Too Scared to Love

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Well, Miss Roberta Greene,’ he addressed her tightly, swinging her around, ‘tell me that this is a shock to you.’

  Roberta stared in front of her at a large portrait which had not been visible from the door. It was of a woman of a similar age to her, wearing a forced smile on her lips.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked, curiosity overcoming her confusion.

  ‘My wife, as you well know,’ he said derisively.

  ‘Why should I know?’

  ‘Don’t tell me that it was sheer coincidence that you applied for this job. Look at the portrait. Can’t you see the resemblance?’

  Roberta focused on it and she reluctantly saw what he meant. They both had red hair, pure natural red, unadulterated by any shade of brown or auburn and, from what she could see, the same grey, widely spaced eyes.

  But there any resemblance stopped. Roberta’s hair was cut in a neat bob that hung to her shoulders, and far from being neat and plain, which was how she considered herself, there was something untamed about this woman in the portrait. Her hair was a mass of curls, her eyes wild and knowing.

  Was this what lay behind his accusations?

  ‘What are you trying to imply?’ she asked coldly, turning to face him. Her colour had returned to normal, and that alarming, addled feeling she had had a moment ago had subsided.

  ‘Put it this way,’ he said in an unyielding voice. ‘It isn’t the first time that someone has tried to wheedle her way into my affections, or should I say my money, by playing on a resemblance to my late wife.’

  Roberta stared at him, taking in the hard contours of his face. Was there any woman brave enough to try and wheedle her way into this man’s affections? she wondered. He didn’t strike her as the sort who could be wheedled into anything. In fact, he looked the sort who played situations to suit himself, and to hell with the rest of the world.

  ‘Late wife?’

  ‘Yes, late,’ he snapped impatiently. ‘She died some years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I. Sorry that you turned up here.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re quite wrong about me,’ Roberta informed him calmly.

  ‘Oh, are you really? Afraid that I’m quite wrong about you?’ He stared back at her until she flushed, and then the harshness in his face softened slightly into amusement.

  Roberta felt a surge of anger which she quickly stifled. She could see what he was thinking clearly enough because he couldn’t be bothered to hide it. He saw her as a prim little English woman, with nothing of that tigerish grace of his late wife, and he found it laughable.

  She didn’t care, but on the other hand she didn’t see why she should have to put up with being the butt of his humour merely because he happened to be her employer.

  ‘Quite frankly, and I’m sorry to dent your ego, I had never heard of you until I applied for this job.’

  ‘I may be Canadian,’ he drawled, ‘but my face is well-known in the business circles in your country. As was my wife’s.’

  She detected a certain inflexion in his voice at the mention of his wife and she put it to the back of her mind.

  ‘I don’t know a great deal about business,’ Roberta said, folding her arms across her chest and not caring for the way he raised one eyebrow at the movement. ‘I’m an au pair, not a stockbroker. I really wouldn’t know a prominent businessman from a bank clerk. I also,’ she continued, irritated with herself for being addled by those brilliant-green eyes, ‘consider it very rude that you haven’t seen fit to introduce yourself.’

  ‘Are you usually so uptight?’ he asked, ignoring her question and moving to sit in the leather armchair, where he proceeded to scrutinise her with infuriating thoroughness.

  ‘I’ve just been dragged through your house,’ Roberta replied through gritted teeth, ‘subjected to wild accusations—naturally I’m a bit tense at the moment.’

  ‘Naturally.’ He was laughing at her, even though his face was serious.

  ‘And you still haven’t introduced yourself,’ she flared. ‘I take it that you’re Emily’s father.’ She knew who he was, of course, but that didn’t mean that it excused his lack of manners.

  ‘You’re like a schoolteacher I once had,’ he said, ignoring her yet again. ‘Very prim and always bristling with righteous indignation.’

  Roberta was positively fuming now. She hardly ever got angry, but right now she felt like exploding.

  ‘I seem to remind you of a lot of people, don’t I?’ she intoned politely. ‘I had no idea the world was so full of my look-alikes.’

  He laughed at that, and her lips tightened a little bit more.

  ‘Definitely like that schoolteacher I mentioned,’ he said, ‘and the name is Grant Adams.’

  Without that hostility marring his features, she was disturbed to realise, there was something very attractive about this man. Maybe it was that combination of striking good looks and the sense of power that he radiated.

  Either way, it alarmed her, because after everything that had happened she should be immune to men, most of all men with charm.

  They were dangerous, and danger was one element in her life she could quite happily live without.

  ‘I wish I could say that meeting you has been a pleasant experience, Mr Adams,’ she heard herself saying, ‘but I can’t.’

  ‘Let’s hope that time remedies that,’ he murmured, his eyes still glinting as though he found her a diverting novelty. ‘Have you met my daughter?’ He waved her to the other chair in the room and she hesitatingly sat down.

  She had hoped that she might be able to leave the room, but he was clearly not in the slightest bit tired. In fact, he looked as though he could have kept going for another few hours at least. If this was his norm, then lord only knew how much sleep he needed. Maybe none. She glanced across at him and decided that he was the type who considered sleep an unnecessary waste of valuable time.

  ‘Briefly,’ Roberta replied. ‘I’m afraid I was a little late getting here, and she was in bed when I arrived, although she did pop into see me.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said blandly, ‘and what did you think of her?’

  ‘She seems very outspoken,’ Roberta said carefully.

  ‘I would say that that’s an example of very British understatement. She lacks discipline.’

  ‘Lots of teenagers are a bit unruly, Mr Adams.’

  ‘Grant. And Emily goes way beyond the boundaries of unruly. Have you been told that she’s been expelled three times?’

  ‘No,’ Roberta admitted, not surprised at that.

  ‘Have you been told that she should be at school now, but she was expelled from her last one a month ago?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That hardly surprises me. My mother probably thought that such vital statistics would put off any prospective candidates for the job. Not many people are ready or willing to take on a fourteen-year-old with no sense of responsibility.’

  Roberta was shocked by the inflexible hardness in his voice. No wonder your daughter’s a bit off the rails, she wanted to say.

  ‘A sense of responsibility is something that’s gleaned from the example of those around,’ she said bluntly.

  ‘Meaning?’

  There wasn’t a great deal of amusement in his eyes now. She suspected that he was not accustomed to being criticised, however implicitly, and he didn’t like it.

  ‘How much time do you spend with her?’ she asked, and his frown deepened.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said coldly, ‘but who’s employing whom? I don’t like your tone of voice, and I certainly don’t like what I think you’re saying.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Roberta murmured, not feeling sorry in the slightest. ‘I don’t mean to tread on your toes, but from what I gathered you don’t spend a great deal of time with your daughter. If you did, perhaps she might be more inclined to live up to your expectations of her.’

  ‘In case it hasn’t occurred to you,’ he said in a hard voice, ‘I do have a livi
ng to make.’

  ‘But at the expense of your daughter?’

  ‘What?’ he roared, running his fingers through his hair and glaring at her. ‘Have you forgotten that you’re paid to look after my daughter and not to analyse my behaviour?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Roberta said calmly.

  ‘You don’t sound it!’ He stood up and paced the room to the window, staring outside, his back to her.

  No, she thought, he really was not accustomed to being criticised. No doubt that was something he held the monopoly on. And got away with, judging from what she had seen.

  But his air of restless aggression didn’t intimidate her. When it came to her job she was coolly professional and daunted by very little. It was only in her personal life that she had bumped into things she couldn’t handle.

  ‘I was wrong about you,’ he bit out, turning to face her. ‘You may have a passing resemblance to Vivian, but that’s about all.’ He walked across the room and leant over her, his hands gripping either side of the chair. ‘But something must ruffle that cool exterior of yours. What is it? What goes on behind that controlled face of yours? You’ve made your opinions of me loud and clear; now it’s time for me to ask a few questions. After all, I’m entrusting my daughter to you.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROBERTA regarded him with a trace of alarm. As far as she was concerned, being au pair to Grant Adams’s daughter in no way gave him an invisible right to quiz her on her personal life, but the look of intent on his face, inches away from hers, disturbed her.

  She lowered her eyes and wished that he would remove himself to another part of the room. His daunting masculinity so close to her made her feel slightly giddy and out of control and she didn’t like it.

  ‘I don’t think,’ she said carefully, ‘that what goes on under this cool exterior of mine, as you put it, has anything to do with my job here. I’m being paid to look after your daughter for four weeks, and that’s precisely what I shall do. I happen to be very good at my job.’

  ‘I never said you weren’t.’

  She could feel his breath warm on her face, and it seemed to go to her head like incense. That, coupled with the relentless, demanding glint in his eyes, made her hackles rise even further and she had to control herself against another unaccustomed surge of anger.

  ‘Then I don’t see that there’s anything further to discuss,’ she said evenly, raising her eyes to his.

  ‘You really would have made a great schoolteacher.’

  ‘And I resent your constant insults!’ she snapped.

  ‘Me? Insults? I thought that you were the one doing that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She eyed him levelly, inwardly cringing from that intangible sense of unquestioned power that radiated from him.

  ‘What I mean, my dear Roberta Greene, is that you feel free to make sweeping generalisations on my relationship with my daughter, but the minute I suggest that I try and discover what makes you tick, you instantly clam up. Surely you can see it from my point of view. I know nothing about you.’

  ‘I come with references,’ Roberta interrupted him, realising that her choice of words made her sound like some kind of prize dog proclaiming its pedigree. ‘Your mother will have copies of them all—’

  ‘But what do they say about you?’

  ‘That I’m experienced in this,’ she said evenly. ‘I’ve been an au pair now for two years. There’s not much else I can tell you, except that you must trust me with Emily.’

  He stood up and walked back to the armchair by the desk, and Roberta breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t realised how much she had been affected by his proximity until she felt a swift release of tension that made her body sag.

  Poor Emily, she thought sympathetically. She was probably scared stiff of her father. He certainly didn’t seem the sort who had a great deal of patience, and that was the one virtue that most adolescents needed in abundant supply.

  ‘I don’t suppose I have much choice, do I?’

  It was a rhetorical question, but Roberta answered it nevertheless.

  ‘You could always ask me to return to England,’ she pointed out. ‘After all, you didn’t hesitate to do that when you thought—’

  ‘When I thought that you had conned your way over here on your physical similarity to my wife,’ he finished for her, and she nodded. He shrugged. ‘I know how to handle gold-diggers,’ he said abruptly. ‘It pays to be ruthless.’ The hard inflexion in his voice made her shudder.

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind when I’m dealing with your daughter,’ Roberta said mildly.

  Her eyes met his, and for the first time he smiled, a genuine smile that lent his face such extraordinary charm that she was almost knocked for six.

  ‘I really would love to know what makes you tick,’ he commented lazily, and she stood up, in no way prepared to let his idle musings force her into a position of defensive anger again.

  She didn’t need anyone prying into her life. Right now, it was all too sensitive a subject for that. Not that she would have been inclined to have told him anything, anyway. She was not given to sharing confidences, least of all with a man who gave off warning signals that even a deaf person would have been able to hear.

  ‘And I really would love to get some sleep,’ she said politely, with a cool little smile on her lips.

  ‘I take it that was a “hands off” remark?’ he asked with amusement. Any minute now, Roberta thought with hostility, he’ll start referring to me as quaint, or an oddity.

  ‘If by that you mean that I don’t intend to discuss my personal life with you, then yes, you’re absolutely right.’

  She began to move towards the door when his speculative drawl stopped her in her tracks.

  ‘Same colour hair, same eyes, but you really are nothing like my late wife at all. Unless, of course, you’re an extremely fine actress.’

  Roberta didn’t turn around. She found his words offensive, because when she thought of that woman in the portrait she thought of everything that was wild and exciting. To have the differences between them pointed out to her was tantamount to telling her that she was as dull as dishwater.

  Nobody likes to think that they’re dull, do they? she told herself.

  ‘If I were an extremely fine actress,’ she said, staring straight ahead of her, her back to him, ‘I wouldn’t be an au pair. I’d be in the acting profession.’

  ‘I hope so,’ he said, conversationally enough, ‘because, as I said, I can be ruthless when it comes to gold-diggers.’

  There was no answer to that one, and Roberta left the study, shutting the door quietly behind her, quickly running up the stairs until she got to her bedroom.

  It was late, and she hadn’t slept for hours, what with the long flight and the inevitable waiting around at airport terminals, but she didn’t feel tired at all. Her mind felt as though it had been suddenly thrust into overdrive, and as she undressed and lay on the huge bed her thoughts flitted tantalisingly and aggravatingly back to Grant Adams. Odious man. Not only had he seen fit to insult her, but he had also seen fit to laugh at her.

  She had only met a few North Americans in her life. They had been full of joie de vivre and terribly extrovert. She wasn’t like that, but her natural reserve wasn’t a matter for amusement, was it?

  She had always been quite reticent. She wondered now whether that hadn’t increased over the past eight months.

  She cast her mind back over everything that had happened to her recently, for the first time not feeling her stomach contract at the thoughts racing through her mind.

  Her mother’s death she could face now with less of that desperate sense of loss. The pain was duller, more of a lingering sensation of sadness.

  She had been very close to her mother. From as far back as she could remember they had been a twosome. Her father had died when she was only eighteen months old, and her mother had never remarried.

  ‘It could never be the same,’ she had once told her. ‘I loved him
too much to ever give my heart to someone else. It would have seemed like a betrayal.’

  So they had tackled life together, hand in hand, and when she died quite suddenly nine months ago Roberta had been shattered.

  Now, looking back, she could see that Brian’s entrance into her life had come when she least needed it. She had been vulnerable, unprepared, emotionally in need of support, and he had swept through her like a whirlwind. Blond, handsome, charming, he had wooed her with flowers, surprised her when she least expected it.

  Roberta stared upwards at the ceiling, allowing her mind to roam freely for the first time over her huge mistake, not trying to shut it away somewhere safe where it couldn’t touch her.

  We all make mistakes, don’t we? she told herself.

  How was she to know what he really was? She had had no experience of men, after all. Physically, her life had been a closed book as far as that was concerned. When he didn’t pressure her into sleeping with him, she had been relieved and delighted. It had been one more point in his favour, so his requests to borrow some money, small amounts to start with, had hardly caused a ripple.

  He had told her that he was an actor, struggling to get parts.

  Now, as she lay in bed, she found that she could actually think of his lies with a certain degree of resigned cynicism, instead of with that choking bitterness.

  Of course he hadn’t been an actor, though he should have been one. His performance with her was deserving of an Oscar. He had softened his borrowing with little, thoughtful, romantic gestures, and like a fool she had swallowed it all hook, line and sinker.

  She had let herself be lulled into a false sense of security, had even begun discussing marriage, and he had encouraged her in that. So, when he raised the subject of buying a house together, it had seemed reasonable enough to her. He had persuaded her that she could keep on her mother’s place, renting it out, as an investment, and they could use the better part of the money left to her to buy into a new property.

  They would be cash buyers; they would have no problem finding somewhere. The market was depressed; they could find a bargain.