Gentlemen Prefer... Brunettes

‘Beth, you don’t understand...’ The waitress arrived to take their order and when she had gone the urge to tell someone, anyone, the truth about Jonathan had evaporated. That was her secret. Her shame. ‘Are you sure you won’t come along to the gym?’

‘At six-thirty?’ Beth seemed as relieved to let the subject drop as she was.

‘An hour in the gym three mornings a week helps to counteract the occupational hazard of constantly tasting new recipes to get them just right.’

‘You mean you claim membership of the gym as an expense against income tax?’ Beth was seriously impressed by that.

‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ Cassie confessed.

‘Check it out with your accountant and let me know what he says. I wonder if I could get away with it? You have to be fit to run your own business, you know.’

‘You have to be fit for any kind of job and somehow I can’t imagine the Inland Revenue subsidising health club membership for the entire nation.’

‘Why not? Think what it would save on the National Health bill.’

‘You know, you’re wasted in business, Beth. With a mind like that you should be in politics. Running the Exchequer.’

‘Are you coming, Nick? The meeting is about to start.’

Veronica was framed in the doorway, her slender figure displayed to advantage in the palest grey and white dress. Outside the day was hot and humid, yet this woman managed to look as if she was moving in her own air-conditioned space, a picture of unruffled poise. He suspected that if she were a glass she would be frosted. The very opposite of the way he was feeling at that moment.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ he muttered, wishing she would move on instead of watching him hunt through the papers on his desk for a sheet of figures that had disappeared without trace.

Instead, she asked, ‘Lost something?’ in a tone that suggested a whole heap of things. But mostly that she had never lost anything in her entire life.

‘One of my secretary’s kids is sick,‘ he muttered. ‘But I know she did those figures before she went home last night...’

Veronica appeared to glide across the room, then, bending from the knees, she picked up a sheet of paper that had fallen beneath his desk. ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ she enquired as she stood up and offered it to him, a faint smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Like everything she did it combined an economy of movement with perfect grace. He wondered briefly if she had ever been a model, but immediately discounted the possibility that she would ever involve herself in an occupation so trivial.

‘That’s it. Thanks, Veronica.’ He smiled somewhat ruefully, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘I seem to be all over the place today,’ he said, with a slightly helpless shrug. That ‘little boy lost’ thing seemed to get to some women. Maybe it would touch Veronica Grant.

‘The heat gets to some people.’ Her tone suggested only the weak and feeble.

Obviously not.

He shuffled the papers into order and picked up the folder with the details of the new project he had been working on. Beneath it lay Cassie Cornwell’s book, which, despite his promise, had not been opened since he bought it. But at least he hadn’t hidden it away in the bottom of his desk as she had predicted. Veronica picked it up and turned it over to examine the photograph on the back.

‘Is this the book you’re giving your sister?’ she asked.

‘Yes...and no.’ He shrugged. ‘I bought more than one copy.’

Veronica’s eyebrows moved upwards in gentle query. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been bulk buying them as presents for all your female relations?’

‘Thus saving on time, effort and shoe leather? Isn’t that what you advised?’

‘Not quite.’

Somehow he had known that there would be precious few Brownie points for admitting to such a lack of imagination. The truth at least had the virtue of being surprising. ‘No, well, actually, I bought that copy for myself.

‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘You’re a new man through and through.’

Her scepticism was beginning to irritate him. ‘The idea amuses you?’

‘You don’t really expect me to believe that you cook for yourself, Nick?’

‘Men have to eat too, you know.’

‘In my experience they usually manage that by getting some poor woman to cook for them.’

‘Really?’ Some of the women who had wanted to cook for him had been a long way from poor, but he didn’t think she was referring to their fiscal status. He wondered why she so despised domesticated women. Did she think they were letting the feminist side down? ‘Maybe you should try a better class of man,’ he advised.

‘Is that an invitation?’

‘An invitation?’

Without thinking he stood back to let her precede him through the door. She didn’t appear to notice this lapse or, if she did, she let it go, but once she was in the corridor she stopped and turned to face him.

‘An invitation to dinner, Nick. I’ve never met a man who could cook before. To be honest I’m still not sure that I believe you can—but I’m prepared to be convinced. I’m free on Thursday evening, if you’ve a space in your diary?’

Not by so much as the twitch of a muscle did Nick betray his surprise. Was that all it took to melt the ice-lady? A little home cooking? Or was it simply that she couldn’t resist the opportunity to catch him out in a lie? Did she think he’d wriggle and squirm to get out of it?

‘Well, there’s an evening track meeting at Crystal Palace that I’m supposed to attend. We’re sponsoring one of the events.’ He waited while her face arranged itself into the superior kind of smile that suggested she had expected some feeble excuse. Then he shrugged and grinned. ‘But I don’t imagine I’ll have any trouble finding someone to go in my place. Shall I pick you up at around eight?’

It was her turn to be surprised, but if she was she didn’t let it show either. ‘Won’t you be occupied with your sauces?’ she asked, making a little stirring gesture.

Frankly, he hadn’t a clue. He had no idea what making a sauce entailed, but he knew it couldn’t be difficult—his mother could do it for heaven’s sake.

‘I won’t know until I’ve decided what to cook. Perhaps I’d better send a car for you.’

Her enigmatic look faltered slightly as she realised that he was serious. Then she lifted one elegantly clad shoulder a fraction of an inch. ‘At eight? Why not? What have I got to lose?’

‘Your waistline?’ he suggested, recalling Cassie’s comments about calories.

She gave him a disbelieving look before returning his book and heading for the meeting, one hundred per cent businesswoman again, her entire being focused on the launch of a new line in ladies’ golfing equipment.

Yet once when he looked up from the projected sales figures he was quoting to the team he caught her looking at him, her forehead creased in a slightly puzzled frown, and it was all he could do to stop himself from smiling.

Every woman had a weak spot. Even if it was only the desire to see a man make a fool of himself. He wondered about Cassie Cornwell and what her weak spot was. Not that kind of cynicism, he was prepared to bet any amount of money. She had the kind of eyes that would melt at a litter of puppies. Or the sight of snow falling on Christmas morning. Or a new baby grasping at her finger...

‘Nick?’

He started at the sound of his name and glanced up to discover half a dozen pairs of eyes looking up at him expectantly. It took a moment to clear the appealing image of Cassie Cornwell and puppies and Christmas in front of a log fire from his brain. What did it was the distinctly predatory look he surprised in Veronica Grant’s eyes.

It was a momentary expression, almost instantly replaced by the cool, slightly distant look she normally adopted. He might have imagined it. But it gave him the uncomfortable feeling that she wasn’t in the least bit taken in by his ‘new man’ act. And that if she caught him out in a lie he’d never be allowed to forget it.

Cassie had been cooking since she was old enough to stand on a chair and knead a piece of dough at her mother’s side and she always found the beating, the kneading, the careful combining of ingredients as she prepared a favourite recipe therapeutic.

But ever since she had turned down Nick Jefferson’s invitation to lunch nothing, not even the creation of a new pasta dish, had been able to shake her of the conviction that she had made a mistake. And it infuriated her. She slammed down the dough on the work surface in her kitchen and proceeded to take her feelings out on it. Nick Jefferson was not her kind of man and never would be. In a hundred years. And she certainly wasn’t his kind of woman.