He made his way to the back of the house, observing the chaos in which four people apparently lived with no pressing desire to tidy up behind themselves. The kitchen sported the detritus of breakfast eaten on the run and not cleared away. Jumpers were slung in odd places and shoes were randomly scattered. On the window ledge a row of cards suggested a birthday had come and gone.
Coffee made, he reached the sitting room to find that Heather had fallen asleep. She had stripped off her jumper and was sprawled on the sofa with one arm raised, half covering her face and dipping over the arm of the chair.
She had kicked off her shoes, revealing thick grey socks.
Theo stood for a few seconds, drawing in a sharp breath, because the shapeless figure wasn’t quite as shapeless as he had imagined. Her breasts were big, succulently generous, but there was proportion to her body and the sliver of skin he glimpsed where the tee shirt rose up was surprisingly firm.
He rubbed his eyes to dispel the uneasy sensation of staring at her, and the even more uneasy suspicion that he would have liked to move closer so that he could appreciate those curves a bit more.
Without waking her up, he deposited the coffee on the table by the sofa and, after a few seconds’ hesitation, pulled out his pen and hunted around for some paper. He wasn’t going to wake her, but walking away without saying goodbye somehow felt wrong. So he jotted down a couple of lines, wishing her luck in getting a new job, then he left, resisting the terrible urge to look back over his shoulder at her softly breathing body.
Once outside, he laughed at the insanity that had possessed him for a few fleeting seconds. He had looked at her and had been turned on! He almost called Claudia, knowing that some sweet talk would have her running back into his arms, but instead he switched off his mobile phone and forced his highly disciplined brain to concentrate on the work he had had to defer to the following morning.
Heather, surfacing the next day to the sounds of one of her room-mates clattering about in the kitchen, had a few seconds of blissful oblivion during which she imagined the sounds to be Theo, making her that cup of coffee.
The cup of coffee lying cold on the table by her. Next to a note which she now read. It said nothing at all. A few polite words scribbled down before he left the house, doubtless relieved that there was no need for him to continue the charade of entertaining her.
Heather sat up and buried her head in her hands. He hadn’t woken her up! She had fallen asleep and lost her opportunity to spend a few more minutes in his company.
The sun seemed to have gone out of her life. It was only when, after a week, one of her friends in the house mentioned it that Heather gave herself a stiff lecture. Moping around over a man she had known for roughly three hours was insane.
‘Am I insane?’ she asked her reflection. ‘No. Because you know,’ she added, wagging her finger censoriously at herself, ‘only a complete loony would lose sleep over a man like Theo!’
She pulled herself together and accepted the job at Tom’s pub. It was, as she had predicted, hard work but sociable, and was suited to her temperament. The hours might have been longer, and her exhaustion levels might have been higher, but she was at least eating regularly, and she took Fridays off. Theo’s remark about being young and enjoying life had stuck in her head.
Not, even after six weeks, that any of those fun-packed Friday evenings with her friends could compare to that one night that had sprung from nothing and disappeared before she could hold onto it.
And his image kept slipping into her head. She couldn’t seem to help it. One minute she would be laughing at something and the next minute there he was, released from the restraints she kept trying to put on him. She went to bed with him at night and woke up to him the following morning, and she just couldn’t help it. It was involuntary. The man haunted her.
Of course it would end. Time had a wonderful way of healing, and she cheerfully resigned herself to due process. She was so resigned, in fact, that when, two months after she had last laid eyes on him, she picked up her telephone to hear his voice on the other end, she almost didn’t recognise it.
Then she sat down, flapping her arm madly so that Beth would turn the television down, which she did, making sure she remained where she was to overhear the conversation. Heather could feel her heart start racing. He had managed to get her name from the firm of cleaners she had worked for, apparently. Heather assumed his influence must have unlocked her personnel file, since its contents were confidential. Not that she cared. She just wanted him to tell her why he had called.
‘I have a proposition to put to you,’ he finally said, when pleasantries had been exhausted.
‘Really?’ She tried to keep the stomach-turning curiosity out of her voice.
‘My housekeeper has gone. Her sister in Scotland has fallen ill and needs looking after. The job has become vacant and I thought of you.’ He briefly explained what it entailed. It could even, he informed her, be a live-in post. His apartment had a separate wing and he was rarely there anyway. He preferred to spend as many of his free weekends as he could in the country. He told her how much she would be earning and the figure made her gasp. It was far and away more than she was currently earning with both her jobs combined. She would be able to save and, if she decided to live in, would be able to afford her course within months, instead of the tortuous years she had anticipated.
Not that financial considerations played much of a part in her decision.
‘I accept,’ she told him promptly, making him smile at the other end of the line. ‘Just tell me when you want me to start…’
CHAPTER THREE
‘SO,’ BETH said sternly, ‘what happens next?’
Eighteen months on and they were sitting in the usual place they met, an all-day French wine bar and restaurant which never seemed particularly bothered about serving cappuccinos to people who had zero intention of eating but would still manage to occupy valuable seats for hours at a stretch.
Heather bit her lower lip nervously, because she knew exactly what was coming. She managed to buy herself a few seconds of thinking time by taking a sip of her coffee, but the question was still there when she met her friend’s concerned, probing brown eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ she dodged unsuccessfully.
To start with Beth had been overjoyed at her friend’s sudden run of good luck. To be asked to do something as undemanding as looking after a house that would be very clean most of the time anyway, considering its owner wasn’t often there, at a salary that was way over the going rate, sure beat the hell out of working in Tom’s rowdy pub till all hours of the morning. Giving up the assistant teaching job would be a wrench, but, heck, she would be able to complete her course and then get started on the career ladder.
As far as Beth was concerned, a woman was defined by her career. She herself had wanted to be a lawyer from the age of five, if she was to be believed, and had got on with turning her dream into reality without ever deviating from her route.
Heather deeply admired her friend’s ambitious streak. So much so that she had tried very hard in the beginning not to let on that her real reason for accepting Theo’s generous offer was her own inarticulated need to be near him. But, not being secretive by nature, she had soon lapsed into easy confidences, and ever since had had to endure her friend’s occasionally withering remarks about being used.
‘I mean,’ Beth said, leaning forward with the concerned frown of one friend trying to impart to another friend what should have been self-evident, ‘now that your course has finished, are you going to move out and get a job with that publishing company? The one you sent your application off to? You did send that application off, didn’t you?’
Heather wilted in the face of this direct line of questioning and mumbled something about needing to add a few finishing touches to it. In truth, the envelope had been lying in her bag for a fortnight while she fought off the sickening prospect of leaving behind a situation that was going nowhere but happened to be working very nicely for her.
While she continued to fan the flames of her infatuation, Theo was as far removed from being interested in her sexually as he ever had been. Theirs was an evolving situation. She had evolved into emotional dependency and he had evolved into having the perfect housekeeper. Indeed, her housekeeping duties were now virtually non-existent. She did some light cleaning, mostly in her own wing, some even lighter cooking to accommodate him when he happened to be in for supper, but mostly she had become a curious mixture of out-of-hours secretary and general do-it-all.
He talked to her about work issues, no longer reminding her that everything he told her was always in the strictest confidence. She’d used to laugh at his frowning secrecy, gently informing him that she personally didn’t know a single person who would have been remotely interested in offshore deals involving companies they had never heard of. He would watch her as she pottered around his kitchen, chatting about her friends and what they got up to.
He found her relaxing and amusing and, more importantly, undemanding. Unlike the women he continued to wine and dine, she showed none of the clinginess that some of them displayed, and she had never nurtured ambitions beyond her reach. In his eyes, they had the perfect relationship. He paid her handsomely, and had increased her already generous salary every three months in direct proportion to the level of duties she took on. In return she helped him in ways far beyond what he would have expected his own secretary at work to do.