It was a hideous realisation. Mattie closed her eyes briefly in despair. When she opened them again, there was a new hardness there.

„There‟s no point discussing this further, Dominic.‟ She placed one hand flat on the desk and stood up, moving to stand behind it so that it was a physical and significant barrier between them. „I don‟t like what you did. And I can‟t respect anyone who would behave like that. This relationship, or whatever it was, was never going anywhere and now I‟m bringing it to an end.‟

She afforded him a view of her ramrod-straight back as she turned to face one of the windows.

Her heart longed to see him one last time. Her head refused to allow her the luxury.

But she knew he hesitated. Heard it as she followed his footsteps to the door, the brief pause. Then it was all over and he was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

GLORIA had gone home. Dominic had given her the afternoon off in a fit of grudging compassion. The poor woman had been reduced to tiptoeing around him for the past fortnight as his temper had become increasingly vile. She had arrived every morning to find him already at his desk, head buried in his work, only looking up when she entered to mutter the barest of greetings. Instructions had been given to her with deadly abruptness and he knew that he had been a snarling beast on the odd occasion when his plans for the day had been unexpectedly disrupted.

Dominic liked his secretary. The last thing he wanted was to drive her to the furthest reaches of her patience.

On the other hand, he just couldn‟t seem to help himself. He couldn‟t get Mattie out of his head, or the way their affair had ended. With a dismissive little parting shot that managed to sum him up as some kind of monstrous, self-serving opportunist who had availed himself of whatever weapons he possessed in his armoury in an attempt to bed her.

He had replayed that last conversation so many times in his head that he thought he was going crazy.

But not as many times as he had stood by his office window, when his computer was going mad and his phone lines were buzzing, thinking about whether he should go and see her.

Corner her in her office.

He was doing it right now. At six-thirty in the evening, when he should be taking advantage of the relative peace to answer the growing mound of correspondence that needed seeing to. Standing by the window, scowling and cursing himself for the way she had climbed under his skin and wrapped herself round his heart. His so-called deadened heart that had supposedly learnt lessons from past experience.

With a muffled oath Dominic began pacing his office, like a panther trapped in a cage when the rest of the jungle was calling him outside.

If he went to see her, then what? Another argument, with the same result, but this time conducted in full view of her work colleagues? He certainly couldn‟t confront her in her apartment because she had moved out. Gone where, he had no idea. Probably back to the ex. Just the thought of that was enough to make him swear profusely to himself.

His big mistake had been to telephone Liz Harris, her boss, on the pretext of trying to locate her boss, and then engage himself casually on the subject of Mattie, how she was doing in the job, how she liked the apartment. Which was when he had discovered that she had moved out.

That had been five days ago. Five very bad days during which he had had ample time to realise that not seeing her was on a par with a slow, painful death and thinking of her back in the arms of Frankie was even worse. Five nightmare nights during which he had been forced to accept that what had started as a casual fling had ended up as a deadly serious relationship that he had thrown away like an idiot.

He veered wildly from cursing himself for not having been honest with her from the word go, to raging at her for having taken his involvement in the wrong light.

He had already snatched his jacket from the cabinet in which it was stored, along with a change of suit and several shirts, and was sticking it on when the phone rang.

Dominic let it ring, debating whether his mood could carry him through yet another meaningless call with a client, and eventually decided that he really couldn‟t let work suffer at the expense of what he was going through.

Not that Mattie was in the slightest bit aware of the argument going on in his head as she waited tensely on the other end of the line. The only thing she was aware of was the frantic beating of her heart and the acute nervousness that was making her perspire just at the thought of hearing his voice.

She almost dropped the mobile phone when she finally did hear that voice snap shortly down the line, which made her wonder whether she had caught him on the way out, which in turn made her head spin with the possibilities of where exactly he was on his way out to.

Don’t even go there, she told herself feverishly, as if she hadn‟t been there a thousand times and back over the past fortnight.

„Hello, Dominic, it‟s me. Mattie.‟ Her voice was as controlled as her feelings were not.

He heard the coolness in her voice and all thoughts of his part in the dissolution of their relationship vanished like a puff of smoke. Back came the irrational anger that he had been ditched, ditched, by someone whom he had done the biggest favour possible, sorted out her career.

He should inform her in a few pithy phrases that he wanted nothing further to do with her. His pride demanded it.

Dominic moved over to his desk, sat down and swivelled around so that he was facing the window.

„Yes?‟ His voice was equally cold.

„Have I caught you on your way out?‟ Mattie asked and when he told her that, as a matter of fact she had, she immediately and again wildly wondered where he had been planning on going. Bad move. She needed her wits about her to get through this call, not scattered to the four winds because jealousy was eating away at her like a poison.

„What do you want?‟ Dominic asked flatly.

„We need to talk.‟

„Really?‟ He stared out into the nothingness that sprawled outside his window and felt a surge of heady excitement made all the more powerful by the fact that he hadn‟t been the one to initiate the contact. But hell, her voice sounded good. „What about? More of the same? Or have you come to your senses and realised that I might actually have had a valid point of view, after all?‟

„Where were you going tonight? Somewhere important? Anything you could cancel? I really would like to see you sooner rather than later.‟ Her words came out in a rush and she found that she was still holding her breath while the seconds ticked by.

„I suppose I could cancel my…appointment.‟ What appointment? The only appointment he had was a date with the bottle of whisky back in his apartment and the television with the sound turned down. „I could come over to the apartment, I guess…‟