A Suitable Mistress. CATHY WILLIAMS
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was something dark and menacing behind them. ‘And you never answered my question,’ he said, his features relaxing. ‘Do you dislike me personally or do you simply dislike what I represent?’
‘Do you care?’
‘I’m interested,’ he answered lazily, sidestepping the question, which, she knew, had been foolish anyway.
‘I don’t dislike you,’ she said, trying to sound more sophisticated. ‘Although, I admit that I don’t find your type attractive.’
‘And what type is that exactly? Using your vast knowledge of men as a starting point.’
This time she was certain that he was laughing at her. He was a mere nine years older than her but in terms of experience it was tantamount to a lifetime and she knew it. As he did.
‘Cruel,’ she said, ‘arrogant, too good-looking, too cut off from feeling any real emotion about anyone.’
‘You have no idea what emotions I feel,’ he murmured, sipping some of his coffee and looking at her over the rim of the cup.
She didn’t add the real reason that she disliked him—a dislike that she had nurtured over the years and one that had become more real to her with the passing of time, rather than faded—an overheard conversation, a few passing words before the door closed on her red-faced humiliation.
‘You’ll have to watch your chauffeur’s little girl, Dane.’ The merry tinkle of Martha’s laughter. She had a way of laughing that made it seem as though she was a vastly superior being. ‘She’s got a teenage crush on you.’
Suzanne had been hidden from sight, a loose-limbed girl of sixteen on her way to deliver a message from her father.
‘Don’t concern yourself over that,’ Dane had said. His voice had been indifferent, and although she hadn’t been able to see him she had imagined him strolling across to the patio doors, looking outside, his thoughts on things that had very little to do with an irritating adolescent and her fanciful illusions.
‘But darling,’ Martha had said, ‘you’re a very attractive man—’ her voice had been warm and amused ‘—and a child like that probably finds you irresistible. She peeps at you whenever you’re around. You must have noticed that she snatches every opportunity to visit the house when she knows that you’re here.’
Dane hadn’t answered, and Martha had said, which had been the final blow of mortification, ‘Besides, you must remember that she’s only the chauffeur’s daughter. You mustn’t let her get ideas above her station.’
And that had been that. Suzanne had turned away and heard the door shut before she had even made it down the corridor into the hall. The message she had been sent to deliver had flown out of her head completely. It had left a nice, tidy spot, just the right size for her disillusionment to set in.
‘And I hold you responsible for the way my father was treated,’ she told him bitterly. ‘You may not have been around, but you owed it to the people who worked for your father to see that they were treated properly, instead of just vanishing off the face of the earth and leaving your stepmother in charge. Did you even know that people who had worked for your father for years at the house were dismissed only weeks after your father died?’
She was gathering momentum now and was astounded when he said evenly, betraying no emotion whatever, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘You...you did?’
‘I made sure that they were all financially compensated. Very generously compensated.’
‘How on earth did you find out?’ Suzanne asked, frowning and trying hard to work out how a man thousands of miles away could have discovered that. Did he have some mysterious crystal ball in his New York penthouse, which he looked into every time he wanted to see what was happening on the other side of the world?
‘I have my ways.’
‘Spies, you mean?’
‘Nothing quite so dramatic.’ A shadow of a smile flitted across his dark features. ‘Someone there has been keeping an eye on things for me. He told me as soon as Martha began firing old hands.’
‘Why didn’t you return yourself to sort it out?’
‘It would have been impossible.’
Which, to her ears, implied that he hadn’t been bothered; but then, if he had been so unbothered, why would he have made sure that his father’s men were compensated? Why?
‘So you did know about the way Martha treated Dad, then?’ she threw at him in an accusing voice, and he shook his head.
‘As far as I knew, he was one of the ones who remained in her employment and, as I told you, my offer of money was amicably but firmly returned to sender. I will admit, though, that I was told of...changes, for want of a better word. Certain facts were reported back to me.’
‘What facts?’
‘Nothing that you need concern yourself with.’ His tone of voice did not invite lively debate on the subject. He had thrown her, she thought, a few scraps of information, but he had no intention of explaining any more to her. Probably because he felt no need to launch into any lengthy explanations to a girl who was, after all, beneath him in social standing.
‘What did you do with your father’s possessions?’ he asked suddenly, and she scowled.
‘There weren’t many. The few big things he had accumulated over the years, I left with a friend in Leamington Spa. I brought the smaller things to London with me.’
She looked down into her coffee-cup. There was a locket with a picture of her mother inside, a stack of old letters which she had written to Santa Claus over the years, and which he had assiduously kept in a scrapbook, all her report cards from school, a box of photographs, the watch which old Mr Sutherland had given to him on his fiftieth birthday and which he had worn every day of his life from the moment he had received it. She had packed them neatly into a small cardboard box and had kept them in her cupboard in the bedsit.
She hoped that he wasn’t looking when she wiped a tear away-from her cheek. She didn’t want him rushing across to her with a load of phoney sympathy and a handkerchief.
‘Now,’ he said, and there was, thankfully, no indication that he had noticed her brief lapse, ‘shall we discuss the job?’
‘There’s really no need—’ she began, thinking that this sounded like a rerun of what she had said when he had offered her a room in his apartment.
‘I realise that,’ he cut in abruptly. ‘Just as I realise what a bitter pill it is for you to swallow, taking anything that’s handed to you from a member of my family. But this isn’t the act of charity that you’d like to believe. I have several companies over here, all bought with some of my father’s inheritance two years ago. I took them over when they were in receivership and they’re all now thriving.’
He had bought companies in England after he had moved to America? Why would he have done that? And if he had done that, why bother to go to America at all?
‘You’ve been back to England since you went away?’ she asked, perplexed.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And still you never came to the house to see your stepmother?’
‘No.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Don’t,’ he said with a tinge of impatience, ‘ask so many questions.’
‘Yes, sir!’ she muttered under her breath, and he shot her a crooked smile.
‘Good girl. Now, there’s a position vacant in one of the companies for an assistant accountant How far had you reached in your studies?’
Suzanne tucked her feet up underneath her and leant forward, resting her elbows on her knees. Her long hair fell in an untidy