The Unexpected Mistress

‘Hell, don’t do that! We’ve got another film producer offering us an option on your next book!’ panicked his agent, seeing twelve per cent of a fortune vanishing overnight.

But Cassian had stopped listening. His sharp ears had heard an unusual noise in the narrow alley beside the house. Moving to the low parapet, he could see a man there, curled up in a foetal position and moaning with pain. Someone was running into the darkness of the souk beyond. Without making a fuss, he politely excused himself and went to investigate.

It was a few minutes before he realised that the bruised and battered man he’d hauled into the house was Tony Morris, his old enemy from that very part of England which had sprung to mind so surprisingly at the mention of the word ‘home’.

As Tony blubbered and whimpered, and he silently washed the blood from the flabby face, Cassian found his longing for Yorkshire increasing quite alarmingly, the memories coming hot and fast and extraordinarily insistent.

Ruled by his instincts, he acknowledged that perhaps it was time to go back. Time to immerse himself in the landscape which had reached like loving arms into his unhappy soul and given him solace and peace of mind. Time also to face the devils that haunted his dreams.

And then Tony offered him the opportunity on a plate to do just that.

Laura slammed two mugs on the table and doled out the last of the coffee granules with a preoccupied expression. Coffee wasn’t the only thing she’d have to eliminate from her shopping list. Poverty was staring her in the face.

‘Sue,’ she said urgently to her life-long friend, ‘I’ve got to get a new job sharpish.’

Sue looked sympathetic. ‘Nothing yet, then?’

‘No. And I’ve been searching in Harrogate all this week!’

‘Wow!’ Sue exclaimed, suitably impressed.

Her friend was the only person who knew what a huge step that had been. It was a month now since she’d lost her job. Night after night, Laura had lain awake worrying about her child’s future, his poor health, his fragile state of mind. For Adam’s sake she must find work! She must! she’d thought with increasing panic.

No work was available in Thrushton where she lived, nor in the small community of Grassington nearby. None, either in nearby Skipton.

Up to now her entire existence had been confined to the rolling dales and picturesque stone villages surrounding the River Wharfe. Of the rest of Yorkshire, she knew nothing—let alone England—and the thought of travelling further to work had made her blanch with apprehension.

It was a stupid reaction, she knew, but not one of her making. If she had ever been born with self-assurance and confidence, then it had been crushed by her restrictive up-bringing. If she’d ever had ambition then that too had withered and died, thanks to the critical tongue of her adoptive father’s sister, Aunt Enid, and the scorn and cruelty of her father’s son Tony.

She knew she was submissive and reticent to a fault. But the needs of her own child meant a radical rethink of her life. It didn’t matter to her that she wore jumble sale clothes, but she had to earn good money and buy some decent gear for Adam—or he’d continue to be bullied unmercifully.

‘I’d do anything,’ she said fervently, ‘to ensure we can stay here. This house is my…my…’

‘Comfort blanket,’ supplied Sue with a grin. ‘Be honest. It is.’

Laura glared at her horribly perceptive friend and then let her tense mouth soften in recognition.

‘You’re right. But I need stability and familiarity in my life. Adam too. We’d both go to pieces anywhere else.’

‘I know, duck. I think you’ve got real grit to pluck up the courage to hunt for work in Harrogate.’ Raising a plump arm, Sue patted Laura’s long and elegant hand in admiration. ‘But…it’d be a bit of a nightmare journey without a car, wouldn’t it?’

Laura grimaced. ‘Two buses and a train and a long walk. What choice do I have, though? Nine-year-old boys can eat for England. Mind you, employers weren’t exactly falling over themselves to take me on. I’m fed up! I’ve exhausted every avenue,’ she complained crossly.

‘Must be something out there,’ Sue encouraged.

Laura rolled her eyes. ‘You bet there is. Lap dancing.’

Tension made her join in with Sue’s giggles but it was frustrated resentment that made her jump up and perform a few poses around an imaginary pole. She adopted an ‘I am available’ face and moved her body with sinuous grace. It seemed an easy way to earn money.

‘Crikey. I’d give you five quid!’ Sue said admiringly. ‘Madly erotic. But then you’ve got the most fab legs and body. That monumentally baggy shirt would have to go, though,’ she advised. ‘Wrong colour!’

Hastily smoothing her tousled hair, Laura subsided breathily into the chair and wriggled down her slim skirt—which she’d acquired like most of her clothes from the local jumble sale and which was almost a size too small.

She felt quite shaken by her erotic performance. She was a natural. Perhaps these things could be passed on genetically, she thought gloomily. After all, she was a bastard. That had been rammed into her enough times.

If only she knew what her real mother had been like! Then she wouldn’t have to wonder if her mother had been a tart, as Aunt Enid had claimed.

‘She was a slut!’ Enid—her father’s sister—had claimed. ‘Your mother slept with anyone and everyone. And married to your father, a respectable solicitor! Diana brought the name of Morris into disrepute.’

Laura would never know the truth. Would never know why her mother had been unfaithful. Would never know the identity of her real father. Nobody else knew that she wasn’t George Morris’s child.

As soon as Laura was born, her mother had run away and George had had no choice but to bring Laura up as his daughter. Which he’d resented. That explained his indifference and total lack of affection.

Misty-eyed, she looked around the comfortable, stone-flagged kitchen with its huge Aga and deep inglenook fireplace, wincing as she imagined the uproar when her mother’s infidelity had been discovered. And she understood how hard it must have been for her ‘father’ to accept his wife’s bastard.

Together with Aunt Enid, he had created a regime so narrow and unbending in an effort to keep her on the straight and narrow, that she had turned into a timid mouse. Albeit, she thought wryly, with unrivalled domestic skills and a posture a ramrod would be proud of. Pity she didn’t have other qualifications. She might be more employable.

‘You know, Sue,’ she confided, ‘sometimes I’ve felt as though I’m prostituting myself at interviews with all that smiling, all that looking eager and charming and willing…oh, I hate it all!’

Close to losing control, she thumped the table, and Sue jumped in surprise at Laura’s unusual vehemence.

‘Something’ll turn up,’ her friend soothed, not very convincingly. ‘I’ve got my dental appointment later, in Harrogate. I’ll get the local paper for you to look through the Jobs Vacant column.’

‘I’ll do anything decent and legal. I’m willing to learn, conscientious and hard-working…but the downside is that I’m plain and shy and my clothes are out of the Ark,’ Laura muttered. ‘I see all the other applicants glowing with confidence in their make-up and attractive outfits and I know they’re laughing at me behind their smooth, lily-white hands!’ Glaring, she held up her own. ‘Look at mine! They’re rough enough to snag concrete. I tell you, Sue, I’d be just as good as them, given a lick of lippy, a decent haircut and a ten-gallon drum of hand cream!’

‘I’ve never known you so forceful,’ Sue marvelled.

‘Well. It’s because I’m angry.’ Laura’s blue eyes flashed with rare inner fire. ‘When will the world recognise that appearances aren’t everything? That it’s what’s here—’ she banged her chest vigorously ‘—and here—’ her head had the same treatment ‘—that’s important! And what’s that removal van doing outside?’ she wondered, breaking off with a frown.

‘Getting lost,’ suggested Sue without interest. ‘Nobody round here’s moving that I know about.’

Built from local rock in the Middle Ages and enlarged in the Georgian period, Thrushton Hall stood at the far end of the twenty other stone houses that comprised the tiny village, a cheerful cottage garden separating the handsome manor house from the narrow lane outside—which led only to the river.

Laura leaned across the deep window embrasure and peered through the stone mullioned window. Clearly the van driver had missed a turning. And yet the name plaque on the low drystone wall seemed to satisfy the removal men who’d jumped from the cab, because they brought out a flask and sandwiches and proceeded to settle themselves on the wall to eat.

‘Well, unknown to us, we’ve become a designated picnic spot!’ Laura declared wryly. A battered four-wheel drive cruised up and drew to a halt behind the small van. ‘Here’s another picnicker!’ she called back to her friend. ‘Huh! We’ll have a coachload of tourists here in a minute and I’ll have to give them sun umbrellas, waste bins and loo facilities! Sue, come and…!’

But her words died in her throat. From the Range Rover emerged a tall, slim figure in black jeans and T-shirt. The breath left her lungs as if they’d been surgically deflated.

‘What’s the matter?’ Sue hurried up, then grabbed Laura’s arm with a gasp. ‘Blow me! Isn’t that…?’

Laura’s eyes had grown huge, her lashes dark against the unnatural pallor of her face.

‘Yes!’ she choked. ‘It’s Cassian!’

His appearance was so unexpected, so utterly bizarre, that she stood rooted to the ground in numb disbelief while he chatted to the men. And then he began to turn to the house. Like children caught doing something naughty, she and Sue hastily dodged back out of sight.

‘What a hunk he’s become!’ Sue declared. ‘He’s absolutely scrummy. But…why’s he here—of all places?!’