The Ultimate Surrender

‘As your business partner and half-owner of this place, of course it is in his interests to ensure that you remain single and put the business first,’ Phil continued, taking any edge off his words with the smile he gave her. ‘In his shoes I suspect I might be tempted to do exactly the same.’

Polly didn’t make any response. She couldn’t. Marcus would never try to stop her from having a relationship with someone if she wished to do so. Would he? Just let him dare! She was not answerable to him where her private life was concerned, and so far as the business was concerned they were equal partners. It annoyed her more than she wanted to show that not just Suzi but Phil too, it seemed, appeared to believe that it was Marcus who held the real power.

‘No comment?’ Phil pressed.

Polly stopped walking to look at him. He was looking back at her with an expression of quizzical but very male interest in his eyes.

‘I’m a free agent,’ she told him. ‘And as for my guard dog…’ She paused, and then told Phil recklessly, ‘He will soon be moving into a new kennel.’

Heavens, what on earth had come over her? What she had just said was tantamount to…But no, she didn’t want to think about what a foolishly dangerous flirtatious step she had just taken. Already she was beginning to regret it and to feel almost breathlessly light-headed—and equally breathlessly light-hearted? If so…

‘We’d better catch up with the other two,’ she told Phil huskily.

Marcus had already finished showing Suzi the first of their guest rooms when they caught up with them.

Whilst all the bedrooms had had to be redecorated since Richard had originally painted them, when she had had them done Polly had held many a mental conversation with her dead husband. It wasn’t just his memory she wanted to keep alive but his whole artistic ethos, and when she saw the look of admiration in Phil’s eyes as she proudly showed him their guest bedrooms Polly knew that she had succeeded.

‘No. Not that door,’ she intervened quickly when they had almost reached the end of the corridor and Phil was striding towards the last room.

‘That’s Marcus’s suite of rooms,’ she explained.

Suzi made a small, tantalising moue and told Marcus suggestively, ‘Oh, what a pity we can’t go in…I think a man’s bedroom tells you so much about what he’s really like…’

What he was really like in bed was quite plainly what she meant, Polly decided, but she suspected that if Marcus had volunteered to show her his rooms she might have been disappointed.

They were very plain and impersonal—but then, of course, Marcus did not spend an awful lot of time in them, being away on business so much, and Polly couldn’t remember there ever being a time when, to her knowledge anyway, he had had a woman stay over in them.

She knew there had been women in his life, of course; there had been photographs taken whilst he was away with a variety of stunningly beautiful women posing next to him.

‘A friend,’ had been his inevitable response when Briony had asked innocently who they were; sometimes she herself had answered phone calls from husky-voiced women asking for him and just giving their Christian name with the confidence of knowing that it would be instantly recognisable to him.

Oh, yes, Marcus was a very heterosexual, very male man.

‘The hotel really is very small, isn’t it?’ Suzi drawled disparagingly. ‘More of a guest house, really.’

Anger flashed in Polly’s eyes as she listened to her. She herself and her loyal staff had worked very hard to get the hotel deservedly recognised as one of the country’s best small country house hotels and to refer to it as a guest house was, so far as she was concerned, not just rude but ill-informed as well.

But, before she could say anything, a little to her surprise, Marcus was speaking, telling Suzi firmly, ‘Fraser House is perhaps not a hotel in the larger sense of the word. In fact I suspect that, like others in the rather select grouping it shares, it doesn’t easily lend itself to labelling. As you’ve just observed, we are rather short of bedrooms—so much so that we are increasingly having to turn potential guests away. Which is one reason why I’ve decided to give up my own rooms here!’

‘Personally I would much rather stay in this kind of hotel than one of the larger, more impersonal ones,’ Phil intervened.

‘We do have more rooms on the next floor,’ Polly told Suzi crisply, nor could she resist adding pointedly, ‘And I rather doubt that you’d find many guest houses offering the kind of facilities that we offer. Our leisure complex not only has a first-rate gym but we also have an Olympic-size swimming pool.’