Sleeping Partners. HELEN BROOKS

Guy’s Cavalier, with shaving foam, ribbons and a supermarket-load of tin cans, and soon the happy couple were off in a hail of rice and confetti and ribald shouts from Guy’s football cronies, some of which made her mother’s face tighten.

      Robyn stood stiff and still looking after the departing lights of the car, willing herself not to give way to the storm of emotion that was like a great hot ball in her chest. She had to get through this with a modicum of dignity, she told herself silently. No one, no one must guess what had happened, not a hint. She wouldn’t be able to bear it. She wouldn’t.

      The whole episode hadn’t been Clay’s idea. She had followed him out to the lake when he had made it perfectly clear all evening he didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She had thrown herself at him, quite literally—offered herself on a plate. No, not even offered, she corrected painfully—forced herself on him more like. She’d instigated everything, everything. What had possessed her? And now he thought she was loose, anybody’s…

      And then his voice sounded just behind her, saying coolly, ‘Robyn, we need to talk.’ His hand took her elbow, turning her to face him. His face was closed, inscrutable.

      ‘Let go of me.’ Her voice surprised her: she didn’t expect it to be so firm or so cold considering what she was feeling like inside. ‘Don’t you dare touch me.’

      He complied, instantly.

      ‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Clay, beyond that I’m as sorry as you at what happened tonight,’ she said tautly. ‘So, can we leave it at that?’ She stepped away from him as she spoke.

      The other guests were moving back inside and her mother approached them, sniffling loudly as she gushed how wonderful Cassie had looked and how desperately they were going to miss her. Robyn took her mother’s arm, making some light comment that she was quite proud of when her heart and her pride were in tatters, and once inside the hotel she slipped into the ladies’ cloakroom, locking the door of one of the cubicles behind her. She stayed in there some time, sick and numb with agonising misery and shame, and when she emerged Clay had already left.

      She discovered the next morning, listening to her parents chat over breakfast, that Clay had apparently had a plane to catch having pulled off some big deal in the States. Her father was full of it, declaring they had been lucky to see him at all considering the way Clay’s particular star was rising in the world of business since his father had died.

      ‘He’ll go places, that young man,’ Mr Brett stated firmly. ‘He might have been born with something of a silver spoon in his mouth but he’s not your average, spoilt rich kid, not Clay Lincoln. He’ll go to the very top, you mark my words.’

      Robyn knew exactly what Clay Lincoln was, and also the place she would like him to go. Shame and disillusionment and pain ate her up for months on end and she buried herself in working for her A levels, refusing all offers of dates from any young hopefuls and keeping herself strictly to herself.

      Time passed. She gained first-class grades in her examinations and went to university with the wounds having healed to some extent. But she was wary, extremely wary, of the opposite sex. The odd date, a casual friend or two was fine; anything other than that and she wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that she purposely shut her mind and heart to love and commitment, more that it would take a special man to give her the confidence to become vulnerable again.

      The special man hadn’t come along, the years had passed, and now she was twenty-eight and liked her life the way it was.

      She sat up suddenly in the bath, angry that she had so completely indulged herself with memories that were difficult even now to come to terms with. They said that time heals all wounds… Robyn grimaced to herself as she stepped out of the bath and wrapped a big fluffy towel round herself, sarong fashion. Maybe, in ninety-nine per cent of cases that was true, but where Clay Lincoln was concerned the scar tissue was almost raw. But that was her problem.

      Her soft mouth tightened, and the chocolate brown eyes fringed by thick black lashes that drew so many male glances on a day-to-day basis lost their velvet warmth and became as hard as iron as they narrowed reflectively.

      She had thrown herself at him that day so many years ago and had probably got exactly what she had deserved. She had come to terms with that years ago, but it had taught her a lesson about the ruthless, hard quality of the opposite sex she had never forgotten. He had made her feel less than the dirt under his shoes that night, and however stupid she had been—and she had been stupid all right—she still didn’t think she’d deserved that. She’d only been sixteen for goodness’ sake.

      But it didn’t matter. She walked through to the bedroom, sitting down at her small but exquisite dressing table that had been her grandmother’s. She stared into the misty mirror at the large-eyed girl staring back at her, and nodded defiantly. No, it really didn’t matter. Clay Lincoln was a figure from the past; it had been Cassie’s talk of him that had triggered these reflections. He was in a different world from her now.

      He had had the meteoric success in the business world her father had predicted, his star dazzling, and she had caught glimpses of it now and again in the newspapers and had heard reports from Cassie and Guy who still saw him very occasionally. But she had made sure their paths never crossed. It had been better for everyone that way.

      She had known when he had got married in the States to an American girl a short time after that fateful night at the lake, and also when his wife had died some years later, but she never pursued a conversation about Clay Lincoln. She had told Cassie and Guy she didn’t like him, pretending it was just that she found him abrupt and cold and that she disapproved of the playboy image he had adopted after the death of his wife. If Cassie had ever wondered at her animosity regarding Guy’s old friend she had never said so.

      Robyn breathed in deeply, reaching for the rich moisturising cream in front of her without taking her eyes off the ones staring back at her from the mirror.

      She neither wanted nor needed to see Clay Lincoln again. Not ever. And nothing would ever make her change her mind on that point. And as for Cass’s suggestion of approaching him with a view to him having a stake in her business, her own special baby—she would rather go bankrupt!

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘ROBYN, you remember Clay Lincoln, don’t you? Guy and Clay were at university together.’

      Robyn had just stepped into Cassie’s large open-plan lounge where her sister’s dinner guests were gathered in celebration of Guy’s thirty-fifth birthday. She had been smiling as she’d walked into the room but in the last moment the smile had been wiped off her face with shock. According to Cassie there had been three couples Robyn knew quite well invited to dinner tonight, along with Guy’s brother whom Robyn was partnering due to Cassie’s sister-in-law being away in Blackpool at a conference the bank she worked for had organised and which Beryl had been unable to get out of.

      But the tall, lean man in front of her was definitely not dear old Jim. And the photos she had seen of Clay in the newspapers over the last years had failed to do him justice. Twelve years ago he had been pretty stupendous; now he was easily the most handsome man she had ever seen in spite of the jet-black hair she remembered now being liberally streaked with silver.

      He was bigger—broader—than he had been at twenty-three but only in the breadth of his shoulders and chest; the leanness that had always given his good looks an almost animal quality was still there, but made all the more powerful by maturity.

      The youthful face had changed into one in which cynicism had scored deep lines which annoyingly only heightened his attractiveness; the silver-blue eyes were piercing in the deeply tanned skin and his mouth was possessed of hard worldly sensuality she was sure had not been there twelve years ago.

      It was a disturbing face, magnetic in quality but almost too male, even cruel. But why was his face—along with the rest of him—present in Cass’s house tonight? Robyn took a deep, hidden breath, silently thanked the guardian angel who had prompted her to make a special effort to look her best tonight, and said carefully, ‘Hello, Clay; it must