A Suitable Mistress

‘Just curious.’ He shrugged and laughed, not at all taken aback by her reply.

‘I don’t ask you about the women in your life,’ Suzanne muttered, irritated as much by his attitude as by his line of questioning.

‘Feel free to,’ he said, folding his arms and shrugging again. She caught his eyes and was struck, as she had been years ago, by his magnificent ability to make it seem as though one hundred per cent of his attention was focused entirely on her. A trick of sorts, she knew, a talent for pretence, but how she had once let it work on her. She couldn’t think back to her adolescence without cringing.

‘I’m not that interested,’ she said, wondering whether she should scrape her plate clean or whether that would appear greedy. The food had tasted wonderful—full of tomatoes and herbs. Far better than anything she could whip up. She had never been at her best in a kitchen. Things always seemed to go wrong whenever and wherever they possibly could. Sauces always curdled, or else became lumpy, meat always seemed to burn, and she always managed to forget whatever was boiling until the smell became unavoidable.

She stood up and began clearing away the dishes, vaguely piqued to realise that if she was uninterested in his women then he was even less interested in her response.

He employed, he told her, a woman who came in and cleaned every other day. She also did his ironing and cooked if and when he wanted her to.

‘Lucky old you,’ she said, watching him as he fixed them cups of coffee and nodded briefly in the direction of the lounge.

‘Shall we clear the air, Suzie?’ he asked with a resigned sigh. ‘Do you dislike me personally, or do you simply dislike the family I represent?’

He sat down on the chair opposite her and stretched out his long legs, crossing them loosely at the ankles.

‘How can you expect me to give you an honest answer to that question, when I am not renting a room in your house?’

‘Because,’ he said steadily, his expression shuttered, ‘you haven’t yet learned the art of deception. You would like to maintain some kind of dignified coldness, I imagine, but your need to express yourself trips you up constantly. Am I right?’

‘You’re always right, aren’t you?’

‘I think that that’s one reason why you’ve let yourself go so utterly for the past few months. You’ve not spoken to anyone about your father’s death. Instead you’ve bottled up your emotions, which is alien to you, and the result is that you’re still as maudlin and confused as you were the day he died.’

‘I am neither maudlin nor confused,’ she denied hotly.

‘You seem to think that I washed my hands of your father the day I left the house,’ he said, in a cool statement of fact. ‘I did write to him, you know, and a little over a year ago I sent him a cheque in case he needed money. I knew that he had put aside the small legacy my father left him for you. He returned my cheque with a friendly enough letter saying that he was fine.’

Suzanne stared at him, floored by this revelation about which she had known nothing. ‘Pride,’ she managed to say, recovering her power of speech.

‘Almost certainly,’ he agreed, either not noticing or else deliberately ignoring the effect that his words had had on her. ‘Still, I had no idea that my stepmother was giving him such a hard time.’

‘And if you had known, would you have rushed over to save the situation?’

He paused for a fraction of a second—a fraction long enough for her to know that as far as he was concerned he had divorced himself from his past and would not have reopened it willingly. She felt a surge of anger against him and her hand was trembling when she picked up the coffee-cup. He might have offered money to her father, but time was something which he could ill afford to spare.

‘I would have dealt with it,’ he told her grimly, which did very little to appease her anger.

‘From thousands of miles away? How compassionate you are!’

He would have thought about it, she told herself, and written a polite letter, but the urgency of it all would have been lost on him. He had been caught up in a different world and chauffeurs had no place in it. She felt tears of self-pity spring to her eyes, but for once the associated thought of nibbling some chocolate did not arise. She was far too busy feeling angry with him.

‘Why have you decided to come back?’ she asked. ‘If it was so exciting in America, why return?’

‘It was now or never.’ Five words that silenced her because there was something dark and menacing behind them. ‘And you never answered my question,’ he said, his features relaxing. ‘Do you dislike me personally or do you simply dislike what I represent?’

‘Do you care?’

‘I’m interested,’ he answered lazily, sidestepping the question, which, she knew, had been foolish anyway.

‘I don’t dislike you,’ she said, trying to sound more sophisticated. ‘Although, I admit that I don’t find your type attractive.’

‘And what type is that exactly? Using your vast knowledge of men as a starting point.’

This time she was certain that he was laughing at her. He was a mere nine years older than her but in terms of experience it was tantamount to a lifetime and she knew it. As he did.

‘Cruel,’ she said, ‘arrogant, too good-looking, too cut off from feeling any real emotion about anyone.’

‘You have no idea what emotions I feel,’ he murmured, sipping some of his coffee and looking at her over the rim of the cup.

She didn’t add the real reason that she disliked him—a dislike that she had nurtured over the years and one that had become more real to her with the passing of time, rather than faded—an overheard conversation, a few passing words before the door closed on her red-faced humiliation.

‘You’ll have to watch your chauffeur’s little girl, Dane.’ The merry tinkle of Martha’s laughter. She had a way of laughing that made it seem as though she was a vastly superior being. ‘She’s got a teenage crush on you.’

Suzanne had been hidden from sight, a loose-limbed girl of sixteen on her way to deliver a message from her father.

‘Don’t concern yourself over that,’ Dane had said. His voice had been indifferent, and although she hadn’t been able to see him she had imagined him strolling across to the patio doors, looking outside, his thoughts on things that had very little to do with an irritating adolescent and her fanciful illusions.

‘But darling,’ Martha had said, ‘you’re a very attractive man—’ her voice had been warm and amused ‘—and a child like that probably finds you irresistible. She peeps at you whenever you’re around. You must have noticed that she snatches every opportunity to visit the house when she knows that you’re here.’

Dane hadn’t answered, and Martha had said, which had been the final blow of mortification, ‘Besides, you must remember that she’s only the chauffeur’s daughter. You mustn’t let her get ideas above her station.’

And that had been that. Suzanne had turned away and heard the door shut before she had even made it down the corridor into the hall. The message she had been sent to deliver had flown out of her head completely. It had left a nice, tidy spot, just the right size for her disillusionment to set in.

‘And I hold you responsible for the way my father was treated,’ she told him bitterly. ‘You may not have been around, but you owed it to the people who worked for your father to see that they were treated properly, instead of just vanishing off the face of the earth and leaving your stepmother in charge. Did you even know that people who had worked for your father for years at the house were dismissed only weeks after your father died?’

She was gathering momentum now and was astounded when he said evenly, betraying no emotion whatever, ‘Yes, I did.’

‘You...you did?’

‘I made sure that they were all financially compensated. Very generously compensated.’

‘How on earth did you find out?’ Suzanne asked, frowning and trying hard to work out how a man thousands of miles away could have discovered that. Did he have some mysterious crystal ball in his New York penthouse, which he looked into every time he wanted to see what was happening on the other side of the world?

‘I have my ways.’

‘Spies, you mean?’

‘Nothing quite so dramatic.’ A shadow of a smile flitted across his dark features. ‘Someone there has been keeping an eye on things for me. He told me as soon as Martha began firing old hands.’

‘Why didn’t you return yourself to sort it out?’

‘It would have been impossible.’

Which, to her ears, implied that he hadn’t been bothered; but then, if he had been so unbothered, why would he have made sure that his father’s men were compensated? Why?

‘So you did know about the way Martha treated Dad, then?’ she threw at him in an accusing voice, and he shook his head.