With a slight lifting of her chin, she held Dominic’s gaze for a short second which felt more like an hour in the throbbing tension, then slowly closed her dark lashes over her eyes. When she opened them again, she was looking directly at Vicky. ‘We’ll lose our table if you don’t hurry,’ she reminded her friend softly.
With a silent ‘O’ formed by two Cupid’s bow lips and a pair of rounded eyes which showed a horrified appreciation of the way Madeline had just discarded her brother, Vicky turned and shot back into her office. She must have dived for her bag, because she was back with them before anyone had a chance to move.
With all the cool aplomb her mother had instilled into her, Madeline smiled pleasantly at the hovering receptionist, sent Dominic a cool nod, then was turning towards the lift, ignoring the hot needles of fury that impaled her as she went, chatting lightly to a wholly absorbed Vicky.
‘God in heaven!’ Vicky literally wilted against the panelled lift wall. ‘That was just awful!’
‘Not—pleasant,’ Madeline drily agreed.
‘He’s an arrogant swine!’ Dominic’s sister ground out. ‘Sometimes I—’
‘He was taken by surprise, that’s all,’ Madeline put in, surprised by her instant rise to Dominic’s defence.
‘Taken by surprise, my foot!’ scoffed Vicky. ‘He knew damned well that you were coming here today—I told him! Made him promise to stay out of the way! God,’ she choked, ‘I could kill him for doing that, the rotten devil!’
The lunch was not the resounding success it should have been. Madeline’s confrontation with Dominic had helped spoil it, but it was the feud between their two families which completely ruined the day.
‘It’s crazy,’ Vicky agreed. ‘They don’t seem to mind that you and I stay friends. But my father will have nothing to do with yours, and vice versa.’ She grimaced, ‘It’s made the last four years damned difficult for me if you must know. I daren’t speak to your family because it would upset my lot, but I can’t just snub people who have always been warm and caring towards me. So I stay out of the local social scene for most of the time. That way I don’t get pulled in two different directions.’
‘Is there no way you can think of that would put an end to it?’ Madeline asked anxiously.
Vicky lifted her face and smiled rather cynically. ‘Not unless you and Dominic fa
ncy getting back together again—No,’ she then said quickly when Madeline stiffened up. ‘I didn’t mean that seriously. It’s just that…’ She sighed, frowning. ‘He was sorry afterwards you know. He tried to see you, but…’
‘I don’t wish to know.’ Had he? Had he tried to see her? she wondered. He can’t have tried very hard, then, she stubbornly dismissed the weak sensation Vicky’s claim touched her with.
‘He was appalled at himself. He…’
‘Vicky!’ she warned.
‘All right—all right.’ The other girl waved a placatory hand. ‘I just wanted to understand, that’s all. I never did. Nobody did.’
‘It was no one else’s business.’ Madeline flatly pointed out. ‘Yet they all made it their business by starting this silly feud!’ she added impatiently.
‘They all hurt for their respective chicks, Madeline; surely you can understand that? When you went off to Boston you left one big hornets’ nest of bottled-up emotion behind you. Even Dominic shot off out of it to our sister bank in Australia for six months. By the time he got back, they’d quarrelled so badly that nothing was going to shift either your father or mine.’
‘Did he try?’ Madeline asked wryly.
‘Of course he tried!’ Vicky bristled instantly in her brother’s defence. ‘We all tried! Even the timid Nina, for all the good it did her,’ she muttered.
‘How?’ Madeline asked, surprised to hear that Nina could even find the courage to intervene in any dispute—she had used to run out of the room when Madeline had one of her spats with her father.
‘She insisted we be invited to her wedding,’ Vicky said. ‘Apparently, your father said he was quite happy to see me walk behind Nina down the aisle as one of her bridesmaids—but the rest of ’em could go to hell!’ Vicky’s gruff mimic of her father’s rasping voice was very good, but while doing it she also revealed her own disgust.
‘And Nina actually told you that?’ She was beginning to wonder if her stepsister had changed beyond all recognition if she could repeat something as cruel as that to Vicky.
‘Of course she didn’t!’ Vicky denied, to Madeline’s relief. ‘Annie, your housekeeper, told Clara, our housekeeper, and she was so affronted on our behalf that she told us.’
‘And the feud worsened,’ Madeline added heavily. ‘God, what a mess.’
‘Anyway, it was all so much hot air over nothing,’ Vicky finished grimly. ‘Because there was no way I was going to be able to be bridesmaid at Nina’s wedding while my own family remained in exile.’
It was a mess, and one Madeline saw no way out of. She left Vicky feeling as dissatisfied with their meeting as she had been with anything for a long time. It seemed so damned unfair that Vicky, the innocent in all of it, should be the one to lose out! She wanted Vicky at Nina’s wedding, but she had backed off from inviting her personally, because of the strain she saw it would place on Vicky’s loyalty to her own family. To attend without them would be disloyal. Yet her not being there seemed equally disloyal to her friendship with Madeline.
It was a dilemma, and one Madeline saw no answer to as she went home that afternoon. And for the first time, she seriously considered calling Dominic to see if he could come up with a solution.
So she wasn’t so surprised when he took it upon himself to ring her instead.