by some seventeenth-century English gentleman visiting Rome.
The walls of virtually every English stately home had at one time been decorated by such paintings, some of far more value than others. This, Courage suspected, was a particularly fine example of its genre; the impish expressions on the faces of the cherubs were so lifelike you could almost swear their eyes followed you, and as for the looks on the faces of the satyrs…
Was she being over-unfair as well as over-imaginative in considering their cynical, twisted smiles, their cold, calculating expressions as potentially mirroring those of the man who had bought and now owned them?
As he would own her if she came to work here. A small frown touched her forehead. It was so unlike her to be so over-imaginative, so very wary… So fearful, almost. Most people considered her to be a very controlled person, pleasantly self-confident and at ease in virtually any situation. She had learned long ago to control and conceal any kind of fear, and to know that to betray it was to give another person the potential power to hurt and damage. She prided herself in being fully in control of her own life, of being the kind of woman who made her own choices and her own decisions.
‘Miss Bingham? Mr Reynolds will see you now.’
Smiling with a serenity she did not feel, Courage acknowledged the entrance of the male personal assistant who had opened the door, and who was watching her with admirable professional detachment as she stood up and walked towards him as he held the door open for her.
Presumably it was one of at least two doors into the boardroom beyond, since none of the previous candidates had returned to the ante-room following their interviews. Hopefully they had been allowed to leave, and had not been condemned to some deep, dank dungeon, having been verbally ripped apart by the sharp, predatory professional teeth of a man who, from the accounts she had read of him, more than lived up to his image of a less than friendly character.
Such flights of fantasy were so far removed from her normal calm, logical approach to life that Courage frowned slightly as she walked across the soft Aubusson carpet, noting as she did so that it had not been designed specially for the room, since its pattern did not follow the classic device of mirroring the plasterwork on the ceiling.
She was a tall woman—a fact which had led, in her teenage years, to people mistaking her for being much older than she was. Her bone-structure was slightly too slender for her height, causing people who did not know her well to dismiss her as vulnerable and fragile.
She was neither. Not now. Not since her grandmother had taught her how to be proud of herself and what she was. But she still cloaked the narrowness of her frame with clothes that matched her height—like the suit she was wearing today—so that instead of appearing fragile she gave the impression of strength and quiet power.
Men might find her slightly sexually intimidating, but if they were employers they also found it reassuring. No need to worry about having to mollycoddle a woman who stood five feet eleven in her stockinged feet and whose demeanour said that she was well able to cope with the hysterical tantrums of a temperamental chef or a bullying maitre d’.
She was, Courage noticed wryly as she walked past him, a good inch or so taller than the PA—a fact which she suspected he didn’t very much like. She recognised the type. He would go for fluffy little blondes who made him feel good and who manipulated the hell out of him. He probably had a heavily dependent, immensely strong-willed mother somewhere, who clung to him with a stranglehold.
Courage gave him a calmly thoughtful look as she saw his glance drop to the front of her jacket.
‘Thirty-six C,’ she told him sweetly as she walked past him. ‘Pretty much average for my height. It was on my application form. Along with the photograph that had been requested.’
She had balked a little at that, instinctively suspicious of any employer who needed to know what she looked like, but she had needed the job too much to refuse to supply such details.
The door did not open into a room, as she had imagined, but into a narrow panelled corridor without any windows. Walking down it made her feel mildly claustrophobic, a feeling she quickly quelled, in the same way that she refused to give in to the impulse to turn around and look at the PA as he followed her.
Some sixth sense made her pause outside the door at the end of the corridor to allow the PA to step past her and enter the room ahead of her, announcing her as he did so. After all, if she did get the job she would doubtless be working with him at times. She had let him know that there was no way she was going to be a walk-over; it was no stand-down on her part to acknowledge, and let him know that she acknowledged, his professional position.
‘Miss Bingham.’
No lip-service here to political correctness with any use of the ubiquitous Ms. Not that Courage minded; she wasn’t interested in the kind of respect that could be bought or earned with a title, and which was so often given grudgingly.
‘Miss Bingham.’
As the man seated behind the massive Georgian partner’s desk stood up, Courage only just managed to stop her mouth gaping open.
The board this man looked as though he should be impressing wasn’t so much one of fellow directors and entrepreneurs but one run by the film censorship committee.
Courage couldn’t remember ever, ever having seen such a sexually powerful and tauntingly male man.
Over the years her career had brought her into contact with very many good-looking men, and an equally large number of very wealthy men, but none, not one single one of them, had possessed a tenth of the open sexual charisma of this man.
She didn’t like it, she decided, and she didn’t like him either. She could almost feel the down-blast of the heat of his high testosterone levels, scent the intensely male pheromones which his body exuded like an invisible force-field.
Outwardly he was dressed in the familiar uniform of the successful businessman—an exclusively tailored suit, which disdained to advertise the handiwork of a fashionable designer but which had probably cost twice as much, a plain white shirt and an equally plain tie, a chrome watch on a leather strap and no rings or any other kind of jewellery. He had clean but unmanicured nails, thick dark hair, which was cut rather than styled, and skin which looked weathered rather than tanned and which was already beginning to show the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow.
That a man—any man—should possess such a high-octane brand of sexuality was disturbing enough; that he should so obviously choose not to acknowledge or underline it was… unsettling.
Good-looking men used their sexuality in just the same way as pretty women, but this man was making a positive visual statement that he did not choose to use his. Just because he didn’t choose to, or because he didn’t want to? He didn’t look the sort, to Courage, who would have any difficulty in removing unattended, too-clinging female attachments from his life—no way.
‘Please sit down.’
Courage discovered that she was rather glad to do so, and equally glad that the chair was positioned a good few yards away from the desk behind which he had re-seated himself.
‘Courage. That’s a rather unusual name.’
‘It’s a family name,’ Courage explained calmly.
‘I see from your application form that you describe yourself as single and unattached, and that you list your next of kin as your grandmother.’
‘My parents are both dead,’ Courage told him levelly. He had turned slightly away from her to study some papers on his desk, and as he did so something tugged at the corner of a vague memory, something about the angle of his jaw, the dark shadow he cast.
She was frowning, trying to ease the memory into something more concrete. It was like trying to ease a splinter out of a healed piece of skin. She could see it, feel it when she pressed the wound, but she could not extract it.
When the memory refused to take on any recognisable form she shook her head and let it go. It wasn’t