Unguarded Moment

Alix moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘I—I forget.’

‘Clearly a memorable meal,’ he said softly. ‘Have you seen him lately?’

‘As you appear to know my every move,’ she said clearly, ‘you tell me.’

‘No, you haven’t.’ He leaned back in his chair, dark eyes watchful under hooded lids. ‘Tell me, does Bianca Layton choose your clothes and hairstyle?’

‘So that’s it!’ Alix gave a little artificial laugh. ‘Not very clever, Mr Brant. What exactly are you probing for—some evidence of discontent? You won’t find it. If you’re trying to goad me into saying something about Bianca which you can interpret as disloyalty, then you’re wasting your time. We have a very close relationship, and I’m grateful to her for all the opportunities I’ve had since I’ve been working for her. I’m sorry if my dress sense doesn’t meet with your approval, but you sought my company, remember. I didn’t seek yours.’

‘Quite a speech,’ he said drily. ‘Didn’t Shakespeare say something about protesting too much?’

‘He may well have done,’ she said. ‘But I can assure you it doesn’t apply in this case.’

He smiled lightly. ‘As you wish. Now eat your food.’

‘My appetite seems to have deserted me.’

‘You’re far too sensitive,’ he remarked. ‘Not a desirable attribute for anyone attached to the Layton ménage, I would have thought.’

‘If you disapprove of Bianca so strongly, why do you want to write about her? I thought biographers were supposed to be objective.’

‘Who told you that?’ he queried. ‘I want to write about her because she’s a great star, if not a great actress, and I’m interested in analysing the elements which come together to make such a being.’

‘As you did with Kristen Wallace?’

‘Right,’ he agreed.

‘Then you’ll understand why I won’t want you within a mile of Bianca.’ She met his gaze fully, her own eyes blazing.

‘The lamb leaps to protect the tigress,’ he mocked. ‘Calm down, Miss Coulter. There’s no need for all this defensiveness, unless you already know that your idol has feet of clay. My researches may well reveal that under that highly lacquered exterior beats a heart of pure gold. I could always ask Peter Barnet’s opinion.’

‘Ask who you damned well like,’ Alix said fiercely. ‘But I’m telling you now, you’ll get no co-operation from me, or from anyone else who works for Miss Layton. If you insist on writing this book, it will be an unauthorised biography, written without credibility, a rehash of everything that’s been said before, with an additional helping of your own scurrilous brand of speculation, I have no doubt. Just don’t expect any help.’

‘What would you say,’ he said softly, ‘if I told you that you’d already helped more than you knew? Your lasagne must be stone cold by now. Would you like something else? Coffee, perhaps, and a brandy. You look as if you need it.’

‘I don’t want anything from you,’ Alix said fiercely. She snatched up her handbag. ‘If you’ll tell me what my share of the bill is, I’ll be going.’

‘There’s no hurry.’ The dark face was smooth and enigmatic as he watched her. ‘The curtain doesn’t go up for at least half an hour.’

‘For once your Sherlock Holmes instinct has played you false,’ she said between her teeth. ‘I’m not going to the theatre. There are no seats left for the play I wanted to see.’

‘There are, if you’re talking about the show at the Galaxy. I was intending to go there myself tonight, but something’s come up, so if you want one of my tickets you can have it.’

Alix stiffened. ‘No, thank you.’

He smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to entrap you into spending the remainder of the evening with me.’ He produced a slip of yellow paper from his wallet and put it on the table between them. ‘It’s a ticket for a play you want to see, that’s all.’

‘I want nothing from you,’ snapped Alix on a little flare of temper.

‘As you wish.’ He shrugged slightly, then crumpled the ticket into a ball and tossed it into the empty ashtray. ‘Have a pleasant evening.’ He pushed back his chair and rose.

She said without looking at him, ‘Goodbye, Mr Brant.’ That was the second time she’d said that today, she thought wildly. Not that it had made any difference. And didn’t people say that everything came in threes?

It made her skin crawl to think that she had sat in this very restaurant with Peter, being watched. She had laughed and talked and given herself away a hundred times, and all the time Liam Brant had been there taking note. And he knew why she was no longer seeing Peter too. That was quite obvious.

She was aware that the waiter was at her side, exclaiming in concern about her half-filled plate, asking her anxiously if the meal had been all right. She tried to assure him that everything had been fine, and that she had just not been hungry, refusing his offers of a dessert and coffee.

‘If I could just have the bill, please.’

He looked mystified. ‘The bill, signorina? But it has already been paid.’ Mournfully he collected the plates and took them away, leaving Alix staring after him, her mouth set in fury.

Of course the bill had been paid, she thought angrily. Another barb in her flesh, a deliberate ploy to make her beholden to him even in a small way, like that damned theatre ticket.

How unfair it was that he should have a seat that he wasn’t going to use for the play that she was dying to see. He must have seen her leaving the box office, she thought broodingly. Seen her and drawn his own conclusions.

She looked longingly at the little crumpled ball in the ashtray. What an awful waste it seemed. And as far as Liam Brant was concerned, that was the end of the matter. As soon as the table was cleared, the ticket would be thrown away, or so he thought. And it was only crumpled, not torn. If she was to use it, no one would be any the wiser.

Despising herself, she reached for the small yellow ball and smoothed the ticket out with fingers that shook a little. There was a war going on in her head, one part of her mind arguing fiercely that if she used the ticket, he would never know, and the other warning her that she should tear the ticket into tiny fragments rather than accept the slightest favour at his hands.

But what was the alternative? A quiet evening at home, unpacking and inevitably thinking about the problems the day had thrown up at her. It all seemed curiously unappealing.

She looked down at the ticket and told herself silently, ‘He’ll never know.’

The critics and theatregoers had been right; the cast and production thoroughly deserved the superlatives that had been heaped upon them.

In fact the only thing to mar Alix’s contentment was the second empty seat beside her. She had spent most of the first act in agony waiting for him to join her, preparing herself for the barbed comment, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to leave herself, before it happened.

But it didn’t happen. Even after the interval the seat remained unoccupied, and she was able to relax and give herself over to the untrammelled enjoyment of the evening.

All the same, she couldn’t help wondering exactly what had come up to prevent him seeing the play himself, and exactly who the second seat had been intended for. A woman undoubtedly, she thought, and attractive. His views on that were more than clear. An actress, maybe or a model, or perhaps a ‘media person’. Someone glamorous, so that other people would look and look again, approving his choice and envying him.

She had a sudden disturbing inner image of his face, the cool dark eyes under the hooded lids, the thin high-bridged nose, and the sensuous curve of his lower lip. A man to whom women would matter. A man who would demand physical beauty, a physical response, she thought, remembering with a shiver the frank appraisal in his eyes, and the unwelcome brush of his fingers against her flesh.

That was something, she told herself, that she did not need to remember. She had managed to blot Peter Barnet and his defection out of her mind successfully. He wasn’t even a dull ache any more, and she found it hard to recall anything about him except that he had been easy to talk to—but then he was a journalist, so he was probably professionally a good listener, she acknowledged wryly.

Yet she had never felt the same necessity to be on her guard with Peter as she did with Liam Brant.

When the final curtain call had been taken, and she rose and mingled with the laughing, chattering throng making their way towards the exits, Alix caught herself wondering whether she was the only person in the theatre to have watched the play alone. Everyone else around her seemed to be one of a couple, or part of a group, and she was aware of a lonely feeling deep inside.

Oh, come on, she addressed herself roughly, you’ve no need to feel sorry for yourself. You have a terrific life, and if this was the kind of outing you planned in advance, then you needn’t have been alone.

She didn’t usually feel so much like an outsider. It was the events of the day which had started her thoughts off in such a depressing train, she thought.