Beyond All Reason

‘She struck me,’ he murmured thoughtfully, in a deceptively mild voice, ‘as the sort of woman who doesn’t mind thrusting her opinions on to other people, including her own daughter. That can be a disaster when it happens to a child, or an adolescent.’

He gave her a sidelong glance from under his lashes.

‘She can be a bit domineering, I suppose,’ Abigail admitted, only realising afterwards that she had fallen for a trap. He had given her a choice of talking either about a man or her mother, and she had chosen her mother when in fact, if she had been thinking straight, she would have seen that she was under no obligation to discuss either.

‘This is stupid,’ she said, fidgeting but not actually summoning up the courage to get up, ‘sitting here, wasting time talking about nothing, when there’s a pile of work back in the office waiting to get done.’

‘We’re not talking about nothing. Unless that’s how you would describe your life.’

‘And stop putting words into my mouth!’

Their eyes clashed and she felt a strange, giddy sensation overwhelm her.

‘How long did your friends stay?’ he asked, veering off at another tangent. He sipped his coffee and regarded her over the rim of the cup. Compelling. That more or less described him. His looks, his mind, everything about him compelled. Why else would she be sitting here being persuaded, against her will, to talk about herself?

‘An hour or so after you left,’ she said.

‘Very nice girls,’ he murmured, and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was leading up to something, though what, she couldn’t quite figure out. ‘Have you known them a long time?’

‘Years. I grew up with Alice, in fact. I’m an only child and she was like a sister to me.’

‘Down-to-earth, sensible girl,’ he mused, leaning back in the chair, his long, lithe body dwarfing it.

‘Yes, well, we all are,’ Abigail said tartly. ‘Reality isn’t something you can escape from when you have to strive for every little foothold you gain in life.’

‘That sounds like philosophising to me.’

‘I guess it does,’ she answered with a reluctant grin. ‘I didn’t lead a deprived existence, I always knew that there would be food on the table, but that luxuries were out of the question. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘have I answered all your questions? Do you feel that you now know me? Can we return to work?’

‘There is all that paperwork on the takeovers to work through, isn’t there?’ he agreed, raising his eyebrows, as if only now giving that any thought at all.

‘Yes, there is!’ She didn’t want to sound eager, but on the other hand she had no desire to continue their fraught conversation. In fact, she would have happily taken on a charging bull with her notepad if it would have provided the necessary distraction from Ross’s intimate probing.

‘And you’re right, there’s a pile of paperwork waiting on my desk to be sifted. Usual stuff. Letters from clients, contracts that need signing, statements to look at. Routine things, but they do take up one’s time.’

‘Yes, they do!’ she agreed lustily.

‘But it can all wait, I think. At least until we have another cup of coffee.’ He held out his cup with barely concealed amusement and she threw him a furious look.

Playing games. That was what it was all about, she thought, rapidly refilling his cup and handing it back to him. Games that had been initiated from curiosity. She hated games. She had always been a serious girl, with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and her head where it should be, not spinning somewhere in the clouds.

The only man who had ever played games with her had been Ellis, with his smooth patter. Had his games been initiated through curiosity as well? Or boredom? Or maybe they had been the effect of their enforced late nights alone in an empty office? Whatever, they had taught her a bitter lesson, and she felt a sweeping resentment that Ross was toying with her as well.

Martin was not a game-player. He took life seriously as well. She had a fleeting mental image of him. Pleasant-looking, with neatly combed brown hair and blue eyes. A thoroughly nice chap, as her friend Alice had whispered to her at some point during the engagement party.

She wondered, in a flash of sudden insight, whether she hadn’t allowed herself to enter into a relationship with him because he was just so different from Ellis, because he was sincere at a time when sincerity was the one thing she desperately needed.

She had met him at a dinner party, where they had automatically paired off, being both single, and it had just developed from there. No heady passion, no thunder and lightning, just a quiet, unfussy friendship between two people who shared similar interests. But would she have responded to him if that disastrous romance only months previously had not left such a sour taste in her mouth?

The thought confused her.

‘The food was very good,’ he mused, holding her gaze until the unsteadiness that she had been feeling since they had entered the boardroom threatened to take over completely. ‘I never knew that you were such a good cook.’

Abigail sighed in resignation. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

They both knew what she meant. He had broken through the carefully controlled barrier that had always separated her private life from her working life by turning up at that engagement party, and he wasn’t about to desist until his perverse curiosity about her was satisfied.

‘I’m not a bad cook,’ she said. ‘Why are you suddenly so interested?’

‘What makes you think that I haven’t been interested in you from the start?’

It was a curious way to answer her question and for a minute it threw her into speechless silence. Her mind flew back over the past eighteen months, and snippets of conversation between them resurfaced from the depths of her subconscious, like little eels wriggling free from the rocks under which they had been firmly buried.

She remembered times when he had asked her about herself, about what she did in the evenings, what movies she liked, whether she ever went to the theatre. And she could remember her responses with equal clarity. The uninformative, abrupt answers, the firm closing of any door between them that he might have been trying to open.

The rational side of her knew that it was stupid to let what had happened between her and Ellis affect the way she looked at the rest of the male sex, she knew that the constant erosive effects of her mother were a legacy she should leave behind. But she couldn’t help herself. Ross Anderson, she had known from the very start, was precisely the sort of man she should steer clear of, and she had made sure that she listened to her head and obeyed its instructions.

He continued to stare at her in that unsettling way of his, until she said nervously, with a little laugh, ‘Of course I did far too much food! There was an awful lot left over. I shall be eating cold chicken and beef in various guises until doomsday.’

‘Sounds a dismal prospect,’ he murmured softly, tracing the rim of the cup with one long finger.

‘Do you do a lot of cooking?’ she asked awkwardly, wondering when the inquisition would come to an end.

‘Not if I can help it, no. In fact, I spend most of my eating time in various establishments. It suits me.’

‘Sounds an unhealthy habit,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘You’re probably lacking all the essential minerals and vitamins your body needs to grow.’ It had been a nervous quip, but once she had said it she groaned inwardly at her clumsiness. What on earth had taken possession of her? Where was all the cool self-control that had been in evidence ever since she had started working for him?

‘Do you think so?’ he asked seriously enough, although there was something wickedly amused in his voice.

She kept her eyes firmly averted from his body.

‘My mother was a great believer in eating up all one’s greens,’ she said by way of reply. ‘I guess her constant reminders about carrots and eyesight and broccoli and strong bones must have stuck.’ She tried a cheerful laugh. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t afford to eat out every night of the week even if I wanted to.’

‘An unhealthy habit,’ he agreed, ‘as you said.’ He looked down and idly rotated the coffee-cup in his hand. ‘Your boyfriend didn’t strike me as someone who craves expensive meals either.’ He hardly looked as though her response to that observation was of paramount importance. His voice was casual, off-hand, speculative. Still, she felt her body stiffen. Wasn’t it inevitable that he would drag poor Martin into the conversation? She frowned and wondered why she was now mentally referring to him as Poor Martin. Silly.

‘In fact,’ Ross was saying in the voice of someone who had rummaged through his mental database and unearthed some mildly interesting memory, ‘I was subjected to quite a lecture on the shameful, profligate ways of the rich.’

Abigail didn’t say anything but she gave an inward groan of despair. As soon as Ross had walked through the front door, capturing everyone’s immediate attention, Martin had seen it his duty to jostle for attention, and his method had been to talk much louder than he usually did and to hold forth on subjects with perverse dogmatism. It had been a side to him which she hadn’t seen before, but then again, she had never seen him in competition, however needless, with a man like Ross.

She had missed his lecture on the rich. She had, she thought, probably been clearing away the dishes and taking refuge in the kitchen. She could imagine it all too well, though. In fact, after all the guests had left, he had said to her in a disapproving voice, ‘Overpowering man, your boss. I can’t imagine working for someone like that, but then I guess he’s got what it takes to run a company like his.’ He had made that sound like a distasteful threat but she had been too exhausted by then to pay a great deal of attention to what he was saying.

Martin had a managerial job in a computer company, and he was quite happy with that. His ambitions did not soar to dizzy heights and he was fond of telling her that his parents were perfectly content with their lives, and they never had a great deal of money to throw around. His father was a retired schoolteacher and his mother helped out on a part-time basis at a local flower shop.

‘There’s more to life than money,’ she heard herself say stoutly. ‘Anyway——’ she glanced away from that hard-boned, intimidating face ‘—Martin’s not usually so…so…’ She searched around for the right phrase and finally said, ‘Outspoken. He’s a warm, generous person.’ Her voice had risen slightly and the sudden lift of Ross’s dark brows made her glare at him with irritation.

‘I’m sure he is,’ he replied as though her warm outburst had surprised him. ‘After all, you’re marrying the man.’