Starting Over (4 page)

Now, she was dauntingly aware that she was having second thoughts about her professional future. A short spell of working here in Haslewich would give her time to think through her options—as well as taking up cudgels on behalf of Grandmamma Tania?

Sara wasn't going to deny that she felt that the Crightons had treated Tania badly despite what her father had said.

Having put away her few belongings in the pleasant accommodation Frances Sorter had shown her, Sara made her way back to the restaurant where Frances greeted her arrival with a warm smile.

'We wouldn't normally expect you to work in the evening,' Frances told her, 'but if you
were
prepared to make a start now...'

'I'd be glad to,' Sara told her and meant it, grimacing as her stomach suddenly gave an embarrass-ingly loud rumble.

'Oh, good heavens, you must be starving,' Frances exclaimed. 'Normally staff meals are eaten when we've finished serving but I can arrange for something to be sent into the office for you.'

'A sandwich would be fine,' Sara told her.

'A
sandwich!'
Frances looked horrified. 'This is an award-winning restaurant,' she told Sara mock primly, an amused smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

'How do you feel about chargrilled vegetables and wild salmon?'

'I'm in love with it already,' Sara told her solemnly, her eyes full of laughter. She was going to enjoy working here. Frances had a good sense of humour even if she was slightly frazzled at the moment.

Nearly an hour later Sara grimaced as she took her eyes off the computer screen to take a final mouthful of the delicious meal she had been served. She had become so engrossed in what she was doing her food had gone cold—not that she was still hungry! The more than generous portion she had been served would easily have satisfied two people.

She frowned as the computer refused to give her the information she needed to complete the task she was working on. She would need to have a word with Frances about this.

Getting up she opened the office door and walked down the short corridor that separated it from the restaurant, hesitandy going inside.

Frances had told her that she was 'fronting' the restaurant tonight but Sara couldn't see her anywhere.

The restaurant was very busy, every table taken.

'BOBBIE RANG me earlier,' Tullah told Saul as the waiter filled their wine glasses.

'Livvy's back but Caspar hasn't come with her.

He's staying on in America and according to Livvy the marriage is over.'

Tullah frowned a little. At one time Saul and Livvy had been very close and Saul himself had admitted to her that he had been very attracted to his second cousin, but that was all in the past now. She was Saul's wife.

'It's the girls I feel sorry for,' she continued.

'It's so hard for children when their parents split up.'

Saul had three children from his first marriage and Tullah could still remember how fragile and lost they had seemed when she had first met him and them.

Saul's first wife had abandoned not only her husband but her three children as well, claiming that there was no place for her son and daughters in her second marriage to a man who was not family oriented.

It had not been easy for any of them when she and Saul had first fallen in love and married, Tullah acknowledged, even though now the children totally accepted her. A child of their own had completed their family but Tullah knew she felt a fierce extra protective love for Saul's eldest three children, especially his daughter Meg, and her heart went out to Amelia and Alex.

'If you ask me, men and women should be kept strictly apart except for purposes which are purely rec-reational,' Nick told them both tongue-in-cheek, his eyes dancing with wicked amusement.

Like all the Crighton men he was outstandingly good-looking, but Nick had an added air of excitement and danger, an added aura, a certain very challenging maleness about him Tullah recognised as she gave a small admonishing shake of her head and told him,

'You're incorrigible, Nick, you really are.'

'Nope, I'm just determined never to fall into the trap of allowing my emotions to ruin my life,' Nick told her firmly.

Saul said nothing. He was thoroughly familiar with his younger brother's antipathy towards marriage and commitment.

'One day you'll change your mind,' Tullah warned him. 'You'll see someone and fall in love with her....'

'What is it?' she asked anxiously as Nick suddenly yelped in pain. A girl was standing next to his chair, her face flushed and pink as she started to apologise.

She had obviously bumped into him accidentally as she crossed the dimly lit room. She was extremely pretty, Tullah recognised, amused to realise that Nick was receiving her apology with something less than his normal savoir faire. He might spurn marriage and commitment but that did not mean that her brother-in-law was averse to female company—far from it. Although to be fair to him, so far as Tullah knew his

'relationships' were limited to women who shared his views on the advantages of their short shelf life.

Her face crimson with mortification, Sara stam-mered an apology to the man she had inadvertently bumped into, but her embarrassment was replaced by indignation as he gave her a look of biting scorn instead of accepting her apology in the spirit in which she had given it.

She was still trying to find Frances and having seen her on the other side of the room had been attempting to make her way through the packed restaurant, her eyes on her quarry instead of what was in front of her.

Was it really her fault anyway, she asked herself indignantly as she returned Nick's angry glare with one of her own.
He
had been sitting at the table at an odd angle with the chair pulled out more than was surely necessary.

'You look cross. Is everything all right?' Frances asked in concern when Sara eventually caught up with her.

'I've just had a bit of a run-in with one of your diners,' Sara admitted ruefully. 'I bumped into him but when I tried to apologise—'

'Which one?' Frances interrupted her.

'That table over there,' Sara replied, showing her.

'Oh, Tullah and Saul Crighton's table.'

Crightons!

Immediately Sara twisted round to stare at the trio.

As luck would have it the couple, obviously Tullah and Saul, were seated with their backs towards her.

But the man she'd bumped into...

Sara's breath rattled in her throat as he lifted his head and glared at her.

'Oh, poor Nick,' Frances was saying. 'He's not been very well.'

'You mean like a bear with a sore head not well,'

Sara responded pseudo sweetly.

Frances's eyebrows rose.

'Oh, dear, he really
has
upset you, hasn't he?' she sympathised before continuing briskly, 'No, actually he was involved in a very unpleasant incident. Like nearly all the Crightons he's a qualified solicitor but the work he does is extremely specialised and often rather dangerous. Although in this case...' Quickly she explained just how Nick had come to be hurt, but stubbornly Sara refused to be impressed.

'Perhaps it might help if he carried a sign warning people not to get too close to him,' she suggested through gritted teeth.

Frances forbore to comment. Sara was a gorgeous-looking girl and Nick was a singularly handsome man.

Therefore, it seemed logical to Frances that the two of them should be attracted to one another. As the mother of young adults she was also well aware that sometimes such attraction presented itself disguised as hostility.

'It's nine o'clock. You've been working all evening,' she told Sara with a smile. 'Why don't you call it a day.'

'Not yet,' Sara refused determinedly. Armed with the information Frances had given her she was sure she could solve her problem with the recalcitrant computer.

Frances smiled ruefully as she watched Sara walk away, this time giving the Crighton table a wide berth.

She had liked Sara on sight, sensing within her a gutsy determination allied to a warm sense of humour.

Her stunning good looks would cause havoc, of course!

'NICK,' Tullah expostulated as she saw the grim way her brother-in-law was watching the woman's determined circumnavigation of their table.

'Little madam,' Nick seethed without taking his eyes off her departing back. 'Did you
see
the look she gave me?'

'Well, I certainly saw the one
you
gave her,' Tullah told him dryly.

'Yes,' Saul corroborated. 'You were hardly your normal charming smooth self with her, Nick,' he pointed out. 'Pretty girl,' he added appreciatively, laughing when Tullah gave him a mock glare whilst saying with wifely warning, 'Saul...'

'Very pretty,' Nick agreed sourly. He wasn't even sure himself just why he had reacted so badly to her.

Common sense told him that the painful jolt she had given his still aching wound had been completely accidental and he knew that normally he would not only have accepted her embarrassed apology gracefully but that he would probably have done everything he could to create a good impression and set her at her ease.

So why hadn't he?

Not surely because of that sharp little jolt of male sensual electricity, that more than a mere frisson of sensation that had seized him at their accidental bodily contact. After all, he had experienced physical desire for plenty of other women before her.

Physical desire, yes, but not that swift pang of dangerous knowledge, that unwanted awareness, that instinct that...that what?

That
nothing,
he told himself firmly.

'You're right,' he announced, even though neither Saul nor Tullah had said anything. 'I behaved very boorishly...and by rights I should apologise. I wonder where she's gone.'

'Frances will probably know,' Tullah informed him.

'She was talking to her.'

Ruefully Nick pushed back his chair and got up.

'Sara?' Frances responded in answer to his question.

'Oh, she'll be in the office. She's standing in for our office manager....'

Thoughtfully she watched as Nick made his way through the tables.

SARA GAVE a small crow of satisfaction as she finally got the computer to do as she wished. Nick heard it as he pushed open the door of the office. Sara was standing looking at the computer screen, her eyes alight with triumph and pleasure. She was more than just
pretty
Nick acknowledged as he felt his heart jolt fiercely against his ribs.

Sensing someone's presence Sara turned her head away from the screen, the breath rushing out of her lungs on a shocked whoosh as she realised who the intruder was.

'Frances said I'd find you in here,' Nick told her.

Her body had stiffened and the look in her eyes was both wary and hostile.

Immediately his own body—and emotions—reacted.

'I owe you an apology,' he began tersely.

'Yes, you do,' Sara agreed spiritedly, 'But you're a Crighton and of course Crightons never apologise, especially to women....'

Nick stared at her. Her reaction was so unexpected and so extraordinary that it had taken him completely by surprise.

'What on earth...' he began, but to his fury he saw that Sara was ignoring him, concentrating instead on the screen in front of her, blanking him so totally and completely that he might just as well not have existed.

Women
never
blanked Nick.
Never!
Whilst a part of him was distantly relishing his shock the rest of him was sharply and furiously angry that she could dare to both speak and act as she had.

'Now look here,' he said grimly, 'there's no way you can make
that
kind of statement without explaining just what it's supposed to mean.'

As he spoke he moved closer to the desk, so close in fact that Sara could feel the angry heat coming off his body. This close he was overpoweringly male.

Tall, broad, his eyes so dark that they could almost have been black, not the navy-blue she knew they were. Excitement and fear raced through her veins like rocket fuel. Caution told her that she had gone too far, but the voice of caution wasn't one Sara wanted to listen to. No, she would much rather listen to the siren lure of the exultation egging her on, telling her she was giving Nick what he deserved.

Ignoring him she continued to work.

Nick had had enough. Irritably he reached out towards her, merely intending to cover her hand to stop her working the keyboard, but the moment his fingers brushed her skin a surge of such powerful sexual immediacy coursed through his veins that the original cause of his physical contact with her was forgotten.

'Just let go of me,' Sara snapped at him, her face as white now as it had been flushed when she had bumped into him earlier in the restaurant, her eyes brilliant with the intensity of what she was feeling.

And what she was feeling was... Instinctively Nick knew that she was as aware of the sexual chemistry between them as he was himself.

For a man who was used to being totally in control of himself and his emotions, what he was experiencing was totally unwanted, so incomprehensible.

'I came in here to apologise,' he reminded Sara sharply.

Angrily Sara raised her head to look at him but the sarcastic response she had been about to make died on her hps unspoken, as for some inconceivable reason her gaze was drawn to his mouth and then his eyes and then back to his mouth again.

Almost as though he were standing outside of himself watching what he was doing Nick was aware of his own actions and his inability to stop them. It seemed to take an aeon of time for him to lean forward closing the gap between Sara and himself and then to cover her mouth with his, but in reality he knew it could only have been seconds. Her mouth tasted vel-vety warm, sweet salt sexy and the pressure of his own against it intensified.

Beneath the hot crushing sexuality of Nick's kiss Sara's senses reeled. This was the kind of kiss she had dreamed of as a young awkward girl...the kind of man...the kind of sensual immediacy that could not be contained or controlled. Instinctively her mouth softened beneath Nick's and then outside in the corridor she heard someone laughing.