He felt himself turn on, and lowered his eyes with considerable will-power.
‘Look at the way you’re sitting.’
More bemused by the second, Heather frowned. It occurred to her to ask whether he had been drinking before he came to visit her, because he wasn’t making any sense. Then again, she thought, bringing herself up short, she could hardly trust her own keen sense of deduction, could she?
‘How am I sitting? What are you talking about? You haven’t come here to talk to me about my posture, have you?’ Theo rarely uttered anything that wasn’t relevant to what he wanted to say, but she was at a complete loss as to where he was heading with this line of conversation. ‘I know I slump,’ she said nervously, ‘and I’m going to correct that just as soon as I buy my mobile phone.’
He failed to see the limp stab at humour. ‘When you lean forward like that, pretty much everything is on display.’
Slow colour mounted in Heather’s cheeks, and she pushed herself back and fiddled with the neckline of her top. Changing her drab wardrobe in favour of clothes that were younger and fresher had not taken much encouragement on Beth’s part. Pleased with her new figure, which for her was probably the slimmest she had been in a very long time, she had enthusiastically taken to the shops and bought herself a range of things that showed off her assets, as one of the sales assistants had confidently assured her.
Guilt and a lifetime of circumspection washed over her in a burning tide of embarrassment.
‘You don’t have to look,’ Heather countered belatedly.
‘It would be impossible not to.’ Theo sat back and linked his fingers on his lap. ‘Either you really and truly are not aware of the signals you give off by something as simple as that, or else you are showing me what’s on offer deliberately…’
Heather reeled from the humiliating assumption. Theo’s ego was big, but she had never known just how big until now. Did he really think that she was trying to turn him on? That she was desperate enough to do anything to win him back, even after he had reiterated his views to her only minutes earlier?
Of course he did, she thought in frank, shameful honesty. She had opened that door to him willing to forgive every cutting remark on the simple thread of hope that he had come back with reconciliation in mind. How pathetic was that? Even if he couldn’t read her mind, he was astute enough to sense her need, and naturally he would assume, with that splendid arrogance of his, that she would do anything to tempt him back. Including revealing her body.
For a few taut seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say, and then she felt a slow rush of anger to her head.
‘You really think that I’m sitting here trying to get a response out of you?’ she asked, her voice shaking. ‘That is the most arrogant…conceited…ridiculous assumption you could ever make…’
Theo inclined his head, hearing her out but unmoved by her heated response, and then he shrugged in an exquisitely dismissive gesture.
‘That being the case, then you clearly have no idea how to survive in a world that is full of predatory males…’
‘Predatory males?’ Heather’s thoughts stopped on those two simple words and she stared at him, dumbfounded. ‘Predatory males? The world isn’t full of predatory males, Theo. Not everyone is built along your lines!’
‘I am very far from being a predator,’ he pointed out with insufferable calm. ‘Predators are driven by a need to find and catch their prey. Actually, I have never felt any such need. In fact, I would say that I am more the prey than the predator…’
Heather gasped in disbelief at this wild distortion of fact. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’re as innocent as the driven snow?’
‘Incorrect analogy. I’m saying no such thing. Merely that women chase me more often than not.’
He was probably right too. But that didn’t stop him from being an all-time predator of the highest order. Sensing yet another argument she would be in danger of losing, Heather contented herself by fulminating at his high-handed smugness.
‘Which brings me to the boyfriend…’
She opened her mouth to refute the label, and closed it as quickly as she had opened it. Scott, actually, had been the sweetest of dates, in so far as they had talked until the early hours of the morning over coffee at her flat. She had listened to him pour his heart out about his ex-girlfriend, on whom he was obviously still hung up, and they had parted company promising to keep in touch.
‘Scott isn’t a predator.’ The unlikely thought of that brought a smile to her lips, and seeing it filled Theo with an uncustomary surge of belligerence which he put down to his unsurprising frustration at her naïveté.
‘How would you know? The way you were dressed at that nightclub was a green light to any unattached male. I’m telling you this for your own good, Heather.’
‘You came here to preach to me? Because you don’t think that I’m sensible enough or adult enough to take care of myself?’ She stood up, hand outstretched for his cup. ‘I think it’s time you left, Theo. You should never have come in the first place! What gives you the right to come into my flat and start treating me like a kid?’
‘Calm down. You’re beginning to sound hysterical.’
Heather laughed hysterically and snatched the coffee from his hands, spilling some on his trousers in the process. Her only regret was that the stuff had gone tepid, although he automatically flinched back and sprang to his feet to brush himself down.
‘And I won’t be offering to launder them for you!’ she shrieked. ‘You deserved that!’
Theo, although he didn’t show it, was taken aback by this display of temper. The calm, obliging, sunny-tempered girl…where had she gone?
‘For what? For being decent enough to show concern about protecting you?’
Through the red mist of her anger Heather resisted yelling at him that the only person she needed protecting from was him—and only because she had been idiotic enough to fall in love with him.
Thinking it managed to bring a few seconds of calm to her shattered thoughts, and she took some deep breaths. When in a crisis, breathe deeply and don’t panic. One rule for all situations.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ she managed to say frozenly. ‘I do apologise for spilling the coffee on you, but I won’t be paying the laundry bill.’
‘To hell with the damned trousers!’ Theo exploded. He paced the room, finally leaning against the wall and folding his arms. ‘I don’t care if I have to throw them out! You shriek at me like a fisherwoman when I am the one who should be aggrieved. You have thrown my good intentions back in my face!’
Heather took a few more deep breaths. So this was what love did to a person. Turned her from an even-tempered, cheerful sort into a screaming banshee. Her days of mute adoration seemed a lifetime ago—as did tranquillity and peace of mind.
‘I can take care of myself.’ She folded her arms protectively over her breasts and felt a heady, disturbing rush of awareness as his eyes stripped her of her modest gesture.
‘Tip: watch what you wear, and make sure you don’t flaunt yourself the way you were doing with me a few moments ago…’
‘I’ll remember that. Thank you.’
Her sudden compliance got on his nerves and he stared at her narrowly. Maybe—and it wasn’t a nice thought—he was trying to lock the gate after the horse had bolted. He suddenly had a driving, obliterating need to find out whether she had slept with her date or not, and there was no way he could reasonably put that down to anything caring, concerned or paternalistic.
He walked slowly towards where she was now cringing back into her chair, as if willing the inanimate object to swallow her up, and he leant over her, bracing himself with his hands on either side of her.
Every nerve in her body jumped in wild, searing alarm, and she was aware of her breath coming and going in short, painful bursts.
She kept repeating the mantra about taking deep breaths, but with his face only inches away from hers the exercise was singularly failing to work.
‘And did you remember that when you were with your date? Or did you innocently imagine that he was talking to you and not your breasts?’
‘Don’t you dare insult me like that, Theo.’ Her voice lacked conviction, however. She was sickeningly mesmerised by the dark, burning depths of those magnificent eyes.
It was an insult, but Theo brazenly outstared her. ‘Are you telling me that he didn’t manage to get his paws on you?’
‘I’m telling you that it’s none of your business. Actually, Scott is a really nice guy. He respects me—which is more than I can say for you!’
Theo made a sneering sound under his breath and Heather glared at him coldly.
‘Scott would never talk to my breasts—which is a disgusting expression. I suppose you think that he’s wimp, but he isn’t. And he would never sneer at me either!’
Thinking back on it, Scott, in an ideal world, would have been the perfect partner. Her eyes misted over at the sheer unfairness of life, and as he watched her expression change some new emotion was added to the boiling pot in Theo’s head. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he didn’t like it.