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‘Do you really think so?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
Sally let this sink in. After a bit, she said, ‘I would certainly be much happier if everything was out in the open. Where I come from I’m used to people being up front and honest and I’d hate to go behind another woman’s back.’
‘That’s very commendable,’ Logan agreed with necessary gravity. ‘Why don’t you come with me tomorrow when I deliver the roses? We’ll clear the air and then we can have dinner.’
It seemed an age that she stood there, considering this. He held his breath, bracing himself for her refusal, but then she shrugged. ‘That seems reasonable.’
?CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SALLY tried to carry on at work as if nothing in her life had changed, but it was a tall order considering that everything had changed while she’d been dancing with Logan Black.
?To start with she’d discovered she’d fallen helplessly in love with him, which was a whopping big problem on its own. But then he’d made everything worse by moving in close to her. She’d felt his body heat and every inch of her skin had tightened.
?Tingled.
Yearned.
It could have been a delicious moment,mighthavebecomea delicious moment, if her mind hadn’t flashed to that other time. That other dancing partner.
Instead of bliss, panic had flared.
The only good thing was that she hadn’t dissolved into a quivering, gibbering mess. She’d been pleased, actually, that she’d managed to recover fairly quickly. But then Logan had complicated everything again by asking her out to dinner.
He'd made it sound so simple and straightforward – nothing more than payment for the lessons. But any way Sally looked at dinner with Logan Black it was complex, thorny, problematical...
To start with, every girl knew that dating the boss was a lightning-rod for trouble. If the rest of the staff found out, they would immediately conclude she was hungry for a fast-trackedpromotion. And if office gossip wasn’t something to fret about, there was the whole business of the white roses.
Talk about confusing. Sally suspected that very few women – even women as sophisticated as Chloe had been – had the savoir faireto meet their boss’s current lover and then head off to dinner with him.
But Logan had assured her there’d be no problem and in the end his unruffled certainty had tipped the balance. It was why she’d said yes.
?After all, he stood to lose more than she did if news of their dinner date became water-cooler gossip at Blackcorp. And it washisproblem if their dinner date upset his lover. If he could be calm about that, why couldn’t she?
?Nevertheless, whenever Sally thought about that evening, she found it was possible to look forward to a date and dread it at the same time.
Not surprisingly, when Logan arrived at six-thirty, her stomach was a mass of nerves. He’d quickly showered and changed, as she had, and now he was wearing casual beige trousers and a dark shirt beneath a rather sporty, lightweight jacket.
His hair was still damp and Sally, in her best little black dress and kitten heels – because there was no point innotlooking her best – could smell his aftershave as he opened the car door for her. Once inside the car, she smelled the scent of the white roses glistening on the back seat and her stomach tightened.
Logan tried to make conversation as he drove to Clifton House, but for once Sally was too tense to respond with anything more than monosyllables. Eventually, he gave up, and the journey was completed in uncomfortable silence.
They arrived at very large iron gates, which were opened by a man in a little sentry box. The man greeted Logan andactually dipped his cap as the black car purred through the gateway and up a long, gravelled drive that wound its way through green parkland.
Sally gasped. ‘Where is this? It looks like the grounds of a mansion.’
‘Clifton House,’ was Logan’s brief and unsatisfactory reply.
They emerged from a grove of trees into a wide courtyard complete with a beautiful fountain. In the rays of the setting sun, two storeys of windows glinted gold. Thiswasa mansion. And Sally was way, way out of her comfort zone.
The name – Clifton House – had been embellished in gold on a black sign. And then beneath it, in smaller print, were the wordsNursing Home.
Sally rounded on Logan. ‘I don’t understand.’
As he steered his car into a parking space between graceful sandstone columns, he slanted her a sheepish smile. ‘This is where I bring the white roses.’
‘Is – is the woman you love sick? Or does she run this place?’
