He sat back in his chair, waving one hand casually as he said, ‘My grandfather’s birthday is coming up.’
So is mine, she thought.
‘He’ll be eighty.’
I’ll be thirty.
‘I want to do something special for him.’
He paused, watching her like a hawk, waiting to see which way its prey would jump.
Merlina patiently returned his gaze with limpid eyes, deliberately emptied of all emotion. She wasn’t going to let him feed off her this morning! However, he paused for so long, she finally said, ‘Are you asking me for suggestions?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, I doubt very much you’d be tuned into what entertains my grandfather, Mel. He still drinks champagne at breakfast. In fact, when I was a little boy, he told me to call him Pop instead of Grandpa because he was such an expert at popping corks.’
Her tightly guarded mind had a malfunction and lost control of her tongue, letting wayward words roll off it. ‘Perhaps you also have an equally pertinent reason for calling me Mel instead of Merlina.’
‘Lethal weapon,’ he rolled out, grinning at her again.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The movie, Lethal Weapon. Stars Mel Gibson.’
‘You associate me with a male actor?’
Granted Mel Gibson always gave great performances in his movies, but he was a man, and how on earth could Jake Devila look her over the way he did if he thought of her as a man? Merlina wished she hadn’t opened up on this sore point. She was just sick to death of being called Mel instead of her proper name. That particular thorn had been in her side throughout the whole period of her employment at Signature Sounds and obviously the urge to take it out and deal with it had got the better of her.
‘Never mind,’ she muttered, raising her guard again. ‘I apologise for deviating from your grandfather’s birthday. Please go on.’
‘Believe me…the image I have of you has nothing to do with Mel Gibson’s masculinity,’ he said provocatively.
‘I’m relieved to hear it.’ Though she didn’t want to hear any more. Clearly he was enjoying himself at her expense and frustrating him by not rising to the bait was the safer course. However, she couldn’t resist a hit back before dismissing the subject. ‘I was beginning to wonder how perverse your perception was. But again I apologise. Totally irrelevant. You were saying you wanted to do something special for your grandfather,’ she reminded him with determined purpose.
‘You don’t want your curiosity satisfied?’ he teased.
‘I’m quite sure I don’t,’ she said dismissively.
‘Because curiosity killed the cat and you won’t risk it?’
His eyes danced mockingly.
Her brain overheated. Retaliation steamed straight out of it. ‘When you were a little boy, Jake, someone should have taught you not to toy with cats. They have claws.’
‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘I should have had a nanny just like you, Mel. No doubt you would have turned me into a fine upstanding man.’
He was loving this exchange. Absolutely exulting in it.
She kept her mouth firmly shut. Not another word was going to escape her lips until he got back to business. His lips were twitching with amusement and his dimples were flashing devilment. She couldn’t stop herself from glowering back at him but she did keep her mouth firmly shut.
He pointed a finger at her. ‘Now that’s just what I mean…why you remind me of Mel Gibson. Lots of pent-up energy that you know is going to explode into action when its fuse is lit.’
His eyes were dancing with excitement at the prospect of her losing her cool and blowing up. Merlina was sizzling inside but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a steaming reply. That would mean he’d won his point. She grimly maintained her dignity and he finally sighed his surrender to her brick wall defence.
‘Right! To get back to my grandfather…’
Ah, yes, Merlina thought, still glowering. The champagne cork-popping Byron Devila was notorious for his numerous marriages, just about rivalling King Henry the Eighth on that score. Jake probably took after him in the playboy stakes. The only difference was his grandfather married his playthings. Probably a generational thing. It wouldn’t have been so socially acceptable to have a string of temporary bed-partners in the years of his prime.
‘…I want you to organise a cake.’
‘A cake,’ she repeated, tearing her smouldering gaze from the twinkling mischief in his and assiduously writing the word in her notebook.
‘A very special cake. Eight tiers should do it,’ he went on. ‘One for each decade of his life.’
Merlina wrote 8 tiers. She thought it a bit excessive, but…hers not to reason why, hers but to do or die!
‘And I want eighty candles spread around the edge of the tiers.’
‘That’s going to make it hard for him to blow them all out,’ she remarked.
‘You’d be surprised how hale and hearty my grandfather is,’ came the bland reply.
She flicked a derisive glance at him. ‘Do you really want to give his lungs such a demanding workout on his birthday?’
He smiled. ‘Good of you to care about him, Mel, but I didn’t mean for the candles to be real.’
‘Just decorative candles? They’re not to be lit?’
‘Decorative, yes. Very decorative.’
She rolled her eyes and wrote decorative only.
‘They won’t be real, any more than the cake will be real,’ Jake said helpfully.
It didn’t help. Merlina felt her mind moving towards meltdown. Her hand tightened its grip on the solid reality of her pen and very slowly she lifted her gaze from the notebook on her knee, intent on staring her tormentor down until he behaved himself as a proper boss should. ‘Please explain,’ she said in a dead-pan voice.
He laughed, setting off fireworks in her head—fizzy Roman candles and rockets that zoomed up and exploded.
She hated him, hated him, hated him.
Most of all, she hated how deeply he affected her.
Every cell in her body was jangling with awareness of him, the rippling joy in his laughter and the brilliant vivacity it brought to his all too handsome face.
I’m possessed by the devil, she thought, and somehow, somehow, I have to expunge him from my consciousness and be totally free of him.
‘I’m afraid a call to Cakes for Special Occasions won’t do it, Mel,’ he drawled, having finally sobered up enough to speak.