‘I see someone who spotted an opportunity and seized it with both hands.’ There was a tone to his voice that Heather had never heard before. It was as flat and as hard as a slab of steel, and she stared at him in speechless bewilderment.
Into the silence, Theo moved onwards, his voice growing colder by the second as he contemplated the full spectre of her deceit. ‘I asked myself earlier how things could have changed so drastically between us. For months you were as reliable as the day was long. You took care of the house, you helped me with my work when I needed it, and most of all you never complained. Now here you are, demanding promises of a future…’
‘I wasn’t demanding…I was—’
‘Shut up!’ His voice was like a whip, subduing her into sudden shocked silence once more. In the past, when she had witnessed his anger over something to do with work, he had shown it by stalking round the room, dictating something to her in staccato bursts, his movements restless and fuelled. Now he was perfectly still, and all the more intimidating for that.
‘Was it when you supposedly allowed yourself to be tempted into bed with me that you started thinking what a good catch I might be? Started thinking that maybe, just maybe, if you played your cards right, you would be in with a chance?’
All colour leached from Heather’s face, and her eyes widened in horror at his massive misinterpretation of events.
‘Wh-what…?’ she stuttered.
‘Did you think that if you buttered up my mother you would somehow get one foot over the winning line? After all, you knew that no other woman had ever been in a position to meet any member of my family. Maybe you imagined that circumstances had played right into your hands…You once told me that you believed in fate. Well, what better display of fate than to closet you with my mother for weeks on end?’
‘No! None of what you’re saying is true!’ Heather said, appalled.
Theo, a runaway train gathering momentum, ignored the interruption.
‘Sleeping with me, knowing that I lusted after you, must have seemed the icing on the cake!’ He thought of the way he had looked forward to stepping through the door, craved the nights when he could make love to her, feel every curve of her body, and he hated himself for the weakness. ‘You must have known that I am like any red-blooded male. Throw a naked desirable woman at me and I find it hard to resist.’
With every word he trampled over her fragile hopes, and he was right. She had seen his mother’s sudden appearance on the scene as a sign of fate. Hadn’t she been in the process of really thinking about moving out? And, yes, she had hoped that she would come to mean something to him after they had slept together, that he might see her really and truly for the first time. Naïve expectations had found fertile ground in her romantic heart, and time had done the rest.
‘When did you first begin to think that I might be worth hunting down? Was it when you first stepped into this place and saw it for the first time?’ He remembered her awestruck, wide-eyed pleasure and could have kicked himself for never once thinking that his money might have inspired gold-digging ambitions. At the time he had been amused!
‘I don’t know how you can sit there and say those things, Theo.’
‘Because I am a very practical man. I am also an extremely rich one. And rich, practical men have suspicious minds. You should have taken that into account.’
‘This is like a bad dream,’ Heather whispered. She felt as though she had been cheerfully living in a house, thinking the walls secure, only to find that the house was made of straw and susceptible to a puff of wind.
‘People wake up from bad dreams, Heather. This is no dream. This is reality.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ And she’d brought it on herself. She blindly turned away, scrambled away from those cold, distant eyes into the bedroom, where she frantically began pulling all her possessions out of drawers, out of cupboards, throwing them on the bed in a heap.
Strains of classical music wafted through the door, a beautiful sound that was incongruous with what she was feeling. Deed done, she assumed that he was now relaxing.
She didn’t look in his direction when she walked past towards her old room and the suitcase lying under the bed. She had come with very little and she was leaving with far less. She didn’t much care whether her clothes disappeared in a puff of smoke. She hated them, but she made herself pack them. The few that were in her old bedroom and then the rest.
Somewhere along the line he had disappeared, although the CD player was still softly playing Vivaldi. She assumed he would be in the office. Away from her. After so long with him, he was happy to let her leave his apartment without even bothering to say goodbye.
In a daze, and with her suitcase, her portfolio and some assorted bags at her feet, Heather stood by the front door, not knowing whether to try and find him or not.
In the end there seemed no point. He had said what he had to say and he would never believe that she wasn’t an opportunist.
Instead, she hastily scribbled a note, thanking him for the job he had given her, which had enabled her to fund her course, and leaving him the key to his apartment.
From the sanctuary of his office Theo heard the click of the door being shut, and scowled at the laptop winking in front of him. She would have wondered whether to disturb him to say goodbye and would have hesitated. He knew that because he seemed to know her so well. Not surprising, considering they had shared the same space for such a long time. Big mistake now, in retrospect.
He pushed himself away from the desk and walked through to the kitchen. Of course this was the natural and only conclusion. It needn’t have been, if she had agreed to continue their dalliance, but, no, like all women she had wanted him to pay lip service to the non-existent significance of what they had shared. He felt a wall of frustration slam into him. Why she couldn’t have accepted what was on offer was a mystery to him, but she hadn’t, and so she had to go. He neither needed nor wanted the clutter of a woman in his life—a woman nurturing thoughts of permanence.
Give it a couple of weeks, he told himself, and his head would be clear of her. Until then he would work his guts out and paper over the rough patch with a few dinner dates. Everything back to normal. The way it should be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE had to get out of the flat. Beth had given Heather this piece of advice in a tone of voice that brooked no argument. It had been three weeks, she had pointed out, and three weeks was plenty long enough to pine for a man who had used her.
‘I am getting out of the flat,’ Heather replied, choosing to go with the literal interpretation of her friend’s statement. ‘I’m toting my portfolio to every publisher and advertising agency in the city. In fact, I’m hardly ever in. Actually—’ she dangled a carrot tantalisingly in front of Beth, hoping to play the Distraction Card ‘—I have a second interview with the MacBride agency on Monday. Maybe you could help me shop for a successful interview outfit on the weekend…?’
Beth’s response to that was to announce to her friend that she had found her a date. As if, Heather had thought wildly, she was a charitable organisation in need of government aid.
‘My counterpart in Dublin, as a matter of fact,’ she continued, pleased with herself. ‘I’ve met him a couple of times and he’s perfect. Tall, blond, going places…’
Heather would have to wear something stunning, something along the lines of what she had worn for the office party with the GTB, which was Beth’s abbreviation for Theo—the Greek Tycoon Bastard. And why not do something with her hair? Some highlights, maybe?
And, as always, Heather found herself half protesting, half glumly acknowledging the sense behind what her friend was saying. And, as always, the half she didn’t want to win invariably won.
Which was why she was now, on a Saturday night, standing in front of Beth’s floor-to-ceiling mirror in her bedroom, being inspected by her friend like a microbe under a magnifying glass.
And a very satisfying specimen at that, Beth considered with satisfaction. She stood back and gave a low whistle of appreciation. Heather might think that she had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a date with someone she wasn’t interested in meeting, but she needed to get out. Three and a half weeks had seen her drop weight and her normally sunny nature had become worryingly flat. Yes, she had dutifully gone from agency to agency in search of work, just as she had dutifully moved into the vacant flat next to Beth’s, and she had obligingly summoned up a pretence of light-heartedness. But underneath she was as empty as a shell.
Whether she appreciated it or not, as far as Beth was concerned, her friend needed to go out and have a good time.
Beth did not believe in letting the grass grow under her feet. Yes, time was a great healer, but with a bit of careful forward planning the healing process could be brought forward in leaps and bounds, and she had approached the problem of her friend with the same logical precision that she applied to her work.
The odd meal out and nights in with girlie chats hadn’t worked. Heather had listened whenever Beth broached the subject of Theo, but had stubbornly refused to participate in the cleansing process of conversation. She had listened and resolutely changed the subject.