prejudice against her fiancé, she would thank him to stop making slanderous remarks unless he was prepared to defend them in court!
‘So, he believes that I only asked you to marry me in order to worm his secrets out of you and to deprive him of your valuable services?’ Stephen’s aristocratic mouth curled into a contemptuous sneer. ‘Did his fertile imagination also suggest a motive for my madness?’
‘I thought you asked me here for dinner, not a postmortem,’ Kalera pleaded, his persistence beginning to grate on her nerves. ‘Do we have to talk about it any more? I’m just glad it’s over and done with, and you must admit it turned out better than we expected. Duncan even apologised for the way he overreacted—said it was just the shock—’
‘I’ll bet it was a shock!’ Stephen laughed grimly. ‘Royal doesn’t like it when the tables are turned. He likes to be the one to do the shafting. You should have told him where he could stuff his apology and walked out anyway.’
His unaccustomed crudity made her eyes widen. ‘Stephen!’
‘Well…I don’t trust him,’ he said, a moody look pushing out his lower lip. ‘I just can’t believe he wants you to stay on as his secretary when he knows you and I are engaged. I wouldn’t if our positions were reversed. I wonder what he has up his sleeve? He’s a devious swine—I doubt he’s doing you any favour by letting you work your notice. He probably intends to make your life hell for the next few weeks. Whatever he pays you it won’t be enough…’
It wasn’t a matter of money, but of principle and pride, thought Kalera. In the midst of a disarmingly eloquent apology Duncan had somehow extracted a promise from her that she would stay on until the end of the month to help train her successor. She couldn’t break her word when Duncan’s willingness to keep her on was an act of faith in her integrity; nor did she want to forfeit the respect and liking of her friends at Labyrinth by slinking away from her job as if she were guilty of some wrongdoing.
‘I’m sure I can handle it,’ she said, hoping that he was wrong. ‘I’m tougher than I look, you know.’ She straightened her narrow shoulders, laid partially bare by the classic cut of her simple, sleeveless silk sheath. Her slender, breakable body often led people to overlook her inner strength and mistake her serenity for lack of assertiveness.
‘I know.’ Stephen cupped his hand over hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘I just don’t like the idea of you being hurt because of me. I never wanted to put you through this…’
She felt a familiar tightening in her chest followed by a blossoming of sweet contentment, and turned her hand palm up in his grasp, twining her fingers with his. He lifted their clasped hands to his mouth and gallantly saluted her knuckles with a soft kiss.
She loved the way that he could make her feel cherished and special with simple statements of caring rather than extravagant compliments. She recognised the same emotional reserve in him that existed in herself. After Harry was killed so tragically and so young, she hadn’t wanted to fall in love again. She hadn’t thought that she would ever find another man so perfectly suited to her needs. But then fate had thrown Stephen across her path and his gentle persistence had won her wary heart.
His gaze shifted and suddenly he stiffened, the tender light in his melting brown eyes instantly extinguished. ‘Did you tell Royal that we were coming here this evening?’
Kalera raised her finely arched brows at his curtness. Surely Stephen wasn’t going to turn paranoid on her too! ‘No…at least—I might have mentioned that we were going out to dinner after we shopped for the ring, I suppose, but I don’t think I said where. Why?’
‘Because he’s here—in the restaurant—and he’s coming over,’ said Stephen through his teeth. ‘And you can bet it’s not to offer his best wishes.’
Kalera’s head snapped around, her fine hair spraying over her silk-clad shoulders as Duncan Royal came to a halt beside her chair. It was only long experience of his eccentric taste in clothes that prevented her mouth from falling open at the sight of his attire. He was dressed from head to toe in black, his sculpted silk velvet jacket cropped like a matador’s, the wide lapels and cuffs stiff with flamboyant gold embroidery. Everything about him, from his clothes to the expression on his darkly amused face, reeked of challenge.
‘Well, well, well…if it isn’t the happy couple,’ he drawled, looking down at them with a tigerish smile. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence.’
His gaze shifted to their entwined fingers and before Kalera could curb the impulse she had guiltily snatched her hand from Stephen’s loosened grasp. She immediately picked up her glass and pretended to be drinking from it, but the glint in Duncan’s eye told her that he wasn’t fooled.
‘Mind if I join you for a while?’
Kalera was rendered speechless by his audacity.
‘Yes!’
Ignoring Stephen’s violent rejection, Duncan hooked a soft black ankle-boot around the leg of a chair at the next table, abandoned by a foursome for the dance-floor, and dragged it over, not taking his eyes off Kalera’s flushed face. He smiled as he positioned the chair too close to hers and sat down, his thigh brushing hers under the round table. She crossed her legs to avoid a repetition and found that it was now her bare arm at risk of being caressed by the plush velvet of his sleeve. His black shirt was figured silk, with covered buttons, she noticed unwillingly. And, dear God…!
‘You’re wearing an earring!’ she gasped, sufficiently distracted to forget that she had been about to edge her chair away from his.
‘Yes, do you like it?’ He turned so that the elongated jet and chased gold teardrop swung against the tanned column of his neck, almost brushing the collar of his jacket. A stud or ring was a fairly commonplace declaration of modern macho cool, but the wickedly frivolous elegance of that dangling earring made an entirely different statement. It was the sort of exquisite piece of jewellery that a languid Elizabethan fop might have worn…or a modern rock-and-shock star!
‘I didn’t even know you had your ear pierced,’ murmured Kalera faintly.
‘I didn’t—until this afternoon,’ he said, turning the back of his head towards Stephen and lowering his voice to effectively cut him out of the conversation. ‘For some reason I had this sudden, compelling urge to go out and do something just for the sheer hell of it, something satisfyingly primitive, and preferably masochistic…What prompted me to feel like that, do you think, Kalera?’
‘I have no idea,’ she said, refusing to look into those mocking blue eyes, or acknowledge the gravelly insinuation that she was somehow responsible for his ritual act of self-mutilation. In her experience Duncan needed no outside prompting to encourage his hell-raising impulses. She glanced nervously across the table at Stephen’s stony face, and gave him a secret smile in the hope that it might take the sting out of being ignored.
‘I know I shouldn’t be wearing anything but a stud in it yet,’ Duncan went on in his confiding tone, ‘but you know me, Kalera, I like to experiment. If you stick to the rules all your life you end up never doing any real living.’
His taunt fell on arid ground. Kalera had grown up in a society where there were too few rules rather than too many, and she knew which system she preferred. Duncan, the maverick, was the product of a conventional upper-middle-class upbringing which provided him with the lifelong security of having something to rebel against.
He tapped the lobe of his ear, making
