‘Put Nicholas on, please.’
‘I can’t. He’s not here. He’s gone to the little men’s room. You’re wasting your time, anyway. He doesn’t want to see or talk to you ever again. He has me now and I’m all he wants.’
Olivia sucked in a shaky breath. With a great effort of will, she kept her voice quite calm. ‘And just how long have you been everything Nicholas wants?’
‘Longer than you think. Face it, honey,’ Yvette purred down the line. ‘You haven’t got what it takes to keep a man. It’s not a female’s organisational and management abilities which win the day. Nickie could get that from a computer. Or a cleaner. What he wants is passion. And spontaneity. And fun.’
‘Sex, you mean,’ Olivia shot back, knowing now where Nicholas had got most of his verbal armoury during their final argument.
‘Same thing.’
‘You think he didn’t get sex from me?’ she threw at this heartless creature who thought nothing of taking someone else’s man.
‘Not the kind he wanted, honey. Gotta go. We’re all off down the pub for Chrissie drinks. Bye bye. Oh, and happy Christmas!’
Olivia was left listening to a dead line.
Suddenly, a rage began to simmer deep within her, a dark rebellious rage. Slamming the phone down, she jumped up from behind her desk, hot blood racing through her veins.
Going for Chrissie drinks, were they? Well, good for them. But she was going one better. She was going to a Chrissie party and by God she was going to party. She was going to party all day and she was going to forget. Forget Nicholas and Yvette. Forget that her future had been cruelly smashed. Forget everything but having fun!
Olivia stripped off her jacket and dropped it over the back of her chair. Having fun shouldn’t be too hard. Not once she got a few glasses of champagne into her.
She was a happy drunk. Or she thought she would be. She’d never actually been drunk before. But a couple of glasses of wine always made her feel good.
And, dear God, she needed to feel good. She needed to feel good very, very badly!
Tugging the anchoring bow from the nape of her neck, she shook her head till her hair spilled halfway down her back. Flicking open the top two buttons of her blouse, she gave another defiant toss of her head, then marched determinedly in the direction of the music.
CHAPTER TWO
BY TWO that afternoon, Olivia felt more than good. She felt fantastic. If she’d known champagne was such a great antidepressant she’d have tried it earlier. From her third glass, everything had begun to improve. Her mood. The music. The men.
By the time she’d consumed her first bottle of bubbly, one of the sales reps, a thirtyish womaniser named Phil, whom she wouldn’t normally have given the time of day, started to seem genuinely charming. He’d been chatting away to her for over half an hour when Olivia first became aware of Lewis frowning at her. He was standing with a group from marketing near one of the trestles laden with food, a glass of beer in one hand and a slice of Christmas cake in the other.
Her boss’s near scowl evoked a dark defiance in Olivia. Lewis wasn’t her keeper. She had every right to have some harmless fun if she wanted to. Anyone would think she was doing something wrong instead of what every other single, unattached female here was doing: flirting and having a generally good time!
When Phil asked her to dance, Olivia didn’t hesitate. Putting down her near empty glass and placing her hand in his outstretched fingers, she allowed him to draw her into the centre of the factory floor. The music switched from a softer number to a heady, throbbing beat which stirred her blood, and her general feeling of rebellion, ensuring that she smiled at Phil a little more widely, and danced a lot more provocatively.
Olivia discovered a primitive sense of rhythm she hadn’t known she had, her body taking on a life of its own, undulating with all the grace and sensuality of a belly dancer, her arms reaching up above her head like two cobras under the hypnotic influence of a snake charmer’s music.
The realisation that Lewis’s narrowed blue gaze was riveted to her suddenly sinuous body did not go unnoticed by Olivia. Instantly, she became very conscious of her femininity: the way her full breasts were swaying beneath her blouse; the sensual swing of her womanly hips; the heat being generated in her secret places. It was a most exhilarating and arousing experience.
Olivia felt so sexy, it was sinful! She could have danced for ever, displaying herself shamelessly in front of the men’s gawking eyes.
But especially one man’s.
Shocking her boss out of his complacent attitude towards her was giving her a real buzz. It felt good to have him look at her for once as a woman capable of attracting men, maybe even capable of attracting him.
Actually, it felt more than good. It felt ... thrilling.
The music, however, came to an end, and the disc jockey announced he was having a break.
‘I had no idea,’ Phil murmured as he guided her from the factory floor, ‘that you could be like this.’ Picking up a frosted glass of champagne from a nearby table, he pressed it into her hot little hands.
‘Like what?’ she asked in a breathy voice to rival Yvette’s.
Phil’s leering smile sent warning bells ringing faintly in her fuzzy brain. The realisation of where Phil thought their flirtation was heading brought a momentary jab of conscience, but she easily brushed it aside. That was another thing about being deliciously drunk, she realised. You didn’t fret over things. So Phil was going to be disappointed at the end of the day. So what? No real harm done.
Sipping her drink, she glanced idly around to see if Lewis was still watching her.
He wasn’t. In fact, he was nowhere in sight.
Perversely, Olivia felt quite put out.
‘Another dance?’ Phil suggested.
Olivia was startled to find that the prospect of dancing without Lewis watching her held no appeal at all. In fact, all of a sudden, she’d lost interest in staying where she was.
‘Sorry,’ she said abruptly, ‘but there’s something else I have to do right now.’
Leaving Phil gaping after her, she strode across the factory floor to where the champagne was chilling in a huge vat. Extracting an opened bottle from its bed of ice, Olivia collected two clean glasses and set off in the direction of the main office block.
She found Lewis not in his laboratory, but in his office. He was standing at the window which had a view of the rolling front lawns, but not much else. His grey suit jacket had been discarded along with his tie, both thrown carelessly across the black leather chesterfield standing between them. Staring through the window, he absently undid his cuffs and began rolling up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt.
Without making her presence known, Olivia stood in the open doorway and just stared at him.
He was an exceptionally good-looking man, she finally conceded.
