by Lynne Graham
‘I am trying very hard to be totally frank and not take advantage of your inexperience.’
Draining her glass, she slid clumsily upright, water sloshing everywhere. Her head was swimming. ‘I c-can’t even be offended. You’re certifiable. You’re a big disappointment too.’ She lurched at the large bath-towel and caught it more by accident than design. ‘You deserve the killer bimbo. I want wild passion. I want a lover who can’t keep his hands off me. I want a guy who looks at me as if I’m Demi Moore, is hopelessly in love with my mind and still faithful after our ruby wedding anniversary…’
Hideously dizzy, she collided with incredibly blue eyes and swayed. ‘H-he’s out there somewhere…he just hasn’t found me yet,’ she asserted, slurring her words as she tripped over the trailing towel and fell flat at his feet with a resounding crash. ‘If I thought you were all there was, I think I’d kill myself,’ she concluded as she endeavoured to pick herself up.
‘You are absolutely plastered,’ he groaned, bending down to pick her up since she wasn’t making much headway on her own. He looked down at her with an oddly arrested expression.
‘P-paralytic!’ She giggled and passed out.
*
‘You should have told me that you hadn’t eaten and that you had never had alcohol before.’
Wincing from her sore head, she muttered, ‘Stop g-going on about it.’
Mercifully, it was dark as they left the Pheasant. He had let her sleep and then he had shaken her awake, presented her with her clothes, which he had had dry-cleaned, and a tray of food that had settled uneasily in her too empty stomach. Half an hour later, he had returned and hustled her out of the Pheasant at speed.
He drew up in front of the Hall and swung round to look at her. His expressive mouth suddenly slanted with raw amusement. ‘Drunk…you’re hilarious.’
Tense and miserable, she whispered, ‘I made an idiot of myself.’
He expelled his breath. ‘I rather think you made an idiot of me. But why no alcohol ever before?’
‘My mother,’ she responded tautly.
‘But she loved a—’
‘Yes, loved it a little too much when the going got rough.’ She climbed out of the car.
Floss was comfortably ensconced by the fire in the small sitting-room. Rosie was watching a cartoon on the television. On the brink of offering a stammering apology, Chrissy was forestalled by Blaze.
‘Just as you said, I’ve been working her to death.’
Floss nodded approval of the admission. ‘And she hasn’t been letting me help out with Rosie either,’ she added, and Chrissy flushed, conscious that she had refused the older woman’s assistance, fearful that Hamish might accuse her of taking advantage of his wife’s good nature. ‘I love looking after her,’ Floss concluded wistfully.
When Floss had gone home, Chrissy went out to the kitchen. It was a disaster area, there was no escaping that fact, and with a sigh she rolled up her sleeves.
‘Forget it; put your feet up,’ Blaze drawled from the doorway. ‘The cleaning agency are sending in a squad in the morning and they can come in every couple of days for as long as we have to live in this chaos.’
Chrissy spun round. ‘But that will cost you a fortune!’ she said guiltily.
‘I can afford it,’ he dismissed. ‘You’ll be free to focus your energies on more important things. You know, I never expected you to get down on your knees to scrub floors. To be truthful, I’ve never had to think of practicalities like that.’
He was gone again, but she still stared at the space he had occupied. Every time she thought she understood him, he side-stepped her and astonished her again. He could be so considerate, so gentle with Rosie, and yet she sensed that neither of those virtues coloured his relationships with women. At the Pheasant he had been brutally honest about his desire to make love to her. And even more brutally honest in the acknowledgement that it would lead nowhere.
Few men would have dared such candour. But Blaze had. Yet she could hardly believe that Blaze, who was famous for being able to get any woman he wanted with the barest minimum of effort, could actually desire her…Chrissy Hamilton, who had certainly never had any cause to think of herself as a femme fatale. He behaved as though she was incredibly desirable. Her brow furrowed, confusion making her head ache. At the back of her mind, she was trying not to recall Hamish’s assurance that Blaze wanted revenge on the Hamilton family. Blaze had been extraordinarily kind to her and Rosie, flinging them a lifeline when they were absolutely desperate.
She was saying goodnight to Rosie when she heard the thumping on the front door. Taking the stairs two at a time, she answered it. A powerful hand slammed the door hard back against the wall, forestalling any attempt she might have made to deny entry.
‘D-Dad!’ she gasped in unconcealed horror, backing away fast.
Jim Hamilton lunged forward like a heavyweight boxer going in for the kill, his broad face crimson with menacing fury. ‘So it’s true!’ he bit out, his big hands clenching into fists of rage. ‘He has got you up here!’
‘B-Blaze gave me a job—’
‘A job? Is that what you call it? He gave you something else too, from what I’ve been hearing! You’ve got a kiddy the living spit of the bastard!’
Chrissy was as white as the newly plastered wall behind her, her stricken gaze pinned to him in consternation. ‘Rosie isn’t h-his!’ she protested. ‘I just work for him—’
‘Work for him?’ Jim Hamilton vented a harsh crack of incredulous laughter. ‘On your back? Is that how you work for him? When you were laid up in the Pheasant with him all afternoon, were you working for him then? The whole bloody village is talking about it! Couldn’t wait for the builders to get out, they’re saying! Living up here in sin with a child into the bargain, calling yourself his damn housekeeper! You stupid little cow; didn’t I teach you any better? I’ll teach you better when I get you home, girl…by God, I will!’ he threatened.
‘I’m not g-going anywhere with you.’ Appalled by the scene developing, Chrissy was equally appalled by the news that people were talking about her, making nonsensical assumptions about Rosie’s parentage and even more embarrassing assumptions about the precise nature of her relationship with Blaze.
For the first time it occurred to her that she had left herself wide open to such speculation. Blaze had a wild reputation. Blaze was expected to scandalise and delight the locals with an unconventional lifestyle. In her teens, ninety percent of the juicy gossip on the grapevine had been devoted to Blaze and his sex life.
She was stunned by the sudden realisation that coincidence had undoubtedly lent some colour to the idea that Blaze was Rosie’s father. Just over three years ago, she had suddenly left the area. She had chosen a teacher-training course in London because she had wanted to be with her mother. But didn’t unmarried girls occasionally disappear when they didn’t want people to know that they were pregnant? And ironically the dates would fit… In fact, had she slept with Blaze that long-ago night, Rosie’s arrival eight and a bit months later would have dovetailed perfectly with an event that had never happened. And now here she was, back with a toddler in tow, living under Blaze’s roof. Her skin heated. Dear heaven, no wonder folk were talking! Just how secure would her employment be when Blaze heard that same talk?
‘You’re not staying here with him!’ Jim Hamilton bit out, clamping a rough hand to her narrow waist. ‘He’s trying to make a bloody fool of me—’
‘But you manage that so well without any assistance,’ a lazy drawl, laden with contemptuous amusement, slotted in smoothly.
Shattered by such naked provocation, Chrissy whirled round. Blaze cast her a glittering smile. Lounging in a doorway, he emanated an aura of astounding cool. With a bull-like snort, her father thrust her bodily aside and headed for Blaze instead.
Leaping back to life, Chrissy darted between the two men. Knowing how violent her father’s temper could be, she was afraid he would take a swing at Blaze if she didn’t i
ntervene.
‘Get out of the way!’ Jim Hamilton raged. ‘Let me at him!’
‘I don’t need your protection, Chrissy,’ Blaze murmured drily.
‘She’s coming home. You can keep the brat!’ her father told him.
‘I’m staying h-here.’ Cringing with embarrassment, Chrissy none the less had the strength to stand her ground. Her father was a bully, ready to seize on the first sign of weakness. ‘I can’t stop you thinking what you do, b-but I want to tell you that not a word of it is true.’
‘Don’t waste your breath, sweetheart,’ Blaze advised, tugging her backwards into sudden disturbingly intimate contact with his hard, muscled length. He linked both arms in a blatant statement of possession round her slight, trembling body. Chrissy’s eyes widened to their fullest extent and she went rigid, wondering what on earth he was playing at.
Almost tipped over the edge by the sight of such intimacy, Jim Hamilton swore viciously, the veins knotting warningly in his forehead. ‘He was with Elaine in London!’ he suddenly roared at her. ‘He dropped her back on the doorstep this morning! Does that give you something to think about, you stupid—!’
‘London…E-Elaine?’ Chrissy parroted, with a gasp of disbelief, twisting her head to stare up at Blaze in astonished query. ‘You w-were w-with E-Elaine?’
Drawing back a step, Jim Hamilton angled a triumphant smirk at Blaze. Chrissy’s heartbeat was thumping so loudly in her eardrums that she felt faint and sick. Blaze wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t denying the accusation either. Her throat closed over. Shock was reverbating through her in waves. All of a sudden her father was the least of her worries. So intense was her self-absorption that she turned again to Blaze, almost pleadingly this time, willing him with every fibre of her body to tell her that it wasn’t true.
He couldn’t have been with Elaine…he simply couldn’t have been! Scant hours ago, Blaze had been telling her that it was her he wanted. He hated Elaine…he had to hate Elaine for what she had done! Indifferent to her father’s presence, she attempted to repeat that unanswered question. ‘You w-w-were w-w-w—’ She stammered hopelessly, unable to get the words out this time, so great was her distress.
Her father’s face twisted with revulsion. Her speech impediment had always affected him that way. ‘What man would want to live with you spluttering and stuttering like an imbecile when he could have Elaine?’ he demanded derisively.
Blaze hit him. He flattened her back against the wall and moved so fast that it was over before she even knew what was happening. Jim Hamilton went flying backwards, and, before he could pick himself up, a hand like a hoist anchored to his collar and he was all but thrown out of the front door.
‘You put a foot within a hundred yards of Chrissy again and you’re dead, Hamilton! I’ll destroy you,’ she heard Blaze promise in a chillingly icy drawl. ‘Elaine will be the least of your problems.’
Chrissy was shivering. She hugged her arms clumsily round herself. She felt as if she was inside a glass bubble and everything else was happening outside it. She just couldn’t react. The bombshell her father had unleashed had devastated her, and on one level she was striving to comprehend why she was in such agony. So he was seeing Elaine…so what? she tried to tell herself.
Elaine was everything she herself was not. Elaine was very beautiful, very witty and entertaining when she wanted to be and no doubt very sexy as well. But what Chrissy couldn’t understand was why he hadn’t just told her and why he had been playing that game with her today in the Pheasant. For it must have been a game, the pretence that he found her desirable. She hurt all over. Her skin hurt. Her bones hurt. She had never been in such pain.
‘You bottomed out badly in the parent lottery, didn’t you?’ Blaze murmured smoothly, strolling gracefully down the hall towards her, putting out enough electric energy to electrocute the unwary. Blaze, she registered sickly, had been exhilarated by that ghastly scene with her father. He had actually enjoyed the confrontation. ‘Relax; he won’t be back. He’s too much of a coward. Bloody hell, you’re terrified of him, aren’t you?
She wasn’t. Her father was loud, uncouth and frequently cruel, but she had never been afraid of him. She was the least favoured child, with no outstanding talents which might have made him proud of her. He had a handsome son and a beautiful daughter and would have been quite content had his family ended there. Once Chrissy had been labelled a disappointment she had been ignored. It had been her defection to her mother’s side that had turned her father’s indifference to outright dislike.
No, she wasn’t terrified of her father. The only individual capable of terrifying her was right in front of her now, the rapacious smile of a tiger on his darkly handsome face.
‘Come on.’ He prised her carefully away from the wall and pressed her down on a sofa in the sitting-room. ‘You’re not involved in any of this. Don’t let it worry you. I wouldn’t hurt you. Why would I want to?’ he asked softly, soothingly, much the same way as she had heard him calm a frightened horse.
He was crouched down in front of her. She was nailed in place by the full force of sapphire eyes that controlled and commanded. She felt like a butterfly on the end of a pin, but somehow she still couldn’t drag her disobedient gaze from him. He lifted a cool hand and brushed an almost teasing forefinger along the tremulous line of her mouth. ‘You can speak to me. I don’t mind the stammer. In fact, I think it’s kind of cute. It doesn’t bother me at all.’
Incredulously she registered that he thought that was why she wasn’t talking. But what chilled her most of all was the awareness that this was a male one hundred per cent confident of a sympathetic reception, a male utterly and absolutely convinced that nothing she had heard, nothing she had learnt, was likely to antagonise her.
‘Chrissy…’ He sighed. ‘So I intend to get even—why should that bother you? Your father treats you like dirt, your sister treats you like trash, and you were ready to starve sooner than ask them for help. We are not talking about a close-knit family unit here.’
‘”Getting even”,’ she echoed jerkily. ‘And I’m part of it. Th-that’s why you gave me this job…’
‘Did I accidentally nearly run over you on purpose?’ he mocked. ‘I won’t deny that I foresaw your father’s reaction to your presence under my roof. It amused me, but that wasn’t the sole reason. You were in dire straits and I was in a position to help you. It suited me to hire you and I wouldn’t have done it if there hadn’t been a job for you.’
‘I came too cheap.’ Tearing free of his mesmeric gaze, she studied her linked hands. ‘You’ve been using me—’
‘How? All I did was give you a job.’
He had suggested a familiarity that didn’t exist between them when he’d put his arms round her. He had done that, she saw now, for her father’s benefit. In the same way, he had employed her. Furthermore, he wouldn’t be at all concerned by local gossip, not when that same gossip was seen as a humiliation by her father. She saw it all now and she felt stone-cold as she tasted the extent of her own blind stupidity.
Everything had been planned. The stable girl finding her in his bed the first morning. The hot embrace up at the jumps. The trip to the Pheasant today, seemingly so spontaneous and thoughtful. Her cheeks burned hot as hellfire. No, nobody within a hundred-mile radius of the local grapevine could now be suffering from the slightest doubt that her relationship with Blaze was of an exceedingly intimate nature. Blaze had made damn sure of that! Her reputation had been most thoroughly dragged in the mire.
And the irony of it all was that only the enemy had sought to warn her off! Hamish had been speaking the absolute truth when he’d said that Blaze was a total bastard. And yet that was something she had always known… Just when had she first begun to let that awareness slip? When he’d rescued them from desperation and given her a job? Or when he’d touched her and it had been like every fantasy she had ever had all presented in one unbearably tempting and fascinating package?
‘Chrissy�
�’
A shudder disturbed her rigidity. She wanted to throw herself at him, kicking and screaming. She wanted to hurt him the way he had hurt her. But that wasn’t within her power. It had all been a game for him, and she was just a pawn on his board, not an important playing piece. She wanted to make some wildly dramatic gesture to punish him, but that too was beyond her reach. She couldn’t just walk out. She had no money, nowhere to go, and Rosie to consider. In any case, she had already played her role for Blaze unknowingly. As far as her father was concerned, she was deliberately and shamelessly flaunting her promiscuity with his biggest enemy. Had she had any relationship worth saving with her father, it had just been destroyed for good. And much Blaze would care about that!
‘And what h-have you planned for my sister?’ she heard herself prompt in a taut undertone from which all emotion had been wiped.
He was standing by the oak dresser, pouring himself a glass of brandy from an exquisite Georgian decanter. Firelight gleamed on his black hair, silhouetting his hard, classical profile, the aristocratic jut of his nose and the wide perfection of his mouth. A dark avenging angel, she saw with a shiver, untouched by mere human emotions. He would break Elaine, smash her into pieces. Elaine was an accident waiting to happen in Blaze’s radius.
‘My business…nothing whatsoever to do with you.’ He cast her a nakedly perceptive glance, his lips twisting with grim amusement. ‘And even if you warned her, she wouldn’t believe you.’
Chrissy didn’t trust herself to speak. But she knew that it was unlikely that her sister would listen to her. She also knew that she would still try to make Elaine listen. She had no intention of condoning or assisting Blaze with silence. Yet increasingly what dominated her racing thoughts was a morbid need to know exactly how far Blaze had gone in his desire for revenge. How often had he seen Elaine? Had he made love to her as well? Dear God, the imagery that leapt into her undisciplined mind knotted her stomach with nausea. And she surprised inside herself an emotion more shameful and humiliating than anything she had yet experienced.
