Yesterday's Echoes. Penny JordanЧитать онлайн книгу.
to be against her. She had lost at least fifteen minutes getting petrol, and once she was actually on the motorway there was an unexpected hold-up where a lorry had shed its load and the mess was being cleaned up. She eventually arrived in Chester with only five minutes in which to find a parking spot and to get to Ian Davies’s offices, and Chester was a notoriously difficult place to park.
Luckily she found a spot just when she was beginning to panic and fear that she was going to be late, and even more luckily she found in the glove compartment a long-forgotten bottle of body lotion which a friend had given her to pass on to Chrissie for one of her jumble collections.
As she used it to clean the petrol stains and smell off her legs and shoes, Rosie winced a little at its strong scent. It was a perfume designed to be worn in the evening, not during the day, and it was certainly far too strong for her taste, but at least it had removed the malodorous smell of petrol.
She reached the offices with a minute to spare, and self-consciously checked her appearance in the lift mirror, to see if she looked as flushed and untidy as her hurried rush through the centre of Chester had made her feel.
A little to her own surprise, the reflection that stared back at her from the small mirror looked cool and composed.
Idly, as she waited for the lift to carry her to the top floor, she wondered if anyone had ever thought of placing a hidden camera or watching device in a lift, and then, remembering some of the very odd things she had heard that people sometimes got up to inside them, she reflected wryly that it was probably just as well they did not.
The lift doors opened and she stepped out into the carpeted foyer, composing her features into a calm, professional smile.
THE MEETING PROVED every bit as tricky as she had expected. Ian Davies was a chauvinist who, Rosie suspected, did not entirely approve of the new role that women were playing in the business world.
Had she been a secretary, a personal assistant, someone’s wife or woman friend, she had no doubt that he would have been perfectly charming to her and perhaps even have flirted with her in a courtly, old-fashioned sort of way, but it was plain to her that he was antagonistic not so much to her, but to what she represented.
But, for all his prejudices, he was still very much a business man, and Rosie saw how quickly he assimilated the advantages of using her as his broker.
‘Are you saying that, had you had our business, you would have got us more compensation from our insurers?’ he asked her at one point.
Firmly Rosie shook her head. She was not going to be caught out like that.
‘Without knowing the full details of the arrangements your previous brokers had with your insurers, I can’t say that,’ she told him equably, but smiling, a little grimly, inwardly to herself as she saw that he had caught the small hint she had dropped about his brokers’ private arrangements with the insurers.
She had a very shrewd idea that the brokers he was presently using adopted a policy which she herself refused to consider, and that was an agreement to let some claims go through unhindered in return for the brokers advising other clients not to proceed with theirs, or suggesting to them they should accept lower compensations.
It was her view that her primary loyalty was to her clients and, if that meant a less easy passage with some of the insurance companies, well, so be it.
‘I’ve brought some comparison quotes with me,’ she told him as she stood up. ‘If I may, I’ll leave them with you.’
A little to her surprise, he accompanied her out into the foyer, but after she had thanked him crisply for his time and turned round to leave she realised why.
Jake Lucas was seated in the foyer, obviously waiting to see him, because he was now standing up, and beyond her she could hear Ian Davies saying something about taking him to lunch.
For a moment the shock of seeing him had paralysed her completely, and then Rosie turned quickly on her heel, her heart hammering furiously fast as it drove the blood through her veins, overheating her pale skin.
She felt hot and sick, filled with panic and a frantic desire to escape. It had been bad enough seeing him yesterday, but this was worse.
Frantically she tried to cling to her self-control and professionalism, but in her haste to escape she moved too quickly, and the papers she was carrying slid from her hot, tense grasp.
She bent immediately to pick them up, her face flushing with angry mortification, and then, to her horror, she realised that two pages of paper had drifted to where Jake Lucas was standing.
For a moment she was too panic-stricken to move, and could only crouch where she was, staring numbly at them, filled with sickness and terror at the thought of having to retrieve them.
When Jake himself bent down and picked them up she could only stare at him, unable to drag her gaze from the flat metallic hardness of his grey eyes—like a rabbit trapped by a car’s headlights, she thought mechanically, as he came towards her.
She struggled to stand up, and then completed her self-humiliation by half losing her balance.
The shock of Jake’s hand curling round her arm was like a jolt of electricity. He was so close to her that she could see the dark line along his jaw where he shaved, smell the crisp, clean scent of his soap, see the masculine curl of the dark hairs on his arm where his wrist protruded from his shirt sleeve.
He was still holding her, still watching her…Do something, her brain screamed frantically. Do something…
Somehow she managed to find the willpower to get to her feet, but, as she did so, either because of her tension or the heat it had generated, she was suddenly sharply conscious of the smell of the body lotion she had used to clean her legs, and, she realised, Jake Lucas was aware of it too…She saw the slight, and very betraying, fastidious twitch of his nose, the way his eyes narrowed, the brief, downward glance he gave the lower half of her body and, while she automatically thanked him for his help and turned quickly to make her escape, she was sickly aware of the contempt that faint curl of his mouth had carried.
The look he had given her as she dragged her arm away from his grip had underlined that contempt.
He had never made any attempt to hide from her what he thought of her: that he thought she was sexually promiscuous, that she used her body as a means of getting what she wanted out of life…out of men. And he had just let her know quite plainly that by scenting her legs with that strong, voluptuous perfume she was amply confirming his judgment of her.
What business woman who wanted to be taken seriously at a professional level did anything like that? A discreet touch of something light and cool, a subtle message that said that she was a woman and proud of that fact—that was permissible and acceptable. To wear something so heavy and voluptuous gave off a very different message indeed.
On her way down in the lift, Rosie studied her reflection again. This time it was very different. Her face was flushed, especially along her cheekbones, her eyes huge and dark with emotion, the pupils enormously dilated. Even her mouth looked different somehow, softer, fuller…as though…as though she had been kissed.
Shuddering with distaste, she turned away, and when she stepped out into the street she acknowledged that she felt so emotionally raw and on edge that she was on the verge of tears.
It was just disappointment because Ian Davies had not responded more enthusiastically to her approach, she told herself as she walked back to her car. It wasn’t anything to do with seeing Jake Lucas. That had upset her of course, but she wasn’t going to let the fact that he despised her, that he was contemptuous of her, reduce her to tears.
It wasn’t, after all, his judgment of her that hurt so much; it was the fact that seeing him always reminded him so unbearably of what she had done, of the way she had demeaned herself.
It was bad enough that she knew of her shame and degradation, without him having to know of it too.
But he did know, and nothing she could