The Master's Mistress (12 page)

Protest that he could have told her would be a complete waste of her time and energy; he had decided he was going with Elizabeth to see her father, and as far as he was concerned that was an end to the subject!

‘Rogan, I’m perfectly capable of driving myself wherever I need to go.’

‘For God’s sake, give it up, Elizabeth,’ he rasped impatiently. ‘Just accept that you’ve met someone who’s as stubborn as you are!’

Her eyes widened. ‘My refusal of your offer to accompany me has nothing to do with being stubborn.’

‘No?’ he challenged. ‘Then what
does
it have to do with?’

Delicate colour entered her cheeks even as she glared across at him mutinously. ‘You can’t salve your conscience by forcing your help on me—’ She broke off abruptly, her eyes wide, her breasts quickly rising and falling in her agitation, hands clenched at her sides.

Rogan became very still. ‘What, exactly, do you
suppose I should have a bad conscience about, Elizabeth?’ he asked quietly.

She looked flustered. ‘Your mistake about your father, of course.’

‘Really?’ he pressed.

The colour deepened in her cheeks. ‘Yes, really!’

‘Liar,’ Rogan murmured, eyes narrowing shrewdly. ‘Do you regret what happened this morning?’

Of course she regretted what had happened this morning! Just as she regretted falling in love with this man when she knew he was never going to love her back!

‘Let’s not cloud the issue by talking about this morning,’ she dismissed briskly.

‘What issue is that?’ He once again hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets.

Elizabeth eyed him with frustration as she realised she was becoming distracted herself. But did Rogan
have
to be so darkly handsome? Did he
have
to be the one man who had managed to force himself past the barrier she had years ago erected so carefully about her emotions?

She scowled. ‘That I do not need you to accompany me when I visit my own father!’

‘Fine,’ he bit out tersely. ‘I’ll just come along for the ride, then, and wait outside in the car while you go in and talk to him.’

‘You—’

‘Surrey is probably a very nice place to visit this time of year,’ Rogan continued conversationally.

Elizabeth glared at him. ‘Cornwall is nicer!’

He gave an unconcerned shrug. ‘I’ve seen Cornwall. I’ve never been to Surrey.’

Rogan really was determined on coming with her, she realised in frustration.

And, deep inside herself, despite her misgivings, she was secretly relieved that she didn’t have to say goodbye to him just yet…

She wished she
never
had to say goodbye to him!

‘S
O NOW
, along with the rest of the guys in my unit who survived that last mission, I run my own business in Washington called RS Security,’ Rogan revealed.

He had been talking without pause for half an hour now, ever since Elizabeth had given him the directions for driving to London. In fact, he hadn’t stopped talking, about everything and nothing, since they had left Leonard Brown’s house in Surrey.

All in an effort to give Elizabeth the time she needed to decide how she felt about that visit to her father…

‘The name RS Security covers a multitude of sins,’ Rogan continued. ‘Business and house security. Computers too, of course. Retrieving lost dogs…’

‘
Retrieving lost dogs
?’ Elizabeth repeated disbelievingly.

Rogan shot her a grin; it was the first time she had responded to anything he had said since they got back on the road. ‘Well…maybe not lost dogs so far,’ he conceded lightly. ‘But if someone asked I’d probably do it.’

Elizabeth was well aware of what Rogan was doing—knew he was attempting to distract her by talking about anything but the visit she had just made to her father.

At best, it had been a stilted visit. At worst, it hadn’t served to vindicate her father of any of the things Elizabeth had believed concerning his disastrous marriage to her mother.

What it had achieved, however, was to show her that her father had more than met his match in his second wife, Cheryl. Blonde and beautiful, and twenty years younger than her husband, Cheryl obviously kept the wayward Leonard on a very tight leash. So much so that Elizabeth doubted her father ever had the time or the opportunity to even think about straying!

Seeing her father again had helped Elizabeth to view him through the eyes of an adult, rather than the hurt child she had still been ten years ago…

Oh, Leonard was still handsome. Still charming. Still something of a rogue. Still totally engrossed in his own needs rather than anyone else’s. In fact, he was still everything that had made him such a disaster of a husband for Elizabeth’s mother.

But maybe if her mother had been more like Cheryl—forceful, confident of her own attributes, strong enough to go after the man she wanted and keep him—then the marriage might have turned out differently.

Leonard was still all the things Elizabeth had ever thought him to be. But most of all, he was just weak. A man who for years had fed his own ego by having affairs with numerous other women.

It was disappointing, but at the same time this evening’s visit had been a successful one as far as Elizabeth was concerned. It had freed her, and her emotions, in a way she would never have believed possible. It had wiped out the anger and resentment that had coloured her own life and
decisions for so long. Now she just pitied her father for the weak and foolish man he undoubtedly was.

Unlike Rogan, so strong and confident of himself, who was everything and more that Elizabeth could ever want in a man…

One thing Elizabeth had definitely learnt from this visit to her father was that she wasn’t about to allow the man she wanted to just walk out of her life. At least, not without first telling him how she felt about him.

‘So.’ She turned in the passenger seat to look at him as he sat slightly cramped behind the wheel of her Mini. ‘What it all comes down to is that you’re not such a bad-ass as you would like everyone to believe you are!’

‘Not such a
what
?’ Rogan gave a disbelieving laugh as he shot her a sideways glance.

‘Bad-ass,’ Elizabeth repeated lightly. ‘An American term. It means—’

‘I know what it means, Elizabeth—I’m American, remember?’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t a phrase I had ever expected to hear coming out of the mouth of the learned Dr Elizabeth Brown!’

She shrugged. ‘I watch television programmes from America, just like everyone else.’

‘And read scary vampire books…’

‘
Sexy
vampire books,’ Elizabeth corrected ruefully. ‘If we’re going to talk about them, we may as well be accurate.’

‘Oh, I’m all for accuracy. What do you mean, I’m not such a bad-ass as I like everyone to believe I am?’ Rogan asked curiously.

She’d got his attention, Elizabeth recognised with quiet satisfaction. ‘Number one.’ She held up her first finger. ‘When you realised what Mrs Baines had done you quietly
and efficiently set about putting the situation to rights by telling the police we had now checked thoroughly and nothing was missing after all.’

‘Thanks for saying I was efficient, at least.’ Rogan grimaced.

Elizabeth smiled, unperturbed. ‘Number two. I’m beginning to suspect your claim that your father had arranged in his will for a pension to be paid to his aged housekeeper was not entirely truthful.’

Rogan’s mouth tightened. ‘No doubt he would have done if he had thought of it.’

‘No doubt.’ Elizabeth nodded confidently. ‘Number three—’

‘Exactly how many numbers are there going to be?’ Rogan cut in.

‘Oh, quite a few,’ she teased.

He nodded. ‘Then I suggest we find somewhere to stop and eat while you go through them. We’ve been travelling most of the day. Your father—who I noticed called you Liza!—and your stepmother didn’t seem inclined to invite us to stay for dinner, and I’m starving.’

As a means of changing the subject it was pretty effective, Elizabeth allowed—she was feeling rather hungry herself. ‘No problem.’ She nodded. ‘There’s a rather good Chinese take-away if you turn right at the next corner.’

‘How do you know that?’ Rogan demanded as he took the appropriate right turn and instantly saw the Chinese take-away on the left-hand side of the road.

‘I live just half a mile away from here.’

Rogan gave her a sharp glance once he had parked the car in front of the take-away. ‘The directions you gave me earlier were to
your
place?’

Elizabeth raised auburn brows. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

Yes, Rogan had a problem with that!

Driving with Elizabeth to visit her father was one thing—although she seemed to be bearing up under the strain of that disappointment far better than Rogan had expected she might. In fact, Elizabeth seemed quite perky, considering her father was definitely a rogue and her stepmother was a beautiful harridan, but going back to Elizabeth’s apartment with her definitely hadn’t been in his plans!

Although he wasn’t absolutely sure what his plan had been when he’d insisted on accompanying Elizabeth to Surrey…

‘Just relax, Rogan,’ Elizabeth teased as she moved efficiently about the comfortable kitchen, collecting plates and flatware to go with the Chinese food they had brought in with them.

Elizabeth’s apartment had come as something of a surprise to him, Rogan acknowledged as he absently helped put the cartons of food on the breakfast bar. As she had assured him, it wasn’t a penthouse apartment. Neither was it in a secure and classy apartment building in a prestigious part of London.

Instead, Elizabeth had the ground-floor apartment in a converted three-storey Victorian-style house. Admittedly the rooms were big and spacious, with high ceilings, but they were also old-fashioned, and the furnishings were old and comfortable rather than expensively modern.

All in all, Rogan decided he liked it.

Although he still wasn’t sure about being in Elizabeth’s apartment with her. Especially an Elizabeth who somehow seemed far less prickly and defensive than she usually was…

Elizabeth eyed Rogan quite openly as the two of them sat either side of the breakfast bar and began to eat. Rogan slouched slightly even as he shot her looks from beneath long, dark lashes that were guarded to say the least.

Had she unnerved him by bringing him to her apartment?

She certainly hoped so!

‘So, I was thinking of maybe giving my father some of the Britten money,’ she said brightly. ‘What do you think?’

Rogan straightened his back, dark brows raised. ‘I think that’s your business and no one else’s,’ he finally answered.

She shrugged. ‘I’m asking you for your opinion.’

He frowned. ‘Why don’t you get back to your numbers while I have a think about that?’

Elizabeth continued to look at him for several long seconds before slowly nodding. ‘Okay. We had got up to number three, I believe…?’

Rogan gave a hard smile. ‘Both you and your methodical brain know that we had.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘But I was just checking to see if you knew too.’

‘I know, okay?’

Elizabeth’s smile deepened. ‘Right. Number three.’ She held up her third finger, her expression once again serious. ‘You were in the army, transferred to Special Ops eight years ago, but became sickened by the whole thing when most of your unit was wiped out five years ago, during a mission that went terribly wrong. You resigned from the military after that, along with the five other men who survived. The six of you moved to New York for a while, but moved back to Washington three years ago.’

‘You
were
listening to me in the car earlier, after all,’ Rogan acknowledged softly.

‘Oh, I was listening to your every word, Rogan,’ she assured him. ‘Your scars…’

‘A little memento of that last mission,’ he confirmed.

She nodded. ‘What happened?’

‘I’m really not allowed to talk about it. But what I will say,’ he added, as Elizabeth grimaced, ‘is that mistakes were made. Bad intel, maybe. Whatever the reason, we were ambushed, and half of my men were killed before we got anywhere near completing our mission.’

‘And the other half, Ace, Grant and Ricky included, now work for you in Washington?’

‘You really do have a methodical brain, don’t you?’ Rogan murmured admiringly. ‘They work
with
me, not for me.’

‘At RS Security.’ Elizabeth nodded. ‘Ricky is number four on my list.’

Rogan’s brows rose. ‘
Ricky
is? Why?’

‘You care enough about him to try and stop him from chasing after a woman you know is bad for him.’

‘It’s what any friend would do.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Elizabeth contradicted gently. ‘People don’t care about other people in that way any more, Rogan. It’s all me, me, me. But you care about Ricky.’

‘He’s watched my back on more than one occasion,’ Rogan said.

‘And now you’re watching his.’

‘Move on to number five, Elizabeth!’

‘The woman who was trying to contact you through Grant a few days ago…’ Elizabeth was willing to let the subject of Ricky go if that was what Rogan preferred. If it made him
uncomfortable to admit he cared about the men who he worked with. But she wasn’t going to give up on the rest of this conversation. ‘I thought she was—Well, I assumed she was some woman you’re involved with in New York. When I thought you still lived in New York, that is,’ she added.

‘You mentioned something like that before.’ Rogan shook his head. ‘Meg Bailey is a piranha who’d stab you in the back rather than stop you from drowning. I’d as soon bed a crocodile as I would her!’

‘I get the picture, Rogan,’ Elizabeth assured him with a soft laugh. Relieved beyond measure that Meg Bailey wasn’t what she had thought she was. ‘So who is she, if she isn’t your girlfriend?’

‘She works for Langley, the company who issued our assignments.’

‘She’s one of the people who let you down five years ago?’

‘She is,’ he confirmed grimly.

‘And she’s still trying to contact you after all this time?’

‘We still do the occasional private job for them, okay?’ Rogan told her. ‘Maybe one or two a year. I was out of the country when your letter arrived, which is why I didn’t get here as quickly as I should have.’ He shrugged. ‘What can I say? The guys enjoy keeping their hand in,’ he defended, as Elizabeth gave him a pointed stare.

Her brows rose. ‘The
guys
do…?’

‘Okay, I do too,’ he accepted dryly. ‘But now we do it on our terms, at our convenience, no one else’s, and we gather our own intel,’ he explained.

Elizabeth moistened dry lips. ‘What sort of jobs?’

‘Usually kidnappings and hostage situations that are
too sensitive even for Langley to handle. Satisfied?’ he wanted to know.

Elizabeth was far from satisfied, and felt a deep fluttering of unease in the pit of her stomach just at the thought of Rogan putting himself and his men in danger in that way.

Except…

Her mother, instead of accepting the man she was married to as he was, perhaps becoming involved in the things he did and going with him when he travelled on business, had instead tried to change him, to make him into the sort of man she wanted: a stay-at-home husband who worshipped dutifully at her feet. The sort of man Leonard Brown could never hope to be.

That was another thing Elizabeth had learnt today: people could change themselves if they wished to, but another person never could, or should, try to do that changing for them.

Rogan was the man that he was, danger included.

In fact, he was danger with a capital D!

And Elizabeth loved him so much she ached with it!

Rogan watched the changing expressions on Elizabeth’s face. The shock at learning what he did. The unease. The trepidation. Was there slight distaste there too…?

‘Still think I’m not really a bad-ass?’ he mocked, pushing his plate of food away half eaten.

What the hell had he been thinking, making love to this woman? Dragging a woman like Elizabeth Brown—smart, sassy, so courageous and very much the lady—into the lowlife world he was occasionally forced to inhabit? He had to have been out of his stupid mind!

He stood up abruptly.

‘Where are you going?’ Elizabeth demanded sternly as she also stood up.

Rogan raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, somewhere in my decision to drive to Surrey with you I forgot that I was going to need transport back to Cornwall. As it’s too late now to get a train back, I thought I might look for a hotel to stay in tonight.’

‘You can stay here.’

He smiled humourlessly. ‘I don’t think so, Elizabeth.’

Her chin rose challengingly. ‘Why not?’

Why not? Because if Rogan stayed here there was no way he was going to remain on the couch Elizabeth would no doubt consign him to. Not with her in bed only feet away…!