that off?’ was the first thing she asked, glaring.
Like an angry cat, he thought. An angry cat that he had got it into his head he wanted to tame. An angry cat that would jump six feet into the air if he so much as touched her, even if the touch was strictly polite. He pushed open the door and stood back so that she could brush past him.
‘Didn’t Harry tell you?’ Dominic asked curiously, making sure not to invade her space.
‘He said you gave him your business card. He said you were someone important in the City.’ Mattie regarded him levelly, with hostile suspicion. ‘I don’t care how important you are, you know the ground rules.’
‘But not your name.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I know the ground rules, but I still don’t know your name.’
‘Matilda.’
‘Matilda. You don’t look like a Matilda,’ he said in an amused voice, and her back stiffened.
‘No. And what do I look like? Something a little fluffier? A Candy, perhaps? Maybe fluffier still?’
‘Are you always on the defensive? Matilda?’
‘Mattie,’ Mattie muttered. ‘Everyone calls me Mattie. I hate the name Matilda.’ She blushed at this unnecessary volunteering of information, even though it was hardly a state secret.
‘Why?’
She shrugged, as he knew she would, just as he knew that she hated having let slip the innocuous detail because it was of a personal nature.
‘Well, Mattie,’ he stretched out one arm to hail a taxi, and as it slowed down to pull up to them he said with deadly seriousness, ‘we’re going to have to get in a cab together to go to this hotel…’
‘Hotel? Oh, no. No, no.’ She began backing away and Dominic clicked his tongue in impatience.
‘I said hotel. I didn’t say hotel room. We’re going to a hotel in Covent Garden that I often use when I’m working late. There’s a bar downstairs and it’s guaranteed to be full.’ But her big green eyes were still watching him warily, and he had to fight the urge to just reach out and smooth her ruffled feathers.
He, who had never had to try when it came to the opposite sex, could scarcely believe that he was now willing, at some ungodly time of the evening, to bide his time.
‘Now, are you going to come with me or not? If not, then you can rest assured that you won’t see me again. If you do decide to come, then you’ll just have to swallow your misgivings and climb into this taxi with me. Make your mind up.’
He saw the debate flitting across her face and wondered what he would do if she walked away. Wondered what had brought him to this juncture in the first place.
Fate? A certain boredom with the women he was used to? A need to erase Rosalind by having an affair with someone dramatically different from her in every possible way? Something else? No, nothing else, he told himself.
But whatever the outcome of her internal debate, he wasn’t going to chase after her. He had already behaved out of character as far as she was concerned, and he wasn’t going to do it again.
‘OK.’ Mattie shrugged and, when she reached out to open the door, found that he was there before her, opening it for her. It was a gesture to which she wasn’t accustomed. Frankie was not an opening-car-doors-for-women kind of man.
Still, she made sure to wriggle up to the furthest side of the seat when he stooped to join her, and was immediately glad of it because, even at this distance, she still felt chokingly aware of him.
‘I don’t know your name,’ she said, as the taxi pulled away.
He noticed the way she was huddled against the door, as if scared that he might do something unexpected at any given moment, and he, in turn, made sure to keep a safe distance between them.
‘Dominic Drecos.’
‘Dominic Drecos,’ Mattie repeated, thinking hard. ‘And you’re something important in the City, are you?’
‘Something important, yes.’ She didn’t sound overly impressed with that and he found himself giving in to a childish desire to expand. ‘I deal in corporate finance. We handle mergers and acquisitions. In addition, I speculate in property. Buy to renovate to sell.’
‘Right.’ She turned to gaze out of the window. In this part of London, it was never dark. Too many lights and billboards. It was a rolling scenery she was familiar with, but for some reason she found it easier to stare at the images moving past than at the man sitting on the seat next to her.
He was the first man she had had a proper conversation with in a very long time. She attended her courses during the day but did none of the student socialising that most of the others did and talking to the customers at the nightclub was strictly out of the question. There had just been Frankie. And she and Frankie no longer conversed on any meaningful level.
‘So you don’t live here, then, I take it?’ She reluctantly looked at him and, for one crazy moment, wondered what he looked like underneath the expensive suit and that crisp striped shirt he was wearing under it. Then she blinked and she was back in the taxi, a nightclub waitress with a boyfriend, sitting next to someone important in the City.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, if you did, then why would you go to a hotel when you happened to be working late?’
‘I have an apartment in Chelsea. But this particular hotel does very late suppers and occasionally we might come across here to wind up a deal and eat at the same time.’
‘We?’
‘My people.’
‘Your people.’
‘Accountants, lawyers, whoever happens to be needed. Sometimes, I come here on my own to have a late meal and finish business without the distraction of telephones and fax machines.’ No point telling her that he had been responsible for buying and renovating this particular building and, as a stipulation, had a penthouse suite on the top floor which he sometimes used if he simply couldn’t be bothered to get George to drive him back to his own apartment. That little titbit would have her running for cover.
And he was discovering that the last thing he wanted was to have her running for cover.
For someone who had always had total control over every aspect of his life, this in itself puzzled the hell out of him. It also energised him in equal measure.
‘And what about your wife? Does she enjoy your late suppers at expensive hotels when you’re working late with your people?’ Whether he was married or not was immaterial to her. She had no intention of doing anything with him. But she still found that she was curious.
Was he married?
‘If I were married, I wouldn’t be here.’ There was a flat coolness to his voice that made her want to retract the question. ‘Don’t you find it impossible to work somewhere where your opinion of your customers is so low?’
