they’re using their supposed careers as a means of finding themselves a meal ticket for life.’
Upstairs, Francesca, who had realised that she had left her handbag in the drawing-room, gave a smothered gasp of outrage, but it was left to Beatrice to say quietly, ‘Oliver, you’re letting your prejudices show. I’m sure Francesca doesn’t fall into either of those categories. Elliott’s quite right,’ she added lightly. ‘Even if you were to offer Francesca the job, I don’t think I could advise her to accept it. You were very hard on her this evening. It isn’t her fault she was born into a wealthy aristocratic family… nor that her fiancé jilted her practically at the altar. I admire her for what she’s trying to do. It can’t be easy for her.’
‘Why should it be?’ Francesca heard Oliver Newton reply savagely. ‘Why should life mete out to her advantages it doesn’t mete out to anyone else? So she’s been jilted. So what? Her family will find her another husband and she’ll go home and marry him as readily as she was prepared to marry the other one, and you won’t hear another word about this supposed career. Will they?’ he challenged, stepping back slightly so that he could look up the stairs.
He knew she was there. He had known it all the time… Francesca went rigid with mortification, refusing to move from where she stood in the shadow of the landing. How had he known she was there?
She heard him laugh sourly and then walk towards the front door.
By the time Beatrice and Elliott had returned from seeing him to his car, she was safely inside her bedroom with the door closed.
Never before in all her life had she come up against such a man. He was more powerful, more challenging even than her grandfather, albeit in a very different way. Her grandfather’s autocracy came from generations of ancestors who had believed in their absolute right to do as they wished because of their birth, and to ensure that the family name was upheld as a name to be revered, while Oliver Newton’s arrogance came simply from his own belief in himself. She had never come across anyone like him before, and she shivered as she undressed, remembering the dry heat of his palm against her own; the hardness of the bones beneath the flesh… the lightning sensation of power that his touch had conveyed.
As she showered she had a momentary and vivid mental image of his hands on her body, and she stood tensely where she was, riveted to the spot, snapping her eyes open to dispel the unwanted vision, ignoring the fierce spray of the shower.
How on earth had it happened, that fierce surge of awareness so completely unfamiliar to her and yet so shockingly explicit? And she didn’t even like the man.
Hurriedly she stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel, rubbing herself dry.
Forget him, she told herself, After all, it was hardly likely that she would see him again. Not if he had anything to do with it, she reflected wryly.
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