A Lesson In Seduction

‘So it’s just the two cases going through, then, is it, Mr James?’ asked the airline employee with marked patience.

He didn’t turn his head, seemingly hypnotised by Rosalind’s cocky grin. ‘Uh, well, I think...’

‘He means yes,’ Roz supplied firmly. She began to suspect that his air of muddled confusion presaged a man on the verge of panic. Perhaps the poor lamb was afraid of flying and was trying to put off the evil moment.

‘Mr James? May I see your passport now, sir?’

‘Passport?’

Rosalind decided it would be quicker for everyone if she took charge of the bewildered Mr James.

‘You have remembered to bring it with you, haven’t you?’ she demanded, stepping up beside him at the desk. ‘Is it in here?’

She plucked the blue folder out of the hand clamping the laptop to his chest and flicked it open to see an impressive wad of US traveller’s cheques tucked behind the clear plastic pocket. He made a choked sound of protest and she gave him a chiding look to reassure him that she wasn’t a thief. In the other side of the pocket was a slim dark blue cover stamped with the New Zealand coat of arms. She extracted it and, adroitly avoiding his belated attempt to snatch it back, presented it across the desk.

‘Do you have any preference for seating?’ she asked him, pushing the travel folder back into his hand as the woman leafed through his passport.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, his dark eyes flicking over her face in that irritatingly unfocused way, as if he still couldn’t quite believe that she was helping him.

‘You know—front seat, back seat, nearest the emergency door...that kind of thing?’ she clarified.

‘Emergency door?’ he echoed, with a swift frown.

The frown had the decidedly odd effect of slanting his wicked eyebrows even more satanically without raising a ruffle on the angelically pure forehead. She wondered idly whether his personality contained as many contradictions as his face. He was actually rather good-looking in a limp-around-the-edges kind of way. At least a woman wouldn’t need to fear being dominated by the force of his personality!

‘Look, don’t you worry about it, chum. Just leave everything to me.’ She gave up trying to involve him in the decision-making process and negotiated his boarding pass without further consultation, thrusting his departure card and returned passport at him as the formalities were completed and nudging him away from the desk so that the Japanese couple could take his place.

‘Well, go on, then,’ she said to him, when he seemed inclined to hover inconveniently. ‘You can toddle off to the departure lounge now.’

He didn’t appear to recognise a brush-off when he heard one. ‘Um, I thought I might wait for you... we could have a drink together—or something...’ He trailed off vaguely, flapping his free hand in the air.

Or something? Rosalind studied him with sudden suspicion. Had he guessed that she was a woman, or did he think he was issuing an invitation to a pretty youth? Maybe that little-boy-lost helplessness was a sexual rather than psychological signal. Either way it was up to her to disabuse him.

‘I wasn’t trying to pick you up,’ she said flatly. ‘I helped you out because I felt sorry for you, not because I fancied you.’

He sucked in a sharp breath, a rush of blood darkening his skin. ‘I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—’

His outraged stammer almost made her relent. Her initial impression had been right: harmless, prissy, easily embarrassed. But she still needed to get rid of him before she presented her own documentation. Under the country’s privacy laws, airline personnel were forbidden to give out information about passengers, but if the woman mentioned her name out loud she didn’t want anyone close enough to overhear.

‘Good.’ She cut him off, pointedly turning her slender back on him. ‘Because I’m not interested.’

‘I only wanted to thank you for coming to my assistance,’ he said rigidly, and she grinned to herself at the hint of grit in his milk-shake voice. Maybe he wasn’t such a hopeless wimp after all.

She didn’t answer, and after a moment was relieved to hear him moving away. The trouble with helping lame dogs was that they had a lamentable tendency to want to cling to their rescuers.

After she had checked in she headed for the duty-free shop where she spied Jordan browsing amongst the perfumes. He was flying out to Melbourne on a short business trip related to an arts foundation created by Pendragon Corporation and had conveniently saved Rosalind the taxi fare to the airport.

Their discussion of a couple of days ago having eased her awkwardness in his company, Rosalind gave in to impulse and crept up behind him and whispered menacingly in his ear. ‘Poison!’

‘Do you think so?’ he murmured, withering her with his lack of surprise at her sudden ambush. ‘I rather think that Livvy would suit something lighter, fresher...maybe Yves St. Lament’s Paris?’

As usual he was right. Rosalind waited while he bought the perfume and they chatted briefly before Jordan’s attention was suddenly riveted elsewhere, his eyes slitting as he gazed intently over her head.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Rosalind, her overstretched nerves jumping. ‘Who is it? A reporter?’

Jordan put a heavily reassuring hand on her shoulder as he shook his head. ‘No, no—just someone I know from the old days at the Pendragon Corporation. I’d better go and have a word with him before he comes over and expects to be introduced.’ He kissed her absently on the cheek, eyes still focusing beyond her. ‘Have a good trip, won’t you? And for God’s sake try not to attract your usual quota of trouble!’

Rosalind bristled at that, and spun around as he left, intending to send him on his way with a few blistering words of self-defence, but at that moment she caught sight of the James man amongst the swirl of people in the public departure area. He was easily picked out—he looked isolated and alone in the midst of groups hugging and kissing their farewells. She hurriedly turned her back and skulked off to bury herself in a magazine in the relative privacy of the first-class lounge.

Rosalind didn’t fully relax until she was on board the plane with the engines powering up. The first-class section was only half-full, which meant that those travelling alone had the added privacy of an empty seat beside them. Rosalind’s assigned seat was an aisle one and she had decided to wait until they were airborne before she shifted to the window.

‘Excuse me, Miss Marlow, would you like me to store your hat in the overhead compartment?’

‘Thanks.’ With a straight face Rosalind doffed her wig along with the hat, enjoying the flight attendant’s classic double take. They both broke into chuckles and the hostess’s mask of impersonal politeness was banished by the relaxed warmth of their shared moment of humour.

Rosalind’s natural optimism raised its battered head. She suddenly felt freer than she had in a long, long time. No stresses, no awkward questions, no responsibilities. Maybe this holiday was just what she needed to get her life back on its former smooth-running track.

She sighed with satisfaction as she ruffled her flattened hair into its normal spiky style and accepted the suggestion that she might like a glass of champagne as soon as the flight took off. She stripped off her jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her green shirt, revealing a slender gold bangle on her left wrist.

Glancing at the seats diagonally behind her, she saw the ineffectual Mr James wrenching his seat belt unnecessarily tight, his mouth flat and grim, his precious computer sitting on the empty aisle-seat beside him. He was wearing dark-rimmed spectacles that gave his face a top-heavy look. Maybe it had been myopia rather than mental confusion that had led him to look at her so blankly in the terminal.

He was looking at Rosalind rather than concentrating on his task, and she judged from his frozen expression that he had seen her little performance with the wig and heard her womanly giggle. Evidently he wasn’t a theatregoer, because there was no sign of slack-jawed recognition or avid curiosity in his regard, only cold disapproval, and Rosalind’s sense of liberation increased. She gave him a provocative, feminine smile and a flutter of her dark lashes and he scowled, a muscle flickering in his cheek, his skin taking on a betraying colour. She had never known a man whose complexion was such a telltale barometer of his emotions.

As the stewardess swished past on the way to strap herself in for take-off, Rosalind attracted her attention and murmured, ‘He’s probably too embarrassed to mention it but I think Mr James back there might be a first-time flyer with a touch of phobia.’

The stewardess looked discreetly over her shoulder and made a swift professional assessment. ‘Hmm, he does look a bit white around the mouth, and that case of his should be stowed away...’ Her voice took on an unprofessional lilt of mischief. ‘Cute, though. Maybe I’d better sit by him and hold his hand for take-off...’

She suited her action to her words and Rosalind couldn’t resist watching the man’s disconcerted expression as the attractive young woman stowed his computer and bent over to adjust his lap-belt before slipping into the vacant seat beside him and enveloping his hand in a manicured grasp. She said something to him that made his head jerk up. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and shot an accusing look in Rosalind’s direction that was a surprisingly fierce mixture of frustration and annoyance. Rosalind beamed him a plastic smile. Ungrateful nerd!

Dismissing him from her mind, Rosalind settled in to enjoy the flight. She had never flown first class before and intended to take full advantage of the shameless pampering. Some of the pampering involved the liberal distribution of newspapers and magazines and Rosalind almost choked on her champagne when she spied a photograph of herself cavorting on the front cover of a local popular women’s magazine. She quickly took it for herself and confiscated several other magazines that she suspected might carry news of her current notoriety in their pictorial gossip columns.

Unfortunately her clumsy attempt at censorship was thwarted by the fact that the other stewardesses were offering an identical selection to other passengers. Taking a furtive peep around the cabin, Rosalind was relieved. to note that most of the others were selecting more edifying reading... business reviews and glossy fashion magazines...except for the wretched James man, who received a copy of every single publication and then proceeded to open the very one Rosalind was hoping would be beneath his intellect to notice.

Rosalind muttered to herself as she slid over into the window-seat, out of his sight-line. Maybe he wouldn’t make the connection—the cover photo was years out of date, taken when she’d still had long hair. What kind of man picked a women’s magazine as his first choice, anyway? And did he have to hold it up in such a way that his fingertips appeared to be tucked. into an intimate portion of her bikini-dad anatomy?

Thinking she might as well know the worst, Rosalind thumbed open her own copy and read the three-page story, torn between anger and amusement to discover that it comprised euphemistically couched rumours of her bisexuality, supposedly dating from the time that she had ‘eagerly’ accepted a lesbian role on stage. There was an illustrated list of all the men with whom she had been ‘romantically linked’, which seemed to consist of every male celebrity with whom she had ever been photographed, and to that list was now added a gaggle of ‘galpals’.

Turning the page in fascinated awe at the artistry of the inventions, Rosalind learned that she was now on the ‘hot list’ of a radical gay organisation that focused on outing famous people and that she was on the verge of accepting an offer to appear as the nude centrefold in a famous men’s magazine.

Unfortunately this time it wasn’t only her own somewhat tarnished reputation at stake. Thanks to the country’s strict libel laws, there wasn’t one mention of Peggy Staines, but she would obviously be in the mind of any reasonably informed person who read the story.

If only Rosalind hadn’t agreed to meet Peggy at that hotel! If only Peggy hadn’t insisted on such extremes of secrecy, even down to registering the room in the damning name of Smith. If only Rosalind hadn’t been so stunned by the older woman’s private revelations that she had ignored the first signs of her distress and then wasted precious time searching Peggy’s bag for her medication instead of calling the emergency number straight away.

Rosalind struggled against a renewed flood of guilt. None of it had really been her fault, she reminded herself. She had made a few mistakes in judgement, that was all. She might have been a principal player in the drama, but she hadn’t been its author. It was Peggy who had written the original script, and in spite of her sympathy for the woman Rosalind couldn’t help resenting the fact that she had somehow ended up as the scapegoat in the tangled affair.

She stuffed the offending magazine into the pocket on the seat in front, determined not to brood. Rosalind’s philosophy of life was simple: be positive. There was no point in agonising over actions and events that couldn’t be changed. Self-pity got you nowhere but in the dumps. You had to keep moving forward, substitute ‘if onlys’ with ’what ifs’ and regard each negative experience as character-building for the future rather than as a destructive barrier to present happiness.

With that firmly in mind Rosalind shucked her boots off in favour of the free airline bootees and prepared to eat and drink and make merry across several thousand kilometres of airspace. If she was going to zonk out on a beach for three weeks she had no need to worry about jet lag!