I should refresh your memory on what it’s like to be turned down,’ she challenged.
His smile turned faintly sardonic. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘I’m surprised. I would have said a man such as you would have an impeccable track-record with the ladies.’
He shrugged. ‘You can’t win them all, I suppose.’
Salome thought she caught an edge of pain in those words, and she remembered her previous impression that Mike could well be suffering from a broken heart. Unexpectedly, it touched her. She didn’t like to think of anyone having to suffer what she’d been suffering.
This line of thought also made her realise he might be thinking the same about her, and that this invitation to dinner could very well be a true gesture of kindness. Yet here she was, being difficult and stroppy about it. She resolved to give in graciously and be done with it.
‘Very well,’ she said with a resigned smile. ‘I’ll come. Just this once.’
He seemed pleased. ‘Great. What time will I come along and pick you up?’
It suddenly dawned on her that he thought she’d moved into the penthouse, so she launched into the explanation that she didn’t intend living in the penthouse but would probably sell it, and that she lived with her mother in a neat, three-bedroom brick cottage in the suburb of Killara.
Now he didn’t seem so pleased, a dark frown drawing his black brows together. Salome deduced somewhat caustically that his Christian charity in asking her out clearly didn’t extend to a twenty-minute drive both ways through busy, city-bound traffic.
‘If it’s too much trouble...’ she began.
‘No, no—no trouble.’ But the frown had not entirely disappeared. ‘Just give me the address and a time to be there. By the way, do you have any preference where we eat?’
‘Not Angellini’s,’ she said instinctively.
‘Certainly not.’ His tone was even sharper than hers, and she actually winced. It was peculiar enough going out with a man who had once despised her, and maybe still did! She certainly didn’t want to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak.
A thought struck her, though, that hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘Don’t you have to act as host at your restaurant tonight?’ she asked. He’d always been there, if her memory served her correctly.
‘Not on a Thursday.’
‘Oh...’ Her eyes dropped, her heart regretful all of a sudden that she had agreed to go out with him. He was a link with her past, with Ralph, a past she now wanted to forget. Her ex-husband must be some sort of monster, to deceive her as he had done. She actually cringed as she thought of how she had allowed him to dictate every facet of her life. God, she’d been the original puppet on a string, the perfect piece of clay to mould as he willed. And all the while he’d been making a fool of her, having lovers behind her back while she fulfilled the role he’d chosen for her—that of a decorative hostess with no more say in their life than one of the original paintings he hung on his wall.
Salome shook her head as she vowed never to surrender herself to a man’s will like that again. If she ever remarried it would be to a man who would be her partner, not her master—an equal in every way.
Her eyes lifted to see a ruthless black gaze peering down at her, the gaze of a man whom she suspected would be no more husband material for a woman than Ralph, obviously, had been. For a moment she felt oddly disconcerted, but quickly dismissed the unwarranted reaction. This swinging bachelor’s personal life was no concern of hers. ‘Well, Mike?’ she said. ‘Have you got a pencil and paper, or an excellent memory?’
SALOME’S mother came into her bedroom as the former was putting the final touches on her make-up, and gave the large suitcase sitting beside the door a disgruntled look. ‘Just because I asked Wayne to move in,’ she flung at her daughter in a petulant tone, ‘doesn’t mean you have to move out. I thought you were happy enough living here with me.’
Salome counted to ten, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to keep the angry frustration out of her voice if she answered straight away. When she’d come home and found her mother had asked her latest boyfriend to share not only her bed but the whole house, Salome had seen red. It wasn’t that Wayne was a bad sort. He was probably the best type of man Molly had ever been out with.
But Salome couldn’t bear to stay around and witness her mother make the same old mistakes with yet another man. So she had drastically revised her plans, telling her mother some white lies about the unit and car, saying she had decided to keep them both and live in the unit.
Actually, this was not entirely untruthful. Given her new situation, Salome could see that to leave herself destitute was insane. It was all very well to be high-principled, but she could see, finally, that she had gone too far in giving away all of Ralph’s settlement. Her marriage to him, after all, had cost her four years’ wages. So she’d decided to take the equivalent sum from the money the sale of the unit brought, and buy herself a modest unit somewhere. The same applied to the Ferrari. When she’d met Ralph she had owned an old run-about, which he’d disposed of, so she believed she was justified in using some of the money from its sale to purchase a modest vehicle.
All these plans, however, she kept to herself. It was far easier to let her mother think she was keeping the lot. Less argument. Less hassle.
Molly had been astonished though delighted with what she called her daughter’s finally coming to her senses about keeping something from that ‘old coot!’ Not so delighted, however, about her moving out, for they had become very close over the last year, all their old differences seemingly having been resolved.
Till now.
‘Please, Molly,’ she said calmly. ‘Let’s not argue about it. I’m not exactly moving interstate. I’m only a twenty-minute drive down the highway, and I’ll visit often.’
‘Oh, I get the picture. Wayne’s just an excuse. It’s this Mike Angellini you’re going to dinner with, the one whose unit is next to the one Ralph gave you. You’ve set your sights on him, haven’t you?’
That was so ridiculous that Salome almost laughed.
‘Not at all,’ was her rueful reply as she picked up the bronze lip-gloss. ‘I told you. Mike’s an old acquaintance. I’ve known him for years. You don’t honestly think that after what I’ve been through with Ralph I’d leap into another involvement this quickly, do you?’
‘Who knows what you’d do?’ her mother said archly. ‘Any girl who could marry a man thirty years older than herself could do anything!’
Salome counted to ten again. ‘Not all women like younger men,’ she said with creditable control.
‘Younger men are more fun,’ Molly stated pompously. Then grinned.
Salome shook her head in fond exasperation and began putting more pins in her up-swept hairstyle. Her mother’s behaviour with men frustrated the life out of her,
