on the edge of the desk as her heart began to beat hard again. ‘Theoretically, if I didn’t take you up on this offer, what would happen?’
‘Examining all the angles, Claire? You never can contain that thoroughness, can you?’ Again his gaze sloughed over her and slid away, and again his face closed into an arrogant, confident mask.
‘Not really, no. It’s too ingrained in my nature.’
She had always been the thinker, the one to worry about consequences, while Sophie took life by the throat and couldn’t care less.
The chalk and cheese sisters, their parents used to call them, and it was apt. Sophie still played at life without a safety net. And Claire still worried about, and dealt with, consequences.
Hence Sophie’s stupid action of ‘borrowing’ money from her boss to fund the high-flying lifestyle she thought would impress the man she wanted to marry.
Sophie had lost track of the extent of her borrowing. She had snared Senator Tom Cranshaw in the end, but a month before the wedding was due to take place the man she was working for had discovered what she had done and decided it would be a good opportunity to blackmail her.
Either she met his demands to pay instalments of money that added up to far more than what she’d stolen, or he would reveal her actions to both the police and the press. Sophie would go to jail for embezzlement, and, because he was about to marry her, the Senator’s career would take a hit from which he would probably never recover.
Sophie had run crying to her sister, of course. Confessing all and begging for help. That had been over a year ago, and Claire was still working her way through the mess, with one final payment to take care of three months from now.
She didn’t like that Sophie had hidden the truth from Tom—any more than she liked that her sister had dumped almost all of the financial responsibility for this onto Claire. But it was too late now. They were in too deep. There was no going back.
‘If you declined my marriage offer, you’d go back to the clerical pool earlier than planned.’ Nicholas’s words brought her train of thought to an abrupt halt. ‘After today’s discussion, I would prefer to go onward working with someone less aware, shall we say, of my personal aspirations.’
He delivered this verdict on her fate without a blink, even though he had just issued her with a devastating and thoroughly untenable ultimatum. His shoulders tensed beneath the suit. ‘Not that I expect a negative outcome.’
What was she supposed to do now?
You’ll be able to fix it, Claire. You always know what to do. Sophie’s words rose to haunt her.
I love my sister, and I will protect her, and one day she’ll realise how much I care about her and love me back. She loves me even now. She just isn’t very good at showing it, that’s all.
Claire would figure a way out of this—because Nicholas couldn’t send her back to the clerical pool yet, and that was all there was to it. ‘Why demote me if I say no? It would result in a massive pay-cut for me. That doesn’t seem fair.’
Now that she had her feelings under a bit more control, it frustrated her that she was trying to be noble, not to have a mercenary bone in her body. And here was Nicholas, threatening to take her nice fat paycheque away from her unless she married him.
As administrative assistant to the boss she received five times her normal salary, and she needed every cent.
‘Janice isn’t due to return for ages yet.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ His reserved tone matched the cool green flecks in his eyes. The jut of his jaw sent warning signals blasting over her. ‘Just as you’re aware that this position has never been guaranteed. You could have found yourself back in the clerical pool at any time, for any number of reasons. Or for no reason, if I happened to decide I wanted to make a change.’ He sat forward in his chair with a jerk. ‘Let’s get to the point. What’s your answer?’
Did she have a choice? It would be madness to accept him. Yet how could she say no? She had to have that extra money.
‘What you’ve outlined,’ she ventured, knowing it was a last-ditch effort to stave off the inevitable but unable to stop herself anyway, ‘doesn’t sound a very cosy sort of relationship.’
Heat sparked into his eyes for just a moment, in a wave of scalding intensity. ‘Oh, I think you’d find we’d be perfectly cosy.’
The sheer sensual power of his statement stole her breath. She reacted to him with a responding wave of sexual heat. She might have disabled her emotions, but her hormones were a little more difficult to subdue, apparently.
‘I never realised you—’ She broke off, and this time her sense of panic was even greater.
Things were spiralling out of control. She felt as though she had accidentally climbed onto a roller-coaster on top of a high building—wind blasting her, everything whirling around, nothing firm beneath her searching feet.
‘You weren’t meant to realise.’ He laid his hands on the mahogany desk. Large, well-formed hands, that had never touched her beyond the brushing of fingers to give or receive a file, or to pass a telephone.
Hands that, if she married him, would travel her body in all the ways she had imagined and more. But in lust, just lust, she reminded herself.
‘Until I made the decision to marry you,’ he said, ‘it would have been a mistake to let you see that.’
‘I understand. I guess that’s—ah—a level-headed outlook to take at this point.’ She barely knew what she was saying, but she would need to be level-headed if she hoped to find a way through this situation that wouldn’t end in disaster.
That meant she had to overcome her panic. To get her heart to stop thundering and her senses to untangle from the swirling uproar they’d got themselves into. ‘You’ve taken me by surprise with all of this.’
Unable to endure looking into that magnetising face a moment longer, she rose from the chair and moved to the bank of floor-to-ceiling glass that overlooked the bay. The seas of Sydney Harbour outside appeared calm, virtually unruffled.
In contrast, Claire was a churning cauldron of panic and stress and disillusionment. ‘Do you really never want love? A melding of hearts as well as minds?’ She kept her back turned, addressing the words to his shadowy reflection in the glass. Surely some small part of him longed for those things? ‘Don’t you believe that can happen sometimes? To some people at least?’
‘No. Love—the kind you’re referring to—is nothing more than an illusion.’
His words were clipped and she continued to stare through the glass of the high-rise suite, oblivious now to the harbour activity below.
‘People want to believe in some fairytale ideal, to believe that some transitory feeling can actually keep their marriages together.’ His tone harshened. ‘In truth, marriages survive or not, depending on the level of determination of the partners to make a go of it—and on their suitability in the first place.’
‘How sad.’ She spoke the words beneath her breath, and then turned to face him. To search for the reason he held such an unrelenting, rejecting view on the subject. ‘Your parents are divorced, aren’t they? Is that why—?’
‘Don’t think I had a disastrous childhood, Claire. I didn’t.’ He inclined his head, all sign of emotion carefully locked away once more behind the corporate mask. ‘Yes, my parents are proof that what I say is true, but I would have formed that conclusion anyway. Given the divorce statistics, it’s the only logical thing to believe.’
‘And logic is everything?’ Had he wrapped himself so deeply in reasoning that he could no longer see the emotional side of life? She didn’t want to believe it. There had to be a live, feeling man in there somewhere.
Just waiting to be rescued with the warmth of a woman’s love? With the