A Stranger's Kiss

remind herself more forcefully of this fact. She would simply have to forget that he had kissed her. That he had disturbed a thousand slumbering longings. The kiss had meant nothing at all to him.
    It meant nothing at all to her, she thought, furiously. The fact that he had been able to draw such an eager response from her owed everything to his expertise. He probably spent all his spare time practising. With Jane.
    She took a deep shuddering breath.
    Airline tickets.
    She glanced down. Her hands were clenched together so hard that the knuckles had turned white. As she carefully straightened painful fingers she wondered just how long she had been sitting like that. Too long. She had a job to do and she’d better get on with it.
     As she reached for the phone another thought occurred to her. He had said she would have to stay until Jane returned. ‘Oh, dear God!’ she moaned. It could be months. The situation was getting worse by the minute and short of walking away from Victoria House and never coming back there seemed no way out.
    * * *
    ‘What’s he like?’ Beth Lawrence was curled up in the corner of the sofa, hugging a mug of coffee to warm her hands.
    Tara sank into an armchair opposite and used the time gained to choose her words carefully. ‘He’s... difficult.’
    Beth’s eyes narrowed. ‘Now that’s interesting. I would have said that the man you can’t tame with ruthless efficiency has yet to be born.’
    ‘You’re forgetting Jim Matthews. Perhaps I’m losing my touch.’
    ‘Jim doesn’t count.’
    ‘No. Perhaps not. He’s something of an original after all.’ She thought about this. ‘But I think Adam Blackmore is an original too.’
    ‘Original enough to be unmarried?’
    ‘At the moment.’
    ‘Oh?’ Beth laughed. ‘You’ve plans in that direction then?’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she snapped, then buried her head in her coffee to hide her expression.
    ‘Just a joke,’ Beth replied, then rather more gently, ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’ And Tara realised just how close she had come to betraying herself.
    ‘There were no signs of a Mrs Blackmore in the penthouse anyway,’ she added, carelessly, then blushed as Beth’s eyebrows rocketed skywards. ‘I worked rather late last night and he gave me dinner.’
    ‘How very kind,’ Beth said, drily, but took pity on her partner and changed the subject. ‘So how long will you be working for him?’
    Relieved, Tara shrugged. ‘I don’t know. At least two weeks. We’re going to Bahrain next week. Will you be able to manage the office on your own?’
    ‘I’m going to have to manage, love. The bank manager asked me over for one of his little chats this afternoon. He’s getting restless about the overdraft. Thankfully I was able to stall him with our dazzling prospects.’ Beth caught sight of Tara’s expression and frowned. ‘It is going to be all right?’
    Tara forced a smile. ‘Of course it’ll be all right.’ It would have to be all right. ‘I’m just tired. Jim turned up here last night and it took a while to dislodge him.’ She didn’t elaborate. She wasn’t going to regale Beth with the heart-warming tale of Adam Blackmore rushing valiantly to her defence. His stinging little remark that evening still made her ears go pink.
    He had made no reference to his precipitate arrival at her flat the night before. He had apparently decided that his need of her secretarial skills was more pressing than the small satisfaction he would gain in sending her packing. For a while she had even harboured the hope that he might choose to forget the incident altogether. In vain.
    She had done everything he had asked without comment. Altered a financial report so many times that the figures began to merge before her eyes. Collected his cleaning. Made several hundred cups of coffee and in general had been treated exactly like a rather slow-witted office junior. But by six-thirty everything had been done to his apparent satisfaction, although he hadn’t bothered to say a simple thank you.
    ‘If there’s nothing else, Adam, I’ll go now.’
    He kept her waiting for a full minute before he looked up from his writing block. She took this final insult without a murmur and finally he raised his head, fixing her for a moment with his eyes. Then he made a small gesture of dismissal. ‘No, Tara. I really don’t think that there’s anything else I want from you. Run along home to your little love nest.’ The words, the gesture