Savage Courtship

‘No, I didn’t. So...it’s just me, then...’ His inflexion rose slightly on the last word, just enough to suggest the possibility of a question. Nobody answered immediately and his gaze swivelled suddenly back to Vanessa, who wasn’t quite quick enough to banish her look of apprehension.

He scowled at her. ‘Can I see you for a few minutes in the library, Flynn?’ He turned on his heel and was almost out the door before he halted, looking back. ‘Incidentally, Mrs Riley, I’m really not very hungry this morning, so perhaps just some toast and tea...’

‘Oh, what a pity, Mr Savage, and I’ve just put a nice pot of porridge on the stove—’

‘Porridge?’ He jerked around, looking so shocked at the suggestion that Vanessa, already primed with nerves, gave a jittery little laugh and found herself once again impaled by the focus of his attention.

‘In the library. Now!’ For Benedict Savage the quiet hiss was the equivalent of a furious shout.

‘Yes, sir!’ Vanessa muttered to empty air, rising from her seat and unhooking the cropped navy jacket that was draped over the high back.

‘Well, I never!’ said Kate Riley, crossing her arms over her ample chest and shaking her grey head so that her corrugated perm quivered. ‘You’d have thought I was offering him arsenic. He always said he liked my porridge!’

Vanessa, shouldering into her jacket and procrastinating by squaring the cuffs and lapels, soothed her injured pride absently. ‘He’s probably just in a bad mood—’

‘Mr Savage doesn’t have moods—he’s always a perfect gentleman,’ Mrs Riley pointed out with inescapable truth. ‘He never gets out of bed on the wrong side but it certainly seems as though he did this morning...’

Vanessa murmured something indistinct in answer to the unfortunate metaphor and rushed out of the kitchen, pressing cold hands to her hot cheeks.

Calm down, calm down, she lectured herself sternly as she walked down the flag-stoned hall. If he fires you, you can charge him with sexual harassment. Or was he planning to charge her...? She almost moaned aloud at the thought, its absurdity eclipsed by her horror of scandal. Whatever happened, there would be questions asked because she couldn’t possibly continue to work at Whitefield. She would have to leave the place she had come to look on as a quiet, secure haven from the madness of the world. And what was she going to tell Richard? Oh, damn, damn, damn!

‘Well...?’ Thankfully Benedict Savage had not chosen to adopt an intimidating position of dominance behind the meticulously tidy antique desk that fronted the French windows. Instead he was standing just inside the doorway, one hand resting on a walnut shelf of the book-lined wall, fingers tapping involuntarily against the aged wood as she closed the door behind her.

‘Yes, sir?’ Vanessa stood straight and tall, shoulders squared against the imminent attack.

He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry if my early arrival has caused problems, but I just needed to get away for a space of time and Whitefield seemed the place to do it. The apartment in Auckland is too accessible and...’ he shrugged with a trace of diffidence ‘...well, I know that Mrs Riley gets in a tizz about these things... Just make sure she knows that I don’t expect everything to be as organised as usual...that I don’t want any fuss...’

Vanessa was hard put to it not to let her jaw fall open. Mr Perfection was telling her he didn’t expect perfection? He was waffling about household arrangements when the real business at hand was shrieking to be settled?

She looked at the tapping fingers. Nerves? Mr Cool was nervous?

‘So, you’ll tell her that, will you?’ His fingers suddenly stopped their fluttering with a sudden slam against the wood.

Vanessa’s eyes shot back to his face to find him watching her warily. She scrabbled for foundation on a rapidly shifting ground. He was nervous of her? The notion was mind-boggling.

‘Ah, yes, yes, of course, sir,’ she assured him hastily.

‘Right.’ He took off his spectacles, cleaned their spotless lenses with a beautifully pressed handkerchief retrieved from his hip pocket, and put them on again. ‘I didn’t bring anyone with me.’

‘So you said, sir—in the kitchen, just now,’ she added as he regarded her blankly.

‘Did I? Oh, yes, of course I did.’ He pushed off the bookcase and began to pace. ‘So...where is our other guest, I wonder?’

Vanessa stiffened. ‘If you’re suggesting—’

He jumped in, correspondingly quick to suspect. ‘Suggesting what?’

‘That I take advantage of your absences to invite people to use your house—’ she began, angry that he might be trying to make up spurious reasons for terminating her employment. If he was going to fire her for sleeping with him he was going to have to admit it!

‘No, no, nothing like that.’ His answer was as swift as it seemed genuine, and edged with irritation. ‘If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t continue to employ you, would I? I just wondered if you knew...’

‘Knew what?’ She was deeply uneasy now. Maybe she just should have opened up with an apology and explanation instead of leaving it up to him to introduce the subject. But she had never known her employer be anything but direct, sometimes brutally so.

He stopped pacing a mere stride away and turned to her, hands on his hips. This was it, the moment of truth.

Vanessa lifted her chin bravely, gratified to note that even in flat heels she topped him by at least an inch. Whatever he said, she wasn’t going to shrink into physical insignificance before him!

‘There was a woman...’

‘A woman?’ Vanessa felt herself beginning to heat up. Oh, God, was he going to try to smooth things over by explaining how last night had only been a spasm of lust and that she wasn’t to place any importance on the fact that they had slept together because there was someone else...?

He bit off something that sounded like a curse. Another first. Benedict Savage’s words were usually as cool and as measured as the rest of him, precisely weighed and placed for maximum effect with minimum effort.

‘Yes, a woman.’ His voice roughened sharply at her wide-eyed shock and he raked her with an insulting glare. ‘You do know what a woman is, don’t you, Flynn?’

Her flush deepened at his sneer and she saw his eyes flicker behind their clear lenses, his mouth compress with self-disgust. ‘I’m sorry, that was in extremely poor taste...’ His hand rasped across his beard-shaded chin as he continued rigidly, ‘I mean...last night when I came in, just before midnight...there was a woman—er—in my room...’

‘In your room?’ She couldn’t help it, and when she realised that she had once again inanely repeated his words she bit her lip but this time he ignored the provocation.

‘In bed. A blonde.’

‘A blonde?’ Vanessa retreated, startled, visions of sin dancing in her head. Had she taken part in some kind of orgy without being aware of it? Disported herself in some kind of perverted ménage à trois? Her employer had never brought a female companion with him to Whitefield before, although he had included unattached women in groups of people whom he had occasionally entertained at weekends. She had thought that his love-life must be as reserved as the rest of him, but now Vanessa found herself regarding those weekend groupings in a suspicious new light.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Her air of silent condemnation caused an explosion that was contained almost as soon as it occurred. His hard jaw clenched as he continued doggedly, ‘She had long, fluffy hair...like golden fleece.’ Benedict Savage held her mesmerised stare, faint streaks of red appearing on his high cheekbones as he went on, ‘Have you by any chance seen her around this morning? She’s not anywhere upstairs...’

Golden? Fluffy? Vanessa’s eyes widened as she resisted the urge to touch her neat French pleat to make sure that the wavy, sun-bleached ends were firmly rolled into the concealing centre.

It suddenly occurred to her that her employer had never seen her with her hair down. To him she was just Flynn, discreet, sexless, quietly running his household and overseeing the ongoing restoration of the former coaching inn while he jaunted about the world earning a luxurious living designing buildings that were the complete antithesis of Whitefield.

Vanessa, along with the other permanent staff, was merely one of the chattels that he had acquired when he had unexpectedly inherited a distant relative’s property and, after initially balking badly at the discovery that the late Judge Seaton’s butler was young and female, he had accepted the impeccable references supplied by the lawyer who had handled the judge’s estate. He had, however, made it quite clear to Vanessa privately that she was only acceptable in the position as long as the fact that she was a woman never impinged on the job. It never had.

‘Apart from being blonde, what does she look like?’ Vanessa asked in a strangled voice that tested a wildly implausible theory.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, his bluntness daring her to display any shock. ‘It was dark...I never saw her face. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what her name is; we didn’t get around to introducing ourselves! So, now that your prurient suspicions are confirmed, perhaps you wouldn’t mind answering my questions?’

His sarcasm went right over her whirling head. She was shattered by knowledge that her outrageous theory was right.

There had only been one woman in Benedict Savage’s bed last night and that woman had been Vanessa. But he didn’t know that!

‘I...but...I—’ Relief poured like adrenalin along her veins, throwing her into an even deeper moral dilemna.

As long as he never found out who the woman in his bed had been, Vanessa’s job was safe...

‘I’m not imagining things!’ he growled tersely.

Vanessa licked her lips. ‘Oh...of course not,’ she said, wondering how long her meagre acting skills would sustain her charade of ignorance.

He chose to take her placating comment as a piece of sarcasm and reiterated tightly, ‘She was here, damn it! It was late and I was thick-headed with jet-lag but I wasn’t completely detached from reality. I wasn’t hallucinating!’