Shades Of Submission: Fifty By Fifty Part 53

I just smiled and told her nothing. It was easier that way, and it helped to put some distance between me and events.

He called on the Thursday, but I was in an acquisitions meeting. As soon as I was back in my office there was a tap at the door and Ellie poked her head around. "It's me, Ellie," she said, in that endearing way of hers. "You missed a call. I took a message."

I sat, but she said no more. She was playing that game: I'd been stonewalling her all week and now I was going to have to tease this out of her.

I raised an eyebrow, but refused to give in and ask.

Finally, she said, "It was him. The Honorable Will. He wanted to talk to you. I took his number in case you want to call back. Do you want to call back?"

"Thanks, Ell," I said. "But no thanks. He's had his chance. No more messages from him, okay?"

Attagirl, Trudy. Hot, rich, exciting guy is after you and you bat him away. Way to go, girl. Way to go.

"Thank you, Ellie." She was still standing in the doorway, as if expecting more.

Hot, rich, exciting, yes. But also arrogant, unpredictable, and manipulative, too.

The short time she'd spent with him had been breathtaking, but the price was too high. She wanted more than that. Or less. She wasn't sure which.

But what it came down to was that she wanted a man she could trust. Was that too much to ask?

"I don't want to talk to him, okay?"

Disappointed, Ellie finally retreated.

He was waiting for me. Friday night after work. Sitting on the second step outside the Victorian terrace where I had an apartment. His tailored charcoal suit was rumpled, as if he'd slept in it. His knees were tucked up to his chest, his arms folded across them, the sleeves pulled halfway up his forearms. His shoes were expensive, of course: long and slender, rubbed black leather with patent toe-caps. His pants were a slim fit, narrow at the ankle and calf, emphasizing the long, athletic lines of his legs, his body.

On the ring finger of his right hand he wore a silver signet ring. I remembered it from before: the family seal. The ring was hundreds of years old, just another of those little things that surrounded this man, everyday reminders that he and his kind were anything but everyday.

I'd stopped across the street. I hadn't even realized that I'd come to a halt. Hadn't realized that my heart was pounding as if it were trying to escape from my chest.

Studying his suit, his shoes, his signet ring... anything but his face.

He was watching me. Studying me in return. Those dark eyes.

Predator eyes that's what I'd thought, the first time I met him, the first time those eyes latched onto me at Ethan's wedding. Now, those eyes burned into me with that same intensity and I felt pinned to the spot.

I looked down.

How was it that he made me blush so easily? I don't blush. That's not the person I am.

He stood.

There was that fuzz of dark stubble along his jaw again, the tie knotted tight but pulled loose around his neck, the top b.u.t.ton of his s.h.i.+rt undone.

He stepped away from the entrance to my building, waving a hand as if to usher me through. No words.

I crossed the street, almost walked straight on past him, then paused.

"I never know where I stand with you," I said softly. "I never know when you're telling the truth, and when you're gaming me. I never know when you're leading me on. I don't know you..."

It was his turn to look down, a sudden vulnerability in those dark eyes. "Do you even want to know me?" he asked, and the way he phrased it, his words could have been either a question or a warning.

I looked at him, waited until his eyes returned to meet mine. I couldn't find the words, and I didn't know what that silence said.

Ask me any time up until that point and I'd have said, No. No way. He'd had his chance.

But when he asked me then... well, suddenly I didn't know what the answer would be if I opened my mouth and spoke. So: the silence.

Do I really want to know you, Willem Bentinck-Stanley?

"I"

"Don't go apologizing again," I cut him off. He'd apologized far too much in the short time I'd known him. He'd done so much that deserved apology.

Do I really want to know you?

"I owe you an explanation, at least," he said.

I didn't ask him in.

I knew him well enough not to trust him. I knew myself well enough.

Even after all we'd been through, there was that magnetism, invisible lines that bound us even as we stood awkwardly on that doorstep, an energy that had made that Austrian night so magical.

Close my eyes and I could feel that hardness of his body against mine. His strength, a strength that could crush. His pa.s.sion, his tenderness.

So no, I didn't ask him in.

We went to Cafe Creme, a little patisserie and coffee shop a couple of streets away from my apartment. Neutral territory.

I had Lapsang Souchong; he had double espresso. We sat at a little round table on the street under a striped canopy, and around us people rushed by, a woman with a pram, a black cab, a kid on a moped with an enormous box strapped on the back.

Will cradled his tiny cup in two hands looking like some fairytale giant.

Those eyes.

I was a b.u.t.terfly pinned to a board by those eyes.

"So," I said, wondering why I was the one who should feel so awkward when he was the one with everything to prove. "Sally Fielding."

He looked down.

I sipped at my tea, and gave him a few seconds, but when he didn't answer, I continued, "You said you owed me an explanation... You left me with a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned note!"

He looked down, then up again, and suddenly there was resolve in his eyes. "Sally Fielding," he repeated. "I knew her at Cambridge..."

"She was at All Hallows?" I wondered then if I'd met her, when I'd first visited Ethan at college. I'd hung out with him and his buddies for a time, back then, when I was still trying to work out what to do with myself after Yale and an interns.h.i.+p at a New York publis.h.i.+ng house that had been lots of hard work and taken me nowhere.

He nodded. "Skinny young thing," he said. "Lived life twice as fast as anyone I'd ever known. Took your breath away. Life and soul, and all that."

At first I was thrown by his gall: sitting here with a woman he had seduced, reminiscing about another girl in that swoony kind of way. But then I recognized his tone, and immediately stopped being p.i.s.sed with him. He wasn't talking about a past love, as such; he was talking about someone who had just died; he was in shock still.

I thought back to when my folks had died. To when Ethan and I would find ourselves talking, tailing off into long silences. We couldn't speak back then, and had never really done so since. Death does that; it robs you of the ability to properly grieve sometimes.

"So what happened?" I asked.

He shrugged, and I wondered how many people ever saw this side of him, the vulnerable Will, the confused one.

"She had a thing for Ethan," he said. "She hung around us, became one of the group. She and Ethan had a thing for a while, but it never really went anywhere. She was mad for him, but he didn't feel the same way for her. He was just a red-blooded young man: she threw herself at him, so he let her, but that's all it ever was, you know?"

I'd meant what had happened recently this Sally Fielding was dead, Will had mentioned blackmail but clearly he thought I was asking what had happened back at college.

"And that's all it should have ever been," he went on. "But we were young and we were exploring, and things got out of hand."

"'Out of hand'?"

"Sally was the one who started calling us the Cabal, you know? The three of us... One for all and all for one the Three Musketeers would have been more appropriate."

The Cabal. He'd mentioned that before; Charlie had too. I'd always thought the name sounded a bit sinister.

"There was a bit of a hoo-hah..."

G.o.d, he was so d.a.m.ned English sometimes!

"...a scandal. I did what I could, the family rallied round, kept it all out of the papers."

I'd Googled him, of course. I'd tried to find out more about him, but there had been nothing. Will, and his family, were obviously adept at keeping out of the limelight.

"A scandal?"

"Oh, it was nothing, but it could have been made into something, in the wrong hands. You know what the Press can be like. Three young well-connected men, Cambridge, a girl... Money and s.e.x and people with a long way to fall ripe for the paparazzi, you know?"

I thought of Julie Donovan, one of my authors: her first book had been about her time as a working-cla.s.s Belfast girl and her first encounters with the wealthy elite. I knew exactly what Will meant about that mix. But... three guys and a girl... a scandal. What was he hinting at?

And Ethan? Charlie? My big brother and the man I'd lived with for a year neither of them had ever hinted at scandal. I wondered then just how much I'd been blind to in the past, or perhaps how much I'd blinded myself to.

"Anyway, it all died down," said Will. "The four of us drifted apart. Sally hit a rough patch and dropped out of college. I made sure she was looked after, but then we lost touch and it was all forgotten about."

"Until she reappeared..."

He nodded, then glanced to one side, caught the eye of a waitress and tapped his cup for a refill. We paused while the waitress came out with a fresh cup for him and more tea for me. He thanked her, which confounded me again: that arrogant tap of the cup, as if the waitress was nothing to him, and then taking the trouble to thank her. Such an odd mix of a man.

"That's why I was in Austria," he said. "She was there, at a little clinic. Discreet."

That could only mean one thing. "Rehab?"

He nodded. "I'd thought she was over all that, after she dropped out of college. We put her through rehab then, too. I thought she'd sorted herself out. Poor thing."

"I thought you said she was blackmailing you..."

He shrugged. "She was. I shouldn't have allowed myself to get drawn in. She didn't know what she was getting involved in."

He was shaking. He put his cup down so it wouldn't show, but his hand had been trembling. I reached across, put mine on his, on the table, and waited for him to calm.

"I move in different circles these days," he said. "It can be dangerous. Not the kind of circles where a doped up innocent like Sally should ever be, making a lot of noise and thinking she's being clever."

"Is that what happened? Something to do with... the things you do?"

"I think so, yes," he said. "I think she just got caught in the crossfire. Such a mess. Such a silly f.u.c.king cow. Why couldn't she keep her head down?"

"Could you have done anything?"

"Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not."

I didn't know what to say, then, and suddenly I thought, Am I just another Sally Fielding? Drawn into his circle, exposed to risks I couldn't even begin to grasp... I didn't know who this man was; I was barely even sc.r.a.ping below the surface.

But one thing I did know was that he was dangerous company to keep.

I should get up from that table, walk away. It was nothing to do with me.

I squeezed his hand, felt a slight response, kept that pressure up, that contact: hand on hand, skin on skin. It was a very human thing, a very intimate one.

Finally, he looked up from the table. Those dark eyes, no longer the predator look, the calculating, gaming seducer. There were tears there, pooling, not quite spilling over.

He reached across the table then, and put his free hand tenderly to my cheek. I pushed against him, like a cat, and his thumb found the line of my cheekbone, his touch sensitive, light.

I was mad at him. He'd abandoned me in a hotel in a foreign country, left only a note on the pillow beside me. He'd seduced me and then left me.

I was mad at him.

I kept trying to remind myself of that, but it was an exercise that was lost almost as soon as I started.

I'm mad at you.

His embrace was like steel, strong arms wrapped around me, hands on my back, his face buried against my neck, as we stood in that street under the dappled shade of the lime trees, their leaves just starting to turn golden. All the things you notice as you stand in an embrace like that, your head rus.h.i.+ng. The cars crawling past in the narrow, heavily parked-up street, the kids playing on the sidewalk, the For Sale notice in a window, a jet's contrails ruler-straight across the deep blue sky.

His scent, that heady mix of citrus and spice.

I'm mad at you.

Walking together, not touching. Bound together by those invisible lines again. A tension. A magnetism. A need.

I'm mad at you.