Savage Courtship

‘I’m flattered by your confidence. But if not I suppose there’s always the unemployment benefit.’ His smooth answer followed so seamlessly on hers that it was a moment before she realised her faux pas.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I wasn’t thinking,’ she said, mortified by her slip.

‘I thought it was the reverse,’ he murmured with dismaying perception, his blue eyes studying her flustered face. ‘You seemed to be very deeply immersed in uneasy thoughts. Is there anything worrying you, Flynn?’

Another unprecedented personal question. Now was the moment to confess all and throw herself on his mercy!

Only Vanessa didn’t think that he had any. She vividly recalled his declaration at their meeting that he never made an idle threat and she had seen him deal ruthlessly with those who proved to be dishonest or disloyal. Employee or friend, they simply ceased to exist for him. Vanessa was already in over her head in deceit and, in addition, she had broken his golden rule: thou shalt not be a woman.

‘No, why should you think that?’ Unfortunately her voice cracked on the last word.

‘There’s a slightly...fraught air about you this morning.’

Oh, God!

‘Is there?’ she said brightly. ‘Well, your arrival did rather catch me on the hop.’ She was glad of the ready excuse. ‘I’m afraid I don’t react well to surprises.’

‘Really? Congreve would have it that uncertainty is one of the joys of life,’ he said suavely, no doubt trying to intimidate her with his intellect. Well, Vanessa wasn’t impressed. Anyone who could read could trot out quotations from classic English literature. She might not have gone to university but she could, and did, love to read widely. With anyone else she might even have enjoyed a foolish game of duelling quotations. As it was she just wanted him to find her dull and boring and totally unworthy of his interest.

‘Not mine,’ said Vanessa firmly, starting to edge towards the door, clutching her burden. She didn’t trust this sudden communicativeness of his. He had never shown any inclination to discuss literature or philosophy with his butler before...or ‘household executive assistant’ as he had ludicrously suggested she be re-titled.

She had given that idea short shrift. She was a butler and proud of it. It was what she had trained for. It was in her blood. Her English father was a butler and she had grown up in the stately British household that was his fiefdom, fascinated by the day-to-day management of what was not only a home but a family seat, and a three-hundred-year-old one at that. It had been her fond ambition to hold a similar position one day but, as she had discovered, life had a nasty way of subverting youthful ambitions.

‘No? That surprises me. I thought that coping with the unexpected was one of your great strengths. You certainly never had any problem accommodating the most bizarre requests of my guests... You didn’t turn a hair at the pet lion cub, or the demand to find enough sculls for a wagered boat race on the lake, or, for that matter, the man who collapsed in the soup with a newly developed seafood allergy. Without your prompt action he might have died.’

‘I didn’t say I couldn’t cope,’ said Vanessa, taken aback by his easy recall of incidents she had assumed were long dismissed from his mind as supremely unimportant. At the time they occurred she had merely received a cool word of approval, as if she had done nothing more, nor less, than was required of her. ‘I just said I didn’t react well—personally, I mean. I get churned up inside...’

‘It doesn’t show.’

‘Thank you.’ She was already regretting having told him that much. He was studying her with an intentness that increased her anxieties.

Her fingers curled into her palms as she fought the desire to check her hair. As it dried it would lighten several shades to the warm caramel that was so susceptible to the bleaching effects of the summer sun, although thankfully the gel she used to keep the sides tidy would prevent its waviness becoming too obvious. Still, Benedict Savage was an architect, skilled in the interpretation of line and form, observant of small details that might escape others...

‘It was a comment, not a compliment.’

‘In my profession that is a compliment,’ Vanessa retorted with an unconscious air of smugness that prompted an amused drawl.

‘Being a servant is hardly one of the professions.’

Vanessa bristled at the implied slur. Snob!

‘Of course not, sir. I humbly beg your pardon for my presumption, sir.’ She would have bowed and tugged her forelock but that would be going over the top. As it was his eyes glinted dangerously.

‘You have a devastating line in obsequiousness, Flynn. One might almost suspect it was insolence. Why have I never noticed that before, I wonder?’

Because she had never allowed herself to be so fixed in his attention before. Aghast at her foolishness, Vanessa tried to retrench.

‘I don’t mean to be—’

‘You mean you didn’t think I’d notice. Have I really been so complacent an employer?’

‘No, of course not,’ she lied weakly, and watched his thin mouth crook in a faint sneer.

‘Sycophancy, Flynn? Was that on the curriculum at that exclusive English school for butlers that you graduated, drenched with honours, from?’

This fresh evidence of the acuteness of his memory was daunting. She hugged the trailing sheets to her chest and refused to answer, realising that no answer, however cunningly phrased, would please him. He didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted a whipping-boy for his frustration. The irony was that she had richly earned the position!

‘That’s right,’ he said silkily. ‘Humour me. After all, you can afford to. You know I can’t fire you.’

‘Can’t you?’ Vanessa said, sensing an unforeseen trap in his goading.

‘Well, I could, but that would jeopardise all that I’m doing here, wouldn’t it?’

‘Would it?’ Vanessa was now bewildered.

‘You could tie me up in legal manoeuvring for years—’

‘Could I?’

Her response was a little too quick, a little too curious. His eyes narrowed. Vanessa straightened her spine and squared her shoulders, lifting her chin in a characteristic attempt to establish her physical superiority.

‘I could, couldn’t I?’ she rephrased with a suitable tinge of menace, but not all the threatening body language and fighting language at her disposal could redeem that brief and telling hesitation.

‘Could you?’

‘Yes.’ Her teeth nibbled unknowingly at her full lower lip.

‘And how, precisely, would you do it?’

She was even more at sea, the look in his blue eyes creating a turbulence that reminded her what a poor sailor she was. He looked amused and—her stomach roiled—almost compassionate!

‘Well, I...I...’

‘You don’t know, do you?’ he said gently. ‘You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.’

She lifted her chin even higher. ‘No.’ Her tone implied that neither did she care to find out.

He knew better.

‘Did you not understand Judge Seaton’s lawyer when he explained the situation to you?’ he said, still with that same, infuriating gentleness. ‘He assured me that he’d spoken to you directly after the funeral and that you’d appeared quite calm and collected.’

Vanessa frowned, trying to remember, her brows rumpling her smooth, wide forehead.

She had looked on Judge Seaton as not only a saviour but also as a man she had respected and admired and come to develop a fond affection for.

He had rescued her from the depths of misfortune and she, in turn, had travelled across the world with him, rescuing him from the inertia of his unwelcome retirement and the vicissitudes of old age and an irascible personality. Solitary by nature and never having married, when the judge had started having difficulty in getting about and suffering short memory lapses Vanessa had been the one who chivvied him out of his fits of depression and inspired him to start the book he had still been enthusiastically working on when he died—a social history of his adopted home, Whitefield House, and the surrounding Coromandel region.

His death, though not unexpected in view of his failing health, had been a shock, and at the time of the funeral Vanessa had still been numb and subconsciously hostile towards any threat of change in the haven that she had striven to create for herself at Whitefield. She had mentally switched off at any mention of an arrogantly youthful usurper who, it seemed to her, was proposing to take up his inheritance with unconscionable speed, given the fact that he had never bothered to visit his benefactor while he was alive, nor deigned to attend his funeral.