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The way he said it caused Chas to stir uneasily. ‘I meant afford my services, naturally,’ she said.
‘That too.’ His grey gaze rested on her mouth.
‘What—? Are we talking about the same thing?’
His lips twisted. ‘I don’t think so. I happen to know Thomas Hocking is—how to put it—between mistresses at the moment, and I’ve got the distinct feeling he’d be very happy to afford you in that capacity.’
‘Let me go!’ Chas said furiously and struggled to free herself.
All she achieved was to lose control of her side of the sheet as he swept it aside, although his action did at least reveal that he was wearing a pair of sleep shorts. At the same time it left her completely exposed to him again, and he made the best of it.
‘Mmm…’ he murmured, studying her from head to toe and all the curves, the expanse of pale, skimpily-draped-with-cranberry-silk skin, in between. ‘Love the legs. Definitely mistress material.’
‘Who…who are you?’ she stammered as she tugged her nightgown down as far as she could.
‘Tom Hocking, ma’am. No one calls me Thomas, except Birdie.’
Chas gasped as all sorts of things fell into place. One of them being her sheer stupidity. Who else but the man controlling the purse strings would have what definitely looked like the master bedroom? Why hadn’t she thought of that? Because she’d had a mental vision of an elderly profligate uncle or something! Which was not to say that this Thomas Hocking wasn’t profligate. His intentions only minutes earlier would have certainly fallen into that category.
‘Of all the…’ she said with deep outrage. ‘How could you do this?’
‘Do what? Fall asleep peacefully in my own bed, on my own, until you climbed into it? That’s all I recall.’
Her breasts heaved. ‘No it’s not! You misrepresented yourself, you won’t believe me and you’re keeping me here against my will!’
He opened his mouth then appeared to change his mind. ‘If you got to the bathroom safely, how come you ended up here?’
Chas winced. ‘It is a strange house, and with no lights it’s not so surprising. Anyway, I don’t have a great sense of direction and I didn’t have my watch on.’
He stared at her. ‘Would that have helped? What is it? A luminous compass as well as a watch? A miniature GPS?’
‘Very funny,’ Chas said stiffly. ‘No, but it does help me tell my right hand from my left.’
‘You got to your—mid-twenties,’ he hazarded, ‘without being able to tell your right from your left? That certainly explains it.’
Chas set her teeth at the irony in his eyes. ‘It can happen, believe me.’
He looked as if he wanted to say you learn something every day!, and ruffled his hair. ‘Well, where do we go from here, Aphrodite?’
‘So no one calls you Thomas?’
‘I can’t remember the last time anyone did, apart from Birdie. Why?’
Chas wrenched her wrist free and tumbled off the bed. ‘Where do we go? Back to Brisbane first thing, for me at least. I don’t appreciate being made a fool of like this!’ She grabbed her robe and sponge bag and ran from the room.
Breakfast was a help-yourself affair.
Juice and coffee were set on a buffet table as well as cereals, yoghurt, fruit and a frosted jug of milk. Several silver-lidded warming dishes were lined up and there was a basket of rolls and bread.
The only person in the dining room when Chas entered was Rupert. There was one word that summed up Rupert Leeton, Lord Weaver, and that was diffident. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, he was of medium height, he could most easily disappear in a crowd but, despite his obvious reticence, he was nice.
A good match for Vanessa Hocking? Chas had wondered. Perhaps only time would tell.
She’d calmed down somewhat since her encounter with Tom Hocking but she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable towards any of the Cresswell Lodge inhabitants, so she murmured a cool greeting.
Rupert, however, rose courteously to pull out a chair for her and offered to fetch her a glass of juice.
‘Thank you.’
‘As a matter of fact I feel like saying that to you!’ Rupert placed a glass of orange juice in front of her. ‘Vanessa’s like a new person since your session last night. They were getting all bogged down and it was definitely getting on Tom’s nerves,’ he confided. ‘But your ideas have breathed new life into the old girl!’
‘Ah, Tom,’ Chas murmured, and flicked the bridegroom a reproachful glance.
‘Of course!’ He tapped his forehead. ‘You have no idea who Tom is, do you?’
‘She does now.’
Chas froze as Tom Hocking strolled into the room and poured himself a cup of coffee at the buffet. He sat down opposite Chas with it. ‘Don’t you, Ms Bartlett?’ he added.
Chas swallowed. ‘Yes.’
Tom Hocking smiled and turned to Rupert. ‘What’s this you’ve been telling her about me being a womaniser, as well as all sorts of weird things?’
Rupert grimaced and attempted several garbled explanations. ‘It was the Thomas that did it,’ he finished. ‘It sort of took us by surprise, and then—the girls were just feeling a bit highly strung, I suppose.’
‘Is that so?’ Tom murmured.
Chas studied him. In contrast to Rupert, who was clean and crisp, Tom Hocking had dark shadows on his jaw. He was in his socks, he wore faded jeans and a stained khaki work shirt but—this surprised her—he was not unimpressive.
‘Lord Weaver,’ she said coolly, rather than dwelling on the physical properties that made Tom Hocking stand out even in his work clothes, ‘didn’t start it. He defended you if anything.’
‘Thank you, Rupe,’ Tom said with obvious irony. He rose, picked up his cup and said to her, ‘I’d like to see you in my study when you’ve finished your breakfast, Ms Bartlett. It might be a good idea to get someone to show you right to the door.’
He strolled out.
Rupert clicked his tongue. ‘Sorry about that. It obviously led to a misunderstanding.’
Chas started to say something about a monumental understatement but confined herself to murmuring, ‘You could say so. I get the feeling he’s not an easy person to handle at the best of times, however.’
Rupert considered and shrugged. ‘He does have the final say around here. He is very successful.’
‘Perhaps he needs more than a cup of coffee for breakfast?’ she suggested with a tinge of frivolity she was far from feeling.
‘Oh, he would have been up and about hours ago. He always breakfasts first then goes out to the horses.’
‘I see. One of those?’
Rupert smiled. ‘In a word.’
Chas finished her breakfast but not with great enjoyment. Then she made a point of cleaning her teeth before asking her way to Tom Hocking’s study.
He was on the phone to, it emerged, Birdie Tait. He waved her to a chair and continued his conversation, giving Chas ample time to look around. Like the dining room the study was panelled and, like the rest of the house, was beautifully furnished with antiques—a marvellous old oak desk, two winged chairs with linen covers and a lovely array of art on the walls.
So impressed by the art was she, she got up to have a closer look and didn’t realise he’d finished his phone call until he said her name.
‘Oh!’ She moved back to the chair and sank into it.
They stared at each other across the desk for a long moment.
He was now showered and shaved and wore khaki trousers and a blue sweater with military-style patches on the elbows and shoulders. Unfortunately, Chas discovered, these clothes did not prevent her from seeing him in her mind’s eye wearing nothing but a pair of sleep shorts.
To her further confusion, from the light of pure devilry in his grey eyes, she had no doubt that his mind’s eye had swept away her blue jeans and apricot jumper and he was seeing her in only a flimsy slip of a nightgown.
She prayed that she wouldn’t blush but she did, and it got worse than that. Her nipples tingled, causing her to move abruptly.
There was no way he could have known this had happened to her, not beneath a bra and jumper, but she got the feeling, as his eyes narrowed, that he did. Her awkward movement must have given her away.
‘Yes, well,’ he drawled, ‘you remind me of a long-legged, skittish filly, but what have you to say for yourself this morning, Ms Bartlett?’
Chas drew on all the composure she possessed and remembered her determination to eschew all mention of the events in his bed. ‘I don’t think this is a very good idea, Mr Hocking,’ she said briskly. ‘I don’t believe we could work together, so—’
‘It’s my sister and my mother you’d be working with,’ he interrupted. ‘Incidentally, Birdie has cleared up a lot of the confusion. Apparently she left all sorts of messages for me regarding your metamorphosis into a woman that I never got.’
‘Never got?’ Chas frowned.
‘You will find, should you accept this commission, that it helps to be a horse around here.’ This time he studied her hair caught back at the nape of her neck.
Chas blinked.
‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘all the best treatment is reserved for the horses. Other things, like answering machines, mobile-phone messages and the like get short shrift. Someone borrowed my mobile phone; someone accidentally deleted the message tape on the answering machine. I must admit, I just forgot to check my emails. Birdie is at her wits’ end with us.’
Chas shrugged. ‘I’m not surprised. But that actually makes me more sure that this would be an impossible wedding to organise, Mr Hocking, and—’
‘Why? You appear to have slayed my mother and my sister with your ideas.’
Chas hesitated. ‘That’s the other thing. They did lead me to believe you—uh—might not appreciate the costs involved.’
He smiled somewhat grimly and named a figure.
Chas’s eyes widened and her lips parted.
‘That obviously surprises you, Ms Bartlett. Not enough?’
‘Plenty,’ Chas said, then bit her lip.
He lay back in his chair. ‘I may run a tight ship, which they like to interpret, occasionally, as me being cheap, but I wouldn’t expect Vanessa to marry Lord Weaver without all the trimmings.’
Chas was lost for words.
‘Look…’ He sat forward. ‘I apologise for everything that led up to you feeling you’d been made a fool of last night. But it was me they were taking the mickey out of, not you.’
‘And you didn’t feel you were making fun of me when—?’ She stopped exasperatedly on the thought that she hadn’t planned to mention that.
‘When I was…? Talking about mistress material?’ he suggested. ‘Actually—’ his eyes glinted ‘—I was serious, and that was a compliment.’
‘Well, that depends entirely, Mr Hocking,’ Chas said, ‘on your reputation with women. Was your family maligning you there, do you feel?’
‘I don’t know what they said.’ He still looked amused.
‘That you’d sloped off last night, with a woman, no doubt,’ she elucidated.
His amusement changed to injury. ‘I did not! Well, I guess there was a female involved, actually. Two, as it happens.’
Pure blue scorn beamed his way.
‘I was called out, Ms Bartlett,’ he continued, ‘to help with a difficult foaling. Both the dam and a filly foal survived and are doing well now.’
For a moment Chas wished she could fall through the floor. ‘So…so why did they say that?’
He shrugged. ‘I may have forgotten to mention it to anyone.’ He waited for a moment then said softly, ‘Don’t you have a sense of humour, Chas?’
‘I have a very well-developed sense of humour normally,’ she said slowly. ‘Climbing into a strange man’s bed seems to have dampened it somewhat.’
‘Why don’t we start again?’
She swallowed.
‘You may have carte blanche within the limits of your budget. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this but Rupert’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Wickham, will be attending. So will several other lords and ladies. I’m quite sure this wedding will find its way into some English magazines and papers, not to mention Australian ones.’
Chas clicked her tongue. ‘That’s blackmail.’
He said nothing.
‘But I do run a business,’ she added a little helplessly.
He nodded in serious agreement.
‘Oh, all right!’ Chas was goaded into flinging at him.
He sat back and made a steeple of his fingers. ‘I thought it might be.’
‘Look here, if you’re as successful as they say you are, why take exception to my commercial instincts?’ Chas challenged.
‘I’m not. It’s your other instincts I’m wondering about.’
‘Such as?’
‘How much…’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘How much of your decision was based on curiosity? A mutual curiosity, I do admit, but one stemming from your inability to tell your left hand from your right last night?’
