for jobs, but half-heartedly, because a part of her didn’t want to have to give up her job at Frilton Manor, or else continue at it on weekends only, when he wasn’t guaranteed to be around.
She was about to leave one evening when he appeared from the direction of the library, which doubled as his office, and called out to her. She found herself immediately smiling at him, appreciatively taking in the casual green cords and thick off-white jumper. He could wear anything, she had decided, and still look unbearably, terrifyingly handsome.
He looked at her with that lazy amusement which she knew she had glimpsed in his eyes occasionally, and which always made her tremble with awareness, and then surprised her by asking her to join him for a drink.
‘Or some coffee,’ he said, ‘if you don’t drink.’
‘Oh, I do!’ she lied, blushing. ‘I’d love a…’ she thought quickly about it’… gin and tonic.’
It was after six and already pitch black outside with the threat of snow hanging in the air, and she knew that she should leave before the threat became reality, but the temptation to linger in his company was too irresistible.
She followed him into his study, where a carved mahogany bar blended comfortably with the rest of the furniture, and looked around her guilelessly while he poured her a drink.
It was a shame, she thought, that he had caught her like this at the end of the day, when she was looking a little worse for wear, but at least she was wearing her best-fitting pair of jeans and a navy blue baggy cotton jumper which she knew was flattering with her shade of eyes and dark hair.
He handed her the drink and gestured for her to sit down, while he perched on the edge of the desk, looking down at her from what seemed a great height.
She was beginning to feel nervous and jumpy, which always seemed to be the case whenever she got too close to him, when he broke the silence by asking her whether she had found a job as yet.
Claire looked at him, startled.
‘No,’ she stammered, frowning, ‘I haven’t. I’m sorry. They’re terribly difficult to find, or at least the right ones are. Why do you ask? Do you want to get rid of me?’ She hoped, as she stared at him, that she didn’t look too pleading, but the thought of never seeing him again made her feel slightly sick.
He gave her a long, careful look. ‘Of course not. I just imagined that working here can’t exactly be riveting for a girl of your age. Not on a full-time basis, at any rate. It’s a beautiful house, full of beautiful things, but the job isn’t exactly the height of intellectual stimulation, is it? And I gather from the little I’ve seen of you that you’re not an unintelligent girl.’
She wished that he would stop calling her a girl. She was a woman, not a ten-year-old in a gingham dress with her hair in pigtails. She was twenty years old, wasn’t she? She had been to college, hadn’t she? And she was sitting here now with a glass of gin and tonic in her hand, and that was a very adult drink indeed. She took a mouthful of it and tried to control the grimace of distaste from crossing her features.
‘I enjoy working here,’ she murmured evasively, carefully putting the glass on the table next to her and then sitting on her hands because they were showing a tendency to tremble.
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Because…’ Her voice trailed off while she tried to think of some logical reason to explain why a college graduate qualified to do a completely different job should be content with a cleaning job at Frilton Manor, however splendid a house it was.
‘Because…?’ he prompted, throwing his head back to swallow from his glass.
She watched him, fascinated by the strong, brown column of his throat, the long fingers, the forearm finely sprinkled with dark hair. She was still staring at him when his eyes met hers and she started guiltily.
‘Because,’ she said, trying to remember the question.
‘Because, perhaps, it’s a challenge?’ he drawled. ‘Come on, Claire, be honest with me. Is there some other reason for your working here?’ His green eyes were sharp on her face. ‘You seem honest enough, but who knows? Perhaps there’s a boyfriend lurking on the sidelines somewhere, and the two of you are simply biding your time until you decide which bits of silver you’re going to lift.’
She jumped to her feet angrily, her cheeks flaming red.
‘How can you even think such a thing?’ she asked fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t…I couldn’t…there’s no boyfriend lurking on the sidelines! I wouldn’t dream of…’ His implications were so staggering that she was finding it difficult to articulate, and she grabbed the glass from the table, swallowing the remainder of the drink in one long gulp. There was a rush of blood to her head and for a minute she thought that she was going to faint but she gritted her teeth together and looked at him straight in the eye.
‘It was merely a passing thought,’ he said, shrugging, ‘and I’m surprised you can’t understand my line of questioning. Why would a beautiful girl like you be willing to spend pretty much all day here,’ he gestured around him, ‘when there are far more exciting things happening in the big bad world outside?’
‘I am not a girl!’ she heard herself say in a loud voice, ‘I’m a woman!’ Had he called her beautiful? He had!
There was a long silence, during which she could hear her heart thumping in her chest, even if he couldn’t. She hardly dared breathe and she had the funny feeling that he was looking at her in a completely different way. Or was it just the gin and tonic going to her head? Two glasses of cider and she felt tipsy. Perhaps after one gin and tonic she was beginning to hallucinate.
‘Yes, I suppose you are,’ he said blandly.
‘But not like the sort of women that you’re accustomed to, is that it? Is that what you’re implying?’
‘I didn’t think that I was implying anything.’
‘You haven’t answered my question. Not the first bit of it, anyway.’ These were not at all the things she wanted to say, she realised, but for some reason they were spilling out of her mouth of their own accord and the brain seemed to have very little say in the matter.
Standing up as she was, she was on an eye-to-eye level with him. He was within touching distance, she thought.
‘All right,’ he said as though the matter was really of no great importance to him anyway, ‘if you really want to know, no, you’re nothing like the sort of women that I’m accustomed to. In fact, I can’t recall meeting anyone like you in a very long time. Are you usually so forthright?’
‘I don’t believe in playing games with people.’
‘We shouldn’t be having this conversation,’ he said heavily, and it was on the tip of her tongue to ask him why not when it struck her precisely why not.
Here they were, alone, in a semi-lit room which carried its own seductive atmosphere of intimacy, having a conversation about what was basically sex. It was a dangerous situation, but it was also an exciting one, one in which Claire had never before found herself.
Her emotional life, at the age of twenty, was as pristine as the driven snow. She had had boyfriends, that was inevitable,
