His Convenient Mistress (4 page)

From upstairs, where she had just finished settling Simon, Sara heard the authoritative knock and immediately felt her spine straighten in irritation. It had been a hell of a day and seeing James Dalgleish was the last thing she needed, because she was certain that it was him. She had not gone to his wretched luncheon party and now he had come to check and find out why.

She half debated whether she should just ignore the banging on the door and then remembered the way he had continued standing there the previous day, not prepared to budge an inch until she had invited him in. He would just keep banging if she didn't answer until eventually Simon woke up.

There was no time to try and make herself remotely presentable. Her hair was loose, having been washed only an hour before, and it fell around her shoulders in untamed ringlets, still half-damp. Instead of her usual jeans, she was wearing a loose grey jersey skirt that fell almost to her ankles and a clingy ribbed grey top that ended just above the waistband of the skirt.

‘All right!' she muttered irritably under her breath, hur
rying down the stairs before he broke down the door in his attempts to be heard. ‘Did it occur to you that I might have been sleeping?' she greeted him angrily as she pulled open the kitchen door.

Idiot that she was, she had forgotten how overpowering he was. She had so successfully managed to shove him into the same category as her ex-boyfriend and her son's father, the mere thought of whom was enough to fill her throat with sour bile, that to see James standing there against the backdrop of the sinking sun almost made the breath catch in her throat.

He was so awesomely good-looking. He possessed skin that reacted warmly to the sun, and even in the space of a mere day he seemed browner than she recalled. The top two buttons of his cream shirt were undone, exposing the same, magnificently coloured skin, and the sleeves were roughly rolled back, and as her eyes dropped she took in his lean, muscled arms, then she blinked and her head cleared.

‘No.'

‘It's after nine at night!' she snapped, a little annoyed with herself for being bowled over, if only for a few seconds, by his physical allure. ‘And you normally go to bed at nine?'

‘Why are you here, anyway?'

‘I've now been here twice and both times you've given me a pretty hostile reception. Tell me, is it just me or is it the entire human race?' He looked at her with lazy speculation in his eyes, knowing that she was taken aback by his comment, and while she was still struggling to come up with an appropriate response he continued in the same musing voice, ‘I think it's the human race. Hence your willingness to bury yourself here without even bothering
to take the time out to meet the people in whose community you have chosen to bury yourself.'

‘And I think that you should keep your opinions to yourself considering I haven't asked you to share them with me.'

‘Where is your little boy?'

‘Asleep.'

‘My mother was disappointed that you didn't come. She was looking forward to meeting you.'

Sara flushed guiltily. She'd had no compunction about letting
him
down, but she hadn't considered that she might be letting anyone else down in the process.

James could read it all from her expression and from the delicate bloom of colour that crept into her cheeks.

‘She wondered,' he carried on, elaborating on this piece of fiction without the slightest twinge of guilt, ‘whether you had perhaps been taken ill. The Rectory is quite isolated and, as far as she knows, your telephone might well not have been connected as yet.'

‘I…yes, the telephone is connected. With Simon…'

‘Of course. Still…she was concerned.'

There was a short, awkward pause during which James wondered whether he had piled it on too thick. But if she was going to develop a habit of slamming doors in his face, then he certainly could not afford to develop a habit of allowing it. Not if he wanted to get the Rectory. And anyway, he was, by nature, incapable of allowing anyone to slam a door in his face.

‘Look…I apologise for not coming to your party…but…'

‘It's a little chilly out here. That's the thing with summers in Scotland. However fine the day is, the night always reminds you not to take the warmth for granted. I merely stopped by to make sure that you were all right.' He half
turned, curious to see whether the flush of guilt would be sufficient for her to stop him and it was. She invited him in. Not in the most gracious of voices and certainly with no noticeable enthusiasm, but it was an invitation he discovered he had been quite looking forward to and was all too keen to grasp.

‘Tea?' she asked, once they were in the kitchen. ‘Coffee? Something stronger?'

‘Coffee would be fine.'

‘I apologise for not coming to your mother's little party,' Sara repeated, spooning coffee into cups, with her back to him, ‘but I couldn't. How was it? Did it go all right?'

‘Couldn't…?'

Sara didn't answer. She poured boiling water into the cups, and a dash of milk straight from the long-life carton in the fridge. The fresh milk she had casually tossed into the cardboard box for the trip up had expired. The dreaded trip to the shops could no longer be avoided, that much was true. Nor could she allow her negative feelings about the place to influence her response to the people who lived there. If she did, then her life would be even more of a nightmare than it already was.

‘Simon wasn't very well, I'm afraid,' she said brusquely, putting his cup down in front of him and taking the chair on the opposite side of the table from which she could observe him without that aura of his pervading her senses.

‘What was wrong?' Under the merciless glare of the overhead light, he could see what he hadn't noticed before. Her face was drawn and there were anxious shadows under her eyes.

‘He…suffers from recurrent chest infections. He's still got one now and he was a bit poorly today.' She swal
lowed a mouthful of coffee and shifted her eyes away from the blue ones studying her face.

‘Is he all right now? I know Tom Jenkins, the local doctor. I could call him and get him out here to have a look.'

‘Thank you, but no. Simon's a bit better now. He's upstairs sleeping. Anyway, I couldn't come to your mother's party because at twelve today I was busy dealing with his wheezing and coughing.'

‘You should have driven over. Got me.' Why had he just said that? he wondered.

‘Thanks, but I can deal with Simon on my own. I don't need any knights in shining armour to help me out. I've done it for the past five years and I'll carry on doing it.'

‘I wasn't offering myself as a knight in shining armour.' James's voice was a shade cooler. ‘I was merely suggesting that at this point in time I happen to be the only person you know in this town and as such, if you had needed help, it would have made sense to have come to me.'

‘I told you, I didn't need any help. Look, if you don't mind, I haven't had anything to eat this evening. I'm going to make myself a sandwich. I'm sure you have much better things to do than hang around here watching me eat my dinner.'

‘Sit down.'

‘What?' Sara flashed him a smile of cool incredulity at the rasping command in his voice. ‘For a minute there, I thought I heard you tell me to sit down.'

‘Which just goes to show how accurate your hearing is.' Before she could stand up, which he knew she was going to do, he stood up himself and moved swiftly to where she was sitting, leaning over her with one hand splayed on the arm of her pine chair and the other on the table.

‘What do you think you're doing?' Sara demanded in a high-pitched, unsteady voice.

‘I am making sure you do as I say. Sit down and I'll make the sandwich for you. Tell me what you want in it and point me in the direction of the bread.'

‘I…'

‘You look exhausted. You've obviously been through one helluva long day. Now do as I say.'

‘Or else what?' Sara flung at him. Their eyes clashed and she was mortified to find that she couldn't seem to stop looking at him. Up close, she could smell the fresh, clean scent of him, mingled with the erotic tang of sheer masculinity. It filled her nostrils until she felt as if she was going to faint. Instead, she blinked and clung on rapaciously to her pride. She didn't need this. She didn't need some man, a perfect stranger, to waltz into her house and try and give her orders, even if those orders were issued for her own benefit. She had had to fend for herself from a young age and she had carried on having to do it right the way through pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

‘Oh, all right,' she snapped, just to get him to move away from her.

‘Good.' James pushed himself up but continued to look down at her. ‘Now, where's the bread?' he repeated.

‘Bread bin on the dresser.' The dresser had been Freddie's. Sara herself had not possessed any such thing when she had lived in London. The kitchen in her flat had been all chrome, granite and smooth cherry wood. An old pine dresser would have been ludicrously inappropriate, but she had since discovered that it was an extremely useful item of furniture. She had kept Freddie's mismatched crockery in place, stashing her own out of sight, and there was a growing pile of Simon's things on the surface, stray
colours, bits of Lego, various action-hero dolls in strangely contorted positions.

‘This bread's mouldy,' James said, holding up the plastic bag.

He looked so ridiculous that she had to stifle a smile that crept up from somewhere and threatened to chisel away at her defences.

‘Do you
know
how to make a sandwich?' she asked curiously. ‘Have you
ever
made a sandwich in your life before?' He just didn't look the sandwich-making type.

‘I happen to be a very good cook, actually. You haven't eaten any of this today, have you? Is there another loaf somewhere? No? Then I'll just have to make do, and before you start protesting, my original order to sit down still applies.' He tossed the bread in the bin and did a swift inventory of the modest kitchen, noting the uneasy mingling of her own things amongst Freddie's.

‘You really don't have to,' Sara said automatically, but lord, it felt good to take the weight off her feet and have someone else do something for her for a change. She rubbed her hand across her eyes and stretched out her long legs.

‘Tell me about London,' James said, pulling out a chopping board and then gathering what vegetables he could muster from the basket by the dresser. Everything, he noticed with interest, was as Freddie had left it. Either she had possessed surprisingly little herself or else could not be bothered to install her own things. Which said what? he wondered. ‘What did you do there?'

‘Where did you learn to cook?'

James glanced over to her. She had rested her head back against the chair and her eyes were closed, as if she was simply too weary to keep them open, and for the first time since he'd arrived he felt a pang of guilt at having foisted
his company onto her at nine in the evening. Then he reminded himself that she would have had to eat anyway, and she had actually done quite well from him considering he was here cooking up a pasta dish for her, not an activity he was known to do for any woman.

‘At the hands of my mother during the school holidays,' James informed her, allowing her change of topic to ride. For the moment. ‘She's Italian and prides herself on her culinary skills. As soon as I could hold a sharp knife, I was given things to chop.' His eyes flitted over to find that she was staring at him, and for no logical reason, because he was vastly accustomed to being on the receiving end of women's stares, he felt himself stiffen in response. ‘And as soon as I was tall enough, I was taught how to use the Aga.'

‘Your mother was a chef?'

‘My mother was a model from Naples who met my father in London. Much to her agency's disgust, he charmed her into marrying him after a shockingly brief whirlwind romance and removed her to the back of nowhere, where she flourished. She relished breezing into the lives of all the locals, who had never met a real Italian before and had certainly never had one live in their midst. She held huge parties in winter and taught the wives how to cook homemade pasta. After a couple of years they were eating out of her hand.'

Sara listened to the smile in his voice and felt her heart contract. Whatever else she thought of him as a man, and cooking her a meal would do nothing to alter her opinions, he loved his mother deeply and that counted for a lot.

‘Hence,' he told her, ‘my cooking skills.'

‘And I always thought that it was the other way around,' Sara said, ‘the woman stuck at home cooking the food while the man just did whatever he damn well pleased.'

‘Has that been your experience?' James asked casually, sliding his eyes over to her and taking in the way her body language altered and her face became watchful and closed.

The thought of drawing out whatever story she had to tell, finding out what the hell made her tick, coursed through his veins in a sudden, exhilarating rush. It was a sensation so alien to him that he belatedly reminded himself of the Rectory, which was, after all, the prize to be won.

‘I never asked you whether you were married,' Sara said, surprised to find that she had automatically assumed that he wasn't when she should have assumed just the opposite. ‘Would your wife be happy about your cooking food for me?' she continued slowly, trying to picture the sort of woman he would be married to. Beautiful, blonde and brainless, presumably. She had learnt over the years the better-looking and more powerful the man, the less they wanted a wife who could compete with them. Not restful enough.

‘You insult me,' James said coldly. ‘If I were married, I wouldn't be here. I would be with my woman.'