Bittersweet Love - Cathy Williams [9]
‘Has she?’ Anna exclaimed. She nestled against Kane possessively.
What does he see in them? Natalie asked herself with a sharp pang of jealousy. Stupid question. Their bodies of course. Kane had all the mental stimulation he could handle at work. Every woman he had ever been out with, and there had been no shortage of them over the years, had been a physical work of art. Leggy, seductive. Everything I’m not, Natalie admitted with honesty. Even with my new improved shape and daring hairstyle I’ll never have that sort of feline, vampish grace that attracts him.
She gave Eric a warm smile, a subconscious desire to remind Kane and herself that he wasn’t the only man in the world, and he looked momentarily dazzled.
‘I’ve often wanted to go on a health kick,’ Anna was saying with a flirtatious smile that expertly managed to include both men and neither of the women. ‘Of course, I haven’t got the incentive that you had.’ She addressed her observation to Natalie. ‘ When you’re overweight it’ s so much more motivating to do that sort of thing, isn’t it?’
‘Isn’t it?’ Natalie agreed politely. She gave Kane a look that said, Is this the best you could come up with for a date? and his lips thinned.
‘Shall we go to our table, darling?’ he murmured to Anna, and she gave a throaty laugh of assent.
Natalie watched as they walked across to a table in the far corner of the room. The best table, naturally. Kane had only to show himself at a restaurant and the waiters would appear from nowhere, madly dashing around him, as if sensing his unspoken authority and responding to it.
When she had first joined the company, Natalie had been impressed by this reaction. Now it irritated her. He was just a man, after all. Couldn’t they see that? If the rest of the world treated Kane like a normal human being, instead of a demigod, then he might just get it into that head of his that he wasn’t a cut above everyone else. Not that he ever intimated as much, but that easy self-confidence and lazy assurance spoke volumes.
Across the room she could see him looking absolutely absorbed in whatever Anna was saying. Maybe they were planning what they would get up to after their three-course meal was out of the way. After all, Natalie thought acidly, they had some catching up to do, and she doubted very much of it involved conversation.
For the remainder of the evening, she found her attention drifting off towards Kane and Anna, speculating on all sorts of things, compulsively reading Anna’s body language as she leaned towards Kane, giving him a bird’s-eye view of the shadowy valley between her breasts, and twirling the long stem of her wine glass.
It was a relief when they rose to leave, Kane nodding briefly in her direction as he ushered Anna towards the door, with the usual subservient head waiter in attendance, like a fussy mother hen.
‘Good-looking man, your boss,’ Claire said, following Natalie’s eyes.
‘I suppose so.’ She shrugged and concentrated on her cup of coffee and the tempting little dish of petits fours which she was having trouble resisting.
‘Was that his wife?’
‘Wife?’ Natalie snorted expressively. ‘I think he considers marriage as one of those odd things that other people get up to in their spare time.’
‘And you don’t?’ Eric asked softly, his pale blue eyes looking at her curiously.
Natalie flushed and didn’t say anything.
‘I think marriage is terribly important,’ he continued in the same speculative voice, ‘but without the emotion involved. A business agreement, so to speak.’
Natalie looked at him, surprised, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Claire shake her head, warning her off the inevitable response.
Later, as she was about to step into the taxi to go home, Eric pulled her to one side and asked in an undertone how she felt about seeing him again.
‘It seems a shame to vanish out of