"Lydia--' As she wrenched open the door and stumbled out of the car she heard him call to her, but she sped across the street and up the steps to the house without a backward glance, thrusting her key into the lock and almost falling into the small hall as though it were a real wolf that was aft
er her, fangs open for the kill and hard yellow eyes dilated.
How had that happened? She looked dazedly into the small mirror in the bathroom some minutes later, after a furious bout of weeping, and sniffed dismally. Hannah would be home soon. She had gone to tea with Sophie, and
Sophie's mother was dropping her home just after half past six. She had to pull herself together and act normally. She'd think about this later.
_But when later came, in the quiet and solitude of her lonely bed, she was no nearer to an answer. All she knew was that from the moment she had laid eyes on Wolf Strade her world had turned upside-down, and her with it. She wasn't the person she had known for twenty- seven years; there was some other being working there inside her skin. A passionate, tempestuous, strange being with hidden desires and cravings that the old Lydia found more than a little shocking. It didn't help that the rest of the female population seemed to find him equally attractive. She remembered a conversation she had overheard the week before when she had been sitting quietly in the canteen one lunchtime. Two of the junior secretaries had been seated at a table just round the corner from her, and although she wasn't visible to their gaze every word they had spoken had registered loud and clear.
"He's such an out-and-out dish." A deep sigh had followed the statement, along with the sound of chairs being pulled out, and Lydia had grimaced sympathetically for whoever had spoken. They'd certainly got it bad! There had been a wealth of hunger in the female voice.
Boyfriend trouble, perhaps?
"I know." The other girl had added her sigh.
"But there's no way he'd look at me or you, Carol."
"Well, I can dream, can't I?" the first voice had said, a little indignantly.
"By all means, dream on, but as far as I know he's never dated an employee--not his style."
"Well, with the women he can have at his beck and call, it's not to be wondered at, is it?" the said Carol had replied tersely.
"Did you see that photo in the paper a few months back.
"Wolf Strade and friend" , the caption said. Some friend! With a figure like she'd got I bet they didn't play ludo all night. “A small, suggestive giggle had followed.
"Carol': " Well. It makes me mad. Why can't men see that ordinary working girls can be fun too? “Carol had said petulantly.
"You're getting positively sour in your old age," the other voice had said laughingly.
"And anyway, he'd be too much for you to handle. He was married once, you know, and since then he's had more women than I've had hot dinners, if only a quarter of the rum ours about him are true."
"Oh, they'd be true," Carol had sighed resignedly. "You've only to look into those beautiful blue eyes to know they'd be true, and frankly I'd be prepared to let him teach me anything, anything he knows."
Lydia had left the canteen at that point but the women's conversation had stayed with her all day, try as she might to dismiss it from her mind, and even now she could remember every word. It was stupid and irrational and quite out of character, but she had felt like slapping both of them, and that had horrified her almost as much as the fact that she had sat and listened to a private conversation. Had he been married? she wondered fretfully. And, if so, how had it ended and where was his ex now? What was the matter with her? She shook herself angrily. It was none of her business, it wasn't.
But why had he kissed her? She twisted restlessly in the big bed. Did he think she was easy, like some of the other women who threw themselves at him so blatantly? Well, she'd hardly done anything to dissuade him from such a line of thought, she reminded herself miserably.
She had returned the kiss until the very last moment.
_She knew it and he would have known it. He hadn't been holding her, trapping her in any way; she had been perfectly free to move away if she'd so wished. But she hadn't! The thought brought on a fresh deluge of humiliation and she sat up to punch her pillows violently into shape.
This couldn't continue. She'd be a nervous wreck if she worked for him much longer. The thought gathered steam as she lay there in the soft darkness, and by the time she drifted into a restless, troubled sleep her mind was made up.
She was leaving Strade Engineering and she would tell him so first thing on
Monday morning. Desperate situations needed desperate measures, and right now that was exactly how she felt--desperate.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lydia dressed very carefully for work the following Monday, choosing a demure high-necked blouse in pale coffee and a calf-length full skirt in a darker shade, securing her hair in a tight French plait that she fixed with grim fierceness, and allowing herself just the merest touch of eyeshadow on her wide eyelids. There. She checked herself in the mirror just before she left to take Hannah to nursery.
He couldn't say there was the remotest suggestion of a come-on in this chaste ensemble. She had tormented herself all weekend with the thought that she might have encouraged him in some way, although in all honesty she couldn't see how. But she intended to be all cool efficiency this morning, composed and calm when she told him she would be leaving at the end of the week. Her stomach turned over at the thought. Stop it, she told herself silently.
Wolf Strade will be like a shadowy dream in a few months, an indistinct, vague phantom relegated firmly to the past.
The vague phantom was prowling about her office when she arrived some time later, a sheaf of papers in his hand and a ferocious scowl on his face.