Читать книгу: «An Unforgettable Man»

CHAPTER ONE

COURAGE just managed to stop herself making the betrayingly nervous gesture of smoothing down the skirt of her suit—a copy of a Chanel design she had had made up in Hong Kong for a tenth of the cost of the original—not that there was anyone else in the room to witness any potential breach in her composure. She was, it seemed, the final candidate to be interviewed for the post of household comptroller to the millionaire businessman Gideon Reynolds.

In normal circumstances she would not have been anything like this nervous; she had faced far stiffer interviews than this one in her career. But she had never wanted a job—any job—as desperately as she did this one. And it made no difference reminding herself that she was qualified for it—too well-qualified in many ways. The talents and training of an award-winning management executive of a chain of prestige European conference-centre hotels did not transfer very well to the job opportunities of a sleepy Dorset market town.

She had spent the last week working part-time stacking the shelves at a local supermarket and very glad of the money she had earned there she had been, as well.

The trouble was that the hotel trade, even at her relatively high level, did not pay particularly well. In the past that had not mattered; in the past her love of her work and the perks that went with it—free travel, the opportunity to meet new people, rent-free accommodation—had more than compensated for her smallish salary, but then in the past she had not had to worry about supporting anyone other than herself. In the past she had not had hanging over her the fact that her darling, beloved grandmother was soon going to be desperately in need of her help, not just financially but potentially physically as well.

Her employers had been very understanding, allowing her to terminate her employment with them without any notice—trust Gran not to let her know what was going on, not to want to worry her. It had been her GP—an old family friend—who had got in touch with Courage privately. Not even Gran knew the real extent of the damage to her heart and the frailty of her health.

‘But there must be something you can do,’ Courage had frantically protested to her grandmother’s doctor, her body taut with shock and fear.

‘Yes. We can operate to replace the damaged tissue, but the waiting-list for that kind of operation is at least two years. Your grandmother is a very strong woman, but she is in her sixties. Her condition is extremely severe, and another two years…’

Courage bit her lip. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing her gran—or of seeing her in pain, suffering… Not Gran, who had always been so full of energy and optimism, who had been the steadfast rock of her own life, holding her close and safe, giving her the gift of self-worth, of knowing how much she was loved at a time when…

‘What do you mean you’ve come home?’ her grand-mother had demanded when she had arrived unannounced. ‘What about your work—your career?’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Courage had fibbed breezily, fingers crossed behind her back. ‘I had quite a bit of leave owing to me, and to be honest with you, Gran, I was already thinking about taking a break, giving myself some thinking time to evaluate where I’m going and what I want. The company have offered me the job of running their new Hong Kong conference centre and…’

‘And what?’ Her grandmother had demanded fiercely. ‘It’s the opportunity you’ve always wanted, what you’ve worked for…’

‘In some ways,’ Courage had agreed. ‘And had it been anywhere else but Hong Kong they were posting me to… After all, none of us are really sure what’s going to happen when the colony is handed back to the Chinese.’

‘So what exactly are you saying—that you turned them down?

Courage had seen the suspicion in her grandmother’s eyes, and knowing her pride, the same pride which she herself had inherited, she had broken one of her strongest rules and fibbed a second time.

‘I haven’t totally ruled it out. The company has given me three months to think it over.’

‘Three months… But the longest you’ve ever been able to come home for before has been a couple of weeks.’

‘Which is why I’ve got so much leave owing to me,’ Courage had told her.

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.

The board this man looked as though he should be impressing wasn’t so much one of fellow directors and entrepreneurs but one run by the film censorship committee.

Courage couldn’t remember ever, ever having seen such a sexually powerful and tauntingly male man.

Over the years her career had brought her into contact with very many good-looking men, and an equally large number of very wealthy men, but none, not one single one of them, had possessed a tenth of the open sexual charisma of this man.

She didn’t like it, she decided, and she didn’t like him either. She could almost feel the down-blast of the heat of his high testosterone levels, scent the intensely male pheromones which his body exuded like an invisible force-field.

Outwardly he was dressed in the familiar uniform of the successful businessman—an exclusively tailored suit, which disdained to advertise the handiwork of a fashionable designer but which had probably cost twice as much, a plain white shirt and an equally plain tie, a chrome watch on a leather strap and no rings or any other kind of jewellery. He had clean but unmanicured nails, thick dark hair, which was cut rather than styled, and skin which looked weathered rather than tanned and which was already beginning to show the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow.

That a man—any man—should possess such a high-octane brand of sexuality was disturbing enough; that he should so obviously choose not to acknowledge or underline it was… unsettling.

Good-looking men used their sexuality in just the same way as pretty women, but this man was making a positive visual statement that he did not choose to use his. Just because he didn’t choose to, or because he didn’t want to? He didn’t look the sort, to Courage, who would have any difficulty in removing unattended, too-clinging female attachments from his life—no way.

‘Please sit down.’

Courage discovered that she was rather glad to do so, and equally glad that the chair was positioned a good few yards away from the desk behind which he had re-seated himself.

‘Courage. That’s a rather unusual name.’

‘It’s a family name,’ Courage explained calmly.

‘I see from your application form that you describe yourself as single and unattached, and that you list your next of kin as your grandmother.’

‘My parents are both dead,’ Courage told him levelly. He had turned slightly away from her to study some papers on his desk, and as he did so something tugged at the corner of a vague memory, something about the angle of his jaw, the dark shadow he cast.

She was frowning, trying to ease the memory into something more concrete. It was like trying to ease a splinter out of a healed piece of skin. She could see it, feel it when she pressed the wound, but she could not extract it.

When the memory refused to take on any recognisable form she shook her head and let it go. It wasn’t impossible that she had perhaps at some time caught a glimpse of him. He could quite easily have stayed in one of her hotels. She had certainly never seen him face to face; there was no way she would not have remembered him if she had. No, her memory was more something to do with the way he moved, the angle of his head, the…

‘And you do not have any brothers… or sisters…?’

Courage tensed slightly as he seemed to hesitate over the last two words, giving them a very subtle underlining.

‘No,’ she told him curtly. ‘My parents did not have any other children.’

That, at least, was the truth… And as for the rest… Well, a stepsister was not, after all, any real blood relation, and there had certainly never been any sisterly feelings between her and Laney. Contempt and hatred for Courage on Laney’s part, and fear and loathing on her own.

Now that she was older the fear and loathing had gone, to be replaced by an enormous sense of sadness coupled with an equally intense sense of relief—and guilt… Guilt because she had escaped, because she had Gran, while Laney…

As a child she had only seen the closeness which existed between Laney and her father—Courage’s own step-father—as something which excluded her and threatened her relationship with her mother. Because her mother had done everything her second husband had told her, and Laney had tauntingly warned Courage that she was going to tell her father to send Courage away.

It was only later, as she grew more mature, that she had recognised the possible meaning of those nocturnal visits her stepfather had paid to Laney’s room, the real foundation of the intense closeness which had existed between them.

She shuddered now to recall how easily she could have fallen into the same trap as her stepsister. Fortunately, she had been far too terrified of her stepfather to take him up on his offers to come to her room and ‘talk’ to her.

‘Let me help sort out this problem you and Laney are having. You’re sisters now and you should love each other. I want you to love each other,’ he had insisted softly. ‘Then I can love both of you. You mustn’t quarrel with Laney, Courage. She’s older than you. You must listen to her, let her help you.’

The cruel, manipulative nature of her stepsister, which had made her own early teen years such a misery, could, she acknowledged now, have been not so much a character defect as a direct result of the other girl’s relationship with her father. Courage had no proof that he had been sexually abusive to Laney, but what she knew now as an adult, coupled with her own younger self’s intuitive fear and distrust of the man, made her suspect that he could have been.

And her feelings were not just a whim, not just her jealousy over the way he had taken over her mother, shut Courage out; she was positive of that.

Her mother’s second marriage was the one thing she and Gran never discussed. Her grandmother was of the old school and believed that if you couldn’t say something good about a person then you shouldn’t say anything at all.

Courage had been so shocked when she had heard the news of her mother’s death, but in reality her true mother—the mother she had loved and who had loved her—had disappeared in the early months of her second marriage.

‘No… I don’t have any siblings,’ she repeated firmly.

‘No husband… No partner… No children.’

He was making statements rather than asking questions—after all, she had already supplied all that kind of information on the application form she had filled in, prior to being summoned for this interview—but Courage still responded as though he were questioning her.

‘Isn’t that rather unusual… in these days?’

Courage focused on him. What was he implying? That she was lying—concealing the truth? Or did his question go deeper, probing the foundations of the most personal aspects of herself?

‘Unusual, but not unknown… Not in the hotel trade,’ she responded calmly.

It was, after all, true. The hours she worked and the constant travelling were just two of the reasons why it wouldn’t have been easy for her to form a close, emotional, sexual relationship with a man; up until she had moved back to her grandmothers her ‘home’ had been a room in whatever hotel complex the company had posted her to, and her ‘commitment’ had been the major and most important commitment in her life—the one she had made to her career. But when it had come to making a choice between that career and her grandmother…

Her employers had told her that if she should change her mind at some stage in the future they would be more than happy to welcome her back, and had in fact pleaded with her not to go—especially Gunther, the eldest son of the Swiss family who owned the hotel chain.

‘It says on your application form that you left your previous post for personal reasons.’

‘Yes,’ Courage agreed. ‘I wanted to return to England to be with my grandmother, who is suffering from a… heart condition. She… she brought me up when… when my mother remarried and I…’

‘You what? You feel you owe it to her to repay what she did for you? That’s a very old-fashioned ideology, if I may say so.’

‘I’m a very old-fashioned person,’ Courage re- sponded coolly, sensing the cynicism behind his words. ‘But in actual fact no, it isn’t duty that brought me back. I happen to love my grandmother and I want to be with her. Left to her own devices, she’s all too likely to take on too much… to overtax herself and—’

‘Is her condition treatable?’

‘There is an operation, but the waiting-list is very long and she isn’t a priority case. Private treatment is out of the question, but if Gran can be persuaded to take things easy, preserve her strength…’

‘You do realise that you’re vastly over-qualified for this job, don’t you?’

‘I need to earn my living…’

‘Well, you certainly won’t earn much of one stacking supermarket shelves… Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of outfit you’re wearing right now. Chanel, isn’t it?’

‘A copy. I had it made when I took a business trip to Hong Kong,’ Courage corrected him gently. ‘Hotel management doesn’t pay anything like enough to buy Chanel.’

She had intended the words only as a small rebuke, a subtle warning that his comments were not either welcome or necessary, but the long, thorough look he gave her coupled with his Laconic, ‘No, it doesn’t,’ made the hot, angry colour sting her skin.

There were a variety of ways of interpreting his remarks, none of them particularly charitably inclined towards herself, and all of them variations on a theme. It was pretty obvious, she decided, that she was not going to get the job.

Without saying as much, Gideon Reynolds was giving her the distinct impression that he was trying to get under her skin and manoeuvre her into some kind of angry outburst with his subtle insults. Why, she had no idea. Perhaps he was just that kind of man, and that was the way he liked to enjoy himself. Well, if he did that was his problem, but there was no way she was going to allow him to manipulate her.

As she waited for him to dismiss her and tell her that the interview was over she was frantically trying to work out how many part-time jobs—working behind bars, stacking supermarket shelvcs and doing whatever else might come along—she could find the time and the energy to take on. At the moment…