Savage Courtship

‘Guilt?’ Why didn’t he sit down if he was going to, instead of looming over her like that? There was a perfectly good empty chair next to Richard. She wasn’t going to let him bully her with stand-over tactics. ‘I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about,’ she lied brazenly.

‘No? How about leaving me to come home to a cold, dark, deserted house?’

His mock-pathos made her heart flip-flop in her chest. Perhaps her fate wasn’t so cut and dried after all. Maybe she had mistaken that searing look. Perhaps he was just in a foul mood after losing out on an award he had wanted.

‘You weren’t supposed to be coming home. But as it happens I left a light on—and the oil-fired heating going.’ She adopted a conciliatory tone.

‘I notice you don’t dispute the deserted bit.’ To her dismay he didn’t take the chair beside Richard. Instead he slid on to the banquette beside her. She felt the heat of his thigh even though he remained a decorous distance away on the upholstered leather bench. ‘Unless, of course, you count my ghostly courtesan. Sorry, Flynn, I mean actress... What lovely hair you have, by the way,’ he continued in the same mild, conversational tone. ‘And what a lot of it.’

‘She looks quite different, doesn’t she, with that mane flying free?’ said Richard affably, relaxed by his good meal, and cheerfully oblivious to the undertones.

‘Very different. So different, in fact, I nearly didn’t recognise her,’ said Benedict, shifting on to his hip so that his body was curved towards hers, still a safe distance away and yet suffocatingly close. Vanessa continued to look towards Richard with a fixed smile, her back stiff, conscious that with the blind end of the banquette on her other side she was very effectively trapped.

‘Continuing the equestrian analogy, Wells, what would you call that colour?’ he mused lightly. ‘Golden palomino?’

‘Palominos may have golden coats but their manes are always cream or white. Vanessa’s colouring is definitely bay.’ Richard chuckled.

‘Do you mind? This is a restaurant, not a stable,’ Vanessa cut in sharply, perversely as annoyed with Richard as she was with Benedict. ‘If you came in here gasping for a drink, shouldn’t you order one?’

There was a tiny, splintering silence.

‘Oh, are you talking to me? I didn’t realise—you weren’t looking in my direction,’ came the purr by her ear and she was forced to turn her head to meet the challenge of his stare.

Did he or didn’t he?

Was he baiting her or was her paranoia colouring his innocent words with perilous meaning? He hadn’t seen her face, she reminded herself desperately, so he couldn’t be absolutely certain, not on such flimsy evidence as her hair.

‘Let me buy that drink for you—it’ll be easier all round if I just add it to my bill.’ Richard interrupted the wordless duel with his customary generosity. ‘What would you like? A whisky?’

At Benedict’s careless nod he turned in his seat and beckoned the waitress again.

Benedict hadn’t taken his eyes off Vanessa and now his voice lowered for her ears alone. ‘Is all that hair as soft as it looks, I wonder?’ As he spoke he ran a hand lightly down from the top of her skull to the uneven ends of the thick pelt. Vanessa nearly shot out of her seat. Every nerve-end in her scalp seemed to spit and crackle.

‘I’m sorry, did I hurt you?’ he murmured, his eyes glittering in the light of the flickering candle in the centre of the small table.

‘No,’ Vanessa gritted. He can’t prove a thing, she repeated to herself in a mental chant. All she had to do was hold him off until they got home. Or, better still, until tomorrow, when he might be in a more receptive frame of mind.

‘Mmm, it’s even softer than it looks.’ He stroked again, this time sinking his fingers into the corkscrew ripples and drawing a swath forward over her shoulder. His knuckles brushed the bare skin of her upper arm, sending a fresh shiver of awareness right down to her toes. ‘And very attractive against your black dress and pale skin. Such a surprising colour variation, too; it almost looks golden in this candlelight. And so light and fleecy, such a fluffy confection...’

He leaned towards her as he toyed with the captive locks, his nostrils flaring slightly, and her heart jerked in her breast at each tightening of his lethally soft voice on the trigger words.

‘Do you mind?’ She reached up to push her hair back out of his grasp, discovering to her embarrassment that she was still holding the fork in a white-knuckled grip.

Resisting the temptation to stab him with it, she shifted instead so that her back was to the corner of the banquette, tossing her head so that her hair fell into the shadow behind her. She laid the fork down on the white tablecloth in front of her and then began to fiddle nervously with it as she tried to think of an innocuous starting point for a polite conversation.

When she finally plucked up the courage to give him a quick, sideways glance it was to find him staring down at her hands with their carefully painted nails. Hoping he hadn’t noticed their faint nervous tremor, she clenched her fists, and then froze as his fingertip tracked slowly over the white cloth and up over the ring-finger of her right hand.

‘That’s an interesting ring you’re wearing. Silver and jade, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, a jeweller at a craft commune up past Coromandel made it,’ she babbled eagerly, automatically splaying her hand, as much to shake off his touch as to display the large, ornate ring. Local crafts. You couldn’t get much more innocuous than that. ‘This area is quite famous for the number of artists and artisans—’

‘It’s an extremely unusual design. One might even say...unique.’

There was something odd in his voice, a note of repressed exultation, that brought Vanessa up short just as she was about to agree. The ring. She had been wearing the ring that night and hadn’t bothered to take it off before she crashed into his bed!

‘Oh, I don’t know, she probably stamps them out by the dozen for the tourist trade,’ she said with a hectic little laugh.

But Richard was there to keep her on the straight and narrow, the directest possible route to her downfall...