Best of Virgins Bundle

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Why do you insist on acting like the hired help? Slouching as though your dearest wish is for the ground to open up and swallow you?’

  ‘I am the hired help,’ Katy said, folding her arms and forcing herself not to be intimidated by his suffocating presence.

  ‘In the strictest form of the word,’ he returned swiftly, ‘but you’re also Joseph’s companion and apparently a very valuable part of his life. Despite my initial…shall we say, misgivings…it seems that you’ve exceeded my expectations.’ He sounded faintly surprised at that. ‘As such you do not exactly fall into the category of servant, so stop behaving like one. There is no need to concern yourself with fixing any meals for me while I am here,’ he continued in the same clipped voice that made her want to salute smartly to attention. ‘I am quite capable of doing my own thing.’

  ‘Joseph would be appalled if he thought that…that you were having to take time off work because of him,’ Katy said truthfully. What she didn’t add was that his godfather was in awe of this gifted and charismatic man whom he had raised from adolescence.

  ‘He would be equally appalled if he thought that I couldn’t spare him the time when he needed me. Now is there anything else?’

  For someone who had to be very perceptive—or how else could he have ever achieved the dizzy heights of power that he had?—it amazed Katy that he could on the one hand criticise her for behaving like a servant, while on the other, treating her exactly like one.

  ‘No,’ she mumbled, blushing furiously as she noticed his hand move to the leather belt of his trousers. He wasn’t going to remove it, was he? How far would he go in his stripping-off before he became embarrassed by her presence?

  Katy’s knowledge of men was seriously limited. In twenty-three-years, she had had two boyfriends, both thoroughly nice young men for whom she had felt great affection. It was a mark of her basic friendship with them that she still kept in touch with both.

  She couldn’t imagine either of them casually undressing in front of a woman they didn’t know from Adam.

  ‘Right.’ Bruno’s voice was dismissive. ‘In that case, I’ll see you downstairs at four-thirty precisely.’ He turned away from the shrinking figure and was only aware that she had gone when he heard the door close quietly with a click behind her.

  In between her irritating, agonised mumblings, the girl had raised a very good point and one that Bruno himself had considered on the trip over.

  His work. There was no way that he could think about paying his godfather a cursory visit. Joseph was the one human being in the entire world who meant something to him. It pained him to realise how little he had actually seen him over the past year. He could only count a handful of times, fleeting visits when he could manage to escape from the tyranny of his working life. If he vanished now and his godfather, God forbid, died, Bruno knew that he would never forgive himself.

  He could use his London apartment and work from the offices in the City, he supposed, but even that would entail an involved commute.

  He chewed over the problem while he had a bath. Despite being on the go for the better part of a day, the thought of catching up on some sleep before they left did not inspire him. Sleep, on the whole, always seemed like something that had to be done, but was essentially a waste of time. The only attraction he had ever seen in a bed usually involved the woman lying on it and it had to be said that, however fulfilling the sex was, it was never enough to keep him wallowing under a duvet cover so that he could indulge in post-coital chit-chat.

  By the time he had changed and run through some emails, he had already worked out a solution to his problem. It wasn’t ideal, he reflected as he took in the hovering figure waiting for him in the hall when he emerged from his room an hour and a half later, but it would have to do.

  ‘Jimbo’s got the Range Rover out of the garage.’ Katy rushed into speech as Bruno shrugged on his jacket. It was May. Sunny but with a chill in the air that promised goose-pimples to anyone hardy enough to walk around in short sleeves. Katy thought, with a certain amount of sourness, that Bruno had typically got his dress code exactly right. Tan trousers, checked shirt and a suede jacket that managed to look well worn and authentically beaten as well as incredibly fashionable and hideously expensive. How did he do that? Look rugged and sophisticated at the same time?

  She felt the familiar rush of self-consciousness as she took in her own dress code, which was a grey stretch skirt reaching to her calves, a baggy beige jumper and her thoroughly un-chic grey cord jacket. He always made her feel so horribly awkward. All year round, she felt very comfortable in these clothes. They were functional, hard-wearing and successfully managed to conceal a figure she felt self-conscious about and was constantly reminded about whenever she was in his presence.

  ‘Jimbo?’ Bruno paused to frown and Katy nodded.

  ‘Jim Parks, the man who looks after the garden and does odd jobs around the house. You’ve met him.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ If he had, then he didn’t remember.

  ‘Anyway, the car’s waiting outside. If you like, I’ll drive.’ To her dismay, he nodded.

  Katy was a good driver and she was accustomed to driving Joseph’s car. She regularly went into the town once a week on her afternoon off to shop and she drove Joseph wherever he wanted, which admittedly wasn’t to anywhere far flung, but she had become used to the old gears. Several times she had even used the car to drive down to Cornwall to spend the weekend with her parents.

  None of that made her any the less nervous as she switched on the engine and started down the drive with Bruno’s intense black eyes watching her every move. It was like taking her driving test all over again, except worse. At least her driving test examiner had been a kindly man in his fifties who had put her at her ease, not an arrogant half-Italian who wouldn’t hesitate to launch into a scathing attack on her competence if she happened to change gears a little too roughly.

  She could barely concentrate on his reasonably polite line of conversation as he asked her about traffic in the town centre and about how she amused herself on her days off. She was just too aware of him looking at her to relax.

  She was releasing a long sigh of relief at the sight of the hospital in the distance when he threw her his bombshell.

  ‘I have been thinking about what you said to me about taking time off work and I agree that Joseph would be unhappy if he thought I was forcing myself to stay here, twiddling my thumbs, because I felt sorry for him.’

  Katy glanced surreptitiously at him, then quickly back at the congested road that harboured a plethora of small roundabouts and traffic lights before veering right towards the hospital entrance. The fact that he had actually thought about anything she had said was surprising enough without the additional bonus of knowing that he had agreed with her on something.

  ‘Yes, he really would.’ She breathed a little sigh of relief at what she knew was coming. His imminent departure. But first he wanted her to go through the motions of soothing away his guilt. ‘He’s terribly proud, you know. He would hate to think that you felt sorry enough for him to let your…well, your work life slide.’ She frowned and tried to imagine what it must be like to live a life where everything and everyone came a poor second to work. ‘You have an apartment in London, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ Bruno said irritably. ‘Look at the state of this car park. We’ll be here for hours trying to find a space. You should have told me that the parking facilities were inadequate. I would have arranged for a taxi to bring us here.’

  ‘We’ll find somewhere to park,’ Katy mumbled, scanning the clutter of cars for a vacant spot to back up her optimistic statement. ‘We just have to be patient.’

  Bruno clicked his tongue in instant dismissal of such a notion and frowned darkly out of his window. ‘A much overrated virtue, patience. Wait too long for something and it’s guaranteed to disappear before you can get your hands on it. If I patiently waited for deals to come my way, I wou
ld be struggling to put a crust on the table.’

  ‘But we’re not talking about deals, Bruno. We’re talking about finding a parking space in a car park.’ Her eyes brightened as she spotted someone reversing slowly out of a slot in the lane parallel to hers and she cautiously inched the car forward so that she could ease it into the vacated spot. ‘There,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘didn’t I tell you we’d get something?’

  ‘I was telling you about my…dilemma…concerning work,’ Bruno answered, sweeping over her small victory so that Katy instantly felt deflated.

  ‘Oh, yes. Perhaps we could discuss it after we’ve been to see your godfather?’ She could already feel her spirits lifting at the thought of seeing Joseph. That he had come to mean so much to her in the space of a mere eighteen months was of no great surprise to Katy. As an only child, she had always had a gift when it came to relating to people older than herself and Joseph was somehow special. His blend of shyness, intelligence and gentleness had charmed her from the very first minute she had met him and she had never had any cause to revise her opinions. She was as much at home with him when they were having heated discussions on some subject or other that might have captured his interest in the news, as when they were sitting in companionable silence at the end of the evening before he retired to bed.

  She hoped that he would be able to see them now and perhaps even chat a little and she would much rather relish her anticipation in peaceful silence than be forced to respond to the man striding alongside her.

  ‘We’ll discuss it now, I think,’ Bruno informed her crushingly. He pushed open the glass door and then stood aside to let her pass. ‘I want to focus on Joseph when I see him, knowing that I have sorted out this work situation to my satisfaction. In fact—’ he glanced around ‘—there must be some kind of coffee shop or caféor something here. I should have said what I need to say in fifteen minutes and then we can go and see Joseph.’

  Katy fought down an urge to salute. She also knew better than to express an alternative viewpoint so she suggested the café that was further along on the ground floor. The coffee was fairly awful but they would be able to sit and, anyway, it made sense for her to do what she had to do, nod when he told her that he would be going down to London so that he could carry on working and agree that it was really the only viable solution. At least that way she, too, would feel a weight lifted with the matter sorted.

  ‘What will you have?’ Bruno asked, not looking at her as he assumed his place in the short queue, his hand squarely placed on top of one of the brown trays.

  Somehow direct questions from Bruno always managed to encourage a stammer that Katy possessed with no one else. Of course, when she thought about it, she could understand why. Even when he was being perfectly normal, if such a thing existed in connection with his personality, there was still a latent aggression to him that brought out the worst in her.

  ‘Hello?’ she heard him saying now, finally turning to look at her so that for an instant their eyes tangled and a slow, hot burn started inside her. ‘Is there anyone there? Or have you decided to vanish into the clouds completely?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Katy said, blinking and looking away. ‘I’ll have a coffee.’

  ‘Anything to eat?’

  ‘No. Thank you. Thanks.’

  Frowning black eyes did a once-over sweep of her, finally coming to rest on her flushed face. ‘How much do you eat? Does Joseph make sure that you get fed properly? He can be a little absent-minded when it comes to life’s small essentials. Like food.’ He was at the coffee machine now, pressing buttons for two cups of coffee, while Katy looked on in bewilderment at the turn in his conversation.

  ‘Of course I eat.’ She eyed the restful solitude of one of the tables wistfully.

  ‘You look like a bag of bones under that outfit of yours.’

  In one fell swoop, he managed to make her cringingly aware of her body and its shortcomings. Ever since she was fourteen and had watched on the sidelines as her friends had developed hips and breasts and all the things that the boys seemed to gravitate towards, Katy had nursed the unspoken feeling that her slightness, her small breasts, her boyish shape, were to be concealed at all costs. Baggy, all-enveloping clothes had become her preferred mode of dress, even though her parents had repeatedly told her that she was beautiful. She had always known better than to believe them. Her parents adored her. They would have found her beautiful if she had had three heads and a tail.

  Now she knew that she should greet his uninvited observation with something icily scathing, something that would firmly put him in his place, but nothing came to mind and in the brief silence he continued with bracing disregard for her feelings.

  ‘You need to build yourself up.’

  ‘Build myself up into what? A wrestler?’ Katy said with a spurt of vigour and this time he looked at her with something approaching interest, his dark eyebrows raised in apparent fascination at her sudden forceful tone of voice.

  ‘I really don’t know, now that you mention it, considering you keep your body so cleverly concealed under clothing that any granny would be proud to wear,’ Bruno answered smoothly, but her sarcasm had captured his attention and suddenly the plans he had made regarding work didn’t seem quite so depressingly functional after all.

  ‘Now, we’ll have our coffee and I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve decided on the work front. Why don’t you go and grab a table—a clean one would be good—and I’ll join you when I’ve paid for this lot?’

  He absent-mindedly watched as Katy scuttled across the café to one of the tables at the back, but his thoughts were already moving ahead. He couldn’t see that she would object in any way to what he had in mind and, quite frankly, she had no choice in the matter anyway.

  However, his problems did not begin and end with work. Isobel Hutton Smith, the woman with whom he was currently attached, might have been a model of understanding when it came to his frequent trips abroad, but he doubted whether she would be quite so compliant when it came to him holed up in the countryside a good hour and a half away from her, yet in the same country.

  She had been dropping hints about him settling in one place for good, spicing up her conversation with all-too-transparent musings about the nature of relationships and the speed with which time rushed past.

  Bruno knew that he should have been firmer in squashing some of her more blatant chat about commitment and biological clocks, but somehow he had never seemed to get around to it and he’d allowed the situation to slide. Maybe, he thought now, Joseph’s illness was fate telling him that the time to settle down had arrived, and as he distractedly paid the girl at the till for the two coffees and the tired-looking Chelsea bun he had bought for himself he wondered whether Isobel might not make just the sort of wife he was looking for. Glamorous, well connected and undemanding when it came to his work.

  He glanced across to where Katy now appeared to be brushing a few wayward crumbs from the surface of the table with her hand and decided that he would deal with one thing at a time.

  Work first, girlfriend later and both in second position to the all-consuming need to make sure that his godfather was going to be all right.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘RIGHT.’ Bruno sat down, brilliant black eyes sweeping over the grubby table with such unconcealed distaste that Katy was forced to remind him that a hospital canteen wasn’t going to be along the lines of a five-star restaurant.

  ‘I did try to clear most of the crumbs,’ she finished apologetically, which earned her a frown.

  ‘Why are you apologising for the state of this place?’ Bruno demanded impatiently. ‘Nobody, least of all me, expects a hospital café to be run along the lines of a five-star restaurant, but this table looks as though its ambition is to collect several months of grime before someone gets round to wiping a damp cloth over it.’

  Katy wondered how his employees coped with his obviously impossibly high standards. Did he pour that undiluted, freezing scorn over anyone
who happened to make the smallest slip-up? She shuddered and gulped down a mouthful of coffee.

  How his godfather’s gentleness and sensitivity had never managed to rub off on him baffled Katy. He was as different from Joseph as chalk from cheese, but then she knew that his family background had not been normal. His father had died when he was three and his mother ten years later, during which time he had had the pleasure of being sent to a boarding-school, when he was just a child and not old enough to cross a road by himself let alone cope with being sent away from the only home he had known. He had also had the dubious pleasure of being at the mercy of two stepfathers, neither of whom, from what she had gathered, had been very interested in the precociously intelligent but rebellious child.

  By the time he had reached Joseph, at the age of thirteen, his personality had probably already been formed. He’d been an orphan, wealthy thanks to his mother’s legacy, formidably clever and, according to his godfather, well on the way to believing that the world was at his command.

  Reading between the lines, Katy could picture a devilishly good-looking teenager, cleverer than most of his teachers, fiercely self-confident, yet wary of human relationships.

  She often tried to bolster her self-confidence in his presence by thinking of him as rather lonely underneath the glittering success and financial power.

  Yet again, the ploy failed as she surreptitiously glanced at his darkly striking features as he bit down into the flaccid bun.

  ‘You were going to tell me what…what you’ve decided to do? About work?’ Katy prompted.

  ‘Well, I won’t be returning to New York, at least not until Joseph is back on his feet. The obvious solution would be for me to concentrate on my London office and stay in my apartment in Chelsea, but that in itself would involve a hectic commute if I wanted to get up here to see him, so I’ve decided that the only solution will be for me to set up an office at the house and work from there indefinitely.’