An Unforgettable Man

It was only later, as she grew more mature, that she had recognised the possible meaning of those nocturnal visits her stepfather had paid to Laney’s room, the real foundation of the intense closeness which had existed between them.

She shuddered now to recall how easily she could have fallen into the same trap as her stepsister. Fortunately, she had been far too terrified of her stepfather to take him up on his offers to come to her room and ‘talk’ to her.

‘Let me help sort out this problem you and Laney are having. You’re sisters now and you should love each other. I want you to love each other,’ he had insisted softly. ‘Then I can love both of you. You mustn’t quarrel with Laney, Courage. She’s older than you. You must listen to her, let her help you.’

The cruel, manipulative nature of her stepsister, which had made her own early teen years such a misery, could, she acknowledged now, have been not so much a character defect as a direct result of the other girl’s relationship with her father. Courage had no proof that he had been sexually abusive to Laney, but what she knew now as an adult, coupled with her own younger self’s intuitive fear and distrust of the man, made her suspect that he could have been.

And her feelings were not just a whim, not just her jealousy over the way he had taken over her mother, shut Courage out; she was positive of that.

Her mother’s second marriage was the one thing she and Gran never discussed. Her grandmother was of the old school and believed that if you couldn’t say something good about a person then you shouldn’t say anything at all.

Courage had been so shocked when she had heard the news of her mother’s death, but in reality her true mother—the mother she had loved and who had loved her—had disappeared in the early months of her second marriage.

‘No… I don’t have any siblings,’ she repeated firmly.

‘No husband… No partner… No children.’

He was making statements rather than asking questions—after all, she had already supplied all that kind of information on the application form she had filled in, prior to being summoned for this interview—but Courage still responded as though he were questioning her.

‘Isn’t that rather unusual… in these days?’

Courage focused on him. What was he implying? That she was lying—concealing the truth? Or did his question go deeper, probing the foundations of the most personal aspects of herself?

‘Unusual, but not unknown… Not in the hotel trade,’ she responded calmly.

It was, after all, true. The hours she worked and the constant travelling were just two of the reasons why it wouldn’t have been easy for her to form a close, emotional, sexual relationship with a man; up until she had moved back to her grandmothers her ‘home’ had been a room in whatever hotel complex the company had posted her to, and her ‘commitment’ had been the major and most important commitment in her life—the one she had made to her career. But when it had come to making a choice between that career and her grandmother…

Her employers had told her that if she should change her mind at some stage in the future they would be more than happy to welcome her back, and had in fact pleaded with her not to go—especially Gunther, the eldest son of the Swiss family who owned the hotel chain.

‘It says on your application form that you left your previous post for personal reasons.’

‘Yes,’ Courage agreed. ‘I wanted to return to England to be with my grandmother, who is suffering from a… heart condition. She… she brought me up when… when my mother remarried and I…’

‘You what? You feel you owe it to her to repay what she did for you? That’s a very old-fashioned ideology, if I may say so.’

‘I’m a very old-fashioned person,’ Courage re- sponded coolly, sensing the cynicism behind his words. ‘But in actual fact no, it isn’t duty that brought me back. I happen to love my grandmother and I want to be with her. Left to her own devices, she’s all too likely to take on too much… to overtax herself and—’

‘Is her condition treatable?’

‘There is an operation, but the waiting-list is very long and she isn’t a priority case. Private treatment is out of the question, but if Gran can be persuaded to take things easy, preserve her strength…’

‘You do realise that you’re vastly over-qualified for this job, don’t you?’

‘I need to earn my living…’

‘Well, you certainly won’t earn much of one stacking supermarket shelves… Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of outfit you’re wearing right now. Chanel, isn’t it?’

‘A copy. I had it made when I took a business trip to Hong Kong,’ Courage corrected him gently. ‘Hotel management doesn’t pay anything like enough to buy Chanel.’

She had intended the words only as a small rebuke, a subtle warning that his comments were not either welcome or necessary, but the long, thorough look he gave her coupled with his Laconic, ‘No, it doesn’t,’ made the hot, angry colour sting her skin.

There were a variety of ways of interpreting his remarks, none of them particularly charitably inclined towards herself, and all of them variations on a theme. It was pretty obvious, she decided, that she was not going to get the job.

Without saying as much, Gideon Reynolds was giving her the distinct impression that he was trying to get under her skin and manoeuvre her into some kind of angry outburst with his subtle insults. Why, she had no idea. Perhaps he was just that kind of man, and that was the way he liked to enjoy himself. Well, if he did that was his problem, but there was no way she was going to allow him to manipulate her.

As she waited for him to dismiss her and tell her that the interview was over she was frantically trying to work out how many part-time jobs—working behind bars, stacking supermarket shelvcs and doing whatever else might come along—she could find the time and the energy to take on. At the moment…

‘How does your grandmother feel about the fact you’ve given up your career to come home and look after her?’

His question surprised Courage into looking directly at him, something she had been very careful not to do, she recognised unwillingly. His eyes were flint-grey, hard like the coldest northern seas, threatening that immense danger could lurk beneath their deceptively calm surface.

‘She doesn’t know. She thinks I’ve taken an extended holiday to think about my future career path. That I may give up my international job because I don’t want a permanent position in Hong Kong.’

She saw the way his eyebrows lifted and gave a small mental shrug to herself. She had already as good as lost the job; she might as well tell him the truth.

‘Aren’t you worried that someone might tell her the truth?’

‘No, why should I be? Besides, no one knows,’ Courage admitted.

The friends she had made locally as a girl had either moved away now, to pursue their own careers, or were married with young, demanding children—far too busy to question deeply what she was doing. And as for worrying her grandmother by telling her… Why should they do so? Her grandmother was a very well-liked person—a very well-loved person.

‘And if you don’t get this job, what then? Back to filling supermarket shelves?’

He seemed to have a thing about that; perhaps because he considered it was the kind of work he would never demean himself by doing. Well, she didn’t consider it demeaning—far from it.

‘There are far worse ways of earning a living,’ she pointed out fiercely. ‘And, as far as I am concerned, the kind of people who consider honest, physical labour something demeaning, something to be mocked, are just not worth knowing.’

Well, she really had burned her bridges now, Courage acknowledged, to judge from the look he was giving her, but she didn’t care. In her book the kind of people who were really to be despised were like her stepfather—outwardly publicly feted, and acclaimed, well-respected businessmen, who in reality were little more than thieves, preying on the vulnerability and, yes, sometimes the ignorant material greed of others. For all she knew, Gideon Reynolds, too, could be like them. Outwardly lauded and respected but inwardly, secretly…

It was true there had been nothing in the financial press to suggest that his business success was based on anything other than flair and nerve; nothing to say that he had prospered through the same kind of fraudulent dishonesty as her stepfather. But there was still something about him that made her almost glad that she was not going to get the job. A sense of…not fear, exactly… More… more apprehension … A feeling of being mentally circled by the mind of a predator.

Nervously she licked her lips. Now she was letting his overwhelming male sexuality cause her imagination to run wild, but even if she dismissed the discomfort there was still something intimidating and unnerving about the man which, coupled with that irritatingly elusive flicker of recognition, made her feel not just wary and on edge. It was as though… as though…

‘How much would it cost for your grandmother to have her operation privately?’

Courage stared at him, a small frown pleating her forehead. Why was he asking her so many questions on a subject which could surely be of only limited interest to him?

‘Her GP wasn’t specific. There wasn’t really any need,’ Courage hedged.

There hadn’t really been any need. Once he’d told Courage what the minimum cost of the operation would be she had known there was simply no way she could finance it. She had some savings, a small nest-egg, but nothing more.

‘How much?’ she was asked a second time, the male voice which so far had been unexpectedly soft for so formidable a man suddenly sharpening and hardening, betraying just a hint of the high-octane power its owner could potentially release when necessary.

‘Upwards of ten thousand pounds,’ Courage told him quietly, swallowing down the huge lump of anxious despair that filled her throat every time she thought of the vast sum of money which stood between her grandmother and good health.

‘Ten thousand… Umm… Not an impossible sum for someone to raise these days… Presumably your grand- mother owns her own home and—?’

‘Yes, but she has already used it to purchase an annuity,’ Courage interrupted him.

She had had enough of his questions. She had come here to be interviewed for a job—a job she was one hundred and ten per cent certain she was not going to get.

‘And you have no one… no family… no connections who could help?’

‘No, no one,’ Courage told him angrily.

The very thought of asking either Laney or her step-father for help of any kind—even if she had known where to contact them—made her mouth curl in a bitterly painful smile. Her stepfather had hated her grand-mother, had tried every trick in the book to persuade her mother to change her mind about allowing her grandmother to take charge of Courage and to get her back under his own roof, but fortunately her mother had stood firm.

Courage had often wondered in the years since she herself had grown up if her grandmother had perhaps guessed, sensed in some way the danger her daughter-in-law’s second marriage had posed to Courage. Courage’s mother had been a pretty, fragile woman, who had liked parties and socialising. The kind of woman that these days it seemed impossible to believe had ever existed; the kind of woman who needed a man in her life to ‘look after her’.

A discreet tap on the door heralded the arrival of the PA.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he apologised to his boss. ‘Sir Malcolm will be arriving shortly. The ‘copter pilot has just radioed in to say they’ll be landing on time.’

‘Yes, thank you, Chris.’

As Gideon Reynolds started to stand up, Courage did the same. Her interview was obviously at an end, and no doubt all those unexpected and unwelcome questions about her grandmother had simply been a means of idling away a few spare minutes of time before his visitor arrived. Well, she hoped it had amused him to see how the other half lived, Courage decided angrily.

No doubt the ten thousand pounds that was so unobtainable to her that it might as well have been ten million was something he probably spent in a weekend, entertaining a girlfriend. More, she decided sourly, since he was obviously such an expert on Chanel couture clothes. But not such an expert that he had recognised that hers was a copy.

‘Tell me, Miss Bingham,’ she heard him asking unexpectedly, ‘what would you do if you were anticipating the arrival of a VIP and you learned from the helicopter pilot that not only was he late picking up his passenger but that the reason he was late was because the machine was being serviced when he arrived to fly it? Your VIP guest, by the way, is a rather irascible person, who has only agreed to attend the meeting you have arranged on the understanding that he will not be kept waiting.’

‘Initially I would recall the helicopter—no appointment, no meeting, no matter how essential, is so important that someone’s life should be put at risk, and if the machine was still in the process of being serviced there would be no guarantee that it would not develop some sort of problem. I would then contact the passenger, apologise for the delay and assure him that he would be picked up within fifteen minutes.’

She saw the way his eyebrows rose and added, with more self-assurance than she actually felt, ‘If he was being collected from a helicopter pad then it would have to be within range of a national helicopter service. I would obtain a substitute machine and pilot from my own contacts—if I regularly used helicopter transport I would, of course, already know of a reliable back-up service. I would make sure I was on hand the moment the VIP arrived, with both an apology and an explanation, and I would follow this up later, having first of all made sure that he was still able to leave at the originally stated time.’

‘And the original cause of the delay, the mistimed service, how would you deal with that?’

‘That would depend on whether or not I was responsible for its mistiming…’

‘And if you were?’

‘I wouldn’t be,’ Courage told him crisply. ‘Because I would have already made sure that the machine was ready for the pilot to collect at the stated time—and if it wasn’t I would have had a substitute serviced machine there for him.’

‘Very efficient.’

‘I try to be…’

He was already walking over to the door and Courage followed him, coming to an abrupt halt as, unexpectedly, he turned round.

There was less than a metre between them…

She had already seen that he was tall—at least six feet four since she had had to look up at him—and that the physique beneath his subtly tailored jacket possessed the kind of powerful muscle-structure that no desk-bound man could ever possibly have. This man worked out in a gym and he played sport—to win, Courage suspected, and roughly.

Through the polar whiteness of his cotton shirt she could actually see the dark shadow of his body hair. A small shudder ran through her, heat zigzagging through her body like lightning, searing along her cheekbones. She could feel her face burning with mortification as he looked at her.

There had been a time in her life when the sight of a bare male chest covered in body hair had been enough to make her want to curl up and die with embarrassed, shocked awareness of such sexuality—and her own reaction to it. But that had been a long time ago and she had got over it… Just as she had got over…other things.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘N-n-n-nothing,’ Courage lied. ‘I—’

‘Don’t you want to know whether or not you have got the job?’

He was playing with her, taunting her. Angry sparks flashed in Courage’s eyes.

‘You said yourself that I was over-qualified for it.’

‘Which means that I’d be a fool not to snap you up, doesn’t it? When can you start?’

As she fought to control the jumble of confused thoughts and emotions stampeding wildly through her, Courage was still aware of her apparent new employer’s watchful scrutiny of her. It was as though he was looking for some kind of specific reaction, the angle of his head, his jawline as he studied her… The angle of his head?

She frowned, desperately trying to catch hold of the tail-end of the vague wisp of dark memory which still eluded her. It was no use, it was gone. But she had the job, and that was what she ought to be concentrating on right now, not some uncomfortable feeling that there was something somehow familiar to her about her new boss.

Familiar but not familiar-pleasant, or even familiar-indifferent, she acknowledged half an hour later as she drove home in her grandmother’s ancient Morris. No, the kind of familiarity which had stirred so elusively through her was the kind that carried with it un-comfortable feelings of fear and anxiety.

Frowning, Courage changed gear for a sharp bend. There was no point in worrying about it. Wherever it was she had seen him before it would come back to her sooner or later. And, after all, she didn’t have to like the man; she simply had to work for him.

Ideally, he might not be her choice of employer, but that was hardly important; what was important was being able to be close to her grandmother. She was only sixty-seven—not old at all, really—and if Courage could just persuade her to take things more easily until she could have the operation…

The salary Gideon Reynolds had offered her had been astonishingly generous, far more than she had been earning—when he had mentioned the figure he would be paying her her mouth had dropped slightly.

‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her. ‘Isn’t it as much as you already earn?’

‘It’s more,’ Courage had told him honestly—and had caught the quickly suppressed flicker of surprise in his own eyes. ‘It seems a lot to pay someone for the amount of work involved.’

‘A good workman is always worthy of his hire,’ Gideon had responded smoothly. ‘And I promise you won’t find that the job is any sinecure.’

‘I shouldn’t want to,’ Courage had countered promptly.

What was it about the man that made her feel as though he was constantly challenging her, constantly probing…? Constantly testing her, almost…

As she turned off the main road and into the lane which led to her grandmother’s cottage her frown deepened. Why had Gideon Reynolds been so surprised by her honesty? Surely he wouldn’t have employed her if he had felt that he couldn’t trust her?

Stop worrying about him, she advised herself mentally, and start worrying instead about what Gran’s going to say when she hears your news.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU’VE done what? But why? You’ve always said how much you love your job… The travel, meeting different people, the—’

‘Yes, I know, Gran, but things have changed,’ Courage told her, frowning as she saw the small set of step-ladders standing next to the large old-fashioned dresser which dominated one wall of her grandmother’s kitchen.

‘What are those doing there?’ she demanded accusingly.

‘What does it look like? It’s time that dresser had a good clean. The awful weather stopped me getting on with my usual spring cleaning, and it’s high time I got down to it…’

‘Gran, you haven’t been climbing those steps? You know what the specialist said,’ Courage scolded her worriedly.

‘Yes, I know,’ her grandmother agreed grimly. ‘But if you think I’m going to spend the rest of my days being wrapped in cotton wool and treated like a semi-invalid… I’ve got a minor heart condition, that’s all…’

If only that were the case.

‘And if you think I’m going to let you give up your job because of me…’

‘I’m not,’ Courage was quick to reassure her, mentally crossing her fingers as she added untruthfully, ‘The hotel trade has been hit very badly by the recession, Gran. I didn’t want to say anything before and worry you but… Well, there’s been a lot of talk about enforced redundancies…’

‘Is that why you got that part-time job at the supermarket?’ her grandmother questioned her.

‘Yes,’ Courage told her. Originally she had told her grandmother that her three-month stay with her would be too much for both of them if they spent every second in one another’s company, and that her part-time job would give them both a bit of space.

‘This new job will give me a chance to broaden my experience. I’ll be in full charge of the organisation of the household for all his social and business events. Apparently, one of the reasons he bought the estate was to use it for business purposes; his Japanese customers in particular enjoy that kind of thing.’

‘What is his business, exactly?’ her grandmother asked her.

‘His company designs parks and gardens on a large scale rather than a small one. You know the kind of thing—municipal open spaces, hotel grounds, atriums. He does a lot of business in the Middle East—especially Kuwait. Apparently he’s an expert in “greening” arid areas, and his assistant was telling me that he’s been consulted by the authorities in Australia and California following the fires they’ve had there. He has an office in London but apparently he’s presently in the process of moving everything down here.’

‘Mmm… Well, from what I’ve heard he’s an extremely shrewd businessman, and very single-minded when it comes to getting what he wants. When does he want you to start work?’

‘Next Monday. I’ve got an appointment with him on Friday afternoon to sign my contract of employment and go over the way he wants me to work. Apparently he’s flying out to New York on Monday morning, so he won’t be there, and he won’t be back until later in the week.’

‘Mmm… Well, if you’re sure it’s what you want…’

‘I’m sure,’ Courage told her firmly.

It was just as well she had left herself plenty of extra time to make the appointment, Courage acknowledged wryly, as the Morris had stubbornly refused to start. She had had to ring for a taxi and then book the Morris into the garage for a service. It was just as well that a car was one of the perks of her new job.

She noticed that Chris Elliott’s smile was only slightly warmer as the PA opened the front door to her.

‘He’s in the study waiting for you,’ he told Courage. ‘His new Californian appointment has been brought forward. Congratulations on getting the job, by the way.’

‘Thank you.’ Courage responded to his smile with one of her own—one of equally tepid warmth.

From what Gideon Reynolds had told her her job ran parallel to Chris’s, not either below or above it, but she suspected that the PA would try to manoeuvre himself into a slightly superior position to her if he thought he could. She had no wish to get involved in any kind of power struggle with him, but neither was she going to allow him to manipulate her.

It was a warm spring day, and Courage had opted for a slightly more casual but still businesslike outfit than the one she had had on for her initial interview: a soft, spotted silk culotte suit, in brown with cream spots, and a toning cream short-sleeved jacket. Like her ‘Chanel’, she had had it made in Hong Kong.

As she knocked briefly on the half-open study door, and then walked in on Gideon’s command, she noticed him looking briefly at her legs in an automatic male reflex gesture. Nothing was particularly personal in the brief look he gave her, but nevertheless it made her wish she had worn a longer skirt—and tights. Not because of his look but because of her own reaction to it. She was acutely conscious of the tiny frisson of unwanted sensation that ran quickly across her skin.

‘Please sit down,’ Gideon commanded her. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of time. My Californian appointment has been brought forward and I’m flying out tonight instead of on Monday. Here’s a copy of your contract. If you’d like to read through it…’

Dutifully Courage took the document from him, reading it as quickly as she could. She had just got to the bottom of the penultimate page when she stopped abruptly, lifting her head in astonishment.