For Better for Worse

Guiltily, she turned away from the mirror and hurried into the bathroom to get ready for her meeting with Pierre Colbert.

* * *

In London Marcus stared at the file open on his desk. The air in his study smelled stale and claustrophobic. As he stood up to open the window he heard the front door open and a warm, laughing voice call out, ‘Hi, Marcus, we’re back.’

And then the three of them were crowding into his study, Vanessa, Sasha and Sondra.

The long, usually neatly groomed hair was flowing casually down over her shoulders, almost inviting a man to reach out and touch it, the scent of her skin, the upward laughing curl of her mouth and above all the invitation, the knowledge glowing so warmly in her eyes, encouraging him… urging him…

He turned away, and focused abruptly on the photograph of Eleanor standing on his desk. Eleanor… She had been right to doubt that he would be able to cope with Vanessa and Sasha.

If Sondra hadn’t happened to call round with those papers he needed…

He grimaced to himself, remembering the scene she had interrupted: Vanessa’s belligerent insistence that she was old enough to direct her own life.

‘In your eyes, maybe,’ Marcus had told her flatly. ‘But not in the eyes of the law. I meant what I said, Vanessa. You’re not old enough to go out alone to the kind of nightclubs you—’

‘But I wouldn’t be alone,’ Vanessa had interrupted him hotly. ‘Sasha will be with me.’

‘No!’ Marcus had said, and the force of that harsh denial was still reverberating in the air when Sondra walked in.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he had apologised to her as he ushered her into his study.

‘That’s OK,’ she had told him sunnily, adding, ‘I’ve been there myself, you know. I had some pretty bad fights with my dad before I grew up enough to recognise that he wasn’t trying to spoil my fun… just see to it that I didn’t get hurt.

‘It makes things tougher when he’s not there all the time, of course. Up until I reached puberty he’d been pretty easygoing, spoiling me rotten, I guess. It was Mom and my stepdad who laid down the law, but even so it came as pretty much of a shock once Dad started getting heavy with me, cross-questioning my dates and bringing in all kinds of rules and suchlike. Seemed like I only had to want to do something for him to tell me no. We said some pretty tough things to one another at times, but now there’s no one whose opinion I value more. You’d get along real well with him, Marcus. You’re pretty much two of a kind. Guess you’d better watch out, huh? They say a girl kinda tends to go for men like her dad when she’s had a good relationship with him.’

She had laughed as she said it, but even so Marcus had been aware of the very real meaning beneath her comment and of his own frisson of response to it.

‘Just as well I’m already married… and too old,’ he had laughed back, but he suspected she was not deceived and that she had recognised that small, very masculine surge of sexual excitement she had given him. She had come to collect some papers as well as deliver some, and since they weren’t quite ready she had offered to go into the kitchen and make them both a cup of coffee.

Quite how and when the coffee had turned into fullblown ‘afternoon tea’ with Vanessa and Sasha coaxed downstairs to help her he wasn’t sure.

Or how he had come to abandon his work and take the three of them out for ‘proper’ afternoon tea? Or how he had allowed Sondra to persuade him into allowing her to take the girls to the exclusive gym where she had a temporary membership, exclaiming when he had expressed doubts that he was always welcome to join them and keep a fatherly eye on them if he wished.

He hadn’t done so, nor had he taken her up on the suggestion, when he had thanked her, that he could always repay her by taking her out to dinner.

It had been Vanessa who, when Sondra had commented that she was taking a couple of days off to do some sightseeing, had begged to go with her.

Marcus had pointed out to his daughter that Sondra was hardly likely to want her company, but the American girl had overruled him, claiming that there was nothing she would enjoy more.

She had arrived this morning, whisking both girls off with her, leaving him to get on with his work in the peace he had begun to think he might never experience again.

Only, instead of concentrating on his work… he looked at Eleanor’s photograph. She was due back tomorrow only suddenly, urgently, betrayingly he wanted to be with her now, out of the way of this charming, dangerous girl-woman who had made her desire for him so plain. Because he didn’t want her and wasn’t tempted by her, or because he was?

He could see from her expression, when he explained his plan for her to ask her if she could stay with the girls for a couple of nights, that he had both surprised and annoyed her; that his reaction was not the one she either expected or wanted.

Even so, she agreed to stay, but not without first touching him lightly on the arm, and inclining her body just that little bit too close to his own, giving him a look from under her eyelashes which just fell short of being too openly sexual as she suggested that he delay his departure until first thing in the morning.

‘Your wife will probably be having dinner with her business associates,’ she pointed out to him, ‘and won’t be able to spend the evening with you. Why not have dinner here with us and then leave in the morning?’

‘I’ve already checked,’ Marcus lied. ‘The only available flight is this evening. I was just waiting for you to get back to confirm my booking…’

‘Your wife is a very lucky woman,’ Sondra told him softly. ‘I wish I had a man in my life who missed me so much.’

Although she was smiling at him, there was a speculative, feline look in her eyes which told Marcus what she was really thinking.

Normally her behaviour would have merely amused him; it wasn’t a situation that was new to him, after all, and he was glad that she could not know, as he did, that beneath his awareness of his own male vulnerability to what she was offering ran the far more dangerous threat of his anger and resentment against Eleanor.