Jayne Bauling - Ransacked Heart

Then he disconcerted her by laughing again, but the sound was laced with a derision she found intolerable.

‘Does the occasion really merit the heavy dramatics? What do you imagine I’m planning to do? Seduce you tonight? As you say, we hardly know each other.’ He paused, allowing her to assimilate it before adding, ‘Having waited six years, I can probably wait a little longer. It’s almost a habit.’

The outrageous claim squashed incipient embarrassment, and in her distraction Maria allowed him to push her gently aside and take command of her key, turning it swiftly. They were inside her apartment, Luke already closing the door again, before she found her voice.

‘Six years? I don’t believe you! You haven’t been waiting six years, Luke.’ The disbelieving protest was almost indignant. ‘You couldn’t have!’

‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ All humour had vanished as he turned to face her, dropping her key on to the stand beside the door, his features stamped with hostility. ‘And yet it’s true. That’s what you owe me, Maria. Six years—six years in which I’ve never quite succeeded in getting you out of my mind.’

‘It’s not true!’

Panicked, she didn’t want it to be true, because if it was, it increased the threat he constituted a thousandfold.

‘Why are you so incredulous? You must be used to the way men react to you. There can’t be a man alive who sees you and doesn’t want to take you to bed, who doesn’t wonder what you’re like, although some might be able to resist the temptation to try and find out once they realise what you are. I thought I could.’ Luke’s lips twisted. ‘Is that why you’re so sceptical, Maria? Because I didn’t act, didn’t come looking for you again? I’d have despised myself. I despised myself anyway, haunted by things as superficial as a way of moving, a combination of colour and shape, an asymmetrical smile, the chance attributes of someone who holds herself so cheap she’ll squander herself on a man as truly valueless as Florian Jones, and ignore both his marriage and his other affairs. No, I wasn’t going to come after someone like you.’

‘Then what are you doing here now?’ Maria flared, the insults having begun to register humiliatingly, boring hotly into her.

Luke wore an expression of distaste, like a mask, so hard was its set.

‘Bending with the wind that brought you to me,’ he quipped, the humour harsh and followed by a shrug. ‘When Estwick passed on the fact that Jones had mentioned you as a possible candidate for this job and your previous experience confirmed that you were amply qualified to do it, I thought—what the hell! Chance, fate or whatever you want to call it was offering me the opportunity to finally get you out of my system. It would be worth it, if it put an end to such irritations as the inconvenient way I’d suddenly find myself visualising you when I was with other women…So here we are, and that’s

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