Sarah Holland - The Dominant Male

Guilt ate away at her. Bobby was clearly still the same. He had not been the man to awaken her sleeping desires. Gabriel Stone had done that. So what could she possibly say to Bobby about it without rocking their security and damaging their friendship?

‘I suppose you’re just tired?’ Bobby ventured helpfully.

‘I suppose so,’ she agreed, wishing she could confide in him as she had always done when something was bothering her. ‘And I had such a busy week at the office. I was working late every night.’

‘You work too much.’ Bobby smiled, relaxing with the familiar excuse. ‘I’ve told you that before.’

‘I love working. I’ve told you that before!’

Bobby laughed and opened his door. ‘OK, Mademoiselle Workaholic! Let’s call it a night, shall we?’

Rhiannon stepped out of the car too, and walked round in the moonlit, lamplit mews to her bottle-green front door with the gold lion knocker and the two hanging plants beside it.

‘Lunch tomorrow?’ Bobby put his arms around her. ‘I could come round at twelve, read the papers while you cook. Maybe we could have a game of Monopoly…’

The thought of the familiar routine horrified her. Don’t you realise that everything’s changed since I met Gabriel Stone? she wanted to say. But she would just have sounded mad. After all—how could it all have changed in just one meeting with a complete stranger…?

Suddenly she needed to do something that would keep her security with Bobby, and for some insane reason she thought that making him see her in a sexier light would do the trick.

‘Bobby,’ she said on impulse, ‘why don’t we do something different this Sunday?’ ‘Such as? Picnic in Hyde Park? Motor down to—?’ ‘Why don’t we make wild, passionate love instead?’ His eyes almost fell out of his head. ‘Make love…!’ ‘I…’ Her skin burned with embarrassment. ‘I—I just meant we ought to do something different. That’s all.’ She turned away from him, worry in her eyes. His attitude to sex had never bothered her before. Why did it bother her now? But she knew the answer to that. It was six feet six with steel-blue eyes and a tough, sexy mouth.

‘Well, I…’ Bobby coughed nervously, as uncomfortable as she was. ‘I’d love to, darling, but I thought you felt as I did. About sex before marriage, I mean. Not the done thing, and all that. Rather tawdry.’ He shuffled his feet, face red. ‘Sort of thing cheap, insincere people do.’

‘But we have been together for five years, and—’

‘Yes, yes, but…’ He shifted uncomfortably in the lamplight. ‘The wedding night is the proper time. And don’t forget we’ve steered clear of sex because it was what you wanted. That was what you said in the beginning, remember?’

‘What did I say?’ she asked huskily, leaning against his shoulder, closing her eyes and praying that his love, his kindness, his tenderness would keep the forces of her desire for Gabriel Stone at bay. Like a magic charm, an amulet, a crucifix to ward off the Devil.

‘That Jack Ratchett had driven you mad with his need to control you. That he’d made you obey him in everything. And that you never wanted to be involved with a man like that again as long as you lived.’

She sighed softly, reassured. ‘And what else?’

He kissed her forehead, saying deeply, ‘That you would only get involved with me if I promised never to play power-games with you, and never to force you into lovemaking until you were ready.’

‘Yes, that’s right…’ She smiled up into his eyes with love. ‘I did say that, didn’t I?’

‘And you are still happy with it, aren’t you, darling?’ He asked eagerly, almost desperately. ‘I mean—you don’t change your mind about something so loathsome overnight. Do you, dearest?’

‘No…’ Her voice said the word, but she stared at him and thought, Loathsome? Did we really once agree? Am I really going to marry him?

The worry she felt as those thoughts ran through her mind was so deep she couldn’t cope with it. Instinctively she tried to cling to what was safe, secure, familiar.

‘You’re right, Bobby. Power-games are horrid and so is sex. I want nothing more to do with either.’

Horrors! she thought, listening to herself. I sound like some awful old prude instead of a young woman. Do I really hate sex? But even as she thought it she remembered Gabriel Stone’s kiss, her passionate response and the helpless desire she had felt in his arms…

‘Look, I really must go in now,’ she heard her shaken voice saying as her hands fumbled in her bag for the keys. ‘I’m so tired. That’s probably all that’s wrong with me. I need to sleep.’

‘A tired boy is a fretful boy, as my mother always says.’ Bobby irritated her further with yet another of his mother’s sayings. ‘And it applies to girls too, darling. We don’t want you all fretful when you’ve so much work to do, do we?’

Rhiannon smiled tensely, kissed him goodnight and went inside.

She put the light on and stood staring at her beautiful living room for a long moment in silence.

It seemed strange. As though she’d never seen it before. As though it were a rented house, not the home she’d lived in and loved for three years.

Her briefcase was open on the pale yellow couch and the storyboard was visible from here: tiny television screens with colour drawings in each one, depicting frame by frame the advertisement she had devised for Carillo’s Cuban coffee.

A Cuban hacienda at night. Two cups of coffee steaming on an antique drawing room table. An overhead fan and smouldering music…

The camera moved across the bed and out onto the balcony.

A sultry, sexy brunette stands on the balcony over-lookng Havana. She is wearing a long, slinky red evening dress, slit to the thigh, and a red bougainvillea flower in her hair.

A black limousine pulls up in the aristocratic Havana street below. A liveried chauffeur rushes to open the rear door. A tall, dark and incredibly powerful-looking man steps out, looks up at the brunette on the balcony and gives a slow, ruthless smile.

The sultry brunette looks at the camera and says throatily, ‘I like my men the way I like my coffee…dark, rich and very strong.’

CARILLO’S CUBAN COFFEE, flashes up onto the screen. DARK, RICH AND VERY STRONG.

Rhiannon studied the storyboard. When she’d left for the charity fête this morning, her mind had been filled with Carillo’s Cuban coffee. She hadn’t been able to decide whether to stick with ‘Dark, rich and very strong’ or move to her new idea of ‘When you feel like coming on strong’.

Now she couldn’t care less.

It was a matter of complete indifference to her.

All she cared about was whether or not she would ever see Gabriel Stone again, and whether he would kiss her as he had kissed her today, unleashing that dammed-up passion.

He made me feel like a woman for the first time in years, she realised with a shock.

And I loved every second of it.

But how could he do it in just one brief meeting?

How…?

Ambition had been her lover and best friend for so long that she automatically expected to feel dynamic and excited as soon as she crossed the threshold of Solomon Advertising Associates on Monday morning.

But as she entered the busy black glass building on Tottenham Court Road she felt the same sense of detachment and strangeness she had felt all weekend.

She quickened her step, almost running to the lifts as though from the changes in herself. On the seventh floor people said hello to her as always, and she said hello back cheerily, but inside she felt alien to them, and to the whole business of advertising.

She hurried past Bobby’s little glass office without stopping to wave. He was sitting at his desk, playing with the executive toy she had bought him for Christmas last year.