Charlene Sands - Special Deliveries - Her Nine-Month Secret

A cynical smile curved his sensuous mouth. He decided that this unexpected visit from Holly was just the thing. In fact, he couldn’t wait…

Dithering outside the most impressive office building she had ever seen, all smoked glass and metal, Holly chewed her lip and clutched her backpack in front of her like a talisman. People swerved around her, coming and going. They all wore dark business suits and carried briefcases or computer bags slung over their shoulders. These were people in a hurry and on a mission. When she had sent that text to Luiz, asking to meet up, she had expected him to suggest somewhere neutral, maybe a restaurant or a coffee bar. The fact that he couldn’t even be bothered to leave his office to see her was a stark reminder of how little she meant to him and how thoroughly she had been forgotten. He was quite literally prepared to ‘grant her an audience’ between emails.

She knew she should be neither hurt nor surprised by that. She had invested far more in their relationship than he had. He wasn’t going to be eager to see her and he wouldn’t be interested in catching up. In fact, she was slightly surprised that he had agreed to see her at all. She glumly thought that, by the time she was finished saying what she had to say, he would be heartily wishing that he had refused.

Taking a deep breath, she forged a way through the busy swarm of people, either leaving for or returning from lunch. In her shapeless, long-sleeved dress and her thin waterproof anorak, she felt as conspicuous as an elephant at a tea party. She knew, as she was propelled through the revolving doors and ejected like a sack of potatoes into the vast, opulent foyer of the building he had directed her to, that people were staring at her. Politely staring; wondering what on earth she was doing there. She knew that if she didn’t act purposefully right now that a security guard would materialise and offer to show her out of the building. There would be an implicit threat that the police would be involved if she didn’t go quietly.

How on earth had it come to this? It was the question she had been asking herself for the past week. She had made the appointment to see her doctor, as she had been feeling under the weather recently. A prescription and maybe a pep talk on the curative aspect of time had been the only things she’d expected…

Someone bumped into her from behind, a young girl in a snappy black suit carrying the obligatory briefcase and Holly mumbled an awkward apology and was rewarded with a gimlet stare and raised eyebrows.

Her frayed nerves were well and truly reduced to rubble at this timely reminder of how out of place she was here and how horrendous and awkward the next half an hour was going to be.

Indeed, her thoughts were in such a state of meltdown that she was barely aware of the next ten minutes or so, during which a friendly girl, one of four positioned behind a circular desk, pointed to where she should sit whilst one of Luiz’s secretaries came for her. Then, ten minutes later, she was herded off to a private lift and whooshed upwards so that her already sick and nervous stomach churned even more sickly and nervously.

She ceased noticing the curious stares as she was ushered into a huge space that smelled of money being made and deals being done. She paid absolutely no attention to the opulence of her surroundings. She no longer felt insignificant next to the thirty-something-year-old clones with their ears pressed to phones and their fingers tapping on computer keyboards, their body language proclaiming that they couldn’t stop because they were in the middle of making huge profits for their company.

She blindly followed the middle-aged woman in front of her while every fear and apprehension she had nurtured on the train down coalesced into a sickening knot in the pit of her stomach.

She desperately wanted to reach out, grab the woman by the hand and tell her that she had made a terrible mistake; could she please just leave now? But, before she could open her mouth to utter a word, they were at the end of the corridor where she was staring into a boardroom, then turning left through a suite, then an office, then facing a heavy door which was very firmly closed.

Holly felt as though she had had no time to register this side of a Luiz she’d never known existed, no chance to appreciate the world he worked in. She felt that she should have paid more attention to her surroundings. It would have given her the opportunity to stoke up the old anger and fan the flames of hurt and disillusionment which she would need to see her through the next half an hour.

She felt vulnerable, under-prepared and scared to death as the heavy door was pushed open. Her first glimpse of Luiz after all these weeks was of his back, turned away from her as he stared through an impressive bank of windows overlooking the city.

Luiz was aware of his secretary showing Holly in but he only turned around when he heard the soft click of the door being shut. Still playing with the bits of jewellery she had returned to him, he now dropped them into the depths of his trouser pocket and looked at his visitor with a cool, unreadable expression, his antennae on full alert as he studied her, taking in every detail of her appearance.

She had put on weight. Or had she? He couldn’t tell because for the past few weeks the women with whom he had come into contact had all been thin and lanky. Next to any of them someone with even the merest hint of a curve would appear overweight. Next to her, Cecelia was a stick insect.

Familiarity kicked in. The memory of her voluptuous, sexy body slammed into him with the unexpected force of a freight train. He was angrily aware of his dormant libido gathering force and breaking through the barrier of indifference he was keen to keep in place, even though she couldn’t have been dressed in a less flattering outfit. Having not seen him for over two months, she couldn’t even be bothered to dress for the occasion! He thought that she could have tried a bit harder to impress, for someone on a begging mission.

‘I can’t spare you a lot of time,’ he said, moving to sit and watching intently as she hesitantly remained where she was, as though ready to take flight at a moment’s notice. He was riveted by the untouched prettiness of her face. He had contrived to forget the appeal her lack of artifice had always held for him, but he was fast realising that the memory of that had been buried in a very shallow grave indeed. The hope that Cecelia might benefit from comparison wasn’t happening. In fact, it was a struggle to revive the image of the Brazilian beauty with her full, pouting mouth and model size-zero figure.

‘That’s okay.’ In her peripheral vision, Holly was conscious of a comfortable leather sofa against a stark white wall on which hung an imposing abstract painting in bold colours. On the opposite side, a slightly smaller desk was backed by bookshelves, all high-gloss white. But really her eyes were glued to Luiz, as imposing, impressive and sinfully good-looking as he had been in her head, where he had continued to plague her waking moments and invade her thoughts when she was asleep at night.

‘So… what can I do for you?’ He tapped his pen restively on the surface of his desk and lounged back in the chair. Keen eyes noted the slow crawl of colour into her cheeks, confirming his suspicion that her visit was financially motivated. Naturally, he wanted to wait until she was forced to confess the reason for her visit. There was already a cynical twist to his mouth in anticipation of the predictable denouement of her presence in his office but, when the silence stretched on and on, he finally clicked his tongue impatiently and leant forward.

‘You were never short of something to say, Holly, so why the dumbstruck silence?’