

He lounged back in his chair, one hand cupping a brandy glass. There was an air of relaxation about him, and yet there was something else that told Flavia at some alien, atavistic, visceral level of her being that he was not relaxed at all. That he was merely giving the impression of being relaxed.

It was in his eyes. They were heavy-lidded, yet she could see that they were resting on her with an expression that was not in the least somnolent.

For a second, almost overpoweringly, she wanted to get to her feet and run—run far and fast, right out of the building. But she couldn’t. It was impossible. She couldn’t do something so obviously, outrageously socially unacceptable.

She could head for the Ladies’ Room, though.

She seized on the notion with relief. That would be OK—in fact it would be ideal, because then she could pin her hair up and make sure any trace of Anita’s lipstick was gone.

She steeled herself to stand up, but before her stiffened limbs could move Leon Maranz pushed back his chair and surveyed her. His eyes moved back to hers, holding them effortlessly, and in the space of time it took to lock eyes with him she became paralysed, unable to move, breathe, to do anything at all except read in his dark obsidian eyes the unmistakable glint of an unmissable message.

Desire.

It was as flagrant as his audacity in letting his long-lashed eyes rest on her like a physical caress.

Tangible. Intimate …

She thrust up from her chair, stood up, every muscle taut like a wire under impossible tension. She had to go—right now.

‘Do please excuse me. I really must …’

Her voice was high and clipped and breathless. Thoughts seared through her mind.

I can’t cope with this! It’s too flagrant, too overpowering, and it’s all far, far too impossible! Impossible to have anything to do with a man from my father’s world! Impossible to have anything to do with any man when my overwhelming responsibility is for my grandmother. So it doesn’t matter—doesn’t matter a jot what this ridiculous reaction to him is, I can’t let it go anywhere, and I have to stop it in its tracks now. Right now!

But he wasn’t to be evaded. Instead he matched her gesture, getting to his feet in a lithe, effortless movement, towering over her. Too close—much too close. She stepped back, trying not to bump into the empty chair beside her.

‘You know …’ he said, and his voice was a deep, dark drawl that set her nerve-endings vibrating at some weird, subliminal frequency. His eyes did not relinquish hers, did not allow her to tear her gaze away from his. ‘I don’t think I do excuse you, Ms Lassiter. Not two nights in a row.’ The dark glint in his eye was shot through with something that upped that strange subliminal frequency. ‘This time I think I will just do—this.’

He moved so fast she did not see it coming. His hand fastened around her wrist. Not tightly, not gripping it, but encircling it … imprisoning it.

He looked down at her, even taller somehow, his shoulders broader, his eyes darker.

‘I’d like to dance with you,’ he said.

He drew her hand into the crook of his arm so that her hand splayed involuntarily on the dark sleeve of his tuxedo jacket, her nails white against the smooth black cloth. She wanted to jerk free, tear herself away, but he was looking down at her still, a taunting smile playing on his lips.

‘You don’t want to make a scene, do you, Ms Lassiter?’ he said, and a saturnine eyebrow quirked. The dark eyes were glinting. Mocking.

Emotion flashed in her eyes. For a wild and impossible moment, she wanted to do exactly what he’d said she could not—tug her hand free of its imprisonment, push away from him, storm off in a swirl of skirts and leave him standing there.

But there were too many people around. This was a formal function, with people who knew him, knew her father, knew who she was. Too many eyes were coming their way. Heads were turning at other tables set too close by.

He saw her dilemma, mocked it, and started to draw her away, towards the dance floor beyond. He could feel the stiffness of her body, the anger in the set of her shoulders. Well, he had anger of his own. Anger because she had spent the entire meal as if he did not exist, blanking him out, doing her best to ignore him, refusing to see him, talk to him. Refusing to do anything except the one thing she could not refuse.