est friend? Come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed any engagement ring on those slender fingers...
She found out why a couple of hours later as she served afternoon tea in the drawing-room.
Whatever Benedict’s relationship with Lacey Taylor, he wasn’t in love with her. His body language spoke volumes. While Lacey leaned into his every word, smiled at him and laid her hand on his arm every chance she got, Benedict was all but rolled into a defensive ball of armoured politeness. Yet Lacey behaved as if his cool reserve were a gushing welcome. She didn’t so much flirt as brazenly assume, and Vanessa found herself almost admiring her for her gall.
Dane, sprawling sideways in his chair, winked at Vanessa as she bent to offer him a slice of Kate’s Madeira cake.
‘Lucky I’m here to act as chaperon. As you can see, loverboy can hardly keep his hands off her,’ he whispered wickedly.
Since Benedict had moved to stand against the window on the far side of the room to Lacey, his hands clasped firmly behind his back, the comment made Vanessa bite her lip to hold back an unprofessional smirk.
As she straightened she caught Benedict’s smouldering gaze and hastily returned her mouth to its former primness.
She didn’t know how he had got back to the house from the beach but it had taken him an hour and he had arrived in a full-blooded fury, slamming the front door so that the whole house had seemed to shudder and yelling for her in a voice that had promised savage retribution. Fortunately, his unexpected guests had promptly appeared to thwart his temper and since then Vanessa had been grateful to Lacey for sticking to him like fly-paper.
Now he beckoned her with an ominously grim expression, and, holding the plate in front of her like a shield, Vanessa approached him warily.
‘What was he saying to you?’ he demanded in an undertone as Lacey replied to some remark of Dane’s. ‘Whatever it was, don’t believe him. I had no idea they were going to turn up.’
She looked at him serenely. ‘I don’t imagine you did. It must be very awkward to have your intended mistress and future wife under the same roof.’
Her cool whisper made his eyes narrow but she immediately turned away to pour the tea before withdrawing, nervously aware of Benedict’s brooding gaze following every step of her dignified escape.
Later, when she was clearing away the tray, he managed to extricate himself long enough from his guests to waylay her outside the door. ‘It’s not what it looks like, Vanessa. Lacey’s not my fiancée, damn it!’ he said fiercely.
‘That’s odd. She seems to think she is!’
‘We went out together a few times. All right, more than a few,’ he admitted raggedly as she stiffened. ‘But that’s all we did. Go out. It was a mistake. I never asked her to marry me. You have nothing to be jealous of—’
‘Jealous?’ she said with coolly calculated surprise, as if the idea had never even occurred to her, and watched his eyebrows twitch sharply together into a scowl.
‘Benedict—?’
He jerked, cursing under his breath at the snip of heels that accompanied the plaintive call.
‘You’d better run along, Benedict,’ Vanessa goaded, enjoying his harassed expression. ‘Your fiancée’s getting anxious.’
Dinner was even more enlightening. When Vanessa ventured into the room with the soup tureen Benedict turned to Lacey in an excellent imitation of a man to whom servants were wholly invisible and stated deliberately that, as he had already told her a number of times, he had no intention of pandering to their parents’ archaic notion of a dynastic marriage between their offspring.
Her answer was to pat him condescendingly on the hand.
‘Now, Benedict, aren’t you carrying this rebellion against your father too far? So what if he told you he would like to see us married? That’s no reason to sacrifice our future. And it’s rather insulting to both of us to suggest that the only reason I could want to marry you is to consolidate our inheritances. Why, I’ve always adored being in your company and we get on splendidly. I don’t think we’ve ever had an argument in all the years we’ve known each other! And you can’t deny that our backgrounds and careers are incredibly compatible. Don’t you agree, Dane?’
‘Oh, incredibly compatible,’ murmured Dane obediently, earning himself a ferocious look from his friend.
And so it went on throughout the entire four-course meal, Benedict baffled at every turn by Lacey’s unshakeably confident belief in their shared destiny.
Seated between two men in elegant dark suits and looking quite stunning in a simple green cocktail dress, Lacey was obviously in her social element but, by the time she brought coffee, Vanessa no longer wanted to scratch out the gorgeous green eyes. She actually felt sorry for the beautiful and bossy Miss Taylor. Benedict had done everything but yawn in her face to demonstrate his lack of interest and she hadn’t even noticed.
No wonder she and Benedict never argued. Lacey had obviously never roused the man behind the smooth manners and seamless sophistication.
It was evidently only with Vanessa that he was a savage, for, when she had served the final liqueurs and requested permission to retire, Benedict leaned back in his chair and asked silkily, ‘Are you sleeping in your own bed tonight, Vanessa?’
The atmosphere in the dining-room dropped ten degrees in two seconds.
‘I thought her name was Flynn?’ said Lacey sharply.
‘Flynn is her surname,’ supplied Benedict smoothly, not taking his eyes off his quarry. ‘Vanessa?’