Free Spirit Part 5

Hannah had always been vulnerable to criticism. It was a weakness she had striven all her life to hide, but now for some reason her defences deserted her, and she reacted quickly and bitterly to Silas's words, pain stinging her over-sensitive emotions as she retaliated sharply, 'How very typical of a man. I suppose you'd prefer me to wear something like the 1 dress Sarah has on . . . something soft and feminine with tactile appeal . . .'

As he started to frown, she realised too late what she had done. For all his apparent indulgence, this man was her boss. She should never have allowed him to push her into such a personal exchange.

And then, just as she was formulating a stiff apology, his frown vanished and his mouth twitched in a faint smile.

'Attractive though it is, Sarah's outfit isn't exactly what I had in mind. Cyclamen pink is hardly your colour, I suspect,' he added drily, and then, before she could object to the blatant chauvinism of his remarks, he continued smoothly, 'I have a luncheon engagement today with an old client. I've arranged for you to join us. Although initially you won't have much contact with the clients, later on when you've found your feet, so to speak, there may be occasions when I shall ask you to stand in for me. We're lunching at. . .'

He mentioned a restaurant which Hannah well knew was one of the most fashionable and expensive in the City. She also knew that her city suit would look totally out of place among the designer outfits of the other female diners, and she groaned mentally.

In the event, the lunch was not the ordeal Hannah had antic.i.p.ated.

They arrived at the restaurant ahead of the client, who when he joined them proved to be a pleasant man in his early thirties; his manner was perhaps a little too smooth and polished for Hannah's taste, but he was careful to keep her fully involved in the conversation, doing nothing more than raising his eyebrows slightly when Silas introduced her as his personal a.s.sistant.

From the conversation, Hannah soon realised that Silas had apparently embarked on something of a crusade in involving as many women as he could in his business; and that this crusade was well-known among his friends and clients.

The lunch was not a selling exercise, but simply an affirmation of the good relationship that already obviously existed with the client, and afterwards, as they left the restaurant, Hannah felt relaxed enough to ask Silas several questions about Tim Hawley and his business.

Indeed, so engrossed was she that she stepped off the pavement without thinking, gasping out loud when Silas's arm shot out and he grabbed hold of her, swinging her back, just as a taxi screamed round the corner far too fast.

Shaken and angry with herself, Hannah thanked him. All her life her family had teased her for being impetuous and slightly clumsy, and she didn't like having their teasing confirmed by the knowledge that but for Silas's awareness and prompt action she might have been injured by the taxi.

As the immediate shock pa.s.sed, she realised that Silas was still holding her, his hand gripping her arm so tightly that she could feel pins and needles under her skin. She must have made a faint sound of distress without realising it, because immediately his grip relaxed, although he didn't release her. It was odd how aware she was of the heat and strength of his flesh, even through the thickness of her jacket. Her skin seemed to burn from the contact, a fierce, consuming heat that sent pulses of energy singing through her body.

An unfamiliar faintness came over her, a combination of shock and anger, she told herself, as she tried to control it and the horrid buzzing in her ears. She concentrated on focusing on Silas's face.

His skin looked rather pale, the hard jut of his cheekbones uncompromisingly male. Through her dizziness, she felt a dangerous compulsion to reach out and touch them with her fingers.

Abruptly, despite the heat he was generating in her body, she started to shiver. She watched distantly and vaguely as his eyebrows contracted and he frowned at her, feeling his fingers splay out against her arm and his other hand reach for her wrist, cool fingers monitoring her frantic pulse. He said something under his breath, extinguished by the roar of the traffic as the light changed.

'Hannah.' He shook her, and she realised that the look in his eyes was one of concern. Why-because he had registered that all too betraying and very feminine reaction to him? The thought made her go hot again with chagrin and despair. This was the very situation she had been determined to avoid.

Gathering her stunned wits, she pulled away from him, apologising huskily for her clumsiness. Before she looked away from him, she saw his frown deepen and her heart sank. Was he already regretting employing her? Fraught with difficulties though her new job was, she didn't want to lose it.

And then, to her astonishment, she heard him say tersely, 'You weren't clumsy; the taxi driver was at fault. ..' Far more roughly he added, 'He could have killed you. Another few inches...'

Her face went ashen as she looked at him and the reality of what he was saying hit her in all its starkness. She could so easily have been killed. A moment's lack of concentration, a moment's unawareness .

. . and then oblivion. A shudder of horror convulsed her. She felt sick and dizzy, hot and then dangerously, weakeningly cold. Shock, she told herself inwardly, her body registering the presence of Silas's arm around her with grat.i.tude for its warmth and comfort, instincts she had long ago thought successfully suppressed, surging past the barriers of training and life-style as she allowed herself to draw strength from his proximity, leaning gratefully against him while the waves of sickness and dizziness washed over her and the roaring in her ears subsided to no more than the wash of conversation of people walking past them; some of them staring at them, others totally uninterested in their stillness ... in the proximity of their bodies that was almost but not quite an embrace.

The realisation of what she was doing brought Hannah abruptly out of Silas's arms. She heard him saying something about it being his fault, and that he shouldn't have frightened her by highlighting her danger.

She managed to pull herself together sufficiently to give him a weak smile and say shakily, 'I'm only grateful I wasn't with one of my brothers. They're always reminding me how impulsive and careless I am.'

'I take it those were two of your brothers I saw you with on Sunday?'

Silas asked her as they crossed the road in safety and continued to make their way back to the office.

Without looking at him, Hannah shook her head. 'One of them was.

The other was a ... a friend -'

Of my brother's, she had been about to add, but to her astonishment Silas cut right across what she was telling him to say crisply, and with a certain amount of coldness, 'There's no need to be coy, Hannah. If the man is your lover, then why not say so?'

'If he was, I would,' Hannah a.s.serted a little untruthfully. 'As it happens, Malcolm and I had only met this weekend. He's a colleague of my brother's.'

The dark eyebrows rose.

'Really? You surprise me. I had surmised from the very possessive way he was holding on to you that the relationship between the two of you was far more intimate.'

'Even if it were, that would scarcely be any business of yours,'

Hannah told him, jolted out of her habitual caution by the note of interrogation she could detect in his voice.

'On the contrary. When you were interviewed for your job, you informed Gordon that your life was completely free of any emotional commitments.'

Thoroughly angry now, Hannah stopped on the pavement and challenged him. 'And you thought I was lying? Well, I wasn't,' she told him flatly, too angry to employ tact. 'There is no man in my life ... no lover to whom I'm committed. Not now, not in the past, and not in the future.'

She stopped, aware of a brief flaring of something disconcerting in his eyes, before he banished it and said smoothly, 'I'm very tempted to ask you what it is about the male s.e.x that makes you so determined to exclude them from your life, but now isn't the time.'

They were almost back at the office, and too late Hannah realised she had allowed herself to become involved in a far more personal discussion than was wise ... or safe.

Safe. There it was again, that word that Linda had said was so favoured by their generation. She tensed a little uncomfortably, remembering the sensation that had raced through her when Silas had touched her. Sensations which had been far from safe ...

'I've got a board meeting this afternoon. I'd like you to sit in on it.

Tomorrow I'll want your reaction and appraisal of the other board members, then we'll go through the facts about them and see just how keen your judgement is.'

He was testing her, but at least he was giving her fair warning.

Normally Hannah considered herself to be a pretty fair judge of character, but today she had been thrown so off guard by her own emotional and physical vulnerability that her confidence seemed to be draining away from her like life blood from a major artery. She.

gave Silas a suspicious glance, wondering whether he had done it on purpose, just to see exactly how she would cope. He was a very shrewd man, very skilled at manipulating people, no matter how sincere he might appear on the surface.

She was just about to step past him into the building when he said abruptly, 'Wait.'

As she tamed towards him in mute query, he reached out and cupped her face in his hands.

Instantly, all her bones liquefied. Her stomach became a trembling ma.s.s of jelly, and where his hands touched her skin, holding her face as though it were made of the most fragile porcelain, her skin seemed to burn.

She thought he was actually going to kiss her, and stared at him in confused bewilderment, wondering which of them had gone mad.

How could he possibly know of the appallingly intense desire inside her to know what his kiss would be like? How could he read her so clearly that he could turn to her so prosaically and matter-of-factly.

here on the pavement outside his offices and place his mouth to hers? Like an adult giving sweets to a child. Shamingly, the fear grew that somehow she herself had told him, had shown him, had asked him . . . There could be no other explanation for the ease and a.s.surance with which he had stopped her, with which he was holding her.

And yet she would have sworn that, of all men, he was the least likely to indulge in such behaviour with an employee.

She felt, both triumph and disappointment: triumph that he should so immediately respond to her femininity, and disappointment at his lack of control, of responsibility.

As her thoughts swirled fiercely through her mind, he removed one hand from her face and said calmly, 'You've got a s.m.u.t on your cheekbone. It doesn't go with the power dressing. I'd go and check up on it before going back to your desk if I were you. It doesn't match the image.'

And then he was releasing her, smiling at her in a kindly, distant manner, while she could only stand transfixed and stare at him, so thoroughly confused and betrayed by her own emotions that speech was literally impossible.

Later in the afternoon, sitting in on the board meeting, she refused to allow herself to berate herself any longer. All right, so she had come dangerously close to making a fool of herself. Well, let that be a lesson to her. She frowned fiercely, trying to concentrate on what was going on. ..

The board wasn't excessively large. Under a dozen members, most of their names familiar to her from her pre-interview research; mostly but not all of them involved with the Group in one capacity or another, all of them very able and shrewd businessmen. All of them, under the eagle scrutiny of Silas's eyes, treating her as an equal.

It was almost six o'clock before the meeting finished. One of the directors suggested they all went on to a local pub for a drink, and Hannah's heart sank. She felt wrung out both emotionally and physically, and had planned to spend the evening going over some of the client files.

She didn't allow her feelings to show, however, waiting for Silas's response to the other director's suggestion.

To her relief he vetoed it, explaining that he had a dinner engagement. With the woman she had seen with him in his car?

Hannah wondered, and then fought to dismiss her dangerous train of thought, concentrating instead on the final winding up of the meeting.

Knowing that her first few days in her new environment would be physically and mentally punishing, she had deliberately kept this evening free, but it seemed that fate was determined to conspire against her, and, by the time she had finished a.s.suring her mother that she loved her new job, it was gone nine o'clock and her stomach was reminding her that she hadn't eaten since lunchtime.

Half an hour later, shoes off, feet tucked up underneath her,' she was sitting in her favourite chair with a bowl of crisp raw vegetables on the table beside her, deeply engrossed in the files she was studying, when the phone rang again.

Cursing mildly, she got up to answer it. Linda was on the other end of the line, wanting to talk about her weekend. Listening to Linda extolling her lover's virtues, her heart sank a little. She wanted to caution her friend against allowing herself to become too emotionally involved, but just as she opened her mouth to do so she had a vivid memory of her own feelings this afternoon when Silas had touched her, and the caution died unspoken. Who was she to give advice? She was already in dire danger of committing the greatest folly known to a female employee . . . that of falling in love with her boss.

Falling in love . . . She moved restlessly on her chair, no longer really listening to her friend, conscious of the growing schism within her own personality. More and more often now, the softer, more traditional, more emotional and vulnerable side of her nature broke through her self-imposed banishment of it. It was no use blaming Silas. He was simply the focus of those emotions, not the cause.

She heard Linda saying goodbye and responded automatically; her desire to work had gone. She wandered restlessly round her apartment, finally picking up a magazine which she had bought on impulse over the weekend and then discarded.

There was an article in it on women who opted for motherhood in their late thirties; career women who without exception were extolling the virtues of motherhood.

Hannah looked at the photographs with a tiny shudder, acknowledging an inherent fear of studying them too closely.

Why? Because she was afraid that the opinions and emotions of those women featured in the article might be contagious? The she might become a victim of the baby fever that had gripped them?

That she might-appalling thought-experience that same urge to succ.u.mb to the siren call of nature?

Impossible, she told herself, throwing the magazine aside, irritated with herself for the dangerous game she was almost deliberately playing with her own emotions and vulnerabilities. It was rather like the game of 'chicken' she had played at school as a child. Only now she was her own rival.

Despite all her good intentions, it was late when she went to bed, and for once the rhythmic sound of the river did not lull her to sleep.

Like some uncontrollable sickness she couldn't withstand, she started to think about Silas . . . to wonder what he was doing, who he was with. She remembered how she had felt when he had touched her, and shuddered deeply, completely unaware of the low moan that rose in her throat, trying not to visualise him with her . . .

the soignie woman she had seen him with in his car. She was berating herself . . . hating herself for what she was doing, both to herself and, by virtue of the intrusiveness of her thoughts into his personal life, to him.

The week pa.s.sed all too quickly. Her work proved challenging, almost exhaustingly so, for which Hannah was grateful. Deep down inside her a small voice still warned her that she was in danger, that she ought not to have taken the job, but she ignored it, subduing both it and her emotions by relentlessly refusing to acknowledge their existence.

Faces and names became familiar to her, the hierarchy of the Group more clear, the names of its clients coming automatically to her lips instead of having to be memorised.

She was delighted to see how much Silas was prepared to delegate work to her and how much responsibility she would have. In fact, were it not for her unwanted awareness of Silas as man, rather than as an astute financier, she would have been able to describe her life as not far short of perfect.

A longstanding dinner engagement on Wednesday evening, with an old group of friends she had known for many years, gave her the opportunity to announce her career move.

All of them were openly envious, congratulating her on her good luck. All of them took their careers seriously, and none of them questioned her on her reaction to Silas on a personal level, but, instead of feeling relief, she felt rather a fraud ... as though the division within her own nature was already in some subtle way separating her from these serious, dedicated young women; it was as though her very hormones were making her a traitor to the ideals she had held for so long, and the appalling thing was that she didn't seem to be able to do a thing about it. No-matter how strict a control she kept over herself during her waking hours, at night while she was asleep her dreams became turbulent and erotic, stirring up sensations that lingered even while she was awake, giving her an insight into her own nature she would rather not have had.

Desire . . . s.e.xual chemistry . . . give it what name you would, the havoc that such an awareness could bring made her shudder in dread, but she had it under control, she a.s.sured herself later in the evening as she drove home. She was already packed for the overnight stay at Padley Court, and she had warned her parents to expect her home for the weekend. Her motives in going home were complex and not without a certain deviousness. Given the busy pace of her mother's life, she was bound to be kept far too busy to dwell on Silas and her reaction to him.

Every now and again the cold voice of reason told her that it would be safer to simply give up her job, but she couldn't bear to do it. She loved the challenges of her work. She loved the scope and encouragement Silas gave her. She loved the atmosphere that permeated the entire Jeffreys organisation, right from its most junior member of staff, and she knew that there was much she could learn from Silas.

As she stopped the car she had an electrifying, undermining mental vision of him reaching out to touch her, his lean hands caressing her skin, his silver eyes intent on her body. She shivered convulsively, resenting the power of her own desires, wondering with fierce bitterness why they had chosen now to manifest themselves so strongly. If she had to suffer this kind of delayed adolescent development, why on earth did she have to pick on Silas Jeffreys?

Why couldn't she have felt like this about someone safe like . . . like Malcolm? She dwelled bitterly on the recalcitrance of her own nature and its stubborn refusal to behave sensibly. A discreet, easily controlled affair with someone like Malcolm, now at this stage in her life when she was well-established on the career ladder, would have been almost ideal. A relationship which could be picked up and then dropped to suit them both . . . a comfortable physical communion between two people who were fully aware that their relationship was to be kept safely compartmentalised . . . a healthy, unemotional, physical pleasuring of one another. She dwelt bitterly on the benefits of such a relationship while she prepared for bed, wondering a little savagely why on earth she couldn't act on her own sane, sensible advice. Why on earth was she suffering from this inconvenient attack of desire? To merely experience such desire was bad enough, but to have that desire fixated on the one person it would be career suicide to become involved with must be some form of hitherto unsuspected madness.

It was just fortunate that Silas had no interest in her as a woman.

She shuddered to think of the consequences to her carefully planned life had that not been the case. An affair with him, no matter how brief, would mean the end of her career with the Jeffreys Group. She had always been appalled by the stupidity of those of her peers who became emotionally or s.e.xually involved with co-workers. It always* led to problems-accusations of favouritism and worse.

And then, when the inevitable end of the affair came ... Well, she had listened to too many women bemoaning the fact that they were almost being forced to look for another job following the end of their relationship with a colleague to have any doubts as to her own situation under similar circ.u.mstances.

Yes, she was very fortunate indeed that Silas wasn't interested in her. Extremely fortunate. Determinedly she ignored the small pang of pain and chagrin that whispered dangerously that she could make him see her as a woman and not a colleague, that she should make him see her as a woman.

Wearily she prepared for bed, praying mentally that tonight her sleep would be free of dreams, tormenting and subtle sensual shadows that moved across her sleep, arousing her with the eroticism of their movements, with the way their sleep-misted bodies moved together, touching, clinging . . .

CHAPTER SIX.

WHEN she woke up on Thursday morning, Hannah realised that the weather had changed and that the hitherto mild Indian summer they had been enjoying had been replaced by rough winds and a storm-grey sky. Beyond her living-room window, the wind whipped the Thames into white-capped ruffles. Trees which had seemed green only the day before, as though summer would last for ever, now rattled, dry as paper, and the few people She could see moving about were dressed warmly in autumn clothes.

More from habit than deliberate choice, because she never wore her City clothes when she went home, she dressed almost automatically in a warm pleated skirt in bright blues and greens, lightened by a fine broken yellow line which matched the sweater she was wearing with it. There was also a jacket which she had placed on the back of her chair, ready to put on when she went out.

She ate her breakfast quickly, with one eye on the clock. They were travelling down to Padley in Silas's car, and a little to her surprise he had announced that instead of meeting her at the office he would pick her up at home. When she had protested that this was unnecessary, he had reminded her wryly that by picking her up at home he was saving them both almost an extra hour of travelling, and after that there had been no further possible argument.

Even though she had been watching for him, she still felt a small thrill of shock and pleasure in her stomach when she eventually saw his car draw up outside. Sooner or later she was going to stop reacting like this every time she saw him, she told herself stoically, ignoring the tiny curling sensation of awareness that coiled through her muscles.

She arrived downstairs in the foyer almost at the same time as Silas Walked into it. He gave her a brief smile, holding out his hand to take the overnight bag . she had packed the previous evening.

Shaking her head, she responded to his smile and told him, it's all right. It's quite light. I can carry it myself.'

He didn't argue with her, instead opening the door so that she could precede him through it, and then unlocking the boot of his car. This time when he held out his hand, she let him take her bag. He stowed it efficiently in the car next to a very similar one of his own, and then walked round to the pa.s.senger side, opening the door for her.

'It shouldn't take us long to reach Padley, not once we're clear of the London traffic,' he informed her, reversing the Daimler and heading back to the main road. 'While we're travelling, I'll tell you a bit about my plans for the house. At the moment it's more or less gutted. The builders are hoping to move in at the beginning of next month, and once they're there, they reckon it's going to take them at least six months to get everything in order.'

Hannah frowned. 'Won't you find it very difficult living there with the builders in?' she queried.

'Living there?' He gave her a rather startled glance, and then looked away as he negotiated a very sharp corner. 'I don't live there. The place is enormous, far too large for one person. I live in the Dower House.'