An Unforgettable Man

‘How does your grandmother feel about the fact you’ve given up your career to come home and look after her?’

His question surprised Courage into looking directly at him, something she had been very careful not to do, she recognised unwillingly. His eyes were flint-grey, hard like the coldest northern seas, threatening that immense danger could lurk beneath their deceptively calm surface.

‘She doesn’t know. She thinks I’ve taken an extended holiday to think about my future career path. That I may give up my international job because I don’t want a permanent position in Hong Kong.’

She saw the way his eyebrows lifted and gave a small mental shrug to herself. She had already as good as lost the job; she might as well tell him the truth.

‘Aren’t you worried that someone might tell her the truth?’

‘No, why should I be? Besides, no one knows,’ Courage admitted.

The friends she had made locally as a girl had either moved away now, to pursue their own careers, or were married with young, demanding children—far too busy to question deeply what she was doing. And as for worrying her grandmother by telling her… Why should they do so? Her grandmother was a very well-liked person—a very well-loved person.

‘And if you don’t get this job, what then? Back to filling supermarket shelves?’

He seemed to have a thing about that; perhaps because he considered it was the kind of work he would never demean himself by doing. Well, she didn’t consider it demeaning—far from it.

‘There are far worse ways of earning a living,’ she pointed out fiercely. ‘And, as far as I am concerned, the kind of people who consider honest, physical labour something demeaning, something to be mocked, are just not worth knowing.’

Well, she really had burned her bridges now, Courage acknowledged, to judge from the look he was giving her, but she didn’t care. In her book the kind of people who were really to be despised were like her stepfather—outwardly publicly feted, and acclaimed, well-respected businessmen, who in reality were little more than thieves, preying on the vulnerability and, yes, sometimes the ignorant material greed of others. For all she knew, Gideon Reynolds, too, could be like them. Outwardly lauded and respected but inwardly, secretly…

It was true there had been nothing in the financial press to suggest that his business success was based on anything other than flair and nerve; nothing to say that he had prospered through the same kind of fraudulent dishonesty as her stepfather. But there was still something about him that made her almost glad that she was not going to get the job. A sense of…not fear, exactly… More… more apprehension … A feeling of being mentally circled by the mind of a predator.

Nervously she licked her lips. Now she was letting his overwhelming male sexuality cause her imagination to run wild, but even if she dismissed the discomfort there was still something intimidating and unnerving about the man which, coupled with that irritatingly elusive flicker of recognition, made her feel not just wary and on edge. It was as though… as though…

‘How much would it cost for your grandmother to have her operation privately?’

Courage stared at him, a small frown pleating her forehead. Why was he asking her so many questions on a subject which could surely be of only limited interest to him?

‘Her GP wasn’t specific. There wasn’t really any need,’ Courage hedged.

There hadn’t really been any need. Once he’d told Courage what the minimum cost of the operation would be she had known there was simply no way she could finance it. She had some savings, a small nest-egg, but nothing more.

‘How much?’ she was asked a second time, the male voice which so far had been unexpectedly soft for so formidable a man suddenly sharpening and hardening, betraying just a hint of the high-octane power its owner could potentially release when necessary.

‘Upwards of ten thousand pounds,’ Courage told him quietly, swallowing down the huge lump of anxious despair that filled her throat every time she thought of the vast sum of money which stood between her grandmother and good health.

‘Ten thousand… Umm… Not an impossible sum for someone to raise these days… Presumably your grand- mother owns her own home and—?’

‘Yes, but she has already used it to purchase an annuity,’ Courage interrupted him.

She had had enough of his questions. She had come here to be interviewed for a job—a job she was one hundred and ten per cent certain she was not going to get.

‘And you have no one… no family… no connections who could help?’

‘No, no one,’ Courage told him angrily.

The very thought of asking either Laney or her step-father for help of any kind—even if she had known where to contact them—made her mouth curl in a bitterly painful smile. Her stepfather had hated her grand-mother, had tried every trick in the book to persuade her mother to change her mind about allowing her grandmother to take charge of Courage and to get her back under his own roof, but fortunately her mother had stood firm.

Courage had often wondered in the years since she herself had grown up if her grandmother had perhaps guessed, sensed in some way the danger her daughter-in-law’s second marriage had posed to Courage. Courage’s mother had been a pretty, fragile woman, who had liked parties and socialising. The kind of woman that these days it seemed impossible to believe had ever existed; the kind of woman who needed a man in her life to ‘look after her’.

A discreet tap on the door heralded the arrival of the PA.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he apologised to his boss. ‘Sir Malcolm will be arriving shortly. The ‘copter pilot has just radioed in to say they’ll be landing on time.’

‘Yes, thank you, Chris.’

As Gideon Reynolds started to stand up, Courage did the same. Her interview was obviously at an end, and no doubt all those unexpected and unwelcome questions about her grandmother had simply been a means of idling away a few spare minutes of time before his visitor arrived. Well, she hoped it had amused him to see how the other half lived, Courage decided angrily.

No doubt the ten thousand pounds that was so unobtainable to her that it might as well have been ten million was something he probably spent in a weekend, entertaining a girlfriend. More, she decided sourly, since he was obviously such an expert on Chanel couture clothes. But not such an expert that he had recognised that hers was a copy.

‘Tell me, Miss Bingham,’ she heard him asking unexpectedly, ‘what would you do if you were anticipating the arrival of a VIP and you learned from the helicopter pilot that not only was he late picking up his passenger but that the reason he was late was because the machine was being serviced when he arrived to fly it? Your VIP guest, by the way, is a rather irascible person, who has only agreed to attend the meeting you have arranged on the understanding that he will not be kept waiting.’

‘Initially I would recall the helicopter—no appointment, no meeting, no matter how essential, is so important that someone’s life should be put at risk, and if the machine was still in the process of being serviced there would be no guarantee that it would not develop some sort of problem. I would then contact the passenger, apologise for the delay and assure him that he would be picked up within fifteen minutes.’

She saw the way his eyebrows rose and added, with more self-assurance than she actually felt, ‘If he was being collected from a helicopter pad then it would have to be within range of a national helicopter service. I would obtain a substitute machine and pilot from my own contacts—if I regularly used helicopter transport I would, of course, already know of a reliable back-up service. I would make sure I was on hand the moment the VIP arrived, with both an apology and an explanation, and I would follow this up later, having first of all made sure that he was still able to leave at the originally stated time.’

‘And the original cause of the delay, the mistimed service, how would you deal with that?’

‘That would depend on whether or not I was responsible for its mistiming…’

‘And if you were?’

‘I wouldn’t be,’ Courage told him crisply. ‘Because I would have already made sure that the machine was ready for the pilot to collect at the stated time—and if it wasn’t I would have had a substitute serviced machine there for him.’

‘Very efficient.’

‘I try to be…’

He was already walking over to the door and Courage followed him, coming to an abrupt halt as, unexpectedly, he turned round.

There was less than a metre between them…

She had already seen that he was tall—at least six feet four since she had had to look up at him—and that the physique beneath his subtly tailored jacket possessed the kind of powerful muscle-structure that no desk-bound man could ever possibly have. This man worked out in a gym and he played sport—to win, Courage suspected, and roughly.

Through the polar whiteness of his cotton shirt she could actually see the dark shadow of his body hair. A small shudder ran through her, heat zigzagging through her body like lightning, searing along her cheekbones. She could feel her face burning with mortification as he looked at her.

There had been a time in her life when the sight of a bare male chest covered in body hair had been enough to make her want to curl up and die with embarrassed, shocked awareness of such sexuality—and her own reaction to it. But that had been a long time ago and she had got over it… Just as she had got over…other things.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘N-n-n-nothing,’ Courage lied. ‘I—’

‘Don’t you want to know whether or not you have got the job?’

He was playing with her, taunting her. Angry sparks flashed in Courage’s eyes.

‘You said yourself that I was over-qualified for it.’