Slave To Love. Michelle Reid

doesn’t?’ he jeered. ‘In my book it makes him a bloody traitor!’ Grabbing hold of her chin, he lifted it threateningly. ‘Where else has he been deceiving me, I wonder?’ he grated. ‘With you, perhaps? Has my kid brother been trying his luck with you, Roberta? Is that what this is really all about?’

      Angrily she pulled away from him. ‘That is a disgraceful thing to suggest!’

      ‘No more disgraceful than the insults you’ve been throwing at me since I came in here,’ he defended. ‘Joel fancies you. He always has, and don’t try telling me otherwise.’

      ‘You’re crazy if you believe that,’ she sighed, shakily trying to pull herself together.

      ‘Not crazy,’ he denied. ‘Just aware of what’s going on around me. Joel always did want you for himself, and the only reason he has never made a serious move on you before is because I threatened to knock his block off if he ever did.’

      ‘Then why throw us together the other night, if you really believe that?’ Roberta cried in angry amazement.

      ‘Because I thought his respect for me meant more to him than his desire for you,’ Mac stated. ‘But I’m beginning to see that I was wrong.’

      ‘Wrong about a lot of things, if you honestly believe either Joel or myself would do such an underhand thing as to play you false!’ Roberta cried.

      ‘Whatever.’ Mac just shrugged all of that aside, his attention suddenly fixed on the gold watch gleaming at his wrist. ‘I’ll be putting him straight before too long.’ Grimly he turned and strode towards the door. ‘I’ll come down and collect you after work,’ he informed her curtly. ‘Then we’ll go to Jenny’s together to move your things back to Chelsea.’

      ‘I’m not coming back to you, Mac,’ she told him, looking pale but adamant.

      He turned to lance her with a look, the contempt she read in his eyes totally new to her and hurtful. ‘Do I have to come back there and repeat the lesson?’ he demanded, putting shamed colour into her cheeks as he flicked his eyes insolently over the way she was still standing there, shaking in the aftermath of his last assault. ‘I could take you here and now on this floor if I wanted to, and you know it,’ he jeered, ‘so stop trying to draw things out. You’ve made your protest and it has been duly noted. Now we return to the status quo.’

      ‘No!’ she protested. ‘Mac—’

      ‘Six o’clock,’ he clipped out, arrogantly cutting across any protest she had been about to make before he slammed out of the room.

      Roberta stood staring at the closed door, bubbling with anger and frustration, wondering just how he had managed to turn the whole thing round to suit himself like that.

      Easy, a small voice taunted in her head. You made it easy for him by falling so easily into his arms!

      ‘Damn,’ she exploded softly, then heard another door beyond her own slam shut, and cursed again.

      Joel’s office door. True to his word, Mac had gone to take the rest of his anger out on Joel. Guiltily aware that she had well and truly dropped Joel in it with her stupid tongue, she dropped heavily back into her chair, wondering grimly if she would still have a job by the end of this horrible morning.

      CHAPTER THREE

      JOEL was waiting for him when Mac strode into his office.

      ‘Loyal brother you are,’ he barked.

      ‘Loyal lover are you,’ Joel returned the insult. ‘I wouldn’t subject my worst enemy to what you subjected Roberta to on Friday night, and that’s the truth,’ he said, then lazed back in his chair to watch curiously as two strips of guilty colour washed across Mac’s high cheekbones.

      ‘Roberta can fight her own battles without your needing to play the shining knight!’ he muttered.

      ‘Turned my PA to pulp, have we?’ Joel mocked that argument. Roberta could no more fight Mac and win than she could win against a head-on collision with a double-decker bus. ‘So now you thought you’d try pulverising me. Well, sorry, big brother, but I refuse to play. You’re a fool, if you want to hear the truth—which I don’t for one minute think you do. Roberta is one in a million, and you’ve let her slip right through your selfish fingers because you care more for keeping the damned peace on the home front than you care for her.’

      ‘Don’t sermonise over me,’ Mac grated. ‘Not after the way you’ve played me for a fool all weekend. How many times did I call you up?’

      ‘Oh, about ten,’ Joel answered carelessly. ‘Pity you didn’t stop phoning and start driving, isn’t it? You might just have caught her between moves then. Ah...’ he breathed as Mac stiffened. ‘So Roberta pointed out the same error, did she? You’ve got to give it to that girl—’ he smiled ‘—she’s honest to the last full-stop.’

      ‘I had other commitments this weekend,’ Mac defended himself gruffly. ‘She knew that, and if she cared she would have understood.’

      ‘Like you understood how humiliating it was for her to be palmed off on your kid brother at your daughter’s birthday party?’

      ‘Oh, go to hell, Joel,’ Mac sighed, running a hand around the back of his neck then throwing himself into a chair. ‘You know how sensitive Lulu is about me and her mother. It was her night; I had to put her feelings first.’

      ‘Then why invite Roberta at all?’

      ‘Why did she have to accept?’ Mac shot back, and Joel sucked in a short breath, the handsome lines of his face hardening as he stared at his brother.

      ‘You bastard,’ he breathed. ‘You were covering yourself! Playing a let’s-keep-everyone-happy game so that Solomon Maclaine could feel comfortable with his conscience! My God,’ he muttered as he threw himself forward in his chair and glared at Mac, ‘you really are a selfish swine, aren’t you?’