‘Completely pathetic,’ she said, dragging her concentration away from Dan’s physical attributes and her abandonment of logic and applying it to the conversation. ‘And way below me.’
‘So why do it?’
‘Heaven knows,’ she said, because she might be willing to offload the truth about last night but there was such a thing as going too far, and confessing to many and highly personal insecurities to this woman definitely ventured into that territory.
‘Trying to impress us, were you?’ said Samantha mockingly.
‘Very probably. And you were, weren’t you? Impressed, I mean.’
Samantha sniffed. ‘Hardly.’
‘Anyway, it really doesn’t matter any more,’ said Zoe, setting her jaw and pulling her shoulders back because if ever there was a time for a steely backbone this was it. ‘For a while last night I totally lost my mind but that’s fine because now I’m back in possession of it, and you know something, Samantha, you might have made my life pretty damn miserable for the best part of seven years, but not any longer. I’ve had enough. I truly don’t care what you think about me. I haven’t seen you in fifteen years, and I doubt I will again in the next fifteen. You do not matter to me. Your opinion of me does not matter to me. Nothing you say or do has any effect on me any more. It’s over.’
And with that she hung up, relief pouring through her and her teenage self whooping and cheering in the background.
* * *
The pride and delight Zoe felt at finally standing up to the silly cow and telling her to get lost lasted about an hour.
She’d hung up, and done a happy dance in her chair, wishing that Lily were here to celebrate her new-found freedom instead of being halfway up a mountain checking out a corporate bonding package on behalf of a new client, and out of contact. Positively zinging with euphoria and adrenalin, she’d spotted the numerical anomaly almost instantly and had handled a couple of client emails she would otherwise have left for her more client-friendly sister.
But then she’d found herself going over the phone call in her head, and she kept coming back to what Samantha had said about not being able to hold onto a man. Whether she’d intended to or not, Samantha had hit on one of Zoe’s weakest spots—and not just because it had brought back memories of her crush at eighteen.
As much as it pained her to admit it Samantha had a point. She was hopeless at holding onto a man. Three months was her longest relationship, and for a woman of thirty-two that wasn’t exactly anything to write home about.
Her last attempt had ended a month ago when Mike had dumped her and a six-week relationship had bitten the dust. Why she still bothered to try and have one of the bloody things when she was so useless at them was anyone’s guess, but some pathetically optimistic part of her constantly hoped that this one would be different. That this man would be strong enough to put up with her idiosyncrasies and insecurities, and interesting and attractive enough for her to put up with his.
Well, Mike certainly hadn’t been any of that, not that he’d stuck around long enough for either of them to find out for sure.
Utterly fed up with her run of bad luck Zoe had tossed in the online dating towel and had tried her damnedest to forget the whole humiliating experience of their break-up, but Mike’s parting shot had lodged in her brain and infuriatingly refused to budge.
Moments before throwing his hands in the air and declaring that he was giving up, he’d accused her of being a workaholic number-cruncher who was boring and unimaginative and less fun than a burst appendix, and naturally enough, when she’d thought things had been going rather well for a change, it had stung.
> Even worse, when she’d told her sister what he’d said Lily had tentatively suggested that maybe, just maybe, Mike had had a very small point and that perhaps she should think about getting a life beyond the company, and that had stung even more.
Lily had even remarked that Zoe might like to find a hobby, which at the time had made Zoe snort with derision because, really? A hobby? Where would she find the time for a hobby? Besides, statistical analysis was her hobby, which was handy seeing as how their business involved such a lot of it.
Consoling herself with the thought that Mike had had a very small point indeed and hadn’t been particularly good with it, and reminding herself that as the company already had one zany and creative but numerically challenged co-owner in Lily her own skill-set and dedication were vital, Zoe had calmly brushed the criticism aside with a couldn’t-care-less shrug and had decided to move on.
But to her frustration moving on had proved easier said than done, and over the last few weeks she’d found herself dwelling on what Mike and Lily had said, analysing her life from angles she’d never previously considered, and had wound up wondering whether her ex and her sister might not actually be right.
She did channel pretty much every waking hour she had into the business, and, while in the beginning it had been necessary for survival, the company was so well established now and so successful she probably didn’t need to keep her foot on the accelerator all the time.
And as constantly working had become such a habit maybe she had become even more of a hermit than usual. The handful of times Mike had tried to drag her out to dinner or a party she’d acquiesced with such bad grace and then slunk around in the background in an effort to avoid anyone who looked as if they might want to chat that with the benefit of hindsight she couldn’t entirely blame him for giving up on her.
So maybe her inability to hold down a man was her fault, she thought now, picking up her mug and grimacing at the mouthful of horribly cold coffee she ended up with and the sticky skin that clung to her lips. Maybe what had happened at school had squashed her self-esteem and self-confidence so much that she did go into every relationship thinking it was doomed from the start. She certainly didn’t bother to fight for them much.
Oh, she could try and console herself with a whole bunch of statistics about the odds of divorce and that her highly valued reason and logic held no truck with anything as unquantifiable as love, but hadn’t she perhaps been kidding herself all these years? Wasn’t it more likely to be that she couldn’t let her guard down with men in case they discovered the mess she was beneath the cool and confident professional exterior?
And if that was the case, she thought, pushing away from her desk and getting up to go and make a fresh cup of coffee, and her disaster of a love-life had been a sort of indirect result of the bullying, then seeing as how she’d just put that to bed so to speak wouldn’t that mean she could now do something to remedy the situation? Because now she was free to build up her self-esteem and confidence and become the person she thought she could be on a personal as well as professional level.
She’d been told she needed to get a life. Well, maybe it was about time she did, because she was now thinking that she must be incredibly hard work to go out with and it was no wonder no man had stuck around for long.
Maybe it was time to drop her guard, she thought, her heart thumping a little bit faster. Maybe she should let loose and see what happened. And even if a relationship didn’t land in her lap right away, maybe she could just have some fun for a change. She was thirty-two for heaven’s sake. Surely she ought to have had some seriously good sex by now, either within or without a relationship.
Zoe sat back down at her desk before her knees gave way at the thought of mind-bending earth-shattering sex.
Ideally with Dan, she thought suddenly, heat racing through her veins. He looked like he knew how to have fun. He’d kissed her with more than just perfunctory passion, and she’d felt the evidence that he was attracted to her. Lord knew she was attracted to him. She might not know a huge amount about it but if the heat that they could generate just from kissing was anything to go by, then the sex would be out of this world.