Bittersweet Love - Cathy Williams [13]
‘But…’ Natalie began in protestation, but he was already talking down the line, waving her away.
It wasn’t until she was almost ready to leave for home that she next got the opportunity to try and wheedle out of the nightmarish scenario, but Kane was having none of it.
‘Three of the files are at my place. The most complicated three, in fact.’ His eyes narrowed suspiciously on her. ‘Not trying to tell me that you can’t work a bit of overtime, are you? Because I needn’t tell you that this promotion will entail a fair amount of it. I won’t allow clock-watching.’
‘Of course I understand,’ Natalie said hastily, following him with her eyes as he prepared to leave for yet another meeting, this time with one of his financial directors.
‘Good,’ he said smoothly. ‘In that case, there’s no problem, is there?’
‘No problem,’ she agreed with vast understatement.
She got home with barely enough time to have a bath before she rushed back out. The phone was ringing as she stepped out of the bath, and for one fleeting moment of heady optimism she thought that it might be Kane cancelling his engagement.
No such luck. It took her a second or two before she recognised Eric’s voice, then she remembered that she had given him her telephone number, had agreed that they mustn’t lose touch. She rubbed herself dry, wandering around the bedroom with the receiver tucked behind one ear, awkwardly getting dressed in a pair of jeans and a thin cotton top with buttons down the front.
In her left ear, Eric chatted to her enthusiastically until she gently interrupted to tell him that she was going out and would have to say goodbye. She knew that he was going to arrange to see her; after all, hadn’t she given him every encouragement despite her ‘hands off warning? Even so, when he asked her to dinner later on in the week, she felt herself hesitate slightly.
Was it wise? Could she trust him? What if he wanted involvement, even though he had emphatically stated that it was the last thing on his mind?
Then she thought of Kane, the chiselled beauty of his features, the trail of women who flocked behind him, and on the spur of the moment she agreed with Eric that yes, dinner and the theatre would be wonderful.
‘I’m afraid it’ll have to be an early start,’ he said. ‘Can I meet you at your workplace? Say around six?’
It’ll do me good, she thought, catching a taxi to Kane’s flat in St John’s Wood. She wasn’t about to fall into the same old rut of all work and no play, promotion or no promotion. And Kane already knew of Eric’s presence in her life. She would not have to explain anything further to him.
It was raining steadily outside and she let her thoughts drift as the taxi wound its way along Finchley Road, taking ages because the traffic was appalling. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in the country? she thought. No traffic, no pollution, just wide open spaces. She had grown up in the country and although it was years since she had last lived there she still hankered for the peace and quiet.
Whenever she visited her sister in her delightful little house in Tamworth-in-Arden in the Midlands, she felt the same yen to pack in everything, Kane Marshall included, and do something really useful like become self-sufficient somewhere terribly rural.
Of course she wouldn’t.
‘You’d collapse from sheer boredom after a week,’ her sister always told her, whenever her thoughts became a little too fanciful. ‘London’s in your blood now. You’ll probably end up having to wean yourself out of it. Richmond first, then maybe Windsor, then the vegetable plot in the wilderness.’
But then vegetable plots in the middle of nowhere didn’t include Kane, did they? Dammit, she thought, don’t think like that! You’re in the process of trying to exorcise him, or have you forgotten? Thinking along those lines isn’t going to speed it up, is it?
She had to cover her head with her handbag when the taxi set her down outside Kane’s flat. The steady drum of rain had become more of a downpour and she arrived on his doorstep