Mistress for a Night

Mercifully, she’d been too busy wandering round the shops planning her future with Jason to even think about contacting her friend to tell her what had happened and that she’d changed her mind about going with them to New York after all.

Kate and Robin Ansley, Sue’s parents, wouldn’t turn their backs on her, she knew that. Though at the moment they were both in New York. Robin had been there for weeks, setting up the American branch of his London-based advertising agency, and now Kate had flown out for a couple of weeks to make the final decision about where the family should live.

They had always welcomed her into their close and loving family, and would do everything they could to support her through this; she knew that. And Sue would fight her corner to the bitter end.

CHAPTER THREE

GEORGIA came back to the present with a jolt. She felt numb all over, the rapid playback of the past stunning her brain. And the way Jason was looking at her now, with contempt and scarcely veiled hostility, told her that Harold had never owned up to the truth of what had happened that evening all those years ago.

Maybe he’d meant to, but had never raked up enough courage. Jason could be frighteningly forbidding when he wanted to be.

But she’d made her peace with her mother’s husband a long time ago. He’d flown out to New York to break the news of her mother’s death in a car accident the day after her funeral. She hadn’t wanted to see him, not after what he’d done, but his altered appearance had shocked her so much she had listened to what he’d had to say.

His wife’s death, and the manner of it, had made him take a long, hard look at himself, and he’d hated what he’d seen. He hadn’t been able to apologise enough for the lies he’d told on that traumatic evening, the damage he’d done to her, and ultimately to his wife.

It had been hard to forgive him, but, faced with someone as obviously tormented by guilt as he was, she’d had no option but to try. On his return to England he’d written often, and occasionally she had replied, and when she’d returned to the UK he’d travelled to Birmingham once a month to give her lunch.

She’d cancelled their last date, though. She’d been so busy with her presentation. Now she wished she’d made time. He’d always seemed so lonely, pathetically pleased to have her company. He’d never known about her pregnancy, and that had made things easier because not knowing, he couldn’t mention it.

Jason was tall, over six feet, and she had to tilt her chin up to look him in the face. There was nothing there to see but naked dislike. Did he ever wonder what had happened to their baby? Did he even care? Had Vivienne told him about the miscarriage, or had neither of them bothered to mention the subject?

He’d made no attempt to contact her in all these years. He’d washed his hands of her, and the child she’d been carrying.

She never allowed herself to think about the miscarriage, the lost baby; it hurt too much. She closed her eyes briefly, to hide the pain, and felt his gaze on her like a brand, burning through her eyelids. She snapped them open again, and stared into the hard, hostile eyes, pushing the past firmly away. She didn’t know this man who had ignored her existence, the fate of their child. And didn’t want to.

The change in her stunned him. He was staring, he knew he was, but could do nothing about it.

This new version of the plump teenager he remembered was stylishly slender, yet perfectly formed, wearing an elegantly simple cream-coloured sweater, which almost certainly carried an Italian label, over narrow-fitting designer jeans. The woman she had become was light years away from the dumpy, frumpy fifteen-year-old he had first met at Harold and Vivienne’s wedding ten years ago.

The first real and deep compassion he’d felt in all of his twenty-three years of living had twisted sharply inside his guts as he’d looked at her then, wearing an awful blue satin dress that had emphasised every bulge, a fluffy confection of blue flowers set incongruously and precariously on her mouse-brown cropped head, and carrying her mother’s bouquet of white lilies in hands that visibly shook.

There’d been a look of bewilderment in her huge eyes that had made him want to take care of her, shelter her from life’s knocks. Especially when Vivienne, elegant in a darker blue silk, had raised a perfectly arched, perfectly derisive eyebrow whenever her hapless daughter made a gauche remark or clumsy movement.

Vivienne had had no time for her daughter, he had sensed that from the start, and later he had learned why.

But Georgia’s uncomfortably awkward smile—when he had eventually persuaded her to give one—had been beautiful, trusting and innocent, her eyes clinging to his as if he’d been a rock in a raging sea.

Now there was no compassion in him, not for her. She had killed any care he had had for her as surely as she had killed their child. He’d felt sick to his soul when Vivienne had told him of the abortion.

Besides, from the look of her, she needed none. And her smile—should she ever decide to thaw that haughty expression—might still be as beautiful as sunrise, but it would leave him cold.

She broke the long silence. ‘I need the remote control thingy to open the garages.’ Car keys dangled from one slim finger. She’d done something to her hair. Long now, cascading to her shoulders, it shimmered and gleamed in the overhead lights. It looked as soft as the costliest of silks.

Hooding his eyes, he strode towards her, held out a hand. ‘I’ll garage it for you and bring in your luggage.’

‘No.’ Instinctively she enclosed the keys in the palm of her hand. ‘No one touches that car but me.’

So there was an area where she was vulnerable. He shrugged. What did he care? He followed her out, and the vehicle in front of the closed garage area did raise an eyebrow. No wonder she was possessive.

Powerful, sexy, beautifully styled, its origins were as obvious as the classy sweater she wore. Either her job paid mega-bucks or she had a rich lover.

From the look of her, and what he knew of her, from what he remembered of the way she was in bed, he’d lay odds on the sugar daddy. He activated the remote control, then tossed it to her and instructed tightly, ‘Lock up after you. You’re in your old room. Supper in ten minutes; Mrs Moody held it back.’

He’d been watching the double doors slide open as he spoke, and now he turned to look at her again. Her hair shimmered under the security lights and her eyes were dark amber pools that said, Arrogant bastard! as clearly as if she’d spoken the words aloud.

He acknowledged the challenge, the confrontational gauntlet thrown down by those unwavering golden eyes with a brief dip of his head, a tight smile, then strode back into the house.

She could find her own way. Whatever else she might have forgotten—her morals, her responsibilities towards the new life she had once carried and, yes, to him—she could hardly have forgotten the way to the suite of rooms that had been hers. And she could carry her own bags.

Politeness cost nothing, but now he wasn’t even prepared to give her that. Had she been as unsure of herself, as outwardly quashed as he remembered, then he might have been able to manage a stilted pretence of polite behaviour. But this new sassy, super-confident creature with the gleam of battle in her eyes could expect nothing from him.

After the funeral, after he’d satisfied himself that she was prepared to take her new responsibilities seriously, Georgia Blake was on her own.

Her old room. Georgia flung it a look of deep distaste.

She had always hated the little-girly pinks and peaches Vivienne had chosen for its decor, the frills and flounces everywhere and the delicate white and gold furniture that looked as if it might fall to pieces if she went anywhere near it. She had felt like a lumbering elephant in a fairy grotto, but had been too unsure of herself, too cowed by her mother’s resentment of her existence, to object.

If Jason had possessed any sensitivity at all he would have asked Mrs Moody to make a bed up for her in one of the several guest rooms.

Thankfully, she would only have to make use of the room that had been the scene of her humiliation and anguish for a couple of nights at most. Thankfully again, a quick inspection revealed that all of the things she’d left behind on that terrible evening had been turfed out of the drawers and hanging cupboards. Mrs Moody would have binned them on her mother’s instructions.

She tossed her overnight bag on the frilly pink bedcover and stood in front of the mirror, running her fingers through her untidy mane of hair.

‘Mouse’ was a thing of the past. After the trauma of losing everything—Jason, their baby, the right to show her face at Lytham, to have anything more to do with her mother—her hair had grown because she simply hadn’t bothered to have it cut, and the puppy fat had dropped off her because she had only been able to pick at her food.

A final fleeting glance told her she’d do. Jason would have to take her as she was. Vivienne had always insisted they dress for dinner. How well she remembered having to climb out of her uniform of baggy tops that hid a multitude of sins and deck herself in the frilly frocks her mother deemed suitable for a young girl.

Or perhaps Vivienne had deliberately picked out those awful fussy dresses because she’d known they made her daughter look a fright, the contrast with her own elegant perfection all the more pointed.

She wouldn’t let it hurt her. Why should she? Vivienne was dead, the past was dead, and Jason—despite appearing as handsome and virile as ever; even more so if she were to be painfully honest—might just as well be.

Being at Lytham again brought back far too many uncomfortable memories, and if what Jason had said about her inheritance was true then she’d get rid of the place faster than it took her gorgeous, powerful new car to get from nought to sixty!

She found him in the breakfast room, and he hadn’t changed what he was wearing, either. So the old order had altered. Which, she thought, raking her eyes over the lean, powerful frame enhanced by his casual jeans and sweater, was a pity. She would have taken perverse pleasure from annoying him, underlining her confident independence.

‘Ready to eat?’ Did she have to look at him as if they were squaring up for the fight of the century? He lifted the lid of the steaming casserole Mrs Moody had brought through five minutes ago, along with a clutch of jacket potatoes, and found the enticing aroma repelled him.

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