Passionate Nights: The Mistress Assignment / Mistress of Convenience / Mistress to Her Husband

‘Aha … so you’ve seen through my dastardly plot, then,’ Brough responded in the same vein.

Suddenly anxious, she clung to him and whispered, ‘Oh, Brough, it’s all so new, so unexpected. I don’t …’

‘It’s perfect … you’re perfect,’ Brough assured her as he tightened his arms around her and cradled her head against his shoulder. ‘We are going to be perfect … together … Right now, there’s nothing I want more than to stay here with you.’

He looked betrayingly towards the inner doorway to the flat and, guessing what he was thinking, Kelly quickly reassured him. ‘I know and I understand. You’ve got your responsibilities, and anyway, perhaps … Everything’s happened so quickly, so …’

‘I’ll call you the moment I get back from London,’ Brough promised her huskily.

‘There’s so much I haven’t told you,’ Kelly protested as he started to release her.

‘Such as?’ Brough grinned. ‘I’ve already discovered for myself all that I need to know, and what I have discovered, what I do know … I love …’

‘Oh, Brough …’

It was impossible not to throw herself back into his arms and share another passionate kiss with him, and then he was gone, leaving her to touch her fingertips to a mouth that still tingled from the passion of his kiss and to acknowledge with a small, cold shiver that he was wrong, that there were things that he still had to learn.

Would it change what he thought, what he felt, when he learned of her deceit, or would he understand and accept that her deliberate pursuit of Julian had been prompted by loyalty to Beth?

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘SO YOU do understand, Dee, don’t you?’ Kelly asked the older woman anxiously as they sat opposite one another in Kelly’s flat.

Kelly had telephoned Dee as soon as Brough had left, despite the fact that it was late evening. The disquiet she had experienced over the role she was playing vis-à-vis Julian had coalesced following Brough’s departure into a sharp and intense need to free herself from the restrictions that her commitment to Dee’s plans were placing on her. There was no way she wanted to deceive Brough, and there was certainly no way she could even pretend now to be anything other than totally revolted by Julian Cox.

‘I think so,’ Dee confirmed dryly. ‘You’re telling me that you’ve fallen in love with Brough Frobisher and that because of that you don’t want to carry out your part of our scheme.’

‘It isn’t that I don’t want to,’ Kelly corrected her quietly, ‘it’s that I can’t; and even before I realised how I felt about Brough … I’m not trying to be dramatic, Dee, but there’s something about Julian I just don’t trust.’

‘Join the club,’ Dee told her sardonically. ‘I don’t want to cast a shadow over love’s sweet dream, Kelly, and you’re certainly old enough and I believe mature enough to be the best judge of your own feelings, but Brough is Eve’s brother, and he does have a vested interest in monitoring your relationship with Julian therefore.’

Kelly looked at her for several seconds before asking her sternly, ‘What are you trying to say? That Brough is deliberately and callously pretending to … to care about me because he wants to leave his sister with a clear field to Julian Cox?’

‘No. What I’m trying to say is that you would be well advised and wise to be aware that things are not perhaps as straightforward as they could be, that people do have hidden motives and personal agendas for what they do. After all, on the face of it, so far as Brough is concerned, he has a potential rival for your love in Julian, hasn’t he?’

‘I wanted to explain to him but I just didn’t have the chance, and then I decided that I owed it to you to let you know what I intended to do first,’ Kelly told her quickly.

She had found it extremely unsettling and disturbing listening to what Dee had to say. Dee was wrong, of course; Brough would never do anything like that … Would he?