He hated every moment of this.
She had attended more congenial dinner parties herself. Eric Westfield, who was staying on as VP after the new incumbent took over the presidency, and who obviously had more money than the average merchant bank, had not impressed her at their first brief meeting. On closer acquaintance, she thought he was loathsome. The other guests at the table had ostensibly been invited to chat with Richard, but behaved as if they were paid actors whose only task for the evening was to laugh at Westfield’s jokes. Richard, she noticed, confined himself to a brief smile, and only if the pun was halfway successful.
Westfield’s wife was also present, but she was so quiet Lainie kept forgetting she was there, and the poor woman seemed to be an afterthought for her husband, as well. Karen Westfield was about Lainie’s age and well dressed, but she was either half-asleep, texting under the table or highly medicated. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell when all that was visible was a forehead and hairline. Lainie tried more than once to engage her in conversation, but received no response. It was a little weird. Westfield might as well have put a ring on a life-size doll, introduced her as his wife and propped her up at the table.
Of course, if the alternative to spacing out was socializing with Westfield, she understood Karen’s defence mechanism. The arts patron stroked her knee under the table for the third time in the past hour and she jerked back in her seat. The impulse to kick was almost ungovernable. At her sudden movement, Richard looked at her and frowned questioningly. She forced a smile and shook her head. He had uncharacteristically put himself out to secure a major funds boost for her charity. She could sit down to dinner with an unsubtle lech for him.
Although if Westfield’s hand crept any higher than her knee, she reserved the right to take sharp action.
Richard was still looking suspiciously from her to Westfield. “Where do you stand on the Grosvenor Initiative, Eric?” he asked, and Westfield’s attention was thankfully diverted from her legs.
Lainie turned gratefully to answer a query from the society matron opposite about her usual schedule at the Metronome. “So interesting to meet someone in the theatre,” with an inflection that suggested “the theatre” was a euphemism for something a bit more risqué. That type of unwanted attention she could handle.
After the dessert plates had been cleared by a hovering maid, Westfield looked at his wife for the first time all night. “Karen!”
She jumped and her head rose—pulled by the puppeteer’s strings, Lainie thought despairingly. Karen stood, and it appeared the women were to be dismissed to coffee in a separate room. Because apparently this was Downton Abbey. She widened her eyes at Richard as she passed him and saw his lips twitch.
She’d hoped Karen would regain her personality and become magically talkative away from her husband’s depressing influence, but no such luck. The woman sat down on an armchair in a very stately drawing room, crossed her legs and pulled out her phone. She had been texting under the table, then. That was a relief. Lainie had been imagining some sort of brainwashed Stepford scenario. She rather meanly hoped that Karen had a lover. A young fit one with table manners.
When she could no longer bear the social banter of the other two wives, she excused herself to find a bathroom. There were four to choose from on the second floor. She had dried her hands, reapplied her lipstick and was just closing the door when a masculine hand slipped around her waist and squeezed. She froze, her heartbeat picking up. The blunt-tipped fingers didn’t belong to Richard.
Oh, God. How perfectly, hideously undignified and cliché.
*
He felt as if he were in the second act of a Sheridan play. Removal of the feminine element, followed by whiskies, cigars and subtle digs in the billiards room. Richard pushed away from the wall where he’d been observing the halfhearted game of snooker in progress. He checked his watch. Another hour, and they could leave without causing unnecessary offence.
And he could find a mutually satisfying way to make this up to Lainie.
The beginnings of a headache were thrumming in his temples. Abruptly, he moved his head, trying to relax the tension in his neck. He put a hand to his shoulder and massaged the ridges of bone.
After sitting at that dinner table, he was finding it difficult to remember why he wanted to keep on side with Westfield. And if he was right in his suspicions about what had been going on under the table, cordial relations were going to break down fast. He had been prepared to sacrifice a certain amount of personal dignity for the RSPA chair, but he drew a line well before exposing Lainie to sexual assault.