Mistress by Agreement

‘Yes, you. Are you where you want to be in life?’ he asked with a silkiness Rosalie immediately suspected. ‘Doing what you want, being who you want, with whom you want?’

She didn’t like this conversation. ‘Certainly,’ she said briskly.

‘Then we are both very fortunate.’

Rosalie’s jaw set. She couldn’t quite put a label on the quality of his voice but it suggested disbelief, and who the hell was Kingsley Ward to question her, anyway? ‘Yes, we are.’ She rose from her seat. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ she said coolly before making her way to the door marked ‘Signorinas’ at the back of the restaurant.

Once in the small but immaculately clean little cloakroom Rosalie walked across to the two tiny washbasins situated under the plain, unframed mirror. She stared at the flushed reflection and two angry eyes stared back at her. She had done what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do weeks ago when she’d taken the job, and let Kingsley Ward get under her skin. Her soft lips tightened but her irritation was at herself and not Kingsley.

Self-control. It was all about self-control, everything was, she knew that. If anyone knew that, she did. She shut her eyes, shaking her head as it drooped forward, but today the memories she usually kept firmly under lock and key surfaced in a flood. Suddenly she was a little girl again, sitting shivering on the landing with her eyes straining down into the shadowed hall as she listened to the familiar sound of her father shouting at her mother in the sitting room below. Other sounds followed, they always did, but what made this occasion more memorable than all the ones that had gone before was that in the midst of the sound of slaps there came a silence, and then her father’s voice, the tone agitated, saying, ‘Chantal? Chantal, get up. Come on, get up.’

The memory blurred at this point but she could recall the bright lights of the ambulance and then the police car when they had arrived at the house. It had been a police-woman who had come and found her, still sitting in numb silence on the stairs. They had taken her to her maternal grandparents—her father had been brought up in a children’s home and had no family—and it had been a day or two later when her grandmother had told her, very gently but with tears streaming down her face, that Mummy had gone to see the angels in heaven. Her beautiful, tender mother, who wouldn’t have hurt a fly, had never recovered consciousness from the aneurysm that had begun to bleed in her head, caused by one of her husband’s blows.

On the day of the court appearance her father had taken his own life, and at the age of five she had become an orphan. Her grandparents had looked after her from that point, and with her mother having had younger siblings who had gone on to have children her childhood had not been an unhappy one. But there had been a void, a massive gap because she had been a mummy’s girl from the moment she had been born. As she had grown she had begun to understand why her mother had absorbed herself so completely in her child. Her grandparents had told her that her father had been an unhappy individual as a result of a traumatic childhood, insanely jealous of any attention his wife had paid to another adult, be they man or woman, and consequently her mother had led a life isolated from the rest of the world in an effort to keep the peace. Her headstone was a memorial that this hadn’t worked.

Rosalie raised her head, her eyes large and dark with the painful memories. When she’d been eighteen and entering university her grandparents had decided to return to their native France to live their autumn years with the relatives there; her grandfather’s health had been poor and he’d wanted to be close to his brothers.

She had agonised for some time whether to give up her university place in London and go with them, but she had been born in England and she didn’t want to study in France, besides which there were all the friends she would leave behind. In the end she had stayed, and then she had met Miles Stuart…

‘Enough.’ She spoke the word out loud, her mouth setting in a grim line as she ruthlessly put a check on her mind. Why was she thinking of all this today? But she knew why. Miles and Kingsley Ward were miles apart in many ways, but they both had one attribute that was unmistakable: male magnetism.

It was indefinable, something elusive and subtle, but when a man had it, it cut through all the layers of civilisation and refinement and brought a woman right back to grass-roots level, forcing her to acknowledge a sexual response whether she wanted to or not. A powerful weapon. Her eyes darkened still more. And unfortunately mother nature seemed to excel in bestowing it on two-legged rats who didn’t give a damn.

She breathed deeply before washing her hands, taking a moment or two to run her comb through her hair and apply fresh lipstick before she left the cloakroom and walked to where Kingsley was waiting near the front door of the restaurant. Glen was standing talking to him, and Rosalie kept her eyes on the Italian man as she said pleasantly, ‘That was the best meal I’ve had in a long time, Glen.’

‘It is a pleasure to cook for such a beautiful woman.’ He grinned at her as he spoke, and Rosalie had to laugh. He was outrageous but somehow you knew he was as harmless as a kitten.

She turned her gaze to the long, lean figure beside the restaurateur, and eyes of blue ice looked back at her. ‘All ready?’ Kingsley asked easily, smiling the arctic smile.

Once out on the pavement in the fresh May sunshine, Rosalie remembered her manners. ‘That was a lovely lunch,’ she said politely. ‘Thank you.’

‘The pleasure was all mine.’ An ordinary phrase, but he managed to make it sound like a criticism, as though she’d been churlish. She glanced at him and the azure eyes gazed back innocently.

This was going to be one great afternoon!

CHAPTER THREE

ROSALIE asked herself a hundred times afterwards how it had happened. Over the last ten years she had been to umpteen sites, clambering about measuring foundations and walls and areas of land, and not one accident. So why, why had it been this particular day at this particular site and more especially with this particular man that she’d had to go and make the most almighty fool of herself? One minute she had been talking to the architect and hopefully impressing Kingsley with her handle on the job, the next she’d been flat on her face with her ankle feeling as though it was broken.

The architect, a nice middle-aged man, was all concern, but it was Kingsley who picked her up in his arms after she had tried to rise and nearly passed out with the pain.

‘I…I’m all right. Please, I can walk.’ Through the excruciating throbbing the fact that she was being held close to a hard male chest with her head on an eyeline with his throat took precedence.

‘Keep still.’ She had tried to wriggle free and his voice was curt.

‘Really, it feels better already,’ she lied through gritted teeth.

‘And I’m Mickey Mouse.’

The architect, who was now trotting alongside them as Kingsley carried her over to the parked cars, said soothingly, ‘It might just be a sprain, Miss Milburn, but you really should get it checked at a hospital.’

‘I’m not going to a hospital,’ she responded quickly. ‘Not for a sprain.’

‘That’s exactly where you’re going,’ the deep voice just above her head said flatly.

She would have argued better if she weren’t so horribly conscious of being in his arms, but, with the feel of his body as he moved and the overall heady scent of faint whiffs of the most delicious aftershave, she wasn’t feeling herself. ‘If you’ll just take me back to the office I will be fine,’ she said as firmly as her twanging nerves would allow.

They had just reached the car and he didn’t reply. As the architect opened the passenger door Kingsley placed her into the seat as carefully as one would a piece of Dresden china, but even so the action caused an involuntary gasp before she bit her lip hard, her face white.