A Suitable Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  ‘You forget,’ she replied coolly, ‘that I no longer had a roof over my head. Your stepmother made it crystal-clear that she wanted the cottage back and the sooner I cleared out of it the better.’

  ‘Dammit, Suzie, you should have written to me in New York.’ He raked his fingers through his hair—a restless, impatient gesture that she could remember him making even as a teenager. Whenever he was angry over something. Her brother had tried to cultivate it, but somehow he had never managed to convey the same magnetic, effortless charm.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said politely, ‘but I haven’t resorted to asking for charity as yet. Besides, I couldn’t honestly imagine a worse hell than living in the vicinity of your stepmother.’

  She thought of Martha Sutherland with distaste. Brassy blonde and, at thirty-two, less than half the age of the man she had married. She was the sort of woman whose nails were always impeccably varnished in red, and who never set foot out of the house without being sure that everything about her co-ordinated.

  ‘So you threw away your future and moved into a grimy bedsit in London instead.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she snapped.

  ‘I understand better than you think.’

  ‘After seeing me for the first time in years and after only forty-five minutes. What a genius you must be at reading other people’s characters.’

  She hated this conversation and she wished that she could just take refuge in some of that uneaten chocolate lying in her bag. Then, for the first time since he had entered the room, she wondered what he must think, seeing her now. Seeing how much she had changed physically. She knew that he had never found her attractive; she just wasn’t his type—too tall, too gauche, too dark-haired—but what must he think of her now? Overweight, hair unflatteringly pulled back, dressed in dark colours which she knew did nothing for her—somehow she had lost the will to dress with any attempt at style.

  She shoved aside the temptation to reach for her bag and extract the chocolate and contented herself with glaring at him.

  ‘What are you doing for money?’ he asked, looking at her with lazy speculation.

  ‘I have a job,’ she said sullenly. ‘I’ve been temping since I moved down here.’ She linked her fingers on her lap and frowned. Now that she had begun thinking about the changes he must see in her—all for the worse—she found that she couldn’t stop herself. She was acutely aware that her once flat stomach was not so flat as it had been, that her legs and thighs were filling out her trousers in a way that implied that if she continued snacking off bars of chocolate she would soon find herself moving up a size in clothes. Again.

  ‘Doing what, exactly?’

  ‘Doing whatever pays the rent. Exactly.’

  ‘But nothing to do with accountancy.’

  ‘I resent your criticisms,’ she told him resentfully. ‘You have no right to march in here and start telling me what I’m doing wrong with my life. Your zeal to do good would have been far more useful a year ago. In fact, it might have saved my father’s life.’

  A heavy silence greeted this, but he was saved from having to say anything because someone knocked at the door and she leapt to her feet, carefully keeping her eyes firmly averted from his face.

  It never paid to antagonise Dane Sutherland too much. He was a controlled person but when he was angry he could be immensely frightening. Once, when Dane was fifteen, the school bully had made the mistake, never again repeated, of making some sly, sneering remark about old Mr Sutherland. Dane hadn’t raised a finger. He hadn’t had to. He had just gone very close to him and said something which, hovering on the sidelines with two of her friends, she had not heard, but which had been enough to scare Tim Chapman into complete silence.

  Thinking about it, she realised that he hadn’t bullied anyone again after that. In fact, when she’d last laid eyes on him he’d been a rather harassed father of four working at the garage outside town. Rumour had it that his wife took his money off him as soon as it landed in his hands and then doled it out to him as she saw fit.

  She was almost relieved to see her landlady standing outside with her hands on her hips and a belligerent expression on her face. Almost, but not quite. The rent was, for once, late and money was, as always, thin on the ground.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past four days,’ Mrs Gentry said, in that voice of hers which sent shivers of apprehension down her tenants’ spines, even when they had done nothing wrong.

  ‘I’m a bit behind this month with the rent, Mrs Gentry,’ Suzanne said, taking the bull by the horns.

  ‘You could say so.’ She pursed her lips and said in a reedy voice, ‘There’s many who would jump at the chance of renting this bedsit, I don’t have to tell you that. I warned you when I took you on that there was a lot of competition for this place; there’s many who would stand for days queuing up outside to rent here. It’s a prime area to be—’

  ‘Oh, really.’

  Suzanne had never seen anyone make the landlady’s mouth fall open, but Dane did.

  He stood next to her, with his hands in his pockets and a cold smile on his lips.

  ‘And I,’ he continued icily, ‘have yet to meet anyone prepared to stomach the downright primitive conditions of this dump, which you have the nerve to glorify by calling a bedsit.’ Mrs Gentry was staring at him, disconcerted and alarmed and shuffling from one foot to the other.

  ‘There’s many—’ she began, with an attempt to recapture some of her authority, and he cut her off swiftly.

  ‘Who are willing to put up with this ghastly hole simply because they have no choice. And there are some, of whom I am one, who would be more than willing to take you to court for renting out a place like this.’

  ‘Of course I would be more than prepared to fix a few things, more than prepared, if the miss here had complained—’

  ‘The fridge doesn’t work, Mrs Gentry,’ Suzanne interjected swiftly. ‘I mentioned that to you four months ago and I’ve been mentioning it every time I’ve seen you since.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Gentry blustered, ‘I was about to say to you that I’ll have that fridge taken away and replaced. I’ve been meaning to do it for some time, sir—’ she reverted her attention to Dane, clearly at a disadvantage because he was so much taller than she was and she had to crane her neck upwards to look at him ‘—but I’ve been off my head with worry these last few months, what with the husband and his drinking problems.’

  Husband? Drinking problems? This was the first that Suzanne had heard of any such thing. In fact, she was sure that Mrs Gentry lived on her own, probably having nagged her husband into the ground.

  ‘I’ll have the rent for you by the weekend,’ Suzanne said, aware that she would have to cope with the redoubtable Mrs Gentry all on her own, once Dane had gone, and not willing to stir up too much bad feeling just in case she found herself without living quarters. The woman, worse luck, was right when she said that places were hard to get in London, and even this bedsit, appalling though it was, was better than some she had seen.

  ‘It’s already late,’ Mrs Gentry pointed out, on safer ground now. ‘I’ll overlook that, though, if I can have it in my hands no later than Saturday midday.’ She stepped back slightly and then said with a sly smile, ‘However, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to raise the rent from next month. Inflation, you know.’ She told Suzanne how much extra she would have to pay, and it wasn’t until she had straddled off, in search of another victim, that Suzanne sat down on the sofa with a groan of despair.

  ‘I shall never be able to afford it,’ she said. ‘Where am I going to get that money from?’ Especially now that I no longer have a job, she added silently to herself.

  ‘It’s hardly a vast sum of money,’ Dane pointed out reasonably, and she glared at him with loathing. Of course, she wanted to say, it wasn’t a vast sum of money, but it was just enough to make her standard of living very uncomfortable indeed if she was forced to find it out of her now non-exis
tent salary.

  ‘Not to you,’ she told him sourly. ‘You already have vast sums of money, but I haven’t and it’s a great deal to me.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask for a pay rise?’

  ‘A pay rise?’ Her eyebrows flew up and she laughed drily. ‘If you must know, that would be very difficult, since as of today I have joined the ranks of the unemployed. ’ She stood up and fetched both empty mugs and walked towards the kitchen, throwing over her shoulder. ‘But that’s no problem. I shall simply have to dig into my minuscule savings account and make do.’

  It wasn’t something that she wanted. She wasn’t holding onto her savings for anything in particular, but she felt more cushioned knowing that the money was there, even if it wasn’t a great deal. She regarded it as money which she might need for a rainy day. It was a blow to think that the rainy day would turn out to be a bedsit in London and Mrs Gentry’s grasping hands. But what choice did she have?

  ‘How did you manage to lose your job?’ he asked, when she returned to the little sitting room.

  ‘Isn’t it about time that you left? Consider your condolences personally delivered.’

  She ignored the self-righteous little voice in her head and dug inside her handbag for the remainder of the chocolate, which she ate slowly, not caring what he thought of her eating habits. Or her weight problem, for that matter.

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘Oh, all right!’ she snapped, looking at him. How easy everything was for him. Born into wealth, blessed with looks and intelligence. She disliked him sitting there trying to drag conversation out of her when she would much rather have preferred solitude, a little time to consider her position—a little time, the self-righteous voice told her, to feel sorry for herself all over again.

  ‘I had an argument with my supervisor,’ she admitted. ‘And I won’t bother to pretend that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t like the way that he was doing things. There were no controls and he preferred going down to the pub to trying to get things into order. I told him so and he sacked me on the spot. I had to leave as I was only a temp.’

  A ghost of a smile flitted across her face as she remembered the encounter. Mike Slattery was an odious little man with a sharp, ratlike face and a tendency to issue orders. It had been wonderful to give him the benefit of her opinions, even if it had cost her her job.

  ‘You were always outspoken,’ Dane drawled, surveying her from under thick, dark lashes. ‘Always ready to rush in where angels feared to tread. Which,’ he continued, ‘doesn’t solve the problem of what you’re going to do now.’

  Suzanne shrugged and contemplated the empty chocolate wrapper ruefully.

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  ‘And continue to live here?’

  She followed his scathing glance round the room and said angrily, ‘You’d be surprised what a palace this is in comparison to some places that I’ve seen! At least the roof is one piece and there’s a carpet of sorts on the floor.’ A far cry from her father’s cottage. Was Dane thinking that too?

  She looked down, blinking rapidly. Her father had been so upset when Martha Sutherland had announced that the cottage would revert to the house in due course. A gorgeous summer retreat for weekend guests, she had told him, patting her blonde hair and rearranging the decor in her mind’s eye.

  Where had Dane been when her father had needed him? Or maybe he had known of his stepmother’s intentions all along, and had silently gone along with them, letting her do the dirty work while he built empires in America.

  ‘You can’t continue to wallow in grief for the rest of your life,’ he said, looking at her, unperturbed by the outrage on her face which his remark engendered.

  ‘How dare you? I am not wallowing in grief!’

  ‘I understand,’ he continued calmly, ‘how upset you must have been by your father’s death, but allowing your life to crumble is not going to bring him back.’

  Suzanne’s mouth thinned and she wanted to hit him. No one had told her anything like that. At the funeral they had all been so kind and understanding. Even Mr Barnes had sympathised when she’d told him that she was going to leave the company and move down to London.

  Her friends had understood as well. She frowned. She hadn’t contacted any of them, she realised, since she had left Warwickshire—at first because she literally hadn’t been able to bring herself to talk to anyone, and then later because time had elapsed and she had just not got around to it. Most of them had grown up with her. They had all been there at the funeral. She would get in touch with them, she decided, soon.

  ‘Life goes on, Suzie,’ he said, refusing to release the topic even though her stormy blue eyes were telling him to. ‘You can’t continue holding onto your anger and grief, while life slides past.’

  ‘Stop preaching to me!’ She got up and restlessly walked to the bay window in the sitting room and stared outside for a while. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ she told him, turning around and half sitting on the window-ledge, with her arms folded and her face mutinous. ‘I’m getting on with my life and everything is just fine!’

  ‘You are not getting on with your life,’ Dane said, with the same infuriating calm, as if he were talking to a wilful child in need of appeasement. ‘You gave up your course, you now no longer have a job down here...’ His grey eyes raked over her and she flushed, knowing what he was going to say next and resenting it already. ‘And I needn’t tell you the obvious: you’ve looked better.’

  That brought tears of hurt anger to her eyes, even though she could hardly disagree with what he said.

  He paused, thoughtfully, head cocked to one side as though trying out an idea in his head and wondering whether it would fit. ‘You are going to leave this place,’ he said decisively. ‘You are going to come back to my apartment in London, where I am now living, until you find somewhere more salubrious to live. You are going to work for one of my London subsidiaries and you are not going to chuck it in for any reason whatsoever.’

  Suzanne stared at him in complete silence and then said, in as civilised a tone as she could muster, ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘You might just as well pack now and leave with me. It shouldn’t take long. I don’t see too many personal possessions strewn around.’

  ‘I am not coming anywhere with you!’ she said in a high, unsteady voice. ‘I’m not going to accept charity from you.’ The way my poor father did, her tone implied. And just look at what he got for it, she thought. He died an unhappy man, thanks to your wretched stepmother. Your family was responsible, like it or not.

  ‘You are going to do just exactly as I tell you,’ he said, standing up.

  ‘Why? Why should I?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  ‘And your word is gospel?’ She laughed with sarcasm, and he reached out and gripped her arm.

  ‘I know you want to blame someone for your father’s death,’ he ground out, ‘and I know that you have decided that I fit the bill. Fine. It’s a misconception which you will grow out of with time. But I have no intention of letting you stay here a minute longer and that’s that. So start packing your bags. You’re coming with me.’

  ‘I don’t intend to be bullied by you!’

  ‘Someone has to bully you into doing something,’ he said impatiently. ‘If your brother was here instead of in Australia the task would fall to him.’

  ‘Task? Task? So I’m a responsibility now, am I? Poor little Suzanne Stanton who has no control over her life.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She glared at him and had the sinking feeling that arguing would be like trying to make a dent with a wooden spoon in the Rock of Gibraltar. He was immovable. He had waltzed in here, decided that she was unfit to take control of herself and had immediately concluded, probably because he felt guilty, that the onerous task fell to him.

  ‘I don’t need your pity,’ she said bitingly, ‘or anyone else’s for that matter.’

  ‘You’re a child, Suzie,’ he told her b
y way of response. ‘You don’t know what you need. You should thank God that I have returned to take you in hand.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  A BULLY. That, she decided, was what Dane was. An overgrown bully. Suzanne sat next to him in the car, simmering with resentment, and he calmly ignored it all and made polite conversation, asking her questions, prising answers reluctantly out of her.

  The very worst thing was that she knew that she was behaving like a child. His proposition might have gone against everything ingrained in her, everything that told her that he was part of the family that had mistreated her father, but his offer was better than anything that she could come up with herself: a roof over her head and a job.

  And the memory of Mrs Gentry’s face when she’d told her that she could keep her awful little bedsit afforded her quite a bit of silent amusement. She glanced across at him in the dark car and felt a shiver of alarmed apprehension. He was, to himself at any rate, doing her a favour and there was nothing, she told herself, that she should be alarmed about, but she had the uneasy feeling of being a fish in a net—a very large net at this point in time, with lots of room for manoeuvre, but a net nevertheless.

  He looked across at her and she dropped her eyes quickly.

  ‘How long did Tom stay after your father’s funeral?’ he asked casually. He had, she noticed, no qualms at all about referring to her father’s death. Most people studiously avoided mentioning it, as though it were a strangely taboo subject.

  ‘Only a fortnight,’ she replied, looking out of the window at London passing slowly by her—crowded streets, brightly lit shops, a sense of hurry everywhere. ‘Marian couldn’t come over. She’s eight months pregnant and six months ago they told her that she couldn’t travel. He wanted to get back to her as soon as he could.’