Mistress by Mistake

‘If we’re talking make-overs…?’ She allowed her eyes to run speakingly over the tall, rangy figure of her lodger. ‘Do the words ‘‘ageing hippie’’ strike a chord?’ Head high, slender back ramrod-stiff, she stalked up the stairs trying to ignore the sounds of inexpertly muffled laughter. ‘I’ve had a very bad day!’ she yelled in warning over her shoulder.

The carpet beneath her feet was beginning to get thread-worn. It wasn’t the only thing in the big Victorian house that needed replacing—a circumstance that sometimes kept her awake late at night. When her parents had died five years earlier the first thing the solicitors had suggested was putting the rambling old building on the market.

But how could she have wrenched her thirteen-year-old brother away from the only home he’d ever known? He’d already lost his parents, and if they’d moved house he’d have had to change school too. She’d known there wouldn’t be enough left after the debts were settled to buy a place in the same area. Their parents had had many admirable qualities, but a knack with money had not been one of them. Eve had been fiercely determined that no matter what happened Nick wouldn’t suffer—he’d have all the advantages, bar loving parents, that she had had.

When she’d told the solicitors about her idea they’d regarded her with the sort of superior scorn that some people reserve for teenagers.

Impractical, they’d said. Not economically viable. Well, they’d been wrong, she thought with satisfaction. Five years on and Theo was their only long-term lodger, and, with a few exceptions, they’d been lucky with the succession of people who’d rented the other two rooms in the ugly Victorian monstrosity she’d always called home.

Right now they had a lady librarian in her early thirties and a postgraduate engineering student in his twenties as well as Theo, whom they’d known since they were children. She didn’t actually know at what point she and Nick had accepted him as extended family.

Eve had asked Theo once why he stayed, and he’d laughingly told her he was too lazy to move. He’d used to look at property, but he’d stopped pretending some time ago that this was a short-term measure. There had been a few wagging tongues when he’d moved in—she hadn’t yet been nineteen and he wasn’t exactly in his dotage—but unkind gossip had been the exception even then. Now it was non-existent. Eve thought maybe they—she and the other residents of 6 Acacia Avenue—filled a gap in Theo’s life, a gap where, but for a cruel twist of fate, there would have been a wife and children.

The old place ate up the cash, of course, so at the end of the day they weren’t much better off financially, but they coped. Actually, she was better off financially at the moment than she’d dared hope, since Nick had won a prestigious scholarship that was going to ease the financial burden of his three years at university considerably.

‘Do something reckless with it, Evie,’ he’d advised when she’d suggested spending the money she’d been putting aside for his education to replace the leaking flat roof on the kitchen extension.

‘Reckless,’ she said in disgust to her reflection in the mirror on the old mahogany dressing table. She pulled the back of her hand across her crimson-stained lips. This was the last time she let her silver-tongued sibling persuade her to do anything!

‘I’ve planned it with military precision, Evie. Nothing can go wrong.’ Nick had played expertly on her soft heart. Soft heart, she thought once again with a disgusted snort—soft brain, more like! Nick’s meticulous planning had gone wrong—big time.

She blamed herself for being so easily conned. She should have known things were getting out of hand when Nick had produced the expensive designer outfit belonging to his latest girlfriend’s sister and suggested she go into the kitchen to change. She ought to have kicked up a fuss when the girlfriend had produced cosmetics from an apparently bottomless make-up bag. To her amusement the teenager had been scandalised when Eve had casually confessed she didn’t actually bother with make-up normally.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for a miserable-looking Daniel saying, ‘She doesn’t have to do it, Nick,’ she might well have chickened out there and then. Stripping off the borrowed finery, she wished she had done just that, and been saved the most embarrassing, humiliating experience of her life.

That man, she silently fumed as she tightened the draw-string waist of her loose combat trousers with unwanted viciousness. No wonder poor Daniel didn’t confide his personal problems to an insensitive brute like that.

Recalling the flick of those icy cold blue eyes made her feel grubby and guilty all over again. She rubbed fiercely at the rash of goosebumps on her forearms and shuddered. No, she told herself firmly. I refuse to let that feeble excuse for a guardian make me feel like this. I’m not the one who should feel guilty. If Mr Marvellous hadn’t been so busy polishing his own ego he might have noticed his charge was suffering a major dose of teenage angst!

Now, of course, she could think of several choice phrases which would have cut that musclebound bully down to size. What had she come up with at the time? ‘This isn’t what it looks like, Mr Cummings.’

‘I still can’t believe I said that,’ she said out loud.

Theo looked up from the steaming pan to which he was adding indeterminate amounts of a variety of spices.

‘Why don’t you use the extractor? The whole place reeks of curry.’

‘Curry,’ the tall man repeated with offended dignity. ‘That word hardly describes the delicate balance of spices in my work of art.’

‘Fine. The whole place reeks of your work of art.’ She pulled out one of the mismatched chairs that were set around the long table in the middle of the room and slumped dejectedly down.

‘Want to tell Uncle Theo all about it?’ he suggested deserting his culinary enterprise with a regretful backward glance.

‘About what?’

‘Come off it, Evie,’ he said bluntly.

She gave a small concessionary shrug and rested her chin upon her arms, which were supported by the comforting solidity of the oak table. ‘I’ve never been so humiliated in my life!’ she confided, her voice muffled by the soft fabric of her olive striped top. ‘It was Nick’s fault.’

‘It would be,’ her companion acknowledged, speaking with the authority of someone who hadn’t escaped unscathed by that absent young person’s inventive schemes. ‘You’ll feel better if you talk about it.’

Being an innately sensitive human being, he didn’t laugh as the whole story spilled out.

‘There, I knew it—you think I was stupid!’ She lifted her head and tossed a feathery dark curl away from her cheek.

‘I think,’ he soothed, ‘it was a classic case of bad timing.’

‘I couldn’t refuse, could I?’ she appealed to him. ‘Poor Daniel was going through hell at school; he’s such a sensitive boy,’ she said, unable to think of his pale, sensitive features without a gush of maternal anguish.

‘So it was this girl—the man-eater who came on to him—that spread the rumour in school about him being gay?’ Eve nodded. ‘But he’s not…’

‘Gay? Of course not. The poor boy was just petrified by her. Not all seventeen-year-olds are like Nick.’ Confidence with the opposite sex was not something that her brother lacked—a fact that had given her several sleepless nights over the last couple of years.

‘So Nick was supposed to arrive with an audience guaranteed to spread the story just as Daniel was in a clinch with the object of all adolescent male fantasies—a desirable mature woman. Overnight his name would be synonymous with stud.’

‘In a nutshell…’ She pressed her fingers to her temples as if to physically remove the sickening throb of the terrible headache which was developing. ‘A case of bad casting, I know.’

‘It’s quite clever, really,’ Theo mused with grudging admiration.

Eve cast her lodger a look of intense dislike. ‘Clever! Pardon me if I don’t sound suitably appreciative. I doubt if you would either if you’d been threatened and abused by that disgusting man. Do you know what he called me?’ she demanded, her voice quivering with outrage. ‘A predatory, grasping little tart who couldn’t handle real men.’ Even when she closed her eyes she could still see the scornful blaze, hot enough to strip flesh from the bone, in the distinctive blue eyes.

‘Ouch.’

‘Ouch—is that all you can say?’

‘Well, I suppose it must have been a shock for the guy, finding his nephew in the clutches of a—’ He came to an abrupt halt and cast her an apologetic lop-sided smile. ‘That outfit did make you look pretty—well let’s just say you looked the part. Not a tart, you understand,’ he added hastily, ‘just…’

‘You’re digging yourself a very deep hole, Theo,’ she pointed out, uncharitably glad to see someone other than herself suffering foot-in-the-mouth syndrome. ‘He very obviously thought I was a tart.’ Her bosom swelled with indignation. ‘I suppose you think I should be flattered.’

Theo was too wise a man to respond to that challenge. ‘Didn’t you explain? Didn’t the boy put him straight?’

‘What chance did I have? I couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.’ Theo looked openly sceptical and she grated her teeth, at a loss to explain to someone who knew her how she’d been inexplicably reduced to a witless zombie by the sheer trauma of the situation. ‘Plus the fact,’ she continued tartly, ‘Nick and his cronies rolled up about thirty seconds after Drew Cummings put in an appearance. It was a circus. And as for Daniel, he obviously thinks the man can walk on water,’ she spat in disgust.

When Drew Cummings had entered the room she’d thought for one awful moment his nephew was going to pass out. She’d almost envied him; at the time losing consciousness had had a distinct appeal.

‘Talk about macho man!’ she added scornfully. ‘And I’m positive he’s just the type to encourage Daniel’s hero-worship. Having a young boy thinking he’s a cross between James Bond and Mother Teresa is just the sort of ego stroking he would enjoy. He’s the typical product of an over-privileged background—you know the type. He’s got that unshakeable sense of his own superiority.’

Theo let out a long, slow whistle. ‘And how many products of an over-privileged background do you know on a first-name basis, Evie? You sound as if you’re addressing a political rally.’

Eve had the grace to blush. ‘You had to be there,’ she said defensively.

‘This bloke’s really got to you, hasn’t he? You really shouldn’t jump to conclusions, Evie. I thought you were the one down on people who generalised,’ he reminded her. ‘It’s not like you actually know the man.’

The gentle censure in his tone brought a further self-conscious flush to Eve’s cheeks. ‘True, I don’t know him. So things could be worse,’ she agreed tartly. Under the circumstances she felt she was being quite restrained.

‘God, I wish I had been there—as an observer, of course. Come on, Evie!’ he chided. ‘This isn’t like you. Where’s your sense of humour? I don’t doubt Nick’s sorting things out right now. You’ll all laugh about it later.’

Eve stared incredulously at him. Laugh! It was obvious to Eve that Theo failed to appreciate that Drew Cummings was a person totally without redeeming features.