Back in the Headlines

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘Sit down. I’m fixing you some eggs.’

  She noticed he didn’t bother asking her whether she liked eggs. ‘Where’s my phone?’ she questioned as she sat down at the table.

  ‘Eat first,’ he said, walking over and sliding a plate of scrambled eggs towards her.

  She didn’t like his autocratic attitude one bit, but the sight of the food he’d placed in front of her stopped Roxy from saying so. She must have been hungrier than she’d thought because she gave a little moan of greed and ate every scrap, followed by two slices of toast and jam and a large cup of strong black coffee. When she’d finished, she looked up to find Titus leaning against the range, watching her—still with that shuttered expression on his face.

  Suddenly the false intimacy of the scene made her feel a stupid pang of wistfulness and she wondered where that had come from. But the thoughts carried on coming, no matter how hard she tried to stop them. Was this what he did for his girlfriends? she found herself wondering. Cook them breakfast after spending the night making love to them? And would he make love as superbly as he scrambled eggs?

  You bet he would.

  ‘Better?’ he questioned laconically.

  ‘Much. Thank you. You cook a mean egg.’ She forced a smile. ‘Now, can I have my phone please?’

  ‘Of course. Your handbag’s over there, by the sofa.’

  Slowly, Roxy got up from the table, her mind racing as she tried to work out what she was going to do. Could she throw herself on the mercy of one of her old band-mates? Tell them she’d reached rock-bottom and could they please give her a bit of respite while she sorted her life out? But Justina might still be involved with that tyrant of an Italian, mightn’t she? Roxy doubted whether he’d welcome a semi-permanent house-guest which might cramp their sexual Olympics. And she hadn’t heard from Lexi in ages.

  Acutely aware of Titus Alexander’s searing gaze, she withdrew her phone from her bag with trembling fingers, but she could see instantly that the screen was completely blank. Turning her back on him, she stared unseeingly out at the wintry garden as she went through the pantomime of punching out some numbers.

  Closing her eyes, she clamped the phone to her ear, waiting for a moment or two before she started exclaiming in a bright voice, ‘Justina, hi! It’s Roxy. Yeah, yeah—I’m great. Great. Well, actually not so—’

  But at that moment the phone was plucked from her hand and when she whirled round, it was to see Titus standing holding it, a grim expression on his face as his grey eyes bored into her.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘Why are you pretending to have a conversation?’

  ‘I’m not pretending to have a conversation!’

  ‘Really? Then you must have communication skills beyond the reach of most mortals, Roxanne—since the phone battery happens to be dead!”

  Roxy had been in enough tight corners in her life to know that you couldn’t go wrong with the old truism of attack being the best form of defence. ‘And how do you know that?’ she raged. ‘Have you been rifling through my handbag while I’ve been ill?’

  ‘Believe me, sweetheart, I’ve got better things to do than go through your damned handbag,’ he swore. ‘I happen to know because just before it died, it kept ringing and ringing. I thought it might be something important—but it was just your lover trying to get hold of you.’

  ‘My … lover?’ questioned Roxy faintly.

  ‘Murray.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ she grated. ‘That he is not and never has been my lover.’

  ‘No? So how come he let you pay peanuts for your rent?’

  Roxy hesitated as she met the accusatory glitter of his eyes. ‘Because … because he was being kind to me, I suppose.’

  At this, Titus gave a cynical laugh. ‘Oh, come on, Roxanne, you’re not that naive,’ he said as he looked into her amazing blue eyes and thought how they could blind a man with their beauty. ‘Ruthless businessmen like Murray aren’t “kind” for no reason. The guy had the hots for you. And maybe you decided that humping him wasn’t too high a price to pay to live in one of the smartest areas in London—even if he did have a wife at home. You wouldn’t be the first woman to do it and you certainly won’t be the last.’

  ‘You’re disgusting!’ she spat back.

  ‘Maybe I am.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Or maybe I’m just speaking the truth and you can’t bear to hear it. Unless you’re denying that he wanted you?’

  Again, Roxy hesitated. When those steely eyes were boring into her like that, it was difficult to look away—and she got the terrifying impression that he knew exactly what the set-up had been. Besides, she wasn’t trying to impress him, was she? Who cared what Titus Alexander thought of her? It was what she thought of herself that mattered. ‘Yes, he wanted me,’ she admitted baldly.

  ‘Of course he did. Let me guess,’ he mused silkily. ‘You didn’t actually go to bed with him, but you left him dangling with the hope that one day you might?’

  Roxy flushed as his words hit home with an accuracy which made her feel uncomfortable. She had told the accountant very firmly that she didn’t date married men and that much was true. But most men had uncrushable egos, didn’t they? Perhaps he had thought that persistence might wear away her resistance and perhaps it had suited her to let him think that.

  ‘I can’t control what goes on in people’s minds,’ she retorted.

  And neither could he, thought Titus reluctantly. He couldn’t even control what was going on in his own mind. Because why the hell was he looking at her calculating little face and wishing he could wipe away her defiance with a hard and punishing kiss? What was it about bad girls like Roxanne Carmichael, which always made men hunger for them? Angrily, he swallowed down the lump which seemed to have lodged in his throat—wishing it were as easy to rid himself of the hard aching in his groin.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ he questioned unsteadily, wishing he could just wave a wand and magic her out of his life.

  His words brought with them an element of reality and feeling a bit wobbly again, Roxy quickly sat down on the sofa. ‘I haven’t decided,’ she said, aware of how ridiculous she must sound. As if she had a million choices ahead of her instead of none at all. ‘But first I need to get my phone working.’

  ‘Superior communication skills suddenly failing you, Roxanne?’ he mocked. ‘Here, give me the charger.’

  With shaky fingers she fumbled around in her handbag and handed it over to him, watching as he plugged it into the socket. She realised how shockingly easy it was to defer to him and wondered if people always did. Or did his natural dominance come as much from the power of his personality as from the title he had inherited?

  He straightened up to meet her gaze. ‘You can use my phone,’ he said.

  Realising that she had no choice, she took it—even though she hated the idea of him listening into her conversation. She punched out the number but could tell instantly from the tone of the woman who answered that things weren’t good. In fact, that was the understatement of the year. Pressing the phone tightly to her ear, she hoped that Titus wouldn’t hear the tirade of complaints which were now being launched against her. That she had let down several of their biggest clients by not bothering to show up for work.

  ‘I’ve been ill,’ she told the woman at the agency, praying that some small amount of sympathy would come floating her way. She glanced up to his grey eyes fixed on her and she felt a disconcerting shiver whispering its way up her spine. She cleared her throat and looked away from him. ‘I’ve had … pneumonia.’

  ‘Well, that’s not our responsibility, I’m afraid. You should start looking after yourself properly. Stop burning the candle at both ends,’ said the woman haughtily. ‘Decide whether you want to be a cleaner or a singer—because clearly you can’t do both. I’m sorry, Roxanne—but I can’t take the risk of employing unreliable workers. Not with the calibre of clients we have here.’

>   Perhaps if Titus hadn’t been standing there, then Roxy might have pleaded her case. Told the agency that she’d be available for any kind of work they cared to throw at her and she’d never let them down again.

  But she recognised that she might not be able to stick to such a promise because at that moment she felt so weak that she wasn’t sure she’d even be able to get up from the wretched sofa. She had no alternative but to say goodbye and terminate the connection, silently handing the phone back to Titus, who was still watching her in that curiously unsettling way. As if she were a member of some alien species who had decided to inhabit the body of a woman for the day.

  ‘That didn’t sound like a very fruitful conversation,’ he observed.

  ‘How very astute of you.’

  ‘Who was it?’ he demanded.

  She reflected that accepting help and hospitality didn’t really allow you to tell someone to mind their own business. And that it might do him good to realise how the other half lived. But there was a stupid streak of pride which made her reluctant to dispel her image of sultry songstress and confess to him the mundane truth of her existence. ‘The cleaning agency, where I work. Worked,’ she corrected hollowly.

  His dark brows arrowed together. ‘You’re a cleaner?’

  ‘A domestic facilitator, they call it nowadays. But the terminology is irrelevant, since they’ve just given me the sack.’

  ‘But you’ve just been ill,’ he objected.

  ‘Apparently, I’ve just let down two of their biggest clients.’

  ‘And can they do that—just let you go?’

  ‘Who knows? But I’m hardly in a position to be able to take Maid In Heaven to court on grounds of unfair dismissal, am I, Titus?’ She met his eyes and wondered if he could appreciate the exquisite sense of irony. ‘I’m afraid that when you’re the economic underdog, then people can behave pretty much how they please towards you.’

  Titus narrowed his eyes at the barb behind her words. Yet he could hardly chastise her agency for their cold-heartedness, when he’d behaved in a similarly ruthless manner, could he? If he hadn’t kicked her out on the street, then maybe none of this would have happened. He felt an unwilling twist of guilt. ‘Have you got relatives you can go to?’ he questioned.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘I said no,’ she snapped.

  He saw the stubborn tightening of her mouth. ‘Then what are you going to do?’

  Roxy shrugged as if she didn’t really care, reminding herself that this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. She’d learnt to face the bad times and not to let them grind her down. But it didn’t matter how much positive reinforcement she murmured to herself, that didn’t solve her immediate problem of having nowhere to live. She glanced out of the window, where the morning’s frost showed no sign of thawing.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said tonelessly as she watched a blackbird perch on the bare branch of a tree and wondered if that bird could possibly feel as lonely as she did right then.

  Titus didn’t know what made him suggest it. Whether it was the desolate way she spoke those words or whether it had more to do with the sudden tremble of her lips—an unconsciously erotic tremble, which made his heart begin to beat a little faster. Because he wanted her, he realised, his eyes reluctantly drawn to the way her sweater hugged her luscious breasts. And wanting her spelt trouble.

  Yet he was beginning to realise that he couldn’t just walk away and forget about her. He’d done that once before and look what had happened. He didn’t particularly like her—and he certainly didn’t trust her—but he could hardly kick her out on a bitterly cold winter’s day, could he?

  ‘You can come and work for me,’ he said slowly.

  Roxy blinked. ‘For you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I have an estate in the country and I’m having a party there at the end of the month. We always employ extra staff whenever there’s a big event on. I’m sure we can find space for an extra cleaner.’

  The words screamed their way into her consciousness and Roxy flinched. An extra cleaner. Was that what she had become? She looked into his proud, aristocratic features and at that moment something inside her died. Or rather, her image of herself did, because Titus Alexander clearly had no problem defining her by her humble job. From pop idol to skivvy in less than a decade.

  She winced. Well, damn him. Damn him and his privileged life—he who had probably never done a proper day’s work in his life. How she would have loved to turn around and tell him just what he could do with his lousy job, but it was a bleak day out there and she had nowhere else to go.

  And she was a survivor, wasn’t she? She’d come through far worse than this. Steeling herself against the speculative gleam in his grey eyes, she returned his cool gaze.

  ‘When do I start?’ she questioned carelessly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE vintage Bentley drove slowly through the arched stone entrance and Roxy stared at the vast, rolling parkland ahead, which spread out as far as the eye could see. The light covering of frost on the grass made the setting look like some old-fashioned and very beautiful Christmas card. In the distance she could see the pale golden blur of a building—the biggest and grandest building she had ever seen. Surely that couldn’t be his house?

  Glad to have something to focus on other than the taut and muscular thighs of the man sitting next to her, Roxy widened her eyes. ‘You must be joking,’ she breathed.

  Titus shot her a glance, noticing the way that the pale winter sunlight illuminated her dark-blonde hair. He supposed he should have been grateful that she’d slept for most of the long journey from London to Norfolk and that she hadn’t been distracting him with her flippant comments. Yet when she was sleeping, her raw sexuality seemed to ooze from every pore of her amazing body. As if silently begging him to do what nature had conditioned a man like him to do to a woman like her. Each time they’d stopped at a traffic light, he had found himself turning to study her.

  Her silky hair had been spread out over the leather headrest and her magnificent breasts had slowly risen and fallen with every breath she took. Her cushioned lips had been parted and her lashes had fanned the pale perfection of her cheeks. She’d managed to look both angelic and yet wickedly accessible—and he had been overcome by a lust so powerful that it had been as much as he could do not to have pulled her into his arms and started kissing her.

  And wouldn’t that be the worst idea in the world? To seek carnal comfort with a woman like her?

  With an effort, he returned his attention to the long drive which led up to the house.

  ‘I don’t remember making a joke,’ he said repressively.

  ‘I don’t mean a literal joke,’ said Roxy, because wasn’t it simpler to concentrate on the architectural magnificence of his home, rather than on the disapproving presence beside her? ‘I mean, you didn’t tell me that you lived in what is practically a palace! Titus, it’s absolutely massive! And surely that’s …’ Her eyes narrowed as she saw a bright gleam on the horizon which could only mean one thing. ‘That’s not the sea over there, is it?’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ he answered, his mouth hardening as he heard the avaricious excitement in her voice. ‘We have our own beach.’

  ‘Your own beach,’ she repeated and then, because she was so taken aback by the sheer scale of the place, she spoke without really thinking. ‘I wonder how much a place like this would cost on the open market?’

  ‘I hope I never have to find out,’ he snapped.

  ‘You mean you’d never sell it?’

  ‘I mean I can’t sell it, even if I wanted to.’ He nodded briefly at the gardener who was touching a deferential finger to his brow as the big Bentley drove slowly past. Titus knew that many people tried to calculate the extent of his wealth, though, unlike her, most were too polite to do it out loud. But there again—what would someone like her know of aristocratic life?

  ‘Actually, it’s not
mine to sell. I’m just the custodian who looks after it for future generations. That responsibility is the price I pay for having so many privileges.’

  She peered through the wintry light as she thought she saw a church in the distance. Surely he didn’t have his own church, as well? ‘Well, if you’re expecting me to feel any sympathy for you, then I’m afraid you’ll have a long wait. You could accommodate half of England in a place this big.’

  Titus gripped the steering wheel as he stared at the splendour of his ancestral home. At times she could be so vulgar! His attention was momentarily distracted by her crossing one slim, denim-clad leg over the other and once again he felt the potent kick of lust. Was it unconscious or deliberate—that powerful sexual allure she seemed to exude? For the first time he began to wonder how she might fit in with the rest of the staff—and whether this worldly urban singer would adapt to the isolation of his vast Norfolk estate.

  Yet, inevitably, he felt some of the tension escape from his body as he drove towards the glowing golden brickwork of Valeo Hall. He might simply be the ancient building’s temporary custodian and it might bring back bitter memories of his fractured childhood—but it was still home. Still the place where he felt most free. Where he could walk through the vast grounds of the estate and lose himself in the beauty of nature.

  ‘I’ll take you straight up to the great house,’ he said. ‘And you can get to know your way around.’

  Roxy nodded, trying to get her head around the fact that this was going to be her new place of employment. ‘How many people work here?’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘These days there’s only a skeleton staff, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You mean they’re all dead?’

  ‘That’s not even funny, Roxanne.’

  ‘Then why are you laughing?’

  Titus subdued the hint of a smile. ‘What I mean is that the aristocracy have had to make cuts, just like everyone else.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ She mimed playing a violin. ‘My heart bleeds. Couldn’t you just sell off a few thousand acres if you’re broke? By my calculation, that would still leave you with a few thousand more.’