Passionate Nights: The Mistress Assignment / Mistress of Convenience / Mistress to Her Husband

Nothing he had experienced in his admittedly brief contact with Kelly had indicated that she had the kind of insecure, needy personality that would make her a natural victim for a man like Cox.

Eve, on the other hand, if he was honest, desperately needed to feel loved and secure, to have a partner who would incorporate into their adult relationship the kind of protective, emotional padding she had missed from the loss of their father and experienced in a different way at school. Eve needed a man who would treat her gently, a man with whom she could have the kind of relationship which he privately would find too unequal. The woman he loved would have to be his equal, his true partner in every aspect of their lives. There would have to be complete and total honesty and commitment between them, a deep, inner knowledge that they would be there for one another through their whole lives—he too had suffered from their parents’ death, he acknowledged wryly.

And Eve was wrong about him not wanting to fall in love … to marry. At the end of his present decade lay the watershed birthday of forty, comfortably in the distance as yet, but still there on the horizon. When he thought of himself as forty, it was not particularly pleasant to visualise himself still alone, uncommitted … childless … But the woman he married, the woman he loved …

Unbidden, the memory of how Kelly’s lips had felt beneath his flooded his body, sharply reminding him that if a male’s sexual responses were at their fastest and peak in his teens, then they could still react with a pretty forceful and demanding potent speed in his thirties—disconcertingly so.

The dichotomy he had sensed within Kelly at the ball which had so intrigued him had turned to a more personal sense of irritation this afternoon. Did she really think he was so lacking in intelligence … in awareness … that he couldn’t see how alien to her personality her relationship with Julian was? What the hell was it about the man that led a woman like her to …? It was almost as though he held some kind of compulsive attraction for her or had some kind of hold over her.

In another age it might almost have been said that he had cast some kind of spell over her—as she was beginning to do over him?

Kelly paused in the act of picking up her keys. In the close confines of the flat’s small entrance hall she could smell the scent of her own perfume. Defensively she told herself that wearing it was simply second nature to her and meant nothing, had no dark, deep, psychological significance, that the fact that she was wearing it to, and for, a meeting with Brough Frobisher meant absolutely nothing at all.

She wasn’t a woman who was overly fond of striking make-up, nor strictly styled hair, but she did like the femininity of wearing her own special signature scent, even if normally she wore it in conjunction with jeans and a casual top.

Tonight, though, those jeans had been exchanged for a well-cut trouser suit—not for any other reason than the fact that wearing it automatically made her feel more businesslike. And that was, after all, exactly what this evening’s meeting was all about—business. And as for that small spurt of sweet, sharp excitement she could feel dancing over her vulnerable nerve-endings, well, that was nothing more than the arousal of her professional curiosity.

Hartwell china always evoked special memories for her. It had been the Hartwell china she had seen on a visit to a stately home as a girl which had first awoken her interest in the design and manufacture of porcelain, and it had been the Hartwell factory where she had first had her actual hands-on experience of working on the physical aspect of copying the designer’s artistry onto the china itself. And so it was only natural that she should feel this surge of excitement at the thought of seeing a piece which sounded as though it was extremely rare.

It didn’t take her very long to drive to the address Brough had given her. Rye-on-Averton was only a relatively small and compact town, virtually untouched by any effects of the Industrial Revolution and still surrounded by the farmland which had surrounded it way, way back in the Middle Ages.

Parking her own car and getting out, Kelly carefully skirted the expensive gleaming Mercedes saloon car parked in the drive and climbed the three steps which led to the front door. Brough opened it for her virtually as soon as she rang the bell.

Unlike her, he was unexpectedly casually dressed in jeans and a soft cotton checked shirt.

The jeans, Kelly noticed as she responded to his nonverbal invitation to come into the house, somehow or other emphasised the lean length of his legs and the powerful strength of his thigh muscles.

As a part of her studies at university she had, for a term, attended a series of lectures and drawing classes on the human body, and whilst there had been required to sketch nudes, both male and female, but that experience was still no protection against either the images which inexplicably filled her thoughts or the guilty burn of colour which accompanied them.

What on earth was she doing, mentally envisaging Brough posing, modelling for a classical Greek statue? That kind of behaviour, those kinds of thoughts, simply were not her.

‘It’s this way,’ Brough informed her, the cool, clipped sound of his voice breaking into the dangerous heat of her thoughts as he indicated one of the doorways off the hall.

The yellow paint in which the hallway was decorated made Kelly do a slight double-take, a fact which Brough obviously noticed because he commented dryly, ‘Bilious, isn’t it? Unfortunately its shock effect doesn’t lessen with time.’

‘You could always redecorate,’ Kelly pointed out austerely, refusing to allow herself to feel any sympathy with him, even in the unfortunate colour of his walls.

‘Not really. This house is only rented. I’m only living here until the one I’ve bought has been renovated.’

‘Oh, so you’ve moved into the area permanently, then?’

Kelly berated herself furiously as the question slipped out, her curiosity getting the better of her, but to her relief Brough made totally the wrong connection between her question and its motivation as he responded even more dryly, ‘Yes, we have, so I’m afraid you can’t look to our removal from town as an easy way of removing my sister from your lover’s life.’

‘It isn’t necessary for me to do any such thing,’ Kelly denied furiously through gritted teeth, momentarily forgetting her allotted role.

‘Eve believes he intends to marry her. How do you feel about that?’ he challenged her.

‘How do you feel about it?’ Kelly sidetracked.

‘He’s a liar and a cheat and most probably guilty of financial fraud as well,’ Brough told her bitingly. ‘How the hell do you think I feel about it?’

‘She’s your sister.’

‘Strange,’ he continued softly, ‘you don’t look particularly surprised—or shocked. Perhaps you like the idea of having a married lover, especially one whose wife is both extremely rich and extremely in love.’

‘No. That’s not …’

Immediately she realised what she was saying, Kelly stopped.

‘That’s not what?’ Brough goaded her. ‘Not what you want? He’s your lover …’

‘And Eve is your sister,’ Kelly pointed out again quickly. ‘My relationship with Julian is no one’s business other than our own. If you dislike him so much, disapprove of him so much, why haven’t you told Eve so?’

‘She’s too much in love to listen to me or to anyone else. What is it you see in him? What possible attraction can he have for any woman when he …?’

‘Why don’t you ask Eve?’ Kelly suggested.

Ridiculously, dangerously, she was actually starting to feel sorry for him. It was plain how worried he was about his sister, and with good reason, and it was equally plain that he felt helpless to do anything to alter the situation. Even so, she couldn’t resist punishing him just a little, both for what he thought about her and what he had said … and done …

‘It’s obviously hard for a man to see just what it is about Julian that appeals to our sex. Perhaps you feel jealous of him.’

‘Jealous …? Look, just because last night I kissed you, that doesn’t mean—’

‘I mean jealous because Eve loves him,’ Kelly interrupted him shakily.

‘You wanted me to look at this plate,’ she reminded him, anxious to return their conversation to a much more businesslike footing.

‘Yes. It’s in here,’ he told her, ushering her into a large, high-ceilinged room which was painted a particularly unpleasant shade of dull green.

‘Hideous, isn’t it?’ he agreed, correctly interpreting her thoughts. ‘The owner must be colour blind—or worse. You should see the bedrooms; the one I’m occupying is painted a particularly repulsive shade of puce.’

‘Puce …? I don’t believe you,’ Kelly protested. ‘No one would paint a bedroom that colour.’

‘If you want to see for yourself I’ll show you afterwards …’ Brough started to say, and then stopped to study Kelly’s bright pink face with interest.

‘Now there’s an interesting conundrum,’ he mused sardonically. ‘Why should a woman who openly admits that she is sleeping with another woman’s boyfriend blush at the mere mention of a completely altruistic visit to another man’s bedroom? It was my bedroom I was suggesting you view,’ he added gently, ‘not my bed …’

‘I was not blushing,’ Kelly protested. ‘It’s just … it’s just … it’s very warm in here …’

‘Is it?’ Brough asked, adding, ‘Then what, may I ask, are these?’

Before she could stop him he was running a hard fingertip down the full length of her bare arm, right over the rash of goose bumps which had lifted beneath her skin when they’d entered the room’s unheated atmosphere. And what made it worse was that the brief and totally sexless stroke of his finger had made the goose bumps even more prominent—and not just her goose bumps, she acknowledged, mortified by the unwanted discovery that her nipples were inexplicably pressing very hard, tightly aroused, against the constraining fabric of her bra.

Instinctively she turned away from him, lifting her arm in what she hoped was a natural and subtle gesture which he wouldn’t guess was designed to conceal the evidence of her body’s extraordinary behaviour from him.

He had seen it, though, seen it and been both disgusted and angered by it, she recognised, if the look she could see in his eyes was anything to go by.

My God, but she had got it badly if even the mere fact of talking about Cox could arouse her body like that, Brough fumed as Kelly turned her flushed face and aroused breasts out of his eye-line.