A Thorn In Paradise

‘You can’t stay in bed all day,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘You’ll be bored stiff in under an hour. Besides, I may take you for walks in your wheelchair, but you know that you need to exercise your limbs by walking around the house. You know what the doctor said——’

‘I refuse to budge. I don’t care what you or that quack of a doctor says.’

‘Dr Harman isn’t a quack, in fact, he’s noted——’

‘Noted, boted,’ Benjamin cut in with rising irritation. ‘I’m not budging. Though why I should be a prisoner in my own home I fail to understand. This is my home, dammit! How dare he walk in here and shut me up in my bedroom? You’ll have to get him out!’

‘What, me?’ She stopped what she was doing and then looked wryly at him as he gave her a sly smile.

‘So, I see he’s got to you, has he? What did you think of him, then?’

‘If you must know,’ she said calmly, ‘I thought he was overbearing, arrogant and unpleasant.’

‘But good-looking, eh? He used to be damned fine-looking when I last saw him. What does he look like now?’ He glanced down at his gnarled fingers and then clasped them on his lap, continuing to peer at them with overdone fascination.

‘Passable,’ Corinna said. She extracted some clothes from his wardrobe and laid them out on the bed. Grey flannel trousers, a pale blue long-sleeved shirt because Benjamin had no time for short-sleeved shirts, whatever the weather, a pair of charcoal-grey socks.

She could feel her heart step up a beat as she remembered Antonio Silver’s formidable physical impact. In the cold light of day he was probably nowhere as overwhelming as he had appeared the night before, but she still couldn’t prevent the tell-tale flush of colour on her cheeks.

Benjamin, though, wasn’t looking at her. He was still peering at his hands.

‘Well, I won’t see him,’ he said finally, ‘so you might as well put those clothes right where you found them.’

‘Now don’t be silly,’ she began, and he lay down on his side and pretended that she wasn’t there. She wasn’t at all perturbed by this reaction. Benjamin Silver could be childishly truculent at times. He had a fine, sharp mind that had been blunted by disuse. Too little mental stimulation filled him with an energy which his body did not allow him to exhaust and his way of coping was to try and rule the roost around him. Angus McBride was right, he needed more than the walls of Deanbridge House to fill his days.

‘You’ll have to face him some time,’ she said bluntly. ‘He doesn’t look like the type who’s going to disappear just because you want him to. I know that it’s your house, but honestly, what can you do? You’ll just have to face him.’

‘Did he say why he’d come?’ he asked in a muffled voice, and she stiffened, recalling the conversation with a feeling of remembered unpleasantness.

‘That’s something you’ll have to discuss with him,’ she said, looking down, and he rolled over to face her.

‘My curiosity isn’t that great,’ he informed her loftily and she shrugged. She was beginning to feel like piggy in the middle and it was a feeling for which she had no taste. Why did Antonio Silver have to appear on the scene? Things were going so smoothly in her life. For the first time in ages, she felt truly relaxed, having quit her job and left Michael, two aspects of her life which she only realised in retrospect had been pulling her down. Why had he come along and spoilt everything with his accusations and his sophisticated mockery?

She opened her mouth to inform him that there was no way that she was going to play intermediary, but before she could speak he was waving his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

‘Shoo!’ he said. ‘Have the day off. Just so long as you keep that so-called son of mine out of my hair!’

With a cross sigh of defeat, she left the room, quietly shutting the door behind her and made her way downstairs to the kitchen.

There was a parlour which had been specifically designed to be used as a breakfast-room, but neither she nor Benjamin ever used it in that capacity. The kitchen was a much warmer place. It was Edna’s pride and joy and in the entire house it was the one room to which no concessions to glamour had been made. Only the cooking utensils were the best that money could buy, because Edna prided herself on her cooking. She never allowed any of the girls to help her, cultivated her own personal herb garden, and produced simple but lovely fare. She was a great fan of the roast meal, and detested things with too much cream or alcohol as being travesties of good cooking.

‘Sure road to indigestion,’ she was fond of saying. Benjamin, of course, was wont to inform her that she was clearly behind the times, but he too preferred simple cooking, so the arrangement suited him perfectly.

Corinna walked into the kitchen wearing a frown of concentration and immediately stopped dead in her tracks. She had all but convinced herself that Antonio Silver was only an ordinary human being, a mere mortal with no more than a bit of an acid temperament, but seeing him now, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of black coffee in front of him, casually dressed in a beige shirt which had been rolled to the elbows to expose his strong forearms, she felt a sudden urge to turn tail and flee. He was every bit as commanding as her very worst memories. In the light of day, she could see that every bone in his face was stamped with hard, self-assured assertiveness. He was darker than she had thought, his skin bearing the hallmark of a life in a kinder climate, which made his silver-grey eyes appear more startling because of the contrast.

He watched her as she poured herself a cup of coffee, and, when she had sat down, he finally said politely, ‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning,’ Corinna returned awkwardly, shifting her gaze away from his probing stare. ‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked politely, and he raised his eyebrows as if ironically amused by the lack of sincerity in her question. The open hostility was no longer quite as apparent as it had been the night before, but it was still there, of that she had no doubt, simmering away under the surface, temporarily replaced by an equally disconcerting iciness. If only that could distract her from his intense physical appeal, but she was alarmed to find that her body was reacting to his blatant masculinity with edgy awareness.

‘I’ve had better nights,’ he returned, sipping some coffee and looking at her over the brim of the cup. ‘I trust you’ve seen my father and informed him of my presence?’

‘He already knew before I saw him this morning. Edna told him.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’ She fixed him with a blank, innocent stare. She would have preferred not to be sitting here, not to be struggling with her treacherous, racing nerves, but, since she was, she wasn’t about to indulge in open warfare. If this was a cold war, then she would play the rules of that game.

‘And what was his reaction?’

Corinna gave it some thought. Appear calm and collected, she thought, and you’ll feel calm and collected. ‘He wasn’t a hundred per cent impressed,’ she told him calmly. There was fresh bread on the table. She took a slice and buttered it, making sure not to look at him. Passable, she realised, was not an adequate description of Antonio Silver. He had the build of an athlete, his body hard and finely tuned, and a face which would make most women stop dead in their tracks, and no doubt he was very much aware of that. Conceited, she decided at once. The man was probably brimming over with conceit, as well as being thoroughly dislikeable, and conceit was hardly one of the world’s most admirable characteristics, was it?

She could feel those silver-grey eyes on her and she looked up with a polite, detached expression.

‘Not a hundred per cent impressed,’ he drawled lazily, sitting back in the chair to give her the full benefit of his attention. ‘I had forgotten that you British were the masters of understatement.’

‘We British? Aren’t you forgetting that you’re at least half British? Surely not; you made such a point of reminding me of that fact last night.’

There was a brief silence, then he unexpectedly smiled, and that smile filled his face with such devastatingly sexy charm that she felt her cheeks go pink in sudden confusion. She almost found herself preferring the angry insults to this.

‘Where’s Edna?’ she asked quickly, not caring to dwell on the impact he was making on her.

‘Gone to the village. My father may be unimpressed with my arrival, but Edna thinks it’s the return of the prodigal son. She’s gone to stock up on all my favourite foods. God knows how she remembered them. She must have the memory of an elephant.’

So, she thought sourly, the formidable Edna has turned pussycat. He probably had that reaction from every woman he came into contact with.

‘And where’s my father?’ he asked, lowering his eyes in almost precisely the same manner that Benjamin had a short while ago.

‘In his bedroom.’

‘Hiding?’

It was so near the mark that she was taken aback. ‘Trying to get over the shock of realising that you’re here,’ she said tartly. ‘I don’t think he wants to see you, at least not at the moment.’ Maybe you could try again in a few years’ time, she thought, when I’m well and truly out of here.

‘Well, he’s going to see me whether he likes it or not,’ Antonio said coolly, ‘and without you playing the little mediator. No doubt running between the two of us would give you no end of pleasure, but I intend to see him and that’s that.’

‘I can’t think of anything worse than running between the two of you,’ Corinna said tightly, already beginning to feel rattled. ‘He’s your father, you sort your troubles out yourself.’

‘And I won’t have you trying to influence him either.’

She slammed her cup down on the table and looked at him angrily. ‘I have no intention of trying to influence your father!’ she informed him.

‘So you haven’t told him what we discussed last night?’

‘No,’ she said in a more controlled voice, ‘I haven’t told him what you discussed last night. I don’t recall having discussed anything with you.’

‘And you haven’t run to him with any derogatory descriptions of me?’

Corinna opened her mouth and closed it.