A Suitable Mistress

‘And your word is gospel?’ She laughed with sarcasm, and he reached out and gripped her arm.

‘I know you want to blame someone for your father’s death,’ he ground out, ‘and I know that you have decided that I fit the bill. Fine. It’s a misconception which you will grow out of with time. But I have no intention of letting you stay here a minute longer and that’s that. So start packing your bags. You’re coming with me.’

‘I don’t intend to be bullied by you!’

‘Someone has to bully you into doing something,’ he said impatiently. ‘If your brother was here instead of in Australia the task would fall to him.’

‘Task? Task? So I’m a responsibility now, am I? Poor little Suzanne Stanton who has no control over her life.’

‘That’s right.’

She glared at him and had the sinking feeling that arguing would be like trying to make a dent with a wooden spoon in the Rock of Gibraltar. He was immovable. He had waltzed in here, decided that she was unfit to take control of herself and had immediately concluded, probably because he felt guilty, that the onerous task fell to him.

‘I don’t need your pity,’ she said bitingly, ‘or anyone else’s for that matter.’

‘You’re a child, Suzie,’ he told her by way of response. ‘You don’t know what you need. You should thank God that I have returned to take you in hand.’

CHAPTER TWO

A BULLY. That, she decided, was what Dane was. An overgrown bully. Suzanne sat next to him in the car, simmering with resentment, and he calmly ignored it all and made polite conversation, asking her questions, prising answers reluctantly out of her.

The very worst thing was that she knew that she was behaving like a child. His proposition might have gone against everything ingrained in her, everything that told her that he was part of the family that had mistreated her father, but his offer was better than anything that she could come up with herself: a roof over her head and a job.

And the memory of Mrs Gentry’s face when she’d told her that she could keep her awful little bedsit afforded her quite a bit of silent amusement. She glanced across at him in the dark car and felt a shiver of alarmed apprehension. He was, to himself at any rate, doing her a favour and there was nothing, she told herself, that she should be alarmed about, but she had the uneasy feeling of being a fish in a net—a very large net at this point in time, with lots of room for manoeuvre, but a net nevertheless.

He looked across at her and she dropped her eyes quickly.

‘How long did Tom stay after your father’s funeral?’ he asked casually. He had, she noticed, no qualms at all about referring to her father’s death. Most people studiously avoided mentioning it, as though it were a strangely taboo subject.

‘Only a fortnight,’ she replied, looking out of the window at London passing slowly by her—crowded streets, brightly lit shops, a sense of hurry everywhere. ‘Marian couldn’t come over. She’s eight months pregnant and six months ago they told her that she couldn’t travel. He wanted to get back to her as soon as he could.’

She thought regretfully of her brother’s hurried stay in England. It would have been comforting to have him around for a bit longer, although things between them had changed slightly anyway. He was married now and had been for three years.

He had sent their father a ticket to Australia so that he could go to the wedding. She remembered with deep fondness the state of great excitement that had preceded the departure. Anyone would have thought that he had been picked to fly to the moon.

But marriage had taken Tom away a bit from her. They still chatted easily, and wrote to each other often, but his attentions no longer focused on his little sister as indulgently as they had. He had a wife now—a wife whom she had never met although the pictures of her promised someone very friendly—and a baby on the way.

‘He asked me to go back with him,’ she said suddenly, leaning a bit against the door so that she could look at Dane’s averted profile.

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘It seemed like the end of the world and beyond.’ At the time she had felt that to go that far away would be somehow tantamount to desertion. ‘Besides,’ she added, terminating the conversation because she could see it leading to another sermon on how far she had let herself go, simply because, after all these months, she still couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to do anything, however hard she tried, ‘I hate huge spiders.’

‘I suspect there’s probably more to Australia than huge spiders,’ he said drily, half smiling, and she had that unpleasant, falling feeling which she could remember as a teenager, when he had smiled at her in a way that made her feel as though he had access to all her deepest thoughts.

‘Why did you decide to go to America?’ she asked, changing the subject, and his face hardened.

‘I had my reasons,’ he said in his usual, controlled voice, but there was an edge of granite there that hadn’t been there before.

‘What reasons?’ she asked with interest, and he frowned and glanced across at her.

‘I see that tact still isn’t one of your strong points,’ he said with lazy amusement.

‘Why should you feel free to ask questions about my life and I can’t do the same about yours?’

‘Because you’re a child and children shouldn’t ask too many questions.’ He laughed but she didn’t laugh with him.

‘What you’re saying is that, since I should be indebted to you, I should just bow my head in silence and accept what the master tells me without asking anything in return? ’

‘That’s rubbish,’ he told her calmly. ‘But, if you really want to know, I went away to make my fortune.’

‘I thought that your father left you everything?’ He had drawn the lines and she knew that she was overstepping them but he was right, tact never had been one of her strong points, and besides, she had no intention of allowing him to think that she had to be subservient simply because her father had worked for his.

She was grudgingly aware that she was being slightly unfair in this generalisation, but every time she thought of him she thought of his stepmother and the blood rushed to her head with angry force.

‘He left me the estate and a fair-sized inheritance, but control of the company went to Martha.’

‘I’m surprised that she didn’t ask you to take over,’ Suzanne said. He had run it virtually single-handed for the four years before his father died.

‘Oh, there were a lot of things that Martha wanted,’ he said coolly, and this time the warning in his voice left her in no doubt that he did not intend to develop the conversation further. ‘But we don’t always get what we want in life, do we? I decided to make my own fortune in America.’

‘And you did.’

‘And,’ he said, turning to her briefly, ‘I did.’

They had been driving through a very exclusive part of London for the past few minutes. The sort of place that made a very convincing show of being in the country somewhere. Lots of trees and houses hidden from public sight by walls and hedges and long, swirling drives.

The car turned into one of the long, swirling drives and her eyes widened as she took in the proportions of the house. It was huge. A great Victorian building that had been converted into apartments.

No wonder the pitiful increase in rent with which Mrs Gentry had threatened her had seemed a paltry affair to him.

There was a security guard on the ground floor, sitting at a desk and surrounded by various strategically placed plants and a few pieces of discreet furniture here and there. It looked like someone’s lounge.

‘Are you allowed to have guests staying with you?’ she asked in a whisper as they took the lift up to his floor, and he looked at her with a mixture of amusement and irony.

‘This entire block of apartments belongs to me,’ he said. ‘An investment purchase made two weeks after I left the country.’

‘You knew you would come back?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that held no warmth, ‘I knew that I would come back. The only question was when.’

She looked at him, vaguely feeling that there was something here, something not being said, that carried a wealth of hidden meaning, but she couldn’t put her finger on it and he was not about to elucidate. He would never reveal anything unless he wanted to. It was what, she suspected, made him so formidable.

She followed him out of the lift, along the thick white carpet, and it transpired that the entire floor of the building comprised his apartment.

Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a lounge, a kitchen, all beautifully furnished, ready and waiting, she thought, for Dane Sutherland when he decided that the time was right to return.

Suzanne dropped her little battered case in the lounge and looked around her with amazement.