‘So what exactly are you saying—that you turned them down?
Courage had seen the suspicion in her grandmother’s eyes, and knowing her pride, the same pride which she herself had inherited, she had broken one of her strongest rules and fibbed a second time.
‘I haven’t totally ruled it out. The company has given me three months to think it over.’
‘Three months… But the longest you’ve ever been able to come home for before has been a couple of weeks.’
‘Which is why I’ve got so much leave owing to me,’ Courage had told her.
She had, of course, asked the doctor about a private operation for her grandmother, but when he had told her the cost her dismay must have shown in her face.
She knew that there was no way she could find the thousands of pounds it would cost for her grand-mother’s operation. The small cottage in which her grandmother lived was already mortgaged to the company which provided her with her pension annuity payments. Courage herself had no assets she could dispose of to raise any money, and there was no other family to go to.
Her father—her grandmother’s only child—had died before Courage reached her teens, and her mother… Her mother, poor sad soul, had died in a swimming accident while on holiday with Courage’s stepfather and his friends.
A small shudder passed through Courage’s body, raising a rash of ominous goose-bumps on her flesh. Even now she hated thinking about her stepfather, about those years…
As she looked around the elegant, expensively furnished room in which she was sitting, with its silk curtains, its paintings and its antique furniture, she reflected that once she, too, had lived in surroundings as elegant as these.
Her stepfather’s London house, while not as large as this beautiful Georgian mansion where she now sat so tensely in an ante-room waiting to be summoned for her interview, had certainly been equally as impressive, equally filled with expensive art treasures and antique furniture, all planned to awe and impress the poor dupes from whom her stepfather had earned his living, blinding them to the reality of what he really was with the rich luxury of his surroundings.
Fraud, the police had called it, but theft was what it really was. But her stepfather had escaped paying any price for his criminal activities, just as he had always escaped paying any price for anything he had done, for any of the lives he had destroyed.
The last time Courage had heard anything of him he had been living in Mexico, barred from re-entering the United States, where he had made his home after her mother’s death.
No, there was no comparison between the lifestyle she had lived as a rich man’s stepdaughter and that which she had known living with her grandmother in her small rural Dorset cottage. But there was no doubt, had never been any doubt in Courage’s mind, which lifestyle she preferred… which home.
The last candidate for the job had been gone for a much longer time than any of the others, which didn’t bode very well for her own chances, Courage acknowledged.
When the employment agency she had registered with had first contacted her about this job she had hardly been able to believe her luck.
‘It isn’t quite what you’ve been used to,’ the woman who ran the agency had semi-apologised, ‘and I suspect you could end up being more of a glorified housekeeper than anything else, but the salary is exceptionally high, transport is provided and you’d be working less than twenty miles away from where your grandmother lives.’
And she had gone on to explain the exact nature of the job in question and the requirements of her potential employer. Courage had found herself privately agreeing with the other woman’s assessment of the situation.
The job description announced that her potential employer, an extremely wealthy businessman, wanted someone to take charge of the running of his country mansion. Duties would include organising various social and business functions, liaising with his staff in his London office, taking virtually full responsibility for the hiring and firing of staff at the house, and, on those occasions when he had foreign clients visiting him, organising any necessary business facilities for them, including interpreters etcetera.
Gideon Reynolds was the chairman and major stockholder of a complex network of high profit-earning enterprises, a conquistador of a man who had made his fortune and his name during the hectic times of the eighties, but who, unlike other less fortunate entrepreneurs, had gone on to build a very successful empire on the foundations of those successes.
Courage had, of course, researched as deeply as she could into his background and history once she had been told of the job, but had discovered frustratingly little about him. Even her grandmother, who knew all of the local gossip at every level, knew hardly anything about him, other than the fact that when he had first bought the house, which had been little more than an empty shell at the time, there had been a lot of semi-hysterical gossip locally that he planned to turn the house into some kind of leisure centre, complete with a huge golf course.
The leisure centre had never materialised; the golf course had—Gideon Reynolds apparently did a considerable amount of business with the Japanese, who enjoyed the pleasure of playing their favourite sport on a privately owned course.
Courage, who had worked in Japan herself for a while, could well appreciate what a clever move the golf course had been. Had he understood the basis of the Japanese male personality enough to institute such a move himself, or had he simply had very, very astute and knowledge-able advisers? she wondered.
The only thing she had been able to find out about him was that in addition to being a hugely wealthy man he was also extremely demanding to work for. Harsh-featured, ice-cold, merciless when it came to destroying an opponent—these were just some of the descriptions she had read of him in the financial press.
Disappointingly, none of the articles had contained any photographs of him. She knew he was somewhere in his early thirties, which made him six or seven years older than she was herself, and she knew that he wasn’t married, that he had, in fact, never been married. Although there was no hint to be found anywhere that he was anything other than a thoroughly heterosexual male.
‘Modern women do not appear to want marriage,’ he had been quoted as saying in one article she had read-written, unsurprisingly, by a female financial correspondent. ‘Or permanent commitment is not enough for them—they value sexual variety and expertise more than love and fidelity.’
‘So you don’t intend to marry?’ the reporter had challenged him.
‘One day. If only to ensure that I have someone to pass on the business to. But there is no urgency; a man, unlike a woman, can choose to become a parent virtually at any time in his adult life.’
‘You’re out of date,’ the reporter had told him crisply. ‘A woman can now opt to do the same…’
‘Not my woman,’ Gideon Reynolds had told her succinctly.
Another small shiver ran over Courage’s skin as she recalled the article.
He didn’t sound one little bit the sort of man she would have chosen to work for. Her mouth quirked slightly at the enormous mental understatement of her thoughts. But in this instance she had no choice.
If her time with Gran was going to be limited then she didn’t want to waste a precious second of it. Not out of duty, because she thought it was what she owed her grandmother for all that she had done for her, but because she loved her… Loved her so much that already her heart was aching at the thought of losing her, of being alone.
As she blinked back the tears threatening to shadow her eyes—an unusual lavender-blue colour, which strangers always assumed meant she was wearing coloured contact lenses, but which, in fact, she had inherited from her grandmother, like her pale English rose complexion and her thick dark mane of Celtic curls-she focused on the huge oil-painting hanging on the wall above the marble Adam fireplace.
It was, she suspected,