Mark caught up with them and they walked on in silence towards t
he white portico of the front door, feet crunching on the gravel. In spite of the cloudless sky, the stars, the night air was quite warm, yet Zoe was shivering inside her velvet cloak. Seeing this beautiful home had altered her perception of Connel.
She had begun to think of him the way she thought of men she worked with: colleagues, comrades, men you could talk to, casually, as a friend, men you could trust and rely on.
The way he had cooked for her, taken care of her, tidied up and cleaned the house, had not prepared her for what she saw now. Connel did not cook for himself; Mark had just told her. He did not clean his own home. He had servants to do all that for him. Connel, in fact, lived in a different world from her. They had nothing in common. Zoe felt oddly depressed by that thought.
A grey-haired, middle-aged woman, wearing a neat black dress, opened the front door and smiled at them, ushered them into an oak-panelled hall, took their coats and showed them into a long, elegantly furnished room filled with people whose voices made the room seem much smaller than it was; Zoe didn't recognise a single face.
A girl, also in black, offered a tray of drinks. Zoe took Buck's Fizz, orange juice spiked with champagne. So did Sancha. Together they stood, staring around.
The room was classically decorated; the walls painted a smooth, soft eggshell-blue; the white ceiling elaborately plastered, with swags of flowers, cherubs, in the centre of which a chandelier swung, Venetian glass dripping down from rows of bud-like bulbs. There were dark blue velvet sofas here and there, and matching chairs scattered along the walls, leading towards a well-lit garden you could see through open French windows hung with floor-length curtains in the same shade.
'What do you think of the decor?' Sancha whispered, and Zoe shrugged.
'No surprises, are there? I mean, the colour choice and the decor are conventional, traditional, what you would expect in a house like this.'
'But it is so elegant,' Sancha wistfully said.
'If you like that sort of thing.' Zoe gave her a teasing look. 'Just imagine Flora in this room, chucking toys about, not to mention her lunch! How elegant would it look after Flora got to it?'
In the middle of sipping her Buck's Fizz, Sancha snorted with amusement, then began to cough. Zoe slapped her on the back.
'Are you okay?'
'The drink went up my nose!'
'Flora gets up my nose!' Zoe laughed, then stopped as she saw Connel, across the room, in profile. Something disastrous happened to her heartbeat If she had been drinking her Buck's Fizz at that instant she might have choked, too.
Sancha's eyes followed the direction of her gaze. 'Doesn't he look gorgeous?'
Without replying Zoe agreed, absorbing with her eyes and heart what he was wearing: an elegant dark wool suit, beautifully cut and fitting him like a glove, with a waistcoat which emphasised his slim waist, a crisp white shirt and a dark red silk tie. Yes. He looked gorgeous; even sexier than usual. She remembered the sinister, brooding look he had had the night they met in the rain, and smiled to herself. You wouldn't know it was the same man, would you?
Her gaze travelled on to the woman with him, her face raised towards Connel's, her blue eyes smiling into his. 'Who's that he's talking to?' she asked her sister flatly and, she hoped, unrevealingly.
'I've no idea,' Sancha slowly told her. 'She's…pretty, isn't she?'
'Pretty' was hardly the word. The woman was riveting a lot of men's eyes and no wonder. Slender, with a smooth, perfect, golden tanned skin, blonde hair swept up into a chignon, she was wearing white, a sort of Grecian goddess dress, clinging to her in soft silky folds from halfway down her breasts, cascading down her body to her feet.
'How does it stay up?' muttered Sancha.
'Will-power,' Zoe coldly said. She looked as if she had lots of that Her pink mouth smiled widely, but there was determination in her beautiful face and in every angle of those glittering blue eyes, the perfect butterfly mouth, the rather formidable jaw.
'I wonder who she is?' Sancha thought aloud.
'Maybe she works for him?' They seemed to know each other pretty well. Maybe they were lovers? Or had been?
There was an intimacy in the way the girl looked at him that suggested they were more than acquaintances. Zoe's throat felt as if she had just swallowed broken glass. Unlike Larry, Connel hadn't insisted on telling her about his past love life. He hadn't mentioned other women at all. Somehow she had got the impression he wasn't seeing anyone, and as he had been abroad, on this exploration trip, for a year, she had assumed there hadn't been anyone all that time.
'She's Bianca Green,' said Mark, joining them, an amused look on his face, as if he had been eavesdropping before they'd noticed him. 'She's the interior designer who did the house. Looks as if you've got competition, Zoe.'
She gave him a disdainful glance. 'I never compete for men!' On an afterthought, she added, 'And I'm not interested in Connel Hillier, anyway,' and hoped her face and voice were convincing.
'Oh? I had the idea you sounded a trifle jealous!' mocked Mark, and her teeth met.
'No,' she said through them, but the word emerged squashed and rather forced.
'Sure?' asked Mark, and actually laughed.