that she felt endlessly ashamed of herself, and Luke’s slightly sarcastic, ‘So you made it at last,’ didn’t help and made her go pink right to the tips of her ears.
The two men occupied leather armchairs with a low table between them and perhaps it was the contrast with James Cade’s hard, utterly assured confidence that made Luke look wound up to the point of taking off into orbit. At thirty, probably the other man’s junior by five years, Luke was already beginning to lose his sandy hair because he worried too much. Worried that in a handful of years’ time he would be over the hill, considered too old for original thinking…Worried about the state of his marriage…
‘Coffee, Zoe.’ Luke’s instruction, the laboured tone of his voice, jerked her into showing that she hadn’t grown roots into the luxuriously carpeted floor and she hurried, uncomfortably aware that she was hobbling, into his secretaries’ office and closed the door far too vigorously behind her, leaning against it for a second to get her breathing back under control and her mind tidily together.
But she couldn’t hide forever and so demonstrate to their would-be prestigious new client that she couldn’t even produce coffee for three efficiently. Brusquely, she went to work on her mental processes and by the time she had the tray ready she’d convinced herself that, although she might have recognised him immediately—and who the heck wouldn’t? He was dauntingly unforgettable—there was no way he would recognise her.
The small, neat, unobtrusively grey personage she projected today was as unlike last night’s cleavage-andfishnet trollop as it was possible to get. He would never in a million years equate a primly understated twenty-five-year-old accountant with a supposedly fifteen-yearold female of the night who got herself flung out of cars by disgruntled customers!
Not allowing herself to dwell overlong on that aspect because if she did she would stay permanently beetrootcoloured, Zoe carried the tray through, placed it neatly on the table, poured, murmured softly about helping themselves to cream and sugar and sat on the third strategically placed and glaringly unoccupied chair and quietly fished her reading glasses and notepad from her handbag.
And only then, when she was neatly settled, did she force herself to look at him. She couldn’t stare at the section of wall beyond his impressive, dark-suited shoulders for the entire meeting. He would notice and think she was peculiar.
She didn’t want him to have any thoughts about her at all.
There was no doubt about it, she conceded, he was an intensely, formidably attractive specimen. His tall, lean body was clothed with elegant urbanity, the look of complete assurance on his hard-bitten features saved from being awesomely terrifying by the sensual sweep of his wide lower lip.
And Luke was doing all the talking, outlining the comprehensive, confidential and detailed services offered by Halraike Hopkins and she, unprecedentedly, was saying nothing, because if she kept a low enough profile he might forget she was there, and that would be nice, even though she was positively sure he wouldn’t recognise her in a month of Sundays.
But he turned his attention from Luke and as she came into the firing line of those chilling grey eyes she wasn’t so sure. The look was cold, calculating and very, very comprehensive. He would be difficult, if not impossible, to fool, she thought, gulping, wondering if she should try to display a small, polite smile as his eyes left the soft pink of her mouth and locked on to her apprehensive green eyes.
Luke was still talking and James Cade was still impaling her with those impressively clever eyes and Zoe went hot all over, pushed at her glasses with a nervous finger and tried to convince herself that he couldn’t possibly recognise her, trying to see her nondescript appearance through his eyes—the neatly structured, almost mannish grey suit, the tightly confined hair, dark-rimmed spectacles…
As if picking up on her thought processes, his gaze travelled quickly over her body, down to her toes, then swept back up again to dwell on her slender, primly disposed legs.
Could he see those angry-looking grazes and scrapes through the sheer stockings she was wearing? Could he? Her one personal extravagance was pure silk stockings, as light and airy as thistledown. Too late now to wish she’d invested in a few pairs of thick lisle numbers.
Zoe wanted to scream and couldn’t remember ever having felt quite so relieved as she did when James Cade eventually rose from his chair with a fluid economy of movement, ending the meeting, his hand outstretched to Luke who had scrambled to his feet.
‘Thank you for your time,’ Cade said smoothly. ‘Get one of your people to set up a meeting with our MD and company accountant at head office and we’ll get the ball rolling.’
Thank God it was over, Zoe thought on a wave of weak relief as she pushed herself up out of the low leather chair, unable to hide a wince of pain, and he noted it, of course he did, and his mouth was grim as he held out his hand.
There was no option but to take it and the touch of firm flesh and hard bone as long fingers clasped hers was like nothing that had ever happened to her before. At any moment she could dissolve into the carpet because the simple touch of his hand as it swallowed hers made everything she was made of fall to pieces.
Nerves, she told herself as her boss escorted James Cade out to the lift. She had behaved like a halfwit throughout the short meeting but she refused to blame herself. Who wouldn’t have been crippled by nervousness in such circumstances?
But Luke, of course, had no idea of the shock she’d sustained and his, ‘Well you were a lot of help!’ as he walked back in carried enough censure for the two of them. ‘You might have been a pile of bricks for all the input you made. You’ll be handling everything from now on. I hope to God you took notes.’ Then, with tardy concern, ‘You’re not feeling ill or anything, are you?’
Stacking the coffee-cups back on the tray, Zoe thought of the indecipherable squiggles on her notepad and shuddered. But she was back in control again, thinking on her feet. She’d get Simon Elliot, her PA, to set the meeting up as quickly as possible, no problem there, and she said sweetly, ‘No, I’m fine. You put our case beauti fully and I might be wrong but Cade struck me as the type who would prefer any direct dealings to be with another man. I would imagine he has little time for women in the workplace—up there in his rarefied atmosphere, in any case. I imagine he expects women to be seen and not heard, to sit quietly like good little secretaries, take notes and leave the thinking to the big boys.’
He hadn’t struck her as any such thing, she simply hadn’t thought beyond the dreadful embarrassment of seeing him again. But it was as good an excuse as any to explain the way she’d acted and Luke obviously thought it made sense because he followed as she carried the tray out, ruminating,
‘You could be so right. Nice thinking!’ He smiled at her suddenly, the worry lines rolling off his forehead. ‘He’s a cold devil and reputedly doesn’t suffer fools at all—let alone gladly. And his reputation with women stinks. Use them and drop them!’
Zoe, rinsing out the cups at the sink in the cubbyhole adjoining the secretaries’ office, thought she detected a note of admiration in his voice and fell to wondering if she’d been right to be irritated by his wife’s regular phone calls demanding to know where he was, why he was late when he’d said he’d be early, complaining that he’d forgotten he’d promised to attend the children’s sports day, end of term play—whatever.
She’d been irritated by Julie Taylor’s whining, anxious tone so many times in the past but now she was beginning to feel sorry for her. It just went to reinforce her opinion that it must be awful to become so dependent on a partner. It turned a person into a bag of neuroses, stripped them of their self-respect.
