An Unforgettable Man

She had, of course, asked the doctor about a private operation for her grandmother, but when he had told her the cost her dismay must have shown in her face.

She knew that there was no way she could find the thousands of pounds it would cost for her grand-mother’s operation. The small cottage in which her grandmother lived was already mortgaged to the company which provided her with her pension annuity payments. Courage herself had no assets she could dispose of to raise any money, and there was no other family to go to.

Her father—her grandmother’s only child—had died before Courage reached her teens, and her mother… Her mother, poor sad soul, had died in a swimming accident while on holiday with Courage’s stepfather and his friends.

A small shudder passed through Courage’s body, raising a rash of ominous goose-bumps on her flesh. Even now she hated thinking about her stepfather, about those years…

As she looked around the elegant, expensively furnished room in which she was sitting, with its silk curtains, its paintings and its antique furniture, she reflected that once she, too, had lived in surroundings as elegant as these.

Her stepfather’s London house, while not as large as this beautiful Georgian mansion where she now sat so tensely in an ante-room waiting to be summoned for her interview, had certainly been equally as impressive, equally filled with expensive art treasures and antique furniture, all planned to awe and impress the poor dupes from whom her stepfather had earned his living, blinding them to the reality of what he really was with the rich luxury of his surroundings.

Fraud, the police had called it, but theft was what it really was. But her stepfather had escaped paying any price for his criminal activities, just as he had always escaped paying any price for anything he had done, for any of the lives he had destroyed.

The last time Courage had heard anything of him he had been living in Mexico, barred from re-entering the United States, where he had made his home after her mother’s death.

No, there was no comparison between the lifestyle she had lived as a rich man’s stepdaughter and that which she had known living with her grandmother in her small rural Dorset cottage. But there was no doubt, had never been any doubt in Courage’s mind, which lifestyle she preferred… which home.

The last candidate for the job had been gone for a much longer time than any of the others, which didn’t bode very well for her own chances, Courage acknowledged.

When the employment agency she had registered with had first contacted her about this job she had hardly been able to believe her luck.

‘It isn’t quite what you’ve been used to,’ the woman who ran the agency had semi-apologised, ‘and I suspect you could end up being more of a glorified housekeeper than anything else, but the salary is exceptionally high, transport is provided and you’d be working less than twenty miles away from where your grandmother lives.’

And she had gone on to explain the exact nature of the job in question and the requirements of her potential employer. Courage had found herself privately agreeing with the other woman’s assessment of the situation.

The job description announced that her potential employer, an extremely wealthy businessman, wanted someone to take charge of the running of his country mansion. Duties would include organising various social and business functions, liaising with his staff in his London office, taking virtually full responsibility for the hiring and firing of staff at the house, and, on those occasions when he had foreign clients visiting him, organising any necessary business facilities for them, including interpreters etcetera.

Gideon Reynolds was the chairman and major stockholder of a complex network of high profit-earning enterprises, a conquistador of a man who had made his fortune and his name during the hectic times of the eighties, but who, unlike other less fortunate entrepreneurs, had gone on to build a very successful empire on the foundations of those successes.

Courage had, of course, researched as deeply as she could into his background and history once she had been told of the job, but had discovered frustratingly little about him. Even her grandmother, who knew all of the local gossip at every level, knew hardly anything about him, other than the fact that when he had first bought the house, which had been little more than an empty shell at the time, there had been a lot of semi-hysterical gossip locally that he planned to turn the house into some kind of leisure centre, complete with a huge golf course.

The leisure centre had never materialised; the golf course had—Gideon Reynolds apparently did a considerable amount of business with the Japanese, who enjoyed the pleasure of playing their favourite sport on a privately owned course.

Courage, who had worked in Japan herself for a while, could well appreciate what a clever move the golf course had been. Had he understood the basis of the Japanese male personality enough to institute such a move himself, or had he simply had very, very astute and knowledge-able advisers? she wondered.

The only thing she had been able to find out about him was that in addition to being a hugely wealthy man he was also extremely demanding to work for. Harsh-featured, ice-cold, merciless when it came to destroying an opponent—these were just some of the descriptions she had read of him in the financial press.

Disappointingly, none of the articles had contained any photographs of him. She knew he was somewhere in his early thirties, which made him six or seven years older than she was herself, and she knew that he wasn’t married, that he had, in fact, never been married. Although there was no hint to be found anywhere that he was anything other than a thoroughly heterosexual male.

‘Modern women do not appear to want marriage,’ he had been quoted as saying in one article she had read-written, unsurprisingly, by a female financial correspondent. ‘Or permanent commitment is not enough for them—they value sexual variety and expertise more than love and fidelity.’

‘So you don’t intend to marry?’ the reporter had challenged him.

‘One day. If only to ensure that I have someone to pass on the business to. But there is no urgency; a man, unlike a woman, can choose to become a parent virtually at any time in his adult life.’

‘You’re out of date,’ the reporter had told him crisply. ‘A woman can now opt to do the same…’

‘Not my woman,’ Gideon Reynolds had told her succinctly.

Another small shiver ran over Courage’s skin as she recalled the article.

He didn’t sound one little bit the sort of man she would have chosen to work for. Her mouth quirked slightly at the enormous mental understatement of her thoughts. But in this instance she had no choice.

If her time with Gran was going to be limited then she didn’t want to waste a precious second of it. Not out of duty, because she thought it was what she owed her grandmother for all that she had done for her, but because she loved her… Loved her so much that already her heart was aching at the thought of losing her, of being alone.

As she blinked back the tears threatening to shadow her eyes—an unusual lavender-blue colour, which strangers always assumed meant she was wearing coloured contact lenses, but which, in fact, she had inherited from her grandmother, like her pale English rose complexion and her thick dark mane of Celtic curls-she focused on the huge oil-painting hanging on the wall above the marble Adam fireplace.

It was, she suspected, Italian. The subject matter was religious and allegorical, probably commissioned originally by some seventeenth-century English gentleman visiting Rome.

The walls of virtually every English stately home had at one time been decorated by such paintings, some of far more value than others. This, Courage suspected, was a particularly fine example of its genre; the impish expressions on the faces of the cherubs were so lifelike you could almost swear their eyes followed you, and as for the looks on the faces of the satyrs…

Was she being over-unfair as well as over-imaginative in considering their cynical, twisted smiles, their cold, calculating expressions as potentially mirroring those of the man who had bought and now owned them?

As he would own her if she came to work here. A small frown touched her forehead. It was so unlike her to be so over-imaginative, so very wary… So fearful, almost. Most people considered her to be a very controlled person, pleasantly self-confident and at ease in virtually any situation. She had learned long ago to control and conceal any kind of fear, and to know that to betray it was to give another person the potential power to hurt and damage. She prided herself in being fully in control of her own life, of being the kind of woman who made her own choices and her own decisions.

‘Miss Bingham? Mr Reynolds will see you now.’

Smiling with a serenity she did not feel, Courage acknowledged the entrance of the male personal assistant who had opened the door, and who was watching her with admirable professional detachment as she stood up and walked towards him as he held the door open for her.

Presumably it was one of at least two doors into the boardroom beyond, since none of the previous candidates had returned to the ante-room following their interviews. Hopefully they had been allowed to leave, and had not been condemned to some deep, dank dungeon, having been verbally ripped apart by the sharp, predatory professional teeth of a man who, from the accounts she had read of him, more than lived up to his image of a less than friendly character.

Such flights of fantasy were so far removed from her normal calm, logical approach to life that Courage frowned slightly as she walked across the soft Aubusson carpet, noting as she did so that it had not been designed specially for the room, since its pattern did not follow the classic device of mirroring the plasterwork on the ceiling.

She was a tall woman—a fact which had led, in her teenage years, to people mistaking her for being much older than she was. Her bone-structure was slightly too slender for her height, causing people who did not know her well to dismiss her as vulnerable and fragile.

She was neither. Not now. Not since her grandmother had taught her how to be proud of herself and what she was. But she still cloaked the narrowness of her frame with clothes that matched her height—like the suit she was wearing today—so that instead of appearing fragile she gave the impression of strength and quiet power.

Men might find her slightly sexually intimidating, but if they were employers they also found it reassuring. No need to worry about having to mollycoddle a woman who stood five feet eleven in her stockinged feet and whose demeanour said that she was well able to cope with the hysterical tantrums of a temperamental chef or a bullying maitre d’.

She was, Courage noticed wryly as she walked past him, a good inch or so taller than the PA—a fact which she suspected he didn’t very much like. She recognised the type. He would go for fluffy little blondes who made him feel good and who manipulated the hell out of him. He probably had a heavily dependent, immensely strong-willed mother somewhere, who clung to him with a stranglehold.

Courage gave him a calmly thoughtful look as she saw his glance drop to the front of her jacket.

‘Thirty-six C,’ she told him sweetly as she walked past him. ‘Pretty much average for my height. It was on my application form. Along with the photograph that had been requested.’

She had balked a little at that, instinctively suspicious of any employer who needed to know what she looked like, but she had needed the job too much to refuse to supply such details.

The door did not open into a room, as she had imagined, but into a narrow panelled corridor without any windows. Walking down it made her feel mildly claustrophobic, a feeling she quickly quelled, in the same way that she refused to give in to the impulse to turn around and look at the PA as he followed her.

Some sixth sense made her pause outside the door at the end of the corridor to allow the PA to step past her and enter the room ahead of her, announcing her as he did so. After all, if she did get the job she would doubtless be working with him at times. She had let him know that there was no way she was going to be a walk-over; it was no stand-down on her part to acknowledge, and let him know that she acknowledged, his professional position.

‘Miss Bingham.’

No lip-service here to political correctness with any use of the ubiquitous Ms. Not that Courage minded; she wasn’t interested in the kind of respect that could be bought or earned with a title, and which was so often given grudgingly.

‘Miss Bingham.’

As the man seated behind the massive Georgian partner’s desk stood up, Courage only just managed to stop her mouth gaping open.