want anything—and I mean not the slightest thing—causing him any unwarranted stress while he’s going through this.’
‘And you really expect me to believe you don’t blame me for his failure to recover last time?’ exploded Lucy bitterly, unable to believe she was being treated like this.
‘Your infantile sensibilities aren’t of the slightest interest to me,’ he drawled, the boredom in his tone complemented by his eyes, which then left her to follow the progress of the extremely attractive woman walking past their table. ‘The only thing I’m interested in,’ he continued, though apparently having difficulty dragging his eyes temporarily back to Lucy, ‘is the next couple of months being as stress-free as possible for my father.’
‘Oh, dear,’ drawled Lucy, the blood boiling in her as she suspected he had succeeded in making some sort of eye-contact with the woman who, with her companion, had taken a table not quite in her line of vision somewhere to the left of theirs. ‘It looks as though I’m going to have to say goodbye to my dishy drug baron boyfriend—what a shame.’
The look he gave her was such that for an instant she was scared he was going to lunge across the table and throttle her.
‘You come out with remarks like that,’ he rasped, controlling himself with patent difficulty, ‘and yet you wonder why I feel the need to make sure I’ve got you right where I can keep close watch on you.’
‘I take it you’re referring to my new secretarial position,’ exclaimed Lucy with a dismissive laugh. ‘I hope you realise that any day now you’ll be kicking yourself for not having hung on to one of those you so rashly discarded.’
‘There was never any question of any one of them remaining with me,’ he informed her coldly. ‘I certainly don’t expect you to have the first idea about how this consortium runs—and I don’t simply mean the London offices, I mean the whole shebang worldwide; but that’s what I’ve been spending the past two years familiarising myself with. I don’t just look around the companies, or the various sections of the larger ones. Where feasible, and where the executives concerned are in agreement, I actually go in and run the particular section myself for a short period. That’s the only way to gain in-depth knowledge of what’s involved. And when I do that it’s only logical that I should borrow the secretary to the chief executive of the particular area concerned.’
‘Oh—I see,’ murmured Lucy with venomous sweetness. ‘I’d better put all those gossip-mongers straight by pointing out to them that all those secretaries they claim you’ve wined and dined out of office hours were working overtime to bring you up to date with your own business—and it was only coincidental that they happened to be the most attractive of the bunch.’ She glanced across at him smugly, only to find his attention had yet again strayed to the nearby table. ‘Mark, why don’t you simply draw up a chair and join them?’ she hissed viciously. ‘I’m sure her companion won’t object when you explain that all you’re interested in is familiarising yourself with wherever it is she works!’
The instant her words were out his eyes met hers, their goading mockery telling her he had been flirting for no other reason than to see how, if at all, she would react—and she had reacted all right, she accused herself angrily.
‘You sound almost jealous, sweetheart,’ he drawled, obviously determined to rub as much salt as he could into her wound.
‘I’ve told you not to call me sweetheart,’ she snapped in a vain attempt to divert to him some of her fury with herself for having fallen so easily into his trap.
‘So you did—but you don’t deny you were jealous,’ he murmured mockingly. ‘Tell me, Lucy, isn’t it about time you were thinking of finding some poor unfortunate to settle down with?’
‘Perhaps you’d like me to draw up a list so that you can have them thoroughly vetted,’ she retorted hotly. ‘I mean, that’s what you’d do, isn’t it?’
‘But of course,’ he agreed, startling her with a smile. ‘I couldn’t just hand you over to any Tom, Dick or Harry, now could I? Or George, Fred or Henry, for that matter.’
* * *
‘Your stepbrother!’ gasped Sarah Mitson from where she sat curled up in an armchair in Lucy’s flat that evening.
‘That’s what I’ve just said,’ snapped Lucy, feeling drained and miserable and not in the least up to the detailed explanations she knew Sarah was determined to drag from her. ‘My mother’s married to his father.’
‘Heck, Lucy, to think you’ve had the droolingly delicious Mark Waterford as a stepbrother and never breathed a word of it to me—to anyone!’
‘Sarah—please,’ begged Lucy wearily. ‘Just let me do my explaining and stop interrupting, will you?’
Sarah managed to keep her interruptions down to a few tuts and gasps for far longer than either of them would have thought possible, but eventually she broke.
‘Hang on a minute, Lucy,’ she begged. ‘That’s some accident—how exactly did you manage to set the school on fire?’
‘It wasn’t the actual school,’ muttered Lucy. ‘It’s a bit difficult to explain, but the back of the stage in the school hall was in an old wing—part of the original building going way back. It was like a junk room with old scenery from plays and moth-eaten theatrical costumes that no one had got around to throwing out littering the place. Everyone swore that wing was haunted and the reason it was such a mess was that even the staff were too scared to give it a thorough clearing out.’
‘Did you believe it was haunted?’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I told the other girls I didn’t, though I wish to goodness I never had,’ she sighed. ‘I got myself involved in a ridiculous bet with a couple of them which ended up in my agreeing to do a tour of the place...after midnight and by candle-light.’
‘You must have been out of your mind,’ gasped Sarah.
‘I almost was by the time I’d been in there a couple of minutes,’ shivered Lucy. ‘I’d taken two candles, just in case one blew out...I honestly can’t remember clearly what happened, except that I tripped over something and set a paper screen on fire. I was busily trying to put it out when one of the hampers of clothes next to me just went up—I don’t know whether I dropped the other candle into it, or what...luckily the alarm system went off.’
‘How did Mark Waterford react when you eventually explained?’ asked Sarah, her look tentative.
‘He didn’t—because I didn’t,’ muttered Lucy, all this dredging up of the past making her feel wretched and depressed.
‘You certainly seem to have had a screwball relationship with him—that’s for sure,’ observed Sarah diffidently, plainly thrown by that disclosure.
Screwball was one word for it, reflected Lucy bitterly. From the start she and Mark had always seemed to bring out the worst in one another—though, as he had been the adult and she the virtual child, surely it had been up to him to attempt rectifying that, she reasoned defensively. Yet as she continued with her story, she noted with growing discomfort, and not a little resentment, how unusually pensive her normally ebullient friend was becoming.
‘That’s one of the reasons I’ve never been able to tell any of my friends.’ Lucy broke off, then added despondently, ‘I knew no one would understand. And you don’t—I can tell from your face, Sarah!’
‘But I am trying to,’ protested Sarah. ‘Most kids of that age get into scrapes and rebel against the figure of authority in their lives, but I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for your stepbrother, being left on the receiving end of it all. If I’d been him I’d have been fuming to have had the stroppy daughter of my father’s new wife suddenly dumped on me.’
‘You make it sound as though they boarded me out with him,’ protested Lucy. ‘I was at boarding-school to begin with—he was only there as a name for