His innate decency, his integrity, was something else she loved about him. She'd heard him time enough on the car phone dealing with some business or other, or dictating some important correspondence to Veronica Taylor, and knew that his integrity was unshakeable.
She remembered the…
Yancie's thoughts suddenly ceased midflow. That word `integrity' began to pound in her head. They just didn't come any more ethical than Thomson; she just knew it. Suddenly her heart, which had been a plodding muscle of late, started to race. Was she supposed to believe that once he left his office, once he put his business dealings aside, Thomson put his in-built integrity aside also?
She couldn't believe it, she realised. She could not. And yet that was what she had been believing. All these weeks she had trusted, believed what his mother had told her-that he was engaged to Julia Herbert and had been for some months now.
But, leaving alone that the men in the transport section were the biggest gossips she'd ever met, not one word had she heard about him being attached to anyone. Could she believe Thomson would forget totally and utterly that he had a fiancee when some other woman more or less invited him to kiss her?
Loud and strong the answer hammered back-no, he would not. Yancie pulled at the question every way she could. She had to work it out squarely and not arrive at the conclusions she wanted to arrive at purely because she could not take much more of this living in limbo.
He'd kissed her, she'd responded-oh, my, how she'd responded. But-he hadn't pushed her away, as a man engaged to someone else, a man with his integrity, would have. Thomson had instead kissed her again, many times. And, Yancie felt, would have made her his. Yet would he completely ignore the fact that some other woman was wearing his ring?
Had Julia been wearing his ring? Yancie couldn't remember seeing a ring on her finger; but then she couldn't remember not seeing one, either.
Yancie's stomach tied up in knots at the magnitude of her thoughts. If Thomson wasn't engaged to someone else, then he had every right to kiss where he pleased. Every right to ask someone else to marry him.
Yancie knew that she was not very good company for Astra and Fennia that night, and she went to bed early, to plough through the same thoughts over and over again.
But it was the not knowing that moved her to do something about it the next morning.
Yancie was up early, checking through her wardrobe. She knew what she had to do. She felt nervous, shy, all churned up in her stomach-but she couldn't take another day of going around in the same not-knowing circles. She was going to have to go and see Thomson.
Of course he might have absolutely no recollection of asking her to marry him. He had been critically ill, remember. Well, she might not even mention that-but at least, if he had some memory of asking her to marry him, he was entitled to an answer. And what Yancie did remember was that she hadn't given him one.
Fortunately both her cousins went to work early-Yancie felt much too uptight to want to talk about this obsession that had taken her over with anyone but him.
She was wearing an elegant suit that had once fitted snugly but which, although still looking smart, now hung on her thinner frame as she made her way inside the Addison Kirk building.
She chose not to go to the reception deskshe was not in any mood to have her progress stopped before she'd made it as far as the lifts.
But, having made it to the lifts, having got in and started to ascend, Yancie's insides started acting up with a vengeance.
Doubts, great clawing, scratching, spiteful doubts, started to go for her the moment she stepped out onto the floor where Thomson had his office. Don't be ridiculous, scorned the gremlin that had just jumped on her shoulder. Just because Thomson was totally honourable in his workplace, it didn't necessarily mean that he was the same in his relationships. Why, the world was littered with two-timing men who…
She reached his door and found she was half hoping he wasn't in. Didn't she know from personal experience that some days he didn't come into the office at all, but had a driver pick him up from his home and take him wherever his business happened to be?
Oh, please, let him be in! She felt a total mass of contradiction as, having no intention of calling first at his PA's office only to have Veronica Taylor tell her he was too busy to see her, Yancie reached for the handle of Thomson's office door.
She swallowed, gripping it hard, some part of her wanting to flee, her life seeming to depend on her staying and going in. Her last memory before the accident had been of Thomson getting into the Jaguar after he'd seen Julia Herbert to her door. He hadn't wasted any time about seeing her to that door, either, but was soon back, Yancie made herself remember. What sort of behaviour was that for a supposedly engaged man?
On that thought, Yancie gathered together all of her courage, opened the door and went in. Thomson was there. He looked up from his desk, plainly not expecting anyone. He was thinner too, she saw straight away, and her heart started to ache for all his suffering. But he was staring at her as if astounded by her nerve in barging into his office unannounced as if she was the last person he expected to see. She wanted to speak, but her throat felt parched. `H-how are you?' was what she managed for openers.
'I don't recall having an appointment with you!' he barked curtly, rapidly recovering from having appeared momentarily rocked.
Appointment! He really could be a swine when he wanted, she fumed; she was angry, not to mention a bundle of nerves into the bargain. Perhaps that was why, when she had half decided not to mention his proposal if he didn't remember it, she forgot totally what she had or had not decided, and snapped back bluntly, `That's no way to speak to your fiancee!'
Her mouth fell open from the shock of the unintended words she had just hurled at him. But as Thomson, rising from his desk, stared back at her, his expression positively staggered, Yancie didn't know which of them was the more shocked. What she did know, though, was that this was the first he'd heard of it or wanted to hear of it.
It was time, she realised, for her to get out of there!
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT was obvious to Yancie from Thomson's absolutely thunderstruck look that he had not the smallest recollection of ever having proposed to her. And, bearing in mind the strong medication he must have been receiving, she realised, belatedly, that she should never have mentioned it to him.
'I'm-sorry!' she gasped before he had uttered a word-and was on her way.
Unbelievably, however, Thomson had moved, and moved fast, and was at the door before her, his hand down by the door handle, preventing her from reaching for it.
There was a sharp look in his eyes she felt suddenly wary of. `Tell me more,' he commanded.
No way! But he seemed pale. Had he just lost his colour from the shock of her claiming to be his future wife-as if that thought would make any man go pale-or had he been pale to start with?
'You haven't been well!' she exclaimed, fearful for his health.
'I was given a clean bill of health only yesterday.'
Yet, typically, he'd been at work before he'd been given the all-clear-probably been working from home before that. `I shouldn't trouble you,' she said jerkily.
'You've been trouble from the day I met you,' he replied, his eyes on hers, searching, reading.
'Well, you would say that!' she attempted an offhand note that didn't quite come offshe didn't like the shrewd, alert look of him; he was clever, discerning; she knew that much about him. `W-well, I'll be off; I just thought I'd pop in to see how you are.'
She didn't like at all, either, the speculative look that had come to his eyes. `My drivers are doing it all the time,' he answered dryly, his eyes never leaving her face.
Pig! `Well, you look all right to me!' she snapped, glad of a spurt of anger, but wishing he would come away fromm the door so she could go through it. `Well, I'll love you and leave you,' she hinted, and could have groaned aloud that she had trotted out that trite little saying. She wanted to keep a mile away from that word 'love'. She shouldn't have come; she shouldn't, she shouldn't.