by Penny Jordan
She had balked a little at that, instinctively suspicious of any employer who needed to know what she looked like, but she had needed the job too much to refuse to supply such details.
The door did not open into a room, as she had imagined, but into a narrow panelled corridor without any windows. Walking down it made her feel mildly claustrophobic, a feeling she quickly quelled, in the same way that she refused to give in to the impulse to turn around and look at the PA as he followed her.
Some sixth sense made her pause outside the door at the end of the corridor to allow the PA to step past her and enter the room ahead of her, announcing her as he did so. After all, if she did get the job she would doubtless be working with him at times. She had let him know that there was no way she was going to be a walk-over; it was no stand-down on her part to acknowledge, and let him know that she acknowledged, his professional position.
‘Miss Bingham.’
No lip-service here to political correctness with any use of the ubiquitous Ms. Not that Courage minded; she wasn’t interested in the kind of respect that could be bought or earned with a title, and which was so often given grudgingly.
‘Miss Bingham.’
As the man seated behind the massive Georgian partner’s desk stood up, Courage only just managed to stop her mouth gaping open.
The board this man looked as though he should be impressing wasn’t so much one of fellow directors and entrepreneurs but one run by the film censorship committee.
Courage couldn’t remember ever, ever having seen such a sexually powerful and tauntingly male man.
Over the years her career had brought her into contact with very many good-looking men, and an equally large number of very wealthy men, but none, not one single one of them, had possessed a tenth of the open sexual charisma of this man.
She didn’t like it, she decided, and she didn’t like him either. She could almost feel the down-blast of the heat of his high testosterone levels, scent the intensely male pheromones which his body exuded like an invisible force-field.
Outwardly he was dressed in the familiar uniform of the successful businessman—an exclusively tailored suit, which disdained to advertise the handiwork of a fashionable designer but which had probably cost twice as much, a plain white shirt and an equally plain tie, a chrome watch on a leather strap and no rings or any other kind of jewellery. He had clean but unmanicured nails, thick dark hair, which was cut rather than styled, and skin which looked weathered rather than tanned and which was already beginning to show the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow.
That a man—any man—should possess such a high-octane brand of sexuality was disturbing enough; that he should so obviously choose not to acknowledge or underline it was… unsettling.
Good-looking men used their sexuality in just the same way as pretty women, but this man was making a positive visual statement that he did not choose to use his. Just because he didn’t choose to, or because he didn’t want to? He didn’t look the sort, to Courage, who would have any difficulty in removing unattended, too-clinging female attachments from his life—no way.
‘Please sit down.’
Courage discovered that she was rather glad to do so, and equally glad that the chair was positioned a good few yards away from the desk behind which he had re-seated himself.
‘Courage. That’s a rather unusual name.’
‘It’s a family name,’ Courage explained calmly.
‘I see from your application form that you describe yourself as single and unattached, and that you list your next of kin as your grandmother.’
‘My parents are both dead,’ Courage told him levelly. He had turned slightly away from her to study some papers on his desk, and as he did so something tugged at the corner of a vague memory, something about the angle of his jaw, the dark shadow he cast.
She was frowning, trying to ease the memory into something more concrete. It was like trying to ease a splinter out of a healed piece of skin. She could see it, feel it when she pressed the wound, but she could not extract it.
When the memory refused to take on any recognisable form she shook her head and let it go. It wasn’t impossible that she had perhaps at some time caught a glimpse of him. He could quite easily have stayed in one of her hotels. She had certainly never seen him face to face; there was no way she would not have remembered him if she had. No, her memory was more something to do with the way he moved, the angle of his head, the…
‘And you do not have any brothers… or sisters…?’
Courage tensed slightly as he seemed to hesitate over the last two words, giving them a very subtle underlining.
‘No,’ she told him curtly. ‘My parents did not have any other children.’
That, at least, was the truth… And as for the rest… Well, a stepsister was not, after all, any real blood relation, and there had certainly never been any sisterly feelings between her and Laney. Contempt and hatred for Courage on Laney’s part, and fear and loathing on her own.
Now that she was older the fear and loathing had gone, to be replaced by an enormous sense of sadness coupled with an equally intense sense of relief—and guilt… Guilt because she had escaped, because she had Gran, while Laney…
As a child she had only seen the closeness which existed between Laney and her father—Courage’s own step-father—as something which excluded her and threatened her relationship with her mother. Because her mother had done everything her second husband had told her, and Laney had tauntingly warned Courage that she was going to tell her father to send Courage away.
It was only later, as she grew more mature, that she had recognised the possible meaning of those nocturnal visits her stepfather had paid to Laney’s room, the real foundation of the intense closeness which had existed between them.
She shuddered now to recall how easily she could have fallen into the same trap as her stepsister. Fortunately, she had been far too terrified of her stepfather to take him up on his offers to come to her room and ‘talk’ to her.
‘Let me help sort out this problem you and Laney are having. You’re sisters now and you should love each other. I want you to love each other,’ he had insisted softly. ‘Then I can love both of you. You mustn’t quarrel with Laney, Courage. She’s older than you. You must listen to her, let her help you.’
The cruel, manipulative nature of her stepsister, which had made her own early teen years such a misery, could, she acknowledged now, have been not so much a character defect as a direct result of the other girl’s relationship with her father. Courage had no proof that he had been sexually abusive to Laney, but what she knew now as an adult, coupled with her own younger self’s intuitive fear and distrust of the man, made her suspect that he could have been.
And her feelings were not just a whim, not just her jealousy over the way he had taken over her mother, shut Courage out; she was positive of that.
Her mother’s second marriage was the one thing she and Gran never discussed. Her grandmother was of the old school and believed that if you couldn’t say something good about a person then you shouldn’t say anything at all.
Courage had been so shocked when she had heard the news of her mother’s death, but in reality her true mother—the mother she had loved and who had loved her—had disappeared in the early months of her second marriage.
‘No… I don’t have any siblings,’ she repeated firmly.
‘No husband… No partner… No children.’
He was making statements rather than asking questions—after all, she had already supplied all that kind of information on the application form she had filled in, prior to being summoned for this interview—but Courage still responded as though he were questioning her.
‘Isn’t that rather unusual… in these days?’
Courage focused on him. What was he implying? That she was lying—concealing the truth? Or did his question go deeper, probing the foundations of the most personal aspects of herself?
‘Unusual, b
ut not unknown… Not in the hotel trade,’ she responded calmly.
It was, after all, true. The hours she worked and the constant travelling were just two of the reasons why it wouldn’t have been easy for her to form a close, emotional, sexual relationship with a man; up until she had moved back to her grandmothers her ‘home’ had been a room in whatever hotel complex the company had posted her to, and her ‘commitment’ had been the major and most important commitment in her life—the one she had made to her career. But when it had come to making a choice between that career and her grandmother…
Her employers had told her that if she should change her mind at some stage in the future they would be more than happy to welcome her back, and had in fact pleaded with her not to go—especially Gunther, the eldest son of the Swiss family who owned the hotel chain.
‘It says on your application form that you left your previous post for personal reasons.’
‘Yes,’ Courage agreed. ‘I wanted to return to England to be with my grandmother, who is suffering from a… heart condition. She… she brought me up when… when my mother remarried and I…’
‘You what? You feel you owe it to her to repay what she did for you? That’s a very old-fashioned ideology, if I may say so.’
‘I’m a very old-fashioned person,’ Courage re- sponded coolly, sensing the cynicism behind his words. ‘But in actual fact no, it isn’t duty that brought me back. I happen to love my grandmother and I want to be with her. Left to her own devices, she’s all too likely to take on too much… to overtax herself and—’
‘Is her condition treatable?’
‘There is an operation, but the waiting-list is very long and she isn’t a priority case. Private treatment is out of the question, but if Gran can be persuaded to take things easy, preserve her strength…’
‘You do realise that you’re vastly over-qualified for this job, don’t you?’
‘I need to earn my living…’
‘Well, you certainly won’t earn much of one stacking supermarket shelves… Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of outfit you’re wearing right now. Chanel, isn’t it?’
‘A copy. I had it made when I took a business trip to Hong Kong,’ Courage corrected him gently. ‘Hotel management doesn’t pay anything like enough to buy Chanel.’
She had intended the words only as a small rebuke, a subtle warning that his comments were not either welcome or necessary, but the long, thorough look he gave her coupled with his Laconic, ‘No, it doesn’t,’ made the hot, angry colour sting her skin.
There were a variety of ways of interpreting his remarks, none of them particularly charitably inclined towards herself, and all of them variations on a theme. It was pretty obvious, she decided, that she was not going to get the job.
Without saying as much, Gideon Reynolds was giving her the distinct impression that he was trying to get under her skin and manoeuvre her into some kind of angry outburst with his subtle insults. Why, she had no idea. Perhaps he was just that kind of man, and that was the way he liked to enjoy himself. Well, if he did that was his problem, but there was no way she was going to allow him to manipulate her.
As she waited for him to dismiss her and tell her that the interview was over she was frantically trying to work out how many part-time jobs—working behind bars, stacking supermarket shelvcs and doing whatever else might come along—she could find the time and the energy to take on. At the moment…
‘How does your grandmother feel about the fact you’ve given up your career to come home and look after her?’
His question surprised Courage into looking directly at him, something she had been very careful not to do, she recognised unwillingly. His eyes were flint-grey, hard like the coldest northern seas, threatening that immense danger could lurk beneath their deceptively calm surface.
‘She doesn’t know. She thinks I’ve taken an extended holiday to think about my future career path. That I may give up my international job because I don’t want a permanent position in Hong Kong.’
She saw the way his eyebrows lifted and gave a small mental shrug to herself. She had already as good as lost the job; she might as well tell him the truth.
‘Aren’t you worried that someone might tell her the truth?’
‘No, why should I be? Besides, no one knows,’ Courage admitted.
The friends she had made locally as a girl had either moved away now, to pursue their own careers, or were married with young, demanding children—far too busy to question deeply what she was doing. And as for worrying her grandmother by telling her… Why should they do so? Her grandmother was a very well-liked person—a very well-loved person.
‘And if you don’t get this job, what then? Back to filling supermarket shelves?’
He seemed to have a thing about that; perhaps because he considered it was the kind of work he would never demean himself by doing. Well, she didn’t consider it demeaning—far from it.
‘There are far worse ways of earning a living,’ she pointed out fiercely. ‘And, as far as I am concerned, the kind of people who consider honest, physical labour something demeaning, something to be mocked, are just not worth knowing.’
Well, she really had burned her bridges now, Courage acknowledged, to judge from the look he was giving her, but she didn’t care. In her book the kind of people who were really to be despised were like her stepfather—outwardly publicly feted, and acclaimed, well-respected businessmen, who in reality were little more than thieves, preying on the vulnerability and, yes, sometimes the ignorant material greed of others. For all she knew, Gideon Reynolds, too, could be like them. Outwardly lauded and respected but inwardly, secretly…
It was true there had been nothing in the financial press to suggest that his business success was based on anything other than flair and nerve; nothing to say that he had prospered through the same kind of fraudulent dishonesty as her stepfather. But there was still something about him that made her almost glad that she was not going to get the job. A sense of…not fear, exactly… More… more apprehension … A feeling of being mentally circled by the mind of a predator.
Nervously she licked her lips. Now she was letting his overwhelming male sexuality cause her imagination to run wild, but even if she dismissed the discomfort there was still something intimidating and unnerving about the man which, coupled with that irritatingly elusive flicker of recognition, made her feel not just wary and on edge. It was as though… as though…
‘How much would it cost for your grandmother to have her operation privately?’
Courage stared at him, a small frown pleating her forehead. Why was he asking her so many questions on a subject which could surely be of only limited interest to him?
‘Her GP wasn’t specific. There wasn’t really any need,’ Courage hedged.
There hadn’t really been any need. Once he’d told Courage what the minimum cost of the operation would be she had known there was simply no way she could finance it. She had some savings, a small nest-egg, but nothing more.
‘How much?’ she was asked a second time, the male voice which so far had been unexpectedly soft for so formidable a man suddenly sharpening and hardening, betraying just a hint of the high-octane power its owner could potentially release when necessary.
‘Upwards of ten thousand pounds,’ Courage told him quietly, swallowing down the huge lump of anxious despair that filled her throat every time she thought of the vast sum of money which stood between her grandmother and good health.
‘Ten thousand… Umm… Not an impossible sum for someone to raise these days… Presumably your grand- mother owns her own home and—?’
‘Yes, but she has already used it to purchase an annuity,’ Courage interrupted him.
She had had enough of his questions. She had come here to be interviewed for a job—a job she was one hundred and ten per cent certain she was not going to get.
‘And you have no one… no family… no connections who could help?’
‘
No, no one,’ Courage told him angrily.
The very thought of asking either Laney or her step-father for help of any kind—even if she had known where to contact them—made her mouth curl in a bitterly painful smile. Her stepfather had hated her grand-mother, had tried every trick in the book to persuade her mother to change her mind about allowing her grandmother to take charge of Courage and to get her back under his own roof, but fortunately her mother had stood firm.
Courage had often wondered in the years since she herself had grown up if her grandmother had perhaps guessed, sensed in some way the danger her daughter-in-law’s second marriage had posed to Courage. Courage’s mother had been a pretty, fragile woman, who had liked parties and socialising. The kind of woman that these days it seemed impossible to believe had ever existed; the kind of woman who needed a man in her life to ‘look after her’.
A discreet tap on the door heralded the arrival of the PA.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he apologised to his boss. ‘Sir Malcolm will be arriving shortly. The ‘copter pilot has just radioed in to say they’ll be landing on time.’
‘Yes, thank you, Chris.’
As Gideon Reynolds started to stand up, Courage did the same. Her interview was obviously at an end, and no doubt all those unexpected and unwelcome questions about her grandmother had simply been a means of idling away a few spare minutes of time before his visitor arrived. Well, she hoped it had amused him to see how the other half lived, Courage decided angrily.
No doubt the ten thousand pounds that was so unobtainable to her that it might as well have been ten million was something he probably spent in a weekend, entertaining a girlfriend. More, she decided sourly, since he was obviously such an expert on Chanel couture clothes. But not such an expert that he had recognised that hers was a copy.
‘Tell me, Miss Bingham,’ she heard him asking unexpectedly, ‘what would you do if you were anticipating the arrival of a VIP and you learned from the helicopter pilot that not only was he late picking up his passenger but that the reason he was late was because the machine was being serviced when he arrived to fly it? Your VIP guest, by the way, is a rather irascible person, who has only agreed to attend the meeting you have arranged on the understanding that he will not be kept waiting.’