Slave to Love

But he wasn’t listening. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he was muttering. ‘You’re just bloody miffed because I didn’t dance attendance on you all night long!’

‘You didn’t dance attendance at all, the way I remember it.’

‘I had other duties to attend to!’ he snapped. ‘It was Lulu’s night. And she, therefore, had first call on my attention!’

‘She got it, Mac,’ Roberta drily assured. ‘She certainly got it! The full, central and undivided attention of most of the room all night—at my damned expense due to your lack of support for me!’

‘Lulu said something to upset you?’ he asked sharply, really beginning to catch on at last. His eyes darkened, the anger leaving him to be replaced with another look of urgent appeal. ‘Listen, Bunny—’ he leaned towards her again ‘—if Lulu—or any of my family—offended you at the party the other night, then I apologise for them. They’re all so damned—’

Roberta suddenly shot to her feet. ‘They didn’t offend me, Mac. You did! You do it every time you pretend I don’t exist as far as they are concerned! If once—just once—you had come to my side, forced them to accept me for what I am supposed to be to you, then they would have done—and you know it!’ She sucked in a short breath, disgusted with him and herself for putting up with it all for so long. ‘Well—’ She tried to put a brake on her temper, but it didn’t work. Now that it had been let loose it did not want to retreat again. ‘I refuse to hide in the cupboard like your guilty skeleton any longer! I have done nothing—nothing—to be ashamed of. Yet your family—through you—’ she angrily made clear ‘—has sunk my self-esteem to such a level that it can’t sink any lower! And yes—’ she nodded tightly ‘—I’ve had enough!’ The lot, everything she had been bottling up all weekend, was spilling out in one furious wave. ‘More than enough! I will not allow myself to be trodden under your rotten family’s feet for another day! So you can take yourself—and your selfish idea of a relationship—and just get out of here!’

‘Finished?’ he clipped.

‘Yes,’ she said, and sat down with a bump, drawing air into her lungs in an effort to control herself. She had been determined not to lose her temper with him, to finish this with all the cool aplomb that a man like Mac would expect from a woman of her supposed sophistication. But that was the trouble, she conceded angrily. She wasn’t really sophisticated at all! She was just a love-vulnerable fool called Roberta Chandler, forced into playing an alien role because she couldn’t control her feelings for this man!

And to have him she’d had to play it his way—right down the damned line!

‘So you want out.’

‘Not want,’ she corrected, ‘I have out.’

‘Or marriage,’ he derided, shoving himself away from the desk.

‘Oh, no.’ She denied that instantly. ‘You see, that was another thing I discovered on Friday night. I discovered that I have no wish to become a member of your rude and selfish family. But I do want marriage!’ she added quickly, when he flashed her a look that said he might be considering throttling her for that particular insult. ‘And since it obviously isn’t going to be to you—’ her slender shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug ‘—then I must cut my losses and look around for someone else.’

‘Even though it’s me you love?’

Oh, that hurt, and it showed in the way she winced. But she lifted her chin to him, green eyes holding on to his. ‘And who do you love, Mac?’ she challenged quietly.

He swung away, obviously not prepared to answer that one. ‘I learned the wedding lesson the first time around,’ he muttered evasively, going to stand at the window with his hands shoved into his trouser pockets. ‘I have no intention of putting myself through that kind of hell again.’

‘I can understand that,’ Roberta acknowledged fairly. ‘But whatever hell your marriage was to you, Mac, you did gain something very precious from it. You gained Lulu, whom you so obviously love and adore—a daughter who loves and adores you in return. Do you think I don’t want to experience that kind of bond with a child of my own?’ she appealed to the rigid set of his back. ‘Do you honestly think that, just because you see your duty to the human race fulfilled in Lulu, I must accept that it can never happen to me because I love you and therefore must concede to your dictum?’

‘You’re jealous of Lulu!’ he swung around to declare.

‘I am not jealous of Lulu!’ she denied, storming to her feet again as the taunt hit a raw nerve. ‘But I am jealous of what you and Lulu have, that I can never have if I don’t cut myself free from you!’

‘But you’re only twenty-five years old, dammit!’ he rasped. ‘You’ve got years ahead of you to plan things like home and family!’

She felt herself go icy cold. ‘Leave it until you decide that you’ve had enough of me, do you mean?’

The colour drained from his face, his thickly curling lashes flickering down to hide his eyes from her as he turned back to the window. And Roberta smiled bleakly to herself as her heart flipped over, then lay struggling like a dying fish in her breast. She had just knocked the nail right on top of its indisputable head.

‘You’ve never so much as hinted to me before that you felt like this,’ Mac muttered after a long, heavy moment.

‘I was waiting for you to show enough interest in my feelings to wonder,’ she murmured shakily. ‘But you never have, have you?’

Even she heard the contempt in her voice, aimed entirely at herself for her own powers of self-delusion, and Mac’s shoulders shifted on a gesture of discomfort as he picked up on it too.

‘But that really is not the main issue here.’ Grimly she shifted things back on to the right track. ‘The issue being that I am no longer willing to have a hole-and-corner affair with a man who can’t even acknowledge me for what I am supposed to be to him, in front of those people he cares for, because he is ashamed of me.’

‘Now that’s a downright bloody lie!’ Mac barked, spinning around to lance her with a murderous look. ‘You know what you are without my having to spell it out for you!’ he bit out angrily. ‘You are beautiful, you are bright, you are enchanting to be with, and you’re damned fantastic in bed! And any man would be proud to call you his—including me! So stop coming on to me as though I treat you like some dirty secret I keep swept beneath the carpet, because it just isn’t true!’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ he growled, advancing on her with wrathful intent gleaming in his eyes. ‘You are the first woman in ten years that I’ve given my complete loyalty to!’ he reminded her as he reached her.

‘But I gave you a whole lot more than that.’ She had been referring to her love but, typical Mac, he completely misunderstood her.