A Scandalous Engagement

‘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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