been a full five years later, and though her lover—an attractive, experienced man she’d liked a lot—had been perfectly polite, she’d been able to tell he’d been in no hurry to repeat the experience, and actually neither had she. Since then she’d been able to channel her energies into her work—until Quinn.
‘Let me get this straight—you want me for sex and nothing else.’
His low, very quiet tone sent a quiver of apprehension up her spine. Anxiously she searched his face but it was impossible to read anything from his enigmatic expression.
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it like that exactly.’
‘Well, I would!’ he yelled suddenly. ‘I’d put it exactly like that. I’ve heard you called callous, Rowena. I’ve heard you called a cold, calculating bitch.’
Rowena flinched. It was a tired old sexist line that she’d heard many times before and it never failed to make her mad as hell—it hadn’t hurt as it did hearing Quinn say it, though. It was nonsense, of course—a man who shared the qualities that made her good at what she did would have been universally admired for his skill, but not her. No, she was female so that automatically made her as hard as nails.
‘And I’ve always stuck up for you, but I’m beginning to see how much you’ve changed since the old days!’ he blazed. ‘Sex isn’t something you schedule like a finance meeting.’
Rowena listened to his diatribe in stunned silence. ‘I didn’t mean…I had no intention of insulting you, I just wanted to be upfront, Quinn.’
‘I’m slow,’ he reflected with a bitter smile, ‘but not that slow. I don’t need a diagram to tell me what you want.’ At some level he was aware that he was overreacting—after all, he’d been propositioned before.
Quinn’s scornful sneer reawakened her temper. ‘I have to tell you, Quinn, I find all this righteous outrage at being treated like a sex object just a tad hypocritical coming from you of all people. I mean, a man with a track record like yours hardly screams commitment, does he? Or don’t you like it when someone turns the table on you? The way you’re going on anyone would think you wanted a serious relationship or something…’ She saw his face and her eyes widened. ‘Good god!’ she gasped, horrified. ‘You didn’t, did you…?’ She laughed in what was pure nervous disbelief, but he could hardly be expected to know that.
‘I’ve been accused of being shallow in my time…’ His voice had dropped to a soft, menacing whisper, but Rowena was in no mood to be intimidated.
‘I can’t imagine why,’ she muttered belligerently.
The glacial flicker of his long-lashed eyes silenced her. ‘But it would seem I’m an amateur compared to you.’
‘The way I hear it you get by,’ she retorted childishly.
‘Then maybe you hear it wrong,’ he cut back in a chilly voice. ‘I may not be able to match your clinical objectivity, but I’m not totally unrealistic. I accept that some relationships are never going to go anywhere, but they’re fun anyway. I’ve been there and done that, but not as often as you seem to think.’
Rowena hardly noticed this dry postscript; she was too busy dwelling on the lurid images drifting around in her head of Quinn having fun. She actually felt quite unwell—she’d had doubts about that lobster.
‘Part of the excitement of entering a relationship is not knowing where it’s going.’
Diverted by this peculiar viewpoint, Rowena forgot momentarily about the sick churning in her stomach. Personally Rowena always liked to know exactly where she was going.
‘The exploration,’ Quinn expanded forcibly. ‘The wondering whether it might lead somewhere, whether she might be the one.’
Rowena’s jaw dropped—it was something of a revelation to learn that Quinn believed there was such a thing as the one. Let alone discover he was actively looking for her. Boy, had she got Quinn wrong—the man was a romantic!
‘With you there would be no wondering, we’d both know exactly where we were going—nowhere!’ he continued.
Rowena’s chin came up. She didn’t much care for that combination of pity and contempt on his face. It was pretty obvious there was no point suggesting they went nowhere together.
‘Let’s call it crossed wires,’ she suggested with an easy-come, easy-go shrug. Rowena had her pride and she didn’t want him to guess how disappointed, mortified and frustrated she was by his rejection.
His own shrug was just as untroubled and dismissive.
Dragging her thoughts kicking and screaming back to the present, Rowena slid a wary, half-defiant look in the direction of her staff.
Their expressions were respectful enough now but Rowena wasn’t fool enough to imagine that this situation would last for two seconds once she was out of the door. She hadn’t gained her hard-nosed, cool-headed reputation by accident and now in two seconds flat she’d blown her cover wide open.
‘Happy? Hardly,’ she snapped venomously, fixing Quinn with a look of loathing. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse us, Quinn was just leaving.’ Clinging to the tattered shreds of her dignity and trying to show she was still in charge, Rowena shoved Quinn’s jacket at him and nodded imperiously in the direction of the door.
‘So soon,’ Quinn bemoaned sarcastically, throwing his jacket casually over his shoulder. ‘We hadn’t even started talking money yet.’ He waved casually to the three watching women as Rowena, seething with exasperation, grabbed him by the arm.
‘That would be right!’ Rowena flared contemptuously—God, why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? ‘You always did have your eye on the big bucks, Quinn. Why else go in for plastic surgery?’
‘Perhaps I thought I could make a difference,’ he suggested mildly.
Rowena sniffed, unwilling to admit even to herself that her accusation of avarice had been out of line, not to mention totally inaccurate.
Quinn was considered a world expert in facial reconstructive surgery and, though he did make big money from the high-profile clients who sought him out, Rowena knew he didn’t restrict his expertise to those who could pay for it. The vast bulk of his workload was, and always had been, within the NHS, even though he could have made much more by working exclusively in the private sector. Not that money mattered to Quinn, coming as he did from a wealthy, privileged background.
‘Three-thirty in my office, Sylvia!’ Rowena called, putting a bold face on her unorthodox departure.
The three women exchanged glances as the door closed. ‘I knew I recognised his name…’ Anna cried. ‘He did Lexie Lamont’s new nose, so they say, and I saw him on that telly programme last month—the one about that teenager who got hit in the face by a jet ski.’
Sylvia nodded. ‘I saw it; the girl got all choked up every time she talked about him.’
‘Small wonder!’ Anna exclaimed. ‘Did you see the before picture? She mashed just about every bone in her face to pulp—all he had to go on when he rebuilt it were pictures.’
‘There’s no mistake, then, he’s really a doctor. I suppose it’s lucky we didn’t
