Temporary Parents

‘What the devil’s been happening to you?’

The softly spoken concern wriggled briefly beneath her defences. Then she remembered. He didn’t really care a jot. This was how he got women sewing on his buttons.

‘Nothing. A busy morning,’ she replied crossly, struck by the ruthless perfection of his grooming and the messiness of hers. Already he’d lowered her self-esteem.

Desperate not to let it sink further, she straightened the slipping towel around her tiny body, turned back to the mirror and grabbed a brush. As she forced it through her tangled mop, she longed for her hair to miraculously turn into a smooth, sophisticated style for once.

She could see Max watching critically, his arms folded over his lean, taut torso and the plumb-line-straight navy tie accurately bisecting the advertisement-white shirt.

‘I can understand,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that the guy downstairs mussed your hair up in that clinch...but who made you cry in the first place?’

Her lip quivered and she pulled it into a grimace. He’d laugh if she said a baby! So she said nothing, not even issuing a denial about the clinch. Her brushing became more frantic, but she only ended up with shiny, fly-away hair which flew away in a multitude of directions.

Her face looked small and defenceless, her short upper lip bowing to form an ‘oh’ of dismay. Two enormous, wet-fringed eyes stared back at her. She looked as if she’d been stabbed in the heart.

Max didn’t let up. ‘You and the beefy guy had a row...’ He paused in the middle of his surmising, a faint frown on his beautifully tanned forehead. ‘About me? Because I was coming here and you’d told him we’d been lovers?’ he guessed.

‘Don’t exaggerate your own importance!’ she said, shooting a scornful glance at his reflection.

But she quailed at his piercing, bone-melting assessment and longed to be in full war paint for protection. She picked up a tube of all-in-one foundation and powder and began to spread it with shaking, ice-cold fingers.

‘You were kissing and—’

‘No! That’s a lie!’

Disastrously forgetting her intention to stay composed, Laura whirled around indignantly, her eyes glowing fiercely in anger, hair flying about her briefly animated face in jet black tendrils. The wild gipsy look, he’d once said admiringly, before he’d crushed her soft, poppy-coloured mouth beneath his.

For a moment there was a flash of intense light in Max’s eyes. She felt it searing a path straight for her soul. But she was dead inside and it didn’t reach anywhere important. He didn’t even know he was projecting sexual desire, she thought peevishly. It was as natural to him as breathing.

‘Too vehement a response, Laura,’ he declared quietly. ‘I saw you quite clearly. And why shouldn’t you hug and kiss him? Unless...’ His mouth became a tight snarl. ‘Unless he’s married, of course?’

She couldn’t help widening her eyes at his deduction. ‘He owns the business,’ she said evasively, for something to say.

‘And he employs you,’ Max persisted, in a savage undertone, contempt rippling through his harsh features. ‘He gives you a flat—’

‘It’s a bedsit!’ she declared. ‘Of the non-swinging-cat variety! And I pay for it. And I get up at five to start the ovens—’

‘It’s very convenient,’ he agreed disparagingly.

She fell silent. He was going to think the worst of her, but she wasn’t going to keep protesting her innocence. What was the point? In half an hour or so Max would be out of her life again. She hoped.

His lashes dropped, and she realised he was watching the way the first curves of her pinkly shining breasts rose and fell above the failing towel. They went pinker still and her skin prickled as if he’d switched on an electric current in her body.

She turned her back on him and rummaged in a drawer for her shirt, drawing it on and securing the first two buttons before replying.

‘I don’t owe you any explanation of my behaviour,’ she said flatly.

‘No. You don’t So long as you don’t ask for any explanation of mine.’

They were getting closer to the confession. He felt ashamed of two-timing her. Good!

Triumphantly she finished doing up the last button—only to find it wasn’t the last button at all. She had one left over. Annoyed, she started again. Doggedly she worked her way down, her fingers fumbling because he’d moved to one side and was watching every move she made. Her breathing thickened—or the air did; she wasn’t sure.

‘Are you ready to listen now?’ Max asked.

‘Perfectly.’

She made sure she spoke in a clipped tone. From now on she’d be detached. He wasn’t used to women showing no interest in him and it pleased her that, despite looking and sounding devastatingly handsome and sexy, he’d roused no deep, lingering desires.

A little more confidently, she tucked the shirt in and arranged her small body primly in a threadbare wing chair. Legs neatly crossed at the ankles. Back erect. Distantly involved expression on her face.

‘Fire away,’ she said, with all the appearance of a woman about to hear something boring. But she felt she might snap at any moment.

Max began wandering about and fingering everything he came across. ‘I hope you realise I should be in Paris.’

Absently he stroked the gleaming top of the cluttered mahogany sewing table which had once belonged to her grandmother. He seemed absorbed by the feel of the highly polished wood, his whole face responding to the satiny sensuousness beneath his fingertips. It was a very hedonistic action and had Laura’s gaze glued to every lingering caress.

She heaved her mind back to his remark. ‘Of course I didn’t. Paris, you say?’ she asked, intending to sound rudely uninterested, but her remark came out with croaky edges. She cleared her throat as surreptitiously as possible.

Max gave her a look of lazy curiosity and she hardened her eyes in case he got the wrong idea. ‘I’ve had to cancel two meetings.’

He moved lithely on to the mantelpiece, nonchalant and loose-limbed. Casually he began to examine a china herring-gull her mother had sent her. Laura wriggled, uncomfortable with the way he delicately traced the smooth curves of the beautiful bird.

‘Must be important news, then,’ she encouraged him.

‘You can say that again. One of these days, your sister will go too far!’

‘I thought she already had,’ Laura retaliated, wishing he wouldn’t prowl so. It made her feel restless. And it set off his long, sinewy legs and lean thighs too well.

He was already on the other side of the room, his hands thrust in his pockets, shoulders hunched as he brooded at her. Such an electric force field surrounded him that, by moving around, he was filling her tiny bedsit with his energy. If he carried on much longer she’d begin to feel suffocated by it.

‘Daniel rang me,’ Max said sternly.

‘I thought you and your brother hadn’t spoken since the day he married my sister,’ she remarked, lacing her voice with asperity.

Family feuds were so stupid in her view, and Max was small-minded where Fay was concerned. He owed her sister more courtesy than a flat rejection of her existence.

But then, Fay had said he was carrying a torch for her. Max wouldn’t have liked being superseded by his less prepossessing brother.

Max grunted. ‘I’ve been funding Daniel for the last few years.’

‘Oh. That’s very brotherly of you.’ She waited while Max did his best to wear out her cheap carpet.

‘I did it for the kids.’

She stiffened. Was he going to say more? ‘So you should—’

‘But,’ he went on, snapping out the word and glaring at her for interrupting, ‘it seems I was funding something else.’ He came to a halt in front of her, his face unnervingly grim.