Artistic License (19 page)

Sophy said nothing. She wasn’t even sure if she could speak and she didn’t know why she wasn’t walking straight out. As early as the school corridors, some women seemed to possess a certain type of compulsion, like those giant spiders in
Lord of the Rings
that paralysed their victims first so they couldn’t escape. There was usually at least one lurking at every cocktail party and academic function.

“As someone who knows the boys very well,” Jennifer went on, and Sophy was unable to subdue the flicker of her left eyebrow at anybody referring to either Mick or Sean as a “boy”, “do you mind if I give you some advice?” She continued without waiting for a resounding rebuff. “I wouldn’t try to play one off against the other if I were you. I know you wouldn’t think it to look at him, but Mick does eventually catch on to these things and he can have quite a temper.”

Sophy stared at her in disbelief.

“And it’s just a wee bit juvenile to play games.” Jennifer somehow managed to utter those words without being instantly smited by the god of hypocrisy.

Sophy had never been able to stand up to a bully in her life.

Apparently she had only needed the right incentive.

“Thank you. I’ll take that on board. Do you mind if I ask
you
a question?”

The hazel eyes narrowed slightly.

“How much did you bet, out of interest? What exactly
is
the price tag on integrity these days?” Sophy’s hands were fisted behind her back, but her voice was miraculously cool, steady and audible. “Ripping your claws into someone who’s too honourable and too decent even to verbally slap back. That must be really satisfying. You complete and utter bitch.”

Jennifer’s expression had chilled, but she looked at Sophy scornfully.

“Big words from such a very
little
person.”

“It’s not just empty words.”

“Is that supposed to be a threat?” Jennifer asked contemptuously. “Because no offense,” she went on, dripping sarcasm, “but I think I could take you.”

Sophy was absolutely certain that she could. In comparative physique, the other woman was a nylon catsuit away from an alternative career as a superhero. Fortunately she had a more productive use for her hands than throwing a punch.

She smiled back breezily.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she assured the scowling blonde. “I can do much better than physical retaliation.”

“I somehow doubt that I have much to worry about.”

Sophy looked at her once more, just for a moment, her head tilted to one side.

“Want to bet?” she asked.

And she turned and left the bathroom before her knees gave out and completely ruined her exit.

Her hands were still shaking in her lap when Mick drove her home after their lunch at a waterfront cafe. The distance was approximately forty-five seconds by car on a good traffic day, but he was going on to an afternoon appointment in Wanaka, over the Crown Range, and he wanted to have a look at the box of paints. Her half-hearted joke that they were unlikely to be concealing plastic explosives or laced with asbestos had fallen flat. The whole meal had been awkward, with barely a word spoken and eyes skittering off in all directions if they accidentally made contact. Seeing each other naked seemed to have thrown them straight back to the public shells of their first meeting, stammering shyness on her part and impenetrable reserve on his. When she
did
sneak a peek at him, he was usually watching her with a conflicted concern that slid back into aloofness under observation.

She was reaching out to open the front door when he stopped her with a hand on her elbow.

“Sophy,” he said, and then hesitated, seeming to consider and discard various options for speech. She waited, her knuckles locked around the door handle. Butterfly wings were beating a fast tattoo in her stomach.

His dark grey eyes were intent on her face, his wide shoulders tense. He reached out and cupped her cheek with one enormous, comforting palm, his blunt nails gentle against her skin.

Compelled by both the desire to put off a conversation that seemed to be gathering in speed and importance at the rate of an incoming tidal wave, and by desire in general, she slid her own hands up his sides, curving under his arms to clutch his shoulders and tug him down. Her mouth met his, hard and rough, and he returned the kiss without restraint, his forearms falling to form a familiar supportive cross at the base of her spine as he urged her up on her tiptoes.

He tasted good, he smelled amazing and he felt frighteningly safe, but she was not so decimated by the embrace that she didn’t hear the door opening. She didn’t really believe that outside of fiction people could be so overcome by lust that they genuinely didn’t notice when their boss walked in, or the stage curtain went up, or the elevator doors opened, revealing them
in flagrante
. In this case, it was a little difficult to avoid the reality of Jeeves jumping up and clawing happily at her backside or the sound of her cousin snickering on the doorstep.

Reaching behind her to pull Jeeves down before he accidentally ripped off her skirt and tipped the scene over into a complete farce, Sophy hurriedly backed away from Mick, her cheeks flaming with her seven hundredth flush of the day. Tongue kissing in front of family members – mortifying. She coughed and her gaze skated over Melissa’s malicious delight to land on Dale, standing behind her cousin with his hands in his pockets and an expression on his face that she’d never seen. On Dale, that is. She’d seen that particular shade of aloof on Mick plenty of times. Dale, however, was like Sean, larger than life, emotions hung out in the wind for all to see.

Uneasily, she glanced back up at Mick and saw that he too was watching Dale. His mouth was set grimly.

It occurred to her that she seemed to have been involved in quite a number of these Wild West stand-offs in the few weeks since she’d met him.

Fortunately, there was Melissa to break the tension this time and she did so by waving a worse-for-wear shoe in Sophy’s face.

“This is a
Ferragamo pump
,” she said crossly, outrage having reclaimed its position from amusement. “This is a dog puke covered Ferragamo pump.”

Sophy blinked, forced her attention back to Melissa, attempted to drag her brain along for the ride.

“What?” she asked blankly and then frowned. “Why were you wearing your Ferragamos around the house on a Monday morning?”

“I’m sorry, is that the point? No.”

“Sorry to interrupt…this,” Mick broke in hastily, his male alarm obviously going off at the prospect of women arguing over shoes, “but I have to get going, Sophy, or I’ll be late for my meeting.”

“Oh. Sure. Of course.” Sophy shoved at a stand of hair that had fallen loose from her bun. “Um, call me later? Or something.”

“Aren’t you working tonight?” he asked, one hand playing with his keys, rotating them over his knuckles. He cast another long, hard look at Dale, who was still standing silently in the hallway.

“Oh,” she said again, flustered. God,
this day
. This month. “Yes, I am. I’m on from five until twelve again.”

“I’ll pick you up outside the bar at midnight,” he said, and his tone brooked no arguments. Her eyes narrowed slightly, the Army sergeant staccato hitting her straight in the tolerance nerve, but she would rather be safe than proud. She hadn’t been looking forward to walking home alone again, not until they had figured out whether there was anything to fear.

“Fine,” she said stiffly, then belatedly realised that it was still a favour, even if it had been delivered unwrapped and without ceremony, and added, “Thank you.”

He nodded, said a brief goodbye to a fascinated Melissa and clenched his jaw in Dale’s direction, which might have been guy code for a greeting had it not been accompanied by a stony glare.

The car engine hadn’t faded from earshot when Dale spoke for the first time, abruptly.

“I have to get going too,” he said woodenly, and Melissa stared at him in surprise.

“What? I thought we going to get coffee and head in to work.”

He wasn’t looking at either of them. Bending to pat a mechanical hand to Jeeves’s head, he muttered an apology and a vague mumble about picking something up at a store before their shifts started. 

He all but jogged to his car.

Melissa raised a quizzical brow at Sophy.

“Was it something we said?” A grin spread across her face. “And speaking of what obviously
hasn’t
been said – what
have
you been up to, chicky?”

Sophy groaned and buried her face against Jeeves’s neck.

***

By ten o’clock that night, she was beginning to wonder if someone had been spiking her perfume with pheromones. She had been asked out twice, which might have been more flattering if one guy hadn’t vomited on the dance floor immediately after her refusal and the other hadn’t instantly turned and tried his luck with the next woman who got in his path. Another gentleman, using the term with every nuance of sarcasm, had directed his every drink order to her cleavage for the past two hours and someone had actually pinched her on the bottom.
Pinched her bottom
, like she was a cocktail waitress in a comedy burlesque show. All of which was pretty miserable, but relatively harmless. It was a newcomer to the bar who was setting off the more serious alarm bells on her creep radar.

He was young, probably younger than she was, about twenty-one or so, and heavily built, packed with muscle through the arms and chest. He had been sitting at the counter for about twenty minutes, all but ignoring the beer he had ordered, and staring straight at her with a horrible, expressionless,
dead
sort of perusal. Serial killer eyes, if she was going to be melodramatic about it. There was nothing openly lascivious about the observation, but it was so relentless that it was prickling the hairs on the back of her neck. Every flight instinct she possessed was urging her to get away from him, but the bar was packed, they were short-staffed and she felt entrapped and claustrophobic.

Ten minutes later, Ben, the other bartender on duty, leaned close and shouted over the music that one of the waitresses was late back from her break and there was a booth over by the sound system waiting for a tray of cocktails. He was already reaching for it when Sophy seized the opportunity to get out of her watcher’s line of sight for a few minutes.

“I’ll take it!” she called back and arranged the heavy tray carefully on her arms, hoping for the best. It was not one of her marketable skills, negotiating a clear route through throngs of dancers with eight sloshing cocktails.

It turned out be a poor decision all around.

Seven glasses survived with their contents intact, but she was returning to the bar to replace the piña colada she’d spilled mid-journey, coincidentally during a club remix of Rupert Holmes’s
Escape
, always nice to have a thematic soundtrack for her mistakes, when she bumped into a hard chest.

Starting to utter an apology that would never be heard over the music, she looked up and stiffened as she encountered the intense stare of her erstwhile admirer. The frightening blankness – and it was amazing what a different effect that sort of blank impassivity could have, depending on the individual man emitting it – had gone, replaced by a definite flare of…what? Interest? Determination?

Sophy was actually getting quite frightened. She cast a quick glance around. There were people absolutely everywhere, but not one familiar face. It seemed ridiculous; what could he do to her in a crowded public space, after all, but that didn’t halt her increasing panic.

Then he just grabbed for her. Actually seized her by the waist, a complete stranger, and started to tug her toward the side of the room, toward the exit, his grip steely against her ribcage.