His Convenient Mistress (16 page)

‘You stay right where you are.' He began shoving on some clothes, just boxer shorts and trousers and, as an afterthought, his shirt, which he didn't bother to button.

‘Don't be silly, you're the guest.' But she just stretched again, languidly, and raised her heavy eyes to his.

‘Which, of course, means,' he drawled with lazy intent, ‘that you have to make sure that I'm one hundred per cent satisfied, and you can stay right there and think of all the ways you can do that. In the meantime, I shall fetch us both our dessert,
mademoiselle,
just so long as you tell me where to find it.'

‘Larder. Just some iced brownies, I'm afraid. I'm lousy at desserts.' But what joy having him fetch them for her. There was a throw on one of the chairs, and she really should cover herself with it, but the effort involved seemed a little bit too much. Besides, and she revelled in this thought, wouldn't he just tear it off her the minute he returned?

She was aware of him returning even before he re-entered the room with the plate of brownies in one hand and two glasses of wine precariously in the other.

Sara propped herself up on her elbow and surveyed him as he deposited the wine on the table in front of them, then sat on the sofa by her, depressing it with his weight.

He dipped his finger into some icing and held the finger out to her lips, which she proceeded to suck with her eyes tantalisingly fastened on his.

‘Good?'

Sara nodded.

‘Well, I'd better try some for myself, in that case.' At which he repeated the exercise, but instead of proferring his finger to his own mouth he spread a sample on one of her nipples and then…oh…she could only moan as he licked it off very thoroughly before doing the same with the other aching nipple.

She was like a cat being stroked and stretching itself to its fullest so that the stroking could last forever.

Forever.

James didn't pause in his ministrations of her eager body. The realisation crept over him and it was something that he had known for a while.

Forever.

It was a good place to be.

J
AMES
sat at his desk, his long legs stretched out in front of him, planted solidly on the shiny, polished surface. At least he knew that there would be no interruptions of any kind. Everyone had gone home. He had all the time in the world to reflect. Shame that the reflections were of such a sordid nature, but then he had had ample time to consider that it served him right.

From the minute he had laid eyes on Sara King, he had stupidly thrown all his natural caution to the winds. Even when she had spun him her pathetic little story about not wanting him around because she wasn't prepared to have an affair, he had gone, only to return the minute she had crooked her finger. And how his stupidity had returned to bite him.

He looked coldly at the small black and gold bag burning a hole on the desk. Thinking about the ring inside only made him more enraged, but, like Sisyphus toiling up the mountain, it seemed that he had no choice but to stare at it and grimly acknowledge his misplaced trust.

Of course, he would have to deal with it. He had been played for a fool and he had no intention of allowing her the luxury of thinking that she had got away with it.

He swung his long legs from the desk and within minutes he was on the phone, making arrangements with his pilot for his flight up to Scotland. Then he slipped the bag into his jacket pocket. Touching it made him grimace with distaste but he almost enjoyed the feeling of repulsion
because it was a strong and necessary reminder of the fact that he had been taken for a fool.

The helicopter would leave in an hour and a half. By the time he made it up to the Highlands, it would be after ten. His mother would probably be asleep. He hadn't told her that he would be arriving a day ahead of schedule. He hadn't known it himself, not until this afternoon.

If he had any sense, he would leave the inevitable meeting with Sara until the morning, but he wasn't feeling sensible. Besides, he told himself, she would have Simon around in the morning. The minute she realised that he was on to her she would hide behind her son, knowing full well that a full-blown argument would then be out of the question. And James felt ripe for a full-blown argument.

Far from calming him, the flight up gave him a little more time for his rage to intensify.

His mind wandered back to the conversation he had had with Lucy Campbell, who had called him at work simply on the spur of the moment because she happened to be in London. They had had lunch at one of the trendier places that Lucy adored because they gave her the opportunity to look at people and know that they were looking at her.

Lord knew, he would never have found out about the conversation she had had with Sara but a couple of glasses of wine had put her in a mellow mood, and, from teasing him about the fact that the Rectory had passed him by, she had confided that she had explained his desire to get his hands on it to the current owner, just, she had admitted sheepishly, to see her reaction. Jealousy pure and simple, she had admitted airily. After all, hadn't
she
been after the biggest fish in town for most of her years? But, now she had got herself a boyfriend with whom she was head over heels, she could be open and honest.

It had taken him only a matter of seconds to work out why Sara had suddenly decided, out of the blue, to get in touch with him, to throw herself at him. Revenge through seduction. He didn't care what her reasons had been. All he could feel was his own raw pain and all he could think was that he had been on the brink of proposing marriage, of becoming the vulnerable idiot once again.

Vulnerable. Idiot. Two words that had never before entered his vocabulary, or anyone else's for that matter, when it came to describing him.

As predicted, it was almost a quarter past ten by the time the helicopter touched down on the estate and getting on for ten-thirty when his car pulled up outside the Rectory.

He hadn't even bothered to go into the manor. Instead he had gone straight from helicopter to car, with his briefcase slung into the back seat.

As he had half expected, the lights were out at the Rectory. If she was up in bed she probably wouldn't hear him banging on the kitchen door, so he went to the front door instead and kept his fingers depressed on the bell until he heard the shuffle of footsteps. There was no peephole in the door. The Rectory had never been updated to include such modern conveniences. There was, however, a key chain and she opened the door just enough for him to see her peering out at him with a frown. The frown turned to delighted surprise.

Tousled red hair streaming down her back, eyes still drowsy but sexily so, mouth curving into a smile of greeting as she unlatched the door. It all added up to a woman eagerly pleased to see her man unexpectedly.

The woman should go into acting. She would be a natural candidate for an Oscar.

He wondered whether she had simulated pleasure when
they had made love as well or had she ground her teeth together and stuck it out because, at the end of the day, all she wanted was a chance to pay him back?

It galled him to think that, as he followed her into the kitchen, he was still half hoping that his conclusions had all been wildly off course.

‘What on earth are you doing here, James?' she tossed over her shoulder. ‘I thought you were supposed to be flying in tomorrow.'

‘My business dinner was cancelled so I thought I might as well come a few hours earlier than planned. Pleased to see me?' He revelled masochistically in the need to hear her beautiful lips formulate their ready lies. She didn't let him down. In fact, she swung around and wound her arms around his neck so that she could draw him towards her, and instead of pulling back he attacked her mouth with an aggression that startled her. Though not for long. If she could fake passion then she did it very well, he thought, because her mouth almost immediately responded to his urgent plunder and her body curved against his. He could feel himself get hard in response and he roughly pushed her away.

Oh, no. Not tonight. Sex was definitely not on the menu tonight.

‘Were you sleeping?' he asked, leading the way to the kitchen so that she was obliged to fall in step with him.

‘What's wrong?'

James turned around to find her staring at him from the door, a small frown replacing her earlier expression of delight.

‘Wrong?'

‘You seem a little…strange.'

‘Must be the stress of work,' he lied smoothly, watching her watching him. She was just a little too observant for
his liking and it irked him to realise that she possessed, unusually for a woman or at least any of the women he had ever slept with, a talent for reading his moods.

She seemed to accept the explanation, at least for the moment, and filled the gap by chatting about what she had been up to. Buying school uniforms for Simon, getting to meet a few more of the local women her own age at an informal coffee morning for some of the mums at the school, trying to bake a cake and oh, she had bought six chickens and intended to have farm-fresh eggs every day.

James listened to this saga of rural contentment without saying anything. Eventually, Sara's voice dwindled away and the silence was not the kind she had become used to with him. It wasn't the companionable silence they always shared. This quiet had an edge to it and it frightened her.

‘Why is work so stressful at the moment?' she asked, searching for the most obvious explanation for his peculiar behaviour. She must be imagining it, of course, because why else would he have come to see her at this time of the night if not to be relaxed in her company?

‘Work is always stressful.' He had made a pot of coffee and he handed her a cup, removing himself to the opposite end of the kitchen table, from which he could inspect her from a relative distance. ‘Didn't you find that when you worked in London?'

‘Well, yes.' She tried a bright smile but it felt worn at the edges. It was late, even though she no longer felt tired, and the expression on his face was disturbing her at some indefinable level. ‘But then with a child in tow, life tends to be stressful at the best of times.' More silence in need of filling. And not a move to touch her. By now they would normally be all over one another, unable to stop themselves from touching, like teenagers exploring one another
for the first time instead of two adults who had already made love more times than she could remember.

‘So, living here must be a dream come true.' He shot her a cool smile and noted with satisfaction the dampening effect it had. The lovely mouth began to droop and her eyes took on a guarded wariness that still had some power, infuriatingly, to pierce the part of him that he had galvanised into self-mending.

‘I'm not sure about a dream come true,' Sara said with a hesitant smile. ‘But yes, there's a certain magic that I would never have believed to exist when we first arrived.'

‘No?'

For some reason she had never confessed the immediate dislike she had felt for the place when she had first arrived. Hiding away in the Rectory rather than going into the town now seemed like a distant dream. Perhaps she had shied away from that little admission because to insult the Highlands would have been to insult him. And then later, she found that she couldn't.

But now she felt uncomfortably goaded into rambling on.

‘I guess it was such an enormous change from London. Well, you of all people must know what I mean, but then it's always been different for you because you've always lived here.' Now she could hardly believe she had stuck it out in London for so long, and with Simon as well. Mad. ‘When I first came up, well, I was convinced that I'd done the wrong thing. It had seemed like fate when I found out that I'd been gifted this place and I grabbed hold of the opportunity with both hands, but leaving London was a wrench. I'd become accustomed to the noises and the chaos and the way that everything was lived in the fast lane. Always. A bit like your mum must have felt when she moved up here.'

Mention of his mother made his lips thin. His dear
mama
was not going to like this turn of events. She had developed a great deal of affection for Simon and for Sara too, come to that. Her pointedly tactful silence on the subject of her son finally finding the woman of his dreams was proof galore that that very prospect had been running through her head.

‘Course, Simon adores it up here.' She was wittering. She nervously gulped some of her coffee and wondered whether he would take up the conversation if she remained silent or whether he would just sit there, with that disconcerting, forbidding expression on his face, until she began wittering again.

‘So you've said before.'

‘I'm sorry. Repeating myself. Must be getting old.'

Silence.

‘I wish you'd tell me what's wrong.' The plea was wrenched out of her and she laughed to conceal the fear that was beginning to consume her. Fear of what, though?

‘Guess who I saw today.'

‘I don't know. Tell me.'

‘Lucy Campbell. You remember her, don't you? It would appear that the two of you have met. Small, attractive blonde given to gossip.' He sipped some coffee and watched her face as she digested this piece of information.

‘Small, attractive blonde.' So this was where it was leading. His unexpected appearance at her house, his brooding expression, the way he was making very sure not to come too close to her. He was ending their affair, if that was what it was. The fact that she had intended to be the one doing the ending never occurred to her. She had lost sight of her original plan to use him the way he had used her. All she could think of now was the prospect of never seeing him again. No more shared laughter, no more of his
dry teasing, no more of that wonderful feeling of waiting for him to knock on her door, no more losing herself in their lovemaking, thinking everything was all right in the world.

He had found someone else just as Phillip had found someone else, though strangely losing Phillip had been nothing compared to what she felt now, even though he had fathered their son in the course of their brief, doomed relationship.

‘Yes, I believe I do remember her, now that you mention it.' The clever girl had spilled the beans about his plans to buy the Rectory from under her feet, and look at that, she had got her man in the end.

‘I thought you might.'

‘Well,' Sara stood up and carried her cup to the sink then she remained there, with her back pressed against the counter and her hands splayed out on either side of her, ‘you really needn't have rushed over here to tell me, James. Couldn't it have waited until morning? These things happen, after all, don't they?' She shrugged and lowered her eyes for a second.

‘What things?'

‘I suppose you two were destined for a life together from an early age. Isn't that how it works in this part of the world?'

‘Arranged marriages?' His lip curled in cold distaste.

‘Well, maybe not arranged but
expected
.' No room for serious interlopers to come along, although she had never been a serious interloper, had she? They had never talked about commitment or a future together, and he had certainly never mentioned the love word.

‘Two mothers making plans for their little toddlers crawling around on the ground together? The perfect match of children with similar backgrounds, used to sim
ilar lifestyles…' She felt tears of self-pity pricking the backs of her eyelids. Different place, same old story. The daughter of a market trader should never dare hope for the impossible with a man like James Dalgleish. Ditched by two men for basically the same reason. Must be some sort of record.

‘You insult my mother,' he said coldly. ‘You also seem to forget that she came here as an outsider so the thought of marrying me off at the age of four to a suitable local girl would never have occurred to her. Nor am I the sort of man,' he laughed shortly, ‘to meekly marry a woman because she fulfils the right criteria, even though there's a lot to be said for an arrangement of that nature.'