London's Eligible Bachelors: The Unlikely Mistress

‘Could you show me again?’ She had hardly heard a thing he was saying, and she wished he would just go. But the last thing she needed was for all his expensive paintings and books and furniture to suddenly ‘walk’—just because she hadn’t had the sense to lock up properly.

‘Do you want me to write it down for you, step by step?’ he questioned sarcastically.

‘That won’t be necessary!’

This time she listened as if her life depended on it.

‘Understand now?’

‘Perfectly, thank you very much.’

He shot a glance at his watch and gave a small click of irritation. ‘You’ve made me late now. I haven’t been late in years.’

‘Well, you could have shown me all this last night, couldn’t you?’

Yeah, he supposed he could have done—it was just that they had opened a bottle of wine during dinner and had then sat and finished it in the sitting room. Bad idea. And Sabrina had kicked her shoes off in front of the fire, perfectly innocuously, but Guy had been riveted by the sight of those spectacularly slender ankles and had found it difficult to tear his eyes away from them. He had never quite understood why the Victorians had considered the ankle such an erogenous zone, but last night the reason had suddenly hit him in a moment of pulse-hammering insight.

He usually did paperwork on Sunday evenings, but last night it had lain neglected. And now he was late.

He glowered. ‘I’ll be home around seven.’

She looked at him expectantly. ‘Will you be eating supper? Or going out?’

He had said that he would meet up for a drink with Philip Caprice—the man who was now working for Prince Raschid—but he couldn’t really leave her alone on her first full day in London, could he?

He sighed. ‘No, I won’t be going out.’

‘Then—’ she suddenly felt ridiculously and utterly shy ‘—maybe I could cook you supper tonight. I’ll buy the food and everything—as I said, that can be my contribution towards my upkeep.’

He hid a smile, unwillingly admiring her persistence, as well as her independence. ‘OK,’ he agreed gravely. He suspected that she would conjure up some bland but rather noble concoction of pulses or brown rice or something. He repressed a shudder. ‘I shall look forward to it.’

After her shower, Sabrina went back to her room to get dressed. At least now it looked slightly better than when she had first arrived. Guy had cleared away the clutter on the desk, and had pushed the filing cabinets back against the wall. The exercise bike had been moved from its inconvenient position located slap-bang in the middle of the room. It could do with some decent curtains, she decided suddenly, instead of those rather stark blinds.

She shook her head at herself in the mirror. She was here on a purely temporary basis—she certainly shouldn’t start thinking major redecoration schemes!

She dressed in black trousers and a warm black sweater and took the tube to where the London branch of Wells was situated, close to St Paul’s Cathedral.

It was an exquisite jewel of a Georgian building, set in the shadow of the mighty church. Sabrina had been there twice while negotiating her transfer and had met the man she would be working for.

Tim Reardon was the archetypal bookshop owner—tall, lean and lanky, with a fall of shiny straight hair which flopped into his eyes most of the time. He was vague, affable, quietly spoken and charmingly polite. He was single, attractive—and the very antithesis of Guy Masters.

And Sabrina could not have gone out with him if he had been the very last man on the planet.

‘Come on in, Sabrina.’ Tim held his hand out and gave her a friendly smile. ‘I’ll make us both coffee and then I’ll show you the set-up.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled and began to unbutton her coat.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked, as he hung her coat up for her.

It still made her feel slightly awkward to acknowledge it. ‘In Knightsbridge, actually.’

‘Knightsbridge?’ Tom gave her a curious look which clearly wondered how she could afford to live in such an expensive neighbourhood on her modest earnings.

‘I’m staying with a…friend,’ she elaborated awkwardly.

‘Lucky you,’ he said lightly, but to her relief, he didn’t pursue it.

It was easy to slot in. The shop virtually mirrored its Salisbury counterpart, and after she and Tim had drunk their coffee they set to work, opening the post and filing away all the ordered books which had just come in.

The shop was quiet first thing in the morning, and it wasn’t until just after eleven that the first Cathedral tourists began to drift in, looking for their copies of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

During her lunch-hour Sabrina managed to locate a supermarket and rushed round buying ingredients. Never had choosing the right thing proved as taxing. She wanted, she realised, to impress Guy.

When he arrived back home that evening, he walked in on an unfamiliar domestic scene, with smells of cooking wafting towards him and loud music blaring from the kitchen.

He moved through the flat in the direction of the noise, pausing first at the dining-room door, where the table had been very carefully laid for dinner for two.

And when he walked into the kitchen, Sabrina didn’t notice that he was there, not at first. She was picking up something from the floor, her black trousers stretched tightly over the high curve of her bottom, and Guy felt his throat thicken.

‘Hello, Sabrina.’

Half a lemon slid uselessly from her fingers back to the floor as she heard the soft, rich timbre of his voice. She turned round slowly, trying to compose herself, to see him still wearing the beautiful dark suit, the slight shadowing around his chin the only outward sign that twelve hours had elapsed since she had last seen him. Oh, sweet Lord, she thought despairingly. He is gorgeous.

‘Hi!’ she said brightly. ‘Good day at—’

‘The office?’ he put in curtly. ‘Yes, fine, thanks.’

‘Shall I fix you a drink? Or would you prefer to get changed first?’

His mouth tightened. ‘Any minute now and you’re going to offer to bring me my pipe and slippers.’

Sabrina stiffened as she heard his sarcastic tone. ‘I was only trying to be friendly—’

‘As opposed to coming over as a parody of a wife, you mean?’

‘That was certainly not my intention,’ she told him primly.

The glittering grey gaze moved around the room to see that his rather cold and clinical kitchen had suddenly come to life. ‘This looks quite some feast,’ he observed softly.

‘Not really.’ But she blushed with pleasure. ‘And if you’re planning to get out of your best suit, could you, please, do it now, Guy? Because dinner will be ready in precisely five minutes.’

Neglected work. Late. And now she was telling him to get changed!

Guy opened his mouth to object and then shut it again. What was the point? And she was right—he didn’t want to eat in his ‘best’ suit, which was actually one of twenty-eight he had hanging neatly in his wardrobe. He sighed. ‘Five minutes,’ he echoed.

He took slightly longer than five minutes, simply because, to his intense exasperation, he realised that she had managed to turn him on. Had that been her bossiness or her presumption? he wondered achingly as he threw cold water onto his face like a man who had been burning up in the sun all day. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t been with a woman since that amazing night with Sabrina in Venice. Hadn’t wanted to. Still didn’t want anyone. Except her.

Now, that, he thought, was worrying.

The meal began badly, with Guy frowning at the heap of prawns with mayonnaise which Sabrina had heaped on a plate.

‘You don’t like prawns?’ she asked him nervously.

‘Yeah, I love them, but you really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’

‘Oh, it was no trouble,’ she lied, thinking about the beef Wellington which was currently puffing up nicely in the oven. ‘Do you want to open the wine? I bought a bottle.’

He shook his head, remembering last night, the way it had loosened him up so that he had spent a heated night tossing and turning and wondering what she would do if he walked just along the corridor and silently slipped into bed beside her. ‘Not for me thanks,’ he answered repressively. ‘You can have some, of course.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ As if she would sit there drinking her way through a bottle of wine while he looked down that haughty and patrician nose of his.

Guy saw the beef Wellington being carried in on an ornate silver platter he’d forgotten he had and which she must have fished out from somewhere.

‘Sabrina,’ he groaned.

Her fingers tightened on the knife. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like beef Wellington,’ she said, the slight note of desperation making her voice sound edgy.

‘Who in their right mind wouldn’t?’ He sighed. ‘It’s just that you must have spent a fortune on this meal—’

‘It was supposed to be a way of saying thank you—’

‘And I’ve told you before not to thank me!’ he said savagely, feeling the sweet, inconvenient rush of desire as her lips trembled in rebuke at him. ‘Look, Sabrina, I don’t expect you earn very much, working in a bookshop—’

‘Certainly nowhere in your league, Guy,’ she retorted.

‘And I don’t want you spending it all on fancy food!’

‘I’m not here to accept charity—especially not yours!’

‘Sabrina—’

‘No, Guy,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I want to pay my way as much as possible.’

He took the slice she offered him and he stared down at it with grudging reluctance. Pink and perfect. So she could cook, too. He scowled. ‘Do that,’ he clipped out. ‘But this is the last time you buy me steak! Understood?’

That was enough to guarantee the complete loss of her appetite, and it was only pride which made Sabrina eat every single thing on her plate. But by the time they were drinking their coffee his forbidding expression seemed to have thawed a little.

‘That was delicious,’ he said.

‘The pleasure was all mine.’

He heard the sarcasm in her voice, saw the little pout of accusation which hovered on her lips. Maybe he had been a little hard on her. ‘I’m not used to sharing,’ he shrugged.

‘It shows.’ She risked a question, even if the dark face didn’t look particularly forthcoming. ‘Have you got any brothers and sisters?’

‘One brother; he’s younger.’

‘And where is he now?’

He sighed as he saw her patient look of interest. These heart-to-heart chats had never really been part of his scene. ‘He lives in Paris—he works for a newspaper.’

‘That sounds interesting.’

He blanked the conversation with a bland smile. ‘Does it?’

But Sabrina wasn’t giving up that easily. What were they supposed to talk about, night after night—the weather?

‘So, no live-in girlfriends?’ she asked.

The eyes glittered. ‘Nope.’

‘Oh.’ She digested this.

‘You sound surprised,’ he observed.

‘I am, a little.’

‘You see me as so devastatingly eligible, do you, Sabrina?’

Her smile stayed as enigmatic as his. ‘That’s a fairly egotistical conclusion to jump to, Guy—that wasn’t what I said at all. I just thought that a man in your position would yearn for all the comforts of having a resident girlfriend.’

‘You mean regular meals.’ His eyes fell to his empty plate. ‘And regular sex?’

Sabrina went scarlet. ‘Something like that.’

‘The comfort and ease of the shared bed?’ he mused. ‘It’s tempting, I give you that. But sex is the easy bit—it’s communication that causes all the problems. Or rather the lack of it.’ His voice grew hard, almost bitter.

Sabrina looked at him and wondered what he wasn’t telling her. ‘You mean you’ve never found anyone you could communicate with?’

‘Something like that.’ No one he’d ever really wanted to communicate with. ‘Or at least, not unless we both happened to be horizontal at the time.’ He looked at her thoughtfully as she blushed. ‘But I have a very low boredom threshold, princess,’ he added softly.

He was telling her not to come too close—it was as plain as the day itself. And it was the most arrogant warning she had ever heard. ‘More coffee?’ she asked him coolly.

CHAPTER TEN

‘SO HOW has your first week been?’

Guy looked across the sitting room to where Sabrina was curled up like a kitten with a book on her lap—she was always reading, though he noticed that not many pages had been turned in the past hour. Snap, he thought with a grim kind of satisfaction. He hadn’t made many inroads into his own reading.

Sabrina met the piercing grey gaze and repressed a guilty kind of longing. How could she possibly concentrate on her book when she had such a distraction sitting just across the room from her?

‘I’ve enjoyed it,’ she told him truthfully. Well, most of it, anyway. It wasn’t easy being around him, being plagued by memories of a time it was clear that both of them wished forgotten—but at least she had done her utmost not to show it. She forced a smile. ‘How do you rate me as a flatmate?’

Guy thought about it. She was certainly less intrusive than he would have imagined. She kept out of his way in the mornings. She didn’t drift around the place in bits of provocative clothing—and she didn’t leave panties and tights draped over the radiator, which he understood was one of the major irritations when sharing with a woman.

‘Seven out of ten,’ he drawled, his smile not quite easy. ‘And how’s the bookshop surviving with its newest member of staff?’

Sabrina wished he wouldn’t stretch his legs out like that. ‘The shop is f-fine,’ she stumbled. ‘In fact, it’s very similar to the Salisbury branch—’

‘So living in the big city doesn’t scare you, Miss Cooper?’ he mocked softly, cutting right through her stumbled reply.

‘I don’t scare easy,’ she said, raising a glittering blue gaze, and thinking that it was all too easy to be scared. Scared of her susceptibility to Guy Masters—especially when he looked at her like that. Scared of what might happen if he should happen to lazily make a pass at her—because surely most men who had already slept with a woman would make a pass. Even if they’d said that they wouldn’t.

But Guy, of course, hadn’t.

In fact, he’d spent the last five evenings behaving as though he had a piece of radioactive equipment in the room with him—keeping a wary and observant distance and occasionally glancing her a look from beneath those sensationally long black lashes. But tonight he seemed edgy.

‘Do you want to go out for a drink before supper?’ he asked suddenly.

Sabrina snapped her book shut with nervous fingers. ‘What, now, tonight?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s Friday night—it’s what people do.’

Anything would be better than having to spend another whole evening watching while she managed to turn reading a book into a very erotic art form indeed. It was all getting a little too cosy for comfort. And Guy had found that leafing through art-world journals had lost most of its allure when he had the infinitely more distracting vision of Sabrina flicking that bright red-gold hair back over her slim shoulders.

But it was a challenge he had set himself and Guy thrived on challenges. He was determined to resist her—and resist her he damned well would. Unwittingly he had taken advantage of her once before, but once had been enough. ‘How about it?’ he asked.

She thought about the fine wines he had crowding the vast rack in the dining room. Maybe he wanted to go out because he was bored, just sitting here alone with her night after night. And it was just politeness which had made him invite her to go with him.

‘You go out if you like,’ she offered. ‘I’ll stay in. You don’t have to have me tagging along with you.’

‘You can’t sit in here all on your own,’ he objected.

She forced a smile. It would do her good. After five evenings she was beginning to enjoy his company a little too much. ‘Go on! You go, Guy—I’ll be fine here. I’ll probably have an early night.’

Guy felt an infuriating urge to stay home, yet he hadn’t been out a single night this week—and this from the man who was the original party animal. ‘Sure?’ he asked reluctantly.

‘Who else is going?’

‘Tom is, and a couple of guys who work with him. Oh, and I expect that Trudi and Jenna might turn up.’

Jenna. Sabrina’s smile didn’t slip. ‘I think I’ll pass, if you don’t mind. Honestly, Guy, I’m tired.’

Guy rose to his feet, strangely reluctant to move. ‘Maybe we should go out for dinner some time?’

She felt a little stab of pleasure, until she reminded herself that it wasn’t a date. He was simply making sure that she wasn’t bored.

‘Dinner?’ she asked casually.

‘Yeah. There are a couple of clients I need to take out—you might as well come with me.’

‘Oh. Right,’ she said, her heart sinking despite her intention not to let it. No, it definitely wasn’t a date—he couldn’t have phrased it more unflatteringly if he’d tried. The token female at a client dinner!

He paused by the door and shot her a quick glance. ‘Any plans for tomorrow?’

‘Not really. I’m working. I work every third Saturday.’

He nodded. ‘Me, too. Well, actually, I work most Saturdays.’

Sabrina stared at him. ‘Why?’

He frowned. ‘Why what?’

‘Why do you work on Saturdays?’ She gave him a slightly waspish smile. He left at the crack of dawn each morning and didn’t put in an appearance until at least eight o’clock. Even after five days she had decided that he drove himself too hard. ‘You do happen to own the company, don’t you, Guy?’

‘Yes, I do, and I like to make sure that I stay one step ahead of my competitors,’ he retorted softly. ‘And the only way to do that is to work hard. Number-one lesson in life. Build yourself so high that no one can knock you down. Ever.’

She lifted her eyebrows. He sounded almost ruthless. ‘Try to be invincible, you mean?’

There was an unmistakable flicker of tension around his mouth. ‘It’s an achievable goal,’ he answered, in a voice which was suddenly harsh.

She was tempted to tell him that he was already top of the heap. And that it didn’t look as if anyone was going to knock him anywhere, least of all down, but there was a distinctly warning glitter hardening his slate-grey eyes.

She thought of him as polished and sophisticated, a man who had everything, with his dark good looks and his enormous flat and wealthy lifestyle—and that wasn’t even taking into account his consummate skill as a lover. Yet something just now had frozen his face into granite. Had made him look almost savage. Was Guy Masters a man of never-ending ambition—and, if so, then why, when he seemed to have more than most men could only dream of?

‘What’s so good about being invincible?’ she queried softly.

Guy’s face tightened. Because it was the opposite of how his father had operated, with his easy come, easy go attitude to life and all the devastation that attitude had brought in its wake. But he had never shared that devastation with any woman and he wasn’t about to start now. Even with Sabrina Cooper and her warm, trusting smile and tantalising blue eyes which the devil himself must have given her.

‘It all comes down to personal choice,’ he said coldly. ‘And that’s mine.’

Sabrina could recognise a brush-off when she heard one—and more than a reluctance to open up. From the daunting expression in those dark, stormy eyes, it was more like a refusal to talk.

Tactically, she retreated.

‘Have a nice time,’ she said placidly. ‘I think I’ll have a bath and that early night.’

Guy had to stifle a groan as some of the tension he’d been feeling was replaced by a new and different kind of tension. Images of her long, pale limbs submerged beneath the foaming bubbles of his bathtub crept tantalisingly into his mind as his photographic memory recalled them with breathtaking accuracy. Did she really need to share something like that with him?

‘Yeah,’ he clipped out. ‘Do that.’

‘Shall I leave you some supper?’ she asked. ‘I thought I’d make some risotto—I got some amazing oyster mushrooms cheap at the market.’

Guy scowled. Just five days and she seemed to have taken over most of the cooking and most of the shopping—and she insisted on shopping around to save him money—even when he’d told her that she didn’t need to. With her, it seemed pride as much as parsimony—and she could be so damned stubborn.

‘You don’t have to cook for me every night,’ he said shortly. ‘I told you that.’

‘But it’s no trouble if I’m cooking for myself—’

‘I’m perfectly capable of fixing myself some eggs when I get home!’ Guy snapped, and turned and walked out of the room, because that hurt little tremble of her mouth was enough to crumble a heart of stone.

Sabrina could hear him slamming around in his room; then the telephone began to ring. She waited to see whether Guy would answer it, but it carried on ringing and so she picked it up.

‘Hello?’

There was a pause, and then a rather flustered-sounding woman’s voice said, ‘I’m sorry—I think I must have got the wrong number.’

‘Who did you want to speak to?’ enquired Sabrina patiently.

‘Guy Masters. My son.’

‘Your son? Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs Masters, I didn’t realise—I’ll just get him for you.’

‘No, no, wait a minute—just who might you be?’

Sabrina cleared her throat. ‘I’m Sabrina,’ she said. ‘Sabrina Cooper.’ And then, because the voice seemed to be waiting for some kind of clarification, she added, ‘I’m staying here. With Guy.’

‘Are you now?’ enquired the voice interestedly.

‘Er, just a minute, I’ll get him for you,’ said Sabrina hastily, but when she looked up it was to find Guy standing in the doorway, his face a dark and daunting study.

Wordlessly, he came and took the phone from her, and Sabrina quickly left the room, but not before she heard his first responses.

‘Hi, Ma. Mmm. Mmm. No, no. No—nothing like that.’

A few minutes later, he came and found her in the kitchen, chopping up her mushrooms.

‘Don’t do that again!’ he warned.

She put the knife down. ‘Do what?’

‘Answer my phone—especially when I’m around.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said stiffly. ‘I didn’t realise I was breaking some unwritten rule, but of course it is your flat.’ His flat, his territory, his control.

But he didn’t appear to be listening. ‘And now my mother’s asking me eight hundred questions about you. Move a woman in and suddenly everyone’s thinking rice and confetti!’

‘Well, I can assure you that I’m not,’ she told him acidly.

‘Me, neither!’ he snapped.

She turned her back on him and heard him go out, slamming the door behind him, and she viciously decapitated a mushroom. He was bad-tempered and unreasonable, she told herself. And she must have been crazy to agree to come here.

Guy walked into the Kensington wine-bar where his friends had been congregating on Friday evenings for as long as he could remember, surveying the dimly lit and crowded room with an unenthusiastic eye. He asked himself why he had bothered to come out to fight his way to the bar for a glass of champagne when he could have drunk something colder and vastly superior at home. And maybe given Sabrina a glass, too.

He shook his head. What the hell was he thinking of? He always went out on a Friday night!

‘Guy!’ called Tom Roberts, from the other side of the room, and Guy forced himself to smile in response as he wove his way through the crowded room.

‘It’s obviously been a bad day!’ joked his cousin, as Guy joined him.

‘On the contrary.’ Guy took the proffered glass of champagne and gave it a thoughtful sip. ‘I think I may have negotiated a deal on that old schoolhouse over by the river. It’s going to make someone a wonderful home.’

‘So why the long face?’ teased Tom.

‘I guess I’m just tired,’ said Guy, and that much was true. Sleep didn’t come easily when all you could think about was moon-pale flesh and banner-bright hair and a naked body in the room just along the corridor.