CHAPTER FOURTEEN
'I'M out of here!'
The terse announcement from Sue sliced through the dark maelstrom of Barbie's thoughts. She lifted her head from the pillow where it had been buried for some time and tried to focus on her friend.
'Where are you going?'
'To a movie. Anywhere.' Her eyes flicked over Barbie's dishevelled state. 'It's obvious you don't plan on going out with Nick, and I'm not sticking around to be hit by flack from the showdown. The Anne Shepherd thing was your idea, not mine.'
'I can't go out with him. Not with this between us.'
'He's coming here,' Sue tersely reminded her. 'What are you going to do? Shut the door in his face?'
T don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do,' she cried in anguish.
'Well, Nick Armstrong didn't strike me as the kind of guy who accepted having doors shut in his face, so I'm out of here. It's almost a quarter to seven, Barbie. You'd better start shaping up.'
Having delivered this last admonition, Sue was on her way, leaving Barbie to conduct her private business strictly on her own.
A quarter of an hour to go...
Pride forced her off the bed to tidy up her appearance. She exchanged her crumpled clothes for freshly laundered jeans and a blue-and-white checked shirt which she deliberately left hanging loose instead of tucking it in. She didn't want to emphasise her curvy figure, didn't want to look the least bit sexy to Nick's eyes.
She brushed her hair but didn't apply any makeup. Barbie Lamb, au natural, she thought mockingly, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Nick couldn't say she was coming to him in different guises and playing roles tonight. Nothing fake about a bare face. The doorbell rang.
Her heart, which had been a dead weight all afternoon, leapt to painful life, catapulting around her chest. The unconscionable rat, who'd knowingly given her enough rope to hang herself with, had come for another bite of her, loaded with the certainty she was here for the taking.
He'd known, before he'd swept her into his bedroom, that she was Barbie Lamb. Nothing that had happened there had anything to do with Anne Shepherd—a woman he'd just met and strongly desired. The admissions he had ripped from her in the heat of intimacy had been cold-bloodedly calculated to give him the upper hand in any further encounter with him.
She'd wanted him. She'd begged for him. She'd made love to him.
Burning with these humiliating memories, Barbie forced her legs to carry her through the apartment to the door Nick Armstrong was standing behind. She didn't want to open it, but Sue was right. He wasn't going away. And she was bitterly curious to know how he would explain his behaviour this time around.
There was no younger brother Danny lurking in the wings, providing some excuse for playing his game how he'd chosen to play it. And why he'd brought his sister into it today made no sense at all. He hadn't needed Carole's confirmation of her identity. It had been a cruel ploy, like a cat playing with a mouse before he pounced. Just as he had on Monday night.
On a burst of seething anger at his duplicity, Barbie unlocked the door and pulled it open, determined on blasting Nick Armstrong's confidence in manipulating what he wanted. Her grey eyes were as hard and as lethal as silver bullets, but the bullets hit a totally unexpected shield before they reached their target.
Her wings!
He was holding out her fairy princess wings...and they were fully restored to their former glory...no trace of damage at all!
One look at Barbie was enough to tell Nick there would be no playing happy families tonight. Tension whipped through him at the obvious evidence that all the female tools for generating sexual attraction had been abandoned. No makeup. Not even a dash of lipstick. And her clothes were more suitable for housework or gardening than for greeting a man whose interest she wanted to keep.
Wipe-out was telegraphed to him loud and clear.Which meant she had been stringing him along to deliver the hardest, punch-in-the-heart rejection she could.
Anger pumped into a fierce wave of aggression.
He didn't deserve this.
And he wouldn't stand for it.
'Open the door wider so I can bring these wings in for you,' he instructed, determined to catch her off guard long enough to get inside. 'Don't want them damaged again.'
Apparently stunned by seeing them fixed, she stepped aside and let him in. Nick carried them right through the small living area and propped them against the wall next to a hallway which obviously led to bedrooms. He was now in the heart of her private territory and he wasn't about to give up the ground he'd made.
Barbie closed the door automatically, standing against it as she watched the unbelievable proof that he had cared enough to actually follow through on his declared intention. But when had he had the time to mend the broken wings? She felt as confused as she had at seeing them in his office on Monday.
'How did you do it?' she demanded, still seized by a sense of disbelief.
He swung to her with an ironic little smile. 'I contacted a fancy dress costume-maker on Monday afternoon and passed everything over to her.'
Her confusion flattened out. 'Someone else did it.'
'I wanted them to be perfect again.'
'Cost no object,' she muttered, remembering Sue's cynical attitude towards his fixing the wings. 'I guess you've found that money smooths the way to anything you want.'
His chin lifted slightly, his eyes narrowing into slits at her unappreciative reception of his effort. 'I simply wanted to give you pleasure.'
'Take it, you mean,' Barbie snapped. 'A whole lot of secret pleasure in leading Barbie Lamb up the garden path and seeing how far she would go.'
His head jerked in surprise at that accusation.
The fury that had been forcibly stored up inside her all afternoon, broke its banks and spilled forth, her eyes blazing contempt" for his trickery. 'Don't think you can fool me anymore, Nick. I know you know who I am. I can pinpoint precisely when you realised who I am. Your comment on my eyes over dinner...
'So why didn't you come out with the truth then?' he shot back at her. 'Why lie in the first place, and why continue the lie, despite every opening I gave you to admit who you are? Seems to me I was the one being set up as the fool.'
She folded her arms protectively, armouring herself against any firepower he thought he had against her. 'I didn't want you to connect me to any memories you had of Baa-Baa Lamb.'
'I never called you that, Barbie.'
'You thought it of me, always following you around whenever I was given the chance. So much so I caused a problem for you and you had to put a stop to it.'
His mouth thinned, biting back any further denial.
'Anne Shepherd let me be me now,' she cried, hating the knowledge he'd hidden to pursue his own way with her. 'It let me meet you without you thinking of me like that. Me now, Nick, and when it stopped being me now, you should have told me. Instead of which you chose to play your own secret game.'
'It was your game,' he retorted, anger blazing into his eyes. 'And I didn't know what the hell you were up to.'
'If it worried you, why didn't you come straight out with it?
'And have you walk away from me?'
'As you did from me? Bit of guilt there, Nick? Did you decide I was out to get you and dump you?'
Heat speared across his cheeks. 'It was a possibility,' he answered tersely.
'So instead of risking that possibility, you set out to colour the past differently, spinning me that story about Danny, making yourself out to be the noble older brother, standing aside for him to step in.'
'It was the truth,' he asserted emphatically.
She tossed her head in scorn for his truth. 'Well, you certainly weren't standing aside for anything this time. It was straight up to your apartment, into your bedroom...'
'You could have stopped it anytime,' he sliced in, the air between them sizzling with a ferment of crosscurrents.
'So could you,' she hurled back, and out poured the tumult of bitter feelings his deception had stirred.
'You were getting too much of a kick out of it, weren't you? Remembering I'd once had a crush on you, and here I was, all grown up enough to whisk off to bed. Did it feel great, getting me to admit. I wanted you, driving me to the brink, then holding off to make me beg for you
'Damn it!' he exploded, his hands whipping up in an emphatic gesture of frustration. 'You're twisting everything around. I just wanted you to admit who you were. I wanted it to be real between us.
'How much more flesh-and-blood real can you get?'
'I didn't think you'd go that far and when you did, still without identifying yourself—and I gave you every chance to, Barbie—' He started walking towards her, his hands spreading in appeal.
'You stop right there, Nick Armstrong!' she commanded, her eyes flaring a fierce warning. 'I'm calling the shots now!'
He stopped, his hands falling to his sides, clenching. 'You were calling them all along, Barbie. The fairy princess act you played was designed to stir me up, and don't you deny it.'
'Yes.' Her chin went up in belligerent pride. 'I wanted to get a different reaction from you than I got at your twenty-first birthday party.'
'A sweet slice of revenge.' He nodded as though he'd known it all along, his eyes glinting accusingly as he read more into it. 'Did it give you a kick, doing the walking away after you'd sung to me this time around?'
Barbie refused to feel guilty. He'd made her pay for what little vengeance she'd taken on him. 'That was the intention,' she frankly acknowledged. 'But when you kissed me...' The memory of her response caused a rush of hot blood to her cheeks, '...it stirred everything up for me and I wished I hadn't done it' 'Until you had second thoughts and came to my office to see if there was more reaction to be had,' he bit out grimly. 'And when there was, you carried it further...and further...taking me where you wanted it to go. And don't you deny that, either.'
'I didn't know you had Barbie Lamb in your mind,' she flung back at him in a fury of resentment.