‘Please tell me you don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,’ he said as, concentration gone, he gave up on the horse and drank the tea he hadn’t asked for.
‘Of course I don’t,’ she declared, ‘but the implication was that she had a history of instability. They wouldn’t lie about something like that.’ She took another biscuit, clearly in no hurry to be anywhere else.
‘No? She was in full control of her faculties when I saw her,’ he said. ‘I suspect the breakdown story is Morgan and Black’s attempt to focus the blame on her and lessen the impact on their business.’ Lessen the damages.
‘That’s shocking. She should sue.’
‘She hasn’t bothered to deny it,’ he said.
‘Maybe her lawyer has advised her not to say anything. What’s she like? You didn’t say you’d met her.’
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I’m doing my best to forget.’ Forget his body’s slamming response at the sight of her. The siren call of a sensually pleasing body that had been made to wrap around a man. A mouth made for pleasure. The feeling of control slipping away from him.
Precious little chance of that when his hands itched to capture the liquid blue of eyes that had sucked the breath out of him, sent the blood rushing south, nailing him to the spot. A look that eluded his every attempt to recreate it.
It was just as well she was safely out of reach in the Fairview, playing along with Morgan’s game in the hopes of hanging on to her job. Asking her to sit for him was a distraction he could not afford. And would certainly not endear him to his lawyers.
‘I wonder if it was anorexia?’ she pondered. ‘In the past.’ Patsy, generous in both character and build, took another biscuit.
‘No way.’ He shook his head as he recalled that delicious moment when, as Natasha Gordon had offered him her hand, the top button of her blouse had surrendered to the strain, parting to reveal the kind of cleavage any red-blooded male would willingly dive into. ‘Natasha Gordon has all the abundant charms of a milkmaid.’
‘A milkmaid?’
Patsy’s grandparents had immigrated to Britain in the nineteen-fifties and she’d lived her entire life in the inner city. It was likely that the closest she’d ever come to a cow was in a children’s picture book.
‘Big blue eyes, a mass of fair hair and skin like an old-fashioned rose.’ There was one that scrambled over the rear courtyard at the Chase. He had no idea what it was called, but it had creamy petals blushed with pink that were bursting out of a calyx not designed to contain such bounty. ‘Believe me, this is not a woman who lives on lettuce.’
‘Oh...’ She gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘And did this milkmaid apologise with a pretty curtsy?’ she asked, confirming her familiarity with the genre.
‘She didn’t appear to have read the script.’ No apology, no excuses... ‘She suggested that the advertisement was little more than a minor setback.’
‘Really? You’re quite sure the poor woman is not cracking up?’
‘As sure as I can be without a doctor’s note.’ But there was a distinct possibility that he was.
Milkmaids, roses...
Forget wheeling her in to apologise. If it was possible to be any more cynical, he’d have said they were hoping that she might use her charms, her lack of control over her buttons, to distract him from taking legal action.