A Suitable Mistress. CATHY WILLIAMS
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side of the chair.
‘Now you listen to me, my girl,’ he said tersely. ‘I haven’t come here to have an argument with you. Nor have I come here to be attacked for things I knew nothing of.’
‘In three years you never returned once to see for yourself how everything was, to check and make sure that people were happy!’
‘I had my reasons,’ he said grimly, still leaning over her, so that she began to feel something else mingling with her anger—something faint and disturbing which made her even more angry because she didn’t want to feel it.
She had been through that childish, excited infatuation with Dane Sutherland, and she had been disabused of it in no uncertain terms. She had no intention of letting dead embers re-ignite.
He might stand there and plead innocence to everything she said, but he must have known what was going on at Chadwick House. He must have known about the loyal help who had been sacked virtually the day after his father had died. He must have known of the promises made by his father to his workers, which had never been kept.
Old Mr Sutherland had promised her father the cottage. A gentleman’s agreement, because although her father had been his employee the two had been comrades—old friends who would sit and have a cup of tea and lament the passing of time with the shared memories of old men.
Dane must have known that his stepmother had put paid to any such agreement not five months after her husband had died. He must have known because Dane Sutherland was an intelligent man, frighteningly intelligent, and, after all, the house was his. She couldn’t believe, whatever he said, that he had cut himself off so completely from his past.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Suzie?’ he asked, straightening up and giving her time to compose her face and get her nervous system back in order again.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he said, sitting down on the sofa and crossing his legs, one ankle over his knee, ‘you’re a highly intelligent girl. You could have gone to university, but you chose to stay close to your father and apprentice in a company instead. You were doing damned well at it. So why did you throw it all in and move to London?’
‘You forget,’ she replied coolly, ‘that I no longer had a roof over my head. Your stepmother made it crystal-clear that she wanted the cottage back and the sooner I cleared out of it the better.’
‘Dammit, Suzie, you should have written to me in New York.’ He raked his fingers through his hair—a restless, impatient gesture that she could remember him making even as a teenager. Whenever he was angry over something. Her brother had tried to cultivate it, but somehow he had never managed to convey the same magnetic, effortless charm.
‘Thank you,’ she said politely, ‘but I haven’t resorted to asking for charity as yet. Besides, I couldn’t honestly imagine a worse hell than living in the vicinity of your stepmother.’
She thought of Martha Sutherland with distaste. Brassy blonde and, at thirty-two, less than half the age of the man she had married. She was the sort of woman whose nails were always impeccably varnished in red, and who never set foot out of the house without being sure that everything about her co-ordinated.
‘So you threw away your future and moved into a grimy bedsit in London instead.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she snapped.
‘I understand better than you think.’
‘After seeing me for the first time in years and after only forty-five minutes. What a genius you must be at reading other people’s characters.’
She hated this conversation and she wished that she could just take refuge in some of that uneaten chocolate lying in her bag. Then, for the first time since he had entered the room, she wondered what he must think, seeing her now. Seeing how much she had changed physically. She knew that he had never found her attractive; she just wasn’t his type—too tall, too gauche, too dark-haired—but what must he think of her now? Overweight, hair unflatteringly pulled back, dressed in dark colours which she knew did nothing for her—somehow she had lost the will to dress with any attempt at style.
She shoved aside the temptation to reach for her bag and extract the chocolate and contented herself with glaring at him.
‘What are you doing for money?’ he asked, looking at her with lazy speculation.
‘I have a job,’ she said sullenly. ‘I’ve been temping since I moved down here.’ She linked her fingers on her lap and frowned. Now that she had begun thinking about the changes he must see in her—all for the worse—she found that she couldn’t stop herself. She was acutely aware that her once flat stomach was not so flat as it had been, that her legs and thighs were filling out her trousers in a way that implied that if she continued snacking off bars of chocolate she would soon find herself moving up a size in clothes. Again.
‘Doing what, exactly?’
‘Doing whatever pays the rent. Exactly.’
‘But nothing to do with accountancy.’
‘I resent your criticisms,’ she told him resentfully. ‘You have no right to march in here and start telling me what I’m doing wrong with my life. Your zeal to do good would have been far more useful a year ago. In fact, it might have saved my father’s life.’
A heavy silence greeted this, but he was saved from having to say anything because someone knocked at the door and she leapt to her feet, carefully keeping her eyes firmly averted from his face.
It never paid to antagonise Dane Sutherland too much. He was a controlled person but when he was angry he could be immensely frightening. Once, when Dane was fifteen, the school bully had made the mistake, never again repeated, of making some sly, sneering remark about old Mr Sutherland. Dane hadn’t raised a finger. He hadn’t had to. He had just gone very close to him and said something which, hovering on the sidelines with two of her friends, she had not heard, but which had been enough to scare Tim Chapman into complete silence.
Thinking about it, she realised that he hadn’t bullied anyone again after that. In fact, when she’d last laid eyes on him he’d been a rather harassed father of four working at the garage outside town. Rumour had it that his wife took his money off him as soon as it landed in his hands and then doled it out to him as she saw fit.
She was almost relieved to see her landlady standing outside with her hands on her hips and a belligerent expression on her face. Almost, but not quite. The rent was, for once, late and money was, as always, thin on the ground.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past four days,’ Mrs Gentry said, in that voice of hers which sent shivers of apprehension down her tenants’ spines, even when they had done nothing wrong.
‘I’m a bit behind this month with the rent, Mrs Gentry,’ Suzanne said, taking the bull by the horns.
‘You could say so.’ She pursed her lips and said in a reedy voice, ‘There’s many who would jump at the chance of renting this bedsit, I don’t have to tell you that. I warned you when I took you on that there was a lot of competition for this place; there’s many who would stand for days queuing up outside to rent here. It’s a prime area to be—’
‘Oh, really.’
Suzanne had never seen anyone make the landlady’s mouth fall open, but Dane did.
He stood next to her, with his hands in his pockets and a cold smile on his lips.
‘And I,’ he continued icily, ‘have yet to meet anyone prepared to stomach the downright primitive conditions of this dump, which you have the nerve to glorify by calling a bedsit.’ Mrs Gentry was staring at him, disconcerted and alarmed and shuffling from one foot to the other.
‘There’s many—’ she began, with an attempt to recapture some of her authority, and he cut her off swiftly.
‘Who are willing to put up with this ghastly