‘It’s still locked,’ Benedict pointed out.
‘I realise that,’ she said, her damp fingers slipping in panic on the lock as she tried to disengage it.
‘Vanessa—’
She heard the rustle of his movement and whirled round in her seat, only to discover that she was still trapped by her seatbelt and that he was leaning across her to deal deftly with the recalcitrant lock.
‘What?’ To make up for the sharpness of her response she subsided in her seat, reassured by his obvious willingness to let her go.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what the award was for?’
‘Oh, yes—what was it for?’ she asked hurriedly, feeling ashamed of the self-absorption that had led her to misjudge his motives so blatantly badly.
‘Are you really interested?’
Typical of the male injured ego—he was going to make her work for his forgiveness. ‘Of course.’
‘I thought you didn’t like my work.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Dane. When he was here last year you told him that you thought the Serjeant Building was a boring monolith, exhibiting the kind of concrete-slab mentality that made modern cities universally the same.’
‘He just showed me a photo and asked my opinion,’ she said weakly, remembering the amusement the other man had displayed when she had unwisely abandoned her customary reserve around her employer’s guests and proffered an honest rather than diplomatic response. ‘I didn’t realise you had designed it.’
Benedict didn’t seem in the least offended. ‘One of my earliest commissions, when I was still working for my father’s firm. He had a stern rule that one supplied clients with what they wanted, not what the architect thought they should want. In that case the client was a hidebound reactionary who thought that Frank Lloyd Wright was a dangerous lunatic. That building fitted him like a second skin.’
‘I don’t mind some of your later designs,’ Vanessa said comfortingly.
‘Thank you for that damningly faint praise,’ he said wryly. ‘I realise commercial architecture is largely a soulless business...precisely because it’s such a big business, cost-driven to the point that anything new and untried or unusual is usually feared. Plans often have to be approved by a board, and committees are notoriously more conservative and difficult to please than individuals. Only those with real foresight, who want to make a permanent impact on the landscape rather than a smooth turn-around profit on construction, are interested in allowing an architect full artistic freedom. That’s why I left my father’s firm and branched out with Dane. I wanted to create a separate professional identity for myself...concentrate on smaller commissions calling for greater individualism. I still do the big—’ a taunting semi-bow to Vanessa ‘—”boring” bread-and-butter ones, but these days I supplement the stodge with a good leavening of the off-beat. The award was for a private residence at Piha. Would you like to see it?’
‘Go to Piha, you mean?’ Vanessa was startled.
His white teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘I was talking about something a little more convenient—the plans are up in my studio.’
‘Oh. Yes, that would be very interesting,’ she murmured, trying and failing to imagine what kind of houses Benedict Savage would design.
Palatial homes for millionaires and pillars of society, no doubt—they were probably the only ones who could afford his magnificent fees. But at least his dangerous mood seemed to have evaporated now that she had given his ego room to flex. ‘I’d like to see it, some time when it’s convenient...’
His eyes glittered as if he sensed he was being ‘handled’. ‘I’d better put the car in the garage. Would you like to open up the house? And here, you may as well take this.’
He scooped up something from the back seat and thrust a cool, metallic object into her hands. She found herself looking down at a slender, stylised sculpture. ‘Oh, is this your award? It’s very nice.’
She heard the smile in his voice. ‘Yes, very nice. Run on in, there’s quite a chill outside. Have you got your key?’
‘I’m not a child.’ She opened her door to get out and found herself pulled up with a jerk that made her gasp with pain.
‘Here, allow me.’ Kindly, Benedict freed her from her seatbelt and she scrambled out in a flurry of black crêpe de Chine, still clutching his jacket around her, conscious of his chuckle pursuing her up the steps.
She was acting like a nervous teenager for no reason at all, she simme
red as she flicked on the lights in the foyer and stairwell. He must have known that she thought he was going to pounce on her. But then, what was she supposed to think after the things he’d said to her at the restaurant? Beneath the challenging interplay of words there had run a definite current of sexual awareness, heightened by his obviously vivid recollection of their lovemaking.
Unconsciously she placed a hand over her flat stomach. He had actually sounded quite smug when he’d raised the question of pregnancy, as if the idea of her bearing his child wasn’t at all dismaying. In little more than a week he had invaded her body and wrapped himself around her consciousness to such an extent that the certainties that had been her strength and her protection over the last few years had begun to crumble. She was losing control and somehow she had to find a way to regain it.
She put the award carefully on the hall table beside the telephone after studying the engraved plague and was still hovering there uncertainly when Benedict slipped through the front door, which she had left ajar. He must have parked the car with remarkable speed, she thought as he closed the door behind him and locked it, then leant back against the stripped-wood panels just looking at her.
She moved restlessly under that steady gaze. ‘I was just wondering whether you wanted me to serve you coffee—’ She faltered as he pushed away from the door and began to walk slowly towards her. Automatically she backed away, until she reached a wall and could retreat no further.