A Question of Pride (21 page)

Pregnancy had made her vulnerable, and Max seemed to like her dependency on him. Their desire for each other seemed to be enough to hold them together and, for now, that was all that mattered.

The evening dusk gave way to darkness, and the pretty lanterns were allowed to give the performance they were there for. The smell of juicy steaks teased the taste-buds, and the music drew them towards the dance-floor.

'Dance with me.' Max bent to murmur close to her ear while she was talking to one of her mother's friends.

She turned her face up to his, reading the dark glint in his eyes and smiling softly at it. 'Yes, please,' she replied.

There was something a little magical about them tonight. Max could feel it too, she knew, and as he drew her on to the dance-floor in Amy's drawing-room Clea stepped very close to him, so her body brushed his with an intimacy that held them breathless.

Her arms went beneath his jacket, stroking along his lean waist to the lithe curve of his back, and Max let out a soft breath that sighed a little as it was released, his hands splayed across her spine, holding her to the drugging warmth of his body.

The music swirled around them. Clea rested her cheek against his shoulder, and he responded by lowering his mouth to her hair. 'I wish we were alone,' he murmured deeply. 'It sets me on fire just to touch you.'

I know, thought Clea. You do the same for me. If only I lit other feelings in you. If only ...

She turned her head so her mouth made moist contact with his warm throat, tongue flicking out to taste him with a sensuality she could not deny. Her fingers curled, nails digging into the hard muscled skin beneath the silk of his shirt, and Max jerked on a spasm of pleasure.

'Stop it,' he protested huskily. And Clea smiled when she felt the answering throb in his lower body press closer to her.

'You wanted to dance,' she reminded him throatily.

His hold on her tightened. 'It was either endure this torment, or drag you off to that bed your parents have kindly loaned us for tonight.'

'Poor Max!' she teased. 'Having to deny himself for the sake of boring convention.'

He gave a wry laugh. 'To think that I assured your doctor that
I
wouldn't overtire
you!'

'Making love with you doesn't tire me,' she argued softly. 'It—it uplifts me. I love your body, Max,' she whispered to him in blatant seduction. 'All hard and fierce and ...'

'Clea!' he warned roughly. 'Behave! Or I'll have to put the width of the room between us!' And he wasn't joking, Clea noted on a chuckle.

They did become separated later. Joe came looking for Max, dragging him off to meet someone who had voiced an interest in buying a computer system for his company.

The air had grown hot and sticky inside, so Clea wandered outside, breathing in the cooler evening air, glad of some time to herself. She walked slowly down the garden, smiling at the small clutches of people she passed by, following a line of pretty, coloured lanterns until she reached the darker end of the garden where the bench seat stood beneath the flowering cherry tree which was just beginning to sprout fruit.

She sat down, relaxing back to enjoy the tranquillity. The music barely infiltrated this far down the garden; it was darker, the party seeming miles away from this secret hide-out she'd found for herself.

Her mind slipped back to the last time she had sat here, one cold and frosty morning four months ago, when James had put her through the third degree. She smiled at the memory. James had been so shocked, so absolutely floored by her news! Then he had laughed, she remembered. He had sat here, next to her, and guffawed like a man demented.

'Fancy meeting you here.' It was quite uncanny, having James's voice break into her thoughts like that when she had just been thinking about him. She looked up and smiled.

'You have fairies at the bottom of your garden, James,' she told him with mock solemnity, patting the seat beside her in invitation.

'Black-haired wicked sprites, you mean,' he drawled, taking the proffered seat.

'Were you looking for me?' She hoped not. It was nice here, she didn't feel ready to leave as yet.

'Mmm, yes and no,' he drawled evasively. 'Max was looking for you. Amy thought she'd seen you strolling this way, but couldn't be sure, so I suggested I come and look while Max searched the rooms inside the house.'

'All this concern!' she quipped. 'You'll have my head swelling, if you're not careful.'

James leaned back, his gaze on the swaying lanterns just beyond their hiding place. 'Don't you think our concern is justified?' he said after a moment.

Clea glanced sharply at him. He sounded grim, disparaging almost. 'I'm a very sensible person, James,'

she claimed levelly. 'I wouldn't have come down here if I had been feeling in any way unwell.'

'I'm not talking about your physical condition.' He caught her gaze with a sharp one of his own. 'Why did you let Amy and I believe that Max felt nothing for you?' he asked suddenly, and Clea stiffened.

Then her mouth twisted wryly. 'Has he been using that devastating charm of his to convert you, James?'

'That was not an answer to my question,' he drawled, refusing to be diverted.

'Ah!' she sighed. 'The question being, "Did I lie?" No,' she continued with the answer, 'I did not lie.

Which leads to the next obvious question, as to whether Max has been misleading you. The answer to that is no, also. Max, you see, believes he cares for me, which is a long way from the actuality ...

Believing and being are two completely different things.'

'I like him,' James announced after a moment's thought.

'Amy does, too,' Clea pointed out sardonically. 'She already treats him like her son-in-law.' That mobile mouth went awry again. 'Poor Mother, she hates untidy ends. Max does, too. They're quite alike when I come to think about it.'

'Why are you living with him when you feel so much contempt for the man?' James challenged the bitterness he'd heard in her voice, and incorrectly interpreted.

Her head swung around to face him again. 'I don't hate Max!' she denied. 'I can't say I like him very much—not the old Max, anyway ...' She frowned at her own confusion. 'But I don't hate him. I just won't marry him. that's all.'

'Why?'

She blinked. 'Why?' she repeated. 'Because he doesn't love me, that's why. You know that, James,' she went on impatiently. 'I explained it all to you very clearly, here, in this very same spot.'

'And the baby—what do you think his feelings are about the baby?'

Her face softened at that. 'Oh, he already loves the baby,' she said, with a certainty that came from deep within her. Her experience of his gentle care with her body when he made love to her, the way he would pay homage to the unborn child they had both made—they proved it without a doubt.

'I think you're being unfairly cruel to him.'

'What—?'

'In your efforts to make him pay for not loving you, you are deliberately denying him the right to give the child his name. That, to me, is both cruel and unnaturally selfish of you, Clea,' he judged. 'You seem quite prepared to let him care for you and the baby. You'll live with him as a married couple would live. Yet you deny him that one important thing that could make everything decent and right. And all for what, Clea?' he pressed on ruthlessly. 'Revenge? Jealousy, maybe—because he loves the baby more than he loves you?'

'James!' She jumped to her feet, her face flushed, breasts heaving with shock and distress that he could actually be saying these things to her. 'How could you use such terrible words to me? How could you ...'

James remained calm, his eyes steady on her horrified face. 'Envy, resentment, jealousy and revenge, Clea,' he listed cruelly. 'Think about them. And, when you have, come to me and tell me—honestly—that your reasons for denying Max his right as the father of your child are purely altruistic, and that those reasons can stand up strongly against marrying and removing that
bastard
status you're determined to inflict on that baby!'

'That's enough!' grated a harsh voice. And it wasn't Clea's. Hers was locked in her throat, utterly trapped by the shock of James's attack.

Max's arm came protectively around her shoulders. His body was stiff with rage. He glared coldly down at an impervious James.

'None of this is any of your business!' Max's voice was like ice, cutting through the warm night, while Clea trembled violently in his embrace, her mind rocked with a culmination of overwrought emotion.

Thoughts, feelings, James's ruthless accusations—all ran together and clashed, winging her off into a waking nightmare.

'Amy is my business,' James pointed out with amazing calm. 'And so, indirectly, is anything that affects my wife. Clea's situation affects her. So do you, come to that, Max.'

'I won't say this twice, so listen.' Max's face was like hewn rock, anger vibrating from every pore. 'If, as you say, Amy is your prime concern, then understand this—if you so much as mention our relationship again to Clea, I'll stop her from seeing either of you again—and think what that will do to your precious Amy!'

'Max ...' Clea found enough control to speak, her hand pressing urgently to his heaving chest in appeal.

She wasn't sure just how much of the conversation Max had overheard, but his furious reaction made her fear the worst. 'What James was saying isn't true! I—'

The hard arms around her tightened jerkily. 'Shut up, Clea!' he grated harshly.

She turned to face him fully, fear that James may have caused that dreaded break in the tenuous links she and Max had forged this past week making her clutch at his shirt, eyes bright with pained appeal.

'I love you, Max!' she cried in desperation. 'I love you! That's why I wouldn't tie you to me—not for anything in the world could I do that to you! Not for any of the reasons James was giving! I love you! I just couldn't...'

'Oh, Lord!' Max choked, and Clea began to cry quietly into his shoulder.

'And there—' drawled an outwardly unaffected James as he got up languidly from the bench seat '—is where I rest my case.' And he strolled off, leaving Clea and Max alone in the darkness, their bodies locked in a mutual agony of their own making.

'Clea,' Max whispered hoarsely.

'Take me home, Max,' she sobbed. 'I don't want to be here any more. Please, take me home.'

'No, wait,' he appealed, holding her closely to him. 'Wait!' he repeated roughly. He was trembling as badly as she. Clea clutched desperately at him still, so afraid that she couldn't think properly. Everything had been so beautiful! And now it was going all wrong!

'Max, please—!'

'Don't, Clea,' he groaned. 'Don't upset yourself like this!' Max took in a deep breath and let it out again slowly, grappling for self-control. 'Come and sit down and we'll...'

Clea shook her head. She didn't want to sit down, she didn't want to lose contact with the haven of his body and arms. Her grip on him intensified, and Max sighed softly.

'I have something I want to say to you,' he declared. 'But I'm afraid you're going to make yourself ill again if you don't calm yourself. Clea—' he appealed huskily.

'Won't you just sit down?' He tried to look into her face, but she wasn't letting him, burying herself deeper into his shirt front, shaking her head a second time in refusal.

'Don't let go of me,' she pleaded hoarsely.

His arms tightened. 'Never!' he vowed. 'Never again, Clea. I don't think I would survive it ... Do you remember the first time we saw each other?' he murmured after a moment. 'Through the glass partitioning of the typing pool?' His cheek was warm on hers, his body cocooning hers in a tender embrace, his voice a comforting rumble in his hard chest. 'It was like being hit by a steam train,' he confessed wryly, and Clea nodded, because she had felt exactly the same. 'Like a fool, I tried dismissing you from my mind,'

he went on grimly. 'I had an unbroken rule never to associate with my female staff; it invariably led to complications and it seemed easier to ignore their—undeniable charms.' He laughed shortly, aware of how conceited he sounded. Then the grimness was back, and he sighed heavily. 'But not you, Clea—never you! I couldn't dismiss you from my mind. You remained there, like a phantom, clinging to the periphery of my consciousness, until I could stand it no longer, and made you my secretary. I decided—again with that conceit—that I only wanted to have you around so I could look at you, brighten up my day with a vision of a black-haired nymph with pansy eyes and a body that ignited the senses just to look at it. It took a month for my defences to topple,' he recalled wryly. 'Then I was plotting your seduction with a single-mindedness that shocked even me! We make beautiful love, Clea,'

he murmured against her soft cheek. 'But I had that rule I disliked breaking, so I developed this clever dual role of lover and employer and I played it to its extreme, despite knowing I was being unfair to you.'

'I understood,' she whispered.

'I know you did, darling,' he replied grimly. 'But I don't want you to condone my behaviour. I was very cruel to you.'

Yes, Clea thought. He had been cruel, but she'd allowed him to be. She had been so infatuated with him then that he could do nothing wrong in her eyes.

'I had a whole week to acknowledge my faults when I went down to Devon. You'd changed towards me, and in my conceit I couldn't work out the reason why. My week of soul-searching left me feeling pretty grim with myself, I can tell you. I realised later, of course, that your withdrawal before I went away was because of the baby ...'

'And Dianne Stone,' she put in huskily. 'Finding out about her hurt far more than learning about the baby.'

'Dianne Stone was nothing,' Max dismissed roughly. 'I was a fool on the run, and I used her, quite ruthlessly, to try to put a check on my growing feelings for you. To be frank, they terrified me. The last thing I wanted was to tie myself down. You were quite right when you said that to me. But I never touched her—haven't touched any other woman with any intimacy since you. I don't even want them—which was a shock to my system, I have to admit. I'd already begun to realise that things couldn't continue as they had been doing. That my feelings for you were far more involved than I believed—or wanted to believe,' he admitted ruefully. 'So I spent the week brooding, driving my mother up the wall with my black moods, and came back with all my decisions made and ready to magnanimously put them into immediate practice, to find you'd left the company! You have no idea what that did to me!' He groaned, pulling her closer. 'I was so angry, so frightened by what it meant, that I was building walls against you before I even saw you! So when you hit me with your news I reacted true to my conceit, and lashed out at you, and in the process burned all my own bridges where you were concerned.'