Free The Chilling Deception by Jayne Castle Page A

collect you. We’re meeting him for lunch.”
    Wonderful, Guinevere thought morosely. Zac was right. The weekend wasn’t working out at all. At least not the way she’d hoped it would. She propped her elbow on the padded door and leaned her chin on her hand, gazing out the window at the tree-lined road.
    “Zac?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Are you really upset about Cassidy being along on that cruise?”
    There was a beat of heavy silence. “I shouldn’t be, should I?” he asked grimly.
    She slid him a sidelong glance. “No. You shouldn’t. For one thing, I had nothing to do with it. And for another, we haven’t . . .” She faltered.
    “We haven’t had that little chat you want, have we?” he finished for her.
    “Well, no.”
    “Is this chat of ours going to include some kind of agreement regarding outside relationships? Is that the right expression?”
    She drew a deep breath, concentrating fiercely on the narrow winding road. “I had thought it might.”
    There was another heavy silence. Then Zac said slowly, obviously choosing his words with care, “Gwen, I am not normally a possessive man.”
    That surprised her. “You aren’t?”
    “It’s worked reasonably well over the years, since women do not tend to get possessive about me.”
    “I see.” She felt an immediate surge of sheer undiluted feminine possessiveness. The thought of Zac taking someone else out to dinner and discussing such things as a business image and IRS deductions for small firms was enough to make her stomach tighten, she realized suddenly. Until now she had only considered the situation from her side. She had been wary of what she had thought was his growing demand for exclusivity. Now she was forced to take a hard look at her own feelings for him.
    “It’s different with you, Gwen,” he finally said. He sounded very grim about it.
    She turned her head. “It is?”
    He kept his eyes on the road. “I think so.”
    “You only think so?” She felt incipient panic.
    He exhaled slowly and said very steadily, “Gwen, it’s hard enough not knowing what you’re doing or who you’re with on the nights when you’re not with me. If I thought you were sleeping with someone else—It would rip me apart.”
    She caught her breath at the stark honesty of the statement. “Oh, Zac. I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t know . . .”
    He ignored her. “I know you’re used to being free, totally independent. So am I, for that matter. But with me it was kind of a moot point. My social life isn’t exactly hectic.”
    “Neither is mine,” she said quietly. He had been honest with her. She decided it was time to take the same step herself. “Zac, I’m not seeing anyone else. I haven’t dated anyone else since I met you.”
    He did glance at her then, gray eyes full of urgency. “No one?”
    “No one.”
    He chewed on that for a moment. “For what it’s worth, neither have I,” he said.
    “Zac?”
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s worth a lot.”
    There was a great deal of silence for the remainder of the short drive, but it wasn’t an unpleasant silence. Guinevere was aware of the tentative commitment that had just been made between herself and Zac. It wasn’t exactly a formal declaration of the status of their relationship, she decided, but it was a step in the right direction. It was also a little scary, for reasons she didn’t want to consider.
    Vandyke was waiting impatiently for them when they returned. He seemed relieved to see Zac. He also had work for Guinevere. She spent the afternoon typing up some modifications to one of the proposals, which effectively destroyed any possibility of more time with Zac.
    By dinner she was resigned to the inevitability of the failure of the weekend from a personal point of view. It was obvious that Zac had reached the same decision and had decided to give the client what he wanted. He kept unobtrusively within sight of Vandyke most of the time and after dinner he followed his client into the