‘I’d say bon appétit,’ she sighed. Maybe he’d be easier to handle on a full stomach.
‘On the principle that it’s better I take bites out of food than out of you?’ he guessed wolfishly, coming a little too close to her earlier, forbidden meanderings.
‘Something like that,’ she said primly.
‘While I arrange something suitably light for you and filling for me, why don’t you get those papers out so I can look them over?’
Looking them over was a long way from signing, but Vivian hastened to do as he instructed while he was gone. He had shut the door behind him, and opened it so quietly on his return that she wasn’t aware of him until he loomed over her at the desk. The first she knew of him was the hot, predatory breath on the back of her neck.
‘You move very quietly—’ she began, in breathless protest at his consistent ability to surprise her.
‘For a cripple?’ he finished with biting swiftness.
‘That wasn’t what I was going to say!’ she protested, sensing that sympathy was the last thing he would ever want from her.
‘You were going to use a more diplomatic term, perhaps?’ he sneered. ‘Disabled? Physically challenged?’
She was suddenly blindly furious with him. How dared he think that she would be so callous, let alone so stupid, as to taunt him, no matter what the provocation!
‘You move quietly for such a big man is what I was going to say before you rudely interrupted,’ she snapped. ‘And an over-sensitive one, too, I might add. I didn’t leap down your throat when you drew attention to the fact I was blind as a bat, did I? And I have two supposedly undamaged legs and yet I never seem to be able to coordinate them properly. I dreamed of being a ballerina when I was a girl…’ She trailed off wistfully, suddenly remembering who it was she was confiding in.
‘A ballerina?’ He looked at her incredulously, his sceptical eye running over her five-feet-ten frame and the generous curves that rumpled the professional smoothness of her suit.
‘It was just a childish thing,’ she said dismissively, inexplicably hurt by his barely concealed amusement.
He tilted his head. ‘So you dreamed of becoming a perfect secretary instead?’
‘I wasn’t qualified for much else,’ she said coldly. Academically she had been a dud, but she was responsible and willing and got on well with people, her final-year form-teacher had kindly pointed out to her concerned parents, and weren’t those things far more important in attaining happiness in the wider world than the mere possession of a brilliant brain?
Of course some people—like Janna and their younger brother, Luke, who was a musical prodigy; and her mother and father, an artist and a mathematician respectively—managed to have it all…good looks included. Not that her family ever consciously made her feel inadequate. Quite the reverse—they sometimes went overboard in their efforts to convince her that she belonged, that she was the much-loved special one of the family. The Chosen One—because she had been adopted as a toddler, and had proved the unexpected catalyst for the rapid arrival of a natural daughter and t
hen a son.
‘No other thwarted ambitions?’
‘No.’ She didn’t doubt he would laugh like a drain if she told him that her greatest desire was to be a wife and mother. It was her one outstanding talent: loving people—even when they made it very difficult for her. Sometimes almost impossible.
She looked down at the documents on the desk, concentrating on squaring them off neatly, aware of a nasty blurring of her eyesight that had nothing to do with foggy glasses.
The papers were suddenly snatched out of her fingers. ‘This is what you want me to sign?’
‘Mmm?’ Distracted by her thoughts, she took no notice of the faint emphasis. ‘Oh, yes.’ She pulled herself together, certain that her ugly suspicions were correct and that he was now going to announce dramatically that he had no intention of doing so.
Four months ago, when Nicholas Rose had signed a conditional agreement to sell his Auckland property, his lawyer had cited tax reasons for his client wishing to retain legal title until the end of April. Peter had been happy with the extended settlement date, for it had given him time to chase up the other parcels of land that had been part of the lucrative contract Marvel-Mitchell had entered into with a commercial property development company. Nicholas’s property had been the most critical, being a corner lot at the front of the planned shopping mall development, providing the only street access to the larger site. With that in his pocket, Peter had felt free to bid up on one or two other lots, whose owners had demanded much more than current market price.
Then Nicholas Rose had suddenly cancelled his appointment to sign the settlement in Auckland, citing a clause in the conditional agreement that gave the vendor the right to choose the time and place, and Janna had got sick, and Vivian had tried to be helpful and discovered two appalling truths: one, that Nicholas Rose was potentially an implacable enemy, and two, that her cosy dream of love and babies with Peter was shattered beyond redemption.
For long minutes there was no sound but the quiet swish of paper turning, and Vivian’s heart thundered in her ears as she waited for her enemy to reveal himself.
‘Where do I sign?’ He flicked cursorily back through the pages. ‘Here? Here? And here?’
‘Uh…yes.’ He bent and she watched disbelievingly as he uncapped a fountain pen and scrawled his initials in the right places, ending with a full, flourishing signature. The solid gold band on his ring-finger caught her eye as his hand paused, and she stared at the etching of snake and rose, the same crest that she had seen on the letterhead in his lawyer’s office.
‘Now you.’
She numbly took his place as he stood aside. The shaft of the expensive pen was heavy and smooth, warm from his touch, and she was so nervous that she left a large blob after her name. He blotted it without comment.
‘We’ll need this properly witnessed, won’t we?’