Accidental Mistress

Nurse was smiling efficiently and as soon as the doctor had left she fussed around the bed, pointing out where the alarm call was, the light switch, the television switch, and then she said, as she was leaving, ‘You have a visitor, by the way.’

‘A visitor? What visitor?’

The nurse smiled coyly, which only served to deepen Lisa’s bewilderment.

‘I thought he was your young man, actually. He travelled behind the ambulance to the hospital and he’s been waiting here ever since.’

Lisa would have liked to ask a few more questions, including what had happened to her suitcase, last seen baring its contents to all and sundry, but the nurse was already leaving and in her place walked the man who had been bending over her on the road. Her visitor. The man with no name who had taken control of everything until the ambulance had arrived.

She looked at him as he shut the door quietly behind him and felt a quiver of pleasure surge through her. She also felt quite surprisingly shy and tongue-tied and she had to make a huge effort to tell herself that she was being silly.

She was a grown woman now. No longer the child trailing behind her parents, no longer the gauche adolescent with no experience of the opposite sex, no longer the young girl deprived of that network of giggling contemporaries who dropped her eyes and pulled away the minute a boy started taking an interest in her. Those years were behind her now. She told herself that quite firmly and felt better.

She furtively eyed her visitor as he pulled the one and only chair over to her bed, sat down, and proceeded to give her the full benefit of his attention.

‘I believe the last time we spoke no introductions were made,’ he said, and his voice was precisely as she remembered. Dark and somehow inviting you to give all your attention back to him. Willing it, in fact. ‘How are you feeling?’

He had dried out. His hair, she saw now, was thick and black, as were his eyelashes, and he had removed his coat and jacket and rolled the sleeves of his white shirt up to the elbows, so that she could see his forearms, with their sprinkling of fine dark hair.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘A bit restricted, but I suppose I’ll get used to that in due course.’

‘I’m Angus Hamilton, by the way,’ he said with a smile, stretching out his hand to her and then grasping hers so that she felt her skin tingle, and she hurriedly shoved it away under the starched sheet as soon as she could.

‘Lisa Freeman,’ she said, blushing slightly. ‘Nurse said that you came here after the accident. There was no need, really.’

‘Oh, but there was every need.’ He sat back in the chair, which seemed far too small to accommodate him. ‘You see, it was my driver who knocked you over. I’m afraid he didn’t see you soon enough. You stepped out in front of the car and he tried to brake in time. The rest is history.’ He was looking at her intently as he said all this, his blue eyes fixed on her face.

‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘I should have used the pedestrian crossing,’ she said frankly. ‘I was in a dreadful rush, though.’ She thought about the wonderful holiday and her frantic preparations and felt a lump of regret swell in her throat. ‘What happened to my suitcase?’

‘I collected the lot and gave it to the nurse. Were you on your way to catch a plane?’

‘Lanzarote.’ She was normally quite a self-contained person but right now she felt emotional, with tears brimming up behind her eyes.

‘I’m really very sorry,’ he said, and to her embarrassment he reached into his pocket and extracted a fresh white handkerchief which he handed to her. ‘I have no idea what happens in a situation like this, but I’m sure that some compensation can be reached. I’ve sorted out this room for you and naturally I shall make sure that whatever money has been lost on your holiday is forwarded to you.’

‘Y-you sorted out this room?’ Lisa repeated, stammering.

‘Your stay here will be private.’

‘There was no need.’ She looked at him, aghast. It had crossed her mind that being the sole occupant in a room in a very busy hospital was a bit peculiar, but it had never occurred to her that someone else might have paid for it.

‘It was the least I could do,’ he said, frowning.

‘Well, it’s enough.’ She looked at him firmly. ‘I can’t possibly ask you for any kind of financial compensation for an accident that was partly my fault and partly the fault of the heavens opening up.’ In fact, thinking about it, it was probably more her fault than the fault of the weather because she hadn’t been looking where she was going. She had stepped out from between two parked cars, intent on getting to that terminal before her arms gave out completely.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he told her, but sounded more perplexed and irritated than angry.

‘I’m not. I don’t want any money from you.’

‘And what about your holiday?’

Lisa shrugged and pictured herself lying by a pool somewhere with a tinge of regret. ‘It was too good to be true anyway,’ she said on a sigh. ‘I won it, you see. I entered a competition in a magazine and won it, so it’s not really as though I’ve lost any money or anything.’

‘You won it?’ He made it sound as though having to enter competitions to get holidays was something utterly unheard of and she said, defensively,

‘I can’t afford one otherwise!’

She looked at him properly, not at his physical appearance, but at his clothes, his shoes, his watch, and she realised that, although she had no idea what he did for a living, whatever it was paid well because he exuded that air of confidence and power that came to people who had a great deal of wealth. Not the sort of man that she would ever have met under normal circumstances, nor the sort that she would have wanted to meet. A man destined to lead women up garden paths. From the pinnacle of inexperience, she felt sure that she had summed him up correctly.

‘Which is all the more reason...’

‘On no condition will I accept money from you! I was in the wrong and I would have a guilty conscience if I felt that I had swindled you out of money.’

‘I can afford it, for heaven’s sake!’ He was beginning to look as though she had taken leave of her senses. ‘You’re not swindling me out of anything!’

‘No.’

‘Are you always so stubborn?’ he asked, with a faintly mystified look. ‘I must say it’s a new experience to want to give money away only to find it flung back in my face.’

He gave her a long, slow smile that was so full of unintentional charm that she felt her head begin to swim a little. Had she ever met a man as potent as this one was? she wondered. Was that why he was having this heady effect on her? Maybe the fact that she was stuffed full of painkillers had something to do with it. All that medication would have thrown her system out of focus, might be making her responses go awry. She blinked and looked at him and still felt as though something tight was gripping her chest.

‘Do you work?’ he asked at last, curiously. ‘Does it not pay enough for you to have a holiday now and again? When was the last time you had a holiday?’

‘I might be stubborn,’ Lisa said tartly, ‘but at least I’m not nosy.’

‘Everyone’s nosy,’ Angus said, looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and amusement.

‘Oh, are they? What a strange world you must live in, where everyone’s nosy and willing to accept money wherever it comes from and whatever the circumstances.’

He looked even more vastly amused by that and she felt the colour crawl up into her face, making her hot and addled. For a second she was the fourteen-year-old girl in her party frock again, anxiously waiting at the front door for her first date to arrive, hoping that he wouldn’t notice the packing cases, still only halfunpacked in the small living room, assured by her parents that she looked lovely, but knowing deep down that she just looked plain and unexciting. She was only ever exciting in her mind. In reality, she knew that she was shy and reserved and that any self-confidence she had acquired over the years was really only a thin veneer.

‘I hope you’re not laughing at me,’ she said now.

‘Laughing at you?’ His dark eyebrows shot up. ‘Someone with such admirable principles?’

He was laughing at her. He was thinking that she was gauche and ingenuous and naïve and heaven only knew what else besides.

‘Well,’ she said, trying to sound composed, ‘in answer to your questions, yes, I have got a job, yes, I suppose I could just afford to go abroad now and again—well, once a year, anyway—but something would suffer, and as a matter of fact I have never been on a holiday.’

‘You have never been on a holiday?’ He sounded incredulous and she glared at him defensively.

‘That’s right,’ she snapped. ‘Is it so unheard of?’

‘Largely speaking, yes,’ he answered bluntly. He was looking at her as though he had come across a strange species of creature, believed extinct, which, against her better judgement, made her stammer out an explanation of sorts.

’M-my parents travelled around the country a lot... My father didn’t...didn’t like to be in one place for too long... nor Mum... They—they liked the feeling of being on the move, you see...’

‘How thoughtful of them, considering they had a child. Are you an only child? Have you any sisters? Brothers?’