Savage Courtship
Susan Napier
Who's Been Sleeping In His Bed? "I can't deny that it's a common male fantasy to be seduced by a beautiful stranger who conveniently vanishes afterwards… ." Vanessa could kick herself! It had been a simple misunderstanding… how dared Benedict Savage imply that she'd deliberately set out to seduce him? The very idea was outrageous, he simply wasn't her type!No matter that he was the last word in cool, suave sophistication - he was also her boss, and a formidable sexual predator into the bargain. But Vanessa had no intention of falling prey to his dark charm - had Benedict met his match at last?
Savage Courtship
Susan Napier
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u6653e063-427f-540b-9ad0-267a29fa9255)
CHAPTER TWO (#u197df8fd-a1c8-5163-9476-66386fabaf82)
CHAPTER THREE (#u640d6bfc-d24b-5588-8a21-da8def97c082)
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)
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS dark inside the big stone house but the lack of light didn’t hamper the man gliding silently up the narrow stairway. He moved with the sure-footed ease of someone used to exploiting the full potential of his subsidiary senses. He hadn’t needed to be able to see to quietly open the locked front door, double-shrouded in the night-shadow of the portico, and once inside he had found the stairs by instinctively measuring his stride, shifting his double burden to his right hand so that he could plot his upward progress on the smooth banister-rail with his left.
At the top of the stairs he strode confidently into the inky blackness, mentally centring himself between the pale walls to avoid the occasional dark lump of furniture that jutted out into the narrow passageway. Several metres down he turned abruptly to his left, reaching down for a low door-handle and entering the room beyond without even breaking his stride.
When he closed the door behind him the darkness was almost complete and after the briefest of hesitations he walked over to the far wall where he grasped a handful of thick fabric and dragged it aside, revealing a row of narrow windows that overlooked a small, starlit black lake. The smooth yet shifting reflective surface was oddly disorientating, the familiar beacon of the Southern Cross glinted up at him from below, as well as tracing its unique pattern of stars across the midnight vault of heaven.
His hand slowly fisted and then relaxed against the window-frame and, as if the simple action had pumped all the tension out of his body, he slumped, uttering a long sigh of relief as he set the hard, slim case and its soft-sided companion carefully on the floor beside him. He leaned against the windowsill for long moments, an obscure silhouette of dark on dark, his forehead resting against the cool glass. Then, with another sigh, he shrugged himself upright again, rolling his head around on his shoulders in the universal gesture of exhaustion, rubbing his neck with his hand as his soft-soled black shoes padded across the polished wood floor towards a second, shadowy door.
Benedict Savage narrowed his eyes to protect himself against the initial dazzling burst of light in the small bathroom as he flicked on the switch by the door and then leaned over and spun the shower tap to the pre-set pressure and temperature he preferred—strong and almost unbearably hot. He took off his tortoiseshell-framed spectacles and tossed them carelessly on to the marble vanity unit as he rubbed the narrow bridge of his nose.
He couldn’t remember ever having felt this bone-weary before—perhaps because usually any tiredness on the return trip to New Zealand was masked by the sense of euphoria generated by the completion of yet another commission. This time the euphoria had been riddled with an indefinable dissatisfaction that had infuriated him, since the work he had produced had been arguably the best of his success-studded career. Perhaps he had just worked too hard for too long on this one—had wanted it too much. There was bound to be a feeling of anticlimax, especially since he had nothing half as exciting lined up to tackle next.
Benedict shook his head to try and clear the miasma of exhaustion that thickened his thoughts.
He stripped off his tailored suit and ultra-conservative shirt and tie, tossing the separate pieces carelessly across the willow-cane hamper in the corner, a grim smile touching his thin mouth as he contemplated the possibility that age was starting to catch up with him. Tomorrow was his thirty-fourth birthday and, although he was confident that he was still at the peak of his intellectual abilities, perhaps his body was telling him it was time to ease up on a relentless regime of travel-work-travel.
This particular flight across the world had been a nightmare of foul-ups and delays, and he had come perilously close to losing his famed cool. That more than anything told him that it might be time for a serious assessment of his priorities.
Benedict stepped into the shower, glancing briefly at his reflection in the steamy mirror as he pulled the glass door closed, noting with a clinical satisfaction that he didn’t look as wretchedly jaded as he felt. The eyes that felt gritty and bloodshot were their usual cool, clear blue and he had the kind of olive complexion that didn’t readily show the lines of tension that he could feel pulling tightly beneath his skin. His short-cropped black hair might be streaked with premature grey, but his body was as lean and hard as it ever had been, thanks partly to genetics but mostly to his habit of never taking up residence in a hotel or apartment block that didn’t have a swimming-pool. His days always started with a mile of laps, the solitary rhythm soothing his mind as it sharpened his muscles.
The hot shower did its job, loosening his aching joints and easing the tightness in skin desiccated by aircraft air-conditioning. His thoughts drifted on a pleasant plateau of mindless fatigue. He stepped out of the shower cubicle and blotted himself roughly with the thick white towel from the heated towel-rail, too sluggish to notice its faint dampness. Dropping it lazily underfoot, he flicked off the light and padded back into the bedroom, rubbing his strong fingers across his sandpaper jaw, grateful that there was no reason to have to shave again before falling into bed. More than one woman had commented on the intriguing contrast between a beard that grew so quickly and his hairless chest.
He snapped on the standard lamp by the window and opened the casements, enjoying the warm flow of fresh air over his damp skin. Auckland in late March could be chilly, but tonight the region was still palpably in the grip of sultry summer. He stretched, slow and hard, prolonging a shuddering yawn as he savoured a pleasurable sense of anticipation. He removed his steel Rolex and dropped it on to the pristine white blotter on the desk which also served as a dressing-table. The prospect of sliding his naked body between cool, crisply smooth sheets was disconcertingly alluring, given the fact that the only limbs waiting to enfold him there were the celibate arms of Morpheus. Perhaps he really was getting old!
He turned, a wry curve of self-derision on his lips, and froze.
The high, wide single bed was already occupied.
The pool of light spilling across the floor from the lamp behind him barely reached the blanket trailing off on to the floor but the general illumination was enough to show him that his crisp, tight, pristine sheets were a tangled memory. A woman lay sprawled on her stomach in his bed, one arm splayed across the rumpled sheet towards him, the other folded in at her side, her hand disappearing into the tawny froth of hair that rippled across her shoulders, glinting in the subdued light with the lustre of old gold. Her face was well and truly buried in one of Benedict’s rare, private self-indulgences—the super-size down pillows with which he furnished his beds.
He closed his eyes and shook his head sharply, sure that what he saw must be a fatigue-induced hallucination.
He looked again, moving hesitantly towards the bed, still unwilling to trust the evidence of his weary, less than perfect eyesight.
As he got closer he could see the slow rise and fall of her back and hear the faint snuffle made by her breath on the pillow. She was definitely real.
Above the white cotton sheet which draped in modest folds over her hips and legs she wore a wisp of white satin, although judging from the turmoil of the rest of the bed any modesty was purely accidental. One thin white strap had straggled almost entirely off the arm tucked against her body and the consequent lop-sided sagging of white satin revealed a long, breathtaking sweep of graceful back sheathed in lustrously smooth-textured skin the colour of dark honey.
A powerful outrage gripped Benedict. It didn’t even occur to his befuddled brain to question who she was; all he felt was a furious sense of betrayal. His precious privacy had been invaded!
This was his bed, his room, his home, God damn it! No matter that he had never called it such before, nor that it was only one of a number of residences he maintained.
And, hell, he was tired! All he wanted to do was sleep. Was that too much to ask in a man’s own home?
Most infuriating of all was the fact that neither the shower nor the light had woken the feminine invader. Where he desperately longed to be she was already—fathoms deep in contented slumber. Well, not for long!
He bent over and growled savagely, ‘Wake up, Goldilocks; Papa Bear wants his bed back.’
There was not a flicker of response. The allusion that had sprung unconsciously to his lips was ridiculously apposite, he thought as he straightened and glimpsed himself in the mirror of the dressing-table on the other side of the bed. Not only was he feeling emotionally bearish...he was physically bare as well!
The little nip of sardonic humour restored a small measure of Benedict’s normal equilibrium. He suddenly realised that waking up to find a stark-naked man looming over her was more likely to fling his mystery guest into hysterics than prompt a meek departure. The last thing his exhausted mind and body needed right now was to get involved in a dramatic scene.
He turned, intending to fetch his bathrobe from the hook in the bathroom, when the muted burr of his cell-phone distracted him. Tired as he was he couldn’t ignore the siren-call of master to technological slave. He detoured to his briefcase and pulled out the humming unit.
‘So, are you home yet?’
Benedict raked his fingers over his cropped head as he recognised his friend and colleague’s distinctive American drawl. ‘Yes, Dane, just...and you won’t believe what I found!’
A lazy chuckle that was Dane Judson’s good-humoured trademark vibrated in his ear. ‘What do you think of her? Can I pick them, or what? Isn’t she the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen?’
Benedict spun on his heel and stared incredulously at the woman on the bed. ‘She—I—you’re responsible for her being here?’ he stuttered.
His friend laughed and Benedict could hear the faint clink of bottle against glass in the background. ‘Uh-huh. Rendered you speechless, huh? I knew I’d do it one day. I just wish I could have been there to see your face, but I’m stuck here in Wellington until next week.’
‘But what in the—?’
‘Many happy returns for tomorrow, pal.’ There was the audible sound of a toast being drunk.
Benedict cleared his throat as understanding burst upon his sluggish brain. ‘This is your idea of a birthday present? For God’s sake, Dane—!’
‘Don’t worry, pal, it’s all pleasure and no responsibility,’ Dane gleefully misunderstood him. ‘You don’t have to look after her for keeps—she’s strictly on weekend loan. I promised you’d return her in perfect nick so make sure you treat her real lover-like—’
‘What—?’ Benedict moved jerkily back towards the bed, stunned by the revelation that the anonymous female body was there purely for his temporary delectation.
Another rolling laugh. ‘I keep telling you, all work and no play makes Ben a dull boy. And don’t tell me you’re not feeling jaded because I know you well enough to read the signs. You need to revitalise yourself with a little hell-raising and, believe me, this babe is guaranteed to loosen you up real fast. A few days with her and you’ll feel eighteen again...’
‘I wouldn’t wish a second time around as a teenager on my worst enemy,’ Benedict said sardonically, unconsciously lowering his voice as he leaned against the bedside cabinet, wondering what Dane would say if he knew that his outrageous birthday present had got tired of waiting to spring her surprise and was out cold. Benedict decided not to spoil his friend’s mirthful pleasure by telling him. ‘Let alone my best friend. I hesitate to inject a dose of unwelcome reality into your adolescent fantasies, Dane, but isn’t this kind of arrangement a bit unhealthy these days?’
Dane gave a whoop of delighted laughter. ‘Afraid you’ll have a heart-attack from the excitement? Come on, Ben—would I give you something that I thought would kill you? When was the last time you had some innocent, macho fun? A year? Eighteen months ago? Trust me, you have nothing to worry about. I had her thoroughly checked over inside and out and she’s in prime, A-1 condition—’
‘For God’s sake—!’ Benedict could feel the heat in his face, almost as if he was embarrassed on behalf of a woman who was obviously either a high-class call-girl or a free spirit who got her kicks out of having sex with total strangers. He knew it had been quite some time since his last relationship with a woman ended but he had been so absorbed in his work that he had never worried about his inactive libido. Not so Dane, it seemed, whose sex life was as active as his bizarre sense of humour.
‘Dane—’
‘No need to thank me, pal,’ his friend interrupted, ringing off with a breezy, ‘Just enjoy! And remember, it’s pumpkin time Monday morning...’
Benedict swayed slightly under another rolling wave of fatigue as he switched off the phone and placed it clumsily down on the bedside table. He struggled to keep his eyelids open as he wearily debated his options.
There were plenty of other beds in the house but his proprietary interest in this one was stubbornly acute.
Despite her apparent sprawl, his nameless birthday gift actually trespassed on little more than half of the bed, he noted, her left arm and hip neatly aligned with the far edge of the single mattress. He looked down at her outflung arm, at the long, slender fingers curled laxly over the edge of the bed. Her fingertips almost touched his hair-roughened knee. Gently he encircled her wrist and lifted the sleep-heavy arm, placing it neatly back against her side. There was now an inviting expanse of empty bed available. A man-sized portion, if the man was of greyhound-lean proportions...
Goldilocks slumbered on. She was amazingly still, except for that slow, sensuous ripple of breath down the long, beautiful spine. She made sleep seem like an enchantingly erotic experience and Benedict found himself wondering whether a woman who offered herself up so voluptuously to sleep would be equally hedonistic in her approach to lovemaking.
A lazy stirring of male curiosity piqued his jaded senses, his angry earlier resentment overwhelmed by the knowledge that if he cared to find out he only needed to wake her. She was his to command. He wondered if that fleecy gold hair was as soft as it looked, and whether the colour was natural. He wondered whether her front would live up to that matchless back. Even in the slackness of sleep he could see that her muscles were well-toned. Her waking movements would be strong and supple. He imagined watching that golden back arching and flexing in slow, indolent rhythm with the languid thrust of his hips. He’d take her slow and easy at first...and then...and then...
He looked down at his quiescent body in rueful self-derision. And then...nothing. His mind might be aroused but he was so exhausted he was physically incapable of doing his vivid imagination justice. If he got into bed with her tonight he would be sleeping with her in the strictly literal sense.
Waking up with her in the morning, though, was suddenly an enchanting prospect.
Oh, yes...after a good, solid sleep the birthday boy would be in far better condition to appreciate his very unexpected, and undoubtedly expensive present...
CHAPTER TWO
VANESSA FLYNN was sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table sipping her first cup of coffee of the day when her employer burst into the kitchen and came to an abrupt halt.
Her hands tightened around the cup but that was the only visible reaction that escaped her rigid self-control. Inside she was one huge, all-enveloping blush.
Mrs Riley looked up from the breakfast tray she had busied herself over on the kauri-slab bench in surprise.
‘Did you want your breakfast early this morning, Mr Savage?’ she asked, her middle-aged face creased with dismay at this departure from routine. ‘Only, your office never notified us that you were coming last night, you see, so nothing’s quite prepared. I didn’t even know that I’d be needed until Vanessa rang me a little while ago—’
‘No, no...’ Benedict Savage cut her off with a wave of his hand, frowning as he looked at the single setting she had laid on the tray. ‘You don’t have to rush.’
Vanessa braced herself as his gaze lifted, darted about the kitchen, and reluctantly settled on her.
She willed herself not to let her interior blush show, her dark brown eyes steady as they met his. She had dressed in her best wallpaper this morning—sensible, knee-length grey skirt and white short-sleeved blouse, her damp chestnut hair strictly confined to a neat French pleat, her face made up with the discreet foundation and barest touch of ginger lipstick that she habitually wore when on duty—too little to draw undue attention to her features but just enough to satisfy her feminine vanity.
Not that she had much reason to be vain. She was a shade under six feet but without the willowy slenderness that would have rendered her height fashionable. At least everything else was proportionate to her grand size, but that was little consolation. Her face was what might be politely termed strong-boned, her chin too square, her mouth too big and her wide, dark eyes deeply set and heavy-lidded, so that she was cursed with a perpetually sleepy air which was totally at odds with her practical efficiency.
She swallowed, the sweetened coffee turning bitter on her tongue as she withstood the silent stare of the man she had woken up in bed with that morning.
Behind the tortoiseshell frames she found his blue eyes unreadable. Not that Benedict Savage’s expression was ever easy to interpret. To her he had always appeared as precise and controlled as the architectural drawings which papered the walls of the studio next to his bedroom.
He was also a very private man, reserved to the point of coldness. In fact it was that very reserve that made him an ideal employer as far as Vanessa was concerned...that and the fact that his visits to his historic house on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula were few and far between, and never without advance notification.
Until now...
Vanessa’s fingers tightened further on her cup. She had an unwelcome premonition that this visit was going to alter the pleasant tenor of life at Whitefield House completely and forever. Already her perception of Benedict Savage had been unwillingly altered. He was no longer merely her employer, he was now regrettably entrenched in her brain as a man...
He was still looking at her, and she cringed at what he must be thinking.
If only she could remember what had happened!
Unfortunately, last night was a total blank, from the time she had fallen into bed after imbibing more than her share of champagne over an early dinner with Richard, until the moment she had become aware of the sounds of dawn filtering through a window that she knew she had firmly closed the previous evening.
When she had opened her eyes and found herself almost nose to nose with her naked employer, her arm draped over his hard waist, her thigh trapped intimately between his, she had thought at first that she was dreaming. Not that she had ever had erotic dreams about Benedict Savage before; she had always felt utterly safe in that regard. He was just not the sort of man she found attractive. He was too cerebral, too dispassionate, too much of a perfectionist for Vanessa, who much preferred comfort to sharp-edged perfection.
Luckily she had been too muddle-headed to scream when the rest of her senses had confirmed the shocking reality of the bare flesh pressed against hers. She had merely frozen, terrified that her consciousness might awaken his, unable to believe that the supple male hand possessively cupping her soft breast really belonged to Benedict Savage...not to mention the steely hardness that pressed into the hollow of her thigh where it was wedged snugly between his. He might not have roused from sleep but the man in her arms had definitely not been unaroused!
Shame and disbelief had warred for supremacy in the long moments it took for her to realise that she might still be able to extricate herself from the immediate consequences of her folly. The deep, even tenor of his breathing had indicated that Benedict—Mr Savage, she corrected herself grimly, clinging to the flimsy protection that the formality offered—was still deeply asleep, and Vanessa had prayed that he would continue to remain so as she extracted herself, inch by excruciatingly cautious inch, from their tangled embrace, her eyes fixed on his sleeping face.
All had gone well until the final few seconds when he’d shifted and growled an inarticulate protest at the withdrawal of warm, feminine flesh but, blessedly, he hadn’t woken...
When she’d finally slithered off the side of the bed, taking most of the upper sheet with her, he had merely rolled further over on to his face with a groan, slinging a long, sinewy arm around the pillow she had vacated and dragging it under his ribs, pinning it there with his drawn-up knee. She had primly flung the sheet back over him and fled hastily, her mortification ridiculously intensified by the knowledge that her presence in his bed was so easily replaced by a shapeless pillow!
It had taken her all of fifteen minutes’ hard scrubbing in the shower to feel that she had washed the masculine scent and feel of him off her skin and even now the memory of it returned to haunt her.
Once again, she damned Benedict Savage for taking advantage of an innocent mistake. Why hadn’t he woken her up? Or, worse, what if he had woken her and, in an alcohol-induced stupor, she had been recklessly wanton...?
She shuddered, looking warily up at him through the protective screen of her lashes. Why on earth was he just standing there like that? Why didn’t he say something—an accusation, a joke, a request for an explanation, a demand she pack her bags and never darken his door again—anything to break this unbearable tension?
Nervously she tried to assess his uncertain mood. He hadn’t shaved and his hair was ruffled—not a very good sign for a man who always presented a perfectly groomed image, even when relaxing in private. His saturnine face had a more than usually shuttered look, his thin mouth a tight slash across the unshaven lower half of his face that emphasised the general impression of indrawn tension. However, his crisp blue and white striped shirt and dark blue trousers were immaculately co-ordinated, so he hadn’t been in such haste to track her down that he’d just thrown on the first clothes to hand.
The silence stretched on just long enough for her nerve to break under the strain.
‘Did you want me, sir?’
Too late Vanessa realised the suggestive ambiguity of the question and she had to clench her teeth to stop herself gabbling a disclaimer into the ensuing silence. Her neatly buttoned collar suddenly felt chokingly tight.
‘I...’ He released her from the torture of his sole attention, looking around the kitchen again, as if hunting for his words. ‘Er... Am I the only one breakfasting...?’
Vanessa was aware of Mrs Riley’s sidelong glance but refused to share her silent puzzlement at their employer’s uncharacteristic vagueness. She was too busy worrying over whether he was deliberately prolonging her agony or merely unwilling to humiliate her in front of the housekeeper.
‘Why...yes. Vanessa didn’t mention that you’d brought any guests with you this time...’ Mrs Riley was saying, a faint look of bewilderment crossing her face as she watched her employer’s eyes drop as he studied his stylishly shod feet with apparent fascination.
‘No, I didn’t. So...it’s just me, then...’ His inflexion rose slightly on the last word, just enough to suggest the possibility of a question. Nobody answered immediately and his gaze swivelled suddenly back to Vanessa, who wasn’t quite quick enough to banish her look of apprehension.
He scowled at her. ‘Can I see you for a few minutes in the library, Flynn?’ He turned on his heel and was almost out the door before he halted, looking back. ‘Incidentally, Mrs Riley, I’m really not very hungry this morning, so perhaps just some toast and tea...’
‘Oh, what a pity, Mr Savage, and I’ve just put a nice pot of porridge on the stove—’
‘Porridge?’ He jerked around, looking so shocked at the suggestion that Vanessa, already primed with nerves, gave a jittery little laugh and found herself once again impaled by the focus of his attention.
‘In the library. Now!’ For Benedict Savage the quiet hiss was the equivalent of a furious shout.
‘Yes, sir!’ Vanessa muttered to empty air, rising from her seat and unhooking the cropped navy jacket that was draped over the high back.
‘Well, I never!’ said Kate Riley, crossing her arms over her ample chest and shaking her grey head so that her corrugated perm quivered. ‘You’d have thought I was offering him arsenic. He always said he liked my porridge!’
Vanessa, shouldering into her jacket and procrastinating by squaring the cuffs and lapels, soothed her injured pride absently. ‘He’s probably just in a bad mood—’
‘Mr Savage doesn’t have moods—he’s always a perfect gentleman,’ Mrs Riley pointed out with inescapable truth. ‘He never gets out of bed on the wrong side but it certainly seems as though he did this morning...’
Vanessa murmured something indistinct in answer to the unfortunate metaphor and rushed out of the kitchen, pressing cold hands to her hot cheeks.
Calm down, calm down, she lectured herself sternly as she walked down the flag-stoned hall. If he fires you, you can charge him with sexual harassment. Or was he planning to charge her...? She almost moaned aloud at the thought, its absurdity eclipsed by her horror of scandal. Whatever happened, there would be questions asked because she couldn’t possibly continue to work at Whitefield. She would have to leave the place she had come to look on as a quiet, secure haven from the madness of the world. And what was she going to tell Richard? Oh, damn, damn, damn!
‘Well...?’ Thankfully Benedict Savage had not chosen to adopt an intimidating position of dominance behind the meticulously tidy antique desk that fronted the French windows. Instead he was standing just inside the doorway, one hand resting on a walnut shelf of the book-lined wall, fingers tapping involuntarily against the aged wood as she closed the door behind her.
‘Yes, sir?’ Vanessa stood straight and tall, shoulders squared against the imminent attack.
He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry if my early arrival has caused problems, but I just needed to get away for a space of time and Whitefield seemed the place to do it. The apartment in Auckland is too accessible and...’ he shrugged with a trace of diffidence ‘...well, I know that Mrs Riley gets in a tizz about these things... Just make sure she knows that I don’t expect everything to be as organised as usual...that I don’t want any fuss...’
Vanessa was hard put to it not to let her jaw fall open. Mr Perfection was telling her he didn’t expect perfection? He was waffling about household arrangements when the real business at hand was shrieking to be settled?
She looked at the tapping fingers. Nerves? Mr Cool was nervous?
‘So, you’ll tell her that, will you?’ His fingers suddenly stopped their fluttering with a sudden slam against the wood.
Vanessa’s eyes shot back to his face to find him watching her warily. She scrabbled for foundation on a rapidly shifting ground. He was nervous of her? The notion was mind-boggling.
‘Ah, yes, yes, of course, sir,’ she assured him hastily.
‘Right.’ He took off his spectacles, cleaned their spotless lenses with a beautifully pressed handkerchief retrieved from his hip pocket, and put them on again. ‘I didn’t bring anyone with me.’
‘So you said, sir—in the kitchen, just now,’ she added as he regarded her blankly.
‘Did I? Oh, yes, of course I did.’ He pushed off the bookcase and began to pace. ‘So...where is our other guest, I wonder?’
Vanessa stiffened. ‘If you’re suggesting—’
He jumped in, correspondingly quick to suspect. ‘Suggesting what?’
‘That I take advantage of your absences to invite people to use your house—’ she began, angry that he might be trying to make up spurious reasons for terminating her employment. If he was going to fire her for sleeping with him he was going to have to admit it!
‘No, no, nothing like that.’ His answer was as swift as it seemed genuine, and edged with irritation. ‘If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t continue to employ you, would I? I just wondered if you knew...’
‘Knew what?’ She was deeply uneasy now. Maybe she just should have opened up with an apology and explanation instead of leaving it up to him to introduce the subject. But she had never known her employer be anything but direct, sometimes brutally so.
He stopped pacing a mere stride away and turned to her, hands on his hips. This was it, the moment of truth.
Vanessa lifted her chin bravely, gratified to note that even in flat heels she topped him by at least an inch. Whatever he said, she wasn’t going to shrink into physical insignificance before him!
‘There was a woman...’
‘A woman?’ Vanessa felt herself beginning to heat up. Oh, God, was he going to try to smooth things over by explaining how last night had only been a spasm of lust and that she wasn’t to place any importance on the fact that they had slept together because there was someone else...?
He bit off something that sounded like a curse. Another first. Benedict Savage’s words were usually as cool and as measured as the rest of him, precisely weighed and placed for maximum effect with minimum effort.
‘Yes, a woman.’ His voice roughened sharply at her wide-eyed shock and he raked her with an insulting glare. ‘You do know what a woman is, don’t you, Flynn?’
Her flush deepened at his sneer and she saw his eyes flicker behind their clear lenses, his mouth compress with self-disgust. ‘I’m sorry, that was in extremely poor taste...’ His hand rasped across his beard-shaded chin as he continued rigidly, ‘I mean...last night when I came in, just before midnight...there was a woman—er—in my room...’
‘In your room?’ She couldn’t help it, and when she realised that she had once again inanely repeated his words she bit her lip but this time he ignored the provocation.
‘In bed. A blonde.’
‘A blonde?’ Vanessa retreated, startled, visions of sin dancing in her head. Had she taken part in some kind of orgy without being aware of it? Disported herself in some kind of perverted ménage à trois? Her employer had never brought a female companion with him to Whitefield before, although he had included unattached women in groups of people whom he had occasionally entertained at weekends. She had thought that his love-life must be as reserved as the rest of him, but now Vanessa found herself regarding those weekend groupings in a suspicious new light.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Her air of silent condemnation caused an explosion that was contained almost as soon as it occurred. His hard jaw clenched as he continued doggedly, ‘She had long, fluffy hair...like golden fleece.’ Benedict Savage held her mesmerised stare, faint streaks of red appearing on his high cheekbones as he went on, ‘Have you by any chance seen her around this morning? She’s not anywhere upstairs...’
Golden? Fluffy? Vanessa’s eyes widened as she resisted the urge to touch her neat French pleat to make sure that the wavy, sun-bleached ends were firmly rolled into the concealing centre.
It suddenly occurred to her that her employer had never seen her with her hair down. To him she was just Flynn, discreet, sexless, quietly running his household and overseeing the ongoing restoration of the former coaching inn while he jaunted about the world earning a luxurious living designing buildings that were the complete antithesis of Whitefield.
Vanessa, along with the other permanent staff, was merely one of the chattels that he had acquired when he had unexpectedly inherited a distant relative’s property and, after initially balking badly at the discovery that the late Judge Seaton’s butler was young and female, he had accepted the impeccable references supplied by the lawyer who had handled the judge’s estate. He had, however, made it quite clear to Vanessa privately that she was only acceptable in the position as long as the fact that she was a woman never impinged on the job. It never had.
‘Apart from being blonde, what does she look like?’ Vanessa asked in a strangled voice that tested a wildly implausible theory.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, his bluntness daring her to display any shock. ‘It was dark...I never saw her face. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what her name is; we didn’t get around to introducing ourselves! So, now that your prurient suspicions are confirmed, perhaps you wouldn’t mind answering my questions?’
His sarcasm went right over her whirling head. She was shattered by knowledge that her outrageous theory was right.
There had only been one woman in Benedict Savage’s bed last night and that woman had been Vanessa. But he didn’t know that!
‘I...but...I—’ Relief poured like adrenalin along her veins, throwing her into an even deeper moral dilemna.
As long as he never found out who the woman in his bed had been, Vanessa’s job was safe...
‘I’m not imagining things!’ he growled tersely.
Vanessa licked her lips. ‘Oh...of course not,’ she said, wondering how long her meagre acting skills would sustain her charade of ignorance.
He chose to take her placating comment as a piece of sarcasm and reiterated tightly, ‘She was here, damn it! It was late and I was thick-headed with jet-lag but I wasn’t completely detached from reality. I wasn’t hallucinating!’
‘I haven’t seen anyone except Mrs Riley this morning,’ Vanessa said, carefully avoiding any outright lie that could have unpleasant repercussions later. ‘Perhaps it was one of the resident ghosts, sir,’ she joked weakly.
‘I didn’t know we had any. Not that I believe in them, anyway.’
His scepticism was only what she expected from such a logical mind. You only had to look at the buildings he designed to see that his imagination was chained to the starkly realistic. ‘Oh, yes, people say that there are several—’
‘Female?’
She was disconcerted by his persistence over what had been a purely frivolous mention. ‘A couple of them, yes—’
‘Yellow-haired? Scantily dressed? A seductive siren luring a man towards the gates of hell and damnation?’
Oh, God, now she was certain that whatever they had got up to had been deeply sinful.
‘Er, I understand one of them was a guest murdered by one of the ostlers here at the inn—a...a dancing girl who was on her way to entertain at the goldfields at Coromandel...’
‘You mean a whore?’ He cut her gentle euphemisms to ribbons with cool contempt. ‘Well, that certainly fits.’
‘There’s no proof that she was a whore!’ Vanessa said hotly, not sure whether it was herself or the ghost she was supposed to be defending.
‘What about last night?’
‘W-what about last night?’ Vanessa quavered. Surely she hadn’t given him the idea she had expected money for whatever it was she had allowed him to do!
He looked at her impatiently, mistaking her horror for fear. ‘Forget about bloody ghosts. They don’t exist. So-called supernatural apparitions usually turn out to be the self-generated fantasies of people who are either gullible, publicity-seeking or deranged. You said you didn’t see anyone around this morning. What about last night? You were here then, weren’t you? Did you see or hear anything then?’
Oh, God... Her collar tightened again, squeezing her voice into a reedy squeak. ‘I was out. I went to dinner over in Waihi...’ No need to mention she’d been back, and tucked up cosily in his bed, by ten-thirty p.m.
‘Who with?’
In the three years she had worked for him he had never asked her a single personal question and Vanessa floundered, feeling that she was giving away a vital piece of herself with the information. ‘R-Richard—Richard Wells.’
‘The horse-breeder—from the property along the road?’ He frowned. He was obviously trying to remember his fleeting acquaintance with his nearest neighbour; he was probably also wondering what Richard saw in his sexless employee, Vanessa thought sourly, only to be proved wrong as he said sharply, ‘Not with Dane?’
Vanessa gasped. ‘Mr Judson? Of course not. As far as I know he’s at home in Auckland.’
‘Wellington, actually. So he didn’t tell you about his little arrangement...’ He resumed his pacing, looking slightly more relaxed, but Vanessa couldn’t allow her vigilance to relax correspondingly.
‘Arrangement?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He glanced out of the French doors towards the back of the house and suddenly halted with a jerk. ‘What the—? Whose car is that in the garage?’
Desperate for a change of subject, Vanessa moved up beside him to look out at the gleaming white car tucked under the open arches of what had once been the coaching-house stables. ‘Oh, that! It—’
‘What an incredibly beautiful beast of a car!’ His envious drawl cut her off, startling her with its hint of boyish eagerness. Benedict Savage, the last word in sophistication—boyish? ‘Isn’t it a—?’ He leaned closer to the glass panes. ‘Yes, I think it is...a 1935 Duesenberg convertible coupé...just like the one Clark Gable had custom-made. Who on earth...?’ He straightened, suddenly letting loose a rare laugh that sounded half annoyed, half admiring. ‘My God, I bet she arrived in it! That would just be Dane’s style. So that must mean she’s still here somewhere—’
Vanessa stared at him, confused by this added complication. ‘But...I thought it was yours.’
His head snapped sideways. ‘Mine?’ His eyebrows rose in a haughty disclaimer. ‘What on earth gave you that idea? You know very well I have the BMW.’
Yes, a precision-engineered, elegantly low-key car that had seemed perfectly suited to his introverted personality. And yet here he was, practically drooling over a flashy, red-upholstered brute whose every gleaming inch was flauntingly extrovert.
‘Well...I...it was delivered yesterday in your name, so I naturally assumed... I thought perhaps you’d bought it as an investment...’ It was the only explanation that had fitted his coolly calculating image.
‘It was delivered? By whom?’ As usual he cut swiftly to the heart of the matter.
‘Two men. Yesterday afternoon. There was a letter—I assumed from the dealer. I put it there on your desk with the car keys.’
With one last, narrow-eyed glance at the car he picked up the flat envelope and slit the sealed edge with a neatly manicured thumbnail.
What he withdrew wasn’t a letter, but a large card of some kind. He stared at the weedy-looking, spectacle-wearing nerd that Vanessa, pretending not to look but unable to restrain her curiosity, could see gracing the front, before slowly opening it and reading the contents. As Vanessa watched, the flush that had lightly streaked his skin a few minutes earlier exploded into a full-blooded, Technicolor blush. He made a strange choking sound in his throat.
Vanessa was fascinated. She had never seen him look so flustered. ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ she murmured, her determined coolness rewarded by his dazed regard.
‘Dane’s given me a car...’
‘Given you a car?’ She now understood his helpless amazement. She had known that his friend was wealthy, as were most people professionally associated with her employer, but, even as ignorant about cars as Vanessa was, she realised that the gorgeous specimen in the garage was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Dane Judson had a quirky sense of humour and a liking for extravagant surprises, but his extravagances had never been reckless.
‘For my birthday.’ He scanned the card again and corrected himself. ‘No, not given, loaned—it’s being picked up again on Monday...’
That was more like it. Quirky but grounded in economic reality!
‘It’s your birthday?’ For some reason Vanessa had never thought of her employer having birthdays like ordinary people. He had always been so remote as to be ageless, above such frivolous goings-on as birthdays...
‘Today. I’m thirty-four,’ he revealed absently, staring down at the card, reading and re-reading the writing inside as if it were printed in a foreign language that he was having difficulty translating.
‘Many happy returns,’ Vanessa murmured weakly, wishing she had some recollection of the precise nature of the gift she had rendered on the eve of his birthday.
He didn’t respond, raking a hand over his head, spiking up more of the ruffled strands.
‘My God, last night on the phone...all that time Dane was talking about lending me a car, and I thought he was talking in clever metaphors...’
He groaned and closed his appalled eyes. ‘My God, if he ever finds out what I thought I’ll never hear the end of it!’ His hand covered his mouth as he groaned again, with heartfelt disgust, and his next mutter was almost smothered. ‘I must be mad! Ghosts? I could have sworn I hadn’t imagined any of it...’
‘Why, what did you think he was giving you?’ Vanessa asked, the extreme nature of his reaction spicing her curiosity.
His hand dropped away, and the eyes that had been blue with dismay chilled to the colour of pure steel, but his complexion was still betrayingly warm. ‘None of your damned business!’
She knew then exactly what ‘arrangement’ he thought that his sly-humoured friend had made.
She pokered up immediately, forcing down a rush of humiliated fury at the thought of being used as a sexual birthday favour. At least she had the excuse of being inebriated for whatever licentiousness she might have indulged in. He had no excuse whatsoever! And he hadn’t even bothered to look at her face! Her woman’s body had been all that had mattered. Her normally placid temper simmered dangerously.
‘No, sir.’
His eyes narrowed on her, as if he sensed the insolence she so badly wanted to display, but she remained stubbornly impassive and with a shrug he picked up the car keys, tossing and catching them in a gesture that was subtly defiant. ‘I think I’ll go and check out this magnanimous gift of Dane’s.’
‘I’ll tell Mrs Riley to hold your breakfast,’ said Vanessa smoothly as she watched him open the French doors and slip outside.
She knew what he was doing and a small smile of malicious satisfaction curved along her wide mouth.
The imperturbable Benedict Savage was running away. She had witnessed the temporary disintegration of his cynical self-possession and that made him uncomfortable. He knew that she was a shrewd judge of human behaviour—it was what made her such a skilled butler, responsive to the needs of him and his guests to the extent that she seemed able to anticipate their every wish—and he had no desire to be judged on his vulnerabilities. Until now he had been serene in the knowledge that his was the dominant role in the master-servant relationship and now it had probably occurred to him that that balance of power wasn’t immutable, that the power of knowledge accumulated over time might make a servant of the master.
Good! It would serve him right to wonder how much she knew or might guess. She hoped he would relive his discomfort every time he saw her for some time to come. Why shouldn’t he suffer at least a modicum of the helpless self-consciousness that she felt in his presence?
She watched him cross the cobbled courtyard that led to the stables with a smooth, lean-hipped stride, keenly aware of a unique feeling of alienation within her own body and fiercely resenting it. Suddenly she wished that she hadn’t been too embarrassed to inspect the body she had briskly scrubbed under the shower an hour ago. Whatever had happened in his bed might have left marks, evidence that might have relieved her fears—or confirmed them—instead of leaving her in this limbo of...
Evidence?
Give that fearsomely logical brain physical evidence to work on and she wouldn’t stand a chance!
She stiffened, her heart fluttering in her chest. A fresh surge of panic galvanised her into action. She darted over to the French doors and turned the key in the lock before racing out into the hallway and up the stairs, taking them three at a time, her long legs comfortably stretching the distance.
The door to her employer’s bedroom was firmly shut but Vanessa ignored any qualms she had about invading his privacy and skidded inside.
The bed was in exactly the state that she had fervently hoped it would be—abandoned and very much unmade. Vanessa blessed the fact that Benedict Savage’s parents had raised him in a rich and rarefied environment that rendered him ignorant of the kind of basic domestic chores that ordinary mortals like Vanessa grew up performing for themselves.
She quickly ripped the top sheet off the bed, rolling it into a loose ball before dumping it on the floor and attacking the pillows, cursing their ungainly size as she struggled to remove the custom-made pillowcases. Her heart pounded as she spotted the long strands on hair that straggled across one of them. She had never realised that she moulted so much at night...or had it been because this time her head had been thrashing to and fro on the pillow in the throes of unremembered ecstasy?
Her mouth went dry at the insidious image of herself writhing beneath a sleekly tapered male body. Who would have thought that under the fashionably loose clothes a man in a sedentary occupation like architectural design would have a body so hard and compact? His skin had been glossy with health, rippling over lean, surprisingly well-developed muscles.
Furious with herself for letting her thoughts run riot, Vanessa wrenched anew at the stubborn pillowcases and shook them out vigorously before turning them inside out and throwing them on top of the sheet on the floor. She stretched across the bed and had just slipped her hand under the mattress to free the far corner of the sheet when the door jarred open, and a voice rattled chills down her spine.
‘What in the hell do you think you’re doing?’
She could feel one neatly manicured nail catch and tear against the mattress as she jerked upright and around, her sensible shoes skidding on the discarded linen, tangling her feet, so that with a cry of dismay she toppled helplessly backwards across the bed.
CHAPTER THREE
ANYONE else would have reflexively reached out and tried to prevent Vanessa’s fall, but Benedict Savage was a law unto himself. He didn’t lift a finger to save her.
He merely folded his arms across his chest and watched her bounce and come to rest before coldly rephrasing his question.
‘I asked you what you were doing in my room?’
The crisp pattern of his speech was slightly blurred by his rapid breathing. He had been running. What had occurred to her had obviously also belatedly occurred to him; he was here to attempt to sort fact from fantasy.
If she had felt at a disadvantage earlier in his study, it was nothing to what Vanessa felt now.
She pushed herself upright on trembling arms, drawing her knees together and tugging down the skirt over her dangling legs in a vain attempt to recover her dignity. ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ she snapped defensively, wishing he would move out of the way so that she could stand up. ‘I’m making your bed.’
‘Why?’
She bit back the smart-mouthed reply that sprang to her lips and struggled for a respectful monotone. ‘Because it’s my job.’
‘You make my bed?’
For a moment he looked as uncomfortable as she felt. He had refused to allow her to perform the more personal services that a butler usually provided, ones that she had cheerfully carried out for the judge—waking him in the morning, running his bath, laying out his choice of clothing for the day. Benedict Savage had informed her squelchingly at that chilly initial interview that he didn’t require nannying, and that he would thank her not to invade his privacy unless invited. She had duly kept the required distance, but it wouldn’t hurt him to realise that caring for someone’s house was, in its own way, as intimate as caring for their person.
‘I often help Mrs Riley with the housekeeping,’ she said, adding pointedly, ‘As you may have noticed from the household accounts, I only employ extra housekeeping staff when you bring guests to stay. It’s not economic to have a full household complement idle for most of the year.’
His blank look confirmed a long-held suspicion. She doubted that he ever bothered even to glance at the accounts that she scrupulously presented him with every six months. She could be robbing him blind for all he cared. Once he had decided to trust her, he had given her a totally free hand and however flattering that was to her ego it irked her that it also meant the true extent of her efficiency went largely unappreciated.
Unfortunately he ignored the red herring, and pursued a point she had hoped would not occur to such a supremely undomesticated animal.
‘Have I ever given you reason to think I’m so fanatical about cleanliness that I require my sheets to be changed daily?’ he said drily. ‘This is a home, not a hotel—I’ve barely had the chance to get them warm, let alone dirty.’
‘You do have a reputation for being extremely fastidious,’ Vanessa muttered, guiltily thinking of the silky heat that she had been cuddled up to that morning. He had certainly been warming the sheets then. However, she could hardly contradict him.
‘But not to the point of being unhealthily obsessive,’ he said with controlled distaste.
No, she couldn’t picture him being obsessive about anything. That would require a degree of passion she didn’t believe he possessed.
‘You haven’t been here since the beginning of February and your bed hasn’t been properly aired because we didn’t know you were coming,’ she invented hastily. ‘I thought the sheets might have been a bit musty.’
‘Well, they weren’t.’ He looked down at the tumble of linen at their feet, his voice acquiring a strangely husky note. ‘In fact they were quite deliciously fragrant...’
Vanessa tensed with shock at the thread of remembered pleasure in his voice, finding his choice of words disturbingly sensual for someone whom she preferred to think of as a thoroughly cold fish.
Thank God the perfume she had dabbed on at the beginning of last evening was so expensive that she only wore it when she was going somewhere special! She sought for a way to scatter whatever images were re-forming in that frighteningly intelligent brain.
‘Probably from the washing-powder Mrs Riley uses,’ she said prosaically, and rose from the bed, forcing him to step back as she summoned a brisk dismissal.
‘Well, since I’ve gone this far I’ll have to finish the job. I can’t put these sheets back on after they’ve been trampled on the floor. Excuse me.’
He looked from the bed to her and for a terrible moment she thought he was going to dig his heels in. She bravely stood her ground, banking on his intensely private nature to win the brief internal battle he was evidently waging. The thought of exposing himself to her curiosity again would be anathema to him. She deliberately allowed a hint of speculation to impinge on her expression of polite patience.
His reaction was swift and instinctive. His face shuttered and he inclined his head, saying sharply, ‘If you think it’s necessary, I suppose I must bow to your superior domestic knowledge.’
Sarcastic beast! In the past his cynical comments hadn’t bothered her. Now every word he uttered seemed to grate on her nerves.
‘Thank you.’ She hesitated, waiting for him to depart. He looked at her enquiringly, raising his dark eyebrows haughtily above his spectacle frames. It had the irritating effect of making Vanessa feel as if he was looking down on her, even though the reverse was true. She had won their little tussle of wills and now she was being made to pay for it.
Vanessa’s wide mouth pinched as she strove for the self-effacing politeness that until this morning had been second nature in her dealings with this man.
‘I’m sure you must have something better to do than watch me make beds.’
‘Not really,’ he said unobligingly. ‘When you’re on holiday there’s something very satisfying about watching other people toil.’
‘You’re on holiday?’ Vanessa hoped she didn’t sound as appalled as she felt. He had never spent more than a long weekend at Whitefield before. Surely he wasn’t staying any longer than Sunday? She didn’t think she could take the strain.
An idle Benedict Savage would undoubtedly be a bored Benedict Savage, and when bored he might look around for something to engage his intellect—like solving a puzzle that was best left unsolved.
To hide her agitation Vanessa gave the remaining sheet a huge yank to free it and rolled it clumsily up over her arm.
‘More or less,’ he replied absently, watching her bend to pick up the rest of the linen. ‘You could say I’m in between jobs at the moment.’
She was so used to hearing that euphemistic phrase trotted out by people who came to the door applying for casual work, thinking that domestic service was a sinecure for which they needed no skill, training or enthusiasm, that her soothing response was automatic, her mind occupied with more weighty matters.
‘I’m sure you’ll find other employment again soon.’
‘I’m flattered by your confidence. But if not I suppose there’s always the unemployment benefit.’ His smooth answer followed so seamlessly on hers that it was a moment before she realised her faux pas.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I wasn’t thinking,’ she said, mortified by her slip.
‘I thought it was the reverse,’ he murmured with dismaying perception, his blue eyes studying her flustered face. ‘You seemed to be very deeply immersed in uneasy thoughts. Is there anything worrying you, Flynn?’
Another unprecedented personal question. Now was the moment to confess all and throw herself on his mercy!
Only Vanessa didn’t think that he had any. She vividly recalled his declaration at their meeting that he never made an idle threat and she had seen him deal ruthlessly with those who proved to be dishonest or disloyal. Employee or friend, they simply ceased to exist for him. Vanessa was already in over her head in deceit and, in addition, she had broken his golden rule: thou shalt not be a woman.
‘No, why should you think that?’ Unfortunately her voice cracked on the last word.
‘There’s a slightly...fraught air about you this morning.’
Oh, God!
‘Is there?’ she said brightly. ‘Well, your arrival did rather catch me on the hop.’ She was glad of the ready excuse. ‘I’m afraid I don’t react well to surprises.’
‘Really? Congreve would have it that uncertainty is one of the joys of life,’ he said suavely, no doubt trying to intimidate her with his intellect. Well, Vanessa wasn’t impressed. Anyone who could read could trot out quotations from classic English literature. She might not have gone to university but she could, and did, love to read widely. With anyone else she might even have enjoyed a foolish game of duelling quotations. As it was she just wanted him to find her dull and boring and totally unworthy of his interest.
‘Not mine,’ said Vanessa firmly, starting to edge towards the door, clutching her burden. She didn’t trust this sudden communicativeness of his. He had never shown any inclination to discuss literature or philosophy with his butler before...or ‘household executive assistant’ as he had ludicrously suggested she be re-titled.
She had given that idea short shrift. She was a butler and proud of it. It was what she had trained for. It was in her blood. Her English father was a butler and she had grown up in the stately British household that was his fiefdom, fascinated by the day-to-day management of what was not only a home but a family seat, and a three-hundred-year-old one at that. It had been her fond ambition to hold a similar position one day but, as she had discovered, life had a nasty way of subverting youthful ambitions.
‘No? That surprises me. I thought that coping with the unexpected was one of your great strengths. You certainly never had any problem accommodating the most bizarre requests of my guests... You didn’t turn a hair at the pet lion cub, or the demand to find enough sculls for a wagered boat race on the lake, or, for that matter, the man who collapsed in the soup with a newly developed seafood allergy. Without your prompt action he might have died.’
‘I didn’t say I couldn’t cope,’ said Vanessa, taken aback by his easy recall of incidents she had assumed were long dismissed from his mind as supremely unimportant. At the time they occurred she had merely received a cool word of approval, as if she had done nothing more, nor less, than was required of her. ‘I just said I didn’t react well—personally, I mean. I get churned up inside...’
‘It doesn’t show.’
‘Thank you.’ She was already regretting having told him that much. He was studying her with an intentness that increased her anxieties.
Her fingers curled into her palms as she fought the desire to check her hair. As it dried it would lighten several shades to the warm caramel that was so susceptible to the bleaching effects of the summer sun, although thankfully the gel she used to keep the sides tidy would prevent its waviness becoming too obvious. Still, Benedict Savage was an architect, skilled in the interpretation of line and form, observant of small details that might escape others...
‘It was a comment, not a compliment.’
‘In my profession that is a compliment,’ Vanessa retorted with an unconscious air of smugness that prompted an amused drawl.
‘Being a servant is hardly one of the professions.’
Vanessa bristled at the implied slur. Snob!
‘Of course not, sir. I humbly beg your pardon for my presumption, sir.’ She would have bowed and tugged her forelock but that would be going over the top. As it was his eyes glinted dangerously.
‘You have a devastating line in obsequiousness, Flynn. One might almost suspect it was insolence. Why have I never noticed that before, I wonder?’
Because she had never allowed herself to be so fixed in his attention before. Aghast at her foolishness, Vanessa tried to retrench.
‘I don’t mean to be—’
‘You mean you didn’t think I’d notice. Have I really been so complacent an employer?’
‘No, of course not,’ she lied weakly, and watched his thin mouth crook in a faint sneer.
‘Sycophancy, Flynn? Was that on the curriculum at that exclusive English school for butlers that you graduated, drenched with honours, from?’
This fresh evidence of the acuteness of his memory was daunting. She hugged the trailing sheets to her chest and refused to answer, realising that no answer, however cunningly phrased, would please him. He didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted a whipping-boy for his frustration. The irony was that she had richly earned the position!
‘That’s right,’ he said silkily. ‘Humour me. After all, you can afford to. You know I can’t fire you.’
‘Can’t you?’ Vanessa said, sensing an unforeseen trap in his goading.
‘Well, I could, but that would jeopardise all that I’m doing here, wouldn’t it?’
‘Would it?’ Vanessa was now bewildered.
‘You could tie me up in legal manoeuvring for years—’
‘Could I?’
Her response was a little too quick, a little too curious. His eyes narrowed. Vanessa straightened her spine and squared her shoulders, lifting her chin in a characteristic attempt to establish her physical superiority.
‘I could, couldn’t I?’ she rephrased with a suitable tinge of menace, but not all the threatening body language and fighting language at her disposal could redeem that brief and telling hesitation.
‘Could you?’
‘Yes.’ Her teeth nibbled unknowingly at her full lower lip.
‘And how, precisely, would you do it?’
She was even more at sea, the look in his blue eyes creating a turbulence that reminded her what a poor sailor she was. He looked amused and—her stomach roiled—almost compassionate!
‘Well, I...I...’
‘You don’t know, do you?’ he said gently. ‘You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.’
She lifted her chin even higher. ‘No.’ Her tone implied that neither did she care to find out.
He knew better.
‘Did you not understand Judge Seaton’s lawyer when he explained the situation to you?’ he said, still with that same, infuriating gentleness. ‘He assured me that he’d spoken to you directly after the funeral and that you’d appeared quite calm and collected.’
Vanessa frowned, trying to remember, her brows rumpling her smooth, wide forehead.
She had looked on Judge Seaton as not only a saviour but also as a man she had respected and admired and come to develop a fond affection for.
He had rescued her from the depths of misfortune and she, in turn, had travelled across the world with him, rescuing him from the inertia of his unwelcome retirement and the vicissitudes of old age and an irascible personality. Solitary by nature and never having married, when the judge had started having difficulty in getting about and suffering short memory lapses Vanessa had been the one who chivvied him out of his fits of depression and inspired him to start the book he had still been enthusiastically working on when he died—a social history of his adopted home, Whitefield House, and the surrounding Coromandel region.
His death, though not unexpected in view of his failing health, had been a shock, and at the time of the funeral Vanessa had still been numb and subconsciously hostile towards any threat of change in the haven that she had striven to create for herself at Whitefield. She had mentally switched off at any mention of an arrogantly youthful usurper who, it seemed to her, was proposing to take up his inheritance with unconscionable speed, given the fact that he had never bothered to visit his benefactor while he was alive, nor deigned to attend his funeral.
When Benedict Savage had finally made his appearance a week later he had proved totally alien to the late judge both physically and in temperament—something else that Vanessa had fiercely resented.
The fact that the hostility between them was mutual had suited her preconceptions so well that she had sought no explanation for it beyond the superficial. She was safe with male hostility. She could deal with it. It was male interest that made her nervous—self-consciously clumsy, inept and, worst of all, frighteningly vulnerable.
‘I remember him rambling on and on about the will,’ she said slowly. ‘About there being no financial provision for me or some such thing, not that I expected one—I wasn’t family and I’d only been with him two years. I don’t remember what the lawyer said exactly. I was tired; I wasn’t concentrating very well. I was the one who had to make all the arrangements for the funeral, you know. You didn’t bother to arrive until it was all over!’ There was a touch of querulousness in her voice, the echo of that three-year-old hostility.
‘I won’t apologise for that,’ he said evenly. ‘George Seaton and I were only very distantly related on my mother’s side. He may well have not known of my existence—I certainly didn’t know of his. He didn’t leave the house to me by name, he simply deeded it to his closest surviving male blood-relative. Needless to say, my mother was not amused at being told she was no more than a mere twig on the family inheritance tree.’
She hadn’t known that. It certainly threw a different light on his behaviour. And, having found his parents, on the strength of their single, fleeting visit to Whitefield, even more frigid, hypercritical and self-orientated than their son, she could just imagine Denise Savage’s classically beautiful face frozen in an expression of Victorian affront at being confronted with the evidence of her unimportance in the male scheme of things.
A ghost of a smile widened Vanessa’s mouth. ‘He was an appalling old male chauvinist pig,’ she admitted with affectionate disapproval.
‘And yet he hired a female butler barely out of her teens?’
For once Vanessa didn’t freeze up at the delicate probe.
‘I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.’ And for all the wrong reasons, extremely sordid ones. ‘His previous butler had died after being with him for about fifty years. I don’t think he could bear the idea of setting another man in his place and I suppose I appealed to his sense of chivalry...’
‘Why do you say that?’
Her mouth twisted softly awry. ‘He felt sorry for me—’ She had almost forgotten whom she was talking to but a sudden shift in his alertness, causing light to flash like a warning signal off the lenses of his glasses, reminded her. ‘I was in between jobs at the time,’ she explained blandly.
‘Well, he certainly made sure you wouldn’t lose this one,’ Benedict commented. ‘A condition of my inheriting was that I retain the services of the existing butler for at least five years from the date of probate being granted...unless said butler voluntarily relinquished her duties.’
Vanessa’s eyes and mouth rounded in astonishment at the revelation. Then a rush of anger flushed her system and her mouth snapped. ‘But that first day—you threatened to get rid of me because I was a woman!’
‘Untrue. I simply suggested that you would not find me as congenial as the judge to work for, and that you would be happier elsewhere. And I think that “girl” might have been the word I actually used...’
‘Suggested nothing! You were deliberately insulting,’ Vanessa remembered bitterly. ‘You implied I couldn’t do the job because of my sex. You implied that I only had it because I had some kind of hold over a senile old man. The judge wasn’t senile and you knew it—the lawyer must have been perfectly clear about the validity of that will. You were trying to get me to quit!’ she realised explosively. ‘Well, I’m glad I refused!’
Not for the world would she tell him that it was cowardice that had held her back, not a determination to prove him wrong. Not even his slimy allegations could winkle her out of the safe little burrow she had dug for herself. Whitefield needed her and she needed Whitefield. Here she was known only by her name and her job, and not by her reputation.
‘And I wasn’t a girl, either!’ she finished angrily, determined to deny him on all counts. ‘I was twenty, and I’ve always been very mature for my age.’ It was what had been her downfall—her air of calm self-sufficiency combined with a body that, Everest-like, was a challenge to a particular kind of man simply because it was so majestically there. Such splendid isolation had cried out to be conquered...
‘You looked like one to me—a big, gangly girl, slow as a wet week, with a surly black adolescent glower and a habit of looking down your nose at me as if I were a lower form of life. No wonder I didn’t want to have you foisted upon me!’
She immediately felt thick and ungainly, all elbows and knees, the way she used to feel as an wildly overgrown teenager. It was a long time since anyone had made her so clumsily self-aware and she didn’t like it. Not at all. Unknowingly she gave him the same filthy black look that she had given him back then.
‘When you’re my size you can’t flit about like a humming bird,’ she gritted. ‘If I move carefully it’s because I have to calculate clearances that other women take for granted. I doubt if you’d want me blundering about among all these antiques. I’m not, and have never been, slow. Speed is not necessarily an indication of efficiency, you know. In time-and-motion terms, my way is a lot more energy-efficient than if I was rushing about creating a lot of hustle and bustle over tasks that can be performed simply and without fuss!’
If he recognised his favourite phrase being lobbed back in his face, he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, her vehement lecture appeared to amuse him. She made a tentative move around him and he shifted his weight, blocking her path with the mere threat of further movement.
‘Mm, so I very quickly discovered. Why do you think I didn’t persist in my efforts to get rid of you? You don’t appear to exert yourself unduly and yet the work is always done and this house always runs like a well-oiled machine...’ If only he had seen her flying up the stairs that morning. Talk about exerting herself unduly! ‘If you had been other than supremely capable I’d never have left the supervision of the restorations in your hands. You’ve never violated that trust. I wasn’t criticising you just now, I was simply telling you what my first impressions of you were.’
‘Thank you, but I could have done without knowing,’ said Vanessa acidly, thinking that his trust would be summarily withdrawn if he knew the truth about her...not merely about last night but the whole ugly mess that had prompted the judge’s job offer and her ignominious flight from England.
She wondered what his reaction would be if she blurted it all out now. He would probably run the full gauntlet: shock, horror, distaste. She had seen it all before, from people far less fastidious than Benedict Savage, people who were supposed to have been her friends.
‘I thought it time to get it out in the open—so that I might begin to feel less like an interloper here.’
‘Interloper?’ Vanessa’s impatience got the better of her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told her employer. ‘The house belongs to you; you can’t be an interloper in your own home.’
A grim smile twitched his hard cheek. ‘Can’t you?’ His voice lifted from a barely audible irony to that familiar ironic crispness. ‘But then, this isn’t really my home, is it? If one counts a home as a family dwelling, or a residence one has a sentimental attachment to through regular use, I suppose you could call me effectively homeless. I don’t think I’ve spent more than a month at a time at the same address in the last five years.’
The faintly wistful self-derision in his words gave Vanessa a pang but she caught herself before she started feeling too sorry for him. The man was a millionaire for goodness’ sake; he had everything he could possibly want and he had the nerve to complain because his life wasn’t perfect! There were people in the world—in this country—who lived in cardboard cartons, or worse, and here he was complaining about having too many homes!
‘How absolutely frightful for you,’ she replied with a crispness that brought his head up with a jerk. ‘Jobless and homeless. No wonder you’re depressed. If I were you I’d be suicidal.’
‘If you were me you wouldn’t be having the problems I’m having,’ he said cryptically, after a tiny pause and an all-encompassing look that made her extremely nervous. ‘And I can’t envisage you ever taking the easy way out of your problems. You’re the type to go down with all guns blazing.’
‘I don’t approve of firearms,’ she said primly, disturbed by the accuracy of his reading of her character.
‘We have something in common, then...other than sharing possession of this house. That is what we do, isn’t it, legal ownership not withstanding? You’re the one who really makes a home of this house; you’re the one who brings it to daily life, who imprints it with personality...’
Vanessa was aghast at the thought that her possessiveness about the house might be the object of amused speculation to others. It was her secret, her little piece of foolish whimsy. Her eyes were stony as she denied her weakness. ‘I enjoy seeing the house restored to some of its former glory but I’m the caretaker, that’s all. I’m just carrying out your orders.’
‘Since I’m hardly ever here to issue them that statement is highly debatable.’
Her eagerness to preserve the state of armed neutrality between them that had made it so easy to treat him as a cypher instead of a human being made her quick to sense criticism.
‘If you’re not satisfied with my work—’
‘I never said that. On the contrary, I’m delighted with the high standards you’ve maintained in trying circumstances. The restorations are turning out even better than I envisaged. After you’ve finished your bed-making I’ll get you to give me a tour to show me the progress...’
Although bringing him up to date with the work carried out in his absence was a familiar duty that she usually tackled with quiet pride, the thought of spending more time alone in his company while her nerves were still in such a jittery state made Vanessa quail. Fortunately she had a ready excuse at hand.
‘I’ve arranged for some members of the historical society to visit this morning. You did say you didn’t mind them being shown around in return for access to their records about the house. Perhaps they could tag along?’
He looked unenthused at the prospect. ‘Is Miss Fisher one of them?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ Vanessa said innocently. The elderly lady, an archetypal twittering spinster, had taken a shine to the elusive new owner of Whitefield and would make a thorough nuisance of herself if she knew he was back in residence.
‘In that case I think I might take the Duesenberg out for a couple of hours,’ he said hastily. ‘You can give me the tour after lunch. If that fits in with your plans, of course.’
‘Of course, sir,’ she murmured dutifully, heaving an inward sigh of relief as she retreated into the safety of her usual, self-effacing role.
‘And don’t tell her I’m here,’ he scowled.
‘Of course not, sir.’
‘The woman is a human limpet.’
‘Indeed, sir.’
He gave her bland expression a coruscating glare. ‘Are you mocking me, Flynn?’
‘No, sir,’ she lied smoothly.
‘Good. Because I can tolerate a lot of things from my employees—insubordination included, if they’re good at what they do—but I don’t like being laughed at.’
It was definitely an order.
‘Nobody does, sir,’ Vanessa murmured judiciously. She had noticed that about him—his lack of laughter—it was what contributed to her impression of him as having a somewhat colourless personality. Although he was good-humoured to a fault, he rarely showed any spontaneity. His smile was more of a cynical twist than an expression of warmth. Little seemed to take him by surprise.
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