by Penny Jordan
When she walked into the kitchen Jenny took one look at her white face and pain-filled eyes and immediately steered her into a chair, demanding, ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
Still in a state of shock, Courage told her.
‘Well, at least it sounds as though the specialist believes the operation will be a success,’ Jenny tried to comfort her.
‘Yes,’ Courage agreed. ‘I’m being silly, I know. It’s just, I hadn’t expected…’
‘You’ve had a bad shock,’ Jenny told her, stopping speaking as the kitchen door suddenly opened and Gideon strode in.
At first he didn’t see Courage, and said, ‘Jenny, forget about Sunday lunch will you?’ Courage heard him continue, with a far warmer and more friendly inflexion to his voice than she was used to hearing, ‘It appears that I’ve been invited to have lunch with Sir Brian and Lady Sara instead. Although I doubt—’
He stopped abruptly in mid-sentence as he suddenly caught sight of Courage.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, frowning down at her. ‘I thought I gave you the day off…’
Ignoring her pleading look, Jenny was already tactfully whisking herself out of the room, but the very last thing Courage wanted right now was to be left alone with Gideon.
‘Did you visit your grandmother?’
‘Yes,’ Courage told him, and then to her absolute horror her eyes filled with tears, her throat closing up under the overwhelming force of the emotions that threatened her.
‘What is it…? What’s wrong…?’
Gideon was still frowning at her.
Courage could hear the irritation in Gideon’s voice, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
‘My…my grandmother’s condition is more serious than the specialist first believed,’ she told him stiltedly. ‘He’s…he’s going to bring the operation forward…’
‘And?’ Gideon persisted.
Courage didn’t want to answer him but she knew she had very little alternative.
‘The… the operation has a very high success rate…’ she said quietly.
‘What’s going to happen to your grandmother after the operation?’ Gideon questioned her, ignoring her shaky statement.
‘After the operation?’ Courage stared blankly at him. Right now she was far too concerned with the operation itself to worry about the problems she would have to face afterwards, but Gideon’s question reminded her that they would have to be faced.
‘She…I don’t know… The specialist wants her to go to a special nursing home…’
‘How long for?’ Gideon was almost snapping the question at her, his voice as savagely sharp as the incisors of an animal.
‘I…I don’t know… A month…maybe two…’
‘Sounds expensive.’
Courage shot him a haunted, tormented look.
‘Money. Is that all you can think about?’ she de-manded bitterly. ‘My grandmother—’
She checked herself but it was too late.
‘Your grandmother, what?’ Gideon pressed grimly on.
Courage shook her head.
How could she explain to him how much her grand-mother meant to her, how much she loved her…? How much she needed her, how much she felt she owed her?
‘I’ll find the money,’ she told him fiercely instead. ‘Whatever it takes, whatever I have to do.’
The last thing she wanted was for him to think she expected or wanted him to lend her any more. She had seen the cynical, almost bitter expression in his eyes when he had made that comment to her about her grand-mother’s recuperation being expensive.
Why on earth had she come back here in the first place, instead of going straight home? She watched him as he walked past her, her face flushing scarlet with mortification as he turned round and she realised that she had been staring straight at his mouth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘COURAGE, have you got a moment, please?’
Uneasily Courage followed Gideon into his office.
‘I’ve been thinking… Since your grandmother is unlikely to be living at the cottage for at least the next two months there’s no reason why you shouldn’t move in here. It would certainly facilitate things from my point of view if your hours were more flexible,’ Gideon continued, without allowing her to speak.
‘As you know, I’m due in Cornwall tomorrow. Then I’m off to Kuwait and we’ve got the Japanese arriving next week. I’ve promised the Duchy of Cornwall people that I’ll let them have an outline plan by the end of the month—they’ll probably want to come up here to discuss it.’
Courage knew that what he was saying made sense. Some evenings it was close to midnight before she left and it would be far less tiring to make her way to one of the apartments in the stable-block than to drive all the way home.
‘I…I’m not sure’ she started to say, but Gideon was already standing up.
His, ‘Good, that’s all settled,’ drowned out the hesitant protest she had been about to make.
‘Your grandmother’s operation is scheduled for tomorrow, isn’t it?’ he asked her as he held the door open for her.
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
He had already offered her the day off, but Courage had refused. She would much rather be working than simply sitting around waiting…feeling helpless… Unable to do anything to aid her grandmother.
She was going to see her this evening and would visit her again after the operation, just as soon as the specialist said she could.
Gideon had still not replaced his sacked PA and Courage had found that she was taking on more and more of his old duties and, in so doing, working far more closely with Gideon than she had originally anticipated. The work itself she found fascinating and challenging, but the man who generated it…
Whether because of the emotions reawakened by the sound of his voice or because of the man himself, she didn’t know, but there was something about even the most businesslike proximity to Gideon that made her feel tautly on edge, not wholly in control of herself or her responses.
It still brought a hot flush of shame to her face to remember how she had responded… almost invited him to kiss her the evening he had driven her home.
She was under no illusions… A man like Gideon, even without his wealth, would attract scores of women. It would be no new thing to him to have a woman flirting with him, encouraging him to make love to her.
For the first couple of days after the incident she had worried almost obsessively over what he must be thinking of her, but her concern for her grandmother had now taken the place of that more intimately personal concern.
‘You might as well move your things over here today. There’s no point in delaying…’
Courage tensed. She hadn’t heard Gideon walking into her office.
‘No,’ she agreed hollowly. She knew it made sense for her to live in; she had, after all, done so when she’d worked in the hotel trade, so it wasn’t anything new to her. So why did she have this feeling of reluctance… of unease, almost, about doing so? She would have Jenny for company, after all.
‘I didn’t realise you knew Sir Brian and Lady Sara.’
Warily Courage waited a few seconds before saying as lightly as she could, ‘Lady Sara knows my grandmother.’
‘Of course. I should have realised…’
Courage frowned at the cynicism she could sense beneath the outward smoothness of his voice.
‘I believe I have you to thank for my lunch invitation last Sunday.’
Now she could hear the hardness in his voice. It made her flinch slightly, although she tried to hide her re-action from Gideon’s sharp eyes.
‘I simply corrected Lady Sara’s false belief that you were some kind of arms dealer,’ she told him, as calmly as she could.
‘An arms dealer?’ His eyebrows shot up. ‘Why on earth should she think—? Ah… yes, of course. No doubt I have my late and lamented personal assistant to thank for that piece of meddling. Why did you do it?’
‘Why did I do what?’ Courage asked him, pretending not to understand…
‘You know what I mean. You had no need to say anything to her—you could have let her go on socially ostracising me…’
‘I didn’t like what Chris had done,’ Courage told him, looking squarely at him, her chin firming, her eyes wide and serious. ‘It was mean and dishonest, and totally unfair…’
She saw that Gideon was frowning at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘You obviously don’t think I should have interfered. But I hate that kind of behaviour, that kind of small-mindedness and meanness, the kind of person who takes pleasure in putting others
down… in hurting them—’ She broke off, her face
flushing as she realised how emotional and intense she sounded. ‘I doubt you’ll think I’ve done you much of a favour in the long term. Sir Brian is bound to ask you for your advice about his lawns and—’
‘He already has,’ Gideon told her wryly.
There was a glint of rueful amusement in his eyes that made Courage drop her guard enough to ask curiously, ‘What did you tell him?’
‘The truth. That the entire lawn should be dug up and the ground re-seeded. I also told him that if he wanted to consult me professionally I could let him have a list of my consultancy fees…’
Courage choked back a small gasp of laughter.
‘That won’t have made you very popular,’ she warned him.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But the days are gone when I’m prepared to be tolerated simply for what people can get out of me… I won’t buy their acceptance.’
The wintry look in his eyes made Courage shiver slightly.
‘Not that Sir Brian’s given up,’ he added. ‘They’ve invited me over for dinner next month. Lady Sara suggested that you might partner me…’
Courage gave him a flustered, uncomfortable look.
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t. You wouldn’t—’
‘So I’m good enough to work for…but not good enough to be seen socially in public with, is that it?’ he asked.
Courage stared at him.
‘No… No, it isn’t anything like that,’ she denied, shocked both by the anger in his voice and the sentiments he had expressed.
‘I…just… I thought… It doesn’t seem very fair of Lady Sara to foist me off on you like that.’
‘Very tactful. But I suspect what you really mean is that it isn’t very fair of her to foist me off on you. Do you really think I don’t know what people like that say about me behind my back? “Not quite our sort, my dear,”’ he told her savagely, mimicking the upper class drawl of Sir Brian and his friends. “’Plenty of money, of course. Pity he doesn’t have the breeding to go with it…’”
‘Do you know what I was doing while people like you… like Chris were going to your nice, expensive private schools, while you were secure in your expensive, carefully protected, upper class worlds? I was working with a gang of navvies, building motorways, lying about my age, always on the move so that the Social Services people wouldn’t catch up with me and put me back in one of their “homes”.
‘I was thirteen when my mother died. My father had left home long before that. He didn’t want us… didn’t want to know. My mother did her best, but she didn’t have the heart for it once he’d gone. You don’t get much of a start in life living in a condemned block of flats.
‘After she died the council put me into care. Care… My God… I ran away… three times. After the third time I swore I’d never go back. Luckily I was big for my age and could just about manage to pass for sixteen. When the motorway contract finished I was out of work for four months and then I got a job working for a—’ He broke off suddenly, frowning down at her.
‘What the hell am I telling you all this for?’
Go on, Courage wanted to urge him. Tell me more… Tell me everything.
The pain and anger in his voice as she listened to him had touched her emotions so intensely that she felt close to tears. She could almost feel the anguish he must have experienced at his father’s desertion; his mother’s fear… his fear and misery when he was placed in the home, his loneliness. She wanted to reach out and touch him… To hold him…
The shock of what she felt made her body tense in rejection. The feelings she had just experienced were almost those of a woman in love… A woman wanting to comfort the man she loved.
The man she loved… In love with Gideon Reynolds…? Impossible. She would never allow herself to be anything so foolish… so dangerous.
In love with Gideon Reynolds… She gave a small shiver. Of course she wasn’t.
She knew very well what was causing her to be so emotionally and physically aware of him, she acknowledged grimly. It was her own fault. If her own memory had not played that silly trick on her, making her think for that split-second of time that his voice was that of another man, none of this would ever have happened.
But it had happened, and by some alchemical and unfathomable means it had somehow opened a secret, hidden door deep within her psyche, which had made her dangerously vulnerable to Gideon as a man.
She gave a small involuntary shiver. What made the whole thing so much worse was that she suspected that Gideon, with that predatory male sensuality which he possessed in such abundance, was equally aware of her vulnerability.
Nothing had been said, but once or twice she had seen him looking at her, watching her, his glance resting just that fraction of a second too long on her face or her body, in a subtle underlining of her femaleness and his maleness.
Jenny had noticed it too, once commenting to her teasingly, ‘I think our boss rather fancies you…’
Courage had immediately denied it, but her face had gone pink and she hadn’t quite been able to meet Jenny’s amused gaze.
‘Don’t knock it,’ Jenny had advised her. ‘He’s a real hunk, and for once—and this happens rarely—I’ll bet he’ll be even better as a lover than he looks.’
She had apologised when she had seen how embarrassed Courage was.
‘I’m sorry. I forget sometimes how young you are, Courage. At your age you still quite rightly believe that emotional love and sexual desire are things that go hand in hand. At my age… Well, let’s just say that by then you’ve suffered enough disappointments to know how rare really good sex is and to appreciate it when you do find it. And I’m certainly glad I’m not young enough to fall in love with Gideon myself. There’s a certain hardness about him, a cynicism that could prove very hurtful to the woman who loves him.’
Courage fully agreed with everything that Jenny had said. Even when Gideon was being ‘nice’ to her she was still conscious of sensing that somehow he was masking his real feelings, that deep down inside he did not really like her. And yet she had no real base for that feeling. Nevertheless, it disturbed her, and it was always a relief when Gideon went away on business.
Tiredly Courage let herself into her small self-contained apartment above the garage block. She had just come from visiting her grandmother—her first visit since the operation—and even though she had known from a telephone call from the specialist that the operation had gone well, she had still been anxiously on edge, unable to believe fully what he had told her until she had seen her grandmother for herself.
She had come through the operation extremely well, the specialist had told Courage, and he was extremely pleased with its success.
However, he had warned Courage that it was crucially important now that her grandmother received the right kind of post-operative care.
If she kept her own living expenses to the absolute minimum, and used her grandmother’s pension income, Courage estimated that she could just about cover the cost of her grandmother’s recuperation. But in doing so she would be unable to make any repayments for the loan Gideon had made her.
Knowing that she would have to approach him to discuss the matter was weighing heavily on her—but what else could she do?
There was no
other way she could find the money to finance her grandmother’s recovery, and as it was… She grimaced as she looked down at her bare legs. Thank goodness it was summer and she was spared the expense of having to buy tights—that was how stretched her finances were going to be for the next two months.
As she kicked off her shoes, and padded barefoot into the apartment’s tiny kitchen to make herself a cup of tea, she reflected that it was just as well that Gideon was away on business. Somehow, she just didn’t feel able to cope with the trauma and stress of her grandmother’s operation and Gideon as well…
Not that he hadn’t been generous about giving her time off to visit her grandmother—even to the point of insisting that she was to feel free to ignore the demands of her work and visit the hospital as frequently as she wished.
Of course she was grateful to him, but at the same time she was also conscious of the fact that his generosity put her under an even greater burden of debt to him. She might not be able to make any inroads into repaying the money he had loaned her at present, but she was certainly going to make sure that her work didn’t fall behind. Even if that did mean, as it had for the last few days, that she would be working late into the night to make up the time she had taken off during the day to be with Gran.
Gideon was due back later this evening and she wanted to have her desk cleared of its backlog of work before he arrived.
CHAPTER EIGHT
COURAGE had just stepped out of the shower and was reaching for a towel when she heard someone knocking on the apartment’s outside door.
She frowned as she wrapped the towel sarong-wise round her body. It couldn’t be Jenny, as she had decided to use her time off to go and visit her daughter.
Warily Courage padded across the carpeted living-room area of the apartment, glancing through the small window into the courtyard outside as she did so.
She could see Gideon’s car parked outside the garage. Her heart beating unsteadily, she unlocked the door and opened it slightly. Gideon was standing outside.