Mistress by Agreement

by Helen Brooks

  She frowned as she collected up the empty plates and mugs, taking them through to the kitchen where she made herself another cup of coffee before starting work again.

  Twenty minutes later there was another ring at the doorbell. ‘Yes?’ She spoke resignedly into the intercom. It was going to be one of those days where the world and his wife called, she could feel it. She was going to see a show in the West End with Kingsley tonight and they were having dinner first, so she had wanted to put in some good solid hours of work whilst she could. She needed to keep on top of things for her peace of mind.

  ‘It’s Kingsley, Rosie. I need to talk to you.’

  When she opened the front door she was surprised to see him holding a suitcase. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked quickly.

  He nodded before kissing her, a perfunctory kiss that nevertheless sent needles of sensation to her nerves. ‘I need to fly to Jamaica urgently,’ he said quietly, ‘so I’m afraid tonight’s off.’

  She forced down her disappointment. ‘Problem with a hotel?’

  He shook his head. ‘The friend I was best man to recently, Alex, has been involved in an accident,’ he said briefly. ‘Broken his neck jet-skiing. They aren’t sure how bad it is and he’s stuck in this hospital in Jamaica where they were honeymooning. I’ve known his wife as long as I’ve known Alex and she’s got no family, poor kid. She phoned last night, hysterical, so I said I’d fly out today.’

  ‘How awful.’ She stared at him aghast.

  ‘It was their last day there too, would you believe? He made the mistake of drinking at a party some friends they’d made threw to see them off, and then having a last ride round the bay before they changed to get ready to leave.’ He shook his head. ‘Damn fool,’ he muttered hoarsely.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Kingsley.’ She could see he was struggling and she didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Alex and his family were always there for me when Dad remarried; they helped me through a bad time.’

  She had drawn him into the sitting room now, sitting beside him on the sofa and taking his hand as he talked.

  ‘He’s a nice guy, Rosie, you’d like him, and he lives for sport. Any kind, any place, it’s a long-standing joke. It would be better for him to go straight away than be left paralysed. He wouldn’t be able to handle it.’

  ‘It might not come to that.’ She squeezed his hand gently. ‘Lots of people get better from such things. It just depends where the break is and what damage has been done.’

  ‘I guess.’ He sank back on the sofa, rubbing a hand wearily over his face. ‘Joanna phoned at one in the morning and I couldn’t get off to sleep again. Hell, I can’t believe he could be so damn stupid; he knows better than that.’

  ‘What time do you leave?’ she asked softly.

  ‘In a couple of hours.’ He stretched tiredly.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ And when he shook his head, ‘Then first thing is a cup of coffee and then I’ll cook us some brunch, okay?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he murmured, stopping her when she would have risen and putting a hand to her cheek, his touch so light it was like the brush of a leaf. ‘I don’t want to leave you,’ he said huskily. ‘Not like this.’

  Suddenly it wasn’t a time for pretending. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ she whispered back.

  He ran his fingers over her lips, outlining her mouth, and then down to her throat where he caressed the smooth silky skin delicately before pulling her into him. And then his mouth was coaxing hers open, sensation shooting to every part of her body as his lips and tongue explored hers, the hard pressure of his body as he slid her down beneath him intoxicating.

  He kissed her until she was almost mindless with pleasure, his hands stroking and teasing her body as his lips plundered hers, and she knew she was trembling uncontrollably at the need he was drawing forth so effortlessly. He had kissed and caressed her many times over the last months, but never like this. Never like this.

  She knew now, and in fact she had known it for weeks, that she’d been waiting for this time from the first moment she had laid eyes on him. It had been there between them, unspoken but alive and electric, the knowledge of how good they would be together.

  Her breathing was coming in short pants and her breasts felt tight and sensitive, her whole body sensitised. The will to think or hold back was gone, burnt up in the restless urgency that had surfaced under his lovemaking. She clung to him, responsive to his every demand, overwhelmed by a primitive yearning.

  ‘You’re beautiful, Rosie, so beautiful.’ His lips were warm on her throat as he traced burning kisses over her skin. ‘Inside and out. And you don’t seem to realise it. I find that amazing.’ He raised himself slightly, looking into her flushed face as he said again, ‘So beautiful.’

  She opened her eyes, staring into glittering blue made almost black with desire.

  ‘I don’t want an affair with you,’ he murmured, his body as hard as a rock. ‘I want more than that. I’ve fallen in love with you, Rosie. I’ve been fighting it since the first time I kissed you and I knew it deep inside, but I was hoping you would prove me wrong. That you would say or do something that showed me the image I had of you wasn’t real. But it is.’

  She had frozen in his arms, her eyes wide. This wasn’t how it should be. Kingsley was a ‘no complications, love ’em and leave ’em’ type of guy, he’d said so.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ he said softly, becoming aware of her reaction. ‘Don’t you, Rosie?’

  Her voice was a long time in coming, and then it was a whisper when she said, ‘I don’t know.’

  For a long moment he studied her face, his blue eyes searching hers with their penetrating light, and then he straightened up and away from her, pulling her into a sitting position at the side of him. ‘You don’t feel the same,’ he said flatly. ‘Is that it?’

  She swallowed but she couldn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ she said on a deep shuddering breath. ‘This…this has all happened so suddenly.’

  ‘Not from where I’m sitting.’ There was a touch of wryness in his voice now. ‘In the past I’ve wined and dined and bedded them a hundred times over by now.’

  ‘Then…then how do you know you feel differently about me to all the others?’ she managed. ‘That this isn’t a passing whim?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ He was staring at her.

  She looked at him then; the note in his voice demanded it. ‘Yes.’ But she wasn’t sure if that was true.

  ‘Because I didn’t want to wake up beside the others for the rest of my life,’ he said simply. There was a ringing silence but for the life of her she couldn’t speak. ‘What makes you so afraid of me, Rosie?’ he asked very quietly.

  Her heart was pounding. This shouldn’t be happening now, not when his friend was so ill and he had to fly thousands of miles away. It wasn’t fair to him. ‘I…I didn’t say I was frightened of you.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘But for the life of me I don’t understand why. At first I thought it was something physical, especially because you haven’t dated in so long, but we’re fine that way, aren’t we?”

  It was a question and she answered it. ‘I think so.’

  ‘So I waited on that score, trying to show you in every way I could apart from the ultimate act that it would be fine, that I wouldn’t hurt you, that you just had to relax and let yourself know me a little. But today—’ He stopped abruptly, raking back his hair. ‘You were with me every inch of the way.’

  Her body was rigid, her head whirling.

  ‘So what is it, Rosie?’ he asked softly after a moment or two. ‘Why don’t you know how you feel? Why aren’t you letting yourself know how you feel? It’s all to do with your ex-husband. What the hell did he do to you?’

  She bit her lip hard. She couldn’t think clearly any more. She wished she could make some sense of how she felt but she couldn’t pin down any logic. Her emotions had taken over her reason
and paralysed her judgement. How could she make Kingsley understand where she was coming from when she didn’t understand herself? But she had to try; after all he’d said she owed him that at least. She sucked in a gasp of air. ‘Miles…Miles wasn’t normal,’ she said shakily.

  There was silence. Then very gently he said, ‘In what way wasn’t he normal?’

  ‘I…he…’ Her voice faltered. ‘I…need to explain from the beginning. I met him the first year at university and I thought he was wonderful. He was handsome, funny, everything a girl could wish for. I suppose he swept me off my feet. His family were well off and he was the only boy at university with a sports car, that sort of thing. This makes me sound so shallow,’ she added shakily.

  ‘No, just a normal eighteen-year-old away from everything she knows and in love for the first time,’ he said softly.

  She looked at him, stunned by his understanding.

  ‘And?’ He pressured her very gently to continue.

  ‘And he wanted me. I…I hadn’t slept with anyone before and I think he found that a challenge.’

  Kingsley looked at the beautiful face with its silky veil of chestnut hair and his stomach contracted. Whatever this guy had done, hanging was too good for him.

  ‘Anyway, we…we got married because I…’ she forced herself to sit up straighter, aware she had been slumping ‘…because I didn’t think it was right to go to bed otherwise. Up until then he’d been fun and charming but…he changed. Almost overnight. He—’ she shut her eyes tightly, unable to look at him ‘—became violent. Over the slightest thing. But only when we were alone. Everyone else thought he was the perfect husband, and I was young and I thought it was all my fault so I tried to humour him. Looking back, I think that made him even more of a bully.’

  ‘He hit you?’ he said grimly, his guts writhing.

  She nodded. ‘Where it didn’t show, mostly. He was clever like that. After the divorce an aunt of his contacted me—she was the only one of his family to do so—and she told me he had always been violent and cruel from a small boy, but that his parents had made excuses for him. He was unbalanced, she said, and took after his father’s father who had ended his days in a psychiatric hospital.’

  She was shaking, she couldn’t help it, the shock of hearing herself talking to someone about Miles making her nauseous.

  ‘What made you leave him in the end? I presume it was you who walked out?’ he said carefully, aware from her white face and trembling body she was near the limit of her endurance.

  ‘I found him in bed with someone else and when he hit me I hit back,’ she whispered. ‘It sent him crazy.’ She could almost feel the clothes being torn off her back. ‘He tried to—’ She couldn’t say it but he understood anyway. ‘Our neighbour broke the door down and pulled him off me.’ She shook her head blindly.

  His arms came around her and he drew her against him but she couldn’t relax against him, the shame and humiliation of that moment making her stiff and unyielding. If Robert hadn’t helped her Miles would have raped her that night for sure, because she had been all but naked and helpless by then.

  But Robert had proved himself to be a true friend. He hadn’t spoken of what had occurred to anyone except her solicitor when she’d asked him to give a statement, and when Miles’s parents had whisked him home and the rumours had started no one had known anything for sure. It had been the only thing that had enabled her to go on. To be able to hold her head up.

  ‘Where is he now?’ The words were full of a dark, vibrating energy. No one could have doubted why he was asking.

  ‘He crashed his sports car, killing himself and the girl he was with some time ago,’ she said shakily. ‘The aunt wrote and told me.’

  ‘Pity,’ he growled. ‘He got off lightly.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said thickly, wondering why she didn’t feel better for telling him. Wasn’t that what all the books said, that you felt better when everything was out in the open?

  ‘So he was the reason you decided to step out of the human race and become autonomous,’ Kingsley said gently. ‘I can understand that, truly, but don’t let him still beat you down. This is different, we’re different. You do see that, don’t you?’

  She moved out of his arms, away from him. Miles had used those very same words on the day he has asked her to be his wife. ‘We’re different to the rest of them, Lee,’ he’d said, his handsome face smiling and his brown eyes dark and compelling. ‘We’re two halves of one whole and life is going to be perfect from now on. I promise you.’

  Her hands were clenched together now, tension radiating from her. ‘He talked like that,’ she said almost to herself.

  ‘Like what?’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does to me,’ he said quietly, struggling for calmness. ‘I don’t like being compared to him, Rosie.’

  ‘I didn’t mean…’ Her voice trailed away. Perhaps she did mean it. There were so many similarities between Miles and Kingsley, not just the good looks and wealth but their iron wills. She had never imagined in her worst nightmares that Miles was so twisted and cruel under his outward veneer; how could she be sure about Kingsley?

  ‘I’m me, Rosie, not that creep you married.’ He stated the obvious. ‘And I love you.’

  ‘When you told me about Maria you said love was just a pleasant concept, that it doesn’t work in the real world,’ she said flatly. ‘Sooner or later doubt and mistrust happen, that’s what you said.’

  One half of him wanted to shake her for being this way, the other wanted to make all the hurt go away. His frustration and resentment at the way she was putting him in the same category as her former husband showed in his voice when he said, ‘I was talking out of the back of my head, and men are allowed to change their minds occasionally—it isn’t just a woman’s prerogative. I want to be with you, Rosie. Always.’

  ‘And if you change your mind again, what then?’ she said tensely, her chin rising as she stared him straight in the face. Miles had said that she had trapped him, ruined his life. That she was nothing, a parasite, unloving and unlovable. She had fought back against allowing his mental abuse to penetrate her perception of herself for the last ten years; she wouldn’t survive a second time. ‘What if you’re not cut out for togetherness? Would you think I’d trapped you; blame me for being around? Would you say you were tripping over me all the time, that you couldn’t breathe—?’

  ‘Did he do that?’ Kingsley interrupted softly. ‘Did he say all those things?’

  She jerked her head back, self-protection written all over her. ‘It doesn’t matter; what matters is that I don’t want any of this. I’m sorry, but I don’t. I was honest with you from the very beginning.’

  ‘Yes, you were,’ he agreed slowly. ‘So, where do we go from here?’

  She stared at him. She had never felt so wretched in all her life. ‘There…there’s nowhere to go.’

  ‘I don’t accept that,’ he said impassively.

  Her eyes widened. She had expected him to storm out and call it a day. ‘Kingsley, I meant all I’ve said.’

  ‘You think you mean it.’ He was careful not to touch her; it would only complicate things further if he gave in to his desire to take her in his arms and kiss her until she agreed black was white. This was deeper than that. ‘But I don’t believe you do.’

  He closed his eyes and settled back on the sofa again, stretching his long legs as he made himself comfortable.

  There were minuscule particles of dust dancing in a patch of bright sunlight just above his head, and Rosalie’s eyes were drawn to them as she rose to her feet. She stood uncertainly, an ache in her throat and a churning in her stomach, and found she didn’t know what to say. She’d learnt enough about him over the past months, both from her own observations and from business colleagues—who talked avidly of his ruthless reputation—to know Kingsley was not renowned for an excess of patience. This wasn’t like him. At least not as far as she knew. Which b
rought her right back to the point in question—how sure could she be about anything to do with him?

  ‘Did someone mention coffee and brunch?’ His tone was deep, the laconic request bringing her back to herself and she turned, walking into the kitchen on shaky legs.

  She couldn’t believe she had just told Kingsley, Kingsley of all people, about Miles and her marriage. What was he thinking? She stood at the kitchen sink, gripping the porcelain so hard her knuckles shone white through her skin. Did he think she was pathetic and stupid? Was he disgusted, with her as well as Miles? Why, oh, why had she told him? She squeezed her eyes tight, trying to stop the hot tears from falling.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She hadn’t been aware of him following her, but now he enfolded her into his arms and she had no more strength left to resist. ‘I know it took a lot of courage to tell me about him, but he’s gone, Rosie,’ he said over her head as he held her against the solid wall of his chest. ‘You get men like him in every generation, emotional cripples who prey on the gentle and the good. They’re inadequate and deep down they recognise it so they compensate with cruelness. I’m glad he’s dead because it saves me hunting him out and dealing with him as he deserves. Telling me has brought it all back right now and exposed the wound, but wounds can heal, believe me, and it’s better when they’re cleaned out, however painful.’

  It wasn’t as simple as that. There was so much more to this than just her marriage, but she hadn’t fully realised it till now. The violent death of her mother, her father’s suicide, the years of wondering if she had contributed to her mother’s death simply by being born, and then—when she’d thought Miles was the answer to all her hopes and dreams, when she’d found someone who would love her, really love her—the nightmare of her marriage and its cataclysmic end.