Slave to Love

But hours later, having shared a light meal with Jenny, then turned her attention to the TV set, Roberta had to admit that she wasn’t watching anything. In fact, she hadn’t heard or seen a single thing that the TV had been chucking at her all evening!

She was waiting, she realised. She was sitting here in a definite tense waiting mode, waiting for Mac to ring— hoping that he would ring! Yet hoping just as desperately that he would not.

She sighed and sighed again, wishing that these strange sensations she was experiencing inside did not make her feel so—wretched!

You’re in mourning, she diagnosed her problem. Mourning a dead love.

No, not dead, she then revised that thought. But cast into a self-imposed exile. Which only made it harder to deal with, simply because she knew she was having to fight her own decision, her own feelings while knowing—well, half knowing—that Mac would take her back if she just got up now and went to him.

Mac.

Those tiny muscles deep inside her quivered, her senses beginning to ache with a wretched need just thinking about him. About the sheer masculine beauty of his dark good looks. His lazy smile. His sensual kiss. His light, knowing touch...

Her fingers twitched, then began to tingle when she remembered just where she had last touched him intimately. So warm, so strong, so potently aroused that she had to be mad to be giving up the kind of pleasure he could generate for—

‘I’m going to make a coffee. Do you want one?’

Roberta blinked, the sound of Jenny’s voice dropping her like a lift down ten floors as she came out of her reverie. ‘I—no, thank you,’ she answered huskily. ‘I think I’ll just go to bed...’

‘OK,’ Jenny accepted easily enough, but her eyes were knowing as she watched Roberta leave the room, knowing as well as Roberta did that she wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight, no matter how hard she tried.

And she didn’t. She lay there thinking instead. Thinking of Mac as the dynamic businessman she had first met in Joel’s office only days after she joined the company. He’d looked lean, clean, sharp and alive, the well-structured shape of his body by no means disguised by the conventional navy blue suit and pale blue shirt he had been wearing.

He had been laughing with Joel when she had looked up and seen him for the first time and, like a frame taken out of time, she could still hold that picture of him with his head thrown back, his black hair shining in the overhead lights, his face lean and richly tanned because—she’d found out later—he had just returned from a month-long holiday sailing around the Bahamas with his teenage daughter. She could still see his mouth, disturbingly sensual even while wearing that amused smile. And his eyes, a soft, laughing grey that had warmed her through to her very core when they had suddenly settled on to her.

Joel had seen what was happening to her and had smiled wryly as he’d introduced them. ‘Our chairman, Solomon Maclaine,’ he’d introduced Mac drily. Then to Mac, ‘Roberta Chandler, my new PA.’

‘Bertie for short? Or even something more exotic—like Bunny?’ Mac asked, stepping forward to take her hand.

‘No!’ she denied, struggling to maintain her composure because, even then, the simplest touch of his hand had filled her with a hot, stifling breathlessness she had never experienced before. ‘No one ever calls me Bunny,’ she protested. ‘And I wouldn’t answer to it if anyone did!’

‘Except for a lover, of course,’ Mac added outrageously, and watched with a kind of surprised fascination as a blush ran right up her creamy cheeks.

‘Not even then,’ she demurred, lowering her gaze from his because she just didn’t know how to handle the messages his eyes were sending.

‘We’ll see,’ he murmured softly.

And they had seen.

Her stomach curled, forcing her body to curl with it into a tight ball of aching misery as her memory played another picture across her mind: a picture of the two of them lying naked on a white-sheeted bed, she supine beneath him while he lay above her, his body hot and hard, sheened like silk by a fine layer of moisture, the intensity of their desire for one another so concentrated that nothing else in the world existed.

‘Bunny...’ she could hear him whisper, the erotic wonder in the soft, husky sound enough to tip her, groaning, right over the edge.

Then, more often than not, the phone would ring, she reminded herself staunchly. And it would be Delia or Lulu demanding his attention—and getting it as they brutally reminded him where his priorities lay.

With them, not with her. Not with his current bimbo, who was there to be used and discarded as the moment demanded!

Grimly she turned her face into her pillow, and forced herself to remember the bad side of Mac. His careless indifference to her deeper feelings. His crass selfishness in the shrugging way that he would dismiss any protest she might put up against his demanding family with a simple, ‘I’m sorry, Roberta, but I have to go.’ And that would be the end of that. She would revert back to being Roberta again, and the ‘Bunny’ he had just been so completely engrossed in would become nothing but a shadowed memory, lost behind more pressing concerns.

* * *

Heavy-eyed from a rotten night of restless battle with her emotions, and feeling bad-tempered enough to scowl at anyone who so much as glanced her way, Roberta wal

ked into the plush executive foyer of Maclaines, ready to do battle with anyone who dared take her on!

But Joel was her ultimate target, since he, in her wretched state of mind, had become no better than Mac with his outrageous behaviour of the night before.

So she was ready for a row in more ways than one as she took the lift up to the executive floor and walked in through the doors which led to Joel Maclaine’s personal suite of offices—only to have her blazing guns spiked the moment she arrived.