A Suitable Mistress

‘As far as I knew, he was one of the ones who remained in her employment and, as I told you, my offer of money was amicably but firmly returned to sender. I will admit, though, that I was told of...changes, for want of a better word. Certain facts were reported back to me.’

‘What facts?’

‘Nothing that you need concern yourself with.’ His tone of voice did not invite lively debate on the subject. He had thrown her, she thought, a few scraps of information, but he had no intention of explaining any more to her. Probably because he felt no need to launch into any lengthy explanations to a girl who was, after all, beneath him in social standing.

‘What did you do with your father’s possessions?’ he asked suddenly, and she scowled.

‘There weren’t many. The few big things he had accumulated over the years, I left with a friend in Leamington Spa. I brought the smaller things to London with me.’

She looked down into her coffee-cup. There was a locket with a picture of her mother inside, a stack of old letters which she had written to Santa Claus over the years, and which he had assiduously kept in a scrapbook, all her report cards from school, a box of photographs, the watch which old Mr Sutherland had given to him on his fiftieth birthday and which he had worn every day of his life from the moment he had received it. She had packed them neatly into a small cardboard box and had kept them in her cupboard in the bedsit.

She hoped that he wasn’t looking when she wiped a tear away-from her cheek. She didn’t want him rushing across to her with a load of phoney sympathy and a handkerchief.

‘Now,’ he said, and there was, thankfully, no indication that he had noticed her brief lapse, ‘shall we discuss the job?’

‘There’s really no need—’ she began, thinking that this sounded like a rerun of what she had said when he had offered her a room in his apartment.

‘I realise that,’ he cut in abruptly. ‘Just as I realise what a bitter pill it is for you to swallow, taking anything that’s handed to you from a member of my family. But this isn’t the act of charity that you’d like to believe. I have several companies over here, all bought with some of my father’s inheritance two years ago. I took them over when they were in receivership and they’re all now thriving.’

He had bought companies in England after he had moved to America? Why would he have done that? And if he had done that, why bother to go to America at all?

‘You’ve been back to England since you went away?’ she asked, perplexed.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And still you never came to the house to see your stepmother?’

‘No.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Don’t,’ he said with a tinge of impatience, ‘ask so many questions.’

‘Yes, sir!’ she muttered under her breath, and he shot her a crooked smile.

‘Good girl. Now, there’s a position vacant in one of the companies for an assistant accountant How far had you reached in your studies?’

Suzanne tucked her feet up underneath her and leant forward, resting her elbows on her knees. Her long hair fell in an untidy tousle of ringlets down the sides of her face and she gave the question some thought.

‘I was on the verge of qualification,’ she admitted, steeling herself for another fight, but he made no comment, and she explained to him just what she could do, what areas of tax she felt qualified to cover, how knowledgeable she was on company litigation, all the aspects of audit control which she had found very simple at the time. While she spoke, he nodded, listening in silence until she had finished, and she gave a nervous little laugh.

‘Of course, I may have forgotten all of it.’

‘I hardly think so. If anything, you’re probably overqualified for the job I have in mind, but if you were temping then it’ll be more challenging that what you must have been doing.’

‘When it comes to photocopying and filing, most things pose a greater challenge,’ she said with a laugh. Strange, but it felt as though she hadn’t laughed in years. She could hardly believe that that carefree amused sound had actually come out of her. And in the company of a man who sat on the opposite side of the fence to her.

He told her how much she would be paid, and she looked at him with a fair amount of amazement.

‘That’s awfully high,’ she said at last, and he shook his head in genuine amusement.

‘You will never get far in business if you insist on being honest to that degree,’ he said. ‘I pay my workers well because I want their loyalty and hard work. After all, they are the backbone of the company and if they’re disgruntled they won’t stay. High turnover of staff is very bad if a company is to succeed.’

‘And success is what it’s all about.’

‘That’s right.’

She looked at him frankly. If success was what his priority was, then he had attained his goal, because it sat on his shoulders, followed him like a shadow, was there in the dark look of self-assurance and power.

‘Will I be working for you?’ she asked suddenly. For some reason she found the idea of that slightly alarming. She could cope with bumping into him occasionally in the apartment, but the prospect of having him around on a more permanent basis made her uneasy.

‘Oh, no.’ He reached forward and deposited his cup on the table in front of him, then he linked his fingers behind his head and surveyed her. ‘I am involved in a company that is quite removed from the one in which you will be working. I leave the running of this particular publishing company in the hands of my directors. They report back to me at frequent intervals.’

‘So who is going to be my boss?’ Just so long as he bore no resemblance to the odious Mr Slattery then she would be all right.

‘A woman by the name of Angela Street. She’s American. I sent her over about four months ago when I knew that I would be moving back here. She’s smart and efficient and doesn’t let the grass grow under her feet.’

A woman? From America? All the way from America when London was full of smart, efficient women?

Who was he trying to kid? She might be naive but she wasn’t born yesterday. Smart, efficient Angela Street was more than a work machine. Why didn’t he say so? Why didn’t he say that she was his lover?

CHAPTER THREE

WERE clothes for women anything over size ten designed to make them look dull? It appeared so. Suzanne looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom and decided that she looked frumpy. She had worn the suit for two months without that thought ever crossing her mind, but it crossed it now, and she tried, without much success, to smooth the skirt into a semblance of something chic.

It was a light summer suit but the colours were insipid and the overall grey effect didn’t do much for her.

She had tied her long, unruly hair back into a French plait which hung down her back, but strands kept escaping and short of gluing them to the side of her head there seemed little she could do to avoid it.

It was, all things considered, just as well that Dane wasn’t around. He was out of the country for a few days. He wouldn’t have said anything about her appearance but those cool, assessing grey eyes would have said it on his behalf anyway and she would have instantly retreated into a position of muted self-defence, which was childish, she knew, but which was something she couldn’t seem to prevent.

He had, he had told her, spoken to Angela and there was nothing to be nervous about.

‘Why on earth should I be nervous?’ she had asked him airily. ‘Does she bite?’

‘Nothing quite so dramatic,’ he had answered drily, his eyes resting on her and making her feel hot and bothered, and cross to be feeling that way. ‘But she’s extremely capable and quite intolerant of temper tantrums.’

‘I did not lose my last job because of a temper tantrum,’ Suzanne had told him hotly, but she was uncomfortably aware that her outspokenness to her last boss, justified though it had been, had stepped beyond the lines of good sense.

At the time she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t enjoyed the job, she had been paid a pittance and she had had no real idea of why she had stuck the damn thing out for so long, apart from the fact that it had been convenient

She found now that she cared a great deal about keeping this job. It might have been a charitable handout to assuage Dane Sutherland’s guilty conscience, it might have been offered out of remembered affection for her father and the daughter who had harboured a teenage crush on him, but she wasn’t about to live down to his expectations of her as a child by jeopardising it in any way.

She looked at the photograph of her father, which she had put on the dressing table, and for once she found that her eyes did not automatically fill with tears. She told the picture of the middle-aged man with the kind eyes and the self-conscious expression of someone posing for the camera that her personal dislike of Dane Sutherland wasn’t going to get in the way of doing a good job.

‘He won’t be able to think, even for a fleeting second, that I failed the test and what else could you expect of the chauffeur’s daughter.’ Her voice echoed in the silence of the room and she grinned and wondered whether she was going mad. Talking to photographs. What next?

The company was one of four that Dane had bought over the three years that he had been away and hauled out of the doldrums, back into mainstream life.