No Escaping Love

‘It was good of you to keep my stuff for me.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Listen, I’d better not keep—’

‘No, of course not. I’ll get your stuff.’ He retreated into the larger bedroom. ‘Nick will be sorry to have missed you,’ he called out. ‘Did you know he’s in love?’

‘He wrote and told me! What’s she like?’

He reappeared, carrying two large suitcases. ‘Great—when she’s not sitting gazing at him like a lovesick puppy!’

‘You next, then,’ teased Shauna.

‘Is that an offer?’ he smiled.

They heard a loud toot from outside before she had a chance to reply. Shauna knew immediately who it would be.

‘That’ll be my new boss,’ she explained. ‘I’d better go.’

Harry pushed the curtain open a crack. ‘Flash car,’ he observed. ‘What’s he like?’

Shauna peeped out—he was still standing there. ‘The kind of man your mother told you never to go out with—well, most mothers,’ amended Shauna.

‘Lucky devil,’ said Harry gloomily. ‘I have the opposite trouble—instant parental approval—very boring!’

There was a momentary pause. ‘Thanks for my free holiday,’ he smiled. ‘I had a great time.’

He’d travelled out to Portugal in the summer, and her boss had put him up for the fortnight.

She grinned her agreement. ‘Me too. And thanks again for finding me the ad.’

They stood for a moment, hands clasped like the old friends they were—their brief and youthful romance long forgotten. ‘I’ll carry your cases to the car for you,’ he said.

A dark figure loomed up out of the shadows. ‘There’s no need for that,’ contradicted a deep voice, and Shauna started to see Max Ryder standing there, automatically moving away to break the contact, wondering what had caused the faint upward curl of his lip.

She performed the necessary introductions, but she thought that her new boss was decidedly lukewarm in his greeting, and Harry was uncharacteristically taciturn. In fact, for some reason neither man seemed to like the other very much.

Amid promises to call soon, Shauna and Max roared off down the street. There was silence for a moment. Then he spoke.

‘I thought I asked you not to be long,’ he said tetchily as he put his foot down on the accelerator. ‘I hope I’m not going to miss my call.’

‘Sorry,’ she said automatically.

Max gave her a sideways glance. ‘After such a fond reunion, I’m surprised your lover doesn’t want you to stay with him.’

So he had seen them embrace. ‘He is not my lover,’ she said, in an angry voice. Not any more, she thought. An attempt at young love years ago which had fizzled out almost as soon as it had started. Not that she was going to explain that to him. He was her boss, and he had absolutely no right whatsoever to comment on her private life. ‘And even if he were, it’s none of your business.’ Which didn’t come out at all the way she had intended it to.

She saw his hands tighten on the steering-wheel, as if he was not used to being spoken to in such a way, and she might have tried to amend her snapped response, but a glance at the cold, hard profile told her that she would be wise to say nothing, so she stared out into the night as Hyde Park swept by them.

He didn’t speak again until they had arrived back in Mayfair. He was not, Shauna decided, the type of man to engage in meaningless pleasantries.

‘I’ll show you the apartment now.’ He frowned as he glanced again at the pale gold wristwatch. ‘You must be hungry.’

So he was back to being civil. ‘Starving,’ she admitted.

This time, the lift went right past the third floor where he’d interviewed her, and the doors opened straight into an enormous sitting-room. The carpet was white, and littered with Persian rugs. The walls were also white, with several large modern canvases which fitted in perfectly with the simple leather furniture.

Shauna suppressed a gasp. Surely he couldn’t mean that this was her flat? Compared to the dark cubby-hole she’d had in Lisbon, this place was like a palace.

‘The kitchen’s through here,’ he was saying. ‘There’s a bathroom off that passage over there, but of course your room has its own, en suite. This is your room here.’ He pushed open a door to reveal a sumptuously appointed bedroom, decorated in palest eau-de-Nil. ‘You’ll find that—apart from work—we’ll hardly see one another.’

Shauna’s mouth fell open. ‘We? What do you mean “we”?’

He sounded impatient. ‘The flat has three bedrooms, and a great deal of living space. We’ll hardly be on top of one another.’

Suddenly the tall, dark figure of Max Ryder appeared very slightly menacing, and involuntarily she took a step back. ‘But I didn’t know I was going to be sharing with you!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! We are living in the twentieth century, you know!’ he retorted. ‘Men and women do share flats these days—as you’ve obviously done yourself before. Or perhaps you consider yourself such a little sexpot that you think I won’t be able to keep my hands off you?’

‘No, I don’t!’ she parried, a blush creeping into her cheeks as her mind became alight with vivid images that his words had conjured up.

‘Well, that’s something,’ he said, with a kind of grim satisfaction. ‘Because, believe me, the last type of woman to attract me is some tall, skinny kid who doesn’t look old enough to be out of gym-slips!’

Shauna glared at him. It was one thing to decide that the man before her was the last person she’d ever fall for—it was quite another to discover that he felt exactly the same way—and his disparaging remarks made her bristle with indignation. Share a flat with him? Why, she’d rather share with a gang of escaped convicts!

‘And what about—privacy?’ she asked primly.

He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Privacy? Will you stop acting like the original vestal virgin? Slightly redundant anyway, since we’ve just collected your stuff from your ex-lover.’

He managed to make a young love-affair sound so sordid, she thought, her grey eyes sending out sparks of indignation.

‘You’ll have all the privacy you could possibly want,’ he continued. ‘For a start, I’m away in the country most weekends. Secondly, your room is on the opposite side of a very large flat, and it has its own bathroom. So does mine. So the chances of your coming across me in the raw are pretty remote.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘The good news for both of us is that I’ll shortly be having the flat divided into two completely separate apartments. It would have been done already if I had been here to sort the damned builders out. Unfortunately, I’ve been out of the country.’

That explained the tan, thought Shauna.

His eyes were mocking as they surveyed her. ‘Now, are those arrangements secure enough for your Victorian sensibilities, or would you like me to throw in a chastity belt while I’m at it?’ He gave an unexpected grin as he saw her colour heighten yet again.

‘You know, you really are going to have to do something about that blushing, if you’re going to work for me. And you a woman of the world!’

His teasing immediately defused the atmosphere. ‘I am not a woman of the world, if that means what I think it means.’

He was staring at her curiously. ‘Tell me, you didn’t lie about your age in your letter, did you?’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ she flung back at him. ‘Of course I didn’t lie! Do you always think the worst of people, or are you just used to people lying to you?’

‘All the time,’ he mused. ‘Particularly women, and particularly about their age. Except that they usually lop a few years off, whereas in your case …’

There was something distinctly unsettling about the way those green eyes bored into her, she thought, but, refusing to rise to this, she stared steadily at him. ‘Will you be needing me this evening?’ she asked pointedly. ‘Because I’d like to unpack and—’

He shook his head. ‘You’re free until tomorrow morning at ten sharp. Oh, and there’s one more thing—house rules.’

‘I am very tidy,’ she interrupted. ‘And I do not leave dirty dishes in the sink.’