‘He says not. But apparently Mac had been trying your number all night, and he’s gone from the puzzled to the worried to the bloody furious. Joel said he was spitting out all kinds of nasty insinuations that Joel found rather flattering since they seemed to team you and him together. But he swears he played it thick and said nothing other than that he dropped you off last night and that was the last he’d seen of you.’
‘Good old Joel,’ she murmured, thinking, So he’s decided to come down on my side, has he? She had wondered. Joel was Mac’s brother, after all. ‘I could do with a piece of toast,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t eat a single thing at that lousy party last night.’
Jenny made a sound of impatience. ‘He’ll be ringing here at any moment,’ she cried. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Me?’ Roberta paused as she was about to slip two slices of bread into the toaster. ‘I’m going to do nothing,’ she said, feeding the bread into the warming slots. ‘This is your flat. Your phone. You answer it.’
‘In other words, tell him a pack of lies.’
Roberta just shrugged, the strange calmness she had taken into sleep with her the night before still presiding this morning. ‘I thought you might rather enjoy the job,’ she said.
‘Oh, I will,’ Jenny murmured with relish. She had a thing about men of Mac’s calibre, having been heavily involved with one very like him herself once—with similar heartbreaking results. ‘But what if he decides to come barging round here to check?’ she wanted to know.
‘Come off it, Jenny!’ Roberta scoffed. ‘You know as well as I do that he daren’t leave Berkshire until every last one of his guests has left before him! No,’ she said grimly, ‘I’m safe until Monday. Which gives me time to clear my things from the flat before I have to face him.’
The toast popped up, and Roberta pampered herself by spreading a thick layer of butter on it before taking it to the table with her coffee.
‘You’re taking this all very calmly,’ Jenny observed. ‘I mean, Mac is supposed to be the man you fell head over heels in love with—threw all your high-falutin principles away for. Surely you feel some kind of grief for what you’re doing?’
Did she? Roberta bit into her toast while she thought about it. ‘Perhaps I’m suffering from shock,’ she decided finally, discovering that she was still feeling nothing whatsoever except that ice-cold determination which had come with her sudden decision last night.
The telephone began to ring. Something close to terror hit her spine, sending it jerkingly erect. Not so invulnerable, she acknowledged shakily as Jenny moved reluctantly across the kitchen.
‘Shut the door on your way out,’ Roberta called after her, calmly enough, and Jenny sent her a bewildered look before doing as she was told.
The moment the door closed, Roberta darted up and switched on the transistor radio. A Saturday morning pop show blared out, drowning out any hope of overhearing Jenny’s side of the conversation through the thin walls separating the kitchen from the sitting-room. She sat down again, shaking all over.
Feeling nothing, my foot! she scoffed at herself. She was a walking grenade with the pin half out.
But determined, she reminded herself grimly. Damned, wretchedly determined.
Jenny came back. ‘He seems more concerned about you than angry,’ she told her. ‘He can’t understand why you’re not where you’re supposed to be.’
‘So you suggested he look where?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘I reminded him that your parents were home and suggested that you could have gone there. He approved of that idea and rang off to check.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Roberta said after a moment. ‘They’ve already left for warmer climes.’
Gone chasing wild dogs across the Serengeti, having been home only five days to dump off the film of their last field-trip—six weeks studying dolphins in the South China Sea.
Five days. She grimaced. Into their early fifties, and still they barely paused for breath between trips. Still they found no time in their packed schedule to do more than allow their only child a conciliatory phone call to offset any disappointment she might feel for their not having time to meet her, if only for a quick lunch.
They lived in a world of their own, which left no room for unimportant things like daughters. So, what’s new? she asked herself as an old bitterness began to boil up inside her. They have a vague idea of what you do for a living, that your birthday is somewhere in the month of October, that you’re not short of funds and are in good health. What more could a girl want?
A bit of tender, loving care, she grimly answered her own mockery. A father to hug and lean on once in a while. A mother to run to at times like these, confide her troubles in.
A bit of what Lulu Maclaine had a lot of.
Wow! Blowing the air out of her lungs, she pushed herself up from the table with that bit of revealing envy niggling at her conscience.
Then, No, she told herself firmly. It wasn’t just a case of her being envious of what Lulu had that she did not. It was simply that she was not going to take second place to anyone else in her life.
And that, she was determined, was that.
Mac rang the flat half a dozen times during the next two days, and by the time Roberta had come back from her final expedition to the Chelsea flat on Sunday evening poor Jenny was looking flustered.
‘He’s bloody furious with you, he’s so worried!’ she said almost accusingly, which wasn’t surprising since it was Jenny who had had to deal with his calls all weekend, and Mac could frazzle anyone’s nerves when he put his mind to it. ‘Don’t you think you should put him out of his misery now and speak to him yourself?’
‘No,’ Roberta stubbornly refused. ‘Mac has put me through twelve months of misery. Two short days of the same goes nowhere near paying him back.’
‘You went into that relationship with your eyes wide open,’ Jenny pointed out.
Yes, thought Roberta on a sigh. Wide open but hopeful. A hope driven by a deep-seated need to be loved and wanted for herself above all others by a man she could love and want above all others herself.
Well, she had found the man she loved and wanted above all others. The only trouble was, he did not love and want her in the same way!
Which, in the end, left her with nothing to be hopeful for.
* * *
Roberta was at her desk on Monday morning, dictating to Mitzy, when Mac came through the door like a bullet.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he barked, striding forward to slam an angry fist down hard on the top of the desk.
Mitzy jumped, startled out of her wits by his forceful entrance. Roberta took her time before reacting, but then she had been prepared for this—poor Mitzy had not.
Still, as with a carefully schooled expression she lifted her attention from the stack of papers she had been working on and levelled her cool green eyes on him she had to quell a quiver of alarm. Jenny was right, she acknowledged; he was furious. His grey eyes had turned silver with it; his mouth pulled so tightly across his teeth that he was snarling with it—like a dog. A big, dark and ravaging bloodthirsty dog.
‘Do you know the kind of trouble you’ve put me through this weekend?’ he demanded harshly when she didn’t reply. ‘I’ve been going out of my mind worrying what could have happened to you!’
‘But not enough to bring you rushing back from Berkshire to check if I was all right,’ she said, and watched him stiffen up like a board at the thrust.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he growled.
‘Nothing.’ Removing her gaze from him,