A Scandalous Engagement
CATHY WILLIAMS
Jade just couldn't convince millionaire businessman Curtis Greene that she wasn't a gold digger pursuing his younger brother's fortune. Especially as Curtis had returned to his family home to find Jade already in residence….Curtis was determined to protect his brother and control Jade by pretending to be engaged to her himself! Jade was given no chance to protest, and she was stunned by the scandal that followed and by the very real, passionate charge of attraction she felt toward her new "fiance"!
Jade Summers, mystery woman, manages to steal millionaire’s heart….
Former office worker and simple art student manages to net New York’s biggest fish….
The newspaper article was short and scandalously to the point.
Jade took a few deep breaths. “Do you have any idea how this ludicrous rumor started?”
Curtis shrugged eloquently. “Getting into a state about it isn’t going to change anything.”
“I had no idea you were notorious enough to feature in the gossip columns,” Jade informed him tartly.
Another expressive shrug. “I’m rich, eligible…”
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 came 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.
A Scandalous Engagement
Cathy Williams
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
‘SO, YOU’ RE up at last. I didn’t want to disturb you before I left, but have you remembered that the plumber’s coming?’
Jade crooked the telephone receiver between her cheek and her shoulder and carried on making herself a cup of coffee. Even after six weeks it still felt decadent to be wandering around this kitchen at nine-thirty in the morning, wearing only her usual garb of jeans and tee shirt. She should be at work. That was always the first thought that sprang into her head when she blearily opened her eyes to peer at the clock at the side of the bed. The clock which no longer summoned her peremptorily out of sleep at six-thirty in the morning with an insistent, aggravating beeping that could raise the dead.
She should be at work. She should be feeling the pressure, because pressure was the only thing that could rescue her from her thoughts. She should be scrambling into her suit and hurrying out of the flat with her bag slung over one shoulder and her briefcase in her hand. She should be preparing for her daily battle with the London Underground, easing her frantic pace only to stop at the news vendor just outside her office block so that she could buy a tabloid to read at lunchtime.
‘Of course I’ve remembered that the plumber’s coming.’
The voice down the other end of the telephone laughed warmly. ‘I can tell from your tone of voice that you’d forgotten. Two o’clock this afternoon.’
‘Oh, very optimistic, your precision.’ She poured some milk into her mug and sat down at the kitchen table which, after their initial attempts to keep it free from clutter, now sported enough artist’s materials to start a small cottage industry. ’Didn’t your mother ever tell you that plumbers have a different sense of time keeping to all other mortals?’
She sipped her coffee, smiling contentedly at the sound of Andy’s voice. How did he do that? How did he manage to make her feel so loved and wanted and secure? She had known him for less than a year, but it almost felt as though she had known him for ever. As though he was somehow meant to be a part of her life. One of the first things her counsellor had told her was that she needed to begin to trust, needed to stop feeling guilty. Had Andy just happened to come along at the right time, when she’d been beginning the difficult, painful process of chipping her barriers away? Was that why she felt so close to him? As though he was the soulmate she had been blindly searching for over the past two years?
‘No,’ Andy said thoughtfully down the line. ‘Amongst her erratically scattered pearls of wisdom, advice concerning plumbers was noticeably absent. Do you think that’s been part of my problem?’
He chuckled softly, and Jade felt a rush of pleasure at his words. Over the past few months he had opened up in ways neither of them would have thought possible. Both of them had. They had tentatively shared the common ground of counselling, learning to expose their fears and voice their nightmares, and it had paid off. They had learned to reach out to each other, and if she still didn’t automatically react with trust to most people, she was getting better.
‘Now, there’s a possibility,’ Jade joked back, her eyes skimming over some work she had started the day before and liking what she saw. ‘Okay, I’ll make sure I’m washed and brushed by two, even though I’d bet you ten quid that the man doesn’t show up on time. He’ll stroll in just as we’re about to sit down and eat dinner and rake up a few limp excuses about “burst water pipes, guv.’”
‘That’s more than possible, but got to keep the old place ticking over.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ There had been an unspoken acceptance between them from the start that sharing this house involved a complicated series of unwritten rules and regulations. No clutter. No mess. Definitely no broken appliances left to go rusty. And top of the list was ‘No Leaks’. Leaking water could destroy wallpaper and ruin all the tasteful silk that seemed to thread through each of the impressive rooms, not to mention wreak havoc with the paintings.
The paintings, Andy had told her before she had moved in, were worth a small fortune, but she had still been unprepared for the quantity of them. Picassos were dotted about the house with the casual ease that typified people for whom money was no object. She had spent her first day just wandering through the graceful house, nestled in a secluded spot just outside central London, amazed at the profuse splendour while Andy had trailed behind her, smiling indulgently at her gasps of awe.
The place, which he contemptuously referred to as the Mausoleum, was a testament to well-bred opulence. Nothing was overdone but everything had clearly been chosen with no thought of cost. And, however bitterly he spoke of the background that had failed him, he still fitted in: blond, elegant and as beautiful as any Adonis that had been tenderly crafted by its sculptor.
Even now, having grown accustomed to all of it, she still found herself wondering what it must have been like to have been brought up amidst such splendour. A house in the country, another in the wilds of Scotland, yet another in the South of France. The holidays in far-flung places. She imagined his parents, now dead for many years, as a glorious, golden couple. She had spotted pictures of them in the house and her imagination had taken flight at the images of his mother, the typical blonde, English rose, and his father, the typical debonair, dark Greek tycoon. It seemed somehow tragic that all their son could resurrect from his childhood memories was a legacy of nannies, a loathing of boarding schools and a glimpse of his beautiful parents in between their endless and impressive social engagements.
From what she had gathered over time, his had been a life of loneliness and absentee parents, who had compensated for their shortcomings with lavish gifts and money. She pictured him, and his two siblings, rattling around in all those huge houses with a wake of well-paid nannies in attendance, waiting for the hour when their glamorous parents would pay them a brief night-time visit for the statutory peck on the cheek and a quick inspection to make sure that nothing was visibly amiss and the nannies were doing what they were paid for.
Andy Greene had been an emotional mess waiting to happen. She was only glad that their separate chaotic personal troubles had led them to one another.
Two hours after the phone call, Jade had completely forgotten the plumber.
She was still at the table in the kitchen, the only room in the house where disorder was allowed because there were no priceless furnishings that could be accidentally damaged, her slim fingers skimming over the paper in front of her as she experimented with various layouts for a children’s book. She was becoming more confident by the day. It had made no difference that she had studied art at college for two years after leaving school. All that had been years ago, and the first time she had re-entered the art school in London she had been as nervous as if she had never glimpsed the inside of one in her life before. She had stared at pastels and paintbrushes and cartridge paper with the fear of someone suddenly crippled by stage fright. But time was beginning to do its thing. Time and the talent which she had thought had been abandoned for ever by the wayside when all her dreams had turned sour.
She sat back, frowning, and gazed at what she had accomplished over the past few days. The illustrations were lively, but they lacked detail. No matter. She would go back over them and painstakingly begin to put the detail in. It was the bit she loved most. The loving strokes that turned the sketches into the finely etched drawings which she would then paint over in watercolour. She bent her head so that her shoulder-length buttermilk-blonde hair dipped across her face and was raising her hand to begin her work when the doorbell went.
For half a minute she chose to ignore it, but when the ringing turned into banging she distantly remembered the wretched plumber and reluctantly dropped her pencil and walked to the front door.
Of course the damned man would choose this very minute to pay his visit. Well ahead of the time he had given them. Wasn’t that just typical? Jade thought irritably, gritting her teeth together. Hadn’t she said that they operated in another hemisphere when it came to time?
‘All right!’ she yelled, when one bang threatened to bring the door down. Whoever was hammering on the door was certainly no small, retiring type. ‘I’m coming!’
She worked her way through the three locks and yanked open the door, scowling in anticipation of the brute on the other side. Her chocolate-brown eyes were confronted by a chest and, as they quickly travelled upwards, by the most powerfully impressive man she had ever set eyes on before in her life.
He was swarthy, and something about the set of his features and the angular planes of his face lifted him from the merely handsome into the realm of dangerously sensual. His thick hair was very dark, almost black, and in contrast his blue eyes were the ice-blue colour of the sky in winter. She felt an instant and fleeting jolt of unaccustomed awareness surge through her like a sudden electric shock, and she almost took a step backwards, surprised and unsettled by her reaction.
She was still scowling furiously as she met his eyes, though, and was incensed to see that he was scowling back at her. The nerve! So plumbers were in short supply, but who did this one think he was?
She also noted, in passing, that he was not dressed in plumber’s overalls. Not unless plumber’s garb in London ran along the lines of a trench coat with cream-coloured wool jumper and khaki trousers. Good grief. She only hoped that he hadn’t come out to inspect the site and was considering sending in one of his chaps at a later date. Last seen, the leak in Andy’s bedroom had been dripping slowly but persistently into a saucepan which they had strategically placed underneath and had shown no signs of letting up.
‘Good of you to answer the door,’ the man said coldly. ‘Didn’t you hear the doorbell first time around?’
Jade was almost too angry to speak coherently. She stuck her hand on one slim hip and gave him a withering look which failed to do the trick.
‘You’re early,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘And I was busy in the kitchen.’
‘I’m early?’ For a second the scowl disappeared, replaced by a look of astonishment which only managed to make him look more aggressively good-looking, then he was scowling again, this time with somewhat more insolence, allowing his eyes to rake over her and making no attempt to conceal the fact.
Jade abruptly turned away. This was the last thing she was in line for. A lecherous plumber with the manners of a warthog and enough of an over-sized ego to consider himself above overalls and tool kit.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, not that he was standing on ceremony by waiting outside. Oh, no, he was stepping right through the front door, wet shoes and all. ‘And wipe your feet,’ she ordered. ‘You’re not dripping mud into this house. In fact, you might as well take your shoes off and leave them by the door.’ She gave his shoes a scathing look and was frustrated but not surprised to see that they were as out of character as the rest of his outfit. She was no connoisseur of men’s shoes, but these didn’t look as though they had spent their lifetime being dragged through mud.
‘Just exactly who are you?’ he asked, looking at her narrowly and not, she noticed, removing his shoes.
‘Jade Summers,’ Jade replied, bristling. ‘And in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, I’m the person you’ve come to see about this plumbing job.’ She looked him squarely in the face, which necessitated her straining her neck upwards because frankly, to her five foot six, the man was a hulking giant.
‘Plumbing job.’ He continued to stare at her, then he stroked his chin thoughtfully with one finger.
‘Ah! So you remember, do you?’ she said sarcastically. ‘Andy, Mr Greene, got in touch with you last night to come and mend a leak?’
‘A leak…’
‘Would you mind not repeating everything I say?’ She flashed him another of her specialty cold, quenching smiles which, again, had no effect. ‘And I’m beginning to doubt whether you’re competent to handle the job, Mr…’ He inclined his head to one side while she tried to rack her brains for the name Andy had tossed at her at eleven-thirty the night before. ‘Mr Wilkins. You’re hardly dressed appropriately, and you don’t seem to know anything about leaks. Shouldn’t you be asking a few pertinent questions by now? Like Where exactly is your leak, madam? Or Perhaps you’d care to wait while I just fetch my tools?’ She folded her arms and looked at him with narrow-eyed suspicion. ‘I take it you are a qualified plumber…?’
‘I have lots of qualifications,’ the man replied coolly, outstaring her so that she was forced to look away.
‘Good.’ She knew he had. Andy had randomly picked one from the Yellow Pages with the biggest advertising space and she vaguely recalled seeing a few letters here and there after his name. ‘In that case…’ She eyed the trench coat. ‘Maybe you’d like to divest yourself of your coat and follow me upstairs.’
‘Divest? That’s a complicated word for… I beg your pardon. I got the name, but not what your position is here…’
He didn’t sound like a plumber either. Not that she had any idea what plumbers sounded like, since she had never, fortunately, had to cross paths with one. This specimen was obviously a university-educated one, hence the arrogance.
‘That’s because I didn’t mention it, and it’s none of your business anyway. You just need to know that I’m in charge.’ She couldn’t believe she had just said that. Firm she could be, and had had to be for years, working as personal assistant, first of all, then upward bound until she had virtually been all but running the small company she had worked for ever since she’d moved to London two and a half years previously. But tyrannical? Never in a million years.
But what other way to go was there in this situation? Whether this Wilkins man was the boss of his own company or merely an employee with an over-inflated sense of himself, he needed a bit of discipline.
‘Follow me,’ she ordered, looking at his stylish and, more ominously, clean clothes in a jaundiced way. She would give him the benefit of the doubt, but if he had come prepared to fix a leaking ceiling, then she would eat her hat. If she’d possessed one. And there was no point asking her to lead him to the nearest spanner, or whatever tools he needed, because she had no idea where she would find any in the house, and she was pretty certain that Andy would be as clueless as herself.
‘The leak’s in one of the bedrooms,’ she explained, ahead of him, uneasily aware of his presence behind her. She hoped to high heaven that she wouldn’t be subjected to another of his all-over inspections or worse. She shivered, and mentally called up his face, all brooding, dark sensuality. The sort of face that women swooned over. Was straightforward plumbing all he did when he went to houses to mend leaks, or was he accustomed to women giving him the come-on?
She decided to let him go ahead of her. It paid to be careful.
‘The bedroom’s just down there,’ she told him, standing back and pointing along the corridor.
‘Just down where?’
‘Last door on the left. You can’t miss it. We had to pull the bed out and stick a container under the leak to catch the water.’ She watched him warily as he sauntered along the corridor, looking through the open doors, in no visible hurry to get to his destination.
‘And would you mind hurrying up?’ she called after him impatiently. ‘I have a lot of chores to be going on with.’
‘So you work here, do you?’ he called back casually, taking his time, as though she hadn’t spoken. He paused outside the bedroom door to look at her, hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. ‘Don’t you want to come and hear what I’ve got to report about your leak?’ he asked loudly. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, madam. I’m a perfectly well-behaved member of the human race.’
She didn’t like the way he had called her madam. It reeked of disrespect. She pursed her lips together and walked towards him.
The man was wasted in his business, she thought absent-mindedly. He was just too predatorial-looking to spend his life peering down broken drains and inspecting faulty washing machines. He should be out in a jungle somewhere, exploring the depths of the Amazon and slaying man-eating snakes with his bare hands. Or something like that.
‘It’s over the bed. There.’ She pointed to the ceiling and the patch of wallpaper underneath which had been unravelled by the dripping water.
‘I see.’ He walked into the room, side-stepping various articles of clothing which were lying on the ground.
‘Andy’s room,’ she found herself saying, just in case he thought that this mess belonged to her. At the age of twenty-two, and four years her junior, Andy still hadn’t developed any noticeable talent for clearing up behind him. Twice a week a cleaner came and purged the house, but in the intervening days he allowed his bedroom to develop the sort of teenage chaos that would have driven most mothers round the twist. She supposed that his untidiness was simply a reflection of the fact that he had never had the need to be tidy. There had always been someone else clearing up behind him, making sure that everything was neatly folded and put away. Even when he cooked, which he did with flourish, the kitchen afterwards resembled a badly bombed site.
She edged over the wrought-iron bedframe and snatched a pair of boxer shorts off it, dropping them to the ground and then kicking them under the bed. When she raised her eyes, it was to find the plumber looking at her with an unreadable expression.
‘You were saying about the leak?’ she reminded him weakly, staring in concentration at the damp patch on the ceiling.
‘Could be serious.’
Jade’s face blanched. ‘Serious? How serious?’ She didn’t like the sound of that. It didn’t look like much from where she was standing, but then again she wasn’t a plumber, and who knew what build-up of water could be lurking above the ceiling? She imagined Niagara Falls pouring down the wall, destroying everything in its wake, including the vastly expensive carpeting.
‘Can’t be sure.’ He stroked his chin again and continued to stare at her, which she failed to notice with the onset of the horrific, water-filled scenario that was now running through her head. ‘You say you…what?…spotted the water…?’
‘We were watching television and I felt a drip on my head,’ Jade explained, dragging her eyes away from the ceiling and meeting his, which were now glacial. ‘Andy got on the phone immediately,’ she said defensively, primed to contradict any accusations of irresponsibility, not that it should be any concern of the man in front of her. ‘I was here when he made the call, and I know that he stressed the importance of getting it seen to as soon as possible.’
‘And what time would that have been?’
‘A little after eleven in the night,’ Jade said impatiently. ‘Don’t you people keep a log book or something for incoming calls? Look, can you fix it or not?’
‘Not at the moment.’
Jade groaned in despair. ‘But we—Andy explained to you the importance of getting this sorted out. Yet you come here without so much as a screwdriver in sight and tell me that you can’t fix it at the moment.’ She sat on the edge of the bed. ’Well, when can you fix it?’
‘Why don’t we go downstairs to discuss this?’
‘What’s there to discuss?’ It seemed perfectly clear-cut to her.
‘What needs to be done.’ He shrugged and continued to look at her with relentless concentration. She could almost hear his brain ticking away in his head. Probably working out the vast charges he would make at the end of this little job.
‘Oh, all right.’ She stood up wearily, threw one last disgusted look at the leak, which appeared so inoffensive, or had done until the Wilkins man had said otherwise, and headed out of the room.
‘Perhaps we could discuss the situation over a cup of coffee,’ he suggested to her, halfway down the stairs, and she paused to look at him over her shoulder.
‘Haven’t you got other jobs you need to get to?’
‘Not at the moment.’ He had stopped when she had turned to address him. Now he took another step down, and for some reason the thought of being cooped up on the staircase with this man towering over her was enough to get her legs moving again. She swung around, trailing her hand along the banister, and skipped lightly down the remainder of the stairs.
‘Well, I happen to be quite busy,’ she said pointedly, leading the way to the kitchen.
‘Of course. Doing what?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ She couldn’t believe her ears. The man’s rudeness defied description.
‘I only ask because I’ve been here before. A few times, actually, and the house has been empty.’
‘Why would a plumber come to an empty house?’
‘Contract.’ He shrugged eloquently, as though that single word explained a host of things.
Jade groped her way to further enlightenment. ‘Oh, I get it. You come every so often to check up on the place and make sure that everything’s running smoothly?’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’m surprised Andy didn’t recognise your name in the book, in that case,’ she mused aloud, filling the kettle with water and plugging it in.
‘We plumbers. A forgetful lot.’ He raised his eyebrows expressively, and somewhere in the depths of her head she realised that he was laughing at her.
‘Yes. Quite. How do you take your coffee?’
‘Black, one sugar. So…’ He strolled around the kitchen and finally, as she had known he would, ambled over to the kitchen table, where he looked with interest at the drawings spread across the wooden surface. From the other end of the room, Jade watched him with a growing feeling of antagonism.
‘Have a seat, Mr Wilkins,’ she said tightly, ‘and then perhaps we could discuss the matter at hand?’
‘Draw, do you?’
‘That’s right, and I really haven’t got the time for chit-chat.’ How much more blatant did she have to be? She filled their mugs with boiling water, wondered whether it was too late to call in another firm to have a look at the leak, and then stood stock still as he held up one of her sketches to the light and began inspecting it.
‘You do this professionally, do you?’ he asked, depositing the sheet of paper and replacing it with another, which he held up and inspected with the same thorough eye.
‘I’m an art student, as a matter of fact,’ Jade told him icily. She dumped his mug of coffee on the counter, directed him to it, and then took the opportunity to stack away some of her work, aware of him looking at her as she did so, leaning against the counter, utterly at ease.
‘You’re an art student. Yes, I see.’
‘And what precisely do you see, Mr Wilkins? A way to fixing our leak, I hope.’
‘Oh, yes, that shouldn’t be a big job.’
‘I thought you said that it was serious.’
‘Did I?’
Jade’s teeth snapped together in frustration.
‘You know you did.’
‘How on earth does an art student come to be living in a house like this?’ he asked, deftly avoiding all discussion of what he had come to do.
‘I happen to share the place with a friend, as a matter of fact. Now, when can you send someone along to fix this leak?’
‘What makes you think that I won’t be the one to come and fix it myself?’
‘Because of your nails, aside from anything else.’
‘My nails?’ He looked puzzled for a few seconds, then he laughed. It was a distinctive laugh. Deep and sexy, with enough wickedness in it to turn grannies into simpering adolescents. ‘Ah, yes. Not dirty enough?’
‘Put it this way, Mr Wilkins, you don’t strike me as the sort of man who’s ever changed a car tyre in his life, never mind peered into the innards of a drainpipe. Now, why don’t we stop beating around the bush. Just tell me whom I can expect, when, and how much you intend to charge for your services.’
She wondered why she hadn’t seen through his ploy before. Wasn’t it as plain as the nose on her face? Mr Heart-Stopping Big Boss makes initial appearance, charms lady of the house into winning a job which inevitably would be much smaller than he makes out, then sends his troops in with outsized invoice in hand. Probably ran a very thriving business indeed. No wonder he could afford to dress the way he did.
Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t in the running for good looks and cheap charm. She had never been tempted by handsome men with a sweet tongue. No, that had been her sister’s domain.
She felt the familiar pain rush into her and rested her head momentarily against the palm of her hand. When she regained her composure, it was to find the man looking at her with sudden concern.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine.’ She didn’t feel fine. She felt sick, just as she always did whenever she thought of Caroline. ‘Just a passing headache,’ she said shakily. ‘Must be all that detailed work I’ve been doing recently.’
‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
The remark was so accurate that Jade stared at him open-mouthed, then she blinked and shook her head. Yes, she had seen a ghost in a manner of speaking. A little over two years and the image of her sister still haunted her. All that promise sucked away at the age of twenty-four. She had a sudden, overwhelming temptation to bare her soul to this complete stranger sitting opposite her, frowning now, and she had to bite it back.
Yes, her counsellor had said that she couldn’t hold on to the past for ever; yes, she had said that she should learn to talk to people about how she felt, to cherish the life that she had known instead of allowing it to ruin her own life. But she was in a bad way if that meant pouring her heart out to a con man whom she had spoken with for all of an hour. If that.
‘I think it’s time you left,’ she said, making a halfhearted attempt to rise to her feet and then sinking back to the stabilising comfort of the kitchen chair. ‘I…Andy will telephone you later to sort out…everything.’
‘You’re beginning to worry me, Miss Summers.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Perhaps I should get you upstairs.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She was feeling faint again. In an effort to dispel his unwanted concern, she stood up and felt herself sway, then, before she knew it, he had moved swiftly around the table and lifted her off her feet.
‘What are you doing! Put me down this instant.’
‘Forget it. I’m not going to be responsible for leaving you in this house. What if you collapse the minute I leave?’
‘I don’t intend to do any such thing! Put me down!’ This was a nightmare. One minute she was contentedly working away at the kitchen table; the next minute she was being carried upstairs by the local plumber, who apparently thought that she was ill and needed immediate rescue! It was farcical! She continued to demand instant release until he got to the top of the stairs, then she gave up. He was bigger than her, stronger than her, and determined to do his hero bit. Well, let him.
He began heading towards Andy’s room and she feebly told him that he was going in the wrong direction.
‘I thought your bedroom was down there, leaking from the seams,’ he said.
‘No. Mine’s in the other direction, second from the right.’ She could smell him through his shirt, feel the hardness of his chest against her cheek. Everything about him was unashamedly masculine, she thought, from his powerful, well-built body to the way he smelled. She couldn’t wait to get away from the experience.
‘I do apologise,’ he said, without a hint of apology in his voice. ‘I must have misunderstood.’
‘I’m not interested in your misunderstandings, Mr Wilkins.’ Her bedroom door was getting closer and she breathed a sigh of relief. If Caroline were alive now, she would be grinning with merriment at the sight of her shy twin sister being manhandled by just the sort of hulk she had always made a point of avoiding. For the first time she felt a rush of affectionate memories for her sister without any of the accompanying loss and guilt.
He kicked open her bedroom door and Jade peeked to make sure that there was nothing unfortunate lying around. Like her bra. It was spotless, just as she had left it earlier on. The bed carefully made, her clothes tidied away. Andy always laughed at her neatness, but now she couldn’t have been more grateful for it.
‘Just dump me on the bed,’ she instructed. ‘Then you can go. I won’t bother to see you out. Just slam the door behind you.’
He didn’t answer. He deposited her on the bed, stood up, looked around the room with the same practised eye she had seen in evidence earlier, and then returned his gaze to her face.
‘You’re already looking better.’
She knew why. The colour had returned to her cheeks because she was flushed from the feel of his arms around her. The thought was enough to make her even redder.
‘I’ll just have a short rest here and I’ll be as fit as a fiddle.’ She wished he would exit her bedroom, instead of standing there looking at her. Not that she had any feeling of being mentally stripped. Despite her initial worry that she might be dealing with a tedious lecher, he was not sexually interested in her. When he looked at her it was almost as though he was working something out in his head, although that could be just her imagination playing tricks on her.
And, frankly, why should he be interested in her? He was, she reluctantly had to admit, an unusually attractive man, and she was, if she was honest, attractive enough, but hardly a Marilyn Monroe. Her hair was blonde, but straight, her features were small, but unextraordinary, and she was way too slender and flat-chested to ever be termed voluptuous. Her sister’s body had been the one that men had flocked to. More rounded, fuller everywhere, and with the good legs which they had both inherited from their mother. She had flaunted it at every available opportunity. Jade sighed and leant back against the pillows.
‘Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’
Jade gave him a saccharine-sweet smile. ‘I really don’t think so. You wouldn’t have a clue where to find anything, it’s not your house, and anyway cups of sweet tea don’t actually cure anything. It’s all a myth.’
‘You’re probably right,’ he agreed. ‘So this is where you sleep?’
‘Goodbye.’
He continued to survey her room critically. ‘No television. Is that why you were in the other bedroom at that hour of the evening?’
‘You,’ Jade said furiously, ‘are totally out of order. What I do in this house is none of your business. You came here to fix a leak, which you aren’t even competent enough to do, and if you don’t leave immediately I shall…’
‘Throw me out by the scruff of my neck?’
This situation, she thought, was getting out of hand. He was beginning to frighten her a little now.
‘Let’s put it this way; there are other plumbers around. Now, please go!’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and Jade squirmed into a sitting position, drawing her legs up and clasping her arms around them. She looked desperately towards the door, wondering whether she could make a dash for it. But if he wanted to he would have no trouble in pinning her down.
‘Get out or else I’m going to call the police.’ Quiet, menacing, utterly serious. He failed to be intimidated.
‘That won’t work either, you know,’ he said conversationally.
‘Want to bet?’
‘I don’t take money off a lady, if that’s what you are.’ He inclined his body forward slightly. ‘Nor do I wrest telephones away from people, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, it won’t make any difference who you call…’
‘And why not?’
‘Because I’m Andy’s brother and I own this house.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I DON’T believe you.’
She did. Something hadn’t added up from the minute she had laid eyes on him. His clothes, his accent, his general charisma. But she had been expecting a plumber and she had naively assumed that because he had showed up he must be the plumber she had been waiting for. Of course, she should have asked for his card instead of innocently running with her assumptions while he played along, trying to pump information out of her all the way.
Too late now.
‘Of course you believe me,’ he said coldly. ‘But just in case there are any lingering doubts in your mind…’ He extracted a wallet from his trouser pocket, flicked it open to reveal a row of platinum and gold credit cards, and extracted his driver’s licence from one of the compartments.
Jade dutifully took it, confirmed his identity and handed it back to him.
She couldn’t think of a thing to say. She knew why he had come, and Andy was going to be distraught.
‘Cat got your tongue, Miss Summers? I’m disappointed. You were so eloquent up to ten minutes ago.’
Jade glared at him with loathing. ‘Why didn’t you just introduce yourself at the front door and spare us both the ludicrous pretence?’
‘Now, why on earth should I have done that?’ He stuck his wallet away and proceeded to view her without warmth. ‘I didn’t know who the hell you were, but I was willing to stake my fortune on your not being the daily help, and you would have clamped up the minute you knew who I was. No, it was altogether far more productive for me to go along with the charade and see what I could find out along the way.’ He stood up, strolled across to the bay window and looked out before turning around. ‘You look as though you could do with a stiff drink,’ he said in a deceptively mild voice. ‘Don’t go fainting on me, now. I have too many questions to ask.’ He smiled with dangerous menace. ‘And far too many answers you’re just bursting to give.’
‘I’ll get in touch with Andy,’ she said, reaching across to the telephone at the side of her bed, but before she could pick up the receiver his hand was over hers like a vice, stopping her.
‘Not so fast, Miss Summers. You’re in my house and you’re going to listen to what I have to say. Do you read me loud and clear? And we’ll just wait for my brother to return. I’m sure he’d far rather appreciate the surprise.’
‘Your hand? Please remove it. I don’t appreciate the caveman approach.’
Another of those deep, velvety, unsettling laughs, but he removed his hand and stood back.
‘A girl with spirit. Unusual for my brother.’
‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ Jade asked quickly, shooting back to the furthest edge of the bed just in case he got it into his head to try another lunge at her. The man seemed to have a bad effect on her nervous system, and she was rapidly discovering that the closer he got, the worse the effect was.
‘It means that the few trollops he’s ever had, to my knowledge, have all been watery, insignificant bores with the personalities of wet rags.’
Jade sighed. She had never thought that she would meet Curtis Greene. When she and Andy had moved into his house he had assured her that his brother was a workaholic, firmly ensconced in the fast-living bowels of Manhattan, and rarely came to London. When he did there would be advance notice, and they would simply move out until he had cleared off.
He clearly disliked his older brother, even though she had detected a certain awe and admiration in his voice whenever his name was mentioned, and conversations about him had been limited.
‘So I think it’s question-and-answer time, Miss Summers, don’t you?’ No wonder he had failed to be intimidated by her withering looks, she thought miserably. Lord of the house and master of the withering look, himself. The sort of man who would fail to be intimidated by a charging rhino, never mind a diminutive blonde with more lip than common sense.
‘And, charming though the bedroom is, I don’t think it’s quite the place for a conversation.’ He began walking towards the door, looking around only when he was standing in the doorway. ‘Why don’t we adjourn to the sitting room? We’ll be far more comfortable there. Unless, of course, you’re the sort who finds bedrooms the best place to be…?’
Jade sprang out of the bed, barely sparing him a glance, her arms protectively folded across her chest, and brushed past him, irritated to find that, despite his high-handed, despicable, loathsome arrogance, she still found that fleeting physical contact with his shirt slightly unnerving.
‘I don’t care who you are,’ was her opening shot, as soon as they were in the sitting room, ‘I don’t like your attitude. You may think it’s a whizz threatening people but it won’t work on me. And rubbing my nose in the fact that this is your house and I’m a trespasser isn’t going to work either. I have no problem with packing up my things and moving out.’
Her bank manager might find it a little worrying, she thought, but she had enough money saved from her last job to see her through finding a place to rent. And working while she studied was hardly inconceivable. The offer from Andy to share this house, with space for her to paint and only their bills and food to cover, had been manna from heaven, but if it involved bowing and scraping to the brute in front of her, then forget it.
‘Spirited, and full of indignant, outraged pride,’ was his only comment, as he moved to one of the chairs and sat down. Like his brother, Curtis Greene paid scant attention to his surroundings, and, like his brother, he fitted in, from the casual elegance of his clothes to the unspoken assumption of authority he exuded. But unlike his brother, who was a charming and loveable player, Curtis Greene was neither charming nor loveable. He was a shaker and mover whom, she imagined, moved through life playing by his rules and expecting the rest of the world to fall obediently in line.
‘Why don’t you drop the act, Miss Summers? It’s just the two of us now, and we both know what you are.’
Jade tentatively perched on the chair furthest from his and stared at him in bewilderment.
‘An art student,’ she said after a while.
‘So-called.’
‘You can telephone the college in London and confirm it,’ she told him coldly. ‘What do you think I am, if not an art student? Do you think that I sit at the kitchen table every morning with a load of phoney drawings scattered around me, idly waiting for someone to drop by so that I can launch into a string of pathological lies?’ She gave a short, derisive laugh and his mouth tightened.
‘You have a brain and a vocabulary,’ he mused aloud. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’ He frowned thoughtfully, as though genuinely baffled by the phenomenon, but she wasn’t fooled for a minute. This series of observations was all linked to his own agenda, and she was pretty sure that when she discovered what the agenda was she wasn’t going to like it.
‘Now what would my brother see in you?’
Poor Andy, she thought. If he had spent a lifetime coping with this sort of condescending attitude. No wonder the shutters came down every time he mentioned the name Curtis.
‘Just get to the point, Mr Greene, so that I can pack my bags and leave.’
‘Now, you don’t really want to do that, do you?’
‘Well, no,’ Jade agreed, flummoxed. ‘But it is your house, as you pointed out…’
With a sudden movement he stripped off the thick cream sweater to reveal a checked shirt in muted greens and creams and browns. Very slowly he began to roll back the sleeves, exposing strong forearms, liberally sprinkled with fine, dark hair. Jade watched, mesmerised. For a big man, his movements were as graceful as a cat’s.
‘How did you meet my brother?’ he asked conversationally, pausing briefly to glance in her direction, then sitting back in the chair, his head tilted backwards so that his eyes became narrowed, watchful slits.
Had Andy mentioned anything to him about the counselling? she wondered. Doubtful. Aside from Christmas cards and the occasional letter, he’d said that their communications had always been restricted to faxes and E-mails about the company.
‘Oh, we met through mutual friends,’ she said vaguely.
‘What mutual friends might those be?’
‘None that you would know,’ she answered shortly.
‘So you met and…what? Instantly hit it off? Started dating?’
‘We did instantly hit it off, yes,’ she replied uneasily. She was being led somewhere and she didn’t like the feeling. She got the impression that every word she spoke was ensnaring her yet further in whatever ambush he had surreptitiously laid down.
‘And then you moved in? I thought Andy refused to have anything to do with this house? Hasn’t he got his own flat in the Barbican? And what about you? Where were you living?’
‘I don’t know whether he refused to have anything to do with this house or not. He’s never spoken to me about that. I just assumed that it was your house and so—’
‘He’s always known that he can live here whenever he wants to,’ he interrupted abruptly. ‘My question is why has he chosen to move in here now? What’s suddenly wrong with his flat?’
‘He’s lent it out to a friend of your sister who’s over here from Australia for six months.’
‘Ah, so Sarah asked him if he would do her the favour…?’
‘And also…’
‘Yes?’ He looked at her with interest, or at least the interest, she thought darkly, that a shark might show in a prospective meal.
She squared her shoulders and came right out with it. ‘When Andy quit his job, we both thought that it might be a nice idea for us to move in here so that we could have more space respectively for our art work. We had no idea that you would be returning to London.’
‘So I gather. My apologies if I’ve broken up the cosy little love-nest.’
Jade went bright red at his words, opened her mouth to contradict him, and then closed it again. She might as well wait for his full sheet of accusations before she started defending herself.
‘You must have both known that I’d be back, though. Didn’t you?’ His mouth curled. ‘Did Andy imagine for one second that he could fax me his letter of resignation and get no reaction from me but a good luck card and a transatlantic pat on the shoulder?’
‘You’ll have to ask your brother that one,’ she muttered uncomfortably, shifting in the chair, aware that she was perspiring slightly and highly resenting the way he made her feel, like a criminal being tried for charges as yet unspecified.
‘I’m asking you!’ he exploded, shedding his cool demeanour and giving her a taste of what lay underneath. A dangerous wolf in dangerous wolf’s clothing. As if she hadn’t already figured that one out. All wolves had teeth and he was baring his.
She steeled herself not to wilt at his outburst and gave him a serene smile.
‘Yes, well, there’s no need to raise your voice, Mr Greene, and you must know that I can’t answer your question, since I don’t know what’s going on in every recess of your brother’s head.’
‘Well, answer me this,’ he rasped. ‘Did you coerce Andy into this move so that you could get your pretty little foot through the door?’
The accusation, thinly disguised as a question, was followed by such a long silence that the soft noises in the room, the gentle ticking of the antique clock on the mantelpiece, became resounding explosions. She felt fury rush through her, and she had to clamp shut her mouth just in case she started yelling at him. Yelling never got anyone anywhere. It just made a situation worse.
‘I see where all this is leading. No wonder you didn’t want me to call Andy. You needed a bit of time on your own to try and pin me down into…what, exactly? Breaking down and confessing that I’m a gold-digger who’s ruthlessly using your brother for his money?’
‘It won’t be the first time that a woman’s head has been turned by a big bank balance,’ he grated, recovering his deadly calm. ‘And Andy’s a gullible victim. He likes the underdog.’
‘I am not an underdog, Mr Greene. I happen to have been holding down a very good job before…’ She paused, pulling herself sharply back from any mention of counselling. ‘Before I decided to go back into art.’
‘Which is why it just doesn’t add up, if you don’t mind my saying.’ He gave her a cold, triumphant smile. ‘The few girls I have ever known my brother to associate with have all been simpering females without a brain between their ears. You have to admit that it’s a bit strange to find him here with you now, cohabiting in the family mansion which he swore he would never return to. I’m not a complete fool, Miss Summers, and I’m nothing like my brother. I’ve never been taken in by feminine wiles in my entire life and I can smell a scam from a mile away.
‘You’re clever. Clever enough to interest my brother long enough to get what you want. Did you flatter his ego? Was that how you decided to operate? A cunning word here, a sideways glance there, a soft gasp of admiration when he confided that he had always been interested in the world of art? Was that how it went, Miss Summers? Then a hesitant suggestion that perhaps moving in together might be a good idea? Get to know one another better? Share your love of art at close range? Was that how things progressed?’
Jade’s fists clenched into balls at her sides. It was all so ridiculous that she very nearly burst out laughing. If only he knew. But the fact was that Curtis Greene knew nothing at all about his brother. He had never taken the time to find out.
‘What’s so damned funny?’ he asked with narrow-eyed suspicion.
The ghost of a smile which had curved her lips upwards turned into a grin which became even broader as she watched his expression go from hostile suspicion to outright wrath. She began to laugh, throwing her head back and giving full vent to the sound that had become so alien to her over the past two years. She laughed until the tears rolled down her face, and then she subsided into giggles, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands like a child. Eventually she sobered up enough to look at him.
‘I haven’t laughed so much in years,’ she said in a sudden, confiding outburst. ‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’ There was naked curiosity in the cool blue eyes now, but instead of trying to slake it he lowered his eyes for a few seconds, then returned his gaze to her face.
‘But I don’t get the joke.’
‘The joke, Mr Greene, is not just that you’re utterly and hopelessly wrong about me. It’s how utterly and hopelessly wrong you are. I’m not after your brother’s money, or anyone else’s money for that matter. I learned the hard way that money doesn’t buy anything that really makes a difference.’ She paused, shocked that for the second time this aggravating, misguided man had almost succeeded in reaching a place in her that very few people had reached thus far. If any.
‘Very philosophical for a girl of…eighteen? Nineteen?’
‘Twenty-six, actually.’
‘Then what is your relationship with my brother?’ he demanded.
‘What business is it of yours?’
‘What business is it of mine? What business is it of mine?’ he spluttered, wearing the expression of someone who could hardly believe what they were hearing. ‘God, woman, you’ve got some bare-faced cheek!’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Now that his mask of thunderous wrath had slipped, she allowed herself to relax. The atmosphere had altered between them. She couldn’t quite work out how, but she suspected that it was because however much his logic tried to tell him that she was up to no good, his instincts were telling him otherwise. And, peripherally, he was not accustomed to being answered back. She sensed that in some strange, intangible way. He was a man who had prematurely assumed a mantle of power and had grown to accept the respect and subservience it would have brought him.
She knew enough from Andy to piece together Curtis Greene in a way she would not have been capable of doing had she simply met him out of the blue. She knew that he had been the first born, the love-child of his parents when his mother had been only a girl herself. The marriage that had ensued had been going for quite some years before two more children had been produced. By the time his parents had died, in a light aircraft accident, Curtis had been a young man in his early twenties, and without warning had found himself catapulted into a dynasty which he had proved himself more than equipped to handle. More importantly, he had found himself surrogate parent to his two younger siblings and, from what she had gathered, had fulfilled his role through the iron rod of discipline rather than the gentle hand of love.
His past had made him the person that he was today, just as it had made his brother the person he had turned out to be.
She found that she was staring at him, mentally trying to piece him together in much the same way he had been trying to piece her together earlier on, and she only snapped back to the present when he said roughly, ‘He’s my brother. I have to look out for him.’
‘In which case, you have nothing to fear from me.’ She lowered her eyes and half smiled to herself as she played the secrets she held in her head. ‘Andy and I are simply very good friends. Two people who get along.’
‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘Why? Men and women can have very satisfying relationships that aren’t based on…’
‘Sex?’ He shot her a slow, crooked smile and she felt her breath suddenly quicken. From her previously secure vantage point, she now experienced a disconcerting slip in her mental resources. Something about his smile, the way his mouth curved when he murmured that one word, the sudden change in the tenor of his voice, made the room seem much smaller and very hot.
‘Yes. Quite.’ She cleared her throat and adopted an expression of mature concentration.
‘Even when they share the same bed?’ he enquired mildly.
For a few seconds she had to think about that one, then her face cleared. ‘Watching television in the same room. Your brother and I aren’t sleeping together, and you have a sordid mind if you can’t believe that.’
‘I prefer to call it experienced.’
‘Then I guess that we just agree to differ.’ She shrugged, tugging back the reins on her imagination, which threatened to veer off down those experienced paths to which he had alluded. Oh, yes, she had heard all about Curtis Greene’s experience. There had never been a time, she had been told by Andy one evening, when the drink had overcome his natural reserve about his brother, when Curtis had not had an adoring female at his side. For experienced male she preferred to read practised womaniser.
‘So,’ she asked into the growing silence between them, ‘how long do you plan on staying in London?’ A particularly tactless question, she realised, as soon as she had uttered it.
‘Long enough to have a word with my brother.’ He stretched out his long legs in front of him and crossed them lightly at the ankles. ‘A very serious word.’
Jade licked her lips nervously and felt a protective rush of feeling. This visit was going to shock Andy to the core. He wasn’t ready to deal with Curtis and all the demons associated with him. Not yet.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll listen to a word I tell you, but can I ask you not to be hard on Andy?’
For some reason he seemed to find the request amusing.
‘Not be hard on Andy? Since you two seem to be so touchingly close, you must know that I’ve been in charge of his welfare from the time he was eight years old and I was an old man of twenty-one?’
His eyes darkened and she caught something in there, the shadow of regret, but the moment was fleeting enough to make her doubt what she had seen. He leaned forward, his body rigid, and hit one open palm forcefully with his closed fist. The subdued violence behind the gesture made her wince. It also made her determined to fight this man all the way, if only to protect his brother.
‘Being hard was the only way to teach Andy how to cope with his wealth, how to cope with life. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a bloody tough world out there, and when our parents died, it fell to me to teach him how to cope with it.’ His eyes glittered.
‘Well, he’s not a child of eight any longer,’ Jade said steadily, ‘and maybe he’s learnt whatever lessons he needed to learn to give him the strength to go his own way.’
‘Is that the sort of claptrap psychobabble you’ve been pouring into his head? As one good friend to another? Feeding him with idiotic notions about running away from the rat race and doing his own thing with bits of clay and oil paint?’ He laughed acidly. ‘You must have thought you’d hit jackpot in my brother.’
‘I told you, I’m not interested in Andy for his money.’ She heard the trace of contempt in her voice, and knew that he had caught it as well, from his sudden stillness. ‘And I haven’t fed him with any notions of doing anything. In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s got a mind of his own!’
‘And he’s suddenly decided to veer away from his very lucrative job running the family business so that he can become a hack painter. All without any persuasive support from you, his very good and very platonic friend. Now, why do I find that so hard to believe?’
‘Because you have a suspicious nature?’
‘And, by some stunning coincidence, you too were going through the same agonies of indecision, so you decided to throw in your very good job, whatever that may be, to pursue the same ridiculous career calling. What was your job, as a matter of interest?’
She debated whether to tell him or not, and quickly came to the conclusion that the more open she was in certain areas, the sooner she would get him off her back.
‘I worked for a small computer firm,’ she said shortly. ‘I was personal assistant to the director there, but really I ran the place and was financially rewarded for it.’
‘Then why leave?’
‘Because…because I wanted a change of scenery.’
He shook his head in a gesture of irritated frustration. ‘From highly paid personal assistant to dabbling with crayons. That’s quite a change, Miss Summers. So you and Andy do what, exactly…? Sit around in the evenings, playing at being artists, which is really just another way of saying avoiding responsibility and kidding yourselves that the real world doesn’t exist because you’ve chosen to retreat from it? Or is it all just some elaborate courtship? Are you just biding your time over the coloured pencils, eyeing him hungrily, waiting to see when would be the best time to slip under the covers with him?’
Jade gave up. Curtis Greene, finding himself confronted with a situation over which he had almost no control, was responding in probably the only way he knew how. By a process of intimidation and cunning. Every word she said and every truth she uttered would be twisted into something sinister and riddled with insinuation.
She sighed and silently reflected on the future hassle of trying to find somewhere to rent.
‘Yes. You’re right. I’m a vicious, heartless gold-digger who engineered your brother into taking an interest in painting, and to further the illusion of comradeship I decided to toss my own very good job aside so that I could sit around drawing and pretending to be an artist. And, yes, it’s all an elaborate ploy because at night, over the coloured pencils, I’m really carving out a future where I become mistress of the big house and queen of the castle.
‘You’ve caught me napping, as a matter of fact. Normally I’m not dressed in an old pair of jeans and a tee shirt. Oh, no, normally I’m decked out in all my finery on the off chance that my victim might just stroll unexpectedly through the front door. Daylight never sees me without my silver or gold high-heeled shoes, my hair perfectly coiffeured, my nails painted scarlet and an interesting and revealing dress of Lycra. There. Satisfied?’
She looked at him and was invigorated to see him temporarily stumped. He hadn’t expected that response out of her. He had geared himself up for an exhaustive chipping away at all her defences until he was satisfied.
‘That’s a very childish response, Miss Summers,’ he said eventually, and she would have given herself a hearty pat on the back for having won this round of the battle if it hadn’t been for the glint lurking in the depths of his ice-blue eyes.
‘I’m just telling you what you want to hear. You’re determined not to believe a word I say to you so what’s the use my trying?’
‘Course,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘who am I to disbelieve you when you say that you swan about wearing tight dresses and high heels?’ He gave her a slow, thorough and leisurely inspection. ‘I imagine you would look very…what’s the word I’m looking for, here?…alluring?…appealing? Or maybe just…sexy…in a tight Lycra dress with high gold shoes. That translucent, mobile face, just the right interesting mixture of innocence and experience, those eyes with just the right hint of sadness…yes, in a small outfit it would be quite stunning, I imagine…and I can’t get much of an idea about your body, but from what I can see…’
‘That’s enough!’ Her skin seemed to have erupted into tingling goosebumps and she was leaning forward in her chair, clutching it, in fact, her face flushed.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Am I embarrassing you?’ He smiled very slowly at her, which sent her self-control plummeting a few more notches. He waited for a while, watching her as she tried to mobilise her brain into action, then rescued her from the situation by asking what time his brother would be home.
‘Later this afternoon,’ Jade said, licking her lips. ‘He has a lecture at two-thirty and then he usually goes to the library for an hour or so afterwards. I think he was supposed to be meeting a few friends later on, but I don’t know whether he will or not. He said that he just wanted to come home and flop in front of the television with a Chinese takeaway. Normally, I cook something, well, we take it in turns, but he’s a much better cook than I am. In fact, he’s brilliant. I don’t suppose you know that.’
She was rattling. On and on and on to cover the sudden and overwhelming confusion generated by his casual, stray observations about her. The man had a golden tongue, or at least gilt-edged, and he had chosen to wield it on her, and it had had the desired effect, throwing her into a tizzy.
And he talked about her being manipulative! How many women had he lured into his bed using that same, knowing charm? Whatever he had wanted to know about her relationship with Andy, she had somehow satisfied him. His posture indicated as much. He was more relaxed. Gearing up to round two, she thought despondently. Her appearance when he had not been expecting it had doubtless taken him by surprise, but he had not been so flabbergasted that he hadn’t used the situation to his advantage, and for the moment he was content that she was above board. She could be dispatched without further ado. Time to get himself ready for the next phase, which would doubtless be working on his brother, trying to persuade him back into DGG Holdings, the prestigious company that seemed to own everything under the sun under some umbrella or other.
‘Cookery? No. I can’t say I was aware of Andy’s talents in that direction, but then he’s never had much of an opportunity to practise them on me. I’ve been out of the country for the past few years.’ He glanced at his watch, and she could see him working out in his head whether it was worth his while remaining here or leaving to return later. She was no longer of consequence. She had been dealt with.
‘Yes, I know. Look, there’s no need for you to stay here. I don’t know when exactly Andy will be home…’
‘I’ll have a quick look around the old place,’ he said smoothly, standing up. ‘Care to come along?’
Jade sprang to her feet as well and heaved a sigh of relief. ‘No! Take your time. I have loads of work to carry on doing, so if you don’t mind…’
‘Sure,’ he said genially, moving towards her. ‘Forget I’m here. I know how you artists like peace to work in, and I wouldn’t want to get in the line of any artistic temperament.’
‘I don’t possess any such thing.’ Jade stayed her ground, out of politeness and a desire to prove to herself that she could remain unruffled by this man.
‘No?’ He looked at her sideways and she was uncomfortably aware that from where he was standing she had done nothing but react with artistic temperament, from the minute she had laid eyes on him. Pointless to try and explain that she was normally as calm as a lake and that all that brimstone and fire was not part and parcel of her emotional make up. He had simply managed to bring out the worst in her.
‘Absolutely not. None at all. I rarely raise my voice, in fact. I’m a very calm person.’ He continued to look at her with amused disbelief and she could feel a lot of that so-called calm ebbing out of her.
‘Maybe it’s just me, then,’ he told her piously, and she glared at him from under dark eyebrows.
‘Yes, it is just you, actually!’ she snapped. ‘What do you expect? You show up here out of the blue and proceed to subject me to a tirade of unfounded accusations!’ She could hear her voice spiralling higher and she took a deep, steadying breath.
The man was insufferable.
And why was he just standing there with that stupid grin on his face, as though he was the cat that had managed to corner the bowl of cream?
‘You don’t know how relieved I am to hear you say that.’
‘What? What are you talking about now?’ She was finding it difficult to keep up with his rapid shifts in mood. It was like being on a rollercoaster. No wonder he was such a big name in business. He probably addled his competitors to death!
‘Well, I might have to readjust my ideas if I thought that you were acting out of character simply because of my personality…’
‘I have no idea what you’re on about.’ She began walking out of the door, aware of him a few paces behind her.
‘I mean,’ he said to her back, ‘if I addled you, then I might jump to the conclusion that it was because I turned you on. Sexual electricity manifests itself in myriad ways, you know.’
That had her spinning back on her heels to confront him, her body arched forward belligerently.
‘You? Turn me on? Ha! In case no one’s ever mentioned it before, you are the most infuriating human on the face of this planet! Not to mention the most egotistical!’
‘So I can look forward to a calm little stay here, then, with no jealous sibling rivalry?’
She was still fuming over his arrogance and it took her a few seconds to absorb what he had said. When she did, her eyes opened wider in horrified disbelief.
‘Calm little stay here?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘What do you mean by little stay?’
‘Well, Miss Summers, you can’t expect me to rush back to New York when I have to step into my brother’s shoes now that he’s left his job to become an artist, can you?’ He shrugged and gave her a long-suffering look which did not meld well with the aggressive lines of his face. Humility, she thought sourly, was an emotion he only occasionally flirted with. If that. ‘Unless I can persuade him to knock all these stupid daydreams of becoming another Matisse on the head…’ He paused to allow his words to sink in, in all their sickening detail. ‘And, however much I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, I know you’ll appreciate that I might want to linger on here, keep an eye on the situation until I’m fully satisfied that you are what you say you are.’ The blue eyes were rueful, but underneath the phoney expression of regret she could see the hardness all too clearly.
‘So you’ll be hanging around,’ she said dully.
‘That’s right! Might be just for a few days…might be a few weeks…who knows? Might even be for longer…I’m a man who likes to go with the flow, so to speak.’ He eyed the staircase, then her. ‘Hence my desire to become reacquainted with my house. See where I’m going to sleep.’ He flashed her a broad, dazzling smile. ‘Have fun drawing!’
He headed up the stairs, his long legs covering ground rapidly until he was out of sight, while Jade remained where she was, dumbstruck, and wondering how the day had ended on such an awful note.
When the doorbell rang, she answered it with the resignation of someone expecting the worst.
‘Morning, love.’ The man was short, ruddy complexioned and dressed in overalls with an off-colour bomber jacket. He consulted the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Got the right ’ouse, ’ave I? I’m the plumber, ’ere about a leak.’
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS a little after nine in the evening when Jade quietly opened the front door, risked a nervous glance at the hallway and the staircase winding temptingly up to her bedroom. With a little sigh of relief, she closed the door very silently behind her, standing still as it clunked firmly shut. Just in case. Just in case Curtis came bounding out from behind a door somewhere like a bloodhound on the scent of something tasty and her peace of mind was shattered. Yet again. For the sixth day running.
If she had hoped that his appearance at Stratton House might have caused a few ripples before ebbing away into a relative state of calm, then it was becoming increasingly clear that this was not to be the case.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Andy had complained the day before, over a cup of coffee in one of the college canteens. She had watched the droop of his mouth as he listlessly stirred his coffee with concern. ‘He’s been working all the hours God made from as far back as I can remember. Yet he now chooses to saunter back home at seven in the evening so that we can all sit down to a cosy little family meal. What a joke!’
It didn’t take a genius to figure out his tactics, Jade had thought sourly. Curtis Greene, empire-builder and workaholic, was trooping home so that he could keep an eye on them, not that dear Andy suspected a thing. She hadn’t mentioned any of his brother’s grim accusations and she had no intention of doing so. As far as she was concerned, the boat had been rocked enough already, without her adding to the general seasickness.
‘Maybe he’s trying to bond,’ she’d suggested, and they had looked at one another with glum, resigned understanding.
‘Bond, flond. All I’ve had off him are lectures on responsibility and growing up. I’m twenty-two years old!’ He’d raised aquamarine eyes to hers and grimaced. ‘He just can’t seem to get it through that thick skull of his that I’m determined to pursue my art!’
‘Well, you’ll just have to prove to him that you mean business,’ she had said gently.
Easier said than done, she thought now. The only business Curtis understood was the complex business of making money, and after his initial flaming row with Andy he had subsided into the age-old water-dripping-on-stone routine. Over drinks, he would sit, cradling his gin and tonic with a vaguely glowering expression, and refer to the importance of keeping their vast business under family control.
Over dinner, he would punctuate the stilted conversation with observations on the harshness of life and the necessity of confronting it and controlling it, by which he meant packing in thoughts of painting and doing what his family legacy dictated, and over coffee he would throw dark hints about hangers-on, apparently rife in the world of art, who would see the heir to a fortune as easy game. These remarks were the ones that Jade found most difficult to deal with, because she knew that they referred to her but were never couched in terms that would allow her a say on the matter. Not without stirring up a hornets’ nest.
So far Andy had stuck his ground, but for how much longer? Curtis was forceful, and determined to have his way, and she knew that he was just biding his time, confident that he would get precisely what he wanted in the end.
They could leave the place, and in fact they had discussed this option, but, as Andy had said, that would be tantamount to running away, and he had spent his life running away. And Jade, he had informed her desperately, couldn’t leave him alone with Curtis. She was his moral support, and he needed her.
So here they were, the three of them, stuck in the rambling house, with the Master Puppeteer waiting for his chance to pull some strings.
She was tiptoeing up the stairs, gaining confidence that she would make it to bed without obstruction, when, from the foot of the staircase, she heard that dark, velvety voice call out.
‘You’re back. I’ve been waiting to have a word with you.’
She spun around guiltily and remained in frozen animation, with one hand on the banister, the other clutching the lapels of her jacket.
‘I’m kind of tired. Can it wait?’
‘I’m in the blue sitting room.’
So much for deigning to answer her question. She watched, in frustration, his vanishing back, and then reluctantly made her way back down the stairs and towards the sitting room, divesting herself of her jacket en route.
She really was tired. Andy was not back home this evening, and in an attempt to defer her own moment of return she had slugged it out at college, gone to the library and then forced herself to go for drinks with a group of students whose high spirits had only made her feel old and washed out. It was bad enough that she sported none of the prerequisites of the struggling art student. Her hair was its natural colour, her make-up was subdued, her clothes made no statement whatsoever unless you called feeling comfortable a statement, and getting drunk on a regular basis was something she viewed with horror rather than delight.
She walked into the sitting room to find Curtis standing by the bay window with a glass in one hand.
‘I’ve poured you a drink.’ He nodded to the glass on the table in the centre of the room. ‘Take it. Might relax you. You act as though I’m about to eat you the minute you’re within five feet of me.’
Jade snatched up the drink and swallowed a couple of large mouthfuls, then sat down rapidly as the burning liquid shot through her system like fire.
‘What did you want to talk to me about?’
‘Where’s my brother?’
‘Isn’t he at home?’ she asked innocently, wishing that he would do the polite thing and sit down, because he looked even more forbidding standing by the bay window, his body thrown into irregular shadows.
‘No, and you know it. Isn’t that why you made sure to stay out of the house for as long as possible?’ He looked at his watch and gave a theatrically overdone frown of perplexity. ‘If this is the latest you can do, then your social life could do with an injection. Where is he, anyway? I wanted to discuss some business with him.’
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