A Past To Deny

He got out of the car and approached him, and a while later the two of them disappeared inside the building. In less than five minutes they reappeared and stood deep in conversation, the other man every now and then pointing towards a row of greenhouses of varying sizes and shapes and sometimes to the land beyond.

What am I doing here, and with this of all men? Maggie asked herself incredulously as a shiver that was entirely unrelated to the bleakness of the late November weather shuddered through her.

She busied herself for a while, moving back to the passenger seat, but, with that little distraction over, her eyes were drawn back to the taller of the two figures. Whatever it was his shorter companion had said, Slane suddenly threw back his head and laughed, oblivious of the rain now deluging down on them.

That ruinously expensive-looking coat of his would be soaked, thought Maggie; then she found herself smiling at her own innate practicality—after all, what was the odd cashmere coat or two to the seriously wealthy? And Slane Fitzpatrick, apart from everything else he had going for him, was very seriously wealthy.

He slapped the man on the shoulder, then turned and walked back to the car. He was walking to the passenger side, then stopped, gave a lopsided grin, and changed direction.

He’s also a very seriously attractive man, thought Maggie as her heart gave a drunken lurch, and I’ve got to get my act together before I make a complete and utter fool of myself.

‘How can you do this to me, Maggie?’ he groaned, laughing as he got back into the car. ‘I have enough problems with which side of the car to get into in this country without you complicating matters by switching seats on me.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, her pulse rate still chaotic, ‘but it’s better if you drive as I’d never find my way—’ She broke off with a gasp at the sight of him. ‘Have you any idea of the state you’re in? Your coat’s soaking—and as for your hair…!’

He made a soft growling sound in his throat as he turned towards her with a wicked grin, then shook his head vigorously. With a yell of protest Maggie grabbed a box of tissues from the door pocket and flung a handful at him.

‘Any intelligent person would have done his talking inside,’ she protested.

‘Gee, sorry, Mom,’ he replied, with an idiot grin, scrunching up the tissues and rubbing his hair with them. ‘Oh, great!’ he exclaimed in indignant disgust an instant later when the tissues began disintegrating and peppering his hair like soaked confetti. ‘This is all your fault,’ he complained, running tissue-smeared fingers impatiently through his hair and making matters worse, ‘so you can get it out—every last scrap of it!’

‘The intention was that you should dry your face with them, not smear them all over your hair,’ laughed Maggie as he lowered his head and leaned towards her.

She began removing the clumps of sodden tissue, but as her fingers delved into the thickness of his soaked hair her mind hurtled her back to another time, when it had been the exertions of passion that had dampened the hair in which her fingers had feverishly explored—a passion that had dewed their entwined, naked bodies with its own sultry rain. She snatched back her hand as though scalded, her entire body tensing as it shrank towards the door.

‘I—Y-you really ought to get out of that coat,’ she stammered when he lifted his head a little to gaze up at her with coolly mocking eyes.

‘Ought I?’ he drawled, his mouth curving into a smile tinged with mocking malevolence as he straightened. ‘We’ll go find somewhere to eat…I can get out of it there,’ he announced with sudden briskness and started the car.

Maggie gave inordinate attention to fastening her seat belt, racking her brains for something to say that would miraculously clear the air of the almost palpable tension fogging it.

‘I wasn’t exactly needed on this trip, was I?’ she muttered, and realised that those were hardly the words to produce any miracle. ‘I’ll do the gates,’ she offered when, having made no response, he halted the car before them.

‘What, to justify your coming along?’ he drawled, opening his door. ‘There’s no point us both getting wet so I’ll do them. It’s best if I drive through as well—the seat’s probably all messed up too.’

The leather upholstry was wet, Maggie conceded to herself as they went through the tortuous procedure of negotiating the gates, but she could easily have wiped it dry.

‘John’s got it all in hand for us to start tomorrow,’ he said once they were on their way. ‘He’s been with Maurice God knows how many years. Maurice swears John has forgotten more than the average botanist learns in a lifetime about plants—exotic or otherwise.’

‘Does he usually accompany Maurice on field trips?’ asked Maggie, welcoming the distraction of the topic with limp relief.

‘No,’ chuckled Slane. ‘It seems Maurice has never been able to persuade John to set foot on a plane, so John and the team run everything while he’s off gadding about.’

‘You must have been pleased to hear they’d managed to grow this plant. How near to extinction is it?’

‘Extremely near—in its natural habitat, that is,’ he replied as he eased the car into the city’s rush-hour traffic. ‘It grows like a weed just about anywhere. The trouble is it mututes and ends up lacking the vital properties that made it of interest in the first place.’ He swung the car into the entrance of a multi-storey car park. ‘I’ve just realised,’ he muttered, turning to her once they were parked, ‘I don’t have any change on me—how about you?’

Maggie rummaged in her bag. She took out her purse, and a comb which she handed to him.

‘I’ll get a ticket while you get the rest of that tissue out of your hair.’

That she was accompanied by the sort of man who turned heads was made abundantly clear to Maggie as they made their way from the car park towards Grafton Street. She found herself trying to remember what her own reaction had been in that very first instant when she had laid eyes on Slane, but her uncooperative mind kept leaping too far forward, presenting her with images that made her cheeks burn despite the chill of the rain now drizzling lightly against them.

‘We’re going to one of my old haunts—Bewleys,’ he told her, the touch of his hand at her elbow light as he guided her through a sudden swell of people.

‘I’ve never seen so many people!’ exclaimed Maggie. ‘Is it always this crowded?’

‘I guess quite a few of these people are on their way to work,’ he laughed, steering her through a doorway and into a shop heavily scented with the aroma of coffee, ‘but Grafton Street is usually pretty lively.’

Slane at last removed his coat as they entered the famous coffee-house, grinning at Maggie’s reaction of wide-eyed delight as she gazed around the dark wood and marble interior, packed almost to the hilt, and filled with the soft buzz of conversation.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked once they were seated.

‘Starving,’ she replied, a hand rising self-consciously to her damp hair as her eyes met those of a strikingly attractive woman at the next table who had just finished giving Slane a thorough perusal. The woman smiled in sympathy and patted her own hair as much as to say, Mine too, then resumed conversation with her companion.

Just about every woman in their immediate vicinity had done it, observed Maggie without rancour—given Slane an appreciative inspection, followed by a quick appraisal of the woman accompanying such an Adonis. A pretty natural reaction, she thought with a tinge of ruefulness that quickly deteriorated into a pang of alarm as her nose began to throb—with her present luck it was probably shining like a beacon!

‘Shall I just order us the full works?’ asked Slane as a waitress approached.

Maggie nodded, and made the grave error of distracting herself from gloomy speculation regarding her appearance by subjecting Slane to a surreptitious inspection as he spoke to the waitress.

All right, so she was still in a state of shock, she reasoned miserably, feeling as if her mind was operating on badly depleted batteries as her eyes lapped him up. But she had to snap out of it, she told herself angrily. And accepting one minute that her past was a fact that she could no longer avoid facing, then in the next wallowing in the fantasy that she would wake to find it had all been a terrible dream was only a short cut to insanity.

‘You look pensive,’ Slane observed when the waitress had left, his eyes disconcertingly inscrutable as they flickered over her.

‘Do I?’ she exclaimed with a guilty start.

‘Yes.’ He leaned back in his chair, his amused, mocking eyes holding hers.

‘Well, I was thinking,’ she blurted out defensively, and then had to ransack her mind for a topic to back up the claim. ‘I was thinking…about that plant Obviously the aim is to reproduce it intact—but if it grows like a weed why get Maurice to do the trials here? Surely it would have been more practical for you to get someone to grow it in America?’

‘Perhaps—except that I didn’t get anyone to grow it for me anywhere,’ he replied unenlighteningly, then began gazing around him, a look of bored detachment on his face.

Maggie felt anger and confusion doing battle within her. Even if she had only been roped in at the last moment as a lowly lab assistant, it was perfectly natural for her to show an interest in the project…Or perhaps it was simply that he was loath to discuss anything with a woman with whom he had had a one-night stand and whom he was determined not to acknowledge.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, his face brightening. ‘Food. What a welcome sight’

What a welcome distraction, thought Maggie, gratefully inhaling the glorious aromas emanating from the huge platters set before them. Whether he remembered her or whether he was simply an uncommunicative boor with a bad memory, for now she didn’t give a toss—she was starving!

They ate in the silence that such hearty, immaculately prepared food warranted. And it was only after her hunger pangs had been well and truly pandered to that Maggie found her thoughts straying back to where they had been before the arrival of the food had rescued her.

‘I feel it’s almost criminal to leave all this,’ she sighed, resisting the tug of those thoughts, ‘but I couldn’t manage another mouthful—there was enough for three on my plate.’

He grinned across at her, then casually speared a juicily glistening sausage from her plate with his fork.

‘It’s just as well Mrs Morrison isn’t around,’ he laughed. ‘I once made the near-fatal error of telling her I’d breakfasted here—boy, did I have to grovel to get back into her good books.’ He demolished the sausage, then returned to her plate to forage further.

It was what lovers did, thought Maggie weakly—ate titbits from one another’s plates…And wasn’t that what they had been so briefly—the most passionate of lovers?

‘So, this Maurice doesn’t actually work for your company,’ she stated, her need for distraction driving her back to the topic he had so abruptly dismissed.

‘Maurice?’ he echoed, one blue-black eyebrow arching superciliously. ‘I thought I’d already explained—Maurice doesn’t work for anyone. He’s just a brilliant botanist who does his own thing.’

It was like pulling teeth, thought Maggie angrily. ‘You haven’t explained anything—despite your intimation last night that you would,’ she snapped. ‘And that’s why I’m still asking.’

‘So what do you want to know?’ he drawled, his eyes like glittering ice.

‘Well, for a start, if this is Maurice’s thing, why can’t he do his own analyses?’

‘It isn’t his thing.’

‘Well, thanks a million,’ hissed Maggie across the table at him. ‘If that’s the way you motivate your staff, all I can say is God help them!’

‘You need motivating to assist with a bit of lab work, do you?’ he enquired, scowling back at her.

‘Forget I ever showed any interest,’ she snapped, picking up her coffee-cup and draining it. ‘And we can do the work in complete silence for all I care.’

His lips were pursed as he picked up the coffee-pot and refilled both their cups. ‘Give me a break, Maggie,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been through so many time zones in the past few days that right now I’m not too sure which way is up.’

He ladled sugar into his coffee and stirred it, a closed, far-away expression on his face. ‘I’ve no idea whether or not Maurice has succeeded in reproducing this plant in its pristine state, but we’ll know soon enough after it’s been tested—’

He broke off to take some coffee, an expression of utter bleakness on his face. ‘Maurice and my father go back a long way…They first met as kids and kept in regular touch, both being prolific letter writers, right up until my father’s death.’

His father, thought Maggie, her heart constricting.

‘Slane, I—I…’ she stammered, guilt flooding her. ‘Look, if you’d rather not talk about it—’

‘Make up your mind,’ he cut in exasperatedly. ‘Do you want to hear about this or not?’

‘I want to hear,’ she replied robotically. She had known from the little that Connor had said that Slane bore wounds with which she was achingly familiar… Now his had been opened up and there was nothing that could be done to spare him.

‘It seems Maurice came across this plant a few years ago and wrote to my father about it. Some forest tribe or other used it medicinally—mainly as an antidote to poisons and allergies. Maurice plainly thought it was worth investigating—’

He broke off to ask a passing waitress for the bill. ‘A while back Maurice got in touch with me. Off and on, since my father’s death, he’d been experimenting with a range of different growing media. And now he’s come up with several plants he feels are worth testing.’

‘He must be so nervous now that they’re about to be tested,’ said Maggie as the waitress returned with the bill.

‘I doubt if he’ll give it too much thought until he gets the results,’ said Slane, his tone amused. ‘Oh, he’ll keep at it if he hasn’t succeeded—but that’s Maurice. Give him a botanical problem to puzzle over and he’ll happily spend the next decade or so solving it—or proving there is no solution.’

‘Do you think there’s a chance he has solved it?’ asked Maggie as they both rose.

He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ His eyes caught hers before sweeping slowly down the length of her body; then they swept back up again to linger finally on her parted lips and take in the hectic warmth that his deliberations had brought to her cheeks.

When his eyes at last returned to hers they were filled with mocking challenge. ‘Who knows what we’re about to discover once we get started?’

CHAPTER THREE

THEIR conversation in the famous coffee-house had unsettled them both.

It had left Maggie in a mood of dark reflection, in which she found herself digging deeper into the store of banished memories already disturbed by Slane’s arrival. Slane it had left edgy and cynical one moment, then mockingly salacious the next, as those heavy-lidded eyes would catch hers and appear to make suggestions that bore no relation to the innocuous words he happened to be uttering.

Whatever the memories it had stirred in him, as far as Maggie was concerned it was having the effect of accentuating every negative quality he possessed.

So far she hadn’t retaliated, restrained by too many memories of how appalling her own behaviour had been as she had struggled to come to terms with the devastation of grief.

‘Connor mentioned that you’d decided to become a teacher,’ stated Slane as the car ground to a halt in yet another hold-up in the traffic. ‘How come?’

Maggie mentally braced herself; he had spoken the words, but there hadn’t been any trace of interest in them.

‘I decided it was time I had a proper career…and my father taught’

‘What subject did he teach?’

‘Chemistry.’

Now they were on decidedly dodgy ground, thought Maggie, her entire body tensing. Just one snide remark from him in relation to her father and that would be it as far as her feelings of empathy were concerned.

‘I hope you hadn’t anything planned for today,’ he muttered as the line of traffic crawled forward a few feet before stopping again. ‘Who knows? We could be stuck here till dark. Now wouldn’t that be fun?’

Maggie made the error of glancing at him and again found herself bathed in what could only be described as a come-to-bed look—albeit a decidedly mocking one.

‘Why do you keep doing that?’ she exploded, goaded beyond restraint.

‘Doing what?’

‘Looking at me like that!’

‘And what way is that?’

Maggie clamped her mouth tightly shut. Well, at least that was her guilt trip over, she told herself angrily, and a totally misplaced one it had been too. The man was probably incapable of the finer feelings with which she had so foolishly been crediting him—he was a complete and utter boor!

‘I guess this disorientation I’m suffering—’

‘Spare me the drivel,’ pleaded Maggie witheringly.

‘Has stripped away my inhibitions,’ he continued unconcernedly. ‘Thank God for that!’ he exclaimed as the traffic at last flowed freely. ‘I can’t be the first guy who’s looked at you appreciatively—you’re a very beautiful woman, Maggie.’

‘I’m a moderately attractive woman,’ she snapped. ‘So I suggest you save your breath.’ Which was exactly what she should be doing, she told herself exasperatedly.

‘They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ he murmured, his tone all sweetness and reason, ‘and mine reckons you’re beautiful. I mean, what is there that could be improved on? You have eyes that—’

‘Shut up!’ howled Maggie, something in her snapping completely. ‘Just stop it!’

‘Now there’s an enigma for you—a woman who throws a fit when a man tells her she’s beautiful. I wonder what your problem is, Maggie?’

‘I’m not throwing a fit!’ Horrified by the hysteria shrilling her tone, she fought to contain herself. ‘And I don’t have a problem—unless it’s that I’ve put up with your snide remarks and…and everything else you’ve been dishing out to me! And, while we’re on the subject of problems, if you have one over working with me just say so and I can get the next flight home.’

‘As you well know, I can’t afford to have a problem with it—you’re all I’ve got.’

‘Forgive me for saying so, but it takes a lot of believing that someone of your reputation would have such a problem replacing me,’ retorted Maggie, his lack of denial about his behaviour stirring up another seething swarm of does-he-or-doesn’t-he-remember-mes in her beleaguered mind.

‘And what do you know of my reputation, Maggie?’ he drawled as he swung the car into the drive of the house. ‘It would be a laboratory assistant I’d be replacing, not someone to warm my bed.’

‘You’re disgusting,’ gasped Maggie, her hands shaking uncontrollably as they fumbled to release her seat belt.

‘Disgusting?’ he enquired softly, his hand covering hers and stilling its frantic scrabbling.

‘You know perfectly well I was referring to your professional reputation, not to you…to your—’ She broke off, praying for a bottomless pit to appear for her to throw herself into.

‘What—are you too prudish even to say it?’ he asked in that same, steely soft voice. ‘My reputation with women?’

‘I’m not a prude!’ she howled, tearing her hand free.

‘So how come you’re giving such a good impression of being one?’ he enquired, releasing her seat belt.

‘And what, exactly, is your definition of one?’ she demanded, fury rampaging through her. ‘Ice maiden’, ‘prude’—Peter had progressed to other synonyms the night they had parted; vicious and vulgarly explicit, he had hurled them all at her fleeing figure. ‘Any woman who doesn’t fling herself into your arms?’ Dear God, what was she saying? ‘Any woman who doesn’t worship at the shrine of your looks and power?’

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