His Convenient Mistress (14 page)

‘I'm no longer a teenager,' James said drily, because he wanted her to talk and sex would wait. He smiled again and that smile did it. What harm was there in spilling out
a bit of her personal history to him? It wasn't a state secret, for heaven's sake!

So she found herself telling him about her background, about growing up in the East End of London, helping her father with his market stall, a very thriving market stall, but a market stall nevertheless. She was an only child with a quick brain and her parents had lovingly fostered her talent for schoolwork. By the time she was nine she could run the market stall as efficiently as the best of them and she had enjoyed it. She'd learnt to barter, begun to predict trends in what sold and when it sold and why it sold.

‘I never realised it was a talent that would get me where I eventually got, but I was good at…well, trading, I suppose…' She sighed and stared mistily into the distance. Once started, she was discovering that the torrent was unstoppable. Phillip had met her at a social occasion when her star was beginning to shine. He had zeroed in on her and, fool that she had been, she had taken him at face value, she was clever but not clever enough to spot the snob behind the charming veneer.

‘So I never thought twice about telling him all about my parents, where I had grown up. He was appalled. Not,' she added truthfully, ‘that I think that that was the reason it all went pear-shaped. But it certainly didn't help matters. He had no need for bright stars with dubious backgrounds. In fact, as it turned out, he had no need for bright stars at all. He's marrying someone with no pretensions to a career but presumably good breeding stock. Unlike me. The pregnancy was the last straw. He felt guilty to start with, he wasn't a complete monster, but soon he began implying that, since it was my fault, he had no duties to deal with it, with his own son. Every so often he would come around unannounced, I suppose when one of his twinges of guilt got a little hard to handle, but all that stopped after a while.
He hadn't wanted a child and he especially couldn't deal with a son who wasn't the picture of robust health.' Sara sighed and managed a weak smile. ‘So there you go.'

‘Market trader,' James murmured softly, reaching to place a kiss on her mouth, ‘I like it.' And he did. Although if anyone was to ask him precisely why, he would not have been able to provide an adequate answer.

B
Y THE
middle of August, Sara realised that her initial decision to leave Scotland in time to get Simon back to London for school at the beginning of September was no longer on the cards. She had done nothing about arranging somewhere to live, had checked out no schools either in or around London, and whenever she thought about it her mind went unhelpfully blank.

She blamed James. For someone who worked and lived in London, he had certainly found it inside himself to break with his routine so that he could see her, sometimes two or three times during the week, always in the evening when Simon was not around. When he came up on the weekends, all three of them, she insisted that they meet only at night. She said that her days were just too full trying to get the house together and seeing about the million and one things that still needed doing. In fact, she made sure not to be around on the Saturdays she knew he would be travelling up to his estate.

She arranged to explore anywhere and everywhere. She took her shopping trips as far away from home base as she could. She even made a mammoth effort to take Simon across to Edinburgh, giving themselves a little stay-over treat, although all she could think about was the prospect of seeing James when she got back on the Sunday evening.

She adored the way he waited impatiently for her. She could imagine him striding through the millions of rooms in his mansion, frowning with his hands shoved into his
pockets, waiting for her phone call informing him that Simon was settled.

‘It's ridiculous,' he had ground out the weekend before, when she had calmly informed him that no, she couldn't possibly go out with him during the day. ‘ I need to be in your company and yet when I come up here you do nothing but insist I keep away.'

Her laughter had managed to coax a reluctant smile from him, but pretty soon she knew that she wouldn't be able to hold him at bay by telling him that those were her rules and she wanted them respected. He had held off so far but he was like a caged tiger, biding his time until he could push further forward.

She also knew that pretty soon she would have to do what she had set out to do—confront him with his own unpleasant little scheme to buy her house and declare herself the winner, show him that she was nobody's fool and that she could play the sex game as competently as he thought he could.

She was sitting in the garden, half reading a book and half keeping an eye on Simon, who was busily digging up some weeds for her in the hope of finding either worms or buried treasure. She rested her head back, closed her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opened them again it was to see James standing in front of the French doors, watching her.

Sara sat up and blinked but the vision refused to disappear. In fact, the vision strode towards her, long, lean and unfairly sexy in his lightweight trousers and short-sleeved shirt that hung over his trousers.

‘I thought you had a thousand things to do and weren't going to be around,' he said, finally standing in front of her and staring down at her flushed face.

Simon had stopped his energetic exploration of the flower bed so that he could look at James.

‘What are you doing here?'

‘You know, you're doing very little for my concentration, lying there in next to nothing.' He smiled very slowly. ‘Now, what if some passing stranger had called round and found you dressed like that?'

‘Dressed like what?' Sara peered anxiously over to Simon and smiled reassuringly at him. James followed the direction of her gaze to smile at the boy, who grinned back and looked prepared to launch into conversation. Sara thought she'd better nip that in the bud so she told him cheerfully that if he dug a bit deeper she was sure he would find what he was looking for.

‘Which is what?' Blue eyes that had the power to scorch refocused on Sara's flushed face.

‘Buried treasure or worms. Either is equally acceptable. And you still haven't told me what you're doing here, not,' she added as a postscript, ‘that it isn't very nice to see you.' Except not here and not now. She had managed to make very sure that contact with her son was minimal and things weren't going to change there.

Settling scores, which was the object of the exercise or so she kept telling herself, was one thing. She could handle the consequences, but Simon had to be protected from involvement with James.

‘I…I thought we had arranged to meet up a bit later…'

‘We had but…' James looked up into the cloudless blue sky and squinted. The hot summer agreed with him. Naturally inclined to swarthiness, he had been given by the sun a deep, bronzed colour that made most other people look anaemic in comparison. Especially her, with her ultra-fair skin that needed protecting. Not that he seemed
to mind. In fact, she blushed as she remembered some of his more potent adulations of her body.

He glanced back down at her and grinned. ‘It was so bloody hot that I couldn't resist driving over to see if I could catch you before you went out. Somehow,' he leaned over, trapping her in her sun lounger, ‘Mama, wonderful company though she is, was not quite the woman I fancied spending my Saturday with.'

Sara licked her lips. ‘Actually, I was on my way out…'

‘In a pair of shorts and a cropped top that barely covers your breasts? Not if I have any say in that.'

‘I was going to change first!'

‘Out where?'

‘Out to the market, actually. I need to buy some vegetables, food for me to cook for us tonight.'

He hadn't straightened up and the warm suggestiveness of his eyes as they roamed over her face and the upper part of her body made her nipples ache.

‘Good,' he murmured, ‘I fancy a trip to the market. Always such an adventure, that market of ours. I can drive us there. We can have lunch somewhere.'

‘No!'

James frowned and pushed himself up. ‘No? Why not?' He narrowed his eyes suspiciously on her face. Sometimes, not very often, he had the disconcerting feeling that the earth, on which his feet were very firmly planted, was shifting ever so slightly under him. This was one of those times. Shouldn't matter a bean, of course, since sex was all there was between them, hot, vibrant, compulsive sex, but he didn't like her immediate rejection of his company.

‘Because…then you'd see what I'm buying and the meal tonight wouldn't be a surprise.'

‘Let me take you out. You know how much Mama enjoys coming here now to babysit Simon…'

Which was something else, Sara thought guiltily. She hadn't planned it that way, but Simon and Maria seemed to have developed a natural bond and it had been easier to see him away from her own house. More often than not, they went back to his estate and he cooked for her, tempted her palate with delicacies he carried up with him in his helicopter, little morsels of paradise from Fortnum and Mason or Harrods.

Sometimes he would feed her some of the delicious treats, making her recline on one of the sofas in one of the sitting rooms, door firmly closed so that she could stretch out in naked abandonment and nibble what he presented to her. He would kneel by her side, every bit the adoring slave, and then his adoration would become physical, from her toes to the top of her head.

‘No, really, James, I'd rather I just went down to the market and got what I need to get.' She reluctantly swung her legs over the side of the sun lounger so that she could make the point. ‘And I'll get through it a lot quicker if it's just me and Simon.'

‘I have two perfectly functioning legs,' he said tautly, ‘I don't think I'll hold you up. If anything, I can help, take Simon for a milkshake, leave you to shop in peace for a couple of hours.'

‘No!' Sara said sharply. Her eyes slid across to where her son was busily making an unholy mess of the flowers she had planted only days earlier. Obviously his designated spot had failed to yield the expected treasure. She would have to sort that out later.

‘What's the problem, Sara?' OK, so he was being high-handed and obstinate, but he didn't like to think that his
company was surplus to requirements, that she didn't want him around whenever and wherever she could have him, because as far as he was concerned that was how it stood with him at this moment in time. He couldn't stop thinking about her. It was the most severe case of lust he had ever experienced. And when they were together she was as fired-up as he was, so he couldn't understand how she could draw lines around them the way that she did, the way she was doing now.

‘There
is
no problem.' Their eyes met and she was the first to look away. ‘Come on, Simes, upstairs. You've got to change. We're going into town to do some shopping.'

‘But I haven't found any treasure,' Simon wailed, not budging.

‘What you need is a metal detector,' James said, strolling across and, to Sara's dismay, reaching out one hand to take his. ‘Now, a metal detector will tell you where to find your buried treasure. It beeps whenever it senses something interesting in the ground.'

Simon was looking a little too enthralled by that for Sara's comfort, and it was even more alarming when they both followed her inside the house with Simon willingly complying with James's brisk assertion that he would change him so that his mother could get dressed.

‘There's no need,' she protested feebly, only to find herself staring into two pairs of implacable eyes.

Of course, James got his way, accompanying them to the market. This was just what she didn't need, and as soon as she could she made her feelings absolutely clear.

‘This wasn't part of the deal,' she hissed as they ventured into the open-air food market and she could be assured that Simon was distracted enough not to overhear a word they were saying.

‘What
deal
?'

‘Me. You. Us.
That
deal.'

Since that was precisely the arrangement he had always enjoyed with every woman he had ever dated, he was surprised to find himself seething with anger at being informed that he was merely part of a deal.

‘I don't know that I care for that expression.'

‘Why? It's only a
matter of vocabulary
.'

‘Ha, ha. What was the real reason for not wanting me tagging along, Sara? Were you planning on meeting someone in town? A man?' He struggled to hide the primitive stab of jealousy underneath a tone of amused cynicism.

Sara stopped to stare at him. ‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘Is that what I'm being? You seemed pretty determined not to have me around and don't think I haven't noticed that it's the same on all the weekends I've come up here. You're free for the evening, but inexplicably occupied during the day. Wouldn't you say that that was a little strange? A little
revealing
?'

Sara turned away and gave all her attention to the boy behind the stall and then surprised him by handing over the correct amount of money before he had time to consult his piece of paper, do his sums and tell her how much she owed.

‘Well?' James pressed. ‘What do you do with yourself during the daylight hours? If there's some man here you've been seeing, I'll…'

‘What? Hound him out of town? String him up from the nearest lamppost?'

‘Both,' he muttered, scowling, not that he believed that for a minute. He would have heard long before now.

‘There's no man. How could I have the energy for anyone else?' she asked truthfully, which went a little way to
putting the shadow of a smile back on his face. He took the bags of fruit and vegetables from her.

‘We will have lunch together, the three of us,' he stated flatly, and Sara raised her eyebrows at his peremptory tone of voice. ‘I know a very pleasant pub about twenty miles away.'

‘Twenty miles?'

‘No distance at all.' He shrugged and gave her one of those familiar looks that never failed to make her go warm all over. Wicked, arrogant and searingly sexy all wrapped up in one. ‘And then I will deliver you and Simon back to the Rectory in one piece and leave you to get on with the absorbing task of cooking for your man.'

‘
Cooking for my man.
Hm. Aren't you just the sort of sensitive, twenty-first-century guy that every liberated woman dreams of finding?' It was so easy to drift into this kind of teasing banter with him and his sense of humour never let her down. He could make her giggle like a teenager. She was practically giggling now as he visibly puffed himself up and looked every inch the sexy caveman, even though he could cook like a dream when he put his mind to it.

‘Yes,' he grinned back at her, ‘that would be me. The cap certainly fits so, if you don't mind, I think I will wear it. Now, in a
very sensitive
manner, I will take these bags to the car and expect to see you what time…? In about half an hour?'

Sara sighed and gave up. ‘OK. A quick lunch and then
you go home
or I shall have your mother swearing at me for hogging you to myself whenever you come up.'

It was only hours later, after an extraordinarily good lunch at a pub in a small village that made their own town seem like a cosmopolitan city in comparison, that Sara
took time out to sit down and think. She didn't like where her thoughts went. Somewhere along the line, in that murky place between theory and practice, it had become just too damned comfortable being with James. If he had railed against her for shunning his company during the day, she could have told him that she yearned for him when he wasn't with her. She had managed to hang on to that little piece of maternal protectiveness that made her shy away from encouraging contact between him and her son, but for how much longer?

Today had been something of a revelation. She had watched helplessly as James had bonded with Simon. She was his mum, who made sure that he washed his hands, brushed his teeth, didn't eat too much of the wrong foods, read books with him and did puzzles, but James had talked to him in an amusing man-to-man way that had had Simon's eyes dancing with delight. He had carried him from pub to car on his shoulders, bouncing him up and down until her son had laughed till tears had gathered in his eyes. He had seriously discussed the possibility of doing a spot of manly metal detecting together.