Bittersweet Love - Cathy Williams [32]
Beautiful? Her? Every nuance of what she had felt then came flooding back to her now: the momentary thrill, quickly replaced by the agonising, bitter truth that there was nothing beautiful about her. She was over-weight, hardly up to his standards in women. She had recoiled as though he had struck her, turning away so that he couldn’t see the tears blurring her eyes. Of course he was drunk; he must have been. Drunk and not averse to leading on the secretary, in the absence of anyone else. Well, she wasn’t going to be the face that greeted him when he awoke the following morning with a hangover.
She had left the room, running, and she had never worn that dress again. And from that day on she had made sure that she guarded her painful love tenaciously, fiercely, storing it safely behind that placid exterior.
It angered her now that another throw-away compliment could give her that same, wonderful, illicit thrill.
‘Where’s Anna?’ she asked, changing the subject abruptly.
Kane gave her a sideways look from under his lashes. ‘She arrived about an hour ago.’ He paused. ‘You would have seen her, but you were upstairs in your bedroom.’ There was another pause while he continued to survey her. ‘There was no need to share the room with him if you didn’t want to, you know.’
‘Why shouldn’t I want to?’ Natalie asked innocently.
‘Lovers share bedrooms.’ The outright blatancy of the remark made her gasp and he dropped his eyes. ‘Are you his lover?’ he asked in such a low voice that she wondered whether she had heard correctly.
‘Would you mind pouring me another drink?’ Natalie said in an over-loud voice. ‘A glass of white wine please.’
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he repeated, his eyes flicking across to her face.
‘It doesn’t deserve an answer.’
He shrugged as though he didn’t really care one way or another, but the lines of his face as he walked off to pour her drink were hard, even though when he next turned around to face her he was smiling.
She accepted the glass from him, and the conversation was dropped as the doorbell rang and the first of the guests began to arrive, along with Eric who apologised to her for taking slightly longer than necessary, but the technicality of arranging his bow-tie had proved more taxing than he had foreseen.
‘If you’d been there, you could have helped me with it,’ he said, and she had smiled drily at that piece of male chauvinism.
‘I know nothing about bow-ties, and frankly I don’t think I’m missing out on anything.’
The party turned out to be a good one. Kane had an instinctive ability to mix people together, knowing precisely which personalities would complement each other. There was a pleasant sound of voices filling the lounge, when the door opened and Anna made her entry.
Natalie had almost forgotten about the other woman. Now she, along with the other people in the room, women included, fell silent as she entered. Or rather, Natalie thought, made an entrance. Her long body was wrapped lovingly in a black dress that somehow managed to be modest, yet quite wanton in what it didn’t reveal. No jewellery, except for a string of pearls and all that blonde hair upswept into a style that seemed perilously and attractively close to falling down.
Talking resumed, but she noticed that the men couldn’t quite contain their surreptitious glances in Anna’s direction. Including Eric, who had seemingly lost all interest in the business contact whom he was cultivating, and who, he had earlier confided in Natalie, might produce a lucrative source of work. So much for putting work before pleasure, she thought.
Anna’s eyes flicked through the crowd and settled on Natalie. She smiled coyly, glancing back over her shoulder as she made her way towards Kane, and then proceeded to attach herself to his presence as if by in-visible strings. At dinner, she sat next to him, smiling at appropriate intervals during the conversation which bounced between Kane on her right and the financial director of one of their important clients on the left.
Next to Natalie, Eric fought to