She shuddered.
Susie just laughed. ‘Oh, don’t be so negative! Think of the fun you’d have for a fortnight. And anyway—who knows?—Diego Saez might fall headlong in love with your blonde English looks, sweep you off to his million-acre ranch in Argentina and keep you in polo ponies for the rest of your life!’
‘Very amusing,’ Portia answered humourlessly.
She could see no humour in the situation at all. Susie didn’t know what it was like. She thought it would be fun to have someone like Diego Saez pursue you. Fun? Fun to have his dark, heavy-lidded eyes seek you out across a room, make you feel, suddenly and shamingly, as if you were in your underwear, or, worse, make you stall halfway through a sentence and find the breath tight in your throat. Fun to know that of all the men in the world none had ever made her react like this.
It was terrifying, mortifying.
She didn’t want to react to a man like Diego Saez. So why, why did she have to be so punishingly, stupidly aware of him the whole time? Why couldn’t she just ignore him?
She did her best. Did her best to put him off her.
If she couldn’t avoid him—and it seemed she couldn’t, so intrusive was he everywhere she went—then she could at least try and make herself as inconspicuous as possible. As undesirable.
She tried concealing her body. At the next private view she went to she wore a dress that had a high, Chinese-style collar, long sleeves down to the backs of her hands and a hem down to her ankle, with flat slippers that did not lift her hips.
When her tormentor arrived, fussed over by everyone there, he let his glance rest momentarily on Portia, who lifted her chin and looked right through him—but not sufficiently to miss the mocking twist of his mouth as he took in her suppressed appearance.
When the opportunity came he strolled across to her.
‘Very erotic,’ he murmured. ‘You must wear it for me some time—privately.’
Then, before she could say a word, he strolled off again. A redhead, poured into a clinging emerald-green cocktail dress, seized his arm and pressed herself against him blatantly, making it clear how attractive she found him.
Portia glared after him, rigid with fury.
And something even worse.
The jittery, panicky feeling filled her again, and to her disgust she found that she was watching him, seeing how he smiled down at the redhead, who was rubbing up against him now, his mouth giving that sensual twist that disturbed her so much.
She felt that hot wire tug inside her, and forcibly turned her head away so she could not see him.
Why? she thought despairingly. Why was he getting to her like this?
Why couldn’t he just clear out? Go back to Wall Street, Geneva, Buenos Aires—wherever he came from!
And leave her alone.
That was all she wanted. Just to be left alone.
She got some relief when Susie reported—reproachfully—that he had started being seen around with a well-known actress currently starring in a West End hit.
‘Good,’ said Portia tightly.
She took the opportunity to get out of London herself. She’d already taken two days out to visit Yorkshire, in search of the elusive Miss Maria Colding. Now she booked a flight to Geneva. She wanted to check out a painting sold thirty years ago to a wealthy Swiss, listed only as ‘School of Teller’—with luck it would prove to be by Teller himself.
She mentioned her plans to Tom that evening. They shared a house in Kensington, which had been divided into two generous flats, with a guest flat in the basement. The arrangement suited them both—it gave them enough privacy, but each other’s company when they wante
d it.
Tom seemed to be over the flu, but he looked haggard and heavy-eyed, and definitely not firing on all cylinders. Portia frowned, feeling guilty. The last thing she wanted to do was to complain to her brother that she was being pursued by Diego Saez. Tom might feel he had to impose some kind of brotherly protection around her, and, little as she knew the world of high finance, she had nous enough to realise that for Tom to be on bad terms with a man like Diego Saez was not a good idea.
‘You need a break,’ she told him. ‘Can’t you get away from the bank and go down to Salton for a while? It would do you good. You know you hate London.’
‘I can’t get away right now,’ her brother answered shortly.
She looked at him. Everything about Loring Lanchester bored her stupid, but poor Tom had to deal with it, like it or not. As the son and heir, he’d had no option but to step into his father’s shoes. She, a mere daughter, had been free to follow her own consuming interest—the history of art.