Michelle Celmer - At His Service - His 9-5 Secretary

‘Vive la difference.’

Her embarrassment seemed to have restored his equanimity. Drawing on her dignity, Gina said flatly, ‘I’m sorry if you find it old-fashioned or amusing, but I happen to think that love should enter the equation however things turn out in the end. And I know there’s no guarantee with any relationship; I’m not in cloud cuckoo land.’

He looked at her quietly for a moment. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you, Gina.’

And pigs fly .

‘In fact the time was I might have expressed the same views myself, but—’ He paused. ‘People change. Life changes them.’

Gina said nothing. In truth she was startled by this last remark. His tone of voice, the look on his face, was different from anything that had gone before.

‘I guess I’ve become self-sufficient, independent. I like my life the way it is, and to share it with another person would be at best inconvenient and worst a nightmare.’

She wished she’d never started this conversation. Breathing shallowly to combat the shaft of pain that had seared her chest, Gina said quietly, ‘You missed out cynical.’

‘You think I’m cynical?’

She nodded. ‘Not just from what you’ve said tonight, but more over the last twelve months. I wonder, actually, if you really like women much, Harry.’

For a moment he didn’t react at all. Then he said softly, ‘I assure you, I’m not of the other persuasion.’

‘No, I didn’t mean—I—I know you’re not—’

He cut short her stammerings with a dark smile, his voice self-mocking when he said, ‘I know what you meant, Gina. It was my way of prevaricating.’

‘Oh.’ Sometimes his innate honesty was more than a little disturbing.

‘Because you’re right. I am cynical where the fair sex is concerned.’

Why was being proved right so horribly depressing? Hiding her feelings, Gina nodded slowly. Picking her words carefully, she said, ‘Bad experience somewhere in your long-lost youth?’ She hoped to defuse what had suddenly become an extremely charged atmosphere with her tone, knowing he wouldn’t want to talk about it in any detail. The last year had proved he was a master at deflecting questions about his past.

This time he surprised her. Nodding, he leaned forward, taking one of the mints the waitress had brought with their coffee and unwrapping it before he said, ‘Her name was Anna, and it was a wild, hot affair. We were crazy about each other at first, but we were young; I’d just left uni when we met. I thought it would go on for ever, made promises, you know? But after a year or so I found my feelings were beginning to change. I still loved her, cared about her, but I wasn’t in love with her. That something had gone. Perhaps it had only ever been lust, I don’t know.’

‘And Anna?’

‘She said she loved me with all her heart. Then she got sick. A rare form of cancer. Although, she wasn’t. I only found out she’d lied to me after we’d married. One of her friends told me when she was drunk, she thought it was hilarious. I was a joke, apparently.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She was. His voice was painful to hear.

‘So far from Anna only having a few short months to live, months she’d begged me to spend with her as man and wife, she was as healthy as the next person.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told her I was leaving. That night she cut her wrists in the bath.’

Unable to believe her ears, Gina could only stare.

‘And so it began. Months of manipulation and tears and threats and rages. Two more supposed suicide attempts when I was going to leave. Damn it, I was young, little more than a kid. I was in way over my head, and I was stupid. I really thought she might kill herself. Eventually it came to the point where I began to fear I was going mad. That was the point I walked out. Went abroad.’

‘What … what did she do?’

He shrugged. ‘Took me for every penny she could get, and made sure my name was mud, then married some other poor sop.’

Appalled, Gina reached out and touched his hand. ‘She must have been sick.’

‘Sick?’ His lips twisted. ‘No, I don’t think Anna was sick. Manipulative, determined, cruel, hard—all under a cloak of fragile femininity, of course—but sick? I could have forgiven sick, but not the sheer resolve to get her own way no matter whom she trampled underfoot.’

And so he had decided never to get caught like that again. She could understand it. But surely he realised all women weren’t like Anna? Quietly, she said, ‘I think she was sick, Harry. I’ve never met anyone like her. All the women I know would be horrified at what she did.’

He didn’t argue the point. Draining his cup of coffee, he shrugged slowly as he replaced the cup on the saucer. ‘You’re probably right, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, life changes people. She perhaps did me a favour, in the long run. I wouldn’t have ended up in the States, maybe, wouldn’t have decided what I wanted—and more importantly what I didn’t want—so early on in life, but for Anna.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think she did you a favour,’ Gina said with more honesty than tact. ‘How can living an autonomous life be a favour? You’ll miss out on a wife, children—’

‘I don’t want a wife and children, Gina,’ he said calmly and coolly. ‘I have what I want, and I consider myself most fortunate.’

She could have believed him one hundred per cent, but for the shadow darkening the smoky-grey eyes. And then he blinked and it was gone. Perhaps she’d imagined it in the first place. Gathering all her courage, she said, ‘And what you want is a beautiful empty shell of a house, with no family to make it a home? Not ever? A life of complete independence with no one to grow old with, no one to look back over the years with? No one to cuddle when the night’s dark and morning’s a long way off?’

For several seconds, seconds that shivered with a curious intimacy, he held her gaze. Then the grey eyes closed against her. When he looked up again, he was smiling, his voice holding an amused note when he said, ‘You’re a romantic, Gina Leighton.’

How the knowledge that he wasn’t smiling inside had come, Gina wasn’t sure, but it was there. She didn’t smile back, her face sweetly solemn as her eyes searched the sharply defined planes and angles of the hard male features.

‘I believe in love,’ she said softly. ‘I believe in the sort of love between a man and a woman that has the potential to go on for a lifetime, and nothing else can measure up to the contentment and wonder of it. It has the power to sweep away barriers of culture and religion, heal unhealable hurts, and mend broken hearts. It can change the most dyed-in-the-wool cynic for the better and make the world a place worth living in. Yes, I believe all that, and if that fits your definition of a romantic then I hope up my hands and plead guilty, gladly.’

Harry shook his head slowly. ‘And all this when the man you wanted to spend the rest of your life with has let you walk away?’

She blinked. That had been below the belt, and it hurt. Lots.

‘I’m sorry.’ Immediately he reached out and took her hand, holding on to her fingers when she would have pulled away. A thousand nerves responded to the feel of his warm flesh, and as she closed her eyes against the flood of desire his voice came, low and repentant. ‘I’m really sorry, Gina. That was unforgivable. I’m the sort of primeval animal that attacks when it’s threatened.’

Threatened? Bewildered, she met his gaze. For once his face was open, even vulnerable, and it betrayed something: a need, a longing. For what, she didn’t know, but it was there in the smoky depths of the grey eyes. She swallowed hard. ‘You objected to my placing you on a par with an animal earlier,’ she reminded him, managing a fair attempt at a smile.