Special Treatment. PENNY JORDAN
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Название: Special Treatment
Автор: PENNY JORDAN
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
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Weak with shock and reaction, she collapsed on to her bed. What on earth had got into her? Thank God she would never see him again. Thank goodness, he had believed her claim that she had used him as a substitute for her lover, but that had only been in the shock of the moment, when his brain had been confused by the arousal of his body. Later, when he had time to think … to question … Shaking her head, she got up again. She couldn’t stay up here. If she did, Mamie would come up, wanting to know what was wrong. She would have to go back down.
She was half-way across the hall when she bumped into Paul, walking the other way.
‘Ah, there you are! Ma has just sent me to look for you.’
Susannah let him take her arm. Several people were milling about around the entrance to the marquee but, when Paul stopped, her glance went instinctively to the tall, dark-haired man with his back to her. Her heart started pumping frantically, her body shaking.
‘Good, there’s Hazard. He made it, after all. I’d better introduce him to Ma and Pop.’
‘Hazard?’ Susannah queried faintly.
‘Yes. Hazard Maine. He and I both did a stint in Sydney. I met him a few months ago, and then we bumped into one another on the Qantas flight coming over. He’s taking up a new post in this country and he’s at a bit of a loose end. He was at school over here, apparently. He’s lost touch with people since, and so I invited him here.’
‘Where … where is he?’
‘Over there.’
She stared, dumbstruck, at the dark head he was pointing out to her, and an appalling awareness of what she had done swept over her. The man who had accused her of having a married lover, the man she had let caress and arouse her in a way that no man had ever done, the man she had quite deliberately allowed to believe she was the very worst kind of hardened tramp, was Hazard Maine. Paul’s friend … her new boss!
She made a small, inarticulate little sound of despair in her throat.
‘Something wrong?’
‘Paul … I … I have to go and talk to Richard,’ she invented. ‘I’ve just remembered something I should have told him.’
‘Richard?’ Paul called queryingly after her, but she was already disappearing into the crowd, and so he shrugged his shoulders and went on alone.
Hazard Maine! How could fate have tricked her so cruelly? Why had she not had any intuitive warning? Not even his accent had betrayed him. She had never imagined—never dreamed … She wondered frantically whether it was possible to change her whole appearance before Monday, whether she could somehow make herself unrecognisable. Then logic intruded, and she squared her shoulders.
There was nothing he could do. He could hardly sack her because she had allowed him a few physical intimacies, or because she had implied that she was simply using him to satisfy a need aroused by another man. No, he could hardly sack her for that, not without making himself look a fool, and Hazard Maine had not struck her as the type of man who welcomed being made to look a fool.
No, like her, he would just have to accept their working relationship.
And yet, reassure herself as she might, nothing could completely dispel her fear. It was too late now to regret her folly. And Aunt Emily hadn’t brought her up to run away from life’s problems. Besides, where could she run to? No, she would just have to brazen it out.
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