by Penny Jordan
His voice seemed to hold a distinct note of…anger.
Anger. The small elusive thread of recognition that had tugged at her memory before it suddenly became a thick cord of garroting strength, whipping tightly around her, paralyzing her vocal cords, making her shake with shock, the cold sweat of fear springing from her pores.
No. It was impossible. It just couldn’t be. She was imagining things. That voice, Gideon’s voice was not….
She was still clutching the receiver, even though the line had gone dead. She was com pletely alone in the empty room, only the echo of Gideon’s voice to remind her…. Just as, all those years ago, she had also only been left with the echo of a bitterly angry and contemptuous male voice….
PENNY JORDAN
was constantly in trouble in school because of her inability to stop daydreaming—especially during French lessons. In her teens, she was an avid romance reader, although it didn’t occur to her to try writing one herself until she was older. “My first half-dozen attempts ended up ingloriously,” she remembers, “but I persevered, and one manuscript was finished.” She plucked up the courage to send it to a publisher, convinced her book would be rejected. It wasn’t, and the rest is history! Penny is married and lives in Cheshire.
Penny Jordan’s striking mainstream novel Power Play quickly became a New York Times bestseller. She followed that success with Silver, The Hidden Years, Lingering Shadows, For Better For Worse and Cruel Legacy.
“Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters.”
—Publishers Weekly on For Better For Worse
Don’t miss Penny’s latest blockbuster, Power Games, available mid-1996.
Books by Penny Jordan
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An Unforgettable Man
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
COURAGE just managed to stop herself making the betrayingly nervous gesture of smoothing down the skirt of her suit—a copy of a Chanel design she had had made up in Hong Kong for a tenth of the cost of the original—not that there was anyone else in the room to witness any potential breach in her composure. She was, it seemed, the final candidate to be interviewed for the post of household comptroller to the millionaire businessman Gideon Reynolds.
In normal circumstances she would not have been anything like this nervous; she had faced far stiffer interviews than this one in her career. But she had never wanted a job—any job—as desperately as she did this one. And it made no difference reminding herself that she was qualified for it—too well-qualified in many ways. The talents and training of an award-winning management executive of a chain of prestige European conference-centre hotels did not transfer very well to the job opportunities of a sleepy Dorset market town.
She had spent the last week working part-time stacking the shelves at a local supermarket and very glad of the money she had earned there she had been, as well.
The trouble was that the hotel trade, even at her relatively high level, did not pay particularly well. In the past that had not mattered; in the past her love of her work and the perks that went with it—free travel, the opportunity to meet new people, rent-free accommodation—had more than compensated for her smallish salary, but then in the past she had not had to worry about supporting anyone other than herself. In the past she had not had hanging over her the fact that her darling, beloved grandmother was soon going to be desperately in need of her help, not just financially but potentially physically as well.
Her employers had been very understanding, allowing her to terminate her employment with them without any notice—trust Gran not to let her know what was going on, not to want to worry her. It had been her GP—an old family friend—who had got in touch with Courage privately. Not even Gran knew the real extent of the damage to her heart and the frailty of her health.
‘But there must be something you can do,’ Courage had frantically protested to her grandmother’s doctor, her body taut with shock and fear.
‘Yes. We can operate to replace the damaged tissue, but the waiting-list for that kind of operation is at least two years. Your grandmother is a very strong woman, but she is in her sixties. Her condition is extremely severe, and another two years…’
Courage bit her lip. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing her gran—or of seeing her in pain, suffering… Not Gran, who had always been so full of energy and optimism, who had been the steadfast rock of her own life, holding her close and safe, giving her the gift of self-worth, of knowing how much she was loved at a time when…
‘What do you mean you’ve come home?’ her grand-mother had demanded when she had arrived unannounced. ‘What about your work—your career?’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Courage had fibbed breezily, fingers crossed behind her back. ‘I had quite a bit of leave owing to me, and to be honest with you, Gran, I was already thinking about taking a break, giving myself some thinking time to evaluate where I’m going and what I want. The company have offered me the job of running their new Hong Kong conference centre and…’
‘And what?’ Her grandmother had demanded fiercely. ‘It’s the opportunity you’ve always wanted, what you’ve worked for…’
‘In some ways,’ Courage had agreed. ‘And had it been anywhere else but Hong Kong they were posting me to… After all, none of us are really sure what’s going to happen when the colony is handed back to the Chinese.’
‘So what exactly are you saying—that you turned them down?
Courage had seen the suspicion in her grandmother’s eyes, and knowing her pride, the same pride which she herself had inherited, she had broken one of her strongest rules and fibbed a second time.
‘I haven’t totally ruled it out. The company has given me three months to think it over.’
‘Three months… But the longest you’ve ever been able to come home for before has been a couple of weeks.’
‘Which is why I’ve got so much leave owing to me,’ Courage had told her.
She had, of course, asked the doctor about a private operation for her grandmother, but when he had told her the cost her dismay must have shown in her face.
She knew that there was no way she could find the thousands of pounds it would cost for her grand-mother’s operation. The small cottage in which her grandmother lived was already mortgaged to the company which provided her with her pension annuity payments. Courage herself had no assets she could dispose of to raise any money, and there was no other family to go to.
Her father—her grandmother’s only child—had died before Courage reached her teens, and her mother… Her mother, poor sad soul, had died in a swimming accident while on holiday with Courage’s stepfather and his friends.
A small shudder passed through Courage’s body, raising a rash of ominous goose-bumps on her flesh. Even now she hated thinking about her stepfather, about those years…
As she looked around the elegant, expensively furnished room in which she was sitting, with its silk curtains, its paintings and its antique furniture, she reflected that once she, too, had lived in surroundings as elegant as these.
Her stepfather’s London house, while not as large as this beautiful Geor
gian mansion where she now sat so tensely in an ante-room waiting to be summoned for her interview, had certainly been equally as impressive, equally filled with expensive art treasures and antique furniture, all planned to awe and impress the poor dupes from whom her stepfather had earned his living, blinding them to the reality of what he really was with the rich luxury of his surroundings.
Fraud, the police had called it, but theft was what it really was. But her stepfather had escaped paying any price for his criminal activities, just as he had always escaped paying any price for anything he had done, for any of the lives he had destroyed.
The last time Courage had heard anything of him he had been living in Mexico, barred from re-entering the United States, where he had made his home after her mother’s death.
No, there was no comparison between the lifestyle she had lived as a rich man’s stepdaughter and that which she had known living with her grandmother in her small rural Dorset cottage. But there was no doubt, had never been any doubt in Courage’s mind, which lifestyle she preferred… which home.
The last candidate for the job had been gone for a much longer time than any of the others, which didn’t bode very well for her own chances, Courage acknowledged.
When the employment agency she had registered with had first contacted her about this job she had hardly been able to believe her luck.
‘It isn’t quite what you’ve been used to,’ the woman who ran the agency had semi-apologised, ‘and I suspect you could end up being more of a glorified housekeeper than anything else, but the salary is exceptionally high, transport is provided and you’d be working less than twenty miles away from where your grandmother lives.’
And she had gone on to explain the exact nature of the job in question and the requirements of her potential employer. Courage had found herself privately agreeing with the other woman’s assessment of the situation.
The job description announced that her potential employer, an extremely wealthy businessman, wanted someone to take charge of the running of his country mansion. Duties would include organising various social and business functions, liaising with his staff in his London office, taking virtually full responsibility for the hiring and firing of staff at the house, and, on those occasions when he had foreign clients visiting him, organising any necessary business facilities for them, including interpreters etcetera.
Gideon Reynolds was the chairman and major stockholder of a complex network of high profit-earning enterprises, a conquistador of a man who had made his fortune and his name during the hectic times of the eighties, but who, unlike other less fortunate entrepreneurs, had gone on to build a very successful empire on the foundations of those successes.
Courage had, of course, researched as deeply as she could into his background and history once she had been told of the job, but had discovered frustratingly little about him. Even her grandmother, who knew all of the local gossip at every level, knew hardly anything about him, other than the fact that when he had first bought the house, which had been little more than an empty shell at the time, there had been a lot of semi-hysterical gossip locally that he planned to turn the house into some kind of leisure centre, complete with a huge golf course.
The leisure centre had never materialised; the golf course had—Gideon Reynolds apparently did a considerable amount of business with the Japanese, who enjoyed the pleasure of playing their favourite sport on a privately owned course.
Courage, who had worked in Japan herself for a while, could well appreciate what a clever move the golf course had been. Had he understood the basis of the Japanese male personality enough to institute such a move himself, or had he simply had very, very astute and knowledge-able advisers? she wondered.
The only thing she had been able to find out about him was that in addition to being a hugely wealthy man he was also extremely demanding to work for. Harsh-featured, ice-cold, merciless when it came to destroying an opponent—these were just some of the descriptions she had read of him in the financial press.
Disappointingly, none of the articles had contained any photographs of him. She knew he was somewhere in his early thirties, which made him six or seven years older than she was herself, and she knew that he wasn’t married, that he had, in fact, never been married. Although there was no hint to be found anywhere that he was anything other than a thoroughly heterosexual male.
‘Modern women do not appear to want marriage,’ he had been quoted as saying in one article she had read-written, unsurprisingly, by a female financial correspondent. ‘Or permanent commitment is not enough for them—they value sexual variety and expertise more than love and fidelity.’
‘So you don’t intend to marry?’ the reporter had challenged him.
‘One day. If only to ensure that I have someone to pass on the business to. But there is no urgency; a man, unlike a woman, can choose to become a parent virtually at any time in his adult life.’
‘You’re out of date,’ the reporter had told him crisply. ‘A woman can now opt to do the same…’
‘Not my woman,’ Gideon Reynolds had told her succinctly.
Another small shiver ran over Courage’s skin as she recalled the article.
He didn’t sound one little bit the sort of man she would have chosen to work for. Her mouth quirked slightly at the enormous mental understatement of her thoughts. But in this instance she had no choice.
If her time with Gran was going to be limited then she didn’t want to waste a precious second of it. Not out of duty, because she thought it was what she owed her grandmother for all that she had done for her, but because she loved her… Loved her so much that already her heart was aching at the thought of losing her, of being alone.
As she blinked back the tears threatening to shadow her eyes—an unusual lavender-blue colour, which strangers always assumed meant she was wearing coloured contact lenses, but which, in fact, she had inherited from her grandmother, like her pale English rose complexion and her thick dark mane of Celtic curls-she focused on the huge oil-painting hanging on the wall above the marble Adam fireplace.
It was, she suspected, Italian. The subject matter was religious and allegorical, probably commissioned originally 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 ma
n 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.’
