Savage Courtship

‘Being a servant is hardly one of the professions.’

Vanessa bristled at the implied slur. Snob!

‘Of course not, sir. I humbly beg your pardon for my presumption, sir.’ She would have bowed and tugged her forelock but that would be going over the top. As it was his eyes glinted dangerously.

‘You have a devastating line in obsequiousness, Flynn. One might almost suspect it was insolence. Why have I never noticed that before, I wonder?’

Because she had never allowed herself to be so fixed in his attention before. Aghast at her foolishness, Vanessa tried to retrench.

‘I don’t mean to be—’

‘You mean you didn’t think I’d notice. Have I really been so complacent an employer?’

‘No, of course not,’ she lied weakly, and watched his thin mouth crook in a faint sneer.

‘Sycophancy, Flynn? Was that on the curriculum at that exclusive English school for butlers that you graduated, drenched with honours, from?’

This fresh evidence of the acuteness of his memory was daunting. She hugged the trailing sheets to her chest and refused to answer, realising that no answer, however cunningly phrased, would please him. He didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted a whipping-boy for his frustration. The irony was that she had richly earned the position!

‘That’s right,’ he said silkily. ‘Humour me. After all, you can afford to. You know I can’t fire you.’

‘Can’t you?’ Vanessa said, sensing an unforeseen trap in his goading.

‘Well, I could, but that would jeopardise all that I’m doing here, wouldn’t it?’

‘Would it?’ Vanessa was now bewildered.

‘You could tie me up in legal manoeuvring for years—’

‘Could I?’

Her response was a little too quick, a little too curious. His eyes narrowed. Vanessa straightened her spine and squared her shoulders, lifting her chin in a characteristic attempt to establish her physical superiority.

‘I could, couldn’t I?’ she rephrased with a suitable tinge of menace, but not all the threatening body language and fighting language at her disposal could redeem that brief and telling hesitation.

‘Could you?’

‘Yes.’ Her teeth nibbled unknowingly at her full lower lip.

‘And how, precisely, would you do it?’

She was even more at sea, the look in his blue eyes creating a turbulence that reminded her what a poor sailor she was. He looked amused and—her stomach roiled—almost compassionate!

‘Well, I...I...’

‘You don’t know, do you?’ he said gently. ‘You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.’

She lifted her chin even higher. ‘No.’ Her tone implied that neither did she care to find out.

He knew better.

‘Did you not understand Judge Seaton’s lawyer when he explained the situation to you?’ he said, still with that same, infuriating gentleness. ‘He assured me that he’d spoken to you directly after the funeral and that you’d appeared quite calm and collected.’

Vanessa frowned, trying to remember, her brows rumpling her smooth, wide forehead.

She had looked on Judge Seaton as not only a saviour but also as a man she had respected and admired and come to develop a fond affection for.

He had rescued her from the depths of misfortune and she, in turn, had travelled across the world with him, rescuing him from the inertia of his unwelcome retirement and the vicissitudes of old age and an irascible personality. Solitary by nature and never having married, when the judge had started having difficulty in getting about and suffering short memory lapses Vanessa had been the one who chivvied him out of his fits of depression and inspired him to start the book he had still been enthusiastically working on when he died—a social history of his adopted home, Whitefield House, and the surrounding Coromandel region.