Free Unguarded Moment by Sara Craven Page A

later they had separated, and divorce—Bianca's fourth—had soon followed.
    'Marriage is like a disease,' Bianca had once said petulantly. 'Thank God there's a cure.'
    She had shown no signs of becoming involved in another serious relationship since Lester's departure, however. But there had been numerous casual affairs. Bianca was not a woman who could be without a man for very long.
    And Alix wondered if it was not significant that the lovers she had chosen since this last divorce were not solid older men like Lester, but usually very much her junior. It was as if Bianca was constantly seeking reassurance that she was still beautiful, still desirable in spite of the passage of the years no one was even allowed to mention.
    And perhaps it was watching Bianca, absorbing her example, which had made Alix herself so wary in her relationships, at least until recently.
    Try as she might, there were times—in dreams, and in unguarded waking moments—when Liam Brant's dark cool mockery returned to haunt her. No amount of shame or self-admonition was sufficient, it seemed, to wipe his image totally from her mind, and this realisation bewildered and tormented her.
    Gemma asked, 'What on earth are you thinking about? You looked positively haunted for a moment!'
    Alix made herself smile. 'I suppose I am—by the thought of everything that has to be got through before this trip. Leon's office may be making all the arrangements for the journey, but there are still a hundred and one things Bianca wants me to do, and the fact that she changes her mind constantly about each of them doesn't make life any easier.'
    She chattered on, making Bianca's vagaries sound amusing, deliberately shutting out of her mind the difficulties that her employer constantly seemed to create, the barbed remarks which so often seemed to enter her conversations with Alix these days.
    Alix supposed she herself was partly to blame because she had disregarded Bianca's instructions about her appearance, and it was this subject at which most of Bianca's gibes were aimed.
    Not that she'd gone overboard, she thought ruefully, but she'd had her hair cut so that it could no longer be screwed back into that frankly unbecoming chignon. Now it swung dark and glossy as a raven's wing, curving towards her jawline, accentuating her high cheekbones, and the delicate hollows of her throat. She wasn't a beauty and never would be in Bianca's terms, but she had her own attractions and could see no valid reason to conceal them any longer.
    Bianca had been so angry at first that Alix had quite expected her attempt to hand in her notice would be reciprocated. In fact the anger seemed totally out of proportion to the offence—but then so much of Bianca's behaviour was irrational, Alix reminded herself.
    She had encountered unexpected sympathy from Monty, who had said gruffly, 'Leave her to me. I'll settle her down,' and had apparently done so, because the next time Alix had ventured into Bianca's presence the hectic flush had died out of her cheeks, and the stormy light in her eyes had been stilled.
    Afterwards Alix had wondered if the anger might not have been easier to deal with than what followed—the smiling ridicule, the spiteful remarks cloaked in a smile like a wasp's sting in honey. She had smarted for hours at the way Bianca's eyes sometimes slid over her in half-pitying amusement.
    She flayed herself with the thought that perhaps Liam Brant had told Bianca what he'd said, his criticisms of her appearance, and this was why Bianca watched her in that way. And yet if that had been the case she knew Bianca well enough by now to know that she couldn't have resisted the temptation to mention it, to lay the lash gently but surely along what was already an open wound.
    Alix felt herself shiver at the thought. She had been incredibly naive when she first came to work for Bianca, but over the years she had developed what she thought was a protective shell, a self-sufficiency which