Trust Too Much

‘You seemed in some doubt,’ Simon countered derisively. ‘But as I’ve said, it’s your love life that intrigues me right now. Tell me about Sheldon. Were you his personal assistant?’

‘I hadn’t risen quite that high yet. I was assistant to his real assistant, but the position was supposed to lead to promotion eventually.’

Her bright, tender mouth drooped as she recalled the trouble Miss Betancourt had taken, grooming her to be her replacement when she retired in a few years’ time. All for nothing—

‘You must have counted it worth sacrificing since you were prepared to incur Sheldon’s anger by making the thing public knowledge,’ Simon cut into her reflections unsympathetically.

She hadn’t had any choice, unless she had been prepared to let Vance Sheldon rape her, since the Press, so much more cynically suspicious than she, had been on the spot, ready and waiting, eager for drama.

She flung Simon an angrily resentful look as she picked up her glass from beside her on the step and took a sip of mineral water.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she stated tautly. ‘As everyone knows, he fired me or I resigned, depending on which version of the story you believe, so I’ve got more important things to think about, like finding myself another job, and somewhere to live, and a car.’

‘Here in Hong Kong?’ he probed.

‘I think so, yes.’ She couldn’t face going back, although she wasn’t about to reveal her vulnerability by admitting it. ‘Hong Kong is my home. I belong here.’

Simon sent her a glance sparkling with mockery. ‘And you’ll be able to behave as badly as you like within a circle where no one will judge you and make a scandal of it as they seem to have done in Australia, since we all behaved equally badly most of the time. It’s just strange, or perhaps ironic, that you had to go away to become one of us. I like the change, but what happened to the old Fee? Is there any of her left there inside the sophisticated packaging?’

‘There’s hardly likely to be, is there? I’m twenty-two, but on her behalf, since she could never stand up for herself or answer back…Yes, you do all behave badly, especially at these parties, I remember, so why shouldn’t I?’ As she spoke, Fee stood up, still holding her glass, looking down into it for a moment before pouring the remainder of its contents into his lap. ‘Last time was an accident, Simon. This was deliberate, in case you’re in any doubt. Sorry it had to be in the region of both your intellect and your emotions.’

Simon swore, following it with such absolute silence that she couldn’t resist the temptation to look back as she gained the patio. His shoulders shook, and then she heard his laughter.

‘Oh, you were right, you truly do belong here.’ His amused voice drifted up to her. ‘You’re one of our own. Welcome home, Fee.’

Fleetingly, it gave rise to apprehension which subsided when he made no move to detain her.

She hadn’t felt this good in weeks, Fee realised. The only disconcerting thing about it was that it should be Simon Rhodes, of all people, who had revived her fighting spirit.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_ae0e85a9-38d7-588e-a16d-d355755b62bf)

SIGHING, Fee let the newspaper fall to the ground beside the sun-lounger on which she was reclining. None of the positions advertised was exactly inspiring, and likely to add to her difficulties was her intention to be scrupulously discriminating in her choice of boss this time around. She wasn’t risking another Vance Sheldon—never again! On the whole, she was inclined to think that putting her name down with an employment agency might be her best bet. For safety’s sake, she might even opt for temping, she decided, unless she found the perfect boss.

The sun had set but darkness had yet to fall, and it was one of those sultry, gently steaming July evenings she remembered so well from years gone by, the stillness of the air giving all Hong Kong’s island side a dreaming aspect, and yet down in town among the gracefully rearing spires the movement and noise would be as vibrant as ever, equally so over on Kowloonside. But not up here, high above Repulse Bay, blue-white jewel set amid gentle emerald slopes. It was silent here, and soothing.

Her mood of exhilaration hadn’t lasted long after she had tipped her drink into Simon’s lap two evenings ago. She had locked herself into her bedroom, ignoring the people who came and knocked at intervals and eventually falling into the first truly dreamless sleep she had been granted in weeks, despite the sounds of carousing downstairs—because Loren Kincaid had been right. She felt safe here.

She had no idea how or if Simon had explained the state of his elegant trousers to anyone, and she hadn’t enquired, beginning to be embarrassed by her behaviour since such a confrontational attitude was alien to her nature.

A sound from the high patio above her made her withdraw her gaze from the sparkling clarity of the swimming-pool, and there was the subject of her thoughts, Simon Rhodes, carrying his jacket and coming down the stairs towards her. A pang of purely aesthetic appreciation assailed her as she watched him. He moved with such grace and leashed power, and was so beautifully formed, so truly physically perfect in every way that she could only be profoundly grateful that she would never be one of the legion of women who loved him, because how did anyone ever get over such a man?

‘Charles isn’t home yet,’ she informed him casually, resolutely deciding to ignore the fact that the mere sight of him made her feel challenged in some obscure way. ‘But Babs is somewhere inside.’

‘Thank you, she sent me out to join you.’ Simon stood beside her sun-lounger, looking down at her and then at the pool on her other side, a wicked gleam appearing in his eyes. ‘I am so tempted, Fee, after the drenching I received at your hands the other night.’

‘Don’t you dare! And you’re exaggerating…I’m sorry I threw my drink over you, Simon.’ But although she had begun to be ashamed of herself, Fee’s eyes still sparkled at the memory, and her voice refused to emerge as demurely as she wanted it to, a quiver betraying her as she added, ‘I don’t usually behave like that. I don’t know what got into me.’

‘A devil, of course, and it’s looking out of your eyes right now, so I suppose I ought to keep my distance. But all right, I’ll forgive you since it was probably due,’ he conceded magnanimously, ignoring the advice he had just given himself and pulling a matching chair closer to her lounger before seating himself. ‘I shouldn’t have bawled you out in front of everyone the way I did that other time.’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ she agreed tartly, still capable of flushing at the memory, and deciding against asking what had got into him on that occasion.

‘So how is our innocent victim, as Loren keeps insisting you are? I believe she thinks she invented the phrase all by herself.’

‘If you’re so scathing about people’s intellectual limitations behind their backs—and to their faces, now I think of it, because she said you’d called her an airhead—why do you go out with such bimbos?’ Fee flared, incensed on Loren’s behalf.

Simon wore his most arrogant expression. ‘Because they don’t try so hard to be clever, whereas half-bright women keep trying to be cleverer than they are and it bores me because I see through them.’

‘God, have you any idea how inhibited your intolerance must make people when you can’t even be bothered to hide it? I’ll be frightened to open my mouth now,’ Fee claimed tempestuously.

‘You don’t count,’ Simon said rudely, with an indifferent glance at her mouth before noticing the newspaper she had discarded and observing at which page it was open. ‘Looking for…what did you tell me? A home, a car and a job? In fact, we may be able to help you with the first. Rhodes Properties are mainly commercial and industrial, but we have recently added a division dealing with residential, and it’s turning out to be a paying concern with land here so scarce, and rents for ground-floor apartments as high as you choose to make them when everyone is so nervous of a cut in electricity putting lifts out of order…But haven’t you considered staying here? The house still belongs to your father, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ Fee glanced up at the green-tiled roof, a sort fairly common in Hong Kong. ‘But it’s everyone’s home really, for all of us to come back to. If you must know, I want to get away from Babs and Charles because if I’m not independent they’re likely to go on treating me like a baby forever.’

And because she wasn’t a natural fighter, she was afraid she might be tempted to settle for the easy option and let them, Fee supplemented silently, but she wasn’t about to confide that much to Simon. For some reason it was important that he shouldn’t guess how much of the old, uncertain Fee still existed.

He was sending a lazily amused smile across the space between them.

‘They must be blind. It’s definitely a very adult Fee who has come home to us.’ Pausing, he observed her complicated reaction to the meaningful tone before digressing, ‘Your father is still mountaineering, isn’t he?’

‘In a sense. I think he’s part of a movement to clear old base-camp sites of litter all over Pakistan and Nepal, now that the problem has been realised, so he’s giving something back, which is nice. Mountains are all he has ever cared about; all the pleasure he has had has come from them,’ Fee acknowledged the kind of single-minded selfishness that had long since ceased to perturb her.

‘Lucky he had the means to indulge himself.’ Simon referred to the private fortune Jim Garland had spent in pursuit of his obsession.

‘He usually remembered to keep us supplied with money to live on, and he did buy this house,’ Fee reminded him loyally.

‘And dumped you in it when you were a baby. Wasn’t there some near-scandal about that?’ Simon frowned.

She laughed. ‘After my mother died when I was two. She’d never properly recovered from some complication at my birth because it happened somewhere remote in the Himalayas, with no doctors for hundreds of miles. The nannies he left me with here kept walking out, and someone found out and threatened to take him to court if I wasn’t looked after better, so he married Angela. She had Babs, and nowhere to live and no money—poor Babs doesn’t even know who her father was—so it worked out quite well when he was home, only Angela likes lots of attention and a man to be around all the time, and he kept telling her horror stories about my mother’s trials to discourage her because he didn’t want her with him in the mountains.’

Simon shook his head. ‘You girls must have had an even more chaotic childhood than I did. My various step-parents and unofficial aunts and uncles kept changing, but they were there. Angela wasn’t often, was she?’

Fee shook her head.

‘She’s an incurable romantic, always out looking. But Babs looked after me, and when we were older we looked after each other. I shiver when I think about it sometimes, though,’ she added in a hushed voice. ‘Once I got pneumonia and Babs couldn’t make the doctor’s receptionist understand her, and another time it was cold and she decided we should have a hot meal. She was only ten and she burnt her hand badly, and I was frantic; I didn’t know what to do…’

‘God, it’s a horror story.’ Simon sounded unusually thoughtful and he studied her expression for a moment. ‘People shouldn’t get married. Jim and Angela have never bothered with a divorce, have they? Angela was home last year, but then she met someone on his way to take up a contract job somewhere—Jakarta, I think—and she took off with him. But you’re a big girl now and don’t need anyone to take care of you, as you’ve just demonstrated by walking out on your lover in Australia and not even bothering to be discreet about it, all in the fine tradition of your odd family.’

Fee didn’t think she had taken care of herself at all successfully, considering the humiliation she had suffered as a consequence of her own stupid naïveté, and, while she loved her family, she had no intention of following in any of their footsteps. Her dreams were conventional, of a husband who came home to her and children she would care for herself.

‘You would believe that was the way it was,’ she taunted sharply. ‘It may interest you to know that absolutely no one else does.’

‘As we’ve agreed, that’s because the fools all still see you as the child they remember. But you and I both know you’re not. You grew up in a sexually sophisticated milieu and it was only a matter of time before you adopted our mores. Welcome to the real, adult world, darling. It’s a pleasure to know you—or it will be.’

Fee just managed not to look startled. For a moment it had almost sounded as if he was flirting with her, the way he did with other women, but surely that was impossible? Not Simon. Not with her!

‘You’re wrong! About the Australian business, I mean.’ Her dark blue eyes flashed as she dismissed the ridiculous idea. ‘But I don’t care what you think.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ he commended her insouciantly. ‘Never explain yourself, never make excuses, never mind what people say and think. Incidentally, Charles was telling me on the phone earlier that you weren’t finding the job market too promising. That’s why I’m here. I might just have something for you if the position of assistant to Sheldon’s assistant entailed what I imagine it did. There’s a woman who’s leaving Rhodes whose position you might be able to fill, although why she has to take off so inconveniently is beyond me. Her excuse is so stupidly irrational that I refuse to dignify it by calling it a reason.’