chatted easily, and wrote to each other often, but his attentions no longer focused on his little sister as indulgently as they had. He had a wife now—a wife whom she had never met although the pictures of her promised someone very friendly—and a baby on the way.
‘He asked me to go back with him,’ she said suddenly, leaning a bit against the door so that she could look at Dane’s averted profile.
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘It seemed like the end of the world and beyond.’ At the time she had felt that to go that far away would be somehow tantamount to desertion. ‘Besides,’ she added, terminating the conversation because she could see it leading to another sermon on how far she had let herself go, simply because, after all these months, she still couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to do anything, however hard she tried, ‘I hate huge spiders.’
‘I suspect there’s probably more to Australia than huge spiders,’ he said drily, half smiling, and she had that unpleasant, falling feeling which she could remember as a teenager, when he had smiled at her in a way that made her feel as though he had access to all her deepest thoughts.
‘Why did you decide to go to America?’ she asked, changing the subject, and his face hardened.
‘I had my reasons,’ he said in his usual, controlled voice, but there was an edge of granite there that hadn’t been there before.
‘What reasons?’ she asked with interest, and he frowned and glanced across at her.
‘I see that tact still isn’t one of your strong points,’ he said with lazy amusement.
‘Why should you feel free to ask questions about my life and I can’t do the same about yours?’
‘Because you’re a child and children shouldn’t ask too many questions.’ He laughed but she didn’t laugh with him.
‘What you’re saying is that, since I should be indebted to you, I should just bow my head in silence and accept what the master tells me without asking anything in return? ’
‘That’s rubbish,’ he told her calmly. ‘But, if you really want to know, I went away to make my fortune.’
‘I thought that your father left you everything?’ He had drawn the lines and she knew that she was overstepping them but he was right, tact never had been one of her strong points, and besides, she had no intention of allowing him to think that she had to be subservient simply because her father had worked for his.
She was grudgingly aware that she was being slightly unfair in this generalisation, but every time she thought of him she thought of his stepmother and the blood rushed to her head with angry force.
‘He left me the estate and a fair-sized inheritance, but control of the company went to Martha.’
‘I’m surprised that she didn’t ask you to take over,’ Suzanne said. He had run it virtually single-handed for the four years before his father died.
‘Oh, there were a lot of things that Martha wanted,’ he said coolly, and this time the warning in his voice left her in no doubt that he did not intend to develop the conversation further. ‘But we don’t always get what we want in life, do we? I decided to make my own fortune in America.’
‘And you did.’
‘And,’ he said, turning to her briefly, ‘I did.’
They had been driving through a very exclusive part of London for the past few minutes. The sort of place that made a very convincing show of being in the country somewhere. Lots of trees and houses hidden from public sight by walls and hedges and long, swirling drives.
The car turned into one of the long, swirling drives and her eyes widened as she took in the proportions of the house. It was huge. A great Victorian building that had been converted into apartments.
No wonder the pitiful increase in rent with which Mrs Gentry had threatened her had seemed a paltry affair to him.
There was a security guard on the ground floor, sitting at a desk and surrounded by various strategically placed plants and a few pieces of discreet furniture here and there. It looked like someone’s lounge.
‘Are you allowed to have guests staying with you?’ she asked in a whisper as they took the lift up to his floor, and he looked at her with a mixture of amusement and irony.
‘This entire block of apartments belongs to me,’ he said. ‘An investment purchase made two weeks after I left the country.’
‘You knew you would come back?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that held no warmth, ‘I knew that I would come back. The only question was when.’
She looked at him, vaguely feeling that there was something here, something not being said, that carried a wealth of hidden meaning, but she couldn’t put her finger on it and he was not about to elucidate. He would never reveal anything unless he wanted to. It was what, she suspected, made him so formidable.
She followed him out of the lift, along the thick white carpet, and it transpired that the entire floor of the building comprised his apartment.
Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a lounge, a kitchen, all beautifully furnished, ready and waiting, she thought, for Dane Sutherland when he decided that the time was right to return.
Suzanne dropped her little battered case in the lounge and looked around her with amazement.
‘No wonder you thought that the bedsit was dingy,’ she said, turning to face him.
‘The bedsit was dingy,’ he drawled. He had removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt to the elbows so that his powerful forearms were exposed, and she ignored the sudden quickening of her pulses.
‘Well, it’s certainly an eye-opener to see how the other half lives,’ she said honestly, and he frowned with impatience.
‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said, not moving from where he was standing, tall, muscled and disturbing at the other end of the room. ‘You’re going to be living here. Your rooms will be quite separate from mine, and I shall be out of the apartment most of the time so we probably will only see one another in passing, but when we do cross paths I do not expect to be bombarded with a litany of badly veiled insults. Do you understand?’
‘There’s no need to talk to me as though I was a child,’ Suzanne said, mouth turned down.
‘Then you’ll have to get out of the habit of acting like one.’ He walked towards her, picked up her three suitcases and said, over his shoulder, ‘I’ll show you to your room.’
He’d been right about her being separate from him. Her room, which also included a bathroom and another small room off it which had been converted into a sitting room with a television, was at the opposite end of the block.
She looked around her and said, with her back to him, fingering the wonderful patchwork bedspread, which looked as though it had leapt straight out of the pages of an interior decoration magazine, ‘How much rent would you like me to pay?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ There was impatience
