His eyes flicked from the topknot of her hair, down over the clinging gold satin of the embroidered kimono to where her bare toes clutched the mat, like a swimmer about to dive. ‘Or were you still in bed?’ he drawled.
‘No, I’ve been awake for hours.’
He pursed his lips into a mocking kiss-shape. ‘But one doesn’t necessarily rule out the other, does it?’
The Sam she had known would not have spoken to her with that curling distaste. If she had thought he wasn’t angry, then she had misjudged the situation badly. Because he was. Not a shouting, screaming, banging-on-the-wall kind of angry, no. More a quietly bubbling rage which had a dangerous intensity all of its own.
Better to placate him than to antagonise him with a smart answer, surely? Fran tried a smile. It felt like a stranger to her face. But then, she hadn’t exactly had a whole heap to smile about lately. ‘You’d better come in! I…er…wasn’t expecting you.’
‘Weren’t you?’ he murmured, but there was an acid tinge to his words. ‘Did you think I was just some poor punter you’d mucked around and made a fool of, and that I would quietly creep off into a corner, never to be heard of again? If so, then you
underestimated me, Fran. Badly.’
She tried to imagine him creeping anywhere. It was a ludicrous idea! Fran shook her head, trying to appear calm, but it wasn’t easy. She’d forgotten just what physical presence he had. And she felt especially vulnerable in this clinging kimono. She shook her head. ‘I thought nothing of the sort! I meant that I wasn’t expecting you to turn up on my doorstep at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Especially not after all this time.’
‘What—eight days?’ he mocked. ‘I decided to wait until my anger had subsided a little.’ He paused, and the look in his blue eyes was positively steely. ‘I’ve always found that decisions made in the heat of temper are often the ones you most regret. I also wanted to be sure you would be in. That’s why I didn’t choose Monday—a notoriously unpredictable time to catch someone in—’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Why?’
‘In case you’d been lucky, and scored at the weekend,’ he elaborated. ‘Although, maybe that’s presumptuous of me—maybe I’ve disturbed a little early-morning lovemaking? Have you left some poor unfortunate high and dry in your bed panting for more?’ His navy eyes peered over her shoulder in the direction of the half-open bedroom door. ‘If so, I can always come back later?’
She knew then that she was trapped. There was no way on earth she was going to get out of this meeting. She had better just grit her teeth and bear it.
Wishing that she had gone with her initial reaction of shutting the door in his face, Fran stepped aside to let him pass, and her feelings of nervousness increased as she pushed the front door closed behind him. Should she excuse herself now and go and get dressed in something more substantial?
He hadn’t waited to be invited in. Had just marched into her sitting room as if he were a regular visitor and was now standing in the middle of the room, completely dwarfing the place with his tall, denim-blue frame, his black hair looking tousled as it curled around his collar. He was squinting his eyes half-shut as he looked out of the window to where the Liffey was a faint, grey dazzle in the distance.
He turned around as she came in and she wondered could he see the faint shadows beneath her eyes? With so much leisure time on her hands just lately, she shouldn’t have been tired. But tired she was.
‘So,’ she began cautiously, not daring to offer him a drink, because that really would be too hypocritical. ‘You’d better get it over with, and say what you came for, Sam.’
As he turned, his fingers briefly skated over a large, round pebble she had found on the beach at nearby Dalkey and had brought home and polished.
‘Please don’t play dumb with me, Fran. It insults my intelligence.’ He gave the glimmer of a smile. Only it didn’t look the kind of smile you made when you found something funny. And his voice sounded different, too. Cold. Pithy.
‘Sam, I—’
But he cut across her words as brutally as a scythe cutting through long grass. ‘I realise now that my first instinct not to trust you was the correct one. You didn’t just hear about the job, did you, Fran? It was a set-up.’
Fran opened her mouth to deny it and then closed it again. ‘Yes.’
‘Masterminded by a woman who isn’t mature enough to know that rejection is part and parcel of most adult relationships! Particularly ones—’ But he shook his head as he halted himself mid-flow, and walked back over to the window instead.
God, how cynical he sounded! ‘I’ve known Rosie for years!’ she defended. ‘And I’ve never seen her in such a state over a man!’
‘Is it my fault that women find me so irresistible?’ he questioned, and Fran could have cheerfully punched him for his arrogance.
‘No, but there are ways of dumping them which are not guaranteed to break their hearts as you seem to have done!’
He turned around. ‘Not if they don’t want to hear what you’re saying,’ he contradicted softly.
Accusation burned in her eyes. ‘Well, maybe Rosie took it so badly because it wasn’t just her heart you stole!’
There was a long, loaded silence. ‘What else did I steal, Fran?’ he asked eventually. ‘Her sense of proportion? Her powers of reasoning?’
‘You know damned well what else!’
‘Tell me!’ he challenged, and met her accusing stare, head on. ‘Go on! Say it out loud!’