Slave To Love

‘The man was in his counting-house, counting out his money,’ Joel put in, smiling as always. ‘Here, give me your coat.’ He took the velvet wrap from her before Mac could grab the honours. ‘Take-over deals take it out of one, don’t you agree, Mac?’

Mac leaned back against the rich mahogany newel-post, sensing no threat in the way that Joel was smoothing fine velvet over Roberta’s shoulders. This was his home and here, where Roberta counted for nothing, he saw Joel as his safe substitute.

‘The Brunner deal.’ He nodded. ‘You clinched it today.’ Not a question but a well-informed statement of fact.

‘Not quite,’ Joel denied, then shifted uncomfortably under Mac’s sudden black frown. After all, brother or not, Mac was also his boss. ‘But all bar the shouting,’ he quickly assured him. ‘I fly out to Zurich on Tuesday to tie it all up.’

‘Is Franc Brunner playing footsie with you?’ Mac asked sharply.

Joel just shrugged. ‘He knows he owns the patent to a very lucrative product if placed in the right hands. I can’t blame him for being cagey.’

‘Well, I can,’ Mac argued. ‘He approached us, not the other way around. What stopped him signing the deal today?’

‘The legal bods his end,’ Joel said drily. ‘Finding problems when none is there.’

‘Deliberately stalling, you mean,’ Mac said, and looked grimly thoughtful. ‘Do you want me to get involved?’ he offered.

‘No, I damned well do not!’ Joel indignantly replied. ‘The Brunner thing isn’t your baby, it’s mine! So keep your nose out, big brother!’

‘Whoops.’ Mac grinned. ‘Hit a raw nerve, did I?’

‘I can handle it,’ Joel said gruffly while Roberta looked down at her feet, too aware of why Joel was getting so hot under the collar to want Mac to see it written in her face.

The trouble with Joel was that he was a hands-on engineer at heart. Show him a revolutionary new product and he tended to go a bit overboard with enthusiasm about it. Hence the ‘footsie’, as Mac had put it, that Franc Brunner was playing with him. He saw too much eagerness to possess in Joel’s manner and had been playing on that by pushing Joel for a better deal ever since.

‘Can’t we, Roberta?’

His long fingers were stroking the rolled collar of her coat around her slender throat. But when she didn’t immediately answer, they paused to chuck her gently beneath her chin, demanding her support.

She gave it. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Nothing daunts the three musketeers.’

‘Three?’ Mac quizzed.

‘Mitzy,’ Joel explained. ‘Our indispensable third arm.’ He meant their shared secretary, and Mac nodded in recognition.

There was no one else wandering around the hallway, and a short silence fell, broken only by the sound of an old-fashioned waltz seeping out from the huge drawing-room to one side of them.

Mac’s eyes were on Roberta, moving with a lazy warmth over her, though he still made no effort to touch her. ‘I’ll see you Monday, hmm?’ he said. His weekend was fully booked up here in Berkshire, playing host to the dynasty.

Joel felt Roberta stiffen slightly, the tension in her so fierce it was threatening to snap. She did not reply, and Mac took the answer as read, the lazy look dying away.

‘Daddy?’ Lulu appeared at the half-open doorway to the drawing-room, her blue eyes narrowing when she saw Roberta. ‘Hello, Uncle Joel.’ She sent him a beatific smile. ‘Leaving already? That doesn’t say much for my birthday party.’

Joel let go of Roberta to turn and smile at his favourite niece. ‘I must be getting old, pug-face,’ Joel apologised drily, opening his arms as Lulu glided towards him. ‘Can’t seem to burn the candle the way I used to.’

‘You and Daddy both, then, since he’s five years older than you.’ She pouted charmingly at both men. ‘Perhaps he should take a leaf out of your book and ease up on life a little.’

It was a direct slight at Roberta, but neither by word nor expression did she show how easily the younger girl had cut. Mac was smiling indulgently, watching his daughter exchange fond kisses with his brother, the remark not bothering him.

Except for the shock of jet-black flowing hair, Lulu was more like her red-haired mother than her father—a wand-slim girl with long, graceful limbs and sapphire-blue eyes. She lived with her mother in their St John’s Wood home for most of the time, but she adored her handsome father to the point of hero-worship. Mac loved and pandered to this adoration as, Roberta supposed, any doting father would.

But sometimes it was so cloying that it stuck in the throat to watch it.

Like now, as Lulu fluttered her long dark lashes and said, ‘Aren’t my diamond earrings wonderful, Uncle Joel?’ She tilted her head slightly for Joel to get a better look at the exquisite diamond droplets dangling from her ears. ‘I think I have the most wonderful daddy in the whole wide world, don’t you?’

‘Wonderful,’ Joel mockingly agreed, observing the simpering sigh and soulful look that Lulu sent her smiling father. Mac had his hands in his jacket pockets, still leaning against the newel-post, looking as he always did—supremely elegant and totally at ease with himself. ‘He spoils you, pug-face,’ Joel censured teasingly. ‘If you’d been my daughter, for your birthday you would have received an envelope with ten quid in it and a letter explaining to you how the magic eighteen means that you go out in the big bad world and make your own way from now on.’

‘Oh, you don’t mean it.’ Flirting outrageously, Lulu pouted at Joel and appealed to her daddy with wide, wounded eyes. Without really having to try very hard she had effectively cut Roberta right out of it all. ‘Daddy, tell Joel he mustn’t be horrid to me on my birthday!’ she demanded.

‘Joel, don’t be horrid to Lulu on her birthday,’ her father obediently complied, laughing through his stern tone. ‘Where’s that besotted young man you’ve had hanging on your arm all night?’ he then asked curiously.

Again Lulu pouted. ‘He’s trying it on with Mummy since he was getting nowhere with me,’ his daughter pertly replied. ‘So if you don’t get back in there quick and do something about it, I can see Mummy taking on a toy-boy, and how will that make you look?’

‘God forbid!’ Mac levered himself away from the newel-post, and Lulu sent Roberta a look of malicious triumph when it looked as though Mac would just walk away without offering Roberta a backward glance.

Then the triumph altered to a glower as Mac paused and turned, his grey gaze colliding with Roberta’s green one. ‘Sorry you had to leave so soon,’ he murmured softly. ‘I was about to ask you to dance.’

‘Shame, then, that you were too late,’ she said, the slight hint of sarcasm in her voice just enough to make his eyes narrow. ‘A nice party, Lulu.’ She turned that hint of sarcasm on Mac’s daughter next. ‘Once again, many happy returns, and I hope you get all you deserve in life.’

Joel choked on a cough, and moved quickly as Lulu’s eyes took on a decidedly vicious glow. ‘Time to go.’ He gave his niece another kiss, then moved back to Roberta’s side, his smile over-bright as he took a firm grip on her arm. ‘Lunch one day, Mac,’ he offered as a parting shot, and began pulling Roberta towards the front door where one of the hired help for the evening was waiting to see them out, their car already called for and purring at the bottom of the steps.

The last thing Roberta saw as she swept out of the door was Mac’s gaze narrowed thoughtfully on her. He wasn’t a fool; he was well aware that her last remark to him had been a reference to the challenge she had thrown out to him with her eyes earlier and which he had decided to refuse.

What he wasn’t aware of, she knew, was how much he had left too late.

‘That wasn’t wise,’ Joel said quietly.

‘Didn’t you know?’ Roberta drawled. ‘I am not a very wise person.’ But I shall learn, she told herself grimly. God help me, I shall learn.

‘Get in the car.’

She got in the car and pulled her coat more firmly around her body, feeling cold when really it was quite warm for a September night.

Joel didn’t move off right away, but sat tapping the steering-wheel with his fingers while he studied her ruthlessly controlled profile. ‘Be careful how you tackle this, Roberta,’ he advised after a moment. ‘My brother is not known for his good temper when things don’t go his way.’

‘There is only one way to tackle it,’ she said, turning her head slightly away from him so that he wouldn’t see the bitterness glowing in her eyes. ‘There is an old saying about flogging a dead horse. And, much to Daddy’s darling daughter’s delight, no doubt, I’ve decided that I’ve flogged this one for quite long enough.’

‘You’ve put up with his outrageous behaviour towards you for the last year,’ he pointed out. ‘So why decide that tonight is the night you’ve had enough?’

‘Put the car in gear, Joel,’ she said, refusing to answer—if she had an answer to give him, that was, which she didn’t. All she did know was that she’d had enough. And that one small but telling little phrase was going around and around inside her head, until she thought she would go mad listening to it.

‘He won’t let you get away with it.’ Joel moved them smoothly away from the house, the headlights spanning out in a wide arc across the moonless blackness of the Maclaine family’s private estate. ‘He wants you too much.’

‘”Want” being the operative word.’

‘He had a hard time of it from the family when he forced that divorce on them,’ he reminded her. ‘Between them and Lulu he’s been made to feel—’

‘Start defending him and I’ll get out and walk,’ she warned.