Special Treatment

‘I want you. You know that, don’t you?’

The savage words cut through the intensity of her dazed pleasure. She looked up at him. His lashes were so dark and thick. She wanted to reach out and touch him. His skin was flushed, and slightly damp. She could feel the heat burning along his cheekbones as he pressed his face against her skin. He did want her. She exulted in the knowledge.

‘Is this how you entrapped him? With the lure of your body and your pseudo-innocence? Oh God, I …’

The savage disgust in his voice hurt. Susannah wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that this was something she had never shared with any other man and never would, and then reality struck her, starkly and inescapably. What was she doing?

She took advantage of his momentary relaxation to push him away.

He released her, and then cursed as she sprang off the chesterfield, tugging her dress on, her eyes glittering with green fire.

‘Don’t you dare come anywhere near me! Don’t touch me.’ Her voice shook, but she was back in control of herself now. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you think you’re doing … I don’t know what you think gives you the right to—question me!’

‘Don’t you?’ His voice was flat and derisive. ‘Odd, I could have sworn that not so very long ago you knew exactly what it was.’

The way his glance lingered on her breasts made his meaning all too clear. Before she left this room, she had to convince him that he meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. Her pride demanded it. What had happened was too demeaning—so shocking. She moved and winced as her stimulated breasts thrust demandingly against the constraining fabric of her dress, her awareness of her own arousal increasing her humiliation. How could she ever have allowed herself to be caught in such a situation, and with a complete stranger?

‘Oh, that,’ she told him coolly, striving for detachment and self-control. ‘Please don’t take it personally. It’s been rather a long time since I was last—with my lover.’

She shrugged, triumph buoying her up as she caught the fierce glitter of anger darkening his eyes, knowing that he wanted to reject what she was saying. She was hurting his pride and she was glad, fiercely glad.

‘Men don’t have the monopoly on sexual frustration, you know,’ she told him.

‘You …’ He lunged towards her, but as she backed off he stopped, his face contorting with savage bitterness. ‘You wanted me,’ he told her flatly.

‘No,’ she corrected him acidly, ‘I wanted a man … any man, if you want me to be totally honest.’ Her eyebrows lifted as she viewed his bitter, dark face. ‘Oh, come on. You look like a sophisticated man. Surely you didn’t think I was overcome with passion for you?’

He looked as though he wanted to kill her, thought Susannah, torn between exultation and stark, terrifying fear. What on earth had she done? What on earth was she going to do if he refused to believe her? But no, he was turning on his heel and walking towards the door.

At the door, he stopped and turned to look at her.

‘With luck, you and I will never meet again,’ she told him sweetly.

‘Don’t be too sure.’

A threat? But why? He couldn’t want to see her again. Shrugging slightly, she waited until she was sure he had gone and then hurried up to her room.

One look in her mirror told her that she had made a wise decision. Her lips, bare of lip gloss, still looked swollen from his kiss. Her eyes glittered with febrile arousal, and her breasts—Guiltily, she stared down at where they strained against her dress, her nipples hard and erect. She touched them, covering them with trembling hands, as though to protect herself from harm.

Weak with shock and reaction, she collapsed on to her bed. What on earth had got into her? Thank God she would never see him again. Thank goodness, he had believed her claim that she had used him as a substitute for her lover, but that had only been in the shock of the moment, when his brain had been confused by the arousal of his body. Later, when he had time to think … to question … Shaking her head, she got up again. She couldn’t stay up here. If she did, Mamie would come up, wanting to know what was wrong. She would have to go back down.

She was half-way across the hall when she bumped into Paul, walking the other way.

‘Ah, there you are! Ma has just sent me to look for you.’

Susannah let him take her arm. Several people were milling about around the entrance to the marquee but, when Paul stopped, her glance went instinctively to the tall, dark-haired man with his back to her. Her heart started pumping frantically, her body shaking.

‘Good, there’s Hazard. He made it, after all. I’d better introduce him to Ma and Pop.’

‘Hazard?’ Susannah queried faintly.

‘Yes. Hazard Maine. He and I both did a stint in Sydney. I met him a few months ago, and then we bumped into one another on the Qantas flight coming over. He’s taking up a new post in this country and he’s at a bit of a loose end. He was at school over here, apparently. He’s lost touch with people since, and so I invited him here.’

‘Where … where is he?’

‘Over there.’

She stared, dumbstruck, at the dark head he was pointing out to her, and an appalling awareness of what she had done swept over her. The man who had accused her of having a married lover, the man she had let caress and arouse her in a way that no man had ever done, the man she had quite deliberately allowed to believe she was the very worst kind of hardened tramp, was Hazard Maine. Paul’s friend … her new boss!

She made a small, inarticulate little sound of despair in her throat.

‘Something wrong?’

‘Paul … I … I have to go and talk to Richard,’ she invented. ‘I’ve just remembered something I should have told him.’

‘Richard?’ Paul called queryingly after her, but she was already disappearing into the crowd, and so he shrugged his shoulders and went on alone.

Hazard Maine! How could fate have tricked her so cruelly? Why had she not had any intuitive warning? Not even his accent had betrayed him. She had never imagined—never dreamed … She wondered frantically whether it was possible to change her whole appearance before Monday, whether she could somehow make herself unrecognisable. Then logic intruded, and she squared her shoulders.

There was nothing he could do. He could hardly sack her because she had allowed him a few physical intimacies, or because she had implied that she was simply using him to satisfy a need aroused by another man. No, he could hardly sack her for that, not without making himself look a fool, and Hazard Maine had not struck her as the type of man who welcomed being made to look a fool.

No, like her, he would just have to accept their working relationship.

And yet, reassure herself as she might, nothing could completely dispel her fear. It was too late now to regret her folly. And Aunt Emily hadn’t brought her up to run away from life’s problems. Besides, where could she run to? No, she would just have to brazen it out.