Unguarded Moment

She said without looking at him, ‘Goodbye, Mr Brant.’ That was the second time she’d said that today, she thought wildly. Not that it had made any difference. And didn’t people say that everything came in threes?

It made her skin crawl to think that she had sat in this very restaurant with Peter, being watched. She had laughed and talked and given herself away a hundred times, and all the time Liam Brant had been there taking note. And he knew why she was no longer seeing Peter too. That was quite obvious.

She was aware that the waiter was at her side, exclaiming in concern about her half-filled plate, asking her anxiously if the meal had been all right. She tried to assure him that everything had been fine, and that she had just not been hungry, refusing his offers of a dessert and coffee.

‘If I could just have the bill, please.’

He looked mystified. ‘The bill, signorina? But it has already been paid.’ Mournfully he collected the plates and took them away, leaving Alix staring after him, her mouth set in fury.

Of course the bill had been paid, she thought angrily. Another barb in her flesh, a deliberate ploy to make her beholden to him even in a small way, like that damned theatre ticket.

How unfair it was that he should have a seat that he wasn’t going to use for the play that she was dying to see. He must have seen her leaving the box office, she thought broodingly. Seen her and drawn his own conclusions.

She looked longingly at the little crumpled ball in the ashtray. What an awful waste it seemed. And as far as Liam Brant was concerned, that was the end of the matter. As soon as the table was cleared, the ticket would be thrown away, or so he thought. And it was only crumpled, not torn. If she was to use it, no one would be any the wiser.

Despising herself, she reached for the small yellow ball and smoothed the ticket out with fingers that shook a little. There was a war going on in her head, one part of her mind arguing fiercely that if she used the ticket, he would never know, and the other warning her that she should tear the ticket into tiny fragments rather than accept the slightest favour at his hands.

But what was the alternative? A quiet evening at home, unpacking and inevitably thinking about the problems the day had thrown up at her. It all seemed curiously unappealing.

She looked down at the ticket and told herself silently, ‘He’ll never know.’

The critics and theatregoers had been right; the cast and production thoroughly deserved the superlatives that had been heaped upon them.

In fact the only thing to mar Alix’s contentment was the second empty seat beside her. She had spent most of the first act in agony waiting for him to join her, preparing herself for the barbed comment, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to leave herself, before it happened.

But it didn’t happen. Even after the interval the seat remained unoccupied, and she was able to relax and give herself over to the untrammelled enjoyment of the evening.

All the same, she couldn’t help wondering exactly what had come up to prevent him seeing the play himself, and exactly who the second seat had been intended for. A woman undoubtedly, she thought, and attractive. His views on that were more than clear. An actress, maybe or a model, or perhaps a ‘media person’. Someone glamorous, so that other people would look and look again, approving his choice and envying him.

She had a sudden disturbing inner image of his face, the cool dark eyes under the hooded lids, the thin high-bridged nose, and the sensuous curve of his lower lip. A man to whom women would matter. A man who would demand physical beauty, a physical response, she thought, remembering with a shiver the frank appraisal in his eyes, and the unwelcome brush of his fingers against her flesh.

That was something, she told herself, that she did not need to remember. She had managed to blot Peter Barnet and his defection out of her mind successfully. He wasn’t even a dull ache any more, and she found it hard to recall anything about him except that he had been easy to talk to—but then he was a journalist, so he was probably professionally a good listener, she acknowledged wryly.

Yet she had never felt the same necessity to be on her guard with Peter as she did with Liam Brant.

When the final curtain call had been taken, and she rose and mingled with the laughing, chattering throng making their way towards the exits, Alix caught herself wondering whether she was the only person in the theatre to have watched the play alone. Everyone else around her seemed to be one of a couple, or part of a group, and she was aware of a lonely feeling deep inside.

Oh, come on, she addressed herself roughly, you’ve no need to feel sorry for yourself. You have a terrific life, and if this was the kind of outing you planned in advance, then you needn’t have been alone.

She didn’t usually feel so much like an outsider. It was the events of the day which had started her thoughts off in such a depressing train, she thought.

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