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wearing a coat.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
    ‘It wasn’t difficult. I just went to the public library and searched through the electoral rolls.’
    ‘Good lord!’ His persistence stunned her. ‘How long did that take?’
    ‘Mmmm? Oh, not long. I had narrowed the area down quite a bit. I knew which side of town, and that you walked, even when it was raining, so it couldn’t be that far. But I admit that I was damned lucky you live in Albert Mews rather than Washington Lane.’
    ‘Well, your luck just ran out, Jim Matthews. If you don’t leave right now you had better prepare yourself—’ A thunderous knocking at the door stopped whatever she was going to say. ‘What on earth...’
    She ran to the door, fully expecting it to be her next door neighbour with some emergency.
    Instead Adam Blackmore burst through the door. ‘Tara, are you alright?’ He grabbed her arms, staring at her as if to reassure himself. ‘I’d just got back to the penthouse and I realised I hadn’t got the report you typed, so I went into the office.’ He’d been running and he paused to catch a breath. He shook his head. ‘I saw that man who was bothering you last night. He was headed this way. I know you said he wasn’t dangerous, but he was walking down the middle of the road poking about in the cat’s eyes. Quite odd and I thought—’
    He stopped as a movement behind Tara alerted him to the fact that she was not alone. He stepped forward as if to protect her, then halted as he took in the casual manner with which Jim had made himself totally at home on the sofa, feet propped upon the coffee table, the cup of cocoa warming his hands.
    His mouth a thin, angry line, Adam allowed his gaze to travel around the comfortable room, taking in every detail, the small circular window set into foot thick walls, the posts and beams that framed the building decorated with bunches of dried flowers, the little red pot belly stove in the hearth. It came finally to rest on Tara, hair tumbled about her shoulders, feet bare. Dressed for bed.
    ‘I was concerned.’ His eyes, dark and deep as a glacier, met Tara’s. ‘But I see that I needn’t have worried.’ His mouth managed a smile, but it didn’t quite make it to his eyes. ‘I told you he would wait.’
    ‘Adam...’
    He ignored her. He nodded, tight lipped, at Jim. ‘My apologies for the interruption.’ Jim raised a languid hand in acknowledgment. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Tara.’ There was nothing reassuring in this utterance. Nothing reassuring about the careful way he shut the door on his way out.
    Tara turned and stared at her intruder, wondering just what he had cost her. He looked so harmless, so insignificant, totally unaware of the havoc he had caused and the unaccountable misery that lay like a lump of lead in her stomach.
    ‘Truly, Jim Matthews,’ she declared with a sudden burst of anger, ‘you are the most annoying man it has ever been my misfortune to meet.’ But her words had no effect. Jim Matthews was blessed with supreme selfishness, totally unconcerned with anything but his own desires and anger had no power to dent his complacency.
    And the damage had been done. Getting angry with Jim could never change that. But when he repeated his suggestion that she marry him, she finally snapped.
    ‘Don’t you ever listen?’ she demanded. ‘No! No! No!’ Something of her distress must have got through to him and he offered no further argument when she insisted that he must go. She would have demanded his promise that he never return. But she was too tired to bother and she was only too aware that it probably wouldn’t make any difference if she did.
     

 
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    EXHAUSTION supplied the balm of sleep but Tara had to drag herself into Adam Blackmore’s private lift the following morning, and it sped upwards far too fast in its eagerness to decant her onto the twenty-first floor the following