Kitabı oku: «Sophisticated Seduction»

CHAPTER ONE

BRIDGET retrieved the long white T-shirt she had just discarded and pulled it on again, accepting that she would have to wait a little longer for the cool shower she needed so badly. She was still not fully acclimatised to the Delhi heat, although almost a week had passed since she had flown from London to this sometimes troubled, always fascinating city.

The sounds from the front of the house were unmistakable. Someone in possession of a set of keys was entering, and it could be almost anyone, Stirling Industries having company houses in the capitals of most countries in which they were active, and any newly arrived employee had only to call on the head of their Indian office to obtain a spare set of keys.

Or it might be a specially favoured girlfriend of the notorious Nicholas Stirling, permitted to have her own set. If so, she was destined to be as disappointed as those others without keys who had called so optimistically over the last few days, having noticed that the house was occupied and hoping to find him in residence.

An air hostess, an English girl currently working for All India Radio, and an elegant young woman from the British Embassy here in Delhi, they had all claimed to have been passing by chance, but even Bridget, unburdened by cynicism, had suspected that the route was a regular pilgrimage among the man’s admirers.

‘Hello!’

‘And who are you?’

There were two people in the beautiful entrance hall, but Bridget hardly noticed the woman who had spoken first, her shadowy green eyes instantly drawn to the man who had asked that coolly disdainful question. He had that rare quality, a presence which commanded and held the attention and would do so in any company however large and glittering.

She had never seen him in the flesh before, but there was no mistaking Nicholas Stirling. Tall, lean and obviously powerful, with a strong but sharply chiselled face unusually allied to sensuously curved lips, dark grey eyes and the sort of true black hair which had eventually made her realise that her own was not the black she had believed it to be as a child, but simply very dark brown.

His skin was dark too, especially against the pale, cool colours of the hall, and he wore the glamour and decadence of his reputation like a patina. Bridget had never seen anyone so overtly sophisticated, and for several seconds she could only keep on staring at him, as if under some compulsion that excluded conscious thought.

Then she realised that he was waiting for an answer.

‘I’m Bridget…’ She saw disdain become irritation and tried again. ‘Bridget Greer, Mr Stirling. I work for your sister.’

‘Oh, yes? In what capacity, precisely?’ he wondered in a sceptical drawl. ‘Where is Virginia, anyway?’

The question presented her with a dilemma. Virginia had issued all sorts of instructions as to what might be divulged in the event of her brother’s arriving in India— the unlikely event, she had assured Bridget—but here he was, and how much loyalty did she owe her employer?

‘Somewhere in America, I think,’ she answered vaguely but with absolute truth.

‘Why? She’s supposed to be here,’ Nicholas Stirling snapped. ‘Buying fabrics for Ginny’s.’

‘I’m doing it for her,’ Bridget supplied, her voice still naturally soft and gentle, despite slowly rising resentment.

‘Nonsense—or highly unlikely, anyway.’

The grey eyes flicked disparagingly over the strands of dark silky hair that were escaping untidily from the loose French braid that hung down her back, before sweeping her face, so completely bare of make-up, and finally skimming the loose T-shirt which concealed the slenderness of her body but left most of her long, slim legs on display.

Bridget’s face heated in response to a surge of chaotic emotion. No one had ever called her a liar before, and she was lost for an adequate response. She glanced at his blonde, blue-eyed companion, but there was no help to be had there.

‘Why else would I be here?’ she began hotly.

‘I cannot begin to imagine right this moment, although it will probably come to me presently.’ He had clearly put aside his irritation, looking and sounding merely bored now as he indicated the suitcases resting on the marble floor just inside the huge double doors of carved teak. ‘But, as you can see, we’ve just flown in and I’m really not in the mood for solving mysteries. So if you’re set on making this a guessing game, would you mind very much if we postponed it until tomorrow?’

‘Right! Fine! That suits me perfectly!’ The words emerged as an odd series of soft explosions as she gave way to unaccustomed anger in response to the exaggerated courtesy of the request.

She turned swiftly and stalked away, bare feet frustratingly silent on the marble floor, as she would have liked to stamp out. Virginia was right. All the Stirling men were as vile as each other, arrogant, superior creatures, patronising people like her.

In the short, wide passage leading to the bedroom and adjoining bathroom she had chosen for herself, Bridget slowed down. It was so rarely that she experienced anger that she lacked the knack of feeding it, and her conscience was stirring. Most people were tired and irritable after a flight; hungry too, occasionally, and she had told Sita Menon that she wouldn’t need her tonight…

With something a little less than her usual simple good nature, she turned and retraced her steps. By now Nicholas Stirling and friend were in the room Bridget tended to think of as the salon, too elegant and exotic to be called a living-room or lounge.

Her voice too accentless for her origins to be identifiable, the woman was speaking with rueful amusement, and Bridget hesitated uncertainly.

‘…infuriating. I can never manage to achieve that tousled, just-out-of-bed look. It’s very effective.’

‘Wanda, I don’t imagine the girl is a day over eighteen, and she’s young with it,’ Nicholas Stirling drawled. ‘Additionally, I doubt if there’s anything studied about the look you’re referring to. That hair has never seen a gel, a mousse, a spray—or even a hairdresser, in all probability. Forget her. Girls bore me. I like women.’

This time Bridget’s anger was soaring pure blue flame, a pyre for her conscientious intentions, fuelled by the fact that Nicholas Stirling was absolutely right about her lack of acquaintance with hairdressers, but almost four years short of her real age. They could go hungry!

Once more, she turned to leave the hall, but some sound, perhaps her outraged gasp on realising that it was she who was being discussed so contemptuously, must have betrayed her.

‘Just a minute.’ That unspeakable man had emerged from the living-room, closing the door behind him and surveying her impatiently as she spun round. ‘Did you want something, or were you just eavesdropping?’

‘In fact, I was coming to offer to cook a meal for you,’ Bridget announced with a sharpness she hardly recognised as coming from herself.

‘Where’s Mrs Menon—the woman who looks after the house and does the cooking?’ he demanded suspiciously.

‘I told her I didn’t need her tonight, and I happen to know she’s visiting a relative in hospital. That’s why—’

‘I suppose you’re one of these teenagers who never eats?’ he cut in disgustedly, eyes raking her concealing shirt. ‘Your generation doesn’t seem to possess any civilised habits whatsoever, picking at left-overs and listening to private conversations!’

He spoke as if there were at least thirty years between them, but Bridget knew he was thirty-four. Virginia had told her, and his jacket, shirt and trousers somehow confirmed it, elegant and subtly fashionable, but above all obviously comfortable, and worn so unconsciously that there could be no doubting his self-confidence.

‘Well, maybe your friend will be willing to warm up some left-overs for you,’ she suggested tartly.

He caught the note. ‘My friend? Ah, Wanda. Before she warms me up, I suppose you mean?’

It was meant to disconcert, she sensed, and she forced a limpid smile, remembering that he thought her eighteen.

‘Well, yes, as I understand it’s the kind of thing your generation goes in for all the time.’

The way his mouth tightened momentarily gave him a ruthless aspect, but he was too cool to react directly, and a moment later he was smiling at her.

‘Bridget Greer, you said. But I imagine you get called Biddy?’ Unexpectedly, the question revealed a glimpse of charm, but somehow Bridget found it slighting.

‘Bridget,’ she insisted shortly, having decided it was more appropriate to her independent, adult status, now that she had a permanent job with prospects and had moved out of her parents’ home, although her family still tended to use the diminutive.

He seemed to guess what lay behind the insistence. ‘Ah, yes, very mature.’

His smile really was an incredible thing, full of an overwhelming magnetism, and Bridget was momentarily rocked by it. It enabled her to understand the attraction he held for those women who had come to the house and, presumably, for Wanda, and she felt sorry for them. She knew what the Stirling men were really like.

‘You’re not seeing me at my best,’ she submitted dismissively, an acknowledgement of how she knew she must appear to him at present.

‘So you can understand why I’m sceptical about your claim to be working for my sister,’ he agreed.

‘Nevertheless, it happens to be true,’ she asserted.

‘In which case I mean to find out what’s behind it, and particularly what’s behind your presence here. But as I have a guest to entertain it will have to wait until tomorrow morning.’ He paused and added deliberately, in a softly silky tone of warning, ‘So no absconding in the night, please, Bridget.’

‘Why should I? Absconding implies guilt.’

‘And I haven’t caught you doing anything wrong?’ It was almost teasing, and somehow it rattled her.

‘No!’

‘Apart from occupying my company house when it’s my sister who should be here, and you either unwilling or unable to tell me where she is. I don’t like seeing my family taken advantage of, but, as I say, we’ll discuss it in the morning. Would you mind making yourself scarce until then?’

Because he wanted to be alone with Wanda! Bridget achieved the first truly drop-dead smile of her life, without thought or effort, her fury the instinctive spur.

‘With absolute pleasure!’

She stared at him in open dislike for a moment, and he stared back, unnervingly intent, as if he were seeing right into her. Her bare feet put her just three inches below him, which made him approximately six feet. Then, simultaneously, they turned away from each other.

Under the stinging spray of a cool shower, Bridget wondered what had driven her. She had never behaved so aggressively before. It was because he was a Stirling, of course, and an even worse one than Loris. Virginia must be the only Stirling alive with any likeable human qualities at all.

Presumably Wanda hadn’t been asked either to cook or make left-overs palatable, because she heard the sound of a car’s arrival and almost immediate departure while she was drying herself, and the house was silent and empty of other presences when she made her way to the kitchen.

She had meant to cook, experimenting with the day’s purchases, but inclination and appetite had gone, leaving her guilty of Nicholas Stirling’s contemptuous accusations, picking at left-overs.

She was in bed, the light out, by the time her senses, swiftly followed by faint, far-off sounds, told her that she was no longer alone in this house which she had occupied for almost a week now.

To her surprise, neither unhappiness nor the October heat that pressed down on New Delhi had prevented her sleeping on previous nights, but this one was different. That man had restarted the cycle of futile, humiliating thought again. Just because he was Loris Stirling’s cousin.

With so many of her contempories struggling to find permanent jobs, and after occupying several stressful, short-term positions herself, Bridget knew how lucky she had been to secure employment at Ginny’s, a small but successful enterprise producing a range of female fashion-wear that fell happily somewhere between exclusive and mass-produced. Virginia Stirling no longer designed or sewed herself, her energies devoted to the business side of the operation, although she still indulged her passion for fabrics, disappearing for weeks at a time on buying trips, but during those periods when she was back in her London office she took a personal interest in her staff. Thus Bridget had gained experience in most departments before joining the tiny team Virginia was training to assist her in her own job.

And here she was in Delhi, doing Virginia’s job for her. It would never have happened so soon but for the coincidence of the two of them falling in love with two very different men at more or less the same time.

‘You’re new,’ a teasing voice had commented from the door of her office one day, and Bridget had found herself staring at the most romantically handsome young man she had ever seen.

‘No, you are,’ she had retorted shyly, a tight hurting sensation already manifesting itself somewhere in her breast.

‘Fair enough, I suppose. My cousin Nicholas has had me grounded in Seoul, implementing and overseeing the upgrading of safety standards in some new factories he has acquired there—unusually for him, as it’s something he rarely delegates, but I was having woman trouble,’ he had explained with a brave smile that had wrenched at her heart. ‘I’ve just dropped in to say hello to Virginia. I’m Loris Stirling, by the way, the baby of the family. And you are…?’

He had asked her out and she had hesitated before accepting, but his exemplary behaviour on that first date had reassured her: she wasn’t being rushed into anything. There had been many more, some on several successive nights, but with long intervals between others, keeping her guessing, but the way he had kissed her and talked meaningfully about what they might be to each other in the future, and his habit of seeking her out whenever he visited Virginia at work, had encouraged Bridget to dream. One of these days, when he was fully over whatever it was that had caused his cousin to pack him off to South Korea…

She had been dreaming again after one of his visits to the office when Virginia had summoned her, and she had responded with alacrity, snatching at the chance to see him again as she had guessed that Loris would still be with his cousin.

Disappointingly, Virginia had been urging his departure when Bridget paused at the open door, feasting her eyes on the back of his elegant dark head.

‘Doesn’t Nicholas expect you to work occasionally? Get out, Loris. I’m busy even if you’re not, and I’ve got Bridget Greer on her way to fetch a list of quantities I forgot to give her this morning.’

‘Ah, Bridget.’ Loris laughed in a way Bridget had never heard before, the sound somehow both indulgent and contemptuous. ‘She’s a sweet thing—and I’m keeping her sweet, so to speak, for when Pagan has had her day, as I’ve an idea I might like to spend a night or two initiating her into the delights of bed, since I suspect that’s what it would amount to. It could be soon, too. Pagan is starting to get too possessive. I rather think Nicholas is going to have to give me another foreign assignment when I get tired of her, the same as he did with the last one. Maybe I’ll persuade Bridget to go with me.’

The hand Bridget had lifted to knock fell, the movement attracting Virginia’s attention, her beautiful grey eyes growing appalled as they met Bridget’s hurt green ones.

Then she was saying lightly but with an odd, underlying note of urgency, ‘Pagan? That’s the would-be actress? Or singer? She doesn’t strike me as very talented, but she’s certainly well-publicised. Oh, sit down again, Loris; I’ve just remembered something I want to ask you.’

Pale with shock and humiliation, Bridget retained just enough presence of mind to understand that Virginia was giving her the chance to slip away without having to face Loris, and she accepted it frantically.

No wonder she had found his kisses so reassuringly undemanding! He wasn’t interested in her—yet, just expecting to be at some future stage when he tired of the other girl. Cynically, he had been keeping her on ice!

She was barely functional when she returned to her employer’s office half an hour later, the time too short for her to have come to terms with her hurt, its sting still fresh and poignant.

‘Don’t be embarrassed, Bridget,’ Virginia adjured kindly, noticing how she flushed self-consciously as she entered the office. ‘You’re not the first and you won’t be the last to discover what the Stirling men are really like behind their handsome faces. I didn’t bother telling Loris you’d heard, incidentally.’

‘I was in love with him,’ Bridget confided in a small voice, incapable of pretence, the exigencies of pride too new to her to be accommodated.

‘I know, but there’s not a one of them, not my brother or either of my cousins, who is capable of loving, although they all enjoy women.’ Virginia grimaced ruefully. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been too distracted lately to notice what was happening, otherwise I could have warned you. But things have… Oh, now that’s an idea! Or perhaps not. It would be a solution to my problem, but it might not be the right thing for you. On the other hand, I do think you need to get away from here for a while, Bridget, and as it’s through my preoccupation, not to mention my cousin, that you’ve been hurt like this… You’re almost ready to undertake overseas buying on your own now, only I’d meant to send you somewhere nearer to home and less exotic initially. But how would you like to go to India in my place? I’d better explain properly, but first I want you to swear that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone unless I give you permission?’

Her employer was a kind woman, but Bridget had a feeling that she was being swept into some scheme that was more to Virginia’s benefit than her own, especially as Virginia was looking slightly guilty. Nevertheless, going to India would be a major step towards the independence she was aiming for, a goal she had temporarily lost sight of, thanks to the distraction Loris had provided. Additionally, in the newness of her humiliation, the idea of having to face Loris again was acutely distressing, and ‘Virginia did seem to be offering her at least a temporary reprieve from having to do so.

‘Of course I won’t,’ she promised shakily. ‘But I thought your trip to India was all arranged?’

‘It was! It is, but I can’t go! Oh, I wish I knew if I was doing the right thing asking you!’ Virginia sounded unusually confused, angry and amused at once. ‘I just can’t believe this has happened to me. I’m supposed to be like all the other Stirlings. We don’t fall in love! I never have, although I’ve had a few good relationships, and you’d think if I could get to the age of thirty-one without losing my heart I’d be safe from ever doing so, wouldn’t you? I’ve put up a good fight this time too, but that’s partly why I’m now required to prove my commitment.

‘After all my resistance and carrying on about how my work came first, Mortimer isn’t completely sure of me—and I want him to be, now that I’ve had to capitulate, because I know I’ll lose him otherwise. He’s a travel writer and he’s due at a convention in America at the same time I’m scheduled to start buying fabrics in India. I want to go with him, but it’s not fair to my designers and everyone else involved just to scrap or postpone that range after all the work they’re putting in, and my other buyers are all already committed elsewhere… You know, Bridget, I suppose that ultimately the difference between me and the men in the family is simply that I’m a woman. We’re victims—not of men, but of our own natures, and I’m still not sure if I like it!’

Such sentiments were alien to Bridget. In love with Loris, she would quite simply have been delirious with happiness had he returned her feelings.

‘Is that why you want to keep it a secret? Or—’ Natural delicacy made her break off as it occurred to her that the man might not be free.

‘Or is he married?’ Virginia laughed. ‘He and his wife separated many years ago, but they never bothered with divorce. Mortimer is seeing about it now, but I want our marriage to be a fait accompli before I tell anyone. That way, my brother won’t be able to interfere, and he’ll want to, I know. He’s so used to directing our lives, deciding things for us, and he’s likely to decide I’m making a mistake, especially as Mortimer is fifty. I’ve learnt not to confide in Nicholas, although there was a time when I was grateful for the way he’d take command and get us out of our difficulties. He got rid of my very first lover for me when I became unhappy in the affair because I wasn’t in love and the man was. I later found out that my next lover, who didn’t make the mistake of loving me, had been pointed in my direction by Nicholas, to keep me happy. I was furious, and it was after that that Nicholas set me up with Ginny’s, to keep me out of trouble and my mind off men, because I was never satisfied, he said.

‘But since then I’ve run my own life, started and ended my affairs for myself without any help from him. But this! I remember once some woman Nicholas was involved with had set out determined to join the Stirling family; it turned out she’d deliberately provoked her husband into giving her grounds for divorce so she’d be free before engineering a meeting—she actually admitted all this in a fit of pique when Nicholas foiled her.

‘Anyway, when Nicholas made it clear that he wasn’t interested in marriage, she quite coolly transferred her attention to Adrian—Loris’s older brother—as one Stirling was as good as another in her book. But Nicholas was even cooler, the way he extricated Adrian and sent him off to run the American office. I suspect he’d try the same on me and Mortimer. I can’t risk it!’

Virginia gestured expressively, and Bridget could see her point. Nicholas Stirling sounded the most ruthless of autocrats, at least where his family was concerned.

She liked Virginia, and if she herself couldn’t have the love she had dreamed of, so unrealistically, at least she could help Virginia have and keep hers.

Thus she had agreed to this Indian trip, confident that she could handle the buying and prove herself an asset to Ginny’s, doing her best to soothe the doubts Virginia so obviously had. She had arrived in New Delhi to find that Virginia did in fact still rely on her brother, or Stirling Industries, for some things in addition to using the company house, as the head of Stirling Industries’ Indian interests, Mr Bhandari, had insisted on making all Bridget’s domestic travel arrangements for her, brushing aside her embarrassed protests with the assertion that he always did the same for Virginia on her trips.

Tonight, thoughts of Loris were relentlessly intrusive again, invading her mind, tormenting her as they had done so persistently in the days and nights preceding her departure from England, which had mercifully coincided with one of those periods when Loris didn’t contact her—presumably in deference to the possessive Pagan. Since then, the novelty of her surroundings and the responsibilities of her job had provided some relief, but now the ache had begun again, somehow stirred by Nicholas Stirling’s arrival.

Surprisingly, Bridget had found herself unable to shed any tears over Loris, but that too was now suddenly at an end, she discovered as hot tears welled, filling her eyes irresistibly and tightening her throat. Her mouth worked and finally she had to yield to the hurt and humiliation she felt.

The house was situated towards New Delhi’s outskirts and not for the first time Bridget heard the howl of jackals from the hills outside the city, the sound seemingly so full of a profound, poignant grief that she felt her own to be trivial and was abruptly furious with herself—lying here in the dark, sobbing in her bed for an impossible dream, just like the teenager that horrible man Nicholas Stirling believed she was.

But crying had given her unhappiness a looser, more manageable feel, and the emotional release ensured that she slept well and woke with her plans for the day bubbling round in her mind.

Of course, Nicholas Stirling’s presence in the house remained a flaw, but perhaps he and Wanda would sleep late.

As she had formed the habit of doing, Bridget took a tray bearing a glass of mango juice and a pot of coffee out to the table on the long covered veranda with its ornately fretted arches on the side of the house away from the road. The garden here was a formal, symmetrical one, tiled walks running between massed roses which she had been told bloomed for most of the year, and the morning was already hazy with heat.

She had just put down her glass and was pouring coffee when Nicholas Stirling appeared on the veranda, carrying a tie and the jacket of his lightweight suit.

‘So you’re still around?’ He dropped them over the back of a chair and stood surveying Bridget challengingly. ‘I suppose you’ve also told Sita Menon that she’s not required in the mornings? Presumably you don’t eat breakfast either?’

Bridget experienced a frisson of complex emotion as she stared back at him, unable to look away although normally her natural shyness would have had her dropping her eyes after a moment or two. He looked so dark and strong, and yet the vigorous impression was at odds with the jaded, cynical expression in the grey eyeseyes that had seen everything and believed nothing.

‘I accept that I’ve inconvenienced you, but neither Sita nor I could know you were arriving,’ she submitted tightly. ‘Mr Bhandari didn’t mention that you were coming.’

‘He didn’t know,’ he admitted shortly.

‘I hope you’re not expecting me to provide breakfast for you?’ she mocked, adding gently, ‘Although I suppose it’s almost certain that someone like you can’t cook! What about Miss—Wanda? Is she still in bed?’

‘I wouldn’t know. She isn’t here,’ he returned caustically, and his sudden slashingly savage smile was a taunt. ‘She went to a hotel in the end. Your presence here must have inhibited her, or perhaps she balked at the idea of being a corruptive influence on one so young.’

‘Oh.’ Disconcerted, Bridget spoke without thinking. ‘Is that why you’re still in such a bad mood this morning?’

In talking about her brother on various occasions, Virginia had drawn a picture of a man accustomed to having women fall into his bed for his pleasure whenever he wanted them, although he seemed to be discreet in his affairs, his liaison with the fashionable wife of a mainstream rock star the only one to have invited the more prurient attentions of the media.

As she regarded him from beneath the screen of her long eyelashes, potent was the unsought word that came drifting into Bridget’s consciousness. Then her face flamed as she registered its true meaning.

Of course, the thought was prompted by the way he had suddenly been looking at her, as if his thoughts were a kind of reverse, or the other side of hers, and he was contemplating her as some kind of recipient of his maleness—and rejecting her!

‘No, you won’t suffice at all, although it seems you have heard of frustration, as I presume that’s what you’re alluding to,’ he observed with cold amusement. ‘But I’m not here to satisfy your juvenile curiosity. As for breakfast, I’ll get something when I go out. I want to talk to you.’

He had dropped easily into the chair opposite her, and now he took several seconds to scrutinise her once more, rejecting her all over again, Bridget noted with automatic relief. She probably still looked eighteen to him this morning, with her hair gathered loosely up into a ponytail that fell straight and silky from the top of her head, a few strands already escaping to frame her face, which was again untouched by make-up because she had discovered that even the little she occasionally wore melted in the Delhi heat. She was wearing a white sleeveless cotton top tucked into a short, straight skirt in dark pink, her low-heeled court shoes the same colour, her lightly tanned legs bare and delicately golden-brown, wonderfully long and slender, her arms the same shade and very slim. Earrings were her only jewellery, plain little hoops of fine silver.