The British Bachelors Collection

‘I think I’ll go downstairs and catch up on work.’ Damien turned away from her, walked towards his laptop, which he had left on the chest of drawers, and Violet was unaccountably tempted to rush into a frantic apology for having crossed the line.

‘Don’t,’ he threw over his shoulder with biting sarcasm, ‘wait up.’

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN DAMIEN HAD considered the challenge of setting his mother’s fears to rest and allaying her worry that he would not be able to cope with Dominic in her absence, he had envisaged a fairly straightforward solution.

He would take time off work to come to Devon. He would dispatch Violet after her week and, henceforth, he would assume the mantle of responsible son and dependable brother. How hard could it possibly be? He might have been a little lax in his duties over the years, but that was not for lack of devotion to his family. His work, every minute of it, was testimony to his dedication. They wanted for nothing. His brother had the very best carers money could buy. His mother enjoyed help on every front, from garden to house. She fancied roses? He had ensured that a special section of the extensive cultivated land was requisitioned for a rose garden fit to be photographed in a magazine. When she had been complaining of exhaustion only months previously, before the reason behind that exhaustion became known, he had personally seen to it that one of the finest chefs in the area was commissioned to cook exquisite meals and deliver them promptly so that she could be spared the effort of doing so herself. On the rare occasions when she ventured up to London, theatre tickets had been obtained, opera seats reserved, tables at the best restaurants booked.

Unfortunately, his clear cut route now to a successful outcome was proving elusive.

He adjusted his tie, raked his fingers through his hair and then hesitated. He knew that Violet was more than happy to meet him in the sitting room. After five days, she knew that house better than he did. How had that transpired? Because she was involving herself with his family. She and his mother appeared to have become best buddies. From his makeshift office in the downstairs library, he had a clear view of the back garden and had spotted them out there in the cold, slowly strolling and chatting. About what? He had casually asked her a couple of days ago and she had shrugged and delivered a non-answer. Was he going to push it? No. Ever since she had decided that it was her right to speak her mind, she had defied all attempts to smooth the strained atmosphere between them. In company, she was compliant and smiling. The second they were alone together, he was treated to the cold shoulder despite the fact that he had magnanimously chosen to overlook her outrageous, uninvited criticism of him.

He pulled the chair over to the window and sat down. At six-thirty in the evening, the room was infused with the ambers and golds of what had been a particularly fine and sunny day. In an hour, they would be leaving for a local restaurant. This had not been of his choosing. He would have been more than happy to have had a meal in, relaxed for ten minutes and then retired to catch up on his emails. But his mother had suggested it, to take her mind off the treatment which was due to commence at the weekend.

Or maybe, he mused darkly, Violet had suggested it...who was to say? His mind idly wandered over the events of the past few days. The clever way she had bonded with Dominic, involving him in the art preparation she was doing for her class, letting him guide her through some computer stuff for a website she wanted to set up to display the work of her more talented pupils. His mother had taken him to one side and confided that she had never seen Dominic so relaxed with anyone.

‘You know how wary he is of people he doesn’t know...’ she had murmured.

He didn’t, in actual fact. Which had only served as a reminder of what Violet had said about his communication skills.

He scowled and then looked up as the door to the adjoining bathroom slowly opened.

Immersed in her thoughts, with a towel wound turban style around her newly washed hair and another towel wrapped round her body, barely skimming her breasts and thighs, Violet was not expecting him. In fact, she didn’t register him at all sitting on the chair in the far corner of the room.

She was thinking about the past few days. Having a view on Damien and his relationship with his family seemed to have been the catalyst for the one thing she had been determined to avoid, namely involvement. She had told him what she thought about his relationship with his brother and, in so doing, she had unlocked a door and stepped inside the room. She hadn’t wanted to have opinions. She had simply wanted to do her time and then disappear back to her life. Instead, she was becoming attached and she had no idea where that was going to lead. Damien was barely on speaking terms with her. They communicated in front of an audience but once the audience was no longer around, the act was dropped and he disappeared into that office of his, only emerging long after she was fast asleep.

The bed which she had looked at with horror, which had thrown her into a state of panic because she had had visions of rolling over and bumping into him, had turned out to be as safe as a chastity belt. She was not aware of him entering the room at night because she was fast asleep and she was not aware of him leaving it in the morning because she was still sleeping.

She pulled the towel off her head and shook her hair, then she walked towards the bedroom door and locked it because you could never be too sure. Damien would already be downstairs. He would be making an effort.

Just like that, her mind leapt past her own nagging worries and zeroed in on Damien. She no longer fought the way he infiltrated her head. One small passing thought and suddenly the floodgates would be opened and she would lose herself in images of him. It was almost as if the connections to her brain were determined to disobey the orders given and merrily abandon themselves to reformatting her thoughts so that he played the starring role.

Without even looking in his direction, she was still keenly aware of everything he did and everything he said. There was no need to look at him because in her mind’s eye she could picture the way he looked, his expressions, the way he had of tilting his head to one side so that you had the illusion that whatever you were saying was vitally important.

He had stopped trying to corner his mother into making a decision about the house and whether it should be sold.

He had begun asking her about small things, like books she might have read and committees she belonged to in the village.

His conversation with Dominic was no longer a few words, some polite murmurings, a hearty pat on the shoulder and then attention focused somewhere else. Over dinner the evening before, she had heard him telling his brother about one of his deals which had run into unexpected problems with the locals because a vital factory had been denied planning permission, and the trouble they had taken to accommodate their concern.

Violet would rather not have noticed any of these details. She would rather he remained the one-dimensional baddy who barely had two words to say to her the second they were alone. She didn’t want to leave this house only to find herself wondering how the rest of their lives all turned out. She wanted to be able to put them all out of her mind and yet, the more absorbed she became in their dramas, the more difficult she knew that was going to be.

Still frowning, she dropped the towel to the floor and stepped towards the wardrobe. Her hair felt damp against her back and she lifted the heavy mass with one hand and, at that very moment, she saw him.

For a few seconds Violet thought her eyes might be playing tricks on her. She froze, her arm still raised holding her hair away from her body. Her brain refused to accommodate the realisation that he wasn’t safely downstairs but was, in fact, watching her as she stood in front of him, completely and utterly naked. When it did, she gave a squeak of absolute horror and reached for the discarded towel, which she wrapped tightly around her body. She was shaking like a leaf.

‘What are you doing here?’ She backed towards the bathroom door but, before she could make it to the relative safety of the bathroom, he was standing in front of her, barring her path.

For the first time in his life, Damien was lost for words. What was he doing there? Did it make any difference that it was his bedroom?

The thirty-second glimpse of her body had sent his libido into orbit. He was in physical pain and he fought to bring his senses back down to Planet Earth. The fluffy white towel was back in place, secured very firmly by tightly clenched fists, but in his mind’s eye he was still seeing the voluptuous curves of her body. He had caught himself idly wondering what she looked like under the dresses and the jeans and the jumpers. Whenever he had entered the bedroom to find her asleep, the covers had been pulled tightly up to her neck as though, even in slumber, she was determined to make sure that she kept him out. The first time he had seen her in jeans, his imagination had been up and running and her deliberate attempts to keep him at arm’s length had only served to increase its pace.

But nothing had prepared him for the mind-blowing sexiness of her curves. Her breasts, unrestrained by a bra, were far more than a generous handful. Her nipples were big pink discs that pouted provocatively and her stomach was flat as it planed downwards to the thatch of dark blonde hair between her thighs. All thoughts of self-denial were shattered in an instant. Every ounce of common sense that warned him against getting involved with a woman whose departure date from his life was any minute now, vanished like a puff of smoke.

‘You have to go,’ Violet said shakily. ‘I want to get dressed.’ She just couldn’t look him in the face. Her body was burning at the thought of his eyes on it. Even with the towel secured around her, she still felt as though her nudity was on parade.

‘I wanted to talk to you.’

‘We can talk...later...your mother and Dominic...’

‘Will be fine if they have to wait for us for a few minutes.’

He stood in front of her, as implacable as a solid wall of granite. Having made a concerted effort in the past few days to try and give her body as little option as humanly possible to feel any of that unnerving, unwelcome sexual awareness that seemed to ambush her at every turn, she was horribly aware of her racing pulses and the liquid heat pooling inside her. The silence stretched and stretched. She desperately wanted to get dressed and yet shied away from drawing attention to her nakedness under the towel.

‘I need to get dressed,’ she finally breathed and Damien stood aside.

Now that he had dropped all pretence of keeping life simple by not yielding to an attraction that seemed to have a will of its own, he could feel the stirrings of a dark, pervasive excitement coursing through him. Anticipation was a powerful aphrodisiac.

‘Of course,’ he murmured, stepping back further. ‘We can talk later.’ And they would.

Violet only realised that she had been holding her breath when she sagged against the closed bathroom door. Her breathing was thick and uneven. After days of standoff, she had felt those lazy eyes on her naked body and nearly collapsed. What did he want to talk to her about? She had heard the slam of the bedroom door, but she gave it a little while before poking her head out and establishing that the bedroom was empty.

She wanted to put that recollection of him sitting in that chair, looking at her as she blithely discarded the towel, to the back of her mind. Actually, she wanted to eradicate it completely, but it kept recurring as she got dressed and met the assembled party in the Long Room.

What had he thought of her? Had the reality of a body that wasn’t stick-thin repulsed him? She had returned to her uniform of baggy clothes, a shapeless dress over which she had thrown a thick cardigan. The thought of drawing any more attention to herself made her feel sick. At least there would be more than just the four of them for the meal out. Eleanor had invited some of her friends. Damien’s attention would be blessedly diluted. But, even amidst the upbeat conversation and the laughter, she was keenly aware of his eyes sliding over to her every so often. The conversation finally turned to Eleanor’s treatment, which was due to start the following day.

‘No one can tell me exactly how I’ll be affected,’ she confessed to one of her friends who had undergone a similar situation and was full of upbeat advice. ‘Apparently, everyone reacts differently...but it’ll be wonderful knowing that I’ll have Dominic and Damien by my side...’ She looked steadily at Damien. ‘You will be staying on for a short while, won’t you, darling?’

Damien smiled and gave an elegant, rueful and playfully resigned shrug. ‘My office is up and running. It’ll make a nice change looking through the window and not being treated to a splendid London view of office blocks...’

He did it so well, Violet thought, returning to her food. He was charm personified. Everyone was chuckling. There was general laughter when he launched into a wry anecdote about some of the urban myths surrounding a couple of the office blocks in the square mile.

When the laughter had died down, Eleanor turned to Violet. ‘You must hate me for keeping Damien all the way down here in this part of the world...’ she murmured.

Violet flushed. She hated those instances when she had felt horribly as though she was doing more than just play acting for a good reason, when she felt corralled into a corner from which she had no choice but to baldly lie.

‘Oh, I shall be busy...you know...the new term starts soon and it’s always hectic...’ she offered vaguely.

‘But you will come down on the weekends, won’t you, my dear? You’ve been such a source of strength...’

‘Well...sure, although...er...Damien mentioned something about having office stuff to do in London...in the coming weekends...’

‘Did I?’ Damien looked at her with a perplexed expression. ‘I’ve been known to go to the office occasionally on a weekend, but...’ he raised both hands in a gesture of amused surrender while keeping his eyes firmly pinned to Violet’s flushed face ‘...even a diehard workaholic like myself knows when to draw the line...so I’ll be down here unless something exceptional happens in London that requires my presence...’

‘So that means that you’ll be with us this weekend, my dear?’ Eleanor was looking keenly at Violet’s flushed face. ‘I shall probably need some help around the house and it’s so much nicer having someone around who knows us all rather than getting staff in. I do know you’ll be busy at school...so please say if you’d rather not come...perfectly understandable...’

Violet felt the weight of expectation from everyone around the table and she sneaked a pleading glance at Damien, who returned her stare with an infuriatingly bland expression. ‘I...’ she stammered. ‘I’m sure I should be able to...get away for the weekend...given the circumstances...’ She smiled weakly. Even to her own ears, it was hardly the sound of excited enthusiasm but Eleanor was smiling broadly and reached over to pat her on her hand.

‘Perfect! I shall probably be in a horizontal position most of the time but it should give you and Damien a really terrific opportunity to explore the village and the surroundings. I mean, you’ve hardly been out on your own since you got here and I may be an old lady but I’m not so old that I can’t remember what it’s like to be a couple of love birds...!’

Everyone laughed. Dominic said something salacious. Violet cringed.

She barely registered the remainder of the evening. She drank slightly more than was usual for her. By the time they eventually made it back to the house, it was after ten-thirty and her few glasses of wine had gone to her head.

‘You need water,’ Damien said, leading her towards the kitchen once Eleanor and Dominic had disappeared. ‘And paracetamol...you drank too much.’

‘Don’t you dare lecture me on how much I drank, Damien!’ She yanked her arm free of his supportive hand, stumbled, straightened and stopped to glare at him. ‘How could you?’

Damien wondered whether she was aware that she was slurring her words. Ever so slightly. She had also, somewhere along the line, hurriedly done up her cardigan but misaligned the buttons and her hair was all over the place as she had insisted on opening her car window for a spot of fresh air.

‘You’re going to have to sit down if you’re going to accuse me of something.’ He led her towards a kitchen chair, sat her down and fetched her a glass of water and some tablets. ‘Now...’ he positioned his chair squarely to face her and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs and staring at her with earnest concentration ‘...you were about to start an argument...’

Violet was mesmerised by his eyes. He hadn’t shaved for the day and there was a dark shadow that promised stubble in the morning. She wanted to reach out and touch it. The temptation was so strong that she had to sit on her hand to suppress it.

‘So tell me what I’m guilty of,’ Damien prompted, ‘but only when you’ve finished looking at me. I wouldn’t want to rush that...’

Violet reddened and immediately looked away. ‘So now I’m going to be coming here at the weekend,’ she said in a rush. The feel of his eyes on her and the faint woody smell of his aftershave were doing disastrous things to her equilibrium, cutting a swathe straight through the cool detachment she had managed to maintain over the course of the past few days. After his reciprocal coldness, this sudden attention was as dramatic on her nerves as an open flame next to dry tinder.

‘I do recall you agreeing to something of the sort.’ Damien was enjoying her attention. Enjoying the way her eyes skittered away from his face but then were compulsively drawn back to stare at him. He realised how much he had disliked her coolness towards him. They might have found themselves sharing the same space for very dubious reasons, but proximity and their need to pretend had invested a certain edge to what they had. A little wine had now made her lower her defences and he liked that. A lot. He leaned a little closer, as though he didn’t want to miss a single word of what she was saying.

‘Are you telling me that you didn’t mean it?’ he asked in a vaguely startled voice, as though this angle had only now popped into his head. ‘Perhaps I misconstrued the relationship you have with my mother. You two seemed to be getting along like a house on fire...’

‘That doesn’t have anything...to do with...anything...’ Violet said incoherently. ‘I like your mother very much. That’s why I...why it’s such a mistake...’

‘Honestly not following you at all...’

‘I was only supposed to be here until the end of the week...’

‘You were. And you’re free to go once your week here is over.’ He sat back, angling his body to one side so that he could extend his legs. He linked his hands behind his head. ‘You have a life happening back in London. Of course, I know that I could keep you hanging on, doing what I ask of you, because you would do pretty much anything to save your sister’s skin, but...’ He stood up and walked, loose-limbed, to fetch himself a bottle of water, which he drank in one go while he continued to stare at her.

‘But?’ Violet was still having trouble peeling her eyes away from him.

‘But that could prove a never-ending situation. So once we’re back in London, feel free to jump ship. I’ll sign a guarantee that your sister won’t be prosecuted. She will be free as a bird to roam the Spanish coastline doing whatever takes her fancy. And you can return to your life.’

‘And what would you tell your mother?’ Faced with the prospect of returning to her life, Violet was now assailed by a host of treacherous misgivings that this much-prized life, the one she had insisted was there, waiting to be lived, was not quite the glittering treasure she had fondly described. She didn’t quite get it, but there had been a strange excitement to being in Damien’s company. When she was around him, even when, as had been the case over the past few days, she was keeping her distance, she was still always so aware of him. It was as if her waking moments had been injected with some sort of life-enhancing serum.

‘That’s not your problem. You can leave that one to me.’

‘I’d quite like to know,’ Violet persisted. She should be grabbing at this lifeline. She knew that. ‘I’m really fond of your mother, Damien. I wouldn’t want to think...I wouldn’t want her to...’

‘Be unduly hurt? Become stressed out? Think badly of you? All of the above? Funny, but I wasn’t getting the impression that you were overly bothered. After all, five seconds ago you were accusing me of deliberately blindsiding you by not announcing on the spot that you wouldn’t be back here for weekends...’

‘I thought you would want to start bracing your mother for...you know...the inevitable...’

‘The day before she begins what could be gruelling treatment?’

‘Well...’

‘Dominic has become attached to you.’

‘Yes...’ Just something else to think about, just another link in the chain she would have to melt down when she walked away from his family.

‘When my mother begins her treatment she’ll probably be too weak to help with my brother...’

‘He doesn’t need help as such. I mean, he has his carers for the physical stuff...’

‘But has always relied on my mother for everything else. If she’s in bed, she won’t be able to provide all of that.’

‘Which could be where you step in,’ Violet urged him.

Damien flushed darkly. This conversation wasn’t meant to be about him. Her bright eyes were positively glowing with sincerity.

‘I can’t be on call twenty-four seven. I still have a business to run, even if it’s from a distance.’

‘You wouldn’t have to be on call twenty-four seven. Dominic’s perfectly happy doing his own thing. He’s really got into that website I asked him to try and design... Besides, I’ve noticed...’

‘What? What have you noticed?’

‘You didn’t like it the last time I spoke my mind.’

‘Maybe I’ve realised that it’s about time I stop trying to think of your mind as anything but a runaway train,’ Damien mused under his breath.

‘I don’t think that’s very fair.’ All signs of tipsiness had evaporated. She felt as sober as a judge. Her hands were clammy as she rested them on her knees to strain forward.

‘You speak your mind. Maybe I find that a refreshing change. So don’t spoil the habit of a lifetime now by going coy on me.’

‘Okay. Well, I’ve noticed that you’re making a bigger effort with Dominic. I mean, when we got here, you were hardly on speaking terms with him.’

Considering he had asked her to speak her mind, Damien made a concerted effort to control his reaction to that observation. ‘Go on,’ he muttered tightly, through gritted teeth.

‘You never really directly talked to him. You talked at him, then you turned your attention to someone else or something else. And yet,’ she mused thoughtfully, ‘your mother says you two used to be so close when you were growing up...’

So that was what they talked about, Damien thought tensely. They discussed him. He angrily swept aside the sudden undercurrent of guilt that had been his unwelcome companion over the past few days and rose to his feet.

‘It’s late. We should be heading up,’ he said smoothly.

‘We? Aren’t you going to work?’

‘I’ll see you up to the bedroom first. My mother would be horrified if you missed your footing on the stairs because you had a little too much to drink and I wasn’t there to do the gentlemanly thing and catch you as you fell...’

‘You’re annoyed with me because of what I’ve said...’

‘You’re entitled to have your opinions.’

‘I never wanted to.’ She rose a little clumsily to her feet and turned in the direction of the kitchen door.