Sophisticated Seduction

She turned swiftly and stalked away, bare feet frustratingly silent on the marble floor, as she would have liked to stamp out. Virginia was right. All the Stirling men were as vile as each other, arrogant, superior creatures, patronising people like her.

In the short, wide passage leading to the bedroom and adjoining bathroom she had chosen for herself, Bridget slowed down. It was so rarely that she experienced anger that she lacked the knack of feeding it, and her conscience was stirring. Most people were tired and irritable after a flight; hungry too, occasionally, and she had told Sita Menon that she wouldn’t need her tonight…

With something a little less than her usual simple good nature, she turned and retraced her steps. By now Nicholas Stirling and friend were in the room Bridget tended to think of as the salon, too elegant and exotic to be called a living-room or lounge.

Her voice too accentless for her origins to be identifiable, the woman was speaking with rueful amusement, and Bridget hesitated uncertainly.

‘…infuriating. I can never manage to achieve that tousled, just-out-of-bed look. It’s very effective.’

‘Wanda, I don’t imagine the girl is a day over eighteen, and she’s young with it,’ Nicholas Stirling drawled. ‘Additionally, I doubt if there’s anything studied about the look you’re referring to. That hair has never seen a gel, a mousse, a spray—or even a hairdresser, in all probability. Forget her. Girls bore me. I like women.’

This time Bridget’s anger was soaring pure blue flame, a pyre for her conscientious intentions, fuelled by the fact that Nicholas Stirling was absolutely right about her lack of acquaintance with hairdressers, but almost four years short of her real age. They could go hungry!

Once more, she turned to leave the hall, but some sound, perhaps her outraged gasp on realising that it was she who was being discussed so contemptuously, must have betrayed her.

‘Just a minute.’ That unspeakable man had emerged from the living-room, closing the door behind him and surveying her impatiently as she spun round. ‘Did you want something, or were you just eavesdropping?’

‘In fact, I was coming to offer to cook a meal for you,’ Bridget announced with a sharpness she hardly recognised as coming from herself.

‘Where’s Mrs Menon—the woman who looks after the house and does the cooking?’ he demanded suspiciously.

‘I told her I didn’t need her tonight, and I happen to know she’s visiting a relative in hospital. That’s why—’

‘I suppose you’re one of these teenagers who never eats?’ he cut in disgustedly, eyes raking her concealing shirt. ‘Your generation doesn’t seem to possess any civilised habits whatsoever, picking at left-overs and listening to private conversations!’

He spoke as if there were at least thirty years between them, but Bridget knew he was thirty-four. Virginia had told her, and his jacket, shirt and trousers somehow confirmed it, elegant and subtly fashionable, but above all obviously comfortable, and worn so unconsciously that there could be no doubting his self-confidence.

‘Well, maybe your friend will be willing to warm up some left-overs for you,’ she suggested tartly.

He caught the note. ‘My friend? Ah, Wanda. Before she warms me up, I suppose you mean?’

It was meant to disconcert, she sensed, and she forced a limpid smile, remembering that he thought her eighteen.

‘Well, yes, as I understand it’s the kind of thing your generation goes in for all the time.’

The way his mouth tightened momentarily gave him a ruthless aspect, but he was too cool to react directly, and a moment later he was smiling at her.

‘Bridget Greer, you said. But I imagine you get called Biddy?’ Unexpectedly, the question revealed a glimpse of charm, but somehow Bridget found it slighting.

‘Bridget,’ she insisted shortly, having decided it was more appropriate to her independent, adult status, now that she had a permanent job with prospects and had moved out of her parents’ home, although her family still tended to use the diminutive.

He seemed to guess what lay behind the insistence. ‘Ah, yes, very mature.’

His smile really was an incredible thing, full of an overwhelming magnetism, and Bridget was momentarily rocked by it. It enabled her to understand the attraction he held for those women who had come to the house and, presumably, for Wanda, and she felt sorry for them. She knew what the Stirling men were really like.

‘You’re not seeing me at my best,’ she submitted dismissively, an acknowledgement of how she knew she must appear to him at present.

‘So you can understand why I’m sceptical about your claim to be working for my sister,’ he agreed.

‘Nevertheless, it happens to be true,’ she asserted.

‘In which case I mean to find out what’s behind it, and particularly what’s behind your presence here. But as I have a guest to entertain it will have to wait until tomorrow morning.’ He paused and added deliberately, in a softly silky tone of warning, ‘So no absconding in the night, please, Bridget.’

‘Why should I? Absconding implies guilt.’

‘And I haven’t caught you doing anything wrong?’ It was almost teasing, and somehow it rattled her.

‘No!’

‘Apart from occupying my company house when it’s my sister who should be here, and you either unwilling or unable to tell me where she is. I don’t like seeing my family taken advantage of, but, as I say, we’ll discuss it in the morning. Would you mind making yourself scarce until then?’

Because he wanted to be alone with Wanda! Bridget achieved the first truly drop-dead smile of her life, without thought or effort, her fury the instinctive spur.

‘With absolute pleasure!’

She stared at him in open dislike for a moment, and he stared back, unnervingly intent, as if he were seeing right into her. Her bare feet put her just three inches below him, which made him approximately six feet. Then, simultaneously, they turned away from each other.

Under the stinging spray of a cool shower, Bridget wondered what had driven her. She had never behaved so aggressively before. It was because he was a Stirling, of course, and an even worse one than Loris. Virginia must be the only Stirling alive with any likeable human qualities at all.

Presumably Wanda hadn’t been asked either to cook or make left-overs palatable, because she heard the sound of a car’s arrival and almost immediate departure while she was drying herself, and the house was silent and empty of other presences when she made her way to the kitchen.

She had meant to cook, experimenting with the day’s purchases, but inclination and appetite had gone, leaving her guilty of Nicholas Stirling’s contemptuous accusations, picking at left-overs.

She was in bed, the light out, by the time her senses, swiftly followed by faint, far-off sounds, told her that she was no longer alone in this house which she had occupied for almost a week now.

To her surprise, neither unhappiness nor the October heat that pressed down on New Delhi had prevented her sleeping on previous nights, but this one was different. That man had restarted the cycle of futile, humiliating thought again. Just because he was Loris Stirling’s cousin.

With so many of her contempories struggling to find permanent jobs, and after occupying several stressful, short-term positions herself, Bridget knew how lucky she had been to secure employment at Ginny’s, a small but successful enterprise producing a range of female fashion-wear that fell happily somewhere between exclusive and mass-produced. Virginia Stirling no longer designed or sewed herself, her energies devoted to the business side of the operation, although she still indulged her passion for fabrics, disappearing for weeks at a time on buying trips, but during those periods when she was back in her London office she took a personal interest in her staff. Thus Bridget had gained experience in most departments before joining the tiny team Virginia was training to assist her in her own job.

And here she was in Delhi, doing Virginia’s job for her. It would never have happened so soon but for the coincidence of the two of them falling in love with two very different men at more or less the same time.

‘You’re new,’ a teasing voice had commented from the door of her office one day, and Bridget had found herself staring at the most romantically handsome young man she had ever seen.

‘No, you are,’ she had retorted shyly, a tight hurting sensation already manifesting itself somewhere in her breast.

‘Fair enough, I suppose. My cousin Nicholas has had me grounded in Seoul, implementing and overseeing the upgrading of safety standards in some new factories he has acquired there—unusually for him, as it’s something he rarely delegates, but I was having woman trouble,’ he had explained with a brave smile that had wrenched at her heart. ‘I’ve just dropped in to say hello to Virginia. I’m Loris Stirling, by the way, the baby of the family. And you are…?’

He had asked her out and she had hesitated before accepting, but his exemplary behaviour on that first date had reassured her: she wasn’t being rushed into anything. There had been many more, some on several successive nights, but with long intervals between others, keeping her guessing, but the way he had kissed her and talked meaningfully about what they might be to each other in the future, and his habit of seeking her out whenever he visited Virginia at work, had encouraged Bridget to dream. One of these days, when he was fully over whatever it was that had caused his cousin to pack him off to South Korea…

She had been dreaming again after one of his visits to the office when Virginia had summoned her, and she had responded with alacrity, snatching at the chance to see him again as she had guessed that Loris would still be with his cousin.

Disappointingly, Virginia had been urging his departure when Bridget paused at the open door, feasting her eyes on the back of his elegant dark head.

‘Doesn’t Nicholas expect you to work occasionally? Get out, Loris. I’m busy even if you’re not, and I’ve got Bridget Greer on her way to fetch a list of quantities I forgot to give her this morning.’

‘Ah, Bridget.’ Loris laughed in a way Bridget had never heard before, the sound somehow both indulgent and contemptuous. ‘She’s a sweet thing—and I’m keeping her sweet, so to speak, for when Pagan has had her day, as I’ve an idea I might like to spend a night or two initiating her into the delights of bed, since I suspect that’s what it would amount to. It could be soon, too. Pagan is starting to get too possessive. I rather think Nicholas is going to have to give me another foreign assignment when I get tired of her, the same as he did with the last one. Maybe I’ll persuade Bridget to go with me.’

The hand Bridget had lifted to knock fell, the movement attracting Virginia’s attention, her beautiful grey eyes growing appalled as they met Bridget’s hurt green ones.