considered too unstable. And then at university—well, he had a reputation for creating mayhem wherever he went…’
‘I knew you were briefly in partnership with him a few years ago, but I didn’t realise that your acquaintanceship went right back to your childhood,’ said Kalera slowly, aware of a slight sense of unease as it suddenly occurred to her that in spite of the illusion of intimacy created by their secret courtship she still had an awful lot to learn about the man she had promised to marry—and vice versa.
‘We both had parents who were fixated on their sons attending the “right school” and since our fathers were Old Boys who had boarded together it was fairly inevitable that we ended up in the same college.’ Stephen shrugged dismissively. ‘He was an arrogant bastard right from the third form—probably would have been expelled several times over if his father hadn’t been a leading QC and a heavy donator to school funds. As a senior his temper even terrorised the teachers.’
‘I suppose I must have become desensitised to him over the years,’ Kalera murmured, thinking that her own family background had been the perfect training ground for coping with Duncan Royal’s lightning-bursts of emotion. ‘Even when he’s yelling blue murder and throwing furniture—like he was this morning—I’ve never actually been scared of him….’
Stephen leaned forward, his wheat-blond hair burnishing his frowning forehead. ‘What exactly was he yelling at you?’
Kalera’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘You mean before or after he fired me?’
He looked suitably grave, but unsurprised. ‘I’m sorry, darling—I did warn you that was probably what would happen. But at least you don’t have to worry about being out of work. Even if he gets nasty and refuses you a reference, you know you can walk into a job at InfoTech tomorrow if you like—all you have to do is say the word…’
However fondly couched, ‘I told you so’ was still the most aggravating phrase in the English language, decided Kalera, her irritation tempered by the knowledge that Stephen wouldn’t be feeling quite so smug by the time she finished her story.
‘I did try to lead up to it delicately, but as soon as I mentioned your name he fired me on the spot,’ she admitted. ‘Then he called up Security and got two beefy guards to escort me out of the building. He wouldn’t even let me go back to my desk to get my things—’
Her mortification at her treatment was evident in her face as she remembered how it had felt to be marched off the premises like a common criminal.
Stephen’s eyes blazed with sympathy. ‘The bastard! But you’d already formally handed in your written resignation, right? You’re not going to let him get away with putting it around that you were fired—’
‘He won’t,’ she said, flattered by the unexpected heat of his anger. Sometimes she had worried that Stephen was a little too cool and self-restrained, even though it was those qualities about him which she had initially found so appealing. ‘Because he changed his mind before I even got out of the building. He rescinded the firing and demanded I work my notice after all.’
‘He what?’ Stephen collapsed back in his seat, looking thunderstruck.
Kalera didn’t blame him. The swift volte-face had been totally out of character. One of the strengths of Duncan’s charismatic leadership was his ability to make instant decisions based on pure gut instinct, and so rarely did his instincts fail him that he had established a reputation for never failing to act on a snap decision.
‘The guards had taken me as far as the front door and were about to fling me out into the snow when Duncan came racing across the foyer and ripped me out of their hands. He told them he’d made a mistake and then he dragged me back up to his office and locked me in.’
‘He did what?’ Stephen’s smooth baritone rose sharply and Kalera regretted her flippancy when she noticed the covert glances they were receiving from the surrounding tables.
Stephen noticed too and abruptly lowered his voice. ‘My God, he actually locked you in the office with him?’
He looked appalled but there was a tiny thread of speculation in his voice that for no reason at all made Kalera’s whole body flush with heat. She felt the colour rise in her face and suddenly wished her hair weren’t so long and straight that it flowed like water down the middle of her back instead of drifting in handy thickets around her face. Her wispy blonde fringe provided little concealment for her pink cheeks.
‘Not him. Just me,’ she hastened to explain. ‘He pushed me in and locked the door, and then he took off somewhere—to cool down, so he said…’
‘He kept you prisoner!’ Stephen’s raw shock made it sound as if she had been chained to a dungeon wall and flogged. ‘For how long?’
Kalera adopted a soothingly vague expression as she accepted a dessert menu from the waiter whose desire to linger suggested an unprofessional interest in their intriguing conversation.
‘Not long—about an hour or so, I suppose,’ she said, deliberately playing down the drama. She knew exactly how long it had been. She had been left to stew for precisely one hour and fifty-one minutes before Duncan had returned to deliver his pithy lecture on the pitfalls awaiting gullible young widows who fell prey to smooth-talking villains.
She looked over the menu, forcing herself to choose something even though her sweet tooth had been soured by the subject of their conversation. Stephen’s frustration with the interruption was evident as he selected the cheeseboard and sent the flapping-eared waiter briskly on his way before leaning forward again.
‘And then what happened?’
Kalera was reluctant to go into too much detail. Duncan’s comments had not been flattering, either to herself or to Stephen. In fact they had been flagrantly insulting. She had known that the two men harboured an intense dislike of each other but until today she hadn’t recognised the true depth of their mutual hostility.
Her efforts to gloss over the worst bits in the retelling were in vain. For once Stephen seemed insensitive to her distress, insisting that she describe the abrasive encounter word for word, and wanting to know not only what Duncan had said, but how he had looked and sounded when he had realised she would not be cowed into calling off her engagement.
‘And that’s all he said about me?’ he probed, after she had informed him that he had been called a low-down, underhanded, cheating rat; a poor loser who had to compensate for his personal and business inadequacies by blaming others for his own mistakes; a vain, jealous, egocentric man who pursued his selfish goals without caring who he hurt in the process.
‘All! Isn’t that enough?’ asked Kalera, who had been humiliated by Duncan’s assumption that the only possible reason an attractive man could be interested in her was because of him. And he had the nerve to call Stephen egocentric! He had even had the gall to hint that Stephen had tried to cosy up to other female employees of Labyrinth in the past, but that Kalera was the only one naive and stupid enough to fall into his honey-trap.
‘It’s the oldest trick in the industrial espionage book!’ Duncan had declared in disgust. ‘Find a lonely, love-starved female in a sensitive job and seduce her into a secret affair so that her judgment is so clouded by infatuation she doesn’t even notice that her handsome new lover is pumping her for information…and refuses to believe it even when she’s confronted with cast-iron proof!’
Smarting from the image of herself
