Sophie Weston - Avoiding Mr Right

She leaned forward across the table, glaring. ‘Try listening. I am not your sister,’ she hissed.

‘If you were I would have drilled some sense into you by now,’ Luc Henri flung back between his teeth. He was clearly in a right royal rage and saw no reason to curb his temper.

‘You don’t surprise me in the least,’ Christina said with poisonous sweetness. ‘“sense” being anything that agrees with you, I take it?’

He drew an angry breath. Then, even as she watched him, she saw him catch hold of his retort and wrestle it down like a man struggling with a wild animal. He closed his lips tight on whatever it was he had been going to say.

‘You are an education, Miss Howard. My powers of argument seem to be deserting me,’ he said thinly at last. ‘Please be sensible...’

Christina stood her ground. ‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said quietly.

They stood sizing each other up over the table like duellists. Then he smiled. It was not one of his dazzling smiles. It was more like an insult.

‘You needn’t worry that I’d expect payment in kind,’ Luc Henri drawled. ‘Women come to me of their own free will.’

The man at the next table gasped. So did Christina. She felt her face flame. It did not sweeten her temper one iota. But it made her forget briefly that they were in a public place and that, unlike her arrogant opponent, she minded making a spectacle of herself. The anger coursed through her like a forest fire, but she wiped the expression off her face and gave him her most demure smile.

Leaning forward, she twitched the notes out of his hand. The man at the next table shuddered and backed his chair away with a scream of steel-tipped legs across the concrete.

Luc Henri’s eyes had narrowed to slits.

‘Not me,’ Christina said gently.

The narrowed eyes dared her, blatantly. Christina smiled. She stepped back and, with a quick little movement, tossed the notes high, high up into the air.

They were still falling on the startled patrons as she threaded her way between the tables and left.

CHAPTER TWO

CHRISTINA plunged along the street, her heart beating furiously. How dared he? Oh, how dared he? Interfering! Ordering her around! Lecturing her as if he were the head of the family and she a tiresome teenager! Pressing his money on her as if she were some scatterbrain who did not know where she was going to sleep tonight! As if he had the right!

Here her outraged musings brought her up short. The interfering Mr Luc Henri might not have any right to lecture her but there was no doubt that in one way he was right. She had not got anywhere to stay tonight. Christina grinned suddenly. She would end up on a bench in the bus station if she did not start making some calls right now.

In spite of Luc Henri’s patent scepticism, it was not difficult. Christina was a girl who took friendship seriously and people responded in kind.

Sue Stanley was waiting, the door already open by the time Christina arrived at the top of the steep stairs to her studio. They hugged. She yawned widely.

‘Oh, hell,’ said Christina in quick comprehension. ‘Night shift last night?’

She was a nurse. She nodded and led the way inside.

‘I’m sorry.’ Christina was remorseful. ‘I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.’

Sue chuckled. ‘Somebody has to. Mr Right still hasn’t put in an appearance.’ She hefted Christina’s bag squashily onto a rough wooden chair and led the way to the small kitchen. ‘What about you?’

Christina made a face. Her mother had spent half her life waiting for Mr Right to come and rescue her from the problems of everyday life. Meanwhile it had been her young daughter who had tried to manage their disorganised life, until her mother had died. The experience had given Christina a strong distaste even for joking about that mythical beast.

Sue knew her very well. She grinned. ‘No guy made a dint in the armour yet?’

‘And not likely to.’

Sue shook her head. ‘You’ll find out one day,’ she prophesied.

For no reason at all that she could think of, Luc Henri’s imperious face slipped into Christina’s mind. She remembered that odd, intent look in his eyes. Involuntarily she shivered a little. It was not an unpleasurable shiver.

That startled her. Luc Henri had nothing to do with her, she reminded herself. She would never see him again. She did not even want to see him again. Did she?

She said with less than her usual calm, ‘That’s nonsense and you know it.’

The balcony was a blaze of coral and scarlet geraniums in terracotta tubs. Sue led the way outside. Christina sank down onto the top step of the fire escape and looked round with pleasure.

She found Sue was looking at her measuringly. ‘Who is he?’

Christina stiffened faintly. ‘Who is who?’

She had first worked with Christina three years before on a boat attached to an archaeological expedition. All through the summer they had shared their confidences, their crises and their nail scissors. As a result they knew each other very well.

Now Sue was looking at her shrewdly. ‘Whoever kicked you out this morning.’

Christina relaxed again. ‘You’re on the wrong track, Sue. I came off a boat, that’s all. Then I found the bank wouldn’t let me have any cash until the weekend.’

She stared. ‘You? But you’re always so efficient about money.’

‘The bank seems to be less so—some administrative hitch,’ Christina said drily.

Sue could believe it, though she was less convinced that a man was not the cause of Christina’s present predicament. She said so.

To her own, furious incomprehension, Christina blushed. Sue did not even pretend not to notice. ‘I knew it,’ she said gleefully. ‘Tell me, what’s he like?’

‘You’re not exactly tactful,’ Christina complained.

Which of course convinced Sue that her deductions were correct. ‘Oh, tact,’ she said dismissively. ‘No fun in that. Tell me about this dangerous heartthrob of yours.’

In spite of herself Christina laughed. ‘Why would he be dangerous?’

‘If he wasn’t dangerous, you wouldn’t notice him,’ Sue told her with brutal honesty.

Christina was a little shocked. Disturbed too at how well Sue seemed to know her.

‘What do you mean?’

Her friend sighed. ‘Chris, I’ve seen it too often. Most of the time you just don’t seem to notice. Strong men paw the ground with lust and you treat them like brothers. Or another girlfriend.’

Christina was moved to protest. ‘Nonsense.’

‘It isn’t, you know. A man is only going to get you to notice him if he picks you up by your pigtails and hauls you off to his lair.’ She sighed. ‘You’ll get it too.’ She sounded envious.

It did not amuse Christina. Sue saw it and, good friend that she was, stopped teasing.

‘Nothing to do with me if you like your men dangerous. Anyway, I can’t sit out here in the sun all day. I’ve got to get to the market before all the decent vegetables go. Make yourself at home.’

She went. She left Christina restless and uneasy.

Was Sue right? And if so, why had she never said it before? Had the encounter with Luc Henri, brief as it had been, awakened something dormant in Christina which Sue, who knew her so well, recognised? It was not a palatable thought.

It had to be nonsense, of course. He was a high-handed man who was used to having his own way. She hardly knew him. What she did know she didn’t like. It was a relief to know that she was highly unlikely to meet him again. And yet...

There had been something, hadn’t there? Something between them, tense but unspoken. Something she had never felt before. It had made her tingle when he’d looked at her, so that she’d been aware of him to her bones. Christina’s mouth dried as she thought about it.