Escape Me Never

CHAPTER THREE

CASS was still shaking two hours later, but from rage, she assured herself over and over again, not any other emotion.

She turned and punched savagely at an inoffensive sofa cushion. The sheer sexual arrogance of the creature. He clearly hadn’t listened to one word she’d said, so securely armoured in his own conceit that it made him deaf to any point of view but his own.

And when she got back to work, gallingly, she would have to maintain a surface civility towards him at least. Or she could go to Barney, and ask to be taken off the account, she thought frowningly, only that would involve her in all kinds of explanations, she would much prefer to avoid.

But there had to be some way to convince the Rohan Grants of this world that she was not just—there for the taking, the frustrated widow of joke and insinuation.

She hated milky drinks, but she made one for herself before she went to bed, in the hope that it would help her sleep, then lay tossing and turning until far into the night.

But contrary to all expectations, she felt fine when she woke the next morning. Perhaps temper had helped burn out the few remaining germs, she thought drily.

After breakfast, she went downstairs to collect Jodie.

‘I see your visitor was back,’ Mrs Barrett commented archly as she let Cass in.

Cass smiled coolly. ‘A little problem at work.’ And that was putting it mildly, she added silently.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Mrs Barrett said, vexed. ‘You’d think they’d leave you alone when you’re poorly.’

‘There’s no justice, Mrs B.,’ Cass said cheerfully. ‘But I’ll take care it doesn’t happen again.’ And how.

Her reunion with her daughter was everything she could have desired. Until they got back to their own flat, that is.

‘Mrs Barrett’s nice,’ Jodie remarked. ‘She lets me watch unsuitable things on television. She calls it “the box”.’

Cass’s lip quivered. ‘How do you know they’re unsuitable, madam?’

‘Because you always change channels when they come on. You think I don’t notice, but I do,’ Jodie said serenely. ‘Is that man coming back?’

Cass’s heart skipped a beat. ‘What—man?’ She tried to sound casual.

‘The one who came to see you. Mrs Barrett said he came again yesterday.’ Jodie’s face was angelic. ‘Is he going to be my Daddy?’

‘No, he is not,’ Cass said forcibly.

Jodie gave a heavy sigh. ‘I liked him.’

Cass gave her a long look. ‘Jodie—you didn’t say anything to him, did you?’

‘What about?’ Jodie didn’t meet her gaze—a bad sign.

‘About being your Daddy,’ Cass said desperately.

The answer was too long in coming. ‘No-o-o,’ Jodie said, slowly and evasively.

‘Jodie,’ Cass threatened.

Her daughter’s mouth trembled. ‘He didn’t mind, Mummy. He wasn’t cross.’ She ventured an appealing look. ‘He laughed.’

‘I bet he’s never stopped,’ Cass said savagely. ‘What on earth possessed you?’ She sighed, running a distracted irritable hand through her hair. ‘Never—ever say such a thing to a visitor again.’

‘Mrs Barrett said he was your boyfriend.’

‘Well, Mrs Barrett was wrong,’ Cass said with unwonted sharpness. She saw Jodie flinch, and gentled her tone. ‘Sweetheart, he’s a client—a very important man at my work. Not Daddy material at all,’ she added, trying to make a belated joke of it all.

‘He said he’d be honoured,’ Jodie said mournfully.

Cass could have screamed.

She supposed reluctantly, thinking it over later, that it was to his credit that he’d been kind to the child—let her down lightly. But it didn’t make her like him any better, or add relish to the prospect of having to face him again.

She was quite well enough to return to work on Monday morning. Roger was also back, delighted at the acquisition of the Eve account, but far more interested, Cass thought amusedly, in the lingering symptoms of ‘flu which he was convinced still afflicted him.

And when he’d disposed regretfully of his various aches and pains, he then wanted to discuss Rohan Grant. Compared with whom, even Roger’s health was a more acceptable topic, Cass thought crossly.

She steeled herself to answer his questions coolly and concisely trying not to give any of her personal feelings away.

‘And you don’t like him,’ Roger said when she’d finished, proving that she was no actress.

‘Do I have to?’ Cass asked rather sourly. ‘I wasn’t too keen on Randy Sid, King of the Stainless Steel Sink either, but it made no difference to the campaign.’

‘So you’d put the high-flying Mr Grant in the same category, would you?’ Roger gave her a thoughtful glance. ‘What happened Cass? Don’t tell me he made a pass at you,’ he added grinning.

‘All right, I won’t.’ She made a business of searching in her desk drawer for something.

‘You mean he did?’ He sounded almost awed. ‘Dear God.’ He whistled. ‘The guy’s supposed to have an eye for women, but he must have laser vision if he could penetrate that battle dress top, and all the other ethnic layers you’re usually cocooned in. How do you turn him on, Cassie? With the dance of the seven Greenham Common ponchos?’

‘Very amusing.’ Cass slammed the drawer, narrowly missing removing her own finger in the process. ‘I had no idea that my love life, or lack of it, was of such consuming interest to everyone here.’

Roger said quietly, ‘Actually, I was joking, but if I’ve offended you, Cass, then I’m truly sorry.’ He paused. ‘Has it happened at last? Has someone—some man really got to you?’

‘No,’ she said controlledly. ‘Why do you ask?’

He shrugged. ‘Because it has to happen sometime.’ He frowned swiftly. ‘Yet not, I’d have thought, with Rohan Grant.’ He gave her a troubled look. ‘He’s the big league, Cass. His reputation says he likes to love them and leave them. Any relationship with him would be high on passion and good times, but lacking in anything else, including longevity.’

She smiled coolly. ‘My sentiments entirely, so I’m in no danger.’ She picked up some of the papers on her desk. ‘This fireplace company. It seems to me the designs they want to feature in their ads are the really ugly ones. How can we explain that tactfully?’

She was passing Accounts on her way out to lunch later when a man came out. She recognised him as the one who’d spoken to her about the bill for her dress at the lunch party, and spontaneously they smiled at each other. He fell in beside her.

‘Have you given it to the jumble sale yet?’

She laughed. ‘I’m waiting for a good cause.’ She was trying to remember his name. They’d been introduced when he joined Finiston Webber just before Christmas. Lloyd, she thought. That was it—Lloyd Haswell.

He said, ‘Where do you go for lunch?’

She shook her head. ‘I rarely do. I cook in the evenings for myself and my daughter, and I generally use my lunch hours for shopping.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I was going to ask you if you’d join me. There’s a pub I go to that does a marvellous steak and kidney pie. Unless, of course, you’re a vegetarian,’ he added doubtfully.

‘No,’ Cass said cheerfully. ‘I’m an unashamed carnivore still.’ She stole a fleeting look at him under her lashes. He was about her own age or slightly older, nice looking, slightly diffident in his manner. Almost as different from Rohan Grant as it was possible to get. She added, ‘Actually, I am quite hungry. I’m getting over ‘flu, and I haven’t felt like eating a great deal over the weekend.’

His face lit up. ‘Does that mean I have company?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ she returned gaily, refusing to feel guilty at his obvious pleasure. If the consensus of opinion was that she needed a man in her life, then she would have one, she decided coldly and clinically. Someone nice and inoffensive like this Lloyd, whom she could keep at arm’s length when it mattered. She wanted someone to be seen with; someone to convince Rohan Grant that he was wasting his time.

It might not be fair to Lloyd, she thought with compunction, but it wouldn’t do him any lasting damage either.

In the event, she found him good company, with a ready sense of humour. When he mentioned a new West End comedy, and said he was thinking of getting tickets, it was no hardship at all to agree to go with him.

They arrived back at the agency together, and she guessed that the news would spread rapidly. At one time she would have found this painful, but there were worse threats hovering over her now than a little office gossip.

When she got to her own office, Roger was there, just replacing the telephone receiver.

He said ‘McDowell’s been on from Eve.’ He paused. ‘He wanted to know if we’d definitely signed Tracey Kent for the perfume commercial.’

‘Why did he want to know that?’ Cass frowned slightly. ‘Both he and Handson thought she was perfect.’

Roger sighed. ‘Orders from above,’ he said laconically. ‘Apparently the big boss wants Serena Vance to do the launch.’

‘And does he know we haven’t an icicle’s chance in hell of getting Serena Vance?’ Cass asked crisply.

Roger shrugged. ‘He thinks we have. Apparently he and Miss Vance—know each other very well, and she will be happy to star in the Eve commercial as a favour to him.’ He leered. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just what he did for her?’

Cass said with distaste, ‘I’d prefer not to.’ She managed a little laugh. ‘So—we’re stuck with the Randy Sid syndrome all over again.’

‘Well, hardly,’ Roger objected. ‘At least Serena Vance can act. But we’ll have to re-jig her script. The words that would have been acceptable from someone who looked as dewily innocent as Tracey would be ludicrous spoken by Miss Vance.’

Cass fiddled with her pen. ‘Of course, we don’t really know if she’ll do it,’ she pointed out. ‘Perhaps Rohan Grant is just—shooting a line.’

‘Perhaps, but I don’t think so,’ Roger said drily. ‘What would be the point? No, I bet when shooting starts, the camera will be lingering over Miss Vance’s deservedly famous attributes, instead of Tracey’s innocent charms.’ He sighed enviously. ‘What a thing it is to have power, as well as good looks and charisma. I wish Serena Vance owed me a favour,’ he added disconsolately.

When she got home that night, Cass went through a pile of old colour supplements which she had put out for collection by the dustmen, until she found the one, dated a few months earlier, which she wanted. Serena Vance’s challenging beauty stared up from the cover beneath the legend—‘Serena Vance—sex symbol or serious actress?’ Cass couldn’t remember what, if any, conclusion the article inside had come to, but she did recall the other full page photograph which had accompanied it, showing the actress naked except for a few discreetly placed folds of an opulent wild mink cloak. A present, the caption had stated, from an admirer.

‘I wonder who that was!’ Cass muttered to herself, thrusting the magazine back into the pile.

It had come, she told herself, as no great surprise to learn that Rohan Grant had been the lover of someone like the voluptuous Serena. Nevertheless it made his subsequent behaviour towards herself all the more baffling and ridiculous. Unless, of course, he was just amusing himself at her expense—tormenting her to see how she would react. A young widow with a reputation as a loner would seem easy game for a man used to finding his pleasures with sophisticated beauties.

It was a train of thought which should have made her angry, but instead she found herself getting more and more depressed, although she reminded herself that was probably the aftermath of the ’flu.

She cooked supper, had a game of draughts with Jodie before putting her to bed, then settled down with notepad and pen to watch some television. There were several important contracts coming up for renewal at the agency, and she wanted to do a critical breakdown on some of the commercials already running, to show how the campaigns could be improved and up-dated.

But it was difficult, she found, keeping her mind on her work for once. It kept straying, almost obsessively, back to her various encounters with Rohan Grant, analysing them, trying to discover why she’d reacted to him as she had. Remembering particularly that last confrontation when he had told her openly that he intended to seduce her. Remembering his touch—that brief kiss with painful, disturbing clarity.

She thrust the pad and pen away from her with hands that shook. Fool, she castigated herself. He didn’t mean it—any of it. He was just having a little game at your expense, because you annoyed him by turning him down. He decided he’d give you something to think about, and by sitting brooding like this over his nonsense, you’re playing right into his hands.

She looked round the living room and sighed. The flat wasn’t large, but it was enough for her needs and Jodie’s and she’d become casually fond of the place. Now, the walls seemed to be closing in on her, making her feel trapped—restless.

She bit her lip. Maybe she should take Mrs Barrett up on her eager offers to babysit. She had the theatre next week to look forward to, but there were other things too. The cinema, for one instance, and Roger and his wife for another. They were always inviting her for meals, and she’d usually refused, terrified that they might try to matchmake by inviting some spare man of their acquaintance. And yet what had she to fear from such casual meetings?

Staying in alone was no safeguard, and nor was wearing deliberately dowdy clothes. Her real security was Brett’s memory, and the knowledge that, after him, there could never be another man for her.

The past. Her secret armour against the world—and against a man like Rohan Grant in particular.

She bought a new dress for the theatre trip, a silky turquoise thing with a loosely bloused top. Oh, Barney, what did you start, she thought, as she stared back at the attractive stranger she saw in the fitting room mirror.

It got Jodie’s unqualified approval too.

‘You look like a fairy princess,’ she said ecstatically. ‘Are you going with that man?’

Cass smiled at her. ‘I’m going with a man, darling, but not that one. A very nice man, too,’ she added as Jodie’s face visibly drooped.

Lloyd was proving to be extremely pleasant company. He didn’t try to monopolise her at work, but they’d had lunch a couple of times together. She’d almost invited him to call for her at the flat, instead of meeting in the foyer, but decided to stick to the prior arrangement. It wouldn’t be fair, she thought, to arouse hopes in Lloyd which she had no intention of fulfilling.

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