Mistress by Agreement

by Helen Brooks

  She was a mess. This wasn’t about Kingsley, it was about her. She drew away, pushing back her hair from her face as she said quietly, ‘I’ll see to the food and I’ll bring your coffee through when it’s ready.’

  He made no move to hold onto her and he didn’t say a word before he turned and left the kitchen, his eyes just raking her white face for a moment.

  They ate at the little pine table in a corner of her sitting room and it brought back memories of the first time he had been to the house, the evening he had brought her home from the hospital. She should have made sure any relationship between them had ended then. The thought caused her throat to close up and she had to force herself to eat, each mouthful threatening to choke her.

  He glanced at his watch as they finished, his voice expressionless as he said, ‘Are you coming to the airport with me?’

  She stared at him. ‘Do you want me to?’ she asked in a small voice. ‘After all that’s been said?’

  His voice held a touch of irritation as he said, ‘Of course I want you to. What sort of damn fool question is that?’

  She would have smiled if she had been able. His reply was so very much Kingsley, and another strand of the tensile net he’d thrown round her heart. A net she had to break. She couldn’t let herself love him or anyone else, not again. She needed to be in control in every area of her life and love took that away, giving a terrible power to someone else.

  She would go to the airport with him and she wouldn’t say anything more to rock the boat before he left, not in view of the situation he had to deal with in Jamaica with his friend. But this was the finish. It had to be. He just didn’t know it yet.

  CHAPTER NINE

  KINGSLEY took her hand in the taxi on the way to the airport and she let it lie there. They didn’t talk but there was so much unsaid hanging between them that Rosalie felt the air were crackling. She was vitally aware of him at her side, his hard thigh touching hers and his big body seemingly relaxed. But he wasn’t. She knew him well enough by now to know that he was playing a part, just as she was.

  The airport was seething with people, and after Kingsley had checked in his luggage he took her arm and they made their way to one of the fast-food places. He ordered two coffees, which neither of them wanted, and once they were sitting on uncomfortable chairs at a table for two he took her hands in his. ‘You’re cold.’ It was said with surprise.

  She shrugged. She’d been chilled from the inside out since she’d decided what she had to do. ‘My self air-conditioning has never been too good,’ she said lightly.

  Kingsley’s eyes narrowed and he gave her a long look. ‘I’m planning to come back at the end of the week,’ he said quietly. ‘Dinner on Friday night?’

  ‘You might not be back,’ she hedged quickly. ‘Let’s decide later.’

  ‘No, let’s decide now.’

  Suddenly she felt they were discussing more than the dinner. She stared at him. He looked tough and strong, a man who would deal with any problem life presented and sort it out on his own terms. A man who wouldn’t compromise, who would always want his own way because he would feel it was the best way. And yet he had been gentle and understanding with her, she had to admit that. And again this all came back to it being her who was the mixed-up kid, but she was a woman on her own—she had been for ten years—and she had managed just fine, hadn’t she? She’d accepted she had to fight her own battles and stand on her own two feet and she had done it. Her life and what she did with it was down to her, and no one could rob her of that unless she gave over her independence, her self-respect, her autonomy.

  True, the feelings of inadequacy that plagued her in the dark of the night were hard to deal with at times, especially since she had got to know Kingsley. She’d resolutely held back from giving way to the desire of imagining what it would be like to be in his arms, to have him holding her, loving her, banishing the demons with the strength of his presence. Dreams of that sort were all very well, but if they turned into nightmares…

  ‘I wouldn’t let you down, Rosie.’ It was as though he had read her mind and she blinked at him. ‘If I say Friday, I’ll be here on Friday.’ Again they both knew there was more to the conversation than the surface indicated. ‘You are going to have to trust me sooner or later because I’m not going to go anywhere.’

  ‘You’re going to Jamaica,’ she said, thinking, What a stupid thing to say at such a time.

  ‘If you asked me to stay I would,’ he said simply.

  ‘What about your friend?’

  ‘You come first.’

  Her heart began to beat erratically. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to stay. You must go and see him; he needs you.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  She was silent. There was nothing she could say. Nothing at all.

  He sighed irritably. ‘I feel like I’m treading a minefield with you most of the time, do you know that? I never know when something I might say might be used against me, likened to the swine you married. You do that, don’t you? Look for the same failings in me as you found in him?’

  She was horrified and it showed, but she didn’t deny it. How could she? It was true. And what man was going to put up with that in the months and years to come? Certainly not one like Kingsley who only had to click his fingers and have a hundred beauties lined up panting.

  ‘If you think that…’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘Why do I bother?’ He finished the sentence for her. ‘Why do you think I bother, Rosie? Why do you think I’ve been treading on eggshells the last few months? You’ve finally opened up about this sicko you married, but now the steel is inches thicker, isn’t it?’

  ‘What steel?’

  ‘The stuff that coats the door to your heart,’ he said, poetically for Kingsley.

  There was a slight pause. ‘I can’t help how I feel,’ she whispered, letting her hair fall in two wings at the side of her cheeks to hide her face from him and the tears she was struggling to keep behind her eyelids.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ he said, and his voice sounded oddly husky. ‘Don’t you think I went through hell when I realised I was falling in love with you? It’s not just you who has the right to feel scared to death. After Maria I vowed I’d never let this happen again. Who needs it? A woman is a woman is a woman, and there were plenty out there who were only too willing to play the game the way I wanted it. Everything to gain and nothing to lose. Total safety. And then you came along.’

  She didn’t speak, she was crying, soundlessly, the tears slowly dripping down her cheeks, his honesty forcing her to admit what she had been trying to keep buried for weeks. She loved him. She had loved him for days, weeks, months, for ever. That was why the thought of giving herself to him terrified her so desperately. She loved him more than she had ever loved Miles, more than she would have thought herself capable of. Which meant his power over her was absolute. He mustn’t know. He mustn’t ever know.

  He had stopped talking. He was breathing hard and she could feel he was looking at her although she didn’t raise her head. After a moment a crisp white handkerchief was pushed into her hands. ‘Don’t cry.’ His voice was gruff, painful. ‘Damn it, the last thing I want to do is to make you cry. Drink your coffee.’

  She wiped her face and drank the coffee, which was lukewarm and tasted foul, and then she raised her eyes, knowing his would be waiting for her. ‘It would never work, Kingsley, you and I,’ she said shakily. ‘I’d spoil anything you’re feeling for me right now because I can’t be what you want me to be. When Miles did what he did—’ she stopped, wondering how to explain the unexplainable ‘—something died,’ she finished slowly. ‘Something I can’t get back.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ he said with quiet emphasis. ‘I love you, damn it, and I want to marry you and have children and grow old with you. I’m not Miles, I’m not anyone but myself and I’ve allowed you to see what that is, who I am. That has to count for something on this scorecard you keep in your head.’

&nbs
p; She tore her gaze from his, wondering why she had been so foolish as to come here with him. But she knew the answer to that. She’d wanted to be with him, this one last time. Every minute, every second was precious, and they were spending it arguing. She spoke the thought out loud. ‘I don’t want to fight, there’s not much time.’

  ‘I’ve never ducked an issue in my life and I’m blowed if I’ll start with the most important one that’s ever come my way,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ll take a later plane if necessary.’

  She shrank inwardly. She couldn’t cope with much more of this. It was tearing her apart. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she whispered brokenly. ‘Your friend is waiting for you.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ His voice was suddenly very quiet. ‘You really don’t get it. You don’t have the faintest idea what you mean to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ It was wrenched out of her. ‘This is hard enough as it is. Can’t you accept I mean what I say and leave me alone? This is for the best and you’ll see it one day.’

  ‘The hell I will.’ His mouth came down on hers and he kissed her hard, oblivious to anyone else.

  ‘No.’ She jerked her head away, panic-stricken. She couldn’t weaken now and she always did when he touched her. This had to be the end, now, right here. He was away for a few days and it would give him time to reflect, to see she was right. They had no future. She loved him too much for there to be a possibility of a future but she couldn’t say that, he wouldn’t understand. But she mustn’t weaken. He was too formidable an opponent, too intelligent and intuitive for her to show a chink in the steel he’d spoken of. ‘I don’t want this. I don’t want you.’

  He looked her straight in the eyes, his gaze so piercingly blue it was painful to hold. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I do.’ She nodded, her head wagging as though it were on strings. ‘I do mean it. And you’ve got to go. You’ll miss your plane.’

  He said something very rude about the plane, which made a passing customer gasp in shock and hurry to the other end of the seating area.

  ‘I can’t cope with you in my life, Kingsley. Is that plain enough?’ she said desperately. ‘I want it to be like it used to be before I met you. Mike or one of the others can take over the job from now on.’

  ‘I don’t want Mike or one of the others. The contract says you.’

  ‘Then I’ll resign and you can sue me if you want.’ She glared at him, fear and defiance in her face.

  He was silent for what seemed like a long, long time, his face full of a bewildered anger that cut her in two. ‘You needn’t resign your job,’ he said at last. ‘Not because of me. Put Mike on my project if you like, or one of the others. I really don’t care.’

  He stood up slowly, his face grey under his tan. ‘Goodbye, Rosie.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She was conscious of a screaming toddler to the left of her who had just flung orange juice all over its mother, and two teenagers in the corner who were giggling at a magazine they had propped between them.

  Something as momentous as their breaking up shouldn’t happen in such mundane surroundings surely? she thought dazedly.

  He looked at her one last time but he didn’t speak again, merely giving her a curt nod and turning away, walking with calm, measured steps out of the restaurant and out of her life. And she let him go.

  ‘You’ve done what?’

  Rosalie winced at the pitch of Beth’s voice. ‘I’ve split with Kingsley,’ she repeated flatly. ‘It’s over.’

  It was Sunday afternoon and she was sitting in Beth’s garden engulfed in the perfume of roses, honeysuckle and a hundred and one other scents from the profuse blooms adorning every nook and cranny, not to mention the flowerbeds. It was hot, it was very hot and a storm was imminent, but in spite of the weather Beth had cooked a big Sunday roast with all the trimmings, which Rosalie had ploughed through as best she could, considering every mouthful felt as though it would choke her. She hadn’t slept a wink all night and had been prowling the flat at four in the morning crying her eyes out.

  ‘But he adored you, anyone could see that,’ Beth said agitatedly. ‘Don’t tell me another woman hooked him? I don’t believe it.’

  ‘You don’t have to, it didn’t happen like that,’ Rosalie said carefully. ‘We just felt it wasn’t right, that’s all.’

  ‘We?’ Beth looked at Rosalie’s puffy eyes. ‘The rotten, two-timing rat.’

  ‘Beth, I promise you, Kingsley didn’t do anything wrong,’ Rosalie protested. ‘There’s no other woman, believe me.’ Not yet anyway. ‘It was just getting a bit…serious, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, Lee.’ Beth’s voice dropped in horror. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’ Rosalie said uncomfortably.

  ‘Freeze him out? Not Kingsley. Not the most gorgeous man you’re ever likely to meet.’ There was a slight pause, and then Beth said, ‘You did, didn’t you? And you’re regretting it already.’

  For the first time Rosalie could understand why Beth’s children had been eager to escape the nest as soon as they could. There was something terribly annoying about someone who was always right.

  ‘I’m not regretting it, not really,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s for the best in the long run. He wanted more than I could give.’

  ‘Sex without any commitment? Typical man. Is that it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘You to move in with him? Bad mistake. You lose your independence and he keeps his. I can see—’

  ‘Beth.’ She was trying very hard to be patient. ‘He wanted to—’ She stopped. She didn’t know how to put this. ‘He was talking marriage,’ she said at last.

  ‘No…’ It was a long drawn-out gasp. ‘And you said no? Lee, are you mad?’

  Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to come here today, but she couldn’t have faced any of her friends feeling the way she did, and staying brooding in the flat just hadn’t been an option.

  ‘Probably.’ She didn’t smile. ‘Very probably. He thinks I am, anyway. It wasn’t an…amicable parting.’ Her voice had quivered on the last words.

  ‘Oh, baby.’ Beth did what she did best and turned mother earth, springing up and kneeling down beside Rosalie’s chair and hugging her tight.

  It started an avalanche of tears that shocked them both and caused George, who had just wandered out from his study for a few moments, to beat a hasty retreat back indoors.

  Over several glasses of Beth’s iced lemonade liberally laced with lime and crushed raspberries, Rosalie told Beth the whole story throughout the sticky afternoon, discussing her fears and doubts for the second time in as many days but this time with someone who had no axe to grind. They were no nearer a solution when the heat of the day had gone and evening shadows spangled the slanting sunlight, and Rosalie couldn’t honestly say she felt better for discussing the whole sorry mess, but, nevertheless, she was glad she had come to see her aunt. It had been hard to talk about Miles and exactly what had happened in their marriage, but strangely not as hard as she’d expected, perhaps because telling Kingsley had broken some mental barrier that had been in place before.

  ‘I always loathed him, but then you know that,’ Beth said of Miles. ‘In all the time you were with him we hardly saw anything of you. It was all his friends, his interests, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I guess so.’ Rosalie nodded. In that way Miles had been like her father, although her father’s motive had sprung from a misguided, warped jealousy born of love, and Miles’s had been pure selfishness. ‘I didn’t notice it at first as all our friends were mutual.’

  ‘Kingsley isn’t like him, Lee. You do know that, don’t you?’ Beth said earnestly as they made their goodbyes in the cool of the evening. ‘He wouldn’t use force or be violent. I know it.’

  She nodded. ‘I know it too, it’s not that. But…’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I think I’m too scared by marriage to ever want to take a chance again, and then other times over the last twenty-four hour
s I’m almost picking up the phone to try and contact him and tell him I need him. How’s that for inconsistency?’

  ‘Perhaps if you said you’d live with him, without the marriage bit?’ suggested Beth, the most staunch advocator of marriage in the whole of London, who drove her children mad by insisting anything else was living in sin.

  Rosalie gave her aunt a hug. ‘Beth, I’m really going to miss you,’ she said, meaning it. ‘But it’s not even the marriage thing, although that is a sign of huge commitment. It’s more…letting him know how much I love him, you know? Miles would always belittle me to puff himself up and I know Kingsley wouldn’t do that, but when someone is sure of your love they can change…’ Her voice trailed away as she gazed at her aunt. ‘Oh, I don’t know how to put it,’ she said flatly. ‘I just know it scares me to death.’

  Beth looked at her for a long moment. ‘And how much does not being with him scare you?’ she said softly. ‘And don’t answer now,’ she added as Rosalie opened her mouth. ‘Think about it. All right?’

  Rosalie did think about it. She thought about it all through the next few nights when she tossed and turned until dawn in the sticky heat, the anticipated storm and change in the weather yet to make an appearance.

  She woke very early on the Friday morning when Kingsley was due back, even though she hadn’t managed to fall to sleep until way after two.

  She had made the worst mistake of her life. Even marrying Miles paled into insignificance beside sending Kingsley away. Suddenly her mind was crystal clear for the first time since she had met him and she knew exactly what she wanted.

  Miles was gone—in every sense of the word. Gone from her mind, her heart, her life and this world, so what was she doing letting him ruin her life for the second time? Beth was right, the possibility of not being with Kingsley scared her a hundred times more than accepting him fully into her life.

  Kingsley was nothing like Miles, not in character and he had shown her that. His honesty, his straightness, his ability to face issues head-on—Miles had had none of those qualities. Miles had been a pile of dead men’s bones beneath the outward façade of handsomeness and debonair conviviality, nothing about the person he had pretended to be before they’d married had been real. And she had allowed a man like that to convince her that love meant constriction and fear.