‘If you don’t get me home I’ll probably be sick in the car,’ she said with bitter relish and he hastily turned the keys in the ignition, expressing his frustration with a loud gunning of the engine as he pulled out into the road.
‘Don’t think this is the end of it, Flynn,’ he brooded as they surged forward into the darkness.
‘Make up your mind,’ she muttered sullenly.
‘What do you mean?’
She risked a glance at his dark profile. His hearing was as acute as his perception. ‘You call me Vanessa when you want something and Flynn to threaten me. To put me in my place.’
‘I have yet to discover what your place is,’ he said cryptically. ‘Now, be a good girl and shut up while I concentrate. It’s been a bloody long night.’
She remembered then where he had been and felt a small flicker of reviving malice. ‘Who beat you for the award?’
A flash of light from an oncoming car revealed a sardonic curl to his lip. ‘That pleases you, doesn’t it—the thought that I didn’t win?’
‘Of course not.’
‘One day I’m going to teach you to stop telling me lies,’ he clipped. ‘You like the idea of my pride being trampled in the dust. For your information I didn’t nominate myself, Dane did. And I didn’t lose.’
‘But you said—’
‘I didn’t say anything; your prancing stud made the assumptions. I told you he was a bit thick.’
‘You can’t blame him!’ She flew to Richard’s defence. ‘You didn’t appear to be in a very celebratory mood.’
‘I was until I found my butler hiding under his table,’ he said grimly, ‘and discovered why.’
Vanessa shivered at the reminder and hugged his jacket more tightly around her. He had a one-track mind. ‘If you won, why on earth did you leave early?’
‘What should I have done? Stayed to be smothered under the avalanche of sycophantic flattery that goes hand in hand with these things? Is that what you think is important to me? It isn’t the first award I’ve won and it won’t be the last. I know exactly how much and how little they really mean.’
Vanessa would have taken issue with that breathtaking piece of arrogance except that she knew that in his case it was justifiable. She had seen a photograph of his array of plaques and awards in one of the Architectural Digests and read his offhand comment that winning was ‘good for business’.
‘But your plans. You were going to stay overnight at the apartment—’
‘I changed my mind—I know you think I’m rigid and inflexible but I am capable of acting spontaneously on occasion,’ he said irritably. ‘Maybe I just wanted to celebrate my victory with someone who had no axe to grind, about whose opinion I might actually give a damn!’
There was a fraught silence while Vanessa dared to consider what that meant. He couldn’t be talking about her? While she sought for a delicate way of finding out he made another impatient sound.
‘I might have known you wouldn’t be impressed. I suppose you’d prefer to think of me as a valiant loser. As a disappointed man I’m less of a threat, an object of compassion rather than any positive emotion.’
‘Don’t be silly—’
‘Why not? I’ve already made a fool of myself over you once.’
‘This is ridiculous—’
‘I agree, totally absurd.’ He stopped the car with a skidding jerk and unclipped his seatbelt to turn towards her.
She stiffened, fighting off a dangerous pleasure, all her senses focused on the man now lifting his arm to rest along the back of her seat. He had come back because of her. Because of some boyish desire to impress her with his cleverness... Benedict Savage, who took his enormous successes with cynical casualness, had been proudly bearing his honours home on his shield. She moistened her lips and asked nervously, ‘Why have we stopped?’
He was silent for a long moment. Then the furious tension that gripped him seemed to relax. ‘So that I can seduce you on a dark and lonely street, Vanessa; why else?’
His words sent a wave of heat rolling over her. ‘I— Oh!’ She looked out of the window and was mortified to see that they were parked on the gravelled driveway at Whitefield, right before the front door. And she hadn’t even noticed! ‘Oh.’
‘Disappointed?’
She blushed, groping awkwardly for the door-handle and rattling it desperately when she discovered it wouldn’t open.