A Scandal Made In London

And yet, to her horror, it was growing increasingly tempting to think to hell with it and throw caution to the wind. She could feel the pressure to do exactly that building unbearably inside her, and the words were on the tip of her tongue, piling up one on top of the other, clamouring for release.

What was going on? she wondered in mounting panic, clamping her lips together as horror thundered through her. Had the stress of everything that had happened lately finally broken her down? Had Theo cunningly deployed some sort of reverse psychology that suddenly had her desperate to share every tiny detail? Or was it simply that now she’d experienced a smidgeon of his interest she wanted more?

Impossible, she told herself as she took a deep breath through her nose and willed the dizziness to subside. That would be utterly ridiculous. She wasn’t that pathetic. She certainly wasn’t so starved of attention that she’d forfeit her dignity and fall on any crumb dropped at her feet.

But when was the last time a man had expressed any interest in her? Ever? Okay, so Theo had made it perfectly clear at Mike’s funeral he wasn’t interested in her like that, and that was fine because it wasn’t as if she wanted him to do anything about her little problem, was it? Heaven forbid. When she did finally get around to losing her virginity she didn’t want him anywhere near her. He was rude, high-handed and unpleasant and made her bristle with loathing, although, come to think of it, it wasn’t loathing she’d been bristling with for the last quarter of an hour. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was, any more than she understood what that charged moment when he’d looked at her legs had been about. The blessed relief that her money worries were over, most probably.

It couldn’t be anything else. It certainly couldn’t be attraction. What a waste of time and energy that would be. Even if she had liked him, Theo Knox was so far out of her league he was on another planet. He was a staggeringly handsome, enormously successful billionaire. She was an inexperienced ordinary woman of significantly above average height, who managed to look passable on a good day in the right clothes, of which, truth be told, she had few since it was expensive to clothe well a body like hers. She was moderately good at her job and reasonably intelligent, but she wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t special. In fact, she was the very opposite of special.

But regardless of her non-specialness, something about what she’d done had caught his attention enough to summon her up here and grill her when he could have just had her fired. And that was more appealing than it ought to be.

And so it seemed that—oh, dear—she was that pitiful and she was that starved of attention, because whatever the cost to her pride she wanted Theo’s interest back. She wanted to matter to someone. It was undoubtedly stupid and she definitely didn’t want to think about what it said about her, but the longer she sat there, the more inevitable it became, the more powerful was the urge to share, and she suddenly didn’t have the strength to resist.

‘Well, if you really want to know,’ she said, vaguely wondering if she hadn’t completely lost the plot, ‘mainly it’s my height.’

‘What?’ Theo snapped as he whipped his head round, his deep scowl clearly indicating his displeasure at her continued presence.

‘It’s my height.’

‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’

‘Everything.’

‘Why? Lying down—or in most other positions, for that matter—height makes absolutely no difference.’

What?

Okay...

‘Well, naturally I don’t know much about that,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t blushing quite as madly as she suspected and wishing she had stronger willpower. ‘But I hit six foot some time around my fifteenth birthday. I was lanky and clumsy and towered over the boys in my class at school. When it came to adolescent hook-ups they gave me a wide berth. There were plenty of other more normal girls to choose from.’

‘There is nothing abnormal about you,’ he said darkly, his gaze roaming all over her and setting her skin on fire.

‘Others might beg to differ,’ she said, determinedly ignoring it. ‘It was a difficult time anyway. My parents had just died and my twelve-year-old sister was in hospital, fighting for survival. Life as I knew it had shattered. Most people were kind and full of sympathy. Others, not so much. Some didn’t know how to handle it, well, me, really, and teenagers can be cruel, can’t they?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘What did they do?’

‘It was more a case of what they said,’ she said, her throat tightening as she recalled the grief, pain and confusion that had dominated her emotions during that time. ‘There were a lot of stupid, nasty rumours going round. A few bitchy comments. On one particularly memorable occasion a boy came up to me and said that my parents must have deliberately crashed because death was preferable to the embarrassment of having such a freak for a daughter.’

There was a pause, during which Theo’s jaw clenched imperceptibly and his entire body seemed to tense. ‘I literally have no words,’ he said eventually.

‘No, well, that wasn’t pleasant. It took me a while to get over it all, the loss of my parents, the new reality my sister faced, the bullying and then the guilt that my brother had been forced to leave university to come and look after me. And then when I did—which was no mean feat, I can tell you, not least because part of me was convinced that it wasn’t fair of me to live my life when Milly’s had been so devastatingly curtailed—it was to discover that even grown men are put off by my height. Apparently it’s emasculating. Not to mention intimidating.’

A tiny muscle began to hammer in Theo’s cheek. ‘That’s pathetic,’ he said grimly.

‘I know,’ she said with a casual ‘what can you do?’ kind of shrug, as if the years of bullying and rejection that had crippled her self-esteem and destroyed her sense of self-worth meant nothing. ‘But, well, it was what it was and on the upside, all that time my classmates and fellow uni students were dating I spent studying. I got a first-class degree and now have a career I love.’

‘I find your height neither emasculating nor intimidating,’ said Theo, his eyes not leaving hers for a second.

‘Why would you?’ she said as a tiny shiver raced down her spine. ‘You’re a hugely successful businessman with the world at his fingertips. I doubt you’re intimidated by anything.’ Or emasculated. He oozed such virile masculinity it simply wasn’t possible.

‘You’d be surprised.’

As his mouth curved into a faint smile, Kate thought that this was another of those occasions she wanted to look away. More than she wanted to know what intimidated him, which was saying something. The intensity of his gaze was making her skin feel all hot and prickly and yet again she was finding it oddly hard to breathe. She felt trapped. On fire. And suddenly, quite out of the blue, acutely aware of him.

Inexplicably, the tiniest of details began to register. The minute scar that bisected his right eyebrow. The slight bump on the bridge of his nose. And was that a silvery grey hair she could see at his left temple in amongst all the ebony? She rather thought it was.

And it wasn’t only the physical details that she now noticed. She could sense the tension radiating off him and the power he was keeping tightly leashed. The non-verbal signals he was emanating gave her the impression he was furious. On her behalf. And although she had no idea why that would be the case it made her go all warm and fuzzy.

What would it have been like to have had someone like him on her side when she’d been at school? she couldn’t help wondering as the silence stretching between them thickened. What would it feel like now?

Come to think of it, what would he feel like? He’d be hard and muscled, she was sure. All over. He wasn’t the type to tolerate softness. Except maybe where his lips were concerned. Those looked nice and velvety. And what about the sprinkling of dark hair she could see on the backs of his hands? Would it be rough to the touch or silky? And where else might he have it? She had no way of knowing, and now, bizarrely, that, as well as the realisation she’d never find out how soft his lips actually were, seemed a shame.

‘Anyway,’ she said, baffled by the unexpectedly carnal turn of her thoughts and suddenly really rather keen to lighten the weirdly tense atmosphere, ‘your experience of height has probably been far different from mine.’

Theo started, as if she’d jerked him out of deep thought, and his brows snapped together. ‘Has it?’

‘Has anyone asked you what the weather’s like up there?’

‘No.’

‘Suggested a career in basketball?’

‘No.’

‘I bet you haven’t ever had to put up with tiny little aeroplane seats and bashed knees.’

‘I have a private jet.’

Of course he did. ‘I always wanted a little zippy convertible,’ she said with a whimsical sigh. He nodded and she thought for a nanosecond that maybe he did understand after all. ‘Being hugged is a problem.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ she said with a nod, although it wouldn’t be a problem if it was Theo doing the hugging, would it? Her head would tuck into his neck perfectly. Her body would fit against his beautifully. And then she’d know exactly how hard and muscled he was...

‘Doorways.’

What? Oh. ‘Pendant lights.’

‘Hotel showers.’

Not helping. But what was going on? Why was she so flustered by the thought of Theo in the shower? Why was she even thinking about Theo in the shower? And why did she get the impression he was thinking about her in the shower? Unanswerable questions all of them, so she put them out of her mind and focused. ‘Much of the world is structurally tallist, don’t you think?’ she said, thankfully sounding more in control than she felt.

‘It is,’ he said with the glimmer of a smile so fleeting the minute it was gone she thought she must have imagined it.

‘Sleeves?’

‘My clothes are tailor-made.’ Naturally. ‘Shoes?’

‘Nightmare,’ she said. ‘I’m a size nine. And I never wear heels. You?’

‘Heels have never been my thing,’ he said, that faint smile back again.

Kate nearly fell off her chair because, good heavens, was that a joke? Crikey.

‘It’s hard to be inconspicuous.’

He arched an eyebrow. ‘Is that a negative?’

It was for her. She’d been taller than her contemporaries since the moment she’d learned to walk. Throughout her childhood barely a week had passed without someone commenting on it. She couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t felt different, and not in a good way. No amount of positive parental input had helped. She’d just wanted to be the same as everyone else. To fit in. Subsequently she’d spent so much of her childhood and teenage years hunching her shoulders and trying to appear shorter than she was her posture was abysmal. ‘I imagine that depends who you are.’

‘You command attention.’

Obviously he was using the ‘you’ in the general sense, not referring to her in particular, but nevertheless she weirdly found herself sitting up a bit straighter. ‘Possibly,’ she hedged.

‘And statistically, taller people tend to earn a higher salary.’

Her eyebrows lifted. ‘Really?’ That was interesting.

‘So I once read.’

‘I must remember that at my next performance review.’

‘I would.’ He paused, then said, ‘Light bulbs.’

‘Maxi-dresses,’ she batted back.

‘You never have a problem reaching for something from a high shelf.’

‘And you can always spot friends in a crowd.’

‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Definite pluses.’

His words were spoken evenly enough, but something flickered across his expression and the smile faded, and it suddenly occurred to her that while she’d assumed he was too uptight and aloof to do friends, maybe it wasn’t just that. Maybe it was more that it was lonely at the top. And so maybe he was as lonely as she was...

Or not.

The strangely electric heat surging through her dissipated and she went cold, because what planet was she on? A man like Theo would never be lonely. He certainly wouldn’t lack for female companionship. Just because nothing appeared about him in the gossip columns didn’t mean he was a monk. And a moment or two of banter did not make him a kindred spirit. She must have been mad to imagine he ever could be. And to think she’d even harboured the vague hope that he might have some advice for her about how to deal with an excess of centimetres. Of course he wouldn’t. He clearly had no hang-ups about anything at all, and why would he? He was a god and she was about as far from goddess-ness as it was possible to get. She and Theo were poles apart in virtually every way. She had to be even more starved of attention than she realised if she was deluding herself with the idea that they somehow shared something unique. And as for the inappropriate little fantasies about hugging and showers, what had she been thinking?

The setting sun was casting an oddly seductive golden glow across his office and the sense of intimacy it created was messing with her head. That was the trouble. It spun a sort of web that rendered reality all blurry. That was why she found it so easy to talk to him. Why she’d been all of a flutter when he’d so casually mentioned the many sexual positions he’d obviously experienced.

The sooner she could get out of here, the better. If she stayed, who knew what else she might reveal? She’d already humiliated herself quite enough. Once she’d started talking she hadn’t shut up. Besides, what with the rolling of her stomach and the bizarre way she kept going hot and cold at the same time, she was beginning to feel very peculiar indeed.

‘So, anyway,’ she said with a feebly bright smile. ‘There you are. The reasons why I’m still a virgin. Basically no one wants me. And on that pretty mortifying note I should definitely go. I’m sure you have plenty to be getting on with and I’ve taken up more than enough of your time. So, sorry for the firewall breach thing and, uh, thanks for everything... I’d best be off. Unless, of course, there’s anything else?’

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