London's Eligible Bachelors

CHAPTER SEVEN

RINGme if you need to talk. Those had been Guy’s last words to her a week or so ago.

Sabrina opened her eyes and stared at the blank white space of the ceiling. What woman would want to admit to being needy? And what could she possibly say if she picked the phone up to ring him? Hello, Guy, it’s me, Sabrina. Remember me? I’m the woman you had the one-night stand with in Venice?

And then what?

No. There was no point in ringing him. No point in anything really, other than trying to get through each day the best way she could.

‘Sabrina?’

Sabrina turned over and yawned as she focussed her eyes on the clock on the locker. Nearly ten o’clock. She loved her Sunday morning lie-ins. ‘Yes, Mum?’

‘You’ve got—’ there was a rather odd note in her mother’s voice as she called up the stairs, Sabrina thought ‘—a visitor, dear!’

Some sixth sense warned her. Sabrina sat bolt upright in bed, her baggy Minnie Mouse nightshirt almost swamping her.

‘Who is it?’ she demanded hoarsely.

‘It’s Guy,’ called her mother.

Her heart did a somersault. ‘Guy M-Masters?’

‘Why, how many others do you know?’ came a shockingly familiar voice.

‘I’m still in bed!’ she shouted down, feeling the shiver of nerves beginning to trace chaotic pathways over her skin. There was a split-second pause, and then a sardonic reply.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll wait.’

She told herself that there was no way of getting out of seeing him, even if she’d wanted to. And that was the most disturbing thing of all.

She didn’t want to.

Sabrina felt the powerful acceleration of her heart as she quickly showered and dressed.

Instinct told her not to go over the top with her choice of clothes, while pride nagged at her to make some sort of effort. If he was simply calling by to check on her welfare—then she refused to have him wondering what he had ever seen in her.

But she was actually shaking as she dressed—in a warm woollen dress which she’d bought at the market, its ice-blue colour matching her eyes exactly. And her knee-high leather boots—absolutely ancient now, but lovingly polished and cared for, so that they had entirely justified their original high price-tag.

Sabrina went downstairs, expecting—no, hoping—to feel nothing for him. But she wondered who she had been trying to fool, because the moment she walked into the sitting room and saw him she was incapacitated by his sheer physical beauty.

He looked, she thought with a sharp edge of despair, absolutely wonderful—as wonderful as the first time she had seen him. He was wearing a pair of faded jeans which clung to every millimetre of the longest, most muscular legs she had ever seen. The denim emphasised the jut of his hips and the flat planes of his stomach. And he was wearing a beautiful cashmere sweater in a shade of grey just darker than his eyes. A dark jacket lay heaped over a chair.

There was nothing she could do to stop the primitive leap of pleasure in her heart. But at least she could keep it from showing. ‘Hello, Guy,’ she said calmly.

He thought how fine and how translucent her skin was—so fine that you could quite clearly see the shadowed definition of her amazing cheekbones. He had not meant to come here today—he had been waiting for a phone call which had never materialised. He had expected her to ring, the way women always did. And he had been unable to get her out of his mind. Out of a determination to forget her had grown a need to know that she was OK. Well, she certainly looked OK. More than OK.

‘Hello, Sabrina,’ he said slowly. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Much better.’

They stared at one another, like two people meeting for the first time. Well, maybe not quite like that, thought Sabrina. She knew too much about him to ever be like that. The top button of his shirt was open to reveal the tiniest jagged scar which ran alongside his Adam’s apple. A scar she distinctly remembered running the tip of her tongue along, so that his big body had writhed with a kind of reluctant pleasure.

‘Would you like coffee, or something?’

He looked at the luscious tremble of her lips and the ice-blue dazzle of her eyes. ‘No, I’ll tell you what I’d really like,’ he said slowly.

It was so like something he had murmured at the most intimate point of their lovemaking that Sabrina felt her cheeks begin to burn.

‘I’ve got the car outside,’ he said evenly. I thought maybe you could show me something of the city. I’ll park close to the centre, and we can walk.’

Sabrina looked around her, at her sweet mother who could never be accused of being uptight. But the house was small, no, tiny, and it would be impossible to do anything other than stumble out pleasantries that neither of them meant.

‘I’ll go and get my coat,’ she said.

‘Wrap up warmly, Sabrina,’ said her mother. ‘It may be sunny outside, but it’s bitterly cold in that wind.’

Guy helped her on with the coat, which had a collar of fake fur. Her hair was loose and spilled into the fur, giving her a faintly glamorous appearance, he thought.

His fingers brushed lightly over her shoulders and he felt the dark lickings of temptation scramble at his senses. He remembered how translucent her skin had been, and that his tongue had followed the fine blue tracery of the veins which laced her tiny breasts.

She looked at him, a question darkening the blue of her eyes. ‘Where’s the car?’

‘It’s a little way along the street.’ He omitted to say that the street was way too narrow for such a powerful car.

‘Not the limousine, I hope?’ she asked faintly.

He heard the trace of mockery, and gave a wry smile. So she wasn’t particularly impressed by status symbols. ‘No, not the limousine.’ They began to walk up the road together. ‘The landlord of the pub ordered that car, not me. He obviously took one look at me and made an assumption about what my requirements were. I wasn’t intending to make quite such a statement,’ he added drily.

‘Well, you did,’ Sabrina remarked as they drew alongside a more sedate, but equally luxurious car. ‘My mother said that all week the neighbours have been dying to know who the visitor was.’

He paused in the act of unlocking the door, his grey gaze steady and imperturbable. ‘And what did you tell them?’

She managed to return his look, though it wasn’t easy—not when it took her mind back to how she had seen it when he’d been in her arms. Stripped of all pretence, darkened and glazed with…lust, she reminded herself painfully. That was all it had been. Lust.

‘I said that you were…’ She hesitated and now the gaze became laser-sharp, lancing through her. ‘A friend.’

His mouth twisted into a cool smile as he held the door open for her. ‘A friend?’ he mocked.

‘What should I have said, then? A lover?’

‘That certainly would have been more accurate, wouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t think so, Guy. It’s in the past tense now.’

She slid her legs into the car. Actually, she had wanted to say ‘acquaintance’, because that had seemed more accurate than ‘friend’, though it hadn’t really seemed appropriate either—not in view of what had happened. ‘Acquaintance’ implied that you didn’t know somebody terribly well, and yet she knew Guy Masters exceedingly well. Sabrina swallowed. In certain respects, anyway.

She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead while he drove into the city and parked. And in the dim, ugly light of the concrete car park he looked down at her.

‘You haven’t asked me why I’m here,’ he said suddenly.

‘Maybe I’m afraid of what your answer will be.’ She lifted her shoulders a little. ‘Why are you here?’

‘That’s just it.’ He gave a short laugh and shook his head as he locked the car doors. ‘I don’t know!’

With a chill wind blowing in their faces, they walked right into the centre of the city, with the cathedral spire dominating the skyline and drawing them in like a magnet.

‘Want to go inside?’ she asked softly.

He glittered her a dark smile. ‘You know I do.’

Yes, she had known that, just as she instinctively knew that he didn’t want a guided tour, not today. The stiff set of his shoulders said, Stay away, quite clearly.

So she walked around the huge empty cathedral with him, quickly turning away when he paused to stare up at the altar and an indescribable sadness seemed to harden his beautiful face into stone.

And that was grief, she recognised painfully, a grief too bitter to intrude into.

Outside, the wind whipped her hair into ribbons which curled over her cheeks and Guy found his fingers itching to brush them away.

‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said abruptly.

She felt the sinking sensation of disappointment. ‘OK,’ she agreed.

But as he drew up at the end of her street he made no move, taking the key out of the ignition and turning to look at her.

‘So what happened?’ he asked quietly. ‘To Michael?’ he persisted softly. ‘How did he die?’

There was silence.

‘It was a car crash,’ she said eventually. ‘He wanted to go out for the evening, and I didn’t. We were supposed to be saving up. He tried to change my mind, but I wouldn’t. He…’ This bit was hard, but she forced herself to continue. ‘He said that I was a control freak.’

His eyes narrowed with interest. ‘A control freak?’ he echoed softly. ‘Is that so?’

She supposed that he didn’t believe her, and how could she blame him? She hadn’t exactly behaved like that around him, had she? ‘Well, that’s the most peculiar thing—I do like to be in control, yes. Normally.’

‘And so do I,’ he said, his voice as bitter as the recrimination in his eyes. ‘Perhaps we just bring out the worst in each other.’

And the best, she thought suddenly. The very best.

‘We had a row,’ she remembered, her voice slowing painfully. ‘A blazing row. And Michael got angry and he stormed out, and…and…that’s when he crashed. He was killed instantly.’

Guy nodded, his grey eyes narrowing perceptively. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said slowly. ‘So you carry all the guilt, as well as the grief, do you, Sabrina?’

‘If only I hadn’t been so rigid,’ she said bitterly. ‘If I’d gone with him then it might not have happened.’

‘And it just might. That’s a pretty heavy burden to carry, you know, Sabrina. What with that and our little fling you could soon find that feeling guilty becomes too much of a habit.’

She unclipped her seat belt angrily. ‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to—’

The truth?’ he drawled, and something in the way he said it stopped her in her tracks.

‘Do you think I feel good about myself?’ she demanded. ‘Letting a man who was virtually a stranger make love to me, and so soon—’

And so thoroughly, he thought longingly. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he interrupted coolly. ‘I thought we’d already done the regret trip, Sabrina.’

‘We?’ she queried. ‘You mean you feel bad about what happened, too?’

‘What do you think?’

Sabrina looked down at her lap. So now she knew.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she realised aloud, but he shook his head.

‘Oh, yes, you do,’ he said softly. ‘You haven’t seen my flat, or met my family, or seen where I work—but none of that is important. You’ve seen me at my most—’ He bit the word out as if he didn’t like it very much. ‘Exposed.’

‘Like every woman you’ve been to bed with, you mean?’

He shook his head. ‘That night was something outside my experience. Like you, Sabrina, I like to be in control—and on that occasion I most definitely wasn’t.’

‘Guy,’ she said suddenly, and something in the way she said it made his eyes narrow.

‘What?’

‘Who were you thinking about—back there in the cathedral?’

He stilled. Usually he would have blanked such an intrusive question, but hadn’t he just been asking her questions just like that?

‘I was thinking about my father,’ he said slowly, feeling her suck the admission from him. ‘He died a long time ago,’ he said, and then his face hardened. ‘But we’re not here to talk about me, are we?’

‘Apparently not.’ She shrugged listlessly.

‘What you need to face up to now is that it happened! Everything. Michael died and we made love all night long, and however much you might want to unwish that—you can’t. Fact. End of story. The important question is where do you go from here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted brokenly.

His mouth tightened as he saw the dark shadows thrown onto her pale skin by her sharpened cheekbones. ‘I’m taking you out to lunch,’ he said grimly.

She shook her head, more tempted than she should have been. ‘I can’t. I usually have lunch with my mother on Sundays.’

‘Then bring her along.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Why not? She eats lunch, doesn’t she?’

Sabrina nodded, surprised and pleased. Michael wouldn’t have dreamed of issuing such an invitation—he’d seen parents as nothing but authority figures, just hell-bent on stopping you enjoying yourself. ‘I’m sure she’d be delighted,’ she said truthfully.

‘Then let’s go and find her,’ he said, still in that same grim voice.

Sabrina’s mother was as pleased by the invitation as her daughter had anticipated, especially when Guy chose a restaurant on the very edge of the city, one which neither of the two women had ever visited before.

‘Oh, we couldn’t possibly—it’s much too expensive!’ protested Mrs Cooper.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Guy patiently.

‘And we’ll never get a table,’ put in Sabrina.

The grey eyes glittered. ‘Want to bet?’

And of course he got a table—how could she have ever doubted for a moment that he wouldn’t? Men like Guy Masters always got tables.

Sabrina tried very hard to eat her shrimp salad and lobster with some element of appetite, but it was unbelievably difficult to concentrate on the food when there was such a distraction on the other side of the table.

Her eyes kept straying to the dark gleam of Guy’s hair as he sat and chatted to her mother. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone and she could just see the faint shadowing where the dark hair began.

She wiped a damp palm over the napkin which lay on her lap. What on earth would her mother say if she had any idea that the man who was chatting to her so companionably had ravished her daughter more than she’d believed it possible for a woman to be ravished.

Guy studied her from over his wineglass, suddenly registering her tense silence. ‘You’re very quiet, Sabrina,’ he observed.

‘Oh, she’s quiet like that a lot of the time,’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘Can’t seem to snap out of it, can you, darling?’

‘I don’t think Guy particularly wants to hear, Mum,’ said Sabrina warningly.

But Mrs Cooper was only just warming to her subject. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry that Michael is dead—of course I am—and it’s hit her very hard, as you would expect.’

Sabrina didn’t dare meet Guy’s eyes for fear of the derision she might find there. Grief-stricken people didn’t tend to behave in the way she had behaved.

‘I know what it’s like myself,’ said Mrs Cooper, and she reached over and patted Sabrina’s head. ‘After my husband left me, people always saw me just as a divorcee—not as Maureen Cooper in her own right.’

Guy nodded. So Sabrina had no father either.

‘No one will give the poor girl a chance to get over it. And the trouble is that this is where she grew up. Everyone knows her, and everyone knew Michael—and she can’t escape from their memories. I think she should get out and have a little fun. That’s why I persuaded her to go to Venice—she’d always wanted to go there—but when she came back she looked worse than ever.’

‘Have you quite finished, Mum?’

‘Can’t you get away somewhere?’ queried Guy thoughtfully.

‘Like where?’ She met the stormy challenge of his gaze. She had tried fleeing to Venice and look where that had got her.

‘How about London? That’s where most people want to go.’

‘London’s expensive,’ said Sabrina defensively. ‘And I don’t earn very much. And, besides, I don’t really feel like going into a city where I don’t know anyone.’

‘But you know me, Sabrina,’ came the surprising response.

She violently began spearing at a piece of lobster.

‘You know you can always come and stay with me.’ He’d spoken the words aloud before he’d realised their implication.

For a second Sabrina froze, and then slowly lifted her head to gaze at him in disbelief. ‘What did you say?’ she whispered.

‘I have a flat,’ he said. ‘A big flat—plenty big enough to accommodate another person. Come and use the spare room for a while.’

She thought of sharing a flat with him, even temporarily, and her heart began to bang against her ribcage—until she forced herself to quash the hopeless dream and replace it with reality. ‘It’s a crazy idea,’ she said woodenly. ‘I don’t have a job to go to.’

‘So find one.’ He shrugged.

‘It isn’t as easy as that, Guy,’ said Mrs Cooper gently.

Sabrina found herself thinking that Wells did have another branch, in the capital, but loyally she found herself confirming her mother’s words. ‘No, it isn’t.’

Guy stirred his coffee, as if he didn’t really care, and Mrs Cooper got up from the table and beamed. ‘Will you excuse me for a minute?’

Guy rose to his feet until Mrs Cooper had disappeared, and Sabrina thought what impeccable manners he had. She stared across the table at him as he sat back down. ‘It’s very…kind of you, Guy, but you know very well I can’t accept your offer.’

He coolly returned her stare. ‘Do I?’

She narrowed her eyes in frustration. ‘Don’t be so obtuse.’

‘Then don’t be so damned evasive—and come right out with what it is you want to say!’

Surely he wasn’t really expecting her to say it out loud. But, from his unhelpful silence, he clearly was. Reminding herself that they had already been as intimate as any couple could be, Sabrina drew in a deep breath.