скачать книгу бесплатно
‘You took your time deciding to spurn me,’ he mocked softly as he released her, but there was a slight breathlessness to his words and a trace of bemusement in his eyes.
‘That’s because I shouldn’t drink!’ she exclaimed, then cringed at having come out with so pathetic an excuse.
‘Yes, and you were really knocking it back,’ he murmured. ‘You must have had—well, all of two sips, by my reckoning.’
‘I…What I meant was…’
‘No, Ginny, the damage has already been done to my ego,’ he sighed, walking towards the veranda doors. ‘I’m sure that if I ever took the liberty of trying to kiss you again, I’d get an instant brush-off…And leave that broken glass alone, I’ll see to it in the morning—I don’t want you going anywhere near it in your drunken state.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_c6c82493-a4c5-5207-a6d8-978f0e989c01)
WHY she had assumed she would feel any better, having made a phone call to Libby during her visit to the market, was beyond her, thought Ginny irritably. She placed the last of her purchases in the basket of the bicycle she had found rusting in a shed at the villa soon after she had arrived, and climbed on to it.
Of course, she should have known she would end up lying to Libby, she mused dejectedly as she rode along. There had always been a mutually protective element in their relationship which, on her own part, had gone into overdrive now that Libby was pregnant.
‘Ginny, just get the first train you can up here,’ had been Libby’s reaction to the news of the length of her uncle’s proposed stay. ‘Jeanne has plenty of space and can’t wait to meet you.’
‘And then we’d lose the money Michael’s paying, not to mention what we get from my odd gardening contracts—Libby, we can’t afford it.’
Not that long ago it had been a source of hilarity between them, thought Ginny wryly—Libby’s being an heiress and their having to count every penny. But it had been only within the past month that Libby had managed to pay off the small fortune in debts that had littered her life, and now all her generous monthly allowance, together with anything they had left over from their strict budget, was set aside to cover the birth and any related expenses that might crop up—and they kept cropping up.
Of course she had lied, she thought wearily, oblivious of the azure blue of the sea now coming into view, a sight which usually filled her with peace and contentment. Last night, for the first time she could remember, she had gone to bed, her mind and body churning and reeling from the after-effects of what had only been a kiss: this morning she had woken to the same sensation—and it had frightened the wits out of her… Which was one of the reasons it had seemed safer, when talking to Libby, to weave a tale of a pleasantly courteous man who had apologised for the fact that he would be far too engrossed in business matters to be able to pass more than the time of day with her, and who had shown mercifully little interest in his absent niece.
‘That could be the lull before the storm,’ Libby had warned, plainly not altogether convinced. ‘You wait till he gets suspicious and starts turning on the charm.’
It was at that point she had panicked into embroidering with a vengeance. ‘You needn’t worry on the charm score—there’s some woman he’s forever on the phone to. If I’m not mistaken, he’s in love and I’ve a feeling she’s going to join him any day.’
‘Wow, Mikey in love!’ Libby had gasped, unwittingly dispelling Ginny’s immediate panic but also confirming her suspicion that Libby, despite her protestations to the contrary, retained a great deal of affection for her uncle. ‘What I wouldn’t give to see what she’s like! But it’s still not going to be that easy for you. I’ll do what I can from this end, calling and speaking to him from time to time, but, like all the Grants, he has a very suspicious nature where I’m concerned. To be honest, if you had uppped and left, as I suggested, I’d not have put it past him to get the cops out looking for me.’
Ginny cycled up the drive and round to the back of the house.
‘Where have you been?’
Almost falling from the bike with fright, she turned and flung a mutinous look in the direction of the scowling Michael Grant.
‘I really don’t think it’s any of your business where I’ve been,’ she retorted, wheeling the bike to the side of one of the garden sheds.
‘As I see it, it’s very much my business,’ he snapped, dogging her footsteps. ‘I employ you, don’t I?’
‘Indeed you do,’ she replied, her tone saccharinsweet while her blood boiled; this she most certainly could do without. ‘But I wasn’t sure that entailed my reporting my every move to you. But, if you must know, I was at the market, buying the food necessary for the meals my employment requires me to cook for you.’
‘Fine, that’s all I needed to know.’
Ginny flung the bicycle against the shed, fury making her reckless. ‘But this afternoon I shall be elsewhere,’ she announced, unloading the basket. ‘Yours isn’t the only garden I tend.’
‘Well, it is now.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ she enquired icily, while a frantic voice inside her asked just what she thought she was doing. The fact that she hadn’t any other gardening lined up was neither here nor there—her utter stupidity in even mentioning that she did other work was beyond belief.
‘I think you heard well enough,’ he informed her in steely tones. ‘But if you want to play dumb, Ginny, dumb is what we’ll play. So tell me, how many hours would you say constitute a full day’s work?’
She had asked for this, she berated herself angrily, and she would no doubt get it in full.
‘Eight,’ she muttered.
‘I’ll be generous and call it seven…Now, by my reckoning, your only free time from working for me would be between the hours of ten at night and eight in the morning and I don’t imagine too many folks would be lining up to have their gardens messed with during those hours.’
‘I don’t mess with gardens,’ Ginny informed him frigidly, ‘and anyway, I was only joking.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ he drawled, his eyes flickering with barely concealed disdain over her dungaree-clad figure before he turned and walked towards the house. ‘We need to talk,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘so how about if you make us some coffee so we can do it in comfort?’
And how about if you took a running jump? fumed Ginny to herself, convinced he intended complaining about her appearance. What had he in mind—decking her out in a uniform?
Muttering angrily to herself, and convinced she wouldn’t survive two hours of this treatment, let alone a whole month of it, she took herself off to the kitchen. But at least some good had come out of this ghastly encounter, she thought, calming a little as she put her purchases away. Her lying awake half the night racked by memories of being kissed by him had been no more than a stress-induced mental aberration—that was for sure.
She got out coffee-beans and the grinder, her moment of relief swiftly dissipating into frustration. She was beginning to feel as though she had a terrible weight on her shoulders. Libby seemed to thrive on intrigue, whereas she simply wasn’t cut out for it. Perhaps it was because Libby’s background was so steeped in wealth that she had such a cavalier attitude towards money.
‘OK, so I’ll pay it all back once I come into my inheritance,’ Libby had laughed, when Ginny had balked at the idea of their claiming the two salaries—and in Ginny’s name—from the villa. ‘No sweat.’
The idea had disturbed her then, thought Ginny miserably, and now it made her shrivel with embarrassment every time she thought about it. If Michael had fired her on the spot, or threatened her with legal action, she couldn’t honestly have blamed him. But her guilt in that respect didn’t alter the fact that his gallingly high-handed attitude was touching a particularly raw spot in her; she had had enough of being treated like an unpaid skivvy by her aunt ever to take it again—and especially not from this over-prvileged, autocratic American!
‘What are you doing—growing the beans for that coffee?’
Ginny responded to those words from a few paces behind her with a jump that sent the coffee she had just ground scattering everywhere.
‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’ she exclaimed accusingly. ‘I’ll have to grind more!’
‘I’ll grind—you clear up that mess,’ drawled Michael.
‘Excuse me,’ hissed Ginny, her hackles rising, ‘I might be employed by you, but would you mind not issuing me orders as though I were some sort of serf?’
‘OK. Please, Ginny, I’d be terribly grateful if you’d clear up the mess you’ve just made,’ he murmured in a grating parody of an English accent. ‘Tell me, are you always this sensitive?’
Ginny’s unladylike retort was drowned by the shriek of the coffee-grinder he switched on just as she uttered it.
‘You’ve over-filled it!’ she yelled over the din.
‘What?’
‘I said…Oh, forget it!’
He switched off the grinder. ‘I couldn’t hear you with that thing on. Does it always make that noise?’ he enquired, his expression over-brimming with puzzled innocence.
‘Only when it’s too full,’ snapped Ginny, flashing him her most withering look before finishing clearing up the mess and then returning to making the coffee.
‘Things have been happening here since you’ve been out,’ he said.
Ginny had to force herself to keep on with what she was doing as she felt herself freeze. He had found out about Libby!
‘The equipment I’ll need to work from here arrived—I’m using the library as an office.’
‘Where do you want to drink this?’ asked Ginny, relief unfreezing her as she turned towards him with the coffee-jug.
‘Here will do fine,’ he replied, making no attempt to lend a hand as he took a seat at the table. ‘Have you any office experience?’
Ginny, who had been just about to pour the coffee, gave him a look of frowning suspicion. ‘A little,’ she muttered, and all of it bad, she added to herself as she poured out two cups. ‘Why?’ she asked, handing him one.
‘I thought you could help me out with a bit of office work—answering the telephone and checking the odd computer print-out with me.’
‘Oh, I see—you’d like me to work for you twenty-one hours a day, is that it?’
There was a mixture of irritation and amusement on his face as he took a sip from his mug.
‘No, it would involve so little time that I planned letting you off cleaning my shoes in lieu,’ he drawled. ‘So, how about it?’
‘With an organisation as vast as yours is reputed to be, I’d have thought you’d have a battalion of experts, not to mention clerical staff, at your beck and call.’
‘And you’d have thought right,’ he said. ‘But, remember, a year ago I was very much the new guy here. Now I’m the not-so-new guy and I feel the time has come for me to take a couple of steps back and see what sort of picture I get of the overall scene.’
In other words, thought Ginny, whatever he was doing here, he didn’t want his Paris staff knowing about it…A somewhat different story from the one he had originally given her.
Irritation flashed across his features. ‘All you have to do is say yes or no.’
‘I’d be happy to,’ stated Ginny, her curiosity aroused, ‘but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much use—I speak hardly any French.’
‘I guess that could present one or two problems, but I still might be able to use you. Libby’s French is OK—perhaps she might help me out if the need arises. When did you say she’d be back?’
‘I didn’t,’ replied Ginny, her curiosity giving way to an almost sickening feeling of apprehension. ‘I’ve already told you, I don’t know.’ And how many more times was he going to ask her that same question?
‘I guess you don’t think she’d be too happy to help me out in an office or anywhere else,’ he said quietly. ‘Libby and I, as you know, aren’t exactly buddies right now, but it wasn’t always like that. And once she would have jumped at helping out. When she was still quite a small kid, I took her to visit my brother, David, at his office. She was fascinated by the whole set-up and afterwards asked me some pretty adult questions about the family business,’ he continued, his tone surprising Ginny in that it sounded almost wistful. ‘I told her all I could, which wasn’t a great deal as I’d only just started at Princeton and was still pretty ignorant of the set-up myself. Years later, when I’d taken my place as an executive director, I found myself remembering all those questions she had asked—but by then it was too late.’
‘In what way?’
‘Because she’d embarked on a career of screwing up her life in whatever way she could,’ he snapped. ‘Look, I’m not claiming she had an easy time of it—Jack Collier may be in a class of his own as an academic, but he sure as hell was a lousy father.’
‘That may be so, but Libby seems to love him—warts and all,’ stated Ginny. Even in the rare moments when Libby had actually railed against her mixed-up father, there had been no mistaking her exasperated love for him. ‘Which is more than can be said for her feelings towards the Grant family.’
‘I’d be the last to deny the Grants have their faults,’ conceded Michael. ‘Though I’d say mine is pretty much the same as any other family—and not necessarily American—with what some might describe as an over-abundance of wealth and influence. Being the typical patriarch of such a family, my father can be pretty difficult to get on with at times—but my brother’s a much softer character.’
Ginny took a quick gulp from her cup to mask her surprise: she had somehow gained the impression that Libby regarded her uncle David as something of an ogre.
‘I’ve a feeling Libby’s always resented David and his wife once trying to get custody of her. The only reason they even contemplated such a step was because they loved her and felt the way Jack was diving in and out of marriages couldn’t be doing her any good. Once they lost the case we rarely saw Libby, though whether that was coincidence or revenge on her father’s part is anyone’s guess.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there,’ said Ginny, who knew nothing of the incident, but the feelings of sympathy stirring in her made her uneasy. ‘Libby’s never gone into much detail about her family problems.’ Though even when she had been quite young, Ginny had often wondered if love hadn’t been the driving force behind the Grant family’s interference, about which Libby sometimes complained with such bitterness.
‘If you say so,’ he drawled sceptically.
‘I do say so,’ snapped Ginny, his tone dissipating much of her discomfiting compassion. ‘Ours would have been a pretty depressing friendship if the two of us had spent our time exchanging the details of our mutual woes!’
‘Oh, so you’re also a bundle of woes, are you, Ginny?’ he enquired, his tone sarcastic rather than sympathetic.
‘You said you wanted to talk to me,’ snapped Ginny, any sympathy she had felt now entirely dissipated.
‘I did—and that’s what I was under the impression I was doing,’ he muttered, stretching, then dragging his fingers absent-mindedly through his hair. ‘Perhaps I’m just kidding myself, hoping that Libby and I can spend time together, and wondering if I could make a start on answering some of those questions she asked all those years ago.’
‘I thought you’d decided it was too late,’ retorted Ginny, still rattled and on edge.
‘You’re the one who insists she’s turned over a new leaf,’ he snapped.
‘And she has,’ protested Ginny, feeling more and more trapped. Her only alternative to arousing his anger and suspicion was to trot out words that lent credence to the lie that Libby was going to show up, but now her own innate sense of fairness was getting in the way of such words.
‘But not enough for her to want to mend her bridges with her family,’ he stated grimly.
‘No—that isn’t true!’ blurted out Ginny. Even if there hadn’t been Libby’s oft-proclaimed intention to make her peace with the Grants once she and Jean-Claude were married, there was the undeniable affection Libby still felt for Michael—there had been no mistaking it in her voice this morning.
‘Well, I dare say I’ll be able to judge that for myself soon enough,’ he muttered, rising and going over to pour himself more coffee. ‘Would you like more?’
Ginny shook her head, searching frantically for something non-contentious to say. ‘I’m sure Libby probably would be interested in learning more about the family business,’ she eventually managed.
‘Probably,’ he agreed, an edge of sarcasm in his tone. ‘Especially the financial side of it, which is what I deal with. Given that her trust benefits considerably from it annually, it could be/said she has quite an interest in it already.’ He returned to his seat, his expression oddly diffident as he glanced across at her. ‘I don’t have any idea how much you really know about the sort of things Libby got up to,’ he muttered. ‘But no matter how we tried to answer what all the psychologists kept saying were her cries for help—and I admit they were sometimes answered very clumsily—we couldn’t get through to her. I was just a kid when her mother died…but I loved my big sister—and Libby’s all I, and the rest of my family, have left of her.’
It was the terrible reminder of the contrasting lack of love in her aunt that brought the sudden sting of tears to Ginny’s eyes and made her even more inclined to believe that, high-handed though their dealings with Libby had always been, the Grants truly had been motivated by love.
‘I promise you…Libby has really changed,’ she said in a slightly muffled voice.
‘I look forward to seeing that for myself,’ he muttered.
Ginny took another sip of her now cold coffee, trying desperately to harden herself against the guilt niggling inside her by reminding herself of how he had landed himself in Libby’s bad books in the first place.
‘And I look forward to getting to know you, Ginny,’ he added after a pause, his intensely blue eyes rising to hers, scattering her thoughts and re-igniting those disturbing memories that only a while ago she had so blithely dismissed as mental aberration. ‘It’s not often I get the chance to meet with Libby’s friends.’
Perhaps not, thought Ginny, anger stirring once more in her, but from what Libby had said, he had made a point of getting to know one in particular most intimately.
She rose and, without a word, poured herself more coffee, most of the anger in her directed at herself. All right, so she had found him attractive before Libby had warned her what he was like, but that wasn’t an excuse for the way she was behaving now—in fact, there was something bordering on the unhealthy in the way that she could be actively disliking him one moment and feeling violently attracted to him the next.
‘You’re unusually silent, Ginny,’ he murmured, his words coming from right behind her and making her start with fright. ‘Does that mean you don’t want me to get to know you?’
‘I…No,’ she stammered, striving to get a grip on herself. ‘You frightened the life out of me, creeping up on me like that!’
‘I’m sorry. The last thing I meant to do was frighten you,’ he said, placing an apparently concerned arm around her shoulder. ‘And isn’t that a good reason for us getting to know one another…to ensure neither of us feels afraid of the other?’
‘Oh, yes—I’m sure you’re terrified out of your wits by me,’ retorted Ginny, stepping back against the counter as she shrugged his arm from her shoulder. His arm slid down and repositioned itself against her back.
‘Have I reason to be?’ he asked softly, his arm tightening against her back and drawing her towards him.
‘Don’t!’ she warned through clenched teeth, her hands rising and pressing against his chest.
‘Don’t what, Ginny?’ he laughed softly. ‘I honestly haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you yet.’
