skirting through them. In fact, Rose felt virtually invisible.
She found Lily in the middle of a small group of men, not saying much but paying a lot of attention, and very sober. That was good. For Rose, she would leave this evening behind and return to her normal life. For Lily, this was a chance to meet people, to get her face known and, for her sake, Rose hoped that the evening would turn out to be a success.
She hovered briefly on the fringe, then wandered through the crowd and, after a couple more glasses of wine, found that chatting to them wasn’t the nightmare she had predicted. Somewhere Nick was lurking, although she couldn’t actually see him anywhere.
Like Cinderella, she was ready to leave by the stroke of midnight. She seemed to be in a minority of one. The drink was still flowing, her sister was absorbed talking to a couple of guys, her face fresh and animated, and Rose had had enough. She had listened to people talk about other people, had eavesdropped boring conversations about scripts that had never got off the ground and arguments with directors who didn’t know what they were talking about and lottery grants that should have gone to art projects but had ended up going to crazy organisations that wasted the money and went bankrupt within two years. She had eaten the most amazing finger food she had ever tasted, served by the most attentive staff she had ever seen, and refused enough glasses of wine or champagne to fill a cellar.
After fifteen minutes of trying to attract Lily’s attention, Rose gave up and headed out of the room in search of a breath of fresh air.
Outside was a corridor that circled the club area and off which, like little nodules from a main stem, were rooms behind which were probably offices, although Rose couldn’t tell because the doors were all shut. The floors were pale cream marble, merging into the pale cream marble of the walls, along which hung abstract paintings that looked particularly unappealing in the subdued lighting.
She drifted along, deciding to give her sister precisely half an hour more networking time before dragging her out of the place, and was about to head back when she spotted the light from under the door. It was just a narrow strip, but in the relative darkness of the corridor as bright as a beacon and she didn’t hesitate. She walked right towards it and pushed open the door. She hadn’t known what to expect but she certainly hadn’t expected to find Nick there, installed in front of his computer and surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a home office.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, backing out, but he had already pushed his chair away from the desk and was pinning her in her tracks just by looking at her. A further, more elaborate apology formed somewhere in her mind but didn’t quite manage to connect with her vocal cords, which seemed to have seized up.
In the intervening silence, he propped his feet up on his desk and relaxed back, hands folded behind his head.
‘Looking for something?’ His dark eyebrows rose in amused enquiry and Rose cleared her throat.
‘No. I just happened to be…’
‘Escaping all the fun and laughter? Come in and close the door behind you.’ He paused. ‘Well? I don’t bite. At least, not unless I’m invited to.’
Rose, calm, efficient, always-in-control Rose, was beginning to feel very addled. Of course, she ought to graciously thank him for inviting her to his private function, politely turn down his offer to step inside, which had the vaguely dangerous undertones of what the spider had said to the fly, and hunt down Lily pronto.
She found herself obeying him, however, and shutting the door behind her, although once she had done so her legs refused to cooperate by propelling her towards the chair that he was now indicating.
‘Sit.’
‘I…I’m really on my way out, actually.’ Vocal cords found. Thank heavens! ‘I came outside to get a breath of fresh air and saw…well, the light under the door. What on earth are you doing?’ This was much better. Her brain was beginning to function. She made it to the chair and sat down.
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
‘Isn’t it a bit rude for the host to be working at his own party?’
‘I think everyone can manage fine without me for half an hour.’ Nick shrugged and continued to look at her, his expression unreadable. She looked awkward in her dress, as if wearing dresses was not something that came naturally to her but having found herself cornered into buying one, she had opted for the least flattering. Every single woman at the party had made a very special effort to wear something that would make them stand out in the crowd. Rose, on the other hand, had worn something that shrieked background. Briefly, Nick wondered what she would look like underneath the shapeless black garment and drew his breath in sharply, surprised at the thought.
‘Besides, there was no choice. I had an urgent phone call from Australia requesting some information to be emailed to them.’
‘Do you ever stop working?’
‘Occasionally.’ He lowered his eyes. Something about the shape of her breasts, just discernible under the dress, was kick-starting his imagination. ‘Lily seems to be enjoying herself.’
‘Yes. Yes, she does.’
‘But I guess you probably found the whole thing a little…boring…’
She shrugged. ‘Not at all,’ she told him politely.
‘You looked bored every time I saw you.’
‘You were watching me?’
Nick didn’t like the intonation in her voice when she said that. ‘It’s my duty to make sure that my guests are having a good time.’
‘Then I’m surprised your keen sense of duty allowed you to sneak off to this office and work.’ Yet again, she had the nagging, unpleasant suspicion that she was a charity case. ‘Anyway, it was very interesting. It always is, meeting people from different walks of life.’
‘Now why do I get the feeling that you don’t really mean that?’ When she didn’t answer, he added, interested against his will, ‘What’s your walk of life?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I…I work in computers.’ God, that sounded dull, especially when she considered the flamboyant, beautiful people who cluttered his life. How on earth, as a businessman, was he so well connected with the media set? she wondered. Then the question was answered virtually before it was posed. He dated cover girls. Money and looks would always be attracted to money and looks.
‘That’s very interesting.’
‘There’s no need to patronise me.’
‘I’m not. What exactly do you do? In computers?’
‘Nothing very exciting.’
At this point, Nick knew that he should just give up. Getting anything out of this woman was about as rewarding and straightforward as pulling teeth, and if it was one thing he didn’t do, it was to work at making small talk with a woman. But her awkward response was like an invitation to press harder. In front of him, the screensaver came up on the computer and he switched it off.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Look—’ Rose looked at him steadily ‘—I know you probably feel sorry for me…’
‘Why should I feel sorry for you?’
‘Because I don’t slot into your category of an interesting woman.’
‘As you quite rightly pointed out, it’s always an eye opener meeting people from different walks of life.’
‘Well, if you really want to know, I pretty much do everything with computers. Programming, updating systems, designing websites…’ She heard herself rattling off a curriculum vitae that sounded deadly dull. ‘It’s actually very absorbing,’ she stressed.
‘I’m sure it is,’