he had found himself surrogate parent to his two younger siblings and, from what she had gathered, had fulfilled his role through the iron rod of discipline rather than the gentle hand of love.
His past had made him the person that he was today, just as it had made his brother the person he had turned out to be.
She found that she was staring at him, mentally trying to piece him together in much the same way he had been trying to piece her together earlier on, and she only snapped back to the present when he said roughly, ‘He’s my brother. I have to look out for him.’
‘In which case, you have nothing to fear from me.’ She lowered her eyes and half smiled to herself as she played the secrets she held in her head. ‘Andy and I are simply very good friends. Two people who get along.’
‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘Why? Men and women can have very satisfying relationships that aren’t based on…’
‘Sex?’ He shot her a slow, crooked smile and she felt her breath suddenly quicken. From her previously secure vantage point, she now experienced a disconcerting slip in her mental resources. Something about his smile, the way his mouth curved when he murmured that one word, the sudden change in the tenor of his voice, made the room seem much smaller and very hot.
‘Yes. Quite.’ She cleared her throat and adopted an expression of mature concentration.
‘Even when they share the same bed?’ he enquired mildly.
For a few seconds she had to think about that one, then her face cleared. ‘Watching television in the same room. Your brother and I aren’t sleeping together, and you have a sordid mind if you can’t believe that.’
‘I prefer to call it experienced.’
‘Then I guess that we just agree to differ.’ She shrugged, tugging back the reins on her imagination, which threatened to veer off down those experienced paths to which he had alluded. Oh, yes, she had heard all about Curtis Greene’s experience. There had never been a time, she had been told by Andy one evening, when the drink had overcome his natural reserve about his brother, when Curtis had not had an adoring female at his side. For experienced male she preferred to read practised womaniser.
‘So,’ she asked into the growing silence between them, ‘how long do you plan on staying in London?’ A particularly tactless question, she realised, as soon as she had uttered it.
‘Long enough to have a word with my brother.’ He stretched out his long legs in front of him and crossed them lightly at the ankles. ‘A very serious word.’
Jade licked her lips nervously and felt a protective rush of feeling. This visit was going to shock Andy to the core. He wasn’t ready to deal with Curtis and all the demons associated with him. Not yet.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll listen to a word I tell you, but can I ask you not to be hard on Andy?’
For some reason he seemed to find the request amusing.
‘Not be hard on Andy? Since you two seem to be so touchingly close, you must know that I’ve been in charge of his welfare from the time he was eight years old and I was an old man of twenty-one?’
His eyes darkened and she caught something in there, the shadow of regret, but the moment was fleeting enough to make her doubt what she had seen. He leaned forward, his body rigid, and hit one open palm forcefully with his closed fist. The subdued violence behind the gesture made her wince. It also made her determined to fight this man all the way, if only to protect his brother.
‘Being hard was the only way to teach Andy how to cope with his wealth, how to cope with life. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a bloody tough world out there, and when our parents died, it fell to me to teach him how to cope with it.’ His eyes glittered.
‘Well, he’s not a child of eight any longer,’ Jade said steadily, ‘and maybe he’s learnt whatever lessons he needed to learn to give him the strength to go his own way.’
‘Is that the sort of claptrap psychobabble you’ve been pouring into his head? As one good friend to another? Feeding him with idiotic notions about running away from the rat race and doing his own thing with bits of clay and oil paint?’ He laughed acidly. ‘You must have thought you’d hit jackpot in my brother.’
‘I told you, I’m not interested in Andy for his money.’ She heard the trace of contempt in her voice, and knew that he had caught it as well, from his sudden stillness. ‘And I haven’t fed him with any notions of doing anything. In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s got a mind of his own!’
‘And he’s suddenly decided to veer away from his very lucrative job running the family business so that he can become a hack painter. All without any persuasive support from you, his very good and very platonic friend. Now, why do I find that so hard to believe?’
‘Because you have a suspicious nature?’
‘And, by some stunning coincidence, you too were going through the same agonies of indecision, so you decided to throw in your very good job, whatever that may be, to pursue the same ridiculous career calling. What was your job, as a matter of interest?’
She debated whether to tell him or not, and quickly came to the conclusion that the more open she was in certain areas, the sooner she would get him off her back.
‘I worked for a small computer firm,’ she said shortly. ‘I was personal assistant to the director there, but really I ran the place and was financially rewarded for it.’
‘Then why leave?’
‘Because…because I wanted a change of scenery.’
He shook his head in a gesture of irritated frustration. ‘From highly paid personal assistant to dabbling with crayons. That’s quite a change, Miss Summers. So you and Andy do what, exactly…? Sit around in the evenings, playing at being artists, which is really just another way of saying avoiding responsibility and kidding yourselves that the real world doesn’t exist because you’ve chosen to retreat from it? Or is it all just some elaborate courtship? Are you just biding your time over the coloured pencils, eyeing him hungrily, waiting to see when would be the best time to slip under the covers with him?’
Jade gave up. Curtis Greene, finding himself confronted with a situation over which he had almost no control, was responding in probably the only way he knew how. By a process of intimidation and cunning. Every word she said and every truth she uttered would be twisted into something sinister and riddled with insinuation.
She sighed and silently reflected on the future hassle of trying to find somewhere to rent.
‘Yes. You’re right. I’m a vicious, heartless gold-digger who engineered your brother into taking an interest in painting, and to further the illusion of comradeship I decided to toss my own very good job aside so that I could sit around drawing and pretending to be an artist. And, yes, it’s all an elaborate ploy because at night, over the coloured pencils, I’m really carving out a future where I become mistress of the big house and queen of the castle.
‘You’ve caught me napping, as a matter of fact. Normally I’m not dressed in an old pair of jeans and a tee shirt. Oh, no, normally I’m decked out in all my finery on the off chance that my victim might just stroll unexpectedly through the front door. Daylight never sees me without my
