Best of Bosses 2008(130)

For the first time since she had been announced, Nick entertained the possibility that she might not have come to his office because she wanted to engineer a reconciliation.

He had been on a high, anticipating her stammering admission that she couldn’t keep away from him. He had even begun playing with thoughts of how the rest of his day would pan out. At his place. Uninterrupted sex. Touching her, feeling her, enjoying the things she could do to his body and all the myriad things he could do to hers.

But, now she was sitting in front of him, he could see that she was pale. This was not the demeanour of a woman looking forward to embarking on a heady and fulfilling sexual relationship with a man.

In fact, this was the demeanour of a woman who was nervous about blurting out an uncomfortable truth. Nick, astute when it came to reading other people, felt something shift inside him. He was scared, terrified in fact.

Everything seemed to slow down and he became uncomfortably aware that he had broken out in nervous perspiration. He could barely ask the question he knew he had to.

‘Would you like something to drink? Tea? Coffee? I could ask my secretary to bring you some…’

Just the thought of tea or coffee made Rose feel nauseous. She went a couple of shades paler and shook her head.

‘I won’t be long, Nick,’ she said, clearing her throat and making an effort not to be pathetic.

‘No rush. Mind if I have a cup of coffee?’ He buzzed through to his secretary to bring him in a cappuccino and Rose smiled wanly at him.

‘Since when do you ask permission for anything, Nick?’

Since he wanted to buy some time before he heard what she had to say?

He was increasingly convinced that there was something seriously wrong with her. She looked terrible. As white as a sheet. And not because she was nervous, even though she clearly was. No, there was something underlyingly wrong, and as something close to terror continued to eat away at him Nick realised, in a moment of truth, what he had been missing all along.

He had let his own stubborn pride dictate his life. Nick Papaeliou, the man who could have any woman he desired, who had lived his life taking his pick and telling himself that his freedom was the most important thing he possessed, had clung to his vow never to commit like an idiot clinging to a lifebelt in a bath. No woman had ever been able to tempt him out of his conviction that bachelordom was the only way to go and so, when Rose had come along, he had steadfastly ignored all the glaring signs that had gradually begun to clutter his life.

He had mistaken his missing her when she wasn’t around as missing her body. He had longed for her and explained it away as just a normal red-blooded-male reaction to craving a woman who turned him on. And when he had offered her the epitome of commitment as far as he was concerned, the chance to share his house with him, he had blithely assumed that the gesture signified no more than a desire to have what he wanted on tap until he became bored, until they both became bored.

Women had always eventually bored him and the fact that Rose was not included in that category had been so obvious from the start and yet so easy to ignore.

He could have kicked himself.

She had told him that she loved him and what had he done? Asked her to prove it by doing the one thing she didn’t want to do: move in with him.

And now here she was and it sure as hell wasn’t to set that particular little situation right.

She was here to tell him…what?

That she was ill. Thinking about that possibility made him feel instantly sick when his cappuccino was brought in and placed on the desk in front of him.

She was trying hard to be brave and meet his eyes, but she physically couldn’t. He could see that and it terrified him.

‘I can’t have this conversation with you in my office,’ he told her abruptly, and that, at least, made her raise her eyes and look at him.

‘But you don’t know what I’m going to say.’

‘I know it’s serious, whatever it is.’ He pushed the coffee away from him and stood up.

Rose failed to follow suit. Instead she watched as he slung on his jacket, her fists pressed into her lap.

‘I don’t want to go anywhere, Nick. I want to say what I have to say here. Where it’s impersonal…’

Nick shot her a brooding, sideways glance and hesitated before removing his jacket and carefully replacing it on its hanger. Then he walked towards the window and stared down at the city streets below, trying to get his thoughts in order, filled with a cold, clawing panic and the painful knowledge that he had to say what he had to say before she unleashed whatever truth it was she had come to impart to him.

He could feel her eyes on him and, sure enough, he turned around to find her watching him.