The Irresistible Tycoon

‘The last few months have been somewhat…strained at times, haven’t they?’ Lucas raised dark sardonic eyebrows, and at Kim’s faint nod inclined his own head in agreement. ‘But now we both know exactly where we stand and with no hard feelings. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

He smiled as she spoke but Kim was beyond smiling back. Her eyes opened wide as he placed his hands on her slender shoulders but she stood quietly before him, forcing herself not to shrink away. And when the dark head bent and he lightly brushed the top of her head with his lips she still remained motionless, wondering—with a bewilderment that was stronger than anything she’d felt before—why she felt her heart was breaking.

CHAPTER NINE

KIM didn’t go into work that day although Lucas left immediately after their ‘clearing of the air’, as he referred to their talk.

He had ordered her to go back to bed and get some sleep before she had to collect Melody again, but she found sleep was the last thing on her mind in the hours that followed. After an hour or so of tossing and turning she threw back the covers irritably and got dressed again, giving the house an impromptu spring-clean that took all the rest of the day and most of the evening.

The hard physical work helped; at least she fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow that night, and her dreams—if she had any—must have been non-threatening because she couldn’t remember them in the morning, which was a Saturday.

She found her heart was beating so hard it was suffocating the first time she met Lucas after the morning at the cottage, but he had retreated into the hard, attractive, distant tycoon of earlier days and within an hour or two—amazingly to Kim—she found herself relaxing, and by the end of Monday she was sufficiently loosened up to laugh at one of his wickedly amusing observations on life.

The next morning she experienced the same hot shivers and thudding of the heart as the day before, but when Lucas made no attempt to be close or anything but her boss, their old working relationship gradually settled into place.

The silver-grey eyes still pinned her on occasion but that was Lucas, she assured herself each time she caught him looking at her in a certain way. And the habit he had of almost reading her mind was peculiar to him too. It didn’t make her comfortable, but cosiness or serenity had never been an option around Lucas anyway.

Kim found she was missing Maggie more than she would have thought possible as the days and weeks crept by, especially after one of her friend’s phone calls or letters which were all determinedly cheerful and which never mentioned Pete.

She had mentioned Maggie’s situation to Lucas whilst assuring him she would make alternative arrangements for Melody, should the need arise, but it was four weeks before this happened and then the late meeting just necessitated Janie—the mother of Melody’s schoolfriend—walking across the road to the school and keeping Melody until seven, when Kim collected her.

By the time the May blossom had fallen and June had arrived, and Melody was well underway with her herb and vegetable patch, Kim was forced to acknowledge to herself that she was lonely. She adored Melody, worshipped her, but the lack of adult stimulation was getting to her, she told herself crossly one Saturday morning after a particularly vivid and erotic

dream concerning Lucas.

She missed Maggie’s easy, funny companionship, that was all it was. She narrowed her eyes against the hot June sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window. But it wasn’t, was it? her innate honesty forced her to recognise in the next moment.

It wasn’t so much that she was lonely as lonely for Lucas, and there was a subtle difference there. Since she had accepted that she loved him there was barely a minute or two that ticked by that he wasn’t on her mind. It wasn’t so bad when she was at work—at least she could see him there, hear him talk, laugh at his jokes and exist on the perimeter of his busy life.

Sad girl. The thought was immediate and extremely annoying, but truthful. She hunched her shoulders against it and frowned at the sunlight.

And all the long work lunches they shared didn’t help. She was forced to see him in a different light when he took her to one of the little restaurants he favoured, or to the pub, and although he assured her he’d treated June exactly the same and it was the way he liked to relate to his secretaries, it nevertheless caused Kim untold painful heart-searchings.

As had the couple of times she had found herself at his home. She’d met Martha, his housekeeper, and the animal occupants of the beautiful mansion. Again, good reasons for her being there—the first time he had called in on his way back to the office after lunch for a file he’d forgotten, and the next he had asked her to bring some papers to him one morning when he had been working at home, but each time Martha had insisted Kim partake of coffee and home-made shortbread before she had left, and treated her as—what, exactly? Kim asked herself silently. A buddy, a friend? Certainly not as one of Lucas’s employees.

And Lucas’s relationship with his housekeeper she’d found particularly unsettling. His gentle teasing of the little old grey-haired woman, the warmth and tenderness in Lucas’s voice, and the blatant devotion in Martha’s when she spoke of the man she called ‘my wee lad’ had all been disconcerting. Unnerving even.

Not that Lucas had stepped out of line for a minute. Oh, no, not ice-man. ‘Oh, stop it.’ Kim acknowledged she was being spectacularly unfair. It was just that she hadn’t expected her ‘just friends’ decision to be quite so hard, or so apparently easy for him! Sour grapes. Kim nodded to the accusation. Probably. Which made her really mean.

Enough. Get your mind off Lucas and on to something else, she told herself sternly, and with that in mind she walked out of the kitchen door into the spangled sunlight of the garden. ‘Fancy the paddling pool out, sweetheart?’ she called to Melody, who was busily engaged in looking for weeds in her little plot of ground.

A whoop of delight was the answer, and within half an hour the paddling pool was full and they were both in their bikinis, Melody splashing about in the tepid water and Kim sitting in a deckchair under the shade of a copper beech with a mug of coffee in her hand.

An abundance of wisteria had gracefully draped itself over the adjoining garden wall during May, and this was now giving way to a cascade of rambling roses, their delicious scent wafting gently on the still air.

It was a world away from the nightmare of the little bedsit they had endured for two long years. Hot tears pricked at Kim’s eyes—which was ridiculous, she told herself firmly, when she ought to be smiling if anything. But Lucas had made all this possible—given her back her independence, her chance of carving a good life for herself and Melody, of living somewhere like this. And she was grateful, incredibly so, but she’d never really told him.

She blinked very hard. And sooner or later some woman, a little more beautiful or talented or charismatic than the rest, would snare him. She wasn’t aware he was dating again but he could be, for all she knew, and she couldn’t blame him if he was. As he’d said, celibacy wasn’t his style.

And it would be her fault. Her fault she had missed a chance of heaven. But… Kim stared straight ahead but the garden had vanished into the black abyss of her thoughts. If she had her chance over again she would do exactly the same. She might be throwing away her chance of heaven but the hell she had endured with Graham precluded stepping into a relationship again. With Graham she’d had the excuse she hadn’t known what she was doing, but there would be no justification for willingly putting herself and Melody at risk again.

The same old arguments and counter-arguments she had mentally indulged in for the last two months raged in her mind, and when Melody tapped her arm impatiently, saying, ‘Mummy, Mummy. I said I can hear the doorbell,’ it took Kim a few seconds to bring herself back to the real world.

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mummy was daydreaming.’ Kim smiled into the little face frowning up at her, hastily reaching for the cloudy blue sarong that matched the bikini as she rose.

She wrapped the delicately patterned cloth round her waist as she entered the house and padded through the hall to the front door, and it was only as she opened it she realised she hadn’t given a thought to who might be calling at ten o’clock on a sunny June morning.