A Suitable Mistress
CATHY WILLIAMS
Mistress material?Dane Sutherland was rich, powerful and sinfully gorgeous. He had it all - but he wanted more! He wanted Suzanne… and she was equally determined not to fall into his arms, or his bed! Suzanne had a deep grudge against Dane's family and, besides, he was used to dating petite, elegant women who hung on his every word.Suzanne was too tall, too outspoken… . She had to convince Dane she wouldn't make a suitable mistress at all!
“Don’t you believe in marriage at all?” (#u6979b865-35af-5544-a1c1-2470b1601268)About the Author (#ue3afd993-cb2c-56ca-98c0-63fd0707f546)Title Page (#u2f7cfe19-094c-53f0-85e7-44b025b8e56b)CHAPTER ONE (#ua981842b-0373-5b62-9abb-3cb40a84ea5c)CHAPTER TWO (#ub13f3c7e-4e65-57c0-b402-d4c5c943d09d)CHAPTER THREE (#uaad474df-5c3c-516d-a78d-aa689baf07ad)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Don’t you believe in marriage at all?”
Suzanne continued, “You intend to give it a miss just because your father made a mistake?”
“I never said I intended to give marriage a miss,” Dane corrected her. “I merely don’t intend to rush into it because I happen to find a woman desirable.”
“And when do you propose to rush into it?”
“When someone suitable comes along.”
“Someone suitable,” Suzanne thought aloud. She knew what that meant. Someone elegant, good-looking, with the right background. Someone who stood at the opposite end of the spectrum to her!
CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and went to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England—originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.
Cathy Williams writes lively, sexy romances
with heroes to die for! Look out for her
next book in our EXPECTING miniseries,
coming soon!
A Suitable Mistress
Cathy Williams
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
ANOTHER bad day. Another bad week. Suzanne sat down on the edge of the bed and wondered when things were ever going to get better. She surely must have hit rock bottom now. Surely the law of averages said that things had to improve. No one could keep going downhill for ever.
At some point in time, one would crash-land somewhere at the bottom of the deep, dark well, and wouldn’t be able to go any further. Which, she thought tiredly, still left unanswered the question of how exactly you got out of the well, but presumably you would be so relieved not to be still falling that you wouldn’t give that too much hard thought.
Right now, though, she didn’t feel relieved. She felt trapped and hopeless, just as she had felt for the past six months.
She raised her head slightly and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror opposite and looked away hurriedly.
She hated having to face what her head repeatedly told her. That she had let herself go. She hadn’t meant to; it seemed to be something that had happened when she hadn’t been looking, almost when she had had her back turned. She had put on weight, her long hair was neat enough but uninspiring and she knew that she appeared tired, even when she was forcing herself to put recent events behind her and show a smiling face to the world.
She reached inside her handbag, extracted a bar of chocolate, and, steeling herself not to think back, painstakingly removed the wrapper and bit into it, hardly tasting the sweetness, simply content that the sheer movement of eating helped to distract her from the tears which were lurking so close to the surface.
I’ve thrown in my accountancy course, she thought, rewrapping the uneaten bit of chocolate left with the same painstaking motions. I’ve come here to London in search of streets paved with gold, only to find that there’s no such thing, and to top it all I’ve now just lost my job. But there must be a bright side somewhere to this. She frowned and scoured her mind for the odd silver lining or two, and then told herself that she had hated that wretched job anyway.
She had just been a dogsbody, running around and doing all those untidy, boring chores which no one else wanted to do. The downside was that, however hateful it had been, it had at least been a source of income and now, without it, she gloomily contemplated a scenario of unpaid bills, bailiffs, screaming landladies and probably a park bench somewhere with only her pillow and a blanket for company.
It was, she admitted to herself, a fairly ludicrous scenario, since she would not allow herself to be without work, but she dwelled on it anyway, listlessly aware that she should really get out of the bedsit and do something instead of sitting like a block of lead on her bed and letting inertia get the better of her. A block, she thought with a flash of that irony which had recently deserted her, of overweight lead.
She stood up and walked across to the dreaded mirror and made herself look at the reflection staring out at her. There had been a time once, in a past which she couldn’t bear thinking about, when she had been attractive. Long, wavy dark hair, bright blue eyes, a slim, tall figure. Look at you now, she said to herself critically. Your hair desperately needs a trim, your eyes lack sparkle and you’re hardly going to win Miss Slender of the Year, are you?
She was still examining herself and telling herself that she really would go to the hairdressers, that she really would stop eating junk food which was doing absolutely nothing for her, when she heard someone knocking on the door. Very loud knocking. Knocking which instantly brought to mind screaming landladies. Or rather, just the one screaming landlady who seemed to have mastered the trick of avoiding complaints, while still vociferously demanding rent at least a week before it fell due.
You are not going to cower, she told herself sternly. You live in a bedsit which is in a fairly appalling condition, with a fridge that either freezes everything solid or else insists on defrosting at inconvenient times, and besides, you’re bigger than she is.
She strode purposefully towards the door, pulled it open, mentally steeled herself to say something about the fridge, not to mention the curtains which looked as though they were leftovers from the Stone Age, and stepped back in shock at the man standing outside the room.
She felt her face go scarlet and she knew that she was gaping, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Dane Sutherland was the very last person she had expected to see standing outside her door and she was conscious of a rush of awareness at the mere sight of him. Tall, dark and shamelessly good-looking, he was the last person she wanted to see.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked the figure lounging indolently against the doorframe and making the dingy hallway look even dingier than it was.
‘I’ve had a hard time finding you.’
Still the same old voice that she remembered from years back. Deep, velvety, with a trace of dry mockery lurking there somewhere. He could charm the birds off the trees with that voice of his—a voice that held just enough lazy sensuality, a promise of things unspoken. She had watched from the sidelines just how many birds he had charmed off the trees as he had moved through adolescence into maturity. How utterly and childishly aware she had been of him.
It was difficult to know when exactly he had moved from the uncomplicated position of being her brother’s friend into the vastly more complicated one of being a deeply attractive person of the opposite sex.
She could remember when she was fourteen, looking at him surreptitiously from under her lashes, aware of him in a way that she had not been before: aware of him as a man, a first-year university graduate no less, already with the sort of cool, ironic self-assurance which gave him a maturity that her brother had lacked.
‘I suppose I had better ask you in,’ she said ungraciously, averting her eyes and walking back into the room, leaving him to shut the door. ‘I’m afraid I only have tea,’ she said, disliking his presence in her flat, disliking everything about him, and determined to be as churlish and unwelcoming as she felt she could reasonably get away with.
‘Tea would be fine.’ He followed her into the kitchen, which was barely big enough for one person and with him standing there felt chokingly claustrophobic.
She made them both mugs of tea, politely waited until he went back into the small sitting room, and then flopped into the chair furthest away from him.
‘I was very sorry to hear about your father’s death,’ he murmured, watching her intently with those grey, steely eyes, and she could feel the tears gathering momentum at the back of her throat. Again. Every time, in fact, she thought about her father.
‘I would have liked to have come to the funeral,’ he continued, looking at her over the rim of his cup, ‘but I was in New York at the time, and I just couldn’t make it.’
Suzanne shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to put yourself out,’ she said coldly. ‘After all, he was just your family’s chauffeur, for heaven’s sake.’ Just the chauffeur who had worked for them nearly all his life; just the chauffeur who had lived in their cottage and pottered around in their garden; just the chauffeur who had collapsed and died in the line of duty.
‘Why on earth do you continue working for her?’ she had once asked her father.
‘Old Mr Sutherland would have wanted it,’ he had told her, which had made absolutely no sense to her at all. Old Mr Sutherland, she had wanted to point out, was dead, and had been for some time, and now his wife, or rather his second wife, was in charge, and she was an awful woman.
But she had not said anything because they had covered that ground before, and she had known what his answer would be: he was too old now to change, and besides, he liked the house, he liked the grounds, he liked the calm and peace of the countryside. So he had continued to work there, doing whatever the grand lady of the house wanted, which mostly had nothing to do with driving and much more to do with tending the lawns and taking the wretched poodles for walks and repairing whatever needed repair in the great mansion.
And all for what? Martha Sutherland hadn’t even attended the funeral. She had been busy getting ready for a cruise and had made unalterable plans. So a wreath had been sent in her place. A huge, gaudy one. And Dane, who had known him virtually since birth, had been busy as well. Because, after all, he was just their chauffeur, wasn’t he?
Her mind jumped back to that overheard conversation, and she closed the door on it.
She gave Dane a tinny, frozen smile and waited for him to ask her what she meant, but he ignored the pointed sarcasm behind her remark, although his eyes narrowed on her in a way that made her feel just a little bit ashamed that she had said what she had.
‘I thought you were working with that firm of accountants in the town,’ he said, and she shrugged and looked away.
‘I packed it in when Dad died.’ She had been so utterly miserable, and studying to qualify as an accountant—something of which her father had been so proud—had suddenly seemed trivial and meaningless. She had never been entirely sure that that was what she had wanted to do, and without her father’s encouragement she had been gripped by the thought that it was a career which had found her rather than the other way around. She had always been clever with figures and she had settled into accountancy the way that some people settle into marriage—because it was convenient.
‘Why?’
‘Because I wanted to leave the area. Is that a good enough explanation for you? Or would you like to pursue it further?’ She had had a plan, she thought defensively. Where had it gone? How could it have evaporated so quickly, like mist? How could she have ended up like a lost soul wandering in a fog, when she had started out with such determination?
‘And you think that he would have been happy to see you living like this?’ He looked around him at the scrappy room, with its sad, faded rug in front of the fireplace and skirting-boards which were in desperate need of a lick of paint. The bare essentials were so in need of repair that they sabotaged her every effort to make the bedsit into something warm and comfortable. The most she could achieve was neatness.
‘What have you come here for?’ she asked abruptly.
‘I wanted to offer my condolences personally to you, and I admit I was worried when they told me that you had walked out of the company.’
‘So you decided to fit me into your schedule. Big of you,’ she said acidly. Shame, she thought, that he had never been big enough to see that her father got a fair deal working for his stepmother. Shame that he hadn’t been big enough to listen to her father when he’d started getting tired for no reason. Shame that he hadn’t been big enough to let him retire in that cottage, instead of allowing his stepmother to imply that once the old man could no longer function he would have to move out and make way for someone who could.
The threat of having nowhere to live had been enough to keep her father on his toes, when in fact he should have been resting far more than he had been.
She swallowed down the great lump of resentment in her and stared down into the cup of lukewarm tea. The milk was gathering itself into a fine brown film. She inspected the film with minute concentration.
‘Shall I continue to ignore your acid little rejoinders, Suzie, or would you be happier if I gave in and indulged your desire to have a blazing row over nothing?’
‘Nothing!’ Her head shot up at that one and she looked at him with savage dislike. ‘How dare you sit here and say that? I’ve lost the only person in my life who has ever meant anything to me and you call that nothing? That stepmother of yours treated him like a workhorse and you call that nothing? He was old and frail and he should have had the dignity of being able to enjoy the rest of his days in that cottage of yours, without thinking that if he stopped lugging ladders and walking poodles he would no longer have a roof over his head.’
He stood up and walked across to the window and stared out, and although she couldn’t see the set of his face she could tell by the rigidity of his shoulders that he was angry.
‘I don’t like what you’re implying here,’ he said with disarming softness, turning round to face her. The light behind him threw his face into shadows and lent it an air of dark menace.
‘Then you’re free to leave.’ She nodded in the direction of the door and she was perversely pleased when he remained where he was, because, for the first time in the six months since her father had died, she was shouting, and glad to be shouting.
‘He loved your father,’ she threw at him. ‘Why do you think he continued working there, even when your father remarried three years ago? Why do you think he stayed there after your father died?’
‘I have been out of the country for nearly three years,’ Dane said in a controlled voice that didn’t quite manage to hide the undercurrent of anger and impatience at her accusations. ‘I had it on my stepmother’s word that everything at the house was fine.’
‘And that was the extent of your interest in the place?’ she asked bitterly. ‘And how thrilled your dad would have been with that!’
He moved more quickly than she could have expected. One minute he was standing there at the window, and the next minute he was leaning over her, his hands resting on either side of the chair.
‘Now you listen to me, my girl,’ he said tersely. ‘I haven’t come here to have an argument with you. Nor have I come here to be attacked for things I knew nothing of.’
‘In three years you never returned once to see for yourself how everything was, to check and make sure that people were happy!’
‘I had my reasons,’ he said grimly, still leaning over her, so that she began to feel something else mingling with her anger—something faint and disturbing which made her even more angry because she didn’t want to feel it.
She had been through that childish, excited infatuation with Dane Sutherland, and she had been disabused of it in no uncertain terms. She had no intention of letting dead embers re-ignite.
He might stand there and plead innocence to everything she said, but he must have known what was going on at Chadwick House. He must have known about the loyal help who had been sacked virtually the day after his father had died. He must have known of the promises made by his father to his workers, which had never been kept.
Old Mr Sutherland had promised her father the cottage. A gentleman’s agreement, because although her father had been his employee the two had been comrades—old friends who would sit and have a cup of tea and lament the passing of time with the shared memories of old men.
Dane must have known that his stepmother had put paid to any such agreement not five months after her husband had died. He must have known because Dane Sutherland was an intelligent man, frighteningly intelligent, and, after all, the house was his. She couldn’t believe, whatever he said, that he had cut himself off so completely from his past.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Suzie?’ he asked, straightening up and giving her time to compose her face and get her nervous system back in order again.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he said, sitting down on the sofa and crossing his legs, one ankle over his knee, ‘you’re a highly intelligent girl. You could have gone to university, but you chose to stay close to your father and apprentice in a company instead. You were doing damned well at it. So why did you throw it all in and move to London?’
‘You forget,’ she replied coolly, ‘that I no longer had a roof over my head. Your stepmother made it crystal-clear that she wanted the cottage back and the sooner I cleared out of it the better.’
‘Dammit, Suzie, you should have written to me in New York.’ He raked his fingers through his hair—a restless, impatient gesture that she could remember him making even as a teenager. Whenever he was angry over something. Her brother had tried to cultivate it, but somehow he had never managed to convey the same magnetic, effortless charm.
‘Thank you,’ she said politely, ‘but I haven’t resorted to asking for charity as yet. Besides, I couldn’t honestly imagine a worse hell than living in the vicinity of your stepmother.’
She thought of Martha Sutherland with distaste. Brassy blonde and, at thirty-two, less than half the age of the man she had married. She was the sort of woman whose nails were always impeccably varnished in red, and who never set foot out of the house without being sure that everything about her co-ordinated.
‘So you threw away your future and moved into a grimy bedsit in London instead.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she snapped.
‘I understand better than you think.’
‘After seeing me for the first time in years and after only forty-five minutes. What a genius you must be at reading other people’s characters.’
She hated this conversation and she wished that she could just take refuge in some of that uneaten chocolate lying in her bag. Then, for the first time since he had entered the room, she wondered what he must think, seeing her now. Seeing how much she had changed physically. She knew that he had never found her attractive; she just wasn’t his type—too tall, too gauche, too dark-haired—but what must he think of her now? Overweight, hair unflatteringly pulled back, dressed in dark colours which she knew did nothing for her—somehow she had lost the will to dress with any attempt at style.
She shoved aside the temptation to reach for her bag and extract the chocolate and contented herself with glaring at him.
‘What are you doing for money?’ he asked, looking at her with lazy speculation.
‘I have a job,’ she said sullenly. ‘I’ve been temping since I moved down here.’ She linked her fingers on her lap and frowned. Now that she had begun thinking about the changes he must see in her—all for the worse—she found that she couldn’t stop herself. She was acutely aware that her once flat stomach was not so flat as it had been, that her legs and thighs were filling out her trousers in a way that implied that if she continued snacking off bars of chocolate she would soon find herself moving up a size in clothes. Again.
‘Doing what, exactly?’
‘Doing whatever pays the rent. Exactly.’
‘But nothing to do with accountancy.’
‘I resent your criticisms,’ she told him resentfully. ‘You have no right to march in here and start telling me what I’m doing wrong with my life. Your zeal to do good would have been far more useful a year ago. In fact, it might have saved my father’s life.’
A heavy silence greeted this, but he was saved from having to say anything because someone knocked at the door and she leapt to her feet, carefully keeping her eyes firmly averted from his face.
It never paid to antagonise Dane Sutherland too much. He was a controlled person but when he was angry he could be immensely frightening. Once, when Dane was fifteen, the school bully had made the mistake, never again repeated, of making some sly, sneering remark about old Mr Sutherland. Dane hadn’t raised a finger. He hadn’t had to. He had just gone very close to him and said something which, hovering on the sidelines with two of her friends, she had not heard, but which had been enough to scare Tim Chapman into complete silence.
Thinking about it, she realised that he hadn’t bullied anyone again after that. In fact, when she’d last laid eyes on him he’d been a rather harassed father of four working at the garage outside town. Rumour had it that his wife took his money off him as soon as it landed in his hands and then doled it out to him as she saw fit.
She was almost relieved to see her landlady standing outside with her hands on her hips and a belligerent expression on her face. Almost, but not quite. The rent was, for once, late and money was, as always, thin on the ground.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past four days,’ Mrs Gentry said, in that voice of hers which sent shivers of apprehension down her tenants’ spines, even when they had done nothing wrong.
‘I’m a bit behind this month with the rent, Mrs Gentry,’ Suzanne said, taking the bull by the horns.
‘You could say so.’ She pursed her lips and said in a reedy voice, ‘There’s many who would jump at the chance of renting this bedsit, I don’t have to tell you that. I warned you when I took you on that there was a lot of competition for this place; there’s many who would stand for days queuing up outside to rent here. It’s a prime area to be—’
‘Oh, really.’
Suzanne had never seen anyone make the landlady’s mouth fall open, but Dane did.
He stood next to her, with his hands in his pockets and a cold smile on his lips.
‘And I,’ he continued icily, ‘have yet to meet anyone prepared to stomach the downright primitive conditions of this dump, which you have the nerve to glorify by calling a bedsit.’ Mrs Gentry was staring at him, disconcerted and alarmed and shuffling from one foot to the other.
‘There’s many—’ she began, with an attempt to recapture some of her authority, and he cut her off swiftly.
‘Who are willing to put up with this ghastly hole simply because they have no choice. And there are some, of whom I am one, who would be more than willing to take you to court for renting out a place like this.’
‘Of course I would be more than prepared to fix a few things, more than prepared, if the miss here had complained—’
‘The fridge doesn’t work, Mrs Gentry,’ Suzanne interjected swiftly. ‘I mentioned that to you four months ago and I’ve been mentioning it every time I’ve seen you since.’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Gentry blustered, ‘I was about to say to you that I’ll have that fridge taken away and replaced. I’ve been meaning to do it for some time, sir—’ she reverted her attention to Dane, clearly at a disadvantage because he was so much taller than she was and she had to crane her neck upwards to look at him ‘—but I’ve been off my head with worry these last few months, what with the husband and his drinking problems.’
Husband? Drinking problems? This was the first that Suzanne had heard of any such thing. In fact, she was sure that Mrs Gentry lived on her own, probably having nagged her husband into the ground.
‘I’ll have the rent for you by the weekend,’ Suzanne said, aware that she would have to cope with the redoubtable Mrs Gentry all on her own, once Dane had gone, and not willing to stir up too much bad feeling just in case she found herself without living quarters. The woman, worse luck, was right when she said that places were hard to get in London, and even this bedsit, appalling though it was, was better than some she had seen.
‘It’s already late,’ Mrs Gentry pointed out, on safer ground now. ‘I’ll overlook that, though, if I can have it in my hands no later than Saturday midday.’ She stepped back slightly and then said with a sly smile, ‘However, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to raise the rent from next month. Inflation, you know.’ She told Suzanne how much extra she would have to pay, and it wasn’t until she had straddled off, in search of another victim, that Suzanne sat down on the sofa with a groan of despair.
‘I shall never be able to afford it,’ she said. ‘Where am I going to get that money from?’ Especially now that I no longer have a job, she added silently to herself.
‘It’s hardly a vast sum of money,’ Dane pointed out reasonably, and she glared at him with loathing. Of course, she wanted to say, it wasn’t a vast sum of money, but it was just enough to make her standard of living very uncomfortable indeed if she was forced to find it out of her now non-existent salary.
‘Not to you,’ she told him sourly. ‘You already have vast sums of money, but I haven’t and it’s a great deal to me.’
‘Why don’t you ask for a pay rise?’
‘A pay rise?’ Her eyebrows flew up and she laughed drily. ‘If you must know, that would be very difficult, since as of today I have joined the ranks of the unemployed. ’ She stood up and fetched both empty mugs and walked towards the kitchen, throwing over her shoulder. ‘But that’s no problem. I shall simply have to dig into my minuscule savings account and make do.’
It wasn’t something that she wanted. She wasn’t holding onto her savings for anything in particular, but she felt more cushioned knowing that the money was there, even if it wasn’t a great deal. She regarded it as money which she might need for a rainy day. It was a blow to think that the rainy day would turn out to be a bedsit in London and Mrs Gentry’s grasping hands. But what choice did she have?
‘How did you manage to lose your job?’ he asked, when she returned to the little sitting room.
‘Isn’t it about time that you left? Consider your condolences personally delivered.’
She ignored the self-righteous little voice in her head and dug inside her handbag for the remainder of the chocolate, which she ate slowly, not caring what he thought of her eating habits. Or her weight problem, for that matter.
‘Answer my question.’
‘Oh, all right!’ she snapped, looking at him. How easy everything was for him. Born into wealth, blessed with looks and intelligence. She disliked him sitting there trying to drag conversation out of her when she would much rather have preferred solitude, a little time to consider her position—a little time, the self-righteous voice told her, to feel sorry for herself all over again.
‘I had an argument with my supervisor,’ she admitted. ‘And I won’t bother to pretend that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t like the way that he was doing things. There were no controls and he preferred going down to the pub to trying to get things into order. I told him so and he sacked me on the spot. I had to leave as I was only a temp.’
A ghost of a smile flitted across her face as she remembered the encounter. Mike Slattery was an odious little man with a sharp, ratlike face and a tendency to issue orders. It had been wonderful to give him the benefit of her opinions, even if it had cost her her job.
‘You were always outspoken,’ Dane drawled, surveying her from under thick, dark lashes. ‘Always ready to rush in where angels feared to tread. Which,’ he continued, ‘doesn’t solve the problem of what you’re going to do now.’
Suzanne shrugged and contemplated the empty chocolate wrapper ruefully.
‘I’ll manage.’
‘And continue to live here?’
She followed his scathing glance round the room and said angrily, ‘You’d be surprised what a palace this is in comparison to some places that I’ve seen! At least the roof is one piece and there’s a carpet of sorts on the floor.’ A far cry from her father’s cottage. Was Dane thinking that too?
She looked down, blinking rapidly. Her father had been so upset when Martha Sutherland had announced that the cottage would revert to the house in due course. A gorgeous summer retreat for weekend guests, she had told him, patting her blonde hair and rearranging the decor in her mind’s eye.
Where had Dane been when her father had needed him? Or maybe he had known of his stepmother’s intentions all along, and had silently gone along with them, letting her do the dirty work while he built empires in America.
‘You can’t continue to wallow in grief for the rest of your life,’ he said, looking at her, unperturbed by the outrage on her face which his remark engendered.
‘How dare you? I am not wallowing in grief!’
‘I understand,’ he continued calmly, ‘how upset you must have been by your father’s death, but allowing your life to crumble is not going to bring him back.’
Suzanne’s mouth thinned and she wanted to hit him. No one had told her anything like that. At the funeral they had all been so kind and understanding. Even Mr Barnes had sympathised when she’d told him that she was going to leave the company and move down to London.
Her friends had understood as well. She frowned. She hadn’t contacted any of them, she realised, since she had left Warwickshire—at first because she literally hadn’t been able to bring herself to talk to anyone, and then later because time had elapsed and she had just not got around to it. Most of them had grown up with her. They had all been there at the funeral. She would get in touch with them, she decided, soon.
‘Life goes on, Suzie,’ he said, refusing to release the topic even though her stormy blue eyes were telling him to. ‘You can’t continue holding onto your anger and grief, while life slides past.’
‘Stop preaching to me!’ She got up and restlessly walked to the bay window in the sitting room and stared outside for a while. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ she told him, turning around and half sitting on the window-ledge, with her arms folded and her face mutinous. ‘I’m getting on with my life and everything is just fine!’
‘You are not getting on with your life,’ Dane said, with the same infuriating calm, as if he were talking to a wilful child in need of appeasement. ‘You gave up your course, you now no longer have a job down here...’ His grey eyes raked over her and she flushed, knowing what he was going to say next and resenting it already. ‘And I needn’t tell you the obvious: you’ve looked better.’
That brought tears of hurt anger to her eyes, even though she could hardly disagree with what he said.
He paused, thoughtfully, head cocked to one side as though trying out an idea in his head and wondering whether it would fit. ‘You are going to leave this place,’ he said decisively. ‘You are going to come back to my apartment in London, where I am now living, until you find somewhere more salubrious to live. You are going to work for one of my London subsidiaries and you are not going to chuck it in for any reason whatsoever.’
Suzanne stared at him in complete silence and then said, in as civilised a tone as she could muster, ‘You must be mad.’
‘You might just as well pack now and leave with me. It shouldn’t take long. I don’t see too many personal possessions strewn around.’
‘I am not coming anywhere with you!’ she said in a high, unsteady voice. ‘I’m not going to accept charity from you.’ The way my poor father did, her tone implied. And just look at what he got for it, she thought. He died an unhappy man, thanks to your wretched stepmother. Your family was responsible, like it or not.
‘You are going to do just exactly as I tell you,’ he said, standing up.
‘Why? Why should I?’
‘Because I say so.’
‘And your word is gospel?’ She laughed with sarcasm, and he reached out and gripped her arm.
‘I know you want to blame someone for your father’s death,’ he ground out, ‘and I know that you have decided that I fit the bill. Fine. It’s a misconception which you will grow out of with time. But I have no intention of letting you stay here a minute longer and that’s that. So start packing your bags. You’re coming with me.’
‘I don’t intend to be bullied by you!’
‘Someone has to bully you into doing something,’ he said impatiently. ‘If your brother was here instead of in Australia the task would fall to him.’
‘Task? Task? So I’m a responsibility now, am I? Poor little Suzanne Stanton who has no control over her life.’
‘That’s right.’
She glared at him and had the sinking feeling that arguing would be like trying to make a dent with a wooden spoon in the Rock of Gibraltar. He was immovable. He had waltzed in here, decided that she was unfit to take control of herself and had immediately concluded, probably because he felt guilty, that the onerous task fell to him.
‘I don’t need your pity,’ she said bitingly, ‘or anyone else’s for that matter.’
‘You’re a child, Suzie,’ he told her by way of response. ‘You don’t know what you need. You should thank God that I have returned to take you in hand.’
CHAPTER TWO
A BULLY. That, she decided, was what Dane was. An overgrown bully. Suzanne sat next to him in the car, simmering with resentment, and he calmly ignored it all and made polite conversation, asking her questions, prising answers reluctantly out of her.
The very worst thing was that she knew that she was behaving like a child. His proposition might have gone against everything ingrained in her, everything that told her that he was part of the family that had mistreated her father, but his offer was better than anything that she could come up with herself: a roof over her head and a job.
And the memory of Mrs Gentry’s face when she’d told her that she could keep her awful little bedsit afforded her quite a bit of silent amusement. She glanced across at him in the dark car and felt a shiver of alarmed apprehension. He was, to himself at any rate, doing her a favour and there was nothing, she told herself, that she should be alarmed about, but she had the uneasy feeling of being a fish in a net—a very large net at this point in time, with lots of room for manoeuvre, but a net nevertheless.
He looked across at her and she dropped her eyes quickly.
‘How long did Tom stay after your father’s funeral?’ he asked casually. He had, she noticed, no qualms at all about referring to her father’s death. Most people studiously avoided mentioning it, as though it were a strangely taboo subject.
‘Only a fortnight,’ she replied, looking out of the window at London passing slowly by her—crowded streets, brightly lit shops, a sense of hurry everywhere. ‘Marian couldn’t come over. She’s eight months pregnant and six months ago they told her that she couldn’t travel. He wanted to get back to her as soon as he could.’
She thought regretfully of her brother’s hurried stay in England. It would have been comforting to have him around for a bit longer, although things between them had changed slightly anyway. He was married now and had been for three years.
He had sent their father a ticket to Australia so that he could go to the wedding. She remembered with deep fondness the state of great excitement that had preceded the departure. Anyone would have thought that he had been picked to fly to the moon.
But marriage had taken Tom away a bit from her. They still chatted easily, and wrote to each other often, but his attentions no longer focused on his little sister as indulgently as they had. He had a wife now—a wife whom she had never met although the pictures of her promised someone very friendly—and a baby on the way.
‘He asked me to go back with him,’ she said suddenly, leaning a bit against the door so that she could look at Dane’s averted profile.
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘It seemed like the end of the world and beyond.’ At the time she had felt that to go that far away would be somehow tantamount to desertion. ‘Besides,’ she added, terminating the conversation because she could see it leading to another sermon on how far she had let herself go, simply because, after all these months, she still couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to do anything, however hard she tried, ‘I hate huge spiders.’
‘I suspect there’s probably more to Australia than huge spiders,’ he said drily, half smiling, and she had that unpleasant, falling feeling which she could remember as a teenager, when he had smiled at her in a way that made her feel as though he had access to all her deepest thoughts.
‘Why did you decide to go to America?’ she asked, changing the subject, and his face hardened.
‘I had my reasons,’ he said in his usual, controlled voice, but there was an edge of granite there that hadn’t been there before.
‘What reasons?’ she asked with interest, and he frowned and glanced across at her.
‘I see that tact still isn’t one of your strong points,’ he said with lazy amusement.
‘Why should you feel free to ask questions about my life and I can’t do the same about yours?’
‘Because you’re a child and children shouldn’t ask too many questions.’ He laughed but she didn’t laugh with him.
‘What you’re saying is that, since I should be indebted to you, I should just bow my head in silence and accept what the master tells me without asking anything in return? ’
‘That’s rubbish,’ he told her calmly. ‘But, if you really want to know, I went away to make my fortune.’
‘I thought that your father left you everything?’ He had drawn the lines and she knew that she was overstepping them but he was right, tact never had been one of her strong points, and besides, she had no intention of allowing him to think that she had to be subservient simply because her father had worked for his.
She was grudgingly aware that she was being slightly unfair in this generalisation, but every time she thought of him she thought of his stepmother and the blood rushed to her head with angry force.
‘He left me the estate and a fair-sized inheritance, but control of the company went to Martha.’
‘I’m surprised that she didn’t ask you to take over,’ Suzanne said. He had run it virtually single-handed for the four years before his father died.
‘Oh, there were a lot of things that Martha wanted,’ he said coolly, and this time the warning in his voice left her in no doubt that he did not intend to develop the conversation further. ‘But we don’t always get what we want in life, do we? I decided to make my own fortune in America.’
‘And you did.’
‘And,’ he said, turning to her briefly, ‘I did.’
They had been driving through a very exclusive part of London for the past few minutes. The sort of place that made a very convincing show of being in the country somewhere. Lots of trees and houses hidden from public sight by walls and hedges and long, swirling drives.
The car turned into one of the long, swirling drives and her eyes widened as she took in the proportions of the house. It was huge. A great Victorian building that had been converted into apartments.
No wonder the pitiful increase in rent with which Mrs Gentry had threatened her had seemed a paltry affair to him.
There was a security guard on the ground floor, sitting at a desk and surrounded by various strategically placed plants and a few pieces of discreet furniture here and there. It looked like someone’s lounge.
‘Are you allowed to have guests staying with you?’ she asked in a whisper as they took the lift up to his floor, and he looked at her with a mixture of amusement and irony.
‘This entire block of apartments belongs to me,’ he said. ‘An investment purchase made two weeks after I left the country.’
‘You knew you would come back?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that held no warmth, ‘I knew that I would come back. The only question was when.’
She looked at him, vaguely feeling that there was something here, something not being said, that carried a wealth of hidden meaning, but she couldn’t put her finger on it and he was not about to elucidate. He would never reveal anything unless he wanted to. It was what, she suspected, made him so formidable.
She followed him out of the lift, along the thick white carpet, and it transpired that the entire floor of the building comprised his apartment.
Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a lounge, a kitchen, all beautifully furnished, ready and waiting, she thought, for Dane Sutherland when he decided that the time was right to return.
Suzanne dropped her little battered case in the lounge and looked around her with amazement.
‘No wonder you thought that the bedsit was dingy,’ she said, turning to face him.
‘The bedsit was dingy,’ he drawled. He had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbows so that his powerful forearms were exposed, and she ignored the sudden quickening of her pulses.
‘Well, it’s certainly an eye-opener to see how the other half lives,’ she said honestly, and he frowned with impatience.
‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said, not moving from where he was standing, tall, muscled and disturbing at the other end of the room. ‘You’re going to be living here. Your rooms will be quite separate from mine, and I shall be out of the apartment most of the time so we probably will only see one another in passing, but when we do cross paths I do not expect to be bombarded with a litany of badly veiled insults. Do you understand?’
‘There’s no need to talk to me as though I was a child,’ Suzanne said, mouth turned down.
‘Then you’ll have to get out of the habit of acting like one.’ He walked towards her, picked up her three suitcases and said, over his shoulder, ‘I’ll show you to your room.’
He’d been right about her being separate from him. Her room, which also included a bathroom and another small room off it which had been converted into a sitting room with a television, was at the opposite end of the block.
She looked around her and said, with her back to him, fingering the wonderful patchwork bedspread, which looked as though it had leapt straight out of the pages of an interior decoration magazine, ‘How much rent would you like me to pay?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ There was impatience in his voice and she spun round.
‘I have to pay you something,’ she answered stubbornly. ‘I can’t live here for nothing.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ he grated. ‘I’ve known you since you were in nappies. Do you think I expect you to pay me for the privilege of being provided with a roof over your head?’
‘No more charity from your family,’ she muttered, meeting his hard grey eyes levelly.
I’ve learnt a lesson from my father, she thought. What’s given with one hand is taken with the other.
‘There’s no point in letting pride get in the way of judgement, Suzie,’ he said, not angrily but as though he was explaining something to a child.
‘Without pride, we are nothing.’
‘And from what book did you pick up that little gem?’
She flushed angrily, thinking that she had read it somewhere and it had seemed like a damned good piece of wisdom at the time.
‘I’ll pay you what I paid Mrs Gentry,’ she told him. ‘I know it’s not a quarter of what it’s worth, but it’s all I can afford. Don’t think that you can ease your conscience over my father’s treatment by letting me live here free of charge.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Buy something for the place once a month. Would that satisfy your pride?’
She gave it some thought and nodded. ‘All right,’ she conceded, lifting her chin, and he ran his fingers through his hair.
‘Now would you like something to eat? Or would the food stick in your throat?’
Was he laughing at her? There was no smile on his face, but it was difficult to tell with him.
‘Would you like me to cook?’ she offered, and he raised his eyebrows sceptically.
‘Can you cook? I remember when you were thirteen you cooked something for Tom and me and it was a bit of a struggle to get through the meal.’
‘Very funny.’ Why did he still treat her as though she was a child? she wondered crossly. Rescuing her from her unpleasant bedsit, talking to her as though her wits were very slightly scrambled.
‘What was it you cooked?’ He was still amused at the memory, and she followed him into the kitchen, watching the lean build of his body, the way he moved with panther-like grace, every movement silent and economical.
‘Roast chicken,’ she replied, determined not to act the sullen child any more than she could help. ‘It burnt.’ Everything had burnt. She had turned the oven too high. The only salvageable item had been the gravy. She could remember how mortified she had been, infatuated with this dark, devastatingly handsome university graduate, clumsy and thirteen, with long, gangly limbs and long, unruly hair which she had tied up because she had thought that it made her look older.
‘Your father was a superb cook,’ he said, extracting various things from the fridge after he had made her sit down. ‘When you were very young, he used to try out dishes on your brother and me. At the time we thought most of them a bit odd, but they tasted excellent.’
He wasn’t looking at her. He was busy doing something that involved chopping and opening of cans, but he expected a reply. She sensed rather than knew that.
‘Yes, he was a wonderful cook,’ she agreed, feeling that lump in her throat again. She fished inside her handbag and took out a block of chocolate, doing it surreptitiously. She wasn’t accustomed to talking about her father. She had bottled up her emotions inside her ever since his death and it was painful to voice her memories, even when the questions asked were so detached.
She lapsed into her memories and licked her fingers absent-mindedly after she had finished eating the chocolate. She was only aware that Dane was looking at her when she glanced up, her eyes dry, and she said defensively, ‘I’m going to go on a diet.’
He didn’t say anything, which annoyed her more than if he had. He just nodded to two of the cupboards, asked her to set the table, and then returned to what he was doing.
Suzanne got up, feeling instantly lumpy after that forbidden piece of chocolate, and began putting plates and cutlery down.
‘I know that I’ve put on a bit of weight,’ she said into what she thought was a critical silence. ‘It’s simply that I’ve got into the habit of snackıng recently.’ Well, for months, she said to herself. Eating all the wrong things and justifying it by telling herself that she would start a sensible diet tomorrow. She tried to neaten her hair with one hand and decided that it was an impossible task. Her hair never did what it was told.
‘There’s no need to justify yourself,’ he said, bringing food to the table. He deposited two saucepans, one of which contained spaghetti and the other a red sauce smelling of garlic. He had opened a bottle of wine and he poured them both a glass, then sat down so that he was directly facing her.
‘I wasn’t justifying myself,’ Suzanne began, confused. ‘I was simply explaining...’ Her voice trailed off and she helped herself to some of the pasta and the sauce. ‘I happen to like the way I look,’ she continued.
Why did he insist on making her feel so defensive and indignant? she wondered. Why couldn’t he have left her to muddle along to her own devices? She didn’t need his help to pull herself together. She would have done it quite completely on her own. After a while. Why did he have to come along and feel sorry for her? She didn’t want to be an object of pity. He didn’t owe her anything and she wished that he had just left her alone. Just because he had known her since she’d been in nappies didn’t mean that he now owed her something.
‘You’ve changed too, you know,’ she said accusingly, after a while.
And she was taken aback when he leaned back in the chair and said with an amused, lazy smile, ‘Have I? Tell me how.’
Suzanne stared at him with the drowning feeling of having got into something that was beyond her depth.
She tried not to look addled but the only thing her mind would tell her was that, if anything, he had become even more devastatingly handsome than she remembered. His dark good looks had hardened, taken on the indefinable edge of power and control.
‘You look older,’ she said lamely.
‘I am older.’ He waited, amused.
‘Of course, you’re still—still...an attractive man...’ She gave her full attention to a mouthful of spaghetti, thinking what an undignified meal it was, especially when only one of you was doing the eating.
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Dear me, how embarrassed you sound saying that!’ He eyed her as though she was a charming curiosity. ‘Anyone would think that you had no dealings with the opposite sex.’ The grey eyes fixed on her face speculatively.
Suzanne felt her face go hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any serious recollection of dealings with the opposite sex. Nearly twenty-one and still a virgin. Boyfriends, yes. Her father had always been very indulgent about boyfriends; maybe, she thought now, because he could see that, despite the parties she went to occasionally and the boys she brought back home occasionally, she was still as innocent as a wide-eyed child.
Dane Sutherland had been the only one who had stirred her imagination. Everyone else had been little more than a bit of childish fun. True, when she was nineteen, she had had a fling with a man, someone who had worked with her, but she had never felt that driving passion which she had always associated with a serious affair, and she had not slept with him, despite his persistence. In fact, it had mostly been his persistence that had ended their relationship.
‘I’ve been out with men, yes,’ she told him coolly.
‘Slept with any of them?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Just curious.’ He shrugged and laughed, not at all taken aback by her reply.
‘I don’t ask you about the women in your life,’ Suzanne muttered, irritated as much by his attitude as by his line of questioning.
‘Feel free to,’ he said, folding his arms and shrugging again. She caught his eyes and was struck, as she had been years ago, by his magnificent ability to make it seem as though one hundred per cent of his attention was focused entirely on her. A trick of sorts, she knew, a talent for pretence, but how she had once let it work on her. She couldn’t think back to her adolescence without cringing.
‘I’m not that interested,’ she said, wondering whether she should scrape her plate clean or whether that would appear greedy. The food had tasted wonderful—full of tomatoes and herbs. Far better than anything she could whip up. She had never been at her best in a kitchen. Things always seemed to go wrong whenever and wherever they possibly could. Sauces always curdled, or else became lumpy, meat always seemed to burn, and she always managed to forget whatever was boiling until the smell became unavoidable.
She stood up and began clearing away the dishes, vaguely piqued to realise that if she was uninterested in his women then he was even less interested in her response.
He employed, he told her, a woman who came in and cleaned every other day. She also did his ironing and cooked if and when he wanted her to.
‘Lucky old you,’ she said, watching him as he fixed them cups of coffee and nodded briefly in the direction of the lounge.
‘Shall we clear the air, Suzie?’ he asked with a resigned sigh. ‘Do you dislike me personally, or do you simply dislike the family I represent?’
He sat down on the chair opposite her and stretched out his long legs, crossing them loosely at the ankles.
‘How can you expect me to give you an honest answer to that question, when I am not renting a room in your house?’
‘Because,’ he said steadily, his expression shuttered, ‘you haven’t yet learned the art of deception. You would like to maintain some kind of dignified coldness, I imagine, but your need to express yourself trips you up constantly. Am I right?’
‘You’re always right, aren’t you?’
‘I think that that’s one reason why you’ve let yourself go so utterly for the past few months. You’ve not spoken to anyone about your father’s death. Instead you’ve bottled up your emotions, which is alien to you, and the result is that you’re still as maudlin and confused as you were the day he died.’
‘I am neither maudlin nor confused,’ she denied hotly.
‘You seem to think that I washed my hands of your father the day I left the house,’ he said, in a cool statement of fact. ‘I did write to him, you know, and a little over a year ago I sent him a cheque in case he needed money. I knew that he had put aside the small legacy my father left him for you. He returned my cheque with a friendly enough letter saying that he was fine.’
Suzanne stared at him, floored by this revelation about which she had known nothing. ‘Pride,’ she managed to say, recovering her power of speech.
‘Almost certainly,’ he agreed, either not noticing or else deliberately ignoring the effect that his words had had on her. ‘Still, I had no idea that my stepmother was giving him such a hard time.’
‘And if you had known, would you have rushed over to save the situation?’
He paused for a fraction of a second—a fraction long enough for her to know that as far as he was concerned he had divorced himself from his past and would not have reopened it willingly. She felt a surge of anger against him and her hand was trembling when she picked up the coffee-cup. He might have offered money to her father, but time was something which he could ill afford to spare.
‘I would have dealt with it,’ he told her grimly, which did very little to appease her anger.
‘From thousands of miles away? How compassionate you are!’
He would have thought about it, she told herself, and written a polite letter, but the urgency of it all would have been lost on him. He had been caught up in a different world and chauffeurs had no place in it. She felt tears of self-pity spring to her eyes, but for once the associated thought of nibbling some chocolate did not arise. She was far too busy feeling angry with him.
‘Why have you decided to come back?’ she asked. ‘If it was so exciting in America, why return?’
‘It was now or never.’ Five words that silenced her because there was something dark and menacing behind them. ‘And you never answered my question,’ he said, his features relaxing. ‘Do you dislike me personally or do you simply dislike what I represent?’
‘Do you care?’
‘I’m interested,’ he answered lazily, sidestepping the question, which, she knew, had been foolish anyway.
‘I don’t dislike you,’ she said, trying to sound more sophisticated. ‘Although, I admit that I don’t find your type attractive.’
‘And what type is that exactly? Using your vast knowledge of men as a starting point.’
This time she was certain that he was laughing at her. He was a mere nine years older than her but in terms of experience it was tantamount to a lifetime and she knew it. As he did.
‘Cruel,’ she said, ‘arrogant, too good-looking, too cut off from feeling any real emotion about anyone.’
‘You have no idea what emotions I feel,’ he murmured, sipping some of his coffee and looking at her over the rim of the cup.
She didn’t add the real reason that she disliked him—a dislike that she had nurtured over the years and one that had become more real to her with the passing of time, rather than faded—an overheard conversation, a few passing words before the door closed on her red-faced humiliation.
‘You’ll have to watch your chauffeur’s little girl, Dane.’ The merry tinkle of Martha’s laughter. She had a way of laughing that made it seem as though she was a vastly superior being. ‘She’s got a teenage crush on you.’
Suzanne had been hidden from sight, a loose-limbed girl of sixteen on her way to deliver a message from her father.
‘Don’t concern yourself over that,’ Dane had said. His voice had been indifferent, and although she hadn’t been able to see him she had imagined him strolling across to the patio doors, looking outside, his thoughts on things that had very little to do with an irritating adolescent and her fanciful illusions.
‘But darling,’ Martha had said, ‘you’re a very attractive man—’ her voice had been warm and amused ‘—and a child like that probably finds you irresistible. She peeps at you whenever you’re around. You must have noticed that she snatches every opportunity to visit the house when she knows that you’re here.’
Dane hadn’t answered, and Martha had said, which had been the final blow of mortification, ‘Besides, you must remember that she’s only the chauffeur’s daughter. You mustn’t let her get ideas above her station.’
And that had been that. Suzanne had turned away and heard the door shut before she had even made it down the corridor into the hall. The message she had been sent to deliver had flown out of her head completely. It had left a nice, tidy spot, just the right size for her disillusionment to set in.
‘And I hold you responsible for the way my father was treated,’ she told him bitterly. ‘You may not have been around, but you owed it to the people who worked for your father to see that they were treated properly, instead of just vanishing off the face of the earth and leaving your stepmother in charge. Did you even know that people who had worked for your father for years at the house were dismissed only weeks after your father died?’
She was gathering momentum now and was astounded when he said evenly, betraying no emotion whatever, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘You...you did?’
‘I made sure that they were all financially compensated. Very generously compensated.’
‘How on earth did you find out?’ Suzanne asked, frowning and trying hard to work out how a man thousands of miles away could have discovered that. Did he have some mysterious crystal ball in his New York penthouse, which he looked into every time he wanted to see what was happening on the other side of the world?
‘I have my ways.’
‘Spies, you mean?’
‘Nothing quite so dramatic.’ A shadow of a smile flitted across his dark features. ‘Someone there has been keeping an eye on things for me. He told me as soon as Martha began firing old hands.’
‘Why didn’t you return yourself to sort it out?’
‘It would have been impossible.’
Which, to her ears, implied that he hadn’t been bothered; but then, if he had been so unbothered, why would he have made sure that his father’s men were compensated? Why?
‘So you did know about the way Martha treated Dad, then?’ she threw at him in an accusing voice, and he shook his head.
‘As far as I knew, he was one of the ones who remained in her employment and, as I told you, my offer of money was amicably but firmly returned to sender. I will admit, though, that I was told of...changes, for want of a better word. Certain facts were reported back to me.’
‘What facts?’
‘Nothing that you need concern yourself with.’ His tone of voice did not invite lively debate on the subject. He had thrown her, she thought, a few scraps of information, but he had no intention of explaining any more to her. Probably because he felt no need to launch into any lengthy explanations to a girl who was, after all, beneath him in social standing.
‘What did you do with your father’s possessions?’ he asked suddenly, and she scowled.
‘There weren’t many. The few big things he had accumulated over the years, I left with a friend in Leamington Spa. I brought the smaller things to London with me.’
She looked down into her coffee-cup. There was a locket with a picture of her mother inside, a stack of old letters which she had written to Santa Claus over the years, and which he had assiduously kept in a scrapbook, all her report cards from school, a box of photographs, the watch which old Mr Sutherland had given to him on his fiftieth birthday and which he had worn every day of his life from the moment he had received it. She had packed them neatly into a small cardboard box and had kept them in her cupboard in the bedsit.
She hoped that he wasn’t looking when she wiped a tear away-from her cheek. She didn’t want him rushing across to her with a load of phoney sympathy and a handkerchief.
‘Now,’ he said, and there was, thankfully, no indication that he had noticed her brief lapse, ‘shall we discuss the job?’
‘There’s really no need—’ she began, thinking that this sounded like a rerun of what she had said when he had offered her a room in his apartment.
‘I realise that,’ he cut in abruptly. ‘Just as I realise what a bitter pill it is for you to swallow, taking anything that’s handed to you from a member of my family. But this isn’t the act of charity that you’d like to believe. I have several companies over here, all bought with some of my father’s inheritance two years ago. I took them over when they were in receivership and they’re all now thriving.’
He had bought companies in England after he had moved to America? Why would he have done that? And if he had done that, why bother to go to America at all?
‘You’ve been back to England since you went away?’ she asked, perplexed.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And still you never came to the house to see your stepmother?’
‘No.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Don’t,’ he said with a tinge of impatience, ‘ask so many questions.’
‘Yes, sir!’ she muttered under her breath, and he shot her a crooked smile.
‘Good girl. Now, there’s a position vacant in one of the companies for an assistant accountant How far had you reached in your studies?’
Suzanne tucked her feet up underneath her and leant forward, resting her elbows on her knees. Her long hair fell in an untidy tousle of ringlets down the sides of her face and she gave the question some thought.
‘I was on the verge of qualification,’ she admitted, steeling herself for another fight, but he made no comment, and she explained to him just what she could do, what areas of tax she felt qualified to cover, how knowledgeable she was on company litigation, all the aspects of audit control which she had found very simple at the time. While she spoke, he nodded, listening in silence until she had finished, and she gave a nervous little laugh.
‘Of course, I may have forgotten all of it.’
‘I hardly think so. If anything, you’re probably overqualified for the job I have in mind, but if you were temping then it’ll be more challenging that what you must have been doing.’
‘When it comes to photocopying and filing, most things pose a greater challenge,’ she said with a laugh. Strange, but it felt as though she hadn’t laughed in years. She could hardly believe that that carefree amused sound had actually come out of her. And in the company of a man who sat on the opposite side of the fence to her.
He told her how much she would be paid, and she looked at him with a fair amount of amazement.
‘That’s awfully high,’ she said at last, and he shook his head in genuine amusement.
‘You will never get far in business if you insist on being honest to that degree,’ he said. ‘I pay my workers well because I want their loyalty and hard work. After all, they are the backbone of the company and if they’re disgruntled they won’t stay. High turnover of staff is very bad if a company is to succeed.’
‘And success is what it’s all about.’
‘That’s right.’
She looked at him frankly. If success was what his priority was, then he had attained his goal, because it sat on his shoulders, followed him like a shadow, was there in the dark look of self-assurance and power.
‘Will I be working for you?’ she asked suddenly. For some reason she found the idea of that slightly alarming. She could cope with bumping into him occasionally in the apartment, but the prospect of having him around on a more permanent basis made her uneasy.
‘Oh, no.’ He reached forward and deposited his cup on the table in front of him, then he linked his fingers behind his head and surveyed her. ‘I am involved in a company that is quite removed from the one in which you will be working. I leave the running of this particular publishing company in the hands of my directors. They report back to me at frequent intervals.’
‘So who is going to be my boss?’ Just so long as he bore no resemblance to the odious Mr Slattery then she would be all right.
‘A woman by the name of Angela Street. She’s American. I sent her over about four months ago when I knew that I would be moving back here. She’s smart and efficient and doesn’t let the grass grow under her feet.’
A woman? From America? All the way from America when London was full of smart, efficient women?
Who was he trying to kid? She might be naive but she wasn’t born yesterday. Smart, efficient Angela Street was more than a work machine. Why didn’t he say so? Why didn’t he say that she was his lover?
CHAPTER THREE
WERE clothes for women anything over size ten designed to make them look dull? It appeared so. Suzanne looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom and decided that she looked frumpy. She had worn the suit for two months without that thought ever crossing her mind, but it crossed it now, and she tried, without much success, to smooth the skirt into a semblance of something chic.
It was a light summer suit but the colours were insipid and the overall grey effect didn’t do much for her.
She had tied her long, unruly hair back into a French plait which hung down her back, but strands kept escaping and short of gluing them to the side of her head there seemed little she could do to avoid it.
It was, all things considered, just as well that Dane wasn’t around. He was out of the country for a few days. He wouldn’t have said anything about her appearance but those cool, assessing grey eyes would have said it on his behalf anyway and she would have instantly retreated into a position of muted self-defence, which was childish, she knew, but which was something she couldn’t seem to prevent.
He had, he had told her, spoken to Angela and there was nothing to be nervous about.
‘Why on earth should I be nervous?’ she had asked him airily. ‘Does she bite?’
‘Nothing quite so dramatic,’ he had answered drily, his eyes resting on her and making her feel hot and bothered, and cross to be feeling that way. ‘But she’s extremely capable and quite intolerant of temper tantrums.’
‘I did not lose my last job because of a temper tantrum,’ Suzanne had told him hotly, but she was uncomfortably aware that her outspokenness to her last boss, justified though it had been, had stepped beyond the lines of good sense.
At the time she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t enjoyed the job, she had been paid a pittance and she had had no real idea of why she had stuck the damn thing out for so long, apart from the fact that it had been convenient
She found now that she cared a great deal about keeping this job. It might have been a charitable handout to assuage Dane Sutherland’s guilty conscience, it might have been offered out of remembered affection for her father and the daughter who had harboured a teenage crush on him, but she wasn’t about to live down to his expectations of her as a child by jeopardising it in any way.
She looked at the photograph of her father, which she had put on the dressing table, and for once she found that her eyes did not automatically fill with tears. She told the picture of the middle-aged man with the kind eyes and the self-conscious expression of someone posing for the camera that her personal dislike of Dane Sutherland wasn’t going to get in the way of doing a good job.
‘He won’t be able to think, even for a fleeting second, that I failed the test and what else could you expect of the chauffeur’s daughter.’ Her voice echoed in the silence of the room and she grinned and wondered whether she was going mad. Talking to photographs. What next?
The company was one of four that Dane had bought over the three years that he had been away and hauled out of the doldrums, back into mainstream life.
It was, she discovered as she stood in front of it later, larger than she had anticipated. For the first time she acknowledged a certain nervousness underneath the defiant desire to succeed.
She had expected something altogether smaller—a little building, in need of renovation because of its slow decline into debt. She hadn’t realised quite how drastic its kiss of life had been.
The office block was a large, three-storeyed building which seemed to consist mostly of glass—smoky-grey glass. There was a stream of people hurrying in. Suzanne stood for a while in the cool summer sunshine and watched the figures being absorbed one by one into the bowels of the glass building; then she took a deep breath and joined the throng.
She had brought her briefcase with her, partly so that she could carry in a couple of accountancy books and one law one, and partly because the briefcase had been given to her by her father as a present and she wouldn’t have dreamt of going into any job without it, even if the job had involved manual labour on a building site. It was her good-luck charm.
She laid it protectively on her lap as she sat in the reception room and waited to be summoned.
It was, she thought, very American in its decor, or perhaps the places where she had worked before—small, fairly stuffy offices—were just very English in their shabbiness.
There was a feeling of space and light and a great many plants everywhere. The three large paintings on the wall were all abstract, their colours strong and defined, red, orange and blue lines that swept across the canvases, conveying a message which, Suzanne thought, was lost on her. She personally preferred paintings which contained things that were recognisable—scenes of mountains or lakes or forests which seduced you into closing your eyes and imagining that you were far away from the hustle and bustle of the twentieth century.
To the far right from where she was sitting was a bank of four lifts. Angela Street, she thought, would emerge from one of those, and reluctantly she allowed herself to give free rein to the curiosity which had been gnawing away at her ever since she had drawn her conclusions on Dane’s relationship with Angela.
She had told herself that it was pointless speculating on the American, because she really couldn’t care one way or another whether he was sleeping with her, proposing to marry her, or even planning a brood of miniature Dane Sutherlands, but still she wondered what the other woman was like.
Would she be like the girls he used to bring back to the house? Small and pretty and with smiling, awed eyes that followed him around wherever he went?
Suzanne had observed them all from a distance, occasionally hearing more about them from her brother who had found it all wildly exciting, and she had hated them all.
She was still absorbed in her trip down memory lane when she saw a mousy-haired girl with earnest eyes approaching her, and she stood up and held out her hand.
‘Miss Street?’ she asked hesitantly, and the girl’s pale, thin face broke into a smile.
‘One of Miss Street’s secretaries,’ she explained, leading the way to the lift while Suzanne followed in her wake. ‘And she likes to be called Angela, by the way. She says that there shouldn’t be barriers between boss and secretary.’
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