Trust Too Much

by Jayne Bauling

  She had no idea how or if Simon had explained the state of his elegant trousers to anyone, and she hadn’t enquired, beginning to be embarrassed by her behaviour since such a confrontational attitude was alien to her nature.

  A sound from the high patio above her made her withdraw her gaze from the sparkling clarity of the swimming-pool, and there was the subject of her thoughts, Simon Rhodes, carrying his jacket and coming down the stairs towards her. A pang of purely aesthetic appreciation assailed her as she watched him. He moved with such grace and leashed power, and was so beautifully formed, so truly physically perfect in every way that she could only be profoundly grateful that she would never be one of the legion of women who loved him, because how did anyone ever get over such a man?

  ‘Charles isn’t home yet,’ she informed him casually, resolutely deciding to ignore the fact that the mere sight of him made her feel challenged in some obscure way. ‘But Babs is somewhere inside.’

  ‘Thank you, she sent me out to join you.’ Simon stood beside her sun-lounger, looking down at her and then at the pool on her other side, a wicked gleam appearing in his eyes. ‘I am so tempted, Fee, after the drenching I received at your hands the other night.’

  ‘Don’t you dare! And you’re exaggerating…I’m sorry I threw my drink over you, Simon.’ But although she had begun to be ashamed of herself, Fee’s eyes still sparkled at the memory, and her voice refused to emerge as demurely as she wanted it to, a quiver betraying her as she added, ‘I don’t usually behave like that. I don’t know what got into me.’

  ‘A devil, of course, and it’s looking out of your eyes right now, so I suppose I ought to keep my distance. But all right, I’ll forgive you since it was probably due,’ he conceded magnanimously, ignoring the advice he had just given himself and pulling a matching chair closer to her lounger before seating himself. ‘I shouldn’t have bawled you out in front of everyone the way I did that other time.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ she agreed tartly, still capable of flushing at the memory, and deciding against asking what had got into him on that occasion.

  ‘So how is our innocent victim, as Loren keeps insisting you are? I believe she thinks she invented the phrase all by herself.’

  ‘If you’re so scathing about people’s intellectual limitations behind their backs—and to their faces, now I think of it, because she said you’d called her an airhead—why do you go out with such bimbos?’ Fee flared, incensed on Loren’s behalf.

  Simon wore his most arrogant expression. ‘Because they don’t try so hard to be clever, whereas half-bright women keep trying to be cleverer than they are and it bores me because I see through them.’

  ‘God, have you any idea how inhibited your intolerance must make people when you can’t even be bothered to hide it? I’ll be frightened to open my mouth now,’ Fee claimed tempestuously.

  ‘You don’t count,’ Simon said rudely, with an indifferent glance at her mouth before noticing the newspaper she had discarded and observing at which page it was open. ‘Looking for…what did you tell me? A home, a car and a job? In fact, we may be able to help you with the first. Rhodes Properties are mainly commercial and industrial, but we have recently added a division dealing with residential, and it’s turning out to be a paying concern with land here so scarce, and rents for ground-floor apartments as high as you choose to make them when everyone is so nervous of a cut in electricity putting lifts out of order…But haven’t you considered staying here? The house still belongs to your father, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fee glanced up at the green-tiled roof, a sort fairly common in Hong Kong. ‘But it’s everyone’s home really, for all of us to come back to. If you must know, I want to get away from Babs and Charles because if I’m not independent they’re likely to go on treating me like a baby forever.’

  And because she wasn’t a natural fighter, she was afraid she might be tempted to settle for the easy option and let them, Fee supplemented silently, but she wasn’t about to confide that much to Simon. For some reason it was important that he shouldn’t guess how much of the old, uncertain Fee still existed.

  He was sending a lazily amused smile across the space between them.

  ‘They must be blind. It’s definitely a very adult Fee who has come home to us.’ Pausing, he observed her complicated reaction to the meaningful tone before digressing, ‘Your father is still mountaineering, isn’t he?’

  ‘In a sense. I think he’s part of a movement to clear old base-camp sites of litter all over Pakistan and Nepal, now that the problem has been realised, so he’s giving something back, which is nice. Mountains are all he has ever cared about; all the pleasure he has had has come from them,’ Fee acknowledged the kind of single-minded selfishness that had long since ceased to perturb her.

  ‘Lucky he had the means to indulge himself.’ Simon referred to the private fortune Jim Garland had spent in pursuit of his obsession.

  ‘He usually remembered to keep us supplied with money to live on, and he did buy this house,’ Fee reminded him loyally.

  ‘And dumped you in it when you were a baby. Wasn’t there some near-scandal about that?’ Simon frowned.

  She laughed. ‘After my mother died when I was two. She’d never properly recovered from some complication at my birth because it happened somewhere remote in the Himalayas, with no doctors for hundreds of miles. The nannies he left me with here kept walking out, and someone found out and threatened to take him to court if I wasn’t looked after better, so he married Angela. She had Babs, and nowhere to live and no money—poor Babs doesn’t even know who her father was—so it worked out quite well when he was home, only Angela likes lots of attention and a man to be around all the time, and he kept telling her horror stories about my mother’s trials to discourage her because he didn’t want her with him in the mountains.’

  Simon shook his head. ‘You girls must have had an even more chaotic childhood than I did. My various step-parents and unofficial aunts and uncles kept changing, but they were there. Angela wasn’t often, was she?’

  Fee shook her head.

  ‘She’s an incurable romantic, always out looking. But Babs looked after me, and when we were older we looked after each other. I shiver when I think about it sometimes, though,’ she added in a hushed voice. ‘Once I got pneumonia and Babs couldn’t make the doctor’s receptionist understand her, and another time it was cold and she decided we should have a hot meal. She was only ten and she burnt her hand badly, and I was frantic; I didn’t know what to do…’

  ‘God, it’s a horror story.’ Simon sounded unusually thoughtful and he studied her expression for a moment. ‘People shouldn’t get married. Jim and Angela have never bothered with a divorce, have they? Angela was home last year, but then she met someone on his way to take up a contract job somewhere—Jakarta, I think—and she took off with him. But you’re a big girl now and don’t need anyone to take care of you, as you’ve just demonstrated by walking out on your lover in Australia and not even bothering to be discreet about it, all in the fine tradition of your odd family.’

  Fee didn’t think she had taken care of herself at all successfully, considering the humiliation she had suffered as a consequence of her own stupid naïveté, and, while she loved her family, she had no intention of following in any of their footsteps. Her dreams were conventional, of a husband who came home to her and children she would care for herself.

  ‘You would believe that was the way it was,’ she taunted sharply. ‘It may interest you to know that absolutely no one else does.’

  ‘As we’ve agreed, that’s because the fools all still see you as the child they remember. But you and I both know you’re not. You grew up in a sexually sophisticated milieu and it was only a matter of time before you adopted our mores. Welcome to the real, adult world, darling. It’s a pleasure to know you—or it will be.’

  Fee just managed not to look startled. For a moment it had almost sounded as if he was flirting with her, the way he di
d with other women, but surely that was impossible? Not Simon. Not with her!

  ‘You’re wrong! About the Australian business, I mean.’ Her dark blue eyes flashed as she dismissed the ridiculous idea. ‘But I don’t care what you think.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ he commended her insouciantly. ‘Never explain yourself, never make excuses, never mind what people say and think. Incidentally, Charles was telling me on the phone earlier that you weren’t finding the job market too promising. That’s why I’m here. I might just have something for you if the position of assistant to Sheldon’s assistant entailed what I imagine it did. There’s a woman who’s leaving Rhodes whose position you might be able to fill, although why she has to take off so inconveniently is beyond me. Her excuse is so stupidly irrational that I refuse to dignify it by calling it a reason.’

  Fee’s anger subsided and she looked at him hopefully, aware that Rhodes Properties’ reputation was excellent, but then rare pride stirred.

  ‘I don’t need you and Charles to arrange my life for me, thank you very much, Simon,’ she asserted caustically. ‘I’m quite capable of finding a job for myself, and, considering how scathing you’ve been about other people’s failure to realise that I’m not a helpless baby any more, I’d have expected you to tell him to go to hell when he asked you.’

  The smile Simon gave her was biting. ‘Oh, definitely not a helpless baby. A spitting cat is more like it, and I do mean the wild kind. Charles didn’t exactly ask me—’

  ‘No, but I bet he hinted like mad and you felt obliged to come up with something because he’s a friend and you men have this stupid buddy-code about helping each other out,’ she accused tempestuously. ‘I don’t mind Charles interfering so much, because he’s family, but I don’t really even know you except as his friend, so don’t try to make a charity of me. I won’t accept it.’

  Simon was still smiling at her, derisively now, but something flickering at the back of his eyes seemed to suggest that she had either angered or offended him.

  ‘No, you don’t really know me at all, Fee, if you can imagine I’d make you my good deed for the day,’ he drawled mockingly. ‘I’ve no objection to doing Charles a favour, but not if it’s at the expense of anything to do with Rhodes Properties. Assuming you’re interested in the position, I’ll only appoint you if you’re qualified for it. Right now, I have to say I have my doubts, if you’re stupid enough to believe anything else.’

  Fee had always been flexible, seeing no point in clinging obstinately to an idea once it was proved to have no foundation, but something in Simon’s attitude was angering her, and her apology carried a distinct trace of acid.

  ‘Sorry! I was forgetting that first and foremost you’re a hard-headed businessman. Blame it on the way people talk about you. Everyone is so riveted by the social side of your life. But I should have remembered that Rhodes Properties is the one thing you truly take seriously—far more seriously than you do your famous love life.’

  Simon shrugged dismissively. ‘Since, properly administered and maintained, property not only increases in value but is the one thing that actually lasts. Love doesn’t.’

  Irrationally, since she had already known he believed something of the sort, it intensified her anger.

  ‘It might, properly cared for…It does, if people work at it, I’m sure.’

  ‘Who has got that much emotional energy?’ Simon retorted cynically. ‘I haven’t. You haven’t either, obviously, or you’d still be in Australia with Sheldon. I’m assuming you were the lazy one, given the particular nature of your very public break-up.’

  ‘Love didn’t come into that,’ Fee snapped, for once mercifully undistressed by the reference, too fascinated by his attitude and driven by some compulsion to try and understand it. ‘I suppose you’re so cynical because you’ve never seen anyone working at a relationship. You called my family life a horror story and my family odd, but you had all those step-parents and so-called aunts and uncles coming and going—’

  Simon’s laughter stopped her. It was genuinely amused, but there was something hard in his eyes, denial or rejection, lending them the brilliance of diamonds.

  ‘Forget it, Fee, I dealt with all that years ago—not that it required much in the way of effort. There were no villains or victims, just a lot of nice, normal people, all coming and going, as you’ve mentioned. I never expected anything else.’

  ‘So you were never disappointed,’ Fee taunted softly, furious at the way he made her feel so naively idealistic.

  ‘Don’t try to analyse me, darling,’ he advised her with idle indifference. ‘You’re sure to get it all wrong.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you flatter yourself you’re a madly complex, superior being, whereas men are actually the simpler sex, as every woman knows,’ she claimed with a swift, blistering smile.

  But she didn’t really believe there was anything simple about him, while Vance Sheldon had taught her that some men were devious and not to be trusted.

  ‘Oh, I’ve always thought of myself as fairly uncomplicated,’ Simon offered easily.

  ‘All right!’ Irritated by his lack of co-operation with her attempts to comprehend him, Fee gave it up since he so clearly didn’t want to be understood. ‘I accept it. You’re just a simple, single-minded businessman and Rhodes Properties is the only thing in the world that really means anything to you, the only lasting relationship you’ll ever have.’

  ‘Well, don’t sound so disapproving about it,’ he adjured her amusedly, but then he frowned. ‘At least I’m never bored by work.’

  After a moment she decided he wasn’t implying anything personal, and she considered his words, which had allowed her a glimpse of the isolation that his intellect must impose. Rhodes Properties probably provided him with his only real intellectual stimulation, and somehow that struck her as sad, making her wonder if he was ever consciously lonely.

  But the amused way in which he had brushed off all her attempts to understand him better deterred her from probing further. Maybe he enjoyed being misunderstood, or perhaps there was nothing there to understand. Hadn’t she always thought of him as superficial? So why this instinctive urge to look for hidden depths? He had given her no cause to believe any existed.

  Suppressing the strange fancies that had prompted her, she ventured cautiously, ‘If you’re serious about having a job for me, I do have a testimonial.’

  Miss Betancourt had insisted.

  ‘For what it’s worth, and my word is worth a lot, I’m going to give you a reference since Mr Sheldon is still refusing, and exercising your legal rights there is going to take time. I’ll make it clear that both he and I have found your work entirely satisfactory, and there’s no need to mention anything else, although I’m afraid anyone who has heard the story is bound to wonder; but it’s time you stopped blaming yourself so much. Your only fault was that you were too trusting. Finding yourself his only guest at the races should have made you suspicious; it’s what alerted the Press…But there’s no point in worrying about it now, and you can also stop worrying about the other people concerned. Mrs Sheldon isn’t nearly as shocked as you imagine, since she has never had many illusions about her husband.’

  The pen Simon removed from the pocket of the lightweight jacket he had dropped on to another chair was a ball-point, but the most expensive in a range that had left left Fee wondering, when she had once seen an advertisement, what sort of person would spend such a fortune on something so utilitarian.

  ‘A Miss Sung-Li is head of Personnel. Ring her on Monday, but not first thing, because I’ll need to have a word with her, and if she thinks you’re qualified for the job she’ll make appointments for both of us to interview you.’

  Fee regarded him levelly.

  ‘If you’re really not just being kind, because I’m Charles’s sister-in-law—’

  ‘I’m never kind,’ Simon interrupted distastefully, following it with a complicated smile.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ she conceded t
artly, accepting that her assumption had been a stupid one, and jumping slightly as he handed her the card on which he had just scribbled the name and number she would need and their fingers brushed, Simon’s warm and hard. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever done a single altruistic action in your life.’

  An amusedly reflective gleam appeared in his eyes.

  ‘Strangely enough, I used to flatter myself that I might have, once, and I’m not at all sure I won’t yet live to regret it, or else find it rebounding on me in some way.’ Then the thoughtful expression vanished as he paused, warm blue eyes glinting as they lingered on her face a moment before skimming her slender body and the length of her legs, pale because her fair skin couldn’t take much sun, but smooth and slim. ‘Why did you take up office work? You could have been a model. You’re not strictly beautiful, but then many models aren’t when you see what lies under the tricks they perform with make-up.’

  ‘And you’ve seen hundreds?’ Fee taunted.

  ‘Not so many really. I generally prefer small, curvy women myself.’

  ‘But not because they make you feel protective,’ she guessed acidly.

  ‘Hell, no,’ he confirmed, drawling slightly. ‘I like a woman who can take care of herself, stand up for herself, and the sassy little ones usually can.’

  He would. Fee supposed that was partly why he had never appealed to her personally. She knew it wasn’t fashionable, but she dreamed of the sort of man who would take care of her while refraining from the sort of babying that people like Babs and Charles offered her—not that she couldn’t look after herself generally, of course, despite the self-doubt she had suffered since misreading Vance Sheldon’s intentions.

  ‘So you’re able to feel superior without having to be protective at the same time,’ she mocked.

  ‘Everyone is the same height in bed.’ Simon was dismissive. ‘Out of it, your height would have made you ideal for ramp work, especially now that that incredible grace has replaced your clumsiness, so how come you never considered modelling?’