‘What frame of mind was that?’ Georgie asked weakly. Like a moth drawn to an open flame, she felt compelled to learn all the details that would make what she had to do all the more painful.
‘Happy? Optimistic? Girlishly excited? Are you getting the picture here?’
‘Loud and clear,’ she said gloomily. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything to her tomorrow. Didi will understand. In fact, she’ll probably be touched that I cared enough to think about embarking on such a crazy charade.’ Either that or she would be bitterly disappointed, but Georgie wasn’t going to contemplate that outcome.
Pierre cursed under his breath and sprang to his feet. ‘How the hell could you put me in this position?’ He began pacing the kitchen, pausing now and again to glower at some innocuous gadget before transferring his attention back to her.
‘I’m sorry. How many more times do you want me to say that? Maybe you want me to write it out a hundred times as punishment?’ Georgie stood up. ‘I should be getting off to bed now. Tomorrow looks like it’s going to be a marathon day.’
‘Sit back down!’
‘What for?’ She placed her hands squarely on her hips and glared at him. For once she wished that she were a strapping Amazon of a woman, someone who could look at him on eye level and impart some authority, instead of a slip of a girl, five feet four and boyishly built. He absolutely towered over her, both physically and mentally.
‘This conversation isn’t over!’
‘Well, I don’t see where else it can go, Pierre! I messed up. You’ve told me that I’ve messed up. I shall have to go and clean up the mess I made. How much more simple can it get?’
‘I went along with the pretence,’ he said darkly, and Georgie looked at him in startled disbelief. Her mouth fell open.
She sat back down and watched as he dragged a stool over and swung it round so that he could sit on it, resting his arms on the wooden, slatted back.
‘Why?’ she asked faintly. ‘You spent the past few hours listing all the reasons why you refused to have anything to do with my plan…why on earth would you change your mind at the last minute?’
‘For a start, I wasn’t allowed to draw breath. I haven’t heard my mother that animated since…my father was alive.’ He ran his fingers through his hair, a restless gesture of baffled frustration. ‘You must have done a damned convincing job on blurring over the edges of your little piece of fiction. Didi was thrillingly convinced that we truly had been conducting a secret affair, although I can’t understand how she could have been so easily taken in. When did she think we had been meeting up? Did it not occur to her that she would have seen considerably more of me over the past few months if I had been pursuing you?’
Georgie was still grappling with the fact that he was prepared to go along with her idea. Now, of course, she was beginning to have second thoughts.
She hadn’t remembered him having such a powerful effect on her. How was she supposed to be conducting a relationship with a man who could knock what remained of her common sense from her in the space of five seconds? Would it be possible to mention his name to Didi with a dreamy look in her eyes when her teeth were grinding together in frustration at his overbearing, arrogant personality?
‘Did you put that to her?’ Georgie asked and Pierre shook his head dazedly.
‘I intended to,’ he admitted, ‘but it was a bit like being in the path of a bulldozer.’
‘So what happens from here?’ Georgie was entertaining the idea that they could conduct this mysterious yet impassioned affair without actually ever being seen in the same place at the same time. It would be a lot easier to look dreamy eyed about him if he weren’t physically around, getting under her skin.
‘I guess,’ she said, staring off into the distance and thinking aloud, ‘I could chat about you with Didi, giggle over a few girlish tales, disappear on the occasional weekend…I know it sounds deceitful…’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Georgie. I still don’t approve of what you did and it is deceitful. On every level. You made me an accomplice to your scheme—’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call it a scheme.’
‘Too close to the knuckle for your liking?’ He stood up and began making himself a cup of coffee while Georgie watched him with a slight frown. ‘You led an old woman to believe a lie. In fact, worse than a lie because the idea is so utterly improbable.’
‘For the best intentions!’
‘Good intentions.’ He snorted scornfully. ‘The road to hell is paved with them. But that’s as may be. The fact is she believes the fiction and palming her off with girlish tales isn’t going to work.’
‘Why not? Didi just needs a pick-me-up. I know it’s all a charade, but it will get her out of the black hole and that’s all that counts.’
‘The means justifies the ends?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, we won’t go into the sheer naïvety of that concept. The fact is, Didi expects more that just vague reports from you about secret assignations Heaven only knows where. Service stations on a motorway somewhere, I dare say. She insists that I come down for a long weekend…something about doing some Christmas shopping for you…’
Georgie blanched and he noticed her expression of dismay with a cynical acknowledgment of what was going through her head. Quite frankly, it was typical of her. She had embarked on something for the best possible, if totally misguided, reasons, and now her plan had taken on a life of its own and was beginning to drag her along in its unbridled wake.
‘Come down?’
‘That’s right. And furthermore, she won’t be fobbed off with vague, agreeable noises. In fact, this was the most insistent I have ever known her to be with me.’
‘I can imagine.’ Didi, whose own life had been vastly different from Pierre’s, was in awe of her son’s giddy and meteoric rise through the world of high finance, something about which she had virtually zero interest or understanding. She was also well aware of his deep seated disapproval of what he considered his parents’ eccentric approach to money. Those two things combined had always meant that she tiptoed around him, solicitous but never quite relaxed enough for her to make demands.
‘I won’t bother to ask you what you mean by that. Suffice to say that my attempts to assure her that work is always at its most frantic in the time leading up to Christmas were ignored. In fact—’ he had been vaguely surprised and amused at this ‘—I believe she told me at one point to shut up and do as I was told.’
‘Oh, dear. That must have been a first for you.’
Pierre picked up the sarcasm in her voice, but when he looked at her her green eyes were wide and innocent and her expression oozed sympathy.
‘The upshot is that a weekend is on the cards and you two, I gather, will be sharing secrets as you prepare a hot meal for the weary traveller when he arrives.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Beginning to see the downsides to your brilliant scheme? Oh, sorry. Forgot you don’t appreciate me referring to your idea as a scheme. Rubs in the deceptive element a little too strongly for your liking.’
‘Well, it’s a good sign that Didi’s actually taking an interest in cooking,’ Georgie said defensively. ‘Do you remember what a fantastic cook she used to be?’
‘Difficult for me to get a measure of that when I was at a boarding school,’ Pierre said without any inflexion in his voice. ‘At any rate, we’re going to have to at least tally our stories.’
‘I’m beginning to hate this,’ she said miserably. ‘It seemed just such an easy thing to say at the time. It was even kind of fun embellishing it! I never thought…tallying stories…I feel like a liar.’
‘You are a liar. Worse, one who’s prepared to drag other people into your lies…never mind there’s already a woman in my life.’
‘Sorry. And I’m sorry you cut short your evening because I landed on your doorstep.’
Pierre nodded curtly, although he was well aware that there had been no need
to cut short anything. Jennifer, unwinding after a gruelling fortnight working on a deal that had been in the financial section of the newspapers off and on over the past month, had been prepared to enjoy the evening.
He, on the other hand, had found his mind drifting off to a certain slightly built, unruly, scatterbrained blonde waiting back at his house. He had barely been able to concentrate on a word Jennifer had been saying, even though some of the points she had been making about the intricate tax clauses she had had to revise had been quite interesting and pertinent to something he himself was currently working on. In fact, he had found his attention wandering to such an extent that he had finally succumbed and given up on the evening. To be resumed, he supposed, at a later date, when diaries had been consulted and schedules worked around.
‘There was no need for you to feel guilty about leaving me here on my own,’ she pressed, and Pierre let out a roar of laughter.
‘Guilty? Me? For leaving you here on your own? Why should I feel guilty for leaving you here? For a start, you shouldn’t have been here in the first place and, secondly, you could probably bludgeon an intruder to death with your line of small talk.’
‘That’s not very nice,’ Georgie said, stung.
‘No, it’s not and I apologise. Unreservedly.’
‘And I can tell you really mean that,’ she told him coldly. ‘So you want our stories to tally.’
‘If we find ourselves in this fictional world of yours, then we might as well make it as plausible as possible. When exactly did our so called relationship start?’
‘Some time ago. I may have mentioned six to eight months.’
‘And tell me how it all happened. I’m keen to hear where your inventive mind took you.’
‘To a fish restaurant in London the last time I was up.’
‘You were up in London.’
‘No, but I might have been and, if I had been, I might possibly have phoned you to see whether you wanted to go out for a drink.’
‘Even though every time we have met in the past, we have ended up arguing over something or other?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Do you have to object to everything I say? Yes, we met for dinner! I had the…the cod and you had the tuna!’
‘And after our suitably healthy meal…we repaired back to my place for some satisfying and frantic sex?’
Georgie went bright red. She actually thought that she could hear the blood slowly pumping through her veins and her skin went hot and tingly.
He sat there and his presence seemed to fill the kitchen, overwhelming her ability to think clearly.
Away from the familiar social situations in which they had met over the years, and stripped of the usual chaperons of mutual friends and family, she felt suddenly and agonisingly aware of herself as a woman, one he found at best amusing but not in a very funny way and, at worst, downright disagreeable.
And wasn’t she living down to his every low expectation with her bizarre mode of clothing? Would any of his super-efficient girlfriends have undertaken a journey without packing a just-in-case change of clothing? Thereby finding herself at the mercy of a wardrobe several sizes too big for her? Guaranteed to make her look utterly ridiculous? No, no and no in answer to all three.
‘I really haven’t thought about the nuts and bolts in too much detail,’ she said loftily. ‘And I don’t expect Didi will be asking prying questions about…about…anyway, we can just gloss over the exact times and dates we supposedly met up afterwards.’
‘Why did I never come to see you in Devon?’
‘Because you’re incredibly selfish,’ Georgie said waspishly, ‘and that, I think, she would believe!’
Pierre leaned towards her and said softly, ‘Stop right there, Georgie. I am doing you a favour, helping you out of the mess you’ve got yourself into. Yes, maybe it will do Didi some good, maybe it will give her something to look forward to, but I didn’t have to do this. My life was going in a perfectly well-ordered direction without your meddling. So I advise you very strongly to keep that temper of yours in check!’
‘Oh, very well,’ Georgie mumbled, relieved when he drew back and gave her the chance to breathe a little easier.
‘And as soon as Didi is back to her normal self, we tell her that things haven’t worked out between us, got it? I’m not in this for the long haul.’
‘Nor am I!’ Her green eyes flashed, then she remembered the ‘keeping the temper in check’ warning and subsided a little. ‘Will you tell your girlfriend?’ she asked curiously and Pierre shrugged.
‘No need.’
‘No need?’
‘Ignorance is bliss. Have you never heard that saying?’
‘Not when it pertains to something like this.’
‘At any rate, she is not a vital part of my life. We see each other now and again. Enjoy each other. We both of us lead extremely busy lives, too busy to include a time consuming relationship.’
‘Oh.’
For some reason her dumbfounded acceptance of this explanation was more annoying than if she had launched into one of her famous ‘speak without thinking’ monologues.
‘You have a problem with that?’ he asked irritably and Georgie, abiding by rules of detachment, hastened to assure him that she didn’t, not at all.
‘And I take it that there’s no boyfriend lurking in the wings to clutter your little game plan?’ His eyes sharpened on her because, to the best of his knowledge, she had never had a boyfriend, although, thinking about it, who was he to say? Recently he had seen very little of her on his trips to Devon, which, he reluctantly acknowledged, were few and far between.
‘Not at the moment, no.’
‘Has there ever been one?’
Georgie looked at him coldly, but something in her stirred with an odd mixture of hurt and resentment. She knew exactly what sort of women Pierre found attractive, just as she knew that, to him, she was little more than an overgrown tomboy. When he had been making his ambitious plans to leave Devon and make his mark in the city, she had been climbing trees and foraging the beach for driftwood, and later, when time had moved on and she no longer climbed trees, she had branched out in an even more incomprehensible way. Teaching had allowed her to avoid the boring uniform of the office bound woman. She wore trousers and flowing, comfortable clothes and did all the things he himself would never have deigned to do. She had always called it ‘having fun’ although, from what he had implied today, he too had fun in a completely different way.
‘What do you think?’ she asked, trying to inject a note of amusement in her voice although, to her own ears, she sounded sharp and offended.
‘No idea.’ He gave her a leisurely head-to-toe look that made her stomach do a little uncomfortable flip. ‘I somehow never associated you with a raging sex life.’
‘I don’t conduct myself like that!’
‘Like what?’ Pierre found himself oddly interested in her vehement protest and, from nowhere, he recalled what he had thought for those first few seconds when he had seen her wearing his clothes. She was small and slender and the clothes drowned her, but she looked sexy for that. Something about that slightly dishevelled look, as if life was constantly taking her by surprise and delighting her.
‘I don’t do casual relationships for the sex, Pierre.’
‘I thought all twenty-somethings did, or doesn’t it work that way in Devon?’
‘People in Devon are exactly the same as people anywhere else! There’s no need to talk about us as if we evolved from another planet!’ She felt herself building up to an explosion when she noticed that he was trying hard not to laugh. ‘Very funny, Pierre,’ she said sourly.
‘You were saying…that you didn’t believe in sex before marriage…’
‘I never said any such thing and you know it!’ She met those brilliant blue eyes and her stomach did another flip. ‘I just don’t have relationships the way you do. I don’t go out with people because I need a bed partner ever so often. Anyway, whether I’
ve had boyfriends or not is none of your business.’
‘Oh, but it is…considering we’re now an item! Surely I’m entitled to know about your past?’
Georgie was beginning to harbour regrets about her impulsive decision to involve him in a phony relationship. She had pigeon holed him as a good looking but boring man whose only concern was the business of making money. Okay, so maybe his only concern was the business of making money, but she was beginning to have glimpses of a far more complex individual than she had given him credit for.
‘No, you’re not,’ she snapped. ‘Although, and I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I have had several exciting relationships with some very interesting men.’
‘Obviously not exciting enough to have held your attention in the long term.’
‘So which weekend exactly do you have in mind to come to Devon?’ Georgie, unsettled by his prodding, chose to change the subject completely. ‘You mentioned a long weekend, but I guess your work commitments wouldn’t allow that.’
‘Do you mean you hope my work commitment wouldn’t allow it?’
‘I meant that if you can’t find time to have a relationship with a woman, then how can you suddenly find time to have a mini-break in Devon?’
‘Did I have a choice? You can’t have really expected us to have a long-distance relationship until such time as Didi declared herself cured of her depression, did you?’
‘I feel awful that you’re deceiving your girlfriend.’
‘Well, you should have contemplated that possibility before you embarked on your bright idea, and, anyway, isn’t it a tad hypocritical to talk to me about feeling guilty about Jennifer when you’re happy to string Didi along?’
Georgie was silenced by that obvious truth, which didn’t mean that she didn’t give him a mutinous glare by way of response.
Bedded at the Billionaire's Convenience Page 5
