A Suitable Mistress

Husband? Drinking problems? This was the first that Suzanne had heard of any such thing. In fact, she was sure that Mrs Gentry lived on her own, probably having nagged her husband into the ground.

‘I’ll have the rent for you by the weekend,’ Suzanne said, aware that she would have to cope with the redoubtable Mrs Gentry all on her own, once Dane had gone, and not willing to stir up too much bad feeling just in case she found herself without living quarters. The woman, worse luck, was right when she said that places were hard to get in London, and even this bedsit, appalling though it was, was better than some she had seen.

‘It’s already late,’ Mrs Gentry pointed out, on safer ground now. ‘I’ll overlook that, though, if I can have it in my hands no later than Saturday midday.’ She stepped back slightly and then said with a sly smile, ‘However, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to raise the rent from next month. Inflation, you know.’ She told Suzanne how much extra she would have to pay, and it wasn’t until she had straddled off, in search of another victim, that Suzanne sat down on the sofa with a groan of despair.

‘I shall never be able to afford it,’ she said. ‘Where am I going to get that money from?’ Especially now that I no longer have a job, she added silently to herself.

‘It’s hardly a vast sum of money,’ Dane pointed out reasonably, and she glared at him with loathing. Of course, she wanted to say, it wasn’t a vast sum of money, but it was just enough to make her standard of living very uncomfortable indeed if she was forced to find it out of her now non-existent salary.

‘Not to you,’ she told him sourly. ‘You already have vast sums of money, but I haven’t and it’s a great deal to me.’

‘Why don’t you ask for a pay rise?’

‘A pay rise?’ Her eyebrows flew up and she laughed drily. ‘If you must know, that would be very difficult, since as of today I have joined the ranks of the unemployed. ’ She stood up and fetched both empty mugs and walked towards the kitchen, throwing over her shoulder. ‘But that’s no problem. I shall simply have to dig into my minuscule savings account and make do.’

It wasn’t something that she wanted. She wasn’t holding onto her savings for anything in particular, but she felt more cushioned knowing that the money was there, even if it wasn’t a great deal. She regarded it as money which she might need for a rainy day. It was a blow to think that the rainy day would turn out to be a bedsit in London and Mrs Gentry’s grasping hands. But what choice did she have?

‘How did you manage to lose your job?’ he asked, when she returned to the little sitting room.

‘Isn’t it about time that you left? Consider your condolences personally delivered.’

She ignored the self-righteous little voice in her head and dug inside her handbag for the remainder of the chocolate, which she ate slowly, not caring what he thought of her eating habits. Or her weight problem, for that matter.

‘Answer my question.’

‘Oh, all right!’ she snapped, looking at him. How easy everything was for him. Born into wealth, blessed with looks and intelligence. She disliked him sitting there trying to drag conversation out of her when she would much rather have preferred solitude, a little time to consider her position—a little time, the self-righteous voice told her, to feel sorry for herself all over again.

‘I had an argument with my supervisor,’ she admitted. ‘And I won’t bother to pretend that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t like the way that he was doing things. There were no controls and he preferred going down to the pub to trying to get things into order. I told him so and he sacked me on the spot. I had to leave as I was only a temp.’

A ghost of a smile flitted across her face as she remembered the encounter. Mike Slattery was an odious little man with a sharp, ratlike face and a tendency to issue orders. It had been wonderful to give him the benefit of her opinions, even if it had cost her her job.

‘You were always outspoken,’ Dane drawled, surveying her from under thick, dark lashes. ‘Always ready to rush in where angels feared to tread. Which,’ he continued, ‘doesn’t solve the problem of what you’re going to do now.’

Suzanne shrugged and contemplated the empty chocolate wrapper ruefully.

‘I’ll manage.’

‘And continue to live here?’

She followed his scathing glance round the room and said angrily, ‘You’d be surprised what a palace this is in comparison to some places that I’ve seen! At least the roof is one piece and there’s a carpet of sorts on the floor.’ A far cry from her father’s cottage. Was Dane thinking that too?

She looked down, blinking rapidly. Her father had been so upset when Martha Sutherland had announced that the cottage would revert to the house in due course. A gorgeous summer retreat for weekend guests, she had told him, patting her blonde hair and rearranging the decor in her mind’s eye.

Where had Dane been when her father had needed him? Or maybe he had known of his stepmother’s intentions all along, and had silently gone along with them, letting her do the dirty work while he built empires in America.

‘You can’t continue to wallow in grief for the rest of your life,’ he said, looking at her, unperturbed by the outrage on her face which his remark engendered.

‘How dare you? I am not wallowing in grief!’

‘I understand,’ he continued calmly, ‘how upset you must have been by your father’s death, but allowing your life to crumble is not going to bring him back.’

Suzanne’s mouth thinned and she wanted to hit him. No one had told her anything like that. At the funeral they had all been so kind and understanding. Even Mr Barnes had sympathised when she’d told him that she was going to leave the company and move down to London.

Her friends had understood as well. She frowned. She hadn’t contacted any of them, she realised, since she had left Warwickshire—at first because she literally hadn’t been able to bring herself to talk to anyone, and then later because time had elapsed and she had just not got around to it. Most of them had grown up with her. They had all been there at the funeral. She would get in touch with them, she decided, soon.

‘Life goes on, Suzie,’ he said, refusing to release the topic even though her stormy blue eyes were telling him to. ‘You can’t continue holding onto your anger and grief, while life slides past.’

‘Stop preaching to me!’ She got up and restlessly walked to the bay window in the sitting room and stared outside for a while. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ she told him, turning around and half sitting on the window-ledge, with her arms folded and her face mutinous. ‘I’m getting on with my life and everything is just fine!’

‘You are not getting on with your life,’ Dane said, with the same infuriating calm, as if he were talking to a wilful child in need of appeasement. ‘You gave up your course, you now no longer have a job down here...’ His grey eyes raked over her and she flushed, knowing what he was going to say next and resenting it already. ‘And I needn’t tell you the obvious: you’ve looked better.’

That brought tears of hurt anger to her eyes, even though she could hardly disagree with what he said.

He paused, thoughtfully, head cocked to one side as though trying out an idea in his head and wondering whether it would fit. ‘You are going to leave this place,’ he said decisively. ‘You are going to come back to my apartment in London, where I am now living, until you find somewhere more salubrious to live. You are going to work for one of my London subsidiaries and you are not going to chuck it in for any reason whatsoever.’

Suzanne stared at him in complete silence and then said, in as civilised a tone as she could muster, ‘You must be mad.’

‘You might just as well pack now and leave with me. It shouldn’t take long. I don’t see too many personal possessions strewn around.’

‘I am not coming anywhere with you!’ she said in a high, unsteady voice. ‘I’m not going to accept charity from you.’ The way my poor father did, her tone implied. And just look at what he got for it, she thought. He died an unhappy man, thanks to your wretched stepmother. Your family was responsible, like it or not.

‘You are going to do just exactly as I tell you,’ he said, standing up.

‘Why? Why should I?’

‘Because I say so.’

‘And your word is gospel?’ She laughed with sarcasm, and he reached out and gripped her arm.

‘I know you want to blame someone for your father’s death,’ he ground out, ‘and I know that you have decided that I fit the bill. Fine. It’s a misconception which you will grow out of with time. But I have no intention of letting you stay here a minute longer and that’s that. So start packing your bags. You’re coming with me.’

‘I don’t intend to be bullied by you!’

‘Someone has to bully you into doing something,’ he said impatiently. ‘If your brother was here instead of in Australia the task would fall to him.’

‘Task? Task? So I’m a responsibility now, am I? Poor little Suzanne Stanton who has no control over her life.’

‘That’s right.’

She glared at him and had the sinking feeling that arguing would be like trying to make a dent with a wooden spoon in the Rock of Gibraltar. He was immovable. He had waltzed in here, decided that she was unfit to take control of herself and had immediately concluded, probably because he felt guilty, that the onerous task fell to him.

‘I don’t need your pity,’ she said bitingly, ‘or anyone else’s for that matter.’

‘You’re a child, Suzie,’ he told her by way of response. ‘You don’t know what you need. You should thank God that I have returned to take you in hand.’

CHAPTER TWO

A BULLY. That, she decided, was what Dane was. An overgrown bully. Suzanne sat next to him in the car, simmering with resentment, and he calmly ignored it all and made polite conversation, asking her questions, prising answers reluctantly out of her.

The very worst thing was that she knew that she was behaving like a child. His proposition might have gone against everything ingrained in her, everything that told her that he was part of the family that had mistreated her father, but his offer was better than anything that she could come up with herself: a roof over her head and a job.

And the memory of Mrs Gentry’s face when she’d told her that she could keep her awful little bedsit afforded her quite a bit of silent amusement. She glanced across at him in the dark car and felt a shiver of alarmed apprehension. He was, to himself at any rate, doing her a favour and there was nothing, she told herself, that she should be alarmed about, but she had the uneasy feeling of being a fish in a net—a very large net at this point in time, with lots of room for manoeuvre, but a net nevertheless.

He looked across at her and she dropped her eyes quickly.

‘How long did Tom stay after your father’s funeral?’ he asked casually. He had, she noticed, no qualms at all about referring to her father’s death. Most people studiously avoided mentioning it, as though it were a strangely taboo subject.

‘Only a fortnight,’ she replied, looking out of the window at London passing slowly by her—crowded streets, brightly lit shops, a sense of hurry everywhere. ‘Marian couldn’t come over. She’s eight months pregnant and six months ago they told her that she couldn’t travel. He wanted to get back to her as soon as he could.’

She thought regretfully of her brother’s hurried stay in England. It would have been comforting to have him around for a bit longer, although things between them had changed slightly anyway. He was married now and had been for three years.

He had sent their father a ticket to Australia so that he could go to the wedding. She remembered with deep fondness the state of great excitement that had preceded the departure. Anyone would have thought that he had been picked to fly to the moon.

But marriage had taken Tom away a bit from her. They still chatted easily, and wrote to each other often, but his attentions no longer focused on his little sister as indulgently as they had. He had a wife now—a wife whom she had never met although the pictures of her promised someone very friendly—and a baby on the way.

‘He asked me to go back with him,’ she said suddenly, leaning a bit against the door so that she could look at Dane’s averted profile.

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘It seemed like the end of the world and beyond.’ At the time she had felt that to go that far away would be somehow tantamount to desertion. ‘Besides,’ she added, terminating the conversation because she could see it leading to another sermon on how far she had let herself go, simply because, after all these months, she still couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to do anything, however hard she tried, ‘I hate huge spiders.’

‘I suspect there’s probably more to Australia than huge spiders,’ he said drily, half smiling, and she had that unpleasant, falling feeling which she could remember as a teenager, when he had smiled at her in a way that made her feel as though he had access to all her deepest thoughts.

‘Why did you decide to go to America?’ she asked, changing the subject, and his face hardened.

‘I had my reasons,’ he said in his usual, controlled voice, but there was an edge of granite there that hadn’t been there before.

‘What reasons?’ she asked with interest, and he frowned and glanced across at her.

‘I see that tact still isn’t one of your strong points,’ he said with lazy amusement.

‘Why should you feel free to ask questions about my life and I can’t do the same about yours?’

‘Because you’re a child and children shouldn’t ask too many questions.’ He laughed but she didn’t laugh with him.

‘What you’re saying is that, since I should be indebted to you, I should just bow my head in silence and accept what the master tells me without asking anything in return? ’

‘That’s rubbish,’ he told her calmly. ‘But, if you really want to know, I went away to make my fortune.’

‘I thought that your father left you everything?’ He had drawn the lines and she knew that she was overstepping them but he was right, tact never had been one of her strong points, and besides, she had no intention of allowing him to think that she had to be subservient simply because her father had worked for his.

She was grudgingly aware that she was being slightly unfair in this generalisation, but every time she thought of him she thought of his stepmother and the blood rushed to her head with angry force.

‘He left me the estate and a fair-sized inheritance, but control of the company went to Martha.’

‘I’m surprised that she didn’t ask you to take over,’ Suzanne said. He had run it virtually single-handed for the four years before his father died.

‘Oh, there were a lot of things that Martha wanted,’ he said coolly, and this time the warning in his voice left her in no doubt that he did not intend to develop the conversation further. ‘But we don’t always get what we want in life, do we? I decided to make my own fortune in America.’

‘And you did.’

‘And,’ he said, turning to her briefly, ‘I did.’

They had been driving through a very exclusive part of London for the past few minutes. The sort of place that made a very convincing show of being in the country somewhere. Lots of trees and houses hidden from public sight by walls and hedges and long, swirling drives.

The car turned into one of the long, swirling drives and her eyes widened as she took in the proportions of the house. It was huge. A great Victorian building that had been converted into apartments.

No wonder the pitiful increase in rent with which Mrs Gentry had threatened her had seemed a paltry affair to him.

There was a security guard on the ground floor, sitting at a desk and surrounded by various strategically placed plants and a few pieces of discreet furniture here and there. It looked like someone’s lounge.

‘Are you allowed to have guests staying with you?’ she asked in a whisper as they took the lift up to his floor, and he looked at her with a mixture of amusement and irony.

‘This entire block of apartments belongs to me,’ he said. ‘An investment purchase made two weeks after I left the country.’

‘You knew you would come back?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that held no warmth, ‘I knew that I would come back. The only question was when.’

She looked at him, vaguely feeling that there was something here, something not being said, that carried a wealth of hidden meaning, but she couldn’t put her finger on it and he was not about to elucidate. He would never reveal anything unless he wanted to. It was what, she suspected, made him so formidable.

She followed him out of the lift, along the thick white carpet, and it transpired that the entire floor of the building comprised his apartment.

Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a lounge, a kitchen, all beautifully furnished, ready and waiting, she thought, for Dane Sutherland when he decided that the time was right to return.

Suzanne dropped her little battered case in the lounge and looked around her with amazement.

‘No wonder you thought that the bedsit was dingy,’ she said, turning to face him.

‘The bedsit was dingy,’ he drawled. He had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbows so that his powerful forearms were exposed, and she ignored the sudden quickening of her pulses.

‘Well, it’s certainly an eye-opener to see how the other half lives,’ she said honestly, and he frowned with impatience.

‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said, not moving from where he was standing, tall, muscled and disturbing at the other end of the room. ‘You’re going to be living here. Your rooms will be quite separate from mine, and I shall be out of the apartment most of the time so we probably will only see one another in passing, but when we do cross paths I do not expect to be bombarded with a litany of badly veiled insults. Do you understand?’

‘There’s no need to talk to me as though I was a child,’ Suzanne said, mouth turned down.

‘Then you’ll have to get out of the habit of acting like one.’ He walked towards her, picked up her three suitcases and said, over his shoulder, ‘I’ll show you to your room.’

He’d been right about her being separate from him. Her room, which also included a bathroom and another small room off it which had been converted into a sitting room with a television, was at the opposite end of the block.

She looked around her and said, with her back to him, fingering the wonderful patchwork bedspread, which looked as though it had leapt straight out of the pages of an interior decoration magazine, ‘How much rent would you like me to pay?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ There was impatience in his voice and she spun round.

‘I have to pay you something,’ she answered stubbornly. ‘I can’t live here for nothing.’

‘I don’t want your money,’ he grated. ‘I’ve known you since you were in nappies. Do you think I expect you to pay me for the privilege of being provided with a roof over your head?’

‘No more charity from your family,’ she muttered, meeting his hard grey eyes levelly.

I’ve learnt a lesson from my father, she thought. What’s given with one hand is taken with the other.

‘There’s no point in letting pride get in the way of judgement, Suzie,’ he said, not angrily but as though he was explaining something to a child.

‘Without pride, we are nothing.’

‘And from what book did you pick up that little gem?’

She flushed angrily, thinking that she had read it somewhere and it had seemed like a damned good piece of wisdom at the time.

‘I’ll pay you what I paid Mrs Gentry,’ she told him. ‘I know it’s not a quarter of what it’s worth, but it’s all I can afford. Don’t think that you can ease your conscience over my father’s treatment by letting me live here free of charge.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! Buy something for the place once a month. Would that satisfy your pride?’

She gave it some thought and nodded. ‘All right,’ she conceded, lifting her chin, and he ran his fingers through his hair.

‘Now would you like something to eat? Or would the food stick in your throat?’

Was he laughing at her? There was no smile on his face, but it was difficult to tell with him.

‘Would you like me to cook?’ she offered, and he raised his eyebrows sceptically.

‘Can you cook? I remember when you were thirteen you cooked something for Tom and me and it was a bit of a struggle to get through the meal.’

‘Very funny.’ Why did he still treat her as though she was a child? she wondered crossly. Rescuing her from her unpleasant bedsit, talking to her as though her wits were very slightly scrambled.

‘What was it you cooked?’ He was still amused at the memory, and she followed him into the kitchen, watching the lean build of his body, the way he moved with panther-like grace, every movement silent and economical.

‘Roast chicken,’ she replied, determined not to act the sullen child any more than she could help. ‘It burnt.’ Everything had burnt. She had turned the oven too high. The only salvageable item had been the gravy. She could remember how mortified she had been, infatuated with this dark, devastatingly handsome university graduate, clumsy and thirteen, with long, gangly limbs and long, unruly hair which she had tied up because she had thought that it made her look older.

‘Your father was a superb cook,’ he said, extracting various things from the fridge after he had made her sit down. ‘When you were very young, he used to try out dishes on your brother and me. At the time we thought most of them a bit odd, but they tasted excellent.’

He wasn’t looking at her. He was busy doing something that involved chopping and opening of cans, but he expected a reply. She sensed rather than knew that.

‘Yes, he was a wonderful cook,’ she agreed, feeling that lump in her throat again. She fished inside her handbag and took out a block of chocolate, doing it surreptitiously. She wasn’t accustomed to talking about her father. She had bottled up her emotions inside her ever since his death and it was painful to voice her memories, even when the questions asked were so detached.

She lapsed into her memories and licked her fingers absent-mindedly after she had finished eating the chocolate. She was only aware that Dane was looking at her when she glanced up, her eyes dry, and she said defensively, ‘I’m going to go on a diet.’

He didn’t say anything, which annoyed her more than if he had. He just nodded to two of the cupboards, asked her to set the table, and then returned to what he was doing.

Suzanne got up, feeling instantly lumpy after that forbidden piece of chocolate, and began putting plates and cutlery down.

‘I know that I’ve put on a bit of weight,’ she said into what she thought was a critical silence. ‘It’s simply that I’ve got into the habit of snackıng recently.’ Well, for months, she said to herself. Eating all the wrong things and justifying it by telling herself that she would start a sensible diet tomorrow. She tried to neaten her hair with one hand and decided that it was an impossible task. Her hair never did what it was told.

‘There’s no need to justify yourself,’ he said, bringing food to the table. He deposited two saucepans, one of which contained spaghetti and the other a red sauce smelling of garlic. He had opened a bottle of wine and he poured them both a glass, then sat down so that he was directly facing her.

‘I wasn’t justifying myself,’ Suzanne began, confused. ‘I was simply explaining...’ Her voice trailed off and she helped herself to some of the pasta and the sauce. ‘I happen to like the way I look,’ she continued.

Why did he insist on making her feel so defensive and indignant? she wondered. Why couldn’t he have left her to muddle along to her own devices? She didn’t need his help to pull herself together. She would have done it quite completely on her own. After a while. Why did he have to come along and feel sorry for her? She didn’t want to be an object of pity. He didn’t owe her anything and she wished that he had just left her alone. Just because he had known her since she’d been in nappies didn’t mean that he now owed her something.