A Wild Affair

Quincy laughed, relaxing. 'I'm so relieved you aren't still mad at me—I thought you would be hurt, and I couldn't blame you if you were.'

'Not so much hurt as rueful,' Brendan confessed. 'It served me right for tangling with him—I'll know better next time. I'll sneak up behind him and club him down.'

She giggled, hearing the dry self-mockery in his voice and liking him the more for his ability to laugh at himself.

Sobering, Brendan said: 'Don't get involved with him, will you Quincy?'

Her hand curled tightly around the receiver. 'What sort of idiot do you think I am?'

'He's a very attractive guy and you're not exactly worldly wise,' Brendan told her. 'You could get hurt and I'd hate that, you're much too nice to get tangled up with someone from that sort of world.'

'Do me a favour!' Quincy said lightly. 'Credit me with having some common sense, Brendan. You know I was reluctant to come up to London and go through with this, but what could I do when Bobby had got me into it? I felt partly responsible. After all, it was my brother who filled in that form and by the time they had realised it was all a mistake they'd gone ahead and told the press I'd won. I could see why they wanted me to go through with it. It would have been very embarrassing for them. But I'm taking it all with a pinch of salt, I'm not letting any of the glamour get to me.'

'I hope you're not,' said Brendan, and she heard in his voice the echo of her own doubts, the doubts she had suppressed just now. The glamour might not be getting to her, but how could she hide from herself that Joe Aldonez was?

'They don't want you to stay in London,' Quincy said reluctantly.

Brendan was furious at once. 'I don't care what they want! And by they you mean him, don't you? Aldonez? I saw the way he was reacting. He was dying to punch me on the jaw from the minute he saw me. You could see it in his eyes. He's a nasty piece of work, and I don't like the way he looks at you.'

Quincy's lips parted, the question: how does he look at me? hovering on her tongue, but she carefully didn't ask it, although her heart had given a strange, excited little flip at what Brendan had said.

'Remember,' Brendan charged on angrily, 'he's used to having women swoon at his feet. I'd say he's pretty ruthless about getting what he wants, he wouldn't be where he is if he didn't have a ruthless streak. You have to be tough to make it to the top in any business, but particularly in show business, because the obstacles are higher. A man like that goes like a bulldozer for what he wants.'

Huskily, Quincy said: 'He doesn't want me! Don't be idiotic!' She waited on tenterhooks for Brendan's reply—it was absurd to think Brendan had seen anything in Joe's face that she hadn't seen herself and he was probably putting a false construction on Joe's temper when he saw her and Brendan together, but she couldn't help her inner excitement at what he was saying.

'Don't be naive,' Brendan said shortly. 'Don't you know some men notch up their score as if they were going for the world record?'

She changed colour, flinching.

'Quincy,' Brendan said more gently, 'men are different from women. They can separate sex and love—I don't think women can, they get emotionally involved every time. Men just enjoy making it with any pretty girl they meet—some men, that is, men like Joe Aldonez. It's an ego trip for a man like that, part of their image. Don't let him fool you, that's all.'

'I won't!' she said fiercely.

Brendan was silent, as though the feeling in her voice had reached him, then he said: 'Do you want me to stay away? Shall I go back home?'

'After coming all this way to London that would be silly,' Quincy told him. 'Why don't you enjoy a few days here?'

'But I won't see you?' Brendan said flatly.

'I'll be very busy,' she explained in anxious apology. 'And I'll be coming home myself in a couple of days, remember.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I see—okay, Quincy, see you back home.'

She only realised he had hung up when the phone began to whirr softly. With a sigh she replaced the receiver. Talking to Brendan made her realise that this brief trip to London had altered something in her drastically—she wasn't the same girl who had opened the front door to Joe Aldonez so short a time ago. Too much had happened too fast. Her mind was in a state of restless motion all the time. She couldn't sort out how she really felt or what was happening to her. She only knew she had changed, but she had not changed so m

uch that she could bear to contemplate the idea of letting Joe Aldonez use her for an ego trip, as Brendan called it. What Brendan had just said was bitterly close to what she suspected herself—Joe's interest in her was that of the acquisitive collector. He wanted to notch her up on his belt, add her name to his score. Quincy had no desire to be one of a long list of women who had passed through his bed. For the rest of her stay in London she would have to make that very plain to him.

CHAPTER SIX

It had not occurred to Quincy that she might be present at Joe's big London concert. She knew the tickets had been sold out within a day of the concert box office opening; fantastic, inflated prices were being paid for them on the black market and it was the major event of the pop world in London that year. When Carmen told her she was going she had been so excited she couldn't speak for a few minutes, and an amused look flashed across the other woman's face.

'Lucky girl, aren't you?' Carmen would be there, of course, but she did not appear to feel any particular excitement, perhaps because she was used to big concerts. 'All your friends are going to be green with envy!'

Quincy took it for granted that she would be sitting in the audience, but when she arrived at the hall several hours before the concert began she found she was to be backstage, to her surprise.

'I suppose all the seats were sold,' she said, and Carmen gave her a dry smile.

'Of course, but that isn't the reason—your face would be recognised by Joe's fans and you'd be mobbed. I wouldn't put it past some of the more violent ones to take the chance to scratch your eyes out.'