Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (84 page)

Iseult, used to picking up inflections in people’s voices, grasped the extent of the ‘oh’.

‘I’ll be round in half an hour, is that OK?’ she said.

‘I’ll brew coffee,’ Charlie said, smiling into the phone.

Marcella was feeling miserable and unsettled. Her entire view of life had taken a battering. Up to now, the planet could self-combust with bitterness every day over the price of oil and budget cuts, and she could handle it, but there needed to be a few constants in her life. Ingrid and David had been that. Their existence proved that true love could exist; there were nice, decent people out there; and good things came to those who waited.

All entirely false, as it turned out.

Ingrid’s life had been based on a lie and David, dear David whom Marcella had simply
adored,
had been seeing someone else.

What was worse was that there was nobody she could discuss this with because Marcella simply had nobody else in her life to trust with such sensitive information. If she’d had
a partner or a husband, she could have talked to them about it.

Poor Ingrid, thank God we have each other.
She imagined lying with her beloved in bed holding hands, simply being glad that they were together and weren’t ripped apart by infidelity.

But she didn’t have that. No man to hold in bed and talk quietly about how horrible it was for dear Ingrid.

No prospect of a man in her life, either. It wasn’t that she needed romance or rampant sex, just companionship. That was all she craved. David’s very existence had made her think there were decent men out there and that perhaps one day she might find one. Well, she’d found Harry, but she and Harry had been too different and that had never really worked. But
another
decent man. There was little hope of that now.

The plumbing system in the office had broken down completely despite the speedy fix-up job when the reception area had been flooded.

‘The whole thing?’ said Marcella when her business partner Connor gave her the bad news.

‘Heating, sanitation–the works. It’ll cost thousands,’ Connor said grimly.

‘We spent thousands getting it installed in the first place,’ Marcella said.

‘We can sue,’ said Paul, Connor’s assistant, who was new and hadn’t yet been jaded by life.

Connor and Marcella exchanged a will-you-tell-him-or-will-I glance.

Marcella got the honour.

‘We probably will sue,’ she said, ‘but suing is a little like Dr Johnson’s description of marriage–a triumph of hope over experience. And we still have to sort out the problem now.’

‘In other words, we need a good plumber,’ said Connor, in
a voice that implied Dr Johnson’s remarks might have been on the money when it came to plumbers too.

This, Paul could do. ‘My cousin’s a plumber. It’s his own company, he set it up and he’s doing very well. No discounts for cash or any dodgy business. He’s your man. He’s very ambitious, wants to start his own empire, we all say.’

‘Get the emperor to come in and give us a quote,’ Marcella said. ‘I have to go out for a meeting. I’ll be a couple of hours.’

Her meeting had gone on for ages and Marcella stormed up the stairs of SD International, coat flying, thinking about the cost of fixing the office plumbing. The expense would be stratospheric. She’d kill those other incompetent muppets if she got her hands on them.

One wrench of the door on to second floor and Marcella walked headlong into Connor, Paul and another man deep in a conversation.

Her handbag hit the floor, she cannoned off Connor and stepped clumsily back into the third man, who grabbed her arms to steady her.

She shot away from him as if she’d been scalded. She was not in the mood to be grabbed, by anyone.

‘This is my cousin, Lorcan McNamara,’ said Paul in a squeaky, surprised voice.

‘Oh.’ Marcella whirled round to glare at him. If he so much as
looked
at her with an expression that said she didn’t understand plumbing, so help her God, she’d…

Her brain gave a little cavewoman throb of lust.

‘Hello,’ she said.
This
was Paul’s cousin?

It had been a long time since Marcella was jolted by a man. Longer than she could remember. But
this
man, he was something else. It wasn’t entirely his looks–although Marcella could imagine Julie from reception muttering that she wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crisps, which was high praise indeed and few men earned it. He was dark-haired,
that type of darkness that brought heavy eyebrows that could beetle in a moment, and stubble that needed two shaves a day to control it. His eyes were blue, glinting a smile at her, and he was at least ten years younger than her, far too young to be giving her such a knowing smile.

No, it wasn’t any of that, even the lean perfection of him, narrow hips encased in old denims, broad shoulders in a plaid shirt. It was the air of absolute confidence and control, the sense that he did things his way, and that if anybody didn’t like it, that was fine; unless he was in charge, in which case it wasn’t fine and the entire place would march to the beat of his drum, no matter what, and he’d make it happen by sheer force of will.

The bit of her brain still operating gave her cerebral cortex a good shake.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, with a stab at a normal voice. ’So you’re taking on the mammoth task. What’s the verdict?’

‘It’s an interesting job,’ he said, eyes assessing her.

Even his voice was sexy.

‘I’m beginning to think it may take longer than I initially thought,’ he added.

Marcella realised he was flirting with her, in such a subtle way that nobody else noticed. She felt a rush of total lust that made her whole body burn. Suddenly, she was far too hot and her skin was misted in sweat and she felt sure everyone could see it. But the training kicked in. Her own training.

People aren’t looking at you all the time watching for imperfections. You’d be surprised what they don’t notice. If you hiccup, sneeze or flush puce, they often don’t notice, and if you carry on as if you haven’t noticed, then they will carry on too…

Her own words mocked her as the heat increased. Satellites in space could probably detect it.

‘I’ll leave you boys to it,’ she said, and backed off into her
own office.
Leave you boys to it?
What did that sound like? Not the independent career woman, that was for sure.

At her desk, she picked up her desk calendar and fanned herself with it. Had that really happened? Had she just felt herself fall head over heels in sheer lust with Paul’s plumber cousin? She was really losing it now. It was time to give up work, move to a remote island, let her hair grow long and pin it up in a bun with knitting needles.

She kept the door shut all morning and only ventured out at lunchtime when there was no noise in the rest of the office. She didn’t know if Lorcan was starting work that day or when, but the less she saw of him the better. She’d die of embarrassment if she reacted like that again. Imagine if Connor had noticed. Paul wouldn’t, Paul was clueless, but no matter how clever she was at hiding things, Connor would eventually cop on.

Hopefully, it would be a quick job and Lorcan would have his team of people doing it, rather than him being around the office looking broodingly handsome and flirty.

She made herself coffee, took a banana from the kitchen fruit bowl and was on her way back to her office when Lorcan appeared.

‘I was looking for you,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Hanging on to her banana for dear life, Marcella kept walking until she reached the safety of her office. He followed her.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked. ‘Connor seems to be out, but if you want to wait until he’s back–’ She was hot again. She couldn’t fan herself, it would look like she was having a hot flush, which was the kiss of death to a woman in her forties.

‘I don’t want to see Connor. I came up to ask you out,’ he said, staring at her with ferocious calm.

‘To ask me–’

‘–out, yes,’ he said. ‘You’re unattached. I asked. I’m unattached and I find you incredibly gorgeous, so I’m asking you out. Is there a problem with that?’ He put his lovely dark
head to one side and Marcella had a vision of that head nuzzling her throat, with her hands grasping his skull, his mouth moving down further to suck her nipples.

The heat soaked through her white vest this time and she hoped it wasn’t making the fabric cling to her because this bra was so see-through, entirely the sort of thing a woman might wear to bed with the intention of having a man rip it off her later, with his teeth, perhaps…

‘What is it with you?’ she demanded. ‘You, you–’

One eyebrow arched.

‘Out where?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Dinner.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight?’

‘I’m busy,’ she snapped.

‘Tomorrow night?’

‘Fine. Where?’

‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said.

Marcella shook her head. ‘No, I’ll meet you there.’

‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said again. ‘When I take you to dinner, I take you. Eight o’clock? You tell me where.’

‘Are you always this pushy?’ she asked, as she wrote her address on a piece of paper.

‘Only when I really want something,’ he murmured.

When he left, Marcella went to the window and wrenched it open, standing with the breeze flowing over her skin until she cooled down. She would get him out of her system. He was probably as thick as four short planks. Nothing turned her off a man like stupidity.

He wasn’t thick. Quite the contrary. They ate at a small Italian restaurant in the city, and Marcella found that she could listen to him talking all night. Not that he did talk all night: he let her talk, and he listened. But when he did talk, it was clear that a serious brain was behind those sexy blue eyes.

He’d completed a degree in finance before turning to plumbing when the investment bank he’d worked for went through a rocky patch in the late nineties.

‘But why plumbing?’ Marcella asked.

‘Why not plumbing?’

‘With your education, you could do anything.’

‘Do you think that what I did in college means I should want something better than to be a plumber?’ Lorcan said, smearing brie on a cracker for her.

Marcella, realising that he was going to feed it to her and shocked at the fact that she liked the idea, blushed.

‘If you don’t hold it against me that I’m a plumber, I won’t hold it against you that you work in PR,’ he said.

‘I love my job,’ Marcella said.

‘I love mine and I’m proud of it.’ He held the cracker delicately to her lips, teasing her with it, allowing her little bites. ‘I have a growing company, forty employees, and I won’t tell you my turnover because I don’t know you well enough yet, but I’m earning more money than I earned in finance. You’re not an intellectual snob, are you?’

Marcella blushed again.

‘Intellectual snobbery is a real eighties thing,’ he said. ‘I’m more of a nineties guy and I don’t look down on anyone because of their education or what they choose to do with it. Ambition and success have nothing to do with that. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs of the nineties didn’t go to college at all.’

‘Don’t rub it in that I went to college a million years before you did. I’m old enough to be your mother,’ she said anxiously, taking a sip of wine.

‘That’s not possible, not unless my mother had me when she was eleven,’ he replied. They’d already had a conversation about age, where Marcella had told Lorcan the truth, half expecting him to run away at the news that she was forty-nine to his thirty-eight. He’d said it didn’t matter in the slightest.

‘And I don’t go out on romantic dates with my mother,’ he said now. ‘Except when we’re planning to appear on Jerry Springer.’

Marcella laughed loudly, spraying wine everywhere.

‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching over with her napkin. She dabbed his face and then his throat, and it felt as if they had both stopped breathing.

‘If you go any further down with the napkin, we’ll never be able to come to this restaurant again,’ he murmured.

‘I’ve had enough cheese,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

They both made gestures to the waiter to bring the bill, but he won the battle to pay.

He drove slowly, not speaking, and Marcella felt the tingle of anticipation grow inside her. At her house, he parked the car and they sat in silence for a moment.

‘Do you want to come in for a coffee?’ she asked.

‘Do you want me to come in?’ The blue eyes bored into hers. ‘If I come in, I don’t know if I’ll be able to leave.’

Marcella wondered if she was stone mad, but she reached up and touched his cheek where the five o’ clock shadow was breaking through. Like a cat, he moved his face so the line of his jaw was cupped in her hand.

‘You don’t have to leave,’ she said.

Marcella had never kept a secret from Ingrid in all the years they had been friends. No matter what happened, they talked about it. But Marcella couldn’t tell Ingrid about this, this was like breaking all the commandants of being a good friend: enjoying yourself when your friend was devastated and betrayed.

Enjoying yourself with a younger man made it worse.

When she thought about the age gap in isolation, she felt like Hugh Heffner with one of the Playboy girls. She thought of how she and Ingrid had spoken of such men, the sort of men who grew older and older, got covered in liver spots,
had frail bodies, wrinkly skin and eyes that still gleamed when they saw nubile flesh.

‘They’re disgusting,’ Marcella used to say. ‘Why don’t they date women their own age or thereabouts? Why twenty-year-olds?’

‘It’s about power,’ Ingrid used to say sagely. ‘Having a young girlfriend signals to the world that they have the money and the power to attract such a woman. If they didn’t have that, they would just be an ordinary, much older guy.’

So doing it in reverse, dating a younger man, made Marcella feel hypocritical and secretive.

But, oh, he was wonderful.

Lorcan. Marcella rolled his name around in her mouth.

Her younger lover. In the media world she belonged to, that made her a cougar–a woman in her prime with a younger lover.