my presumption, sir.’ She would have bowed and tugged her forelock but that would be going over the top. As it was his eyes glinted dangerously.
‘You have a devastating line in obsequiousness, Flynn. One might almost suspect it was insolence. Why have I never noticed that before, I wonder?’
Because she had never allowed herself to be so fixed in his attention before. Aghast at her foolishness, Vanessa tried to retrench.
‘I don’t mean to be—’
‘You mean you didn’t think I’d notice. Have I really been so complacent an employer?’
‘No, of course not,’ she lied weakly, and watched his thin mouth crook in a faint sneer.
‘Sycophancy, Flynn? Was that on the curriculum at that exclusive English school for butlers that you graduated, drenched with honours, from?’
This fresh evidence of the acuteness of his memory was daunting. She hugged the trailing sheets to her chest and refused to answer, realising that no answer, however cunningly phrased, would please him. He didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted a whipping-boy for his frustration. The irony was that she had richly earned the position!
‘That’s right,’ he said silkily. ‘Humour me. After all, you can afford to. You know I can’t fire you.’
‘Can’t you?’ Vanessa said, sensing an unforeseen trap in his goading.
‘Well, I could, but that would jeopardise all that I’m doing here, wouldn’t it?’
‘Would it?’ Vanessa was now bewildered.
‘You could tie me up in legal manoeuvring for years—’
‘Could I?’
Her response was a little too quick, a little too curious. His eyes narrowed. Vanessa straightened her spine and squared her shoulders, lifting her chin in a characteristic attempt to establish her physical superiority.
‘I could, couldn’t I?’ she rephrased with a suitable tinge of menace, but not all the threatening body language and fighting language at her disposal could redeem that brief and telling hesitation.
‘Could you?’
‘Yes.’ Her teeth nibbled unknowingly at her full lower lip.
‘And how, precisely, would you do it?’
She was even more at sea, the look in his blue eyes creating a turbulence that reminded her what a poor sailor she was. He looked amused and—her stomach roiled—almost compassionate!
‘Well, I...I...’
‘You don’t know, do you?’ he said gently. ‘You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.’
She lifted her chin even higher. ‘No.’ Her tone implied that neither did she care to find out.
He knew better.
‘Did you not understand Judge Seaton’s lawyer when he explained the situation to you?’ he said, still with that same, infuriating gentleness. ‘He assured me that he’d spoken to you directly after the funeral and that you’d appeared quite calm and collected.’
Vanessa frowned, trying to remember, her brows rumpling her smooth, wide forehead.
She had looked on Judge Seaton as not only a saviour but also as a man she had respected and admired and come to develop a fond affection for.
He had rescued her from the depths of misfortune and she, in turn, had travelled across the world with him, rescuing him from the inertia of his unwelcome retirement and the vicissitudes of old age and an irascible personality. Solitary by nature and never having married, when the judge had started having difficulty in getting about and suffering short memory lapses Vanessa had been the one who chivvied him out of his fits of depression and inspired him to start the book he had still been enthusiastically working on when he died—a social history of his adopted home, Whitefield House, and the surrounding Coromandel region.
His death, though not unexpected in view of his failing health, had been a shock, and at the time of the funeral Vanessa had still been numb and subconsciously hostile towards any threat of change in the haven that she had striven to create for herself at Whitefield. She had mentally switched off at any mention of an arrogantly youthful usurper who, it seemed to her, was proposing to take up his inheritance with unconscionable speed, given the fact that he had never bothered to visit his benefactor while he was alive, nor deigned to attend his funeral.
When Benedict Savage had finally made his appearance a week later he had proved totally alien to the late judge both physically and in temperament—something else that Vanessa had fiercely resented.
The fact that the hostility between them was mutual had suited her preconceptions so well that she had sought no explanation for it beyond the superficial. She was safe with male hostility. She could deal with it. It was male interest that made her nervous—self-consciously clumsy, inept and, worst of all, frighteningly vulnerable.
‘I remember him rambling on and on about the will,’ she said slowly. ‘About there being no financial provision for me or some such thing, not that I expected one—I wasn’t family and I’d only been with him two years. I don’t remember what the lawyer said exactly. I was tired; I wasn’t concentrating very well. I was the one who had to make all the arrangements for the funeral, you know. You didn’t bother to arrive until it was all over!’ There was a touch of querulousness in her voice, the echo of that three-year-old hostility.
‘I won’t apologise for that,’ he said evenly. ‘George Seaton and I were only very distantly related on my mother’s side. He may well have not known of my existence—I certainly didn’t know of his. He didn’t leave the house to me by name, he simply deeded it to his closest surviving male blood-relative. Needless to say, my mother was not amused at being told she was no more than a mere twig on the family inheritance tree.’
She hadn’t known that. It certainly threw a different light on his behaviour. And, having found his parents, on the strength of their single, fleeting visit to Whitefield, even more frigid, hypercritical and self-orientated than their son, she could just imagine Denise Savage’s classically beautiful face frozen in an expression of Victorian affront at being confronted with the evidence of her unimportance in the male scheme of things.
A ghost of a smile widened Vanessa’s mouth. ‘He was an appalling old male chauvinist pig,’ she admitted with affectionate disapproval.
‘And yet he hired a female butler barely out of her teens?’
For once Vanessa didn’t freeze up at the delicate probe.
‘I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.’ And for all the wrong reasons, extremely sordid ones. ‘His previous butler had died after being with him for about fifty years. I don’t think he could bear the idea of setting another man in his place and I suppose I appealed to his sense of chivalry...’
‘Why do you say that?’
Her mouth twisted softly awry. ‘He felt sorry for me—’ She had almost forgotten whom she was talking to but a sudden shift in his alertness, causing light to flash like a warning signal off the lenses of
