The Mistress Contract

‘He wants to come up for a few minutes.’ Maisie’s voice was flat and low and Sephy didn’t have to ask who ‘he’ was.

To her eternal shame Sephy was less concerned with the ethics of it all than the fact that she hadn’t bathed in forty-eight hours and her hair was tangled and she must look a sight. ‘No.’ She stared at Maisie and the bizarrely painted face stared back. ‘Not now. Say…say I’m still too ill or something.’

‘Sure.’ She certainly wasn’t going to get any argument from Maisie. ‘Let the creep squirm for a while.’

She didn’t want him to squirm. Ridiculous in the circumstances, but she really didn’t want him to squirm, Sephy thought miserably, as she slid down under the duvet again.

It was a few minutes before Maisie walked back into the bedroom, and this time she was carrying a huge bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates that outdid the colossal absurdity Conrad had taken in to Madge. ‘Okay, so he’s a generous creep,’ Maisie said offhandedly before grinning at her and adding, ‘I told him to come back tomorrow, but that’s about as far as I can push my luck, I think. As it is he’s phoned the doctor himself and got the lowdown on what’s happening. Dead cheek if you ask me.’

‘He didn’t?’ And then she refused the ray of hope before it had a chance to develop into something more hurtful. He was probably only feeling a bit guilty, she told herself silently. As well he might! But it didn’t make any difference to the overall situation and she’d forget that at her peril. ‘How did he know my doctor?’ she thought out loud. ‘I’ve never told him.’

‘Probably from his personnel department,’ the ever practical Maisie said in reply. ‘You did work for him for six years, remember.’

As if she could ever forget!

Sephy insisted on sending Maisie back to her own flat to get a good night’s sleep, but after the other girl had gone the hot bath and long soak she’d promised herself degenerated into a hasty lick and a promise followed by brushing her teeth. She couldn’t believe how exhausted she felt once she’d tottered into the bathroom, and by the time she slid back under the rumpled covers her legs were shaking and her eyelids just wouldn’t stay open.

The next morning she awoke very early and lay looking at the vases of flowers—the bouquet wouldn’t fit into less than two—sitting on her dressing table. The freesias and stock had scented the room with summer, and red and gold chrysanthemums and coneflowers were a blaze of colour against the graceful belladonna lilies standing at the back of the profusion of flowers.

Maisie had already told her that the blooms Conrad had previously bought on the Saturday morning were filling the sitting room’s large windowsill, and for a moment—just a moment—Sephy found herself resenting the inoffensive flowers.

It was too easy to send bouquets and buy chocolates and other expensive presents, she told herself wearily. They only cost him money, and for someone as rich as Conrad money wasn’t a consideration. A fistful of garden daisies or buttercups given with love would have sent her to the moon, but he wouldn’t understand that, or even perhaps believe it. And that wrenched her heart.

She had often looked at film stars or top models in the past who had all but destroyed themselves in some way—drink, drugs, depression leading to attempted suicide—and wondered how they could fall apart when they had the world at their feet and everything they wanted, but even the best things counted as nothing if you didn’t have your soulmate to share them with.

But Conrad wasn’t her soulmate, however much she wished it different. She couldn’t turn him into something he wasn’t any more than he could make her give up the loving, giving part of herself that made her what she was, the part which would become an irritation to him—at best—if she put both feet into his world.

He wanted a cool, worldly Caroline de Menthe clone and she needed roses round the door and happy ever after, something he just wasn’t capable of providing.

Maisie breezed in just before eight and insisted on cooking her fried eggs and bacon with two rounds of toast before she disappeared to the boutique, with promises she would return at lunchtime with sandwiches. ‘Don’t you dare try and do a thing today,’ she warned firmly as she placed the loaded tray across Sephy’s knees. ‘The doctor said a week in bed at least.’

‘Maisie, I hate staying in bed!’

‘Well, you can get up and lie in the sitting room,’ the other girl conceded, ‘but that’s all. Have a bath, drift around looking pale and interesting and prepare to twist the knife when he - who - deserves - his - comeuppance calls. Okay, sweetie?’

‘Maisie, you’re the most unlikely mother hen in the whole of creation.’ Sephy grinned with genuine warmth.

‘I know it.’ There was a vivid shade of purple coating Maisie’s eyelids today which exactly matched her mini-dress, and as the other girl winked at her Sephy laughed out loud. As desolate as she was feeling about Conrad, there was something irrepressible about Maisie that lifted one’s spirits in spite of oneself.

Once she was alone Sephy forced down a few mouthfuls of food and then slept most of the morning, before rising just after eleven and running herself the promised bath. She had been feeling so warm and sticky that the silky water felt heavenly, and after soaking for some minutes she washed her hair, luxuriating in digging her fingers into her scalp and washing out the staleness of the weekend.

Once out of the bath she wrapped a big fluffy bath sheet round herself sarong-style, and peered into the mirror. A brief glance was enough to inform her that the pale and interesting look Maisie had mentioned was definitely in evidence, although she wasn’t sure the interesting part applied.

Her face was lint-white, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose standing out like a scattering of nutmeg on thick cream, and she actually looked thinner. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ she muttered wryly to herself as she walked through into the bedroom to dry her hair.

When the buzzer sounded she grimaced to herself and then glanced at her little bedside alarm clock. Twelve o’clock—Maisie was nothing if not punctual.

She padded quickly through to the hall, surprised to find how much the bath had tired her, and flicked the switch on the intercom as she said, ‘Come on up, mother hen. Your chick’s just drying her hair,’ before opening the flat’s front door and walking through to the sunlit sitting room.

And it wasn’t until she heard footsteps that definitely were not Maisie’s that she realised Maisie would have used Jerry’s key.

CHAPTER NINE

THERE was no time to think, let alone move, and as the tall, lean figure of Conrad walked into the flat Sephy faced him from the middle of the sitting room, her hair falling in thick, damp, rich brown waves about her pale face and bare shoulders, and her honey-gold eyes open wide with shock.

He stopped still in the doorway as he saw her, and in spite of herself she let her eyes feast on him for a moment; she really couldn’t help it. His hard, handsome face was full of very sharply defined planes and angles as a shaft of sunlight hit him, and his coal-black hair and impossibly blue eyes, the tailor-made suit and silk shirt and tie, completed the picture of a man who knew exactly where he was going and woe betide anyone who got in his way on the journey. A man at the top of his profession.

Cold, hard and ruthless; he could definitely be called that on occasion, and yet she had seen the other side of the coin, and it was that which made her heart ache and her senses tighten to breaking point. And it was that weakness she had to fight now.