CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AS THE clapping died down, Christie walked sedately back to her seat with the other speakers.

‘Great speech,’ the man seated next to her told her. ‘You really made them sit and think. And with any luck it will make the dailies. There’s nothing they like more than the combination of a controversial subject and an attractive woman.’

Christie acknowledged his comment with a half-smile, her attention not on him but on the audience. This wasn’t the main lecture hall, of course; subjects such as hers that seemed to cover all the more outrageous and unscientific elements of fringe and alternative medicine had been relegated to an old mission hall on the outskirts of the city, some distance from the main conference centre, but nevertheless her lecture had been well enough attended.

It hadn’t been a first for her, speaking to an audience; her subject was very dear to her heart and she was a powerful orator, making up with emotion for what she lacked in manipulation and subtlety.

She felt the man seated next to her edging his chair slightly closer to her own. The next speaker was now standing at the podium, and as he announced his subject Christie noticed that several people got up to leave. ‘It’s not as hot a topic as yours,’ her companion told her. ‘And he isn’t as attractive.’

Christie could feel the irritation beginning to edge up under her euphoria. She turned her head, giving him a cool, assessing look that told him quite categorically that he was wasting his time. She knew the type far too well: forty-something, married, full of his own self-importance, thinking himself God’s gift to the female sex and looking for a temporary—very temporary—bit on the side.

She saw that he wasn’t pleased at her visual rejection, but she didn’t care; her attention was already back on the audience, her eyes scanning the seated figures below her. What was she actually looking for? Confirmation of what she already knew? That he wasn’t here? Her mouth twisted with self-mockery. What had she expected? What had she wanted?

She had behaved more like a schoolgirl than a woman after their taxi had disgorged them outside their hotel, hanging back deliberately and trying at the same time to pretend that she was not doing so, while she watched him at the reception desk.

He seemed to be having some trouble with his reservation, or was it simply that the receptionist, an over-made-up brunette with pan-sticked skin and a full, sulky mouth, was deliberately keeping him there? In the end pride had won out over desire; the reception area was full and she was being jostled by the busy crowd. The last thing she really wanted was for him to turn round and see her standing there, too obviously waiting for some sort of recognition or contact with him.

After all, if he had been interested in her he had had ample opportunity to do something about it on their taxi journey here, she reminded herself as she fought her way through the crowd and headed for the lifts.

This hotel was rather more expensive than she had wanted, but she had left her booking rather late and had been unable to get in at anything cheaper. Even so … She had wrinkled her nose a little, unimpressed by its bland décor; it was, she’d reflected as she unlocked the door to her room, to the hotel business what fast-food chains were to the food industry.

The air in her room had been overheated and stale, the windows locked down so that she had to ring through to Maintenance to get someone up to open them, her mind not really on the non-opening windows, nor even on her purpose in attending the conference, but on the man who had shared her taxi journey here to the hotel.

He had introduced himself to her as Leo, but Leo who? There were heaven alone knew how many hundreds of delegates here in Edinburgh; what were the chances of running into him again, even if they were booked into the same hotel?

Christie considered herself to be neither naïve nor inexperienced. She had made a decision long, long ago that just because she was a woman she was not going to be forced into the conventional mode of only allowing herself to enjoy sex once she had convinced herself that she was ‘in love’. The human need to enjoy sex was a physical urge, an appetite which, like any other appetite, should be indulged and enjoyed, and which should also be subjected to a certain amount of sensible self-control. She would not, for instance, gorge herself on food she had no real appetite for, which did not really please her, simply because it was there; and it was the same with sex. She was careful, choosy … but that did not mean that she could not and should not enjoy sex simply for what it was.

She did not want a permanent relationship in her life, a man who might try to curtail her freedom, who would almost certainly expect her to put his own needs before hers, who would demand adjustments and alterations in her lifestyle, who might even seek to change the way she thought and felt. She had seen far too often what happened when women committed themselves to men, and it wasn’t going to happen to her.

Saul had once pointed out to her that she seemed to have no difficulty in committing herself to Cathy, in putting her needs before her own, but Christie had told him that that was different; Cathy was her child and depended on her, and another dependant in the form of a permanent male partner in her life was something she just did not want, either emotionally or physically.

It had been a long time, a very long time now since any man had had that kind of physical effect on her—immediate, sharp, hungry, clawing at her flesh, making her ache, making her so aware of him that long before the taxi journey had ended she had been conscious of the betraying softness within her own body, the beginnings of a wetness that had made her fight against the urge to tighten her muscles and cross her legs in rejection of what was happening to her.

If she had had any corresponding physical effect on him, he had kept it well hidden, she’d admitted wryly.

The bedroom window was open and the cool fresh air blowing into the room had made her shiver a little.

The serviceman had glanced admiringly at her as he left. Christie had responded with a cold stare. It always irritated her that men felt that their sex conferred on them the right to express the sexual side of their natures without any kind of thought for whether or not the woman wanted their awareness of her.

Now, as she surveyed the audience below her, she told herself she was a fool for looking for that certain male face. If he had wanted to make contact with her he could have done so in Reception. It was hardly likely that he was going to turn up here.

There were only another two speakers to go before the end of the afternoon session. Tomorrow was the really big day, with an important set of speeches being given by various representatives of the drug industry, including a huge multinational concern which less than five years ago had only just managed to buy itself out of a potential scandal by paying out large sums of compensation before any case could ever reach court.

One of Christie’s patients had been a victim of that particular drug. Its side-effects had caused severe pain and then semi-paralysis of one of her arms. She had been pathetically grateful for the compensation she had received. As a pensioner, she could never have afforded to take Hessler’s to court, she had confided to Christie.

The drug had been withdrawn from the market, of course … at least officially. Christie suspected that it would be marketed again at some point under a different name, and maybe even via a different company. Too much money would have been spent on its research for its producers completely to write it off.

Half an hour later as she walked off the stage several people came up to congratulate her on her speech, including a local reporter who wanted to do a piece on her. A local TV crew arrived and she found herself being interviewed by them as well.

‘That’s great,’ their reporter told her when she had finished. ‘This natural health thing is really hot at the moment.’ He gave her a cynical smile. ‘Personally I prefer to go for the doctor’s cure every time, but if folk want to believe that drinking herb tea is going to help them, who am I to argue with them?’

Christie gritted her teeth and gave him a feral smile. ‘You do realise, don’t you,’ she challenged him, ‘that almost every modern synthetic drug has its equivalent in nature, that many of them are simply chemical copies of a drug first derived from nature?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he agreed flippantly. ‘So if Mother Nature’s so hot on curing things, how come they never found anything to cure the plague and that sort of stuff?’

Christie gave him an exasperated look. ‘They couldn’t cure it because they lacked proper sanitation, proper … And as a matter of fact some of the things they used for smallpox, for instance, like hanging red cloth at the windows, has actually been scientifically proved to be effective.’

‘Yeah? Well, me, I’d prefer a good dose of antibiotics every time,’ he told her. ‘Mind you … it could make a good item for the local news round-up. What’s your name again?’

Grimacing slightly, Christie gave it to him before he turned away to interview someone else.

She wanted to get back to her room to ring Cathy. She knew that she would be fine with Saul, but already she was missing her.

She didn’t see the small white envelope someone had slipped under her door until she had finished her phone call. Frowning, she replaced the receiver and then went to pick it up. The front was blank, the envelope sealed down.

She broke the seal with her nail and withdrew a piece of paper from inside.

Her heart was beating far too fast, the sense of letdown and exhaustion that had followed her speech instantly banished, elation and a swift surge of adrenalin taking its place.

How had he managed to discover her room number? Well, that didn’t matter now, she told herself as she reached for the telephone and punched in the appropriate numbers.

He answered almost straight away and she had said no more than a slightly hesitant, ‘Leo?’ before he recognised her voice and responded warmly.

‘Christie, you got my note. Good. Are you free for dinner this evening, or—?’

‘Yes, yes … I …’ She bit her lip, conscious of sounding almost over-eager.

‘Perhaps we could meet in the foyer at, say, eight?’ he suggested easily, making her feel less self-conscious.

‘Eight would be fine,’ she confirmed.

It was only when she had replaced the receiver that she discovered that she was actually physically trembling a little, the palm of her hand damp, her pulse-rate far, far too high.

What was the matter with her? She was acting like an idiot, she warned herself as she went into her bathroom and held her wrists under the cold tap. He was just a man, for God’s sake. A man … a fellow human being … not some Olympian god.

What would he be like in bed? Her body shuddered, her nipples suddenly peaking under the erotic stimulation of her imagination. Calm down, she warned herself, adding wryly under her breath, ‘Just because he looks good and physically he turns you on it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a good lover. Remember, the proof of the pudding …’ Her mouth curled up at the corners, amusement darkening the colour of her eyes, her heartbeat quickening. Would he be a sensual lover, enjoying touching her, stroking her, kissing her … licking, sucking and biting her skin and inviting her to do the same to him?

Already she could feel the heady mixture of anticipation and sensual languor taking over her body. That his invitation to dinner was merely a precursor to their spending the night together she had no doubt.

She went over to the window, breathing in the clear cool air, throwing her head back and laughing as the excitement gripped her, suddenly feeling more alive, more adventurous, more impetuous than she had felt in a long time.

As honest in the way she felt about her body and her appearance as she was in her attitude towards sex, Christie was not the kind of woman who prepared herself for her lover by dressing herself in the kind of clothes historically thought to appeal to the male sexual appetite. To her that was a form of bondage as outdated as the image of the submissive, obedient, dutiful wife whose one goal in life was to please her mate.

No, a man must take her as he found her, accept her on equal terms, accept her body as that of another individual and unique human being and not see it only as some kind of cruel caricature of the unfortunate models who posed for the so-called ‘male’ magazines, their flesh lifeless and inert, a receptacle for the physical fruit of man’s lust without either giving or receiving any enjoyment from it.

* * *

In his own suite of rooms, Leo continued to hold on to the receiver for several seconds after Christie had hung up.

It had been difficult to track her down, but not as difficult as getting himself a room here in her hotel. The receptionist had told him huffily that they simply did not have any rooms free, until for the first time in his life he had used the power of the von Hessler name.

The look on her face when she’d realised that he was willing to forgo the suite that had been booked for him at the city’s top hotel to take an ordinary double room with them had made his mouth twitch a little with amusement. Flushed and uncertain where she had been lofty and all-powerful, she had gone to find the manager.

A suite had been found for him, and Leo hoped that no one had actually been ejected from it. He had protested that an ordinary room would be fine. In fact, he would have preferred an ordinary room, but the manager had been so shocked at the thought of his occupying anything other than their best suite that he had wryly given way.

Christie Jardine. He knew quite a lot about her now. His PA, baffled by his non-appearance at the hotel suite originally booked for him, had only just about managed to conceal his curiosity when Leo had casually asked him to find out which room Christie was in.

One of the few advantages of his power, Leo recognised, was that he did not have to give anyone any reasons or explanations for what he chose to do.

His PA, for instance, had not been able to ask him either why he had booked into another, less luxurious hotel, nor why he was interested in Christie Jardine. Jürgen was a Hessler man through and through, though, and Leo realised that he had thought he had found the answer to his own curiosity when he’d reported back that Christie was one of that as yet mercifully small band of doctors actually daring to question the morals of the huge multinational drug companies.

Leo had been wryly amused by Jürgen’s obvious disapproval of Christie, gravely thanking him for his report and then feeling a little ashamed of himself for taking advantage of him and his own position. He wondered what his PA would have thought had he known that his interest in Christie was personal and had nothing to do with her antipathy towards corporations such as Hessler’s.

But would she be similarly able to accept him, or would she reject him because of who he was?

He frowned as he looked out across the city. From his penthouse eyrie, only the castle on its granite perch overlooked him, a frowning edifice that dominated the city sprawled at its feet.

How grimly this place must have struck the young spoiled Mary, Queen of Scots, returning here from her cocooned life of soft luxury in France. How cold and dour both it and its people must have appeared to her, judging her, rejecting her.

As Christie Jardine would reject him if she knew who he was. He turned away from the window, frowning. Sooner or later he would have to tell her. It wasn’t in his nature to enjoy any kind of deception and certainly not the kind that involved deliberately withholding from another person information he knew might be drastically important to them.

He reached for the telephone receiver, picking it up and punching in the number he had written down on the pad beside the phone. Once again thanks to his PA, he had the name and number of what he had been assured was one of the city’s best restaurants. Best not in the sense of being patronised by a certain ‘in’ crowd, but best in the sense of being somewhere that was richly rewarding on a much more sensory level.

You could learn a lot about people from the kind of restaurants they favoured and the food they chose to eat. He frowned again, the old habit of self-regulation of his thoughts and actions making him pause to ask himself why he was taking Christie there … as a means of testing her? Or himself?

Neither. He was simply taking an attractive and very sensual woman out to dinner. That was all.

If that was all, why hadn’t he told her who he was?

* * *

In her own room, Christie showered, rubbing the sponge firmly over her skin so that it glowed from the friction. She had good skin, firm and sleek, olive-tinged and healthy. It clung firmly to her bones and muscles. As she rinsed herself off she reached for her towel and then changed her mind, padding naked into the bedroom to study her image thoughtfully in the mirror there, trying to view herself as a man might.

Her legs were long and elegant, her body a woman’s rather than a girl’s, her breasts well shaped but soft from having breast-fed Cathy, her nipples dark and surrounded by large and slightly swollen areolae.

On holiday, sunbathing topless, she had seen the way a certain kind of man had looked at them and, while she had pitied the men for their sexual repression and inadequacy, she had been sharply irritated by their furtively expressed sexual immaturity. She had no more control over the shape of her breasts than she had had over the colour of her eyes; they had been encoded within her at her conception, but to some men it was as though she had deliberately chosen them as an advertisement of her sexual availability.

She had her own scale now for judging how men reacted to them, a private test, which disappointingly few men managed to pass.

There was, after all, as she had pointed out to the distraught woman patient who had come to her requesting a breast-implant operation because of her husband’s attitude towards her neat and perfectly normal pair of thirty-two As, far more to a woman’s sexuality than a pair of oversized boobs. ‘Try telling your husband you want him to have his penis extended,’ Christie had told her.

The woman had stared at her. ‘Is there such an operation?’ she had asked doubtfully.

Christie hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. One thing she did know was that, if there were, ninety-five per cent of the world’s male population would no doubt be queueing up for it. Perhaps, after all, a sex that still could not accept, despite overwhelming evidence to prove it, that as far as women were concerned it was not the size of the equipment that was important but what you actually did with it, and, even more important, what you did before and after you even got around to using it, could be forgiven for its fixation on large breasts.

She placed her hand flat against her midriff. Her waist curved in, her hips round and smooth, her stomach a small gentle swell above the dark tangle of her pubic hair.

Christie knew that she was fortunate in her easy acceptance of her own body and her own sexuality. Every day in her surgery she listened to women patients who were not, and ached for them in their lack of self-love, wanting to urge them to thrust aside their ingrained sense of lack of self-worth and somehow to replace it with pride in their sexuality, with self-confidence in their womanhood, with the right that surely belonged to every human being to value themselves … to love themselves.

It had taken her a long time and a lot of self-searching before she had been able to cast aside the image of herself she had seen in her father’s eyes and to stand tall and proud in her own individuality; an individuality she was fiercely determined to protect and see thrive.

She was perfectly happy to share her body, her pleasure in her own sexuality, her desire and even some of her vulnerabilities with a lover; what she was not and never would be prepared to do was to submerge herself in him, abasing herself for him, demoting herself to second place for the sake of his needs, his ego. If he was not man enough to accept her as an equal, to understand that for her there would always be times when her own needs, her own ambitions must be set above his and he must accept that fact, then there was no place for him in her life, not even as a lover.

Which was probably why she had been celibate for these last several years, she acknowledged humorously as she finished her tally of her physical self and briskly dried her still damp skin, extracting clean underwear from the drawer, a plain fine silk bra and equally plain briefs to go under the warm tobacco-brown of the simple silk dress she was going to wear.

No need for tights; her legs were smooth and lightly tanned, and the silk fabric of her dress wasn’t happy over man-made Lycra and nylon.

She had washed her hair. Now she dried it, brushing it vigorously. It was thick and shoulder-length with a strong curl. When she was a child her father had always complained that it looked wild and untamed. She remembered that now as she plaited it into elegant control. She shivered, acknowledging how much she already wanted Leo; knowing that the imagination of his mouth against her own, against her breast, her stomach and the sensitive female flesh where a small pulse was already beating excitedly, was tensing her stomach and making her body soften and ache so that she could feel its sensual swell pressing against the constriction of her clothes; those who believed that it was only male arousal that caused such an immediate and visible physical swelling of the body were woefully ignorant of either their own or their partner’s reaction.

But then, how many of them ever actually looked? She had been mystified when a man had moved uncomfortably away from her as she studied his erection, sensually enjoying its effect on her senses, on her awareness of the pleasure that awaited her in having him inside her.

It put him off, he told her uncomfortably. Women were supposed to close their eyes.

It had done more than put him off, and after that it had been another test she had subconsciously used on her would-be lovers. They had not only to enjoy having her look at them, but to enjoy looking at her as well.

After all, sex, good sex, should surely employ the use of all of one’s senses; the physical penetration of one body by another was, to her, only the climax of what should have been a banquet, a feast of all the senses. A man who did not enjoy watching her, seeing how much his touch aroused and pleased her, was in her opinion a very poor kind of lover.

Christie wasn’t a fool. She knew that many of her feelings, her beliefs challenged some of the most dearly held male beliefs, challenged them too dangerously in many cases, but she refused to be bullied or cowed into a sexual stereotype because that was the only way some men’s egos could accept her.

And yet she was very much a woman, secretly acknowledging that part of her sexuality that wanted at the height of her desire to be passive, penetrated, possessed, but knew that in being all those things there remained a subtle strength and power, an elemental mystery that held the kernel of the atavistic male drive to possess the female.

Very few men could understand that in a woman. But the few that could and did …

A wry smile curled her mouth. Don’t get too carried away, she warned herself. Just because he looks good and turns you on, it doesn’t mean he’s one of them.

She was down in the lobby at one minute to eight. Christie did not play silly power-games to manipulate the opposite sex, and she was pleased to see that Leo had had the good manners to get there ahead of her.

Good manners were not to her an old-fashioned, outdated means of putting women in second place. Used properly, they were simply an awareness of and a consideration for others. Of either sex. Had she been the one to ask Leo to dinner she would have made sure she was there ahead of him too.

She liked the way he smiled at her, openly taking in her appearance and equally openly letting her know that he found her attractive.

‘The restaurant isn’t very far away,’ he told her. ‘We can walk or take a taxi.’

‘Oh, walk, please,’ Christie responded. ‘It’s so stuffy in here that I’d welcome some fresh air.’

Although he was wearing a suit, it was more casually tailored than the one in which he had arrived at the airport. The cloth looked as though it was some kind of silk mixture and not the kind that had been bought cheaply in between flights to and from Hong Kong and made up overnight, she recognised shrewdly. Which meant either that he was independently wealthy or that he had a generous expense account. Somehow she did not think it was the latter.

He opened the main door for her, but allowed her to walk freely and easily, choosing her own distance from him, which had the effect of causing her to move a little closer to him than she might normally have done. A subtle piece of clever manipulation or a genuine recognition of her equality?

‘I don’t know what the restaurant is going to be like,’ he warned her as he indicated that they should turn left into a narrow street that led up towards the castle. ‘It has been recommended to me.’

‘You have friends in Edinburgh?’ Christie asked him.

‘Er—no.’

She tensed a little, sensing that he was uneasy, withholding something from her.

Damn, she had noticed that small betraying hesitation, Leo acknowledged, registering Christie’s reflexive muscle tension and the quick assessing look she gave him.

He hated lying and he had never been any good at it. And to be a good liar one had to enjoy it, he admitted ruefully. To treat it as a mere pedestrian necessity rather than to indulge in it with flair and enjoyment might have been enough to have helped him get by, but whenever he was called upon to utter even the most basic of humdrum white lies he could almost feel himself flinching away from doing so.

Elle had laughed at him for it. Lying well was not just a skill, nor even a necessity, but one of life’s greatest pleasures, she had told him, adding mockingly that she was surprised he was such a good lover when he lacked this most important loverly skill. It was probably because what he lacked in verbal deceptive flair he made up for with his sensitivity and awareness of people’s emotions, she had decided.

Whether she was right about that or not, Leo knew one thing: Christie Jardine was not the kind of woman who would share Elle’s views on the necessity of deceit.

‘I … I heard about it from … from a business associate,’ he told Christie now, grimly aware that his words, while technically true, still held that betraying note of tension.

A business associate. Did that mean another woman? Christie questioned inwardly, and then frowned quickly. What did it matter how he had learned about the restaurant? Or why her question had made him so uncomfortable? He was a stranger, someone she barely knew, she reminded herself as Leo touched her arm lightly and said, ‘I think we turn left here.’

After all, she could hardly expect him to catalogue his life and the people in it for her, just because they were going out for dinner. She knew she would have been the first to object had he started cross-questioning her about her own life.

They were off the main thoroughfare now and in one of the maze of narrow streets—wynds, as they called them—which formed a maze of ginnels and alleys between the ancient tenement buildings. Once these tenements had been the city apartments of those wealthy high-born country Scots who would leave their estates to come to Edinburgh to enjoy the social season.

The wynd opened unexpectedly into a small courtyard, and Christie blinked in surprise and pleasure at the sight of the profusion of window-boxes, and pots full of flowers that filled the small grey space.

Someone had very cleverly elected to choose plants grey and silver in foliage with white, pale blue and the palest misty lavender-grey flowers, so that now at night with the dusk, the pale, ghostly blue-grey of a northern-lying land, the plants blended perfectly into their surroundings in a way that the hot, bright colours of the Mediterranean never could have done. Even the pots had been carefully chosen to enhance that effect, she observed as she moved closer to study the raised design on one of the lead containers.

Leo watched her as she moved forward to run her fingertip along the relief pattern. She had elegantly long fingers, but the nails were cut short and unpolished. She was totally absorbed in what she was doing, all her concentration focused on the pleasure the containers and their contents were giving her.

It was rare these days to see a child, never mind an adult, exhibit that kind of delight; natural; honest; unashamed of the emotion that others might see.

Her plait had swung forward on to her face and he discovered that he wanted to reach out and tuck it behind her ear so that he could watch her.

He saw her frown suddenly, a rueful look curling her mouth as she turned to him and said, ‘They aren’t lead at all, they’re plastic.’

He could sense her disappointment. ‘Lead would be prohibitively expensive and more at risk from thieves. The plastic is a very good facsimile.’

‘Until you get too close to it,’ she agreed.

‘Like a good many things in life,’ Leo suggested quietly.

Christie frowned. Had he guessed … known … that that was exactly what had been running through her mind, or had he simply voiced a belief that was his own? Either way, it disturbed her that their thoughts should have run so exactly parallel.

‘At least the flowers are real.’

Leo looked at her as he held the restaurant door open for her. Reality in all things would be very important to this woman. Reality and truth.

The restaurant was busy without being overcrowded. The bar area was upstairs in an open gallery so that one could if one wished enjoy an aperitif while looking down on the dining area without being guilty of prying and, equally important, without making the diners below feel as though they were exhibits in a cage.

‘Very clever,’ Christie commented when they were seated at a table, waiting for their drinks, ‘allowing people to indulge in people-watching and to tempt their appetites at the same time.’

‘Mm … and hopefully to prevent them getting too restless when they’re kept waiting for a table.’

Christie gave him a shrewd look: intelligent and good-looking, and, from what she had seen so far, without that irritating male aggression that seemed to be a shared vice of so many successful men.

Successful? She frowned. Now, why had she thought that? Because he wore discreetly expensive clothes; because of his manner; the way he was so comfortably at ease with himself and with his surroundings. The restaurant might not to the untutored eye appear luxurious, and it certainly wasn’t ostentatious, far from it; but Christie had already discerned that the diners, local people in the main, to judge from their soft accents, were not those on their way up their chosen ladders in life, but those who had reached the top and been there long enough to feel relaxed and unimpressed by either status or wealth.

This was a restaurant for people who knew what they wanted out of life; who sought to please themselves and were far removed from the necessity of pleasing others. As Christie watched, a female diner shook her head over the selection of vegetables she was being shown, her smile rejecting the food without embarrassment or self-consciousness, her manner towards the waiter as she spoke to him very definitely that of someone who knew beyond any kind of doubt that the restaurant would be only too pleased to provide whatever it was she chose to have; that there was no need for raised voices or aggressive demands; that she was there to be pleased and pampered.

At another table a woman was sampling some fresh raspberries, tasting a couple before opting to have them, a tiny frown marring her immaculate made-up face as she judged their flavour and texture.

‘The restaurant specialises in providing fresh locally grown or produced food,’ Leo told her. ‘It isn’t exclusively vegetarian but the menu doesn’t carry very many rich red meat dishes. I’m not a vegetarian myself … but, I must admit, these days I seem to have lost the lust for very heavy meats.’

‘As a doctor, I’m all too well aware of the dangers of too much fat consumption,’ Christie told him. ‘I’m a terrific fish fan, and Cathy and I both enjoy raw vegetables and fruit.’

‘Cathy?’

Christie put down her glass, giving herself a few seconds to reply. It wasn’t like her to introduce Cathy into her conversation like that; at least, not in this sort of situation. Cathy and her private life were things she preferred to keep private.

‘My daughter,’ she explained.

Her voice was terse enough for Leo to pick up on her reluctance to discuss the subject, but suddenly it had become very important to him to know if there was a man to go with the child. He gave her a quick look. She would not respond well to a direct question, he suspected; already she was on her guard, slightly tense, her body stiffening as she sat bolt-upright in her chair, her body language almost defying him to ask her anything more.

‘You’re lucky,’ he told her quietly. ‘I don’t have any children, nor indeed a wife.’

‘The two don’t necessarily go hand in hand,’ Christie pointed out drily.

Leo felt her tension relax a little. He had suspected she wouldn’t be able to resist that kind of comment. ‘No,’ he agreed, and then added firmly, ‘However, if I did have a child or children inside or outside marriage, whatever the status of my relationship with the mother, I would want to keep them within my life.’

For the first time Christie heard a certain steeliness in his voice and for some reason it made her sharply aware of the contrast between his attitude and that of Cathy’s father.

Angrily she pointed out to him, ‘You might not be given that choice. If your relationship with your child’s mother broke down there would be no guarantee that you could continue to have a relationship with your child. Most courts still find in favour of a child’s mother.’

‘Yes. But I should like to think that, even if I and my child’s mother could not continue with our relationship, both of us would be left with enough respect for one another and enough love for one child to come to some arrangement that would allow us both to remain in his or her life, even if we no longer remained there together.’

His idealism and the sincerity with which he spoke irritated Christie. He obviously had no idea of what life was really like. The break-up of a sexual and emotional relationship between two adults was a very painful thing, with neither of them inclined or even able to make sane, loving arrangements for sharing the child they had created together, but because she couldn’t voice those thoughts without betraying her own emotions she said instead, ‘What about the distance factor? Sometimes even with the best will in the world it’s not always possible for a father to remain in contact with children who might live some distance away.’

With all the means of transport at his disposal it was extremely unlikely that there was anywhere in the world he could not be within twenty-four hours, Leo reflected, but he knew he could not say so. He had touched a nerve, quite obviously … Because her relationship with her child’s father was not a good one? Why did that thought cause him such a sharp thrill of relief?

They had to break off their discussion to order their meal, and, once they had, Leo changed the subject by asking her about her work.

Her work was something about which Christie felt so passionate that her problem was not in talking about it but in trying to make sure she didn’t totally monopolise conversations by doing so, but on this occasion she was also conscious of a tiny frisson of not exactly chagrin … not even really disappointment, but something that was most definitely not the relief she should have felt in having successfully indicated to Leo that Cathy and her private life were subjects she did not want to discuss.

What had she expected—that he would press her to answer his questions, ignoring her unspoken veto, as if she were a woman saying no when she meant yes?

Her muscles tensed reactively, her self-disgust that she might have been guilty of that kind of passive inability to make her own decisions as sharp as though she did indulge in the kind of fake shy sexual manipulation that meant she paid lip-service to the outdated notion that a woman could not be valued by a man in the sexual sense unless he had to coax or persuade her into acquiescing to his desire; as though a woman were some kind of passive vessel for sex, without the self-respect or pride to claim her rights to her own sexual needs; the right to say yes when she meant yes and to say no when she meant no without being judged on those responses.

Her voice, her manner had warned Leo to keep his conversation away from personal issues, so why now did she feel slighted almost because he had, as though in obeying her unspoken commands he was somehow indicating that he had no real interest in her?

She was still irritated by her own contrariness when their waiter came to escort them to their table.

As Leo walked behind her he observed the economical elegance of the way she moved; she had a natural physical grace, not the languid, calculated, sensual grace of Elle and her like. Christie’s was more buoyant, more vital, her movements quick without being jerky or brittle. She would be an energetic lover, he suspected, one who might even deride him a little for his own slower-paced enjoyment of lingering over each caress and touch.

Leo liked foreplay, a fact that had openly amused Elle, who had told him once that the fates had given him a gift which potentially could make him irresistible to the whole of womankind.

‘I thought it was stamina that women wanted in sex,’ he had offered ruefully, conscious that Elle was already discreetly indicating that her recent orgasm, while enjoyable, had for her simply been a starter to the main meal.

‘Almost any man can be made erect by a woman who has patience and skill,’ Elle had shrugged. ‘Teaching him that she desires more than the mechanical textbook manipulation of her body plus a brief period of penetration if she is to achieve the pleasure she has every right to expect is something else.

‘The best that most women can hope for is that a man will have enough knowledge and self-control to suppress his own orgasm until she has had time to reach hers. To find a man who actually takes as much pleasure in helping her to reach that orgasm as he does in the relief of his own … a man who sometimes enjoys that journey so much that he is actually slower to reach that climax than she …’ Elle had run a delicate fingertip down his body as she spoke, laughing softly under her breath as his quiescent body started to respond to her, conversation forgotten as she drew him down against her.

Christie could be an almost pragmatic, even aggressive lover, he suspected, demanding her right to be treated as an equal, the one who kissed, who controlled, who set the pace. While he had never had any desire to make a woman feel subservient or passive, Leo had also never been attracted to a woman who was sexual rather than sensual, and, on the face of it, Christie was that kind of woman, perhaps treating sex as an appetite to be appeased, as something separate from emotion, above all refusing to let go of her own self-control.

But he had seen the way she touched those flowers, the wondering, almost awed look of pleasure in her eyes, and he had known that, no matter how much she herself might seek to conceal it, she was as vulnerable to sensuality as he was himself.