Savage Courtship

Vanessa was aware of Mrs Riley’s sidelong glance but refused to share her silent puzzlement at their employer’s uncharacteristic vagueness. She was too busy worrying over whether he was deliberately prolonging her agony or merely unwilling to humiliate her in front of the housekeeper.

‘Why...yes. Vanessa didn’t mention that you’d brought any guests with you this time...’ Mrs Riley was saying, a faint look of bewilderment crossing her face as she watched her employer’s eyes drop as he studied his stylishly shod feet with apparent fascination.

‘No, I didn’t. So...it’s just me, then...’ His inflexion rose slightly on the last word, just enough to suggest the possibility of a question. Nobody answered immediately and his gaze swivelled suddenly back to Vanessa, who wasn’t quite quick enough to banish her look of apprehension.

He scowled at her. ‘Can I see you for a few minutes in the library, Flynn?’ He turned on his heel and was almost out the door before he halted, looking back. ‘Incidentally, Mrs Riley, I’m really not very hungry this morning, so perhaps just some toast and tea...’

‘Oh, what a pity, Mr Savage, and I’ve just put a nice pot of porridge on the stove—’

‘Porridge?’ He jerked around, looking so shocked at the suggestion that Vanessa, already primed with nerves, gave a jittery little laugh and found herself once again impaled by the focus of his attention.

‘In the library. Now!’ For Benedict Savage the quiet hiss was the equivalent of a furious shout.

‘Yes, sir!’ Vanessa muttered to empty air, rising from her seat and unhooking the cropped navy jacket that was draped over the high back.

‘Well, I never!’ said Kate Riley, crossing her arms over her ample chest and shaking her grey head so that her corrugated perm quivered. ‘You’d have thought I was offering him arsenic. He always said he liked my porridge!’

Vanessa, shouldering into her jacket and procrastinating by squaring the cuffs and lapels, soothed her injured pride absently. ‘He’s probably just in a bad mood—’

‘Mr Savage doesn’t have moods—he’s always a perfect gentleman,’ Mrs Riley pointed out with inescapable truth. ‘He never gets out of bed on the wrong side but it certainly seems as though he did this morning...’

Vanessa murmured something indistinct in answer to the unfortunate metaphor and rushed out of the kitchen, pressing cold hands to her hot cheeks.

Calm down, calm down, she lectured herself sternly as she walked down the flag-stoned hall. If he fires you, you can charge him with sexual harassment. Or was he planning to charge her...? She almost moaned aloud at the thought, its absurdity eclipsed by her horror of scandal. Whatever happened, there would be questions asked because she couldn’t possibly continue to work at Whitefield. She would have to leave the place she had come to look on as a quiet, secure haven from the madness of the world. And what was she going to tell Richard? Oh, damn, damn, damn!

‘Well...?’ Thankfully Benedict Savage had not chosen to adopt an intimidating position of dominance behind the meticulously tidy antique desk that fronted the French windows. Instead he was standing just inside the doorway, one hand resting on a walnut shelf of the book-lined wall, fingers tapping involuntarily against the aged wood as she closed the door behind her.

‘Yes, sir?’ Vanessa stood straight and tall, shoulders squared against the imminent attack.

He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry if my early arrival has caused problems, but I just needed to get away for a space of time and Whitefield seemed the place to do it. The apartment in Auckland is too accessible and...’ he shrugged with a trace of diffidence ‘...well, I know that Mrs Riley gets in a tizz about these things... Just make sure she knows that I don’t expect everything to be as organised as usual...that I don’t want any fuss...’

Vanessa was hard put to it not to let her jaw fall open. Mr Perfection was telling her he didn’t expect perfection? He was waffling about household arrangements when the real business at hand was shrieking to be settled?

She looked at the tapping fingers. Nerves? Mr Cool was nervous?

‘So, you’ll tell her that, will you?’ His fingers suddenly stopped their fluttering with a sudden slam against the wood.

Vanessa’s eyes shot back to his face to find him watching her warily. She scrabbled for foundation on a rapidly shifting ground. He was nervous of her? The notion was mind-boggling.

‘Ah, yes, yes, of course, sir,’ she assured him hastily.

‘Right.’ He took off his spectacles, cleaned their spotless lenses with a beautifully pressed handkerchief retrieved from his hip pocket, and put them on again. ‘I didn’t bring anyone with me.’

‘So you said, sir—in the kitchen, just now,’ she added as he regarded her blankly.

‘Did I? Oh, yes, of course I did.’ He pushed off the bookcase and began to pace. ‘So...where is our other guest, I wonder?’

Vanessa stiffened. ‘If you’re suggesting—’

He jumped in, correspondingly quick to suspect. ‘Suggesting what?’

‘That I take advantage of your absences to invite people to use your house—’ she began, angry that he might be trying to make up spurious reasons for terminating her employment. If he was going to fire her for sleeping with him he was going to have to admit it!

‘No, no, nothing like that.’ His answer was as swift as it seemed genuine, and edged with irritation. ‘If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t continue to employ you, would I? I just wondered if you knew...’

‘Knew what?’ She was deeply uneasy now. Maybe she just should have opened up with an apology and explanation instead of leaving it up to him to introduce the subject. But she had never known her employer be anything but direct, sometimes brutally so.

He stopped pacing a mere stride away and turned to her, hands on his hips. This was it, the moment of truth.

Vanessa lifted her chin bravely, gratified to note that even in flat heels she topped him by at least an inch. Whatever he said, she wasn’t going to shrink into physical insignificance before him!

‘There was a woman...’

‘A woman?’ Vanessa felt herself beginning to heat up. Oh, God, was he going to try to smooth things over by explaining how last night had only been a spasm of lust and that she wasn’t to place any importance on the fact that they had slept together because there was someone else...?

He bit off something that sounded like a curse. Another first. Benedict Savage’s words were usually as cool and as measured as the rest of him, precisely weighed and placed for maximum effect with minimum effort.

‘Yes, a woman.’ His voice roughened sharply at her wide-eyed shock and he raked her with an insulting glare. ‘You do know what a woman is, don’t you, Flynn?’

Her flush deepened at his sneer and she saw his eyes flicker behind their clear lenses, his mouth compress with self-disgust. ‘I’m sorry, that was in extremely poor taste...’ His hand rasped across his beard-shaded chin as he continued rigidly, ‘I mean...last night when I came in, just before midnight...there was a woman—er—in my room...’

‘In your room?’ She couldn’t help it, and when she realised that she had once again inanely repeated his words she bit her lip but this time he ignored the provocation.

‘In bed. A blonde.’

‘A blonde?’ Vanessa retreated, startled, visions of sin dancing in her head. Had she taken part in some kind of orgy without being aware of it? Disported herself in some kind of perverted ménage à trois? Her employer had never brought a female companion with him to Whitefield before, although he had included unattached women in groups of people whom he had occasionally entertained at weekends. She had thought that his love-life must be as reserved as the rest of him, but now Vanessa found herself regarding those weekend groupings in a suspicious new light.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Her air of silent condemnation caused an explosion that was contained almost as soon as it occurred. His hard jaw clenched as he continued doggedly, ‘She had long, fluffy hair...like golden fleece.’ Benedict Savage held her mesmerised stare, faint streaks of red appearing on his high cheekbones as he went on, ‘Have you by any chance seen her around this morning? She’s not anywhere upstairs...’

Golden? Fluffy? Vanessa’s eyes widened as she resisted the urge to touch her neat French pleat to make sure that the wavy, sun-bleached ends were firmly rolled into the concealing centre.

It suddenly occurred to her that her employer had never seen her with her hair down. To him she was just Flynn, discreet, sexless, quietly running his household and overseeing the ongoing restoration of the former coaching inn while he jaunted about the world earning a luxurious living designing buildings that were the complete antithesis of Whitefield.

Vanessa, along with the other permanent staff, was merely one of the chattels that he had acquired when he had unexpectedly inherited a distant relative’s property and, after initially balking badly at the discovery that the late Judge Seaton’s butler was young and female, he had accepted the impeccable references supplied by the lawyer who had handled the judge’s estate. He had, however, made it quite clear to Vanessa privately that she was only acceptable in the position as long as the fact that she was a woman never impinged on the job. It never had.

‘Apart from being blonde, what does she look like?’ Vanessa asked in a strangled voice that tested a wildly implausible theory.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, his bluntness daring her to display any shock. ‘It was dark...I never saw her face. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what her name is; we didn’t get around to introducing ourselves! So, now that your prurient suspicions are confirmed, perhaps you wouldn’t mind answering my questions?’

His sarcasm went right over her whirling head. She was shattered by knowledge that her outrageous theory was right.

There had only been one woman in Benedict Savage’s bed last night and that woman had been Vanessa. But he didn’t know that!

‘I...but...I—’ Relief poured like adrenalin along her veins, throwing her into an even deeper moral dilemna.

As long as he never found out who the woman in his bed had been, Vanessa’s job was safe...

‘I’m not imagining things!’ he growled tersely.

Vanessa licked her lips. ‘Oh...of course not,’ she said, wondering how long her meagre acting skills would sustain her charade of ignorance.

He chose to take her placating comment as a piece of sarcasm and reiterated tightly, ‘She was here, damn it! It was late and I was thick-headed with jet-lag but I wasn’t completely detached from reality. I wasn’t hallucinating!’

‘I haven’t seen anyone except Mrs Riley this morning,’ Vanessa said, carefully avoiding any outright lie that could have unpleasant repercussions later. ‘Perhaps it was one of the resident ghosts, sir,’ she joked weakly.

‘I didn’t know we had any. Not that I believe in them, anyway.’

His scepticism was only what she expected from such a logical mind. You only had to look at the buildings he designed to see that his imagination was chained to the starkly realistic. ‘Oh, yes, people say that there are several—’

‘Female?’

She was disconcerted by his persistence over what had been a purely frivolous mention. ‘A couple of them, yes—’

‘Yellow-haired? Scantily dressed? A seductive siren luring a man towards the gates of hell and damnation?’

Oh, God, now she was certain that whatever they had got up to had been deeply sinful.

‘Er, I understand one of them was a guest murdered by one of the ostlers here at the inn—a...a dancing girl who was on her way to entertain at the goldfields at Coromandel...’

‘You mean a whore?’ He cut her gentle euphemisms to ribbons with cool contempt. ‘Well, that certainly fits.’

‘There’s no proof that she was a whore!’ Vanessa said hotly, not sure whether it was herself or the ghost she was supposed to be defending.

‘What about last night?’

‘W-what about last night?’ Vanessa quavered. Surely she hadn’t given him the idea she had expected money for whatever it was she had allowed him to do!

He looked at her impatiently, mistaking her horror for fear. ‘Forget about bloody ghosts. They don’t exist. So-called supernatural apparitions usually turn out to be the self-generated fantasies of people who are either gullible, publicity-seeking or deranged. You said you didn’t see anyone around this morning. What about last night? You were here then, weren’t you? Did you see or hear anything then?’

Oh, God... Her collar tightened again, squeezing her voice into a reedy squeak. ‘I was out. I went to dinner over in Waihi...’ No need to mention she’d been back, and tucked up cosily in his bed, by ten-thirty p.m.

‘Who with?’

In the three years she had worked for him he had never asked her a single personal question and Vanessa floundered, feeling that she was giving away a vital piece of herself with the information. ‘R-Richard—Richard Wells.’

‘The horse-breeder—from the property along the road?’ He frowned. He was obviously trying to remember his fleeting acquaintance with his nearest neighbour; he was probably also wondering what Richard saw in his sexless employee, Vanessa thought sourly, only to be proved wrong as he said sharply, ‘Not with Dane?’

Vanessa gasped. ‘Mr Judson? Of course not. As far as I know he’s at home in Auckland.’

‘Wellington, actually. So he didn’t tell you about his little arrangement...’ He resumed his pacing, looking slightly more relaxed, but Vanessa couldn’t allow her vigilance to relax correspondingly.

‘Arrangement?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He glanced out of the French doors towards the back of the house and suddenly halted with a jerk. ‘What the—? Whose car is that in the garage?’

Desperate for a change of subject, Vanessa moved up beside him to look out at the gleaming white car tucked under the open arches of what had once been the coaching-house stables. ‘Oh, that! It—’

‘What an incredibly beautiful beast of a car!’ His envious drawl cut her off, startling her with its hint of boyish eagerness. Benedict Savage, the last word in sophistication—boyish? ‘Isn’t it a—?’ He leaned closer to the glass panes. ‘Yes, I think it is...a 1935 Duesenberg convertible coupé...just like the one Clark Gable had custom-made. Who on earth...?’ He straightened, suddenly letting loose a rare laugh that sounded half annoyed, half admiring. ‘My God, I bet she arrived in it! That would just be Dane’s style. So that must mean she’s still here somewhere—’

Vanessa stared at him, confused by this added complication. ‘But...I thought it was yours.’

His head snapped sideways. ‘Mine?’ His eyebrows rose in a haughty disclaimer. ‘What on earth gave you that idea? You know very well I have the BMW.’

Yes, a precision-engineered, elegantly low-key car that had seemed perfectly suited to his introverted personality. And yet here he was, practically drooling over a flashy, red-upholstered brute whose every gleaming inch was flauntingly extrovert.

‘Well...I...it was delivered yesterday in your name, so I naturally assumed... I thought perhaps you’d bought it as an investment...’ It was the only explanation that had fitted his coolly calculating image.

‘It was delivered? By whom?’ As usual he cut swiftly to the heart of the matter.

‘Two men. Yesterday afternoon. There was a letter—I assumed from the dealer. I put it there on your desk with the car keys.’

With one last, narrow-eyed glance at the car he picked up the flat envelope and slit the sealed edge with a neatly manicured thumbnail.

What he withdrew wasn’t a letter, but a large card of some kind. He stared at the weedy-looking, spectacle-wearing nerd that Vanessa, pretending not to look but unable to restrain her curiosity, could see gracing the front, before slowly opening it and reading the contents. As Vanessa watched, the flush that had lightly streaked his skin a few minutes earlier exploded into a full-blooded, Technicolor blush. He made a strange choking sound in his throat.

Vanessa was fascinated. She had never seen him look so flustered. ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ she murmured, her determined coolness rewarded by his dazed regard.

‘Dane’s given me a car...’

‘Given you a car?’ She now understood his helpless amazement. She had known that his friend was wealthy, as were most people professionally associated with her employer, but, even as ignorant about cars as Vanessa was, she realised that the gorgeous specimen in the garage was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Dane Judson had a quirky sense of humour and a liking for extravagant surprises, but his extravagances had never been reckless.

‘For my birthday.’ He scanned the card again and corrected himself. ‘No, not given, loaned—it’s being picked up again on Monday...’

That was more like it. Quirky but grounded in economic reality!

‘It’s your birthday?’ For some reason Vanessa had never thought of her employer having birthdays like ordinary people. He had always been so remote as to be ageless, above such frivolous goings-on as birthdays...

‘Today. I’m thirty-four,’ he revealed absently, staring down at the card, reading and re-reading the writing inside as if it were printed in a foreign language that he was having difficulty translating.

‘Many happy returns,’ Vanessa murmured weakly, wishing she had some recollection of the precise nature of the gift she had rendered on the eve of his birthday.

He didn’t respond, raking a hand over his head, spiking up more of the ruffled strands.

‘My God, last night on the phone...all that time Dane was talking about lending me a car, and I thought he was talking in clever metaphors...’

He groaned and closed his appalled eyes. ‘My God, if he ever finds out what I thought I’ll never hear the end of it!’ His hand covered his mouth as he groaned again, with heartfelt disgust, and his next mutter was almost smothered. ‘I must be mad! Ghosts? I could have sworn I hadn’t imagined any of it...’

‘Why, what did you think he was giving you?’ Vanessa asked, the extreme nature of his reaction spicing her curiosity.

His hand dropped away, and the eyes that had been blue with dismay chilled to the colour of pure steel, but his complexion was still betrayingly warm. ‘None of your damned business!’

She knew then exactly what ‘arrangement’ he thought that his sly-humoured friend had made.

She pokered up immediately, forcing down a rush of humiliated fury at the thought of being used as a sexual birthday favour. At least she had the excuse of being inebriated for whatever licentiousness she might have indulged in. He had no excuse whatsoever! And he hadn’t even bothered to look at her face! Her woman’s body had been all that had mattered. Her normally placid temper simmered dangerously.

‘No, sir.’

His eyes narrowed on her, as if he sensed the insolence she so badly wanted to display, but she remained stubbornly impassive and with a shrug he picked up the car keys, tossing and catching them in a gesture that was subtly defiant. ‘I think I’ll go and check out this magnanimous gift of Dane’s.’

‘I’ll tell Mrs Riley to hold your breakfast,’ said Vanessa smoothly as she watched him open the French doors and slip outside.

She knew what he was doing and a small smile of malicious satisfaction curved along her wide mouth.

The imperturbable Benedict Savage was running away. She had witnessed the temporary disintegration of his cynical self-possession and that made him uncomfortable. He knew that she was a shrewd judge of human behaviour—it was what made her such a skilled butler, responsive to the needs of him and his guests to the extent that she seemed able to anticipate their every wish—and he had no desire to be judged on his vulnerabilities. Until now he had been serene in the knowledge that his was the dominant role in the master-servant relationship and now it had probably occurred to him that that balance of power wasn’t immutable, that the power of knowledge accumulated over time might make a servant of the master.

Good! It would serve him right to wonder how much she knew or might guess. She hoped he would relive his discomfort every time he saw her for some time to come. Why shouldn’t he suffer at least a modicum of the helpless self-consciousness that she felt in his presence?

She watched him cross the cobbled courtyard that led to the stables with a smooth, lean-hipped stride, keenly aware of a unique feeling of alienation within her own body and fiercely resenting it. Suddenly she wished that she hadn’t been too embarrassed to inspect the body she had briskly scrubbed under the shower an hour ago. Whatever had happened in his bed might have left marks, evidence that might have relieved her fears—or confirmed them—instead of leaving her in this limbo of...

Evidence?

Give that fearsomely logical brain physical evidence to work on and she wouldn’t stand a chance!

She stiffened, her heart fluttering in her chest. A fresh surge of panic galvanised her into action. She darted over to the French doors and turned the key in the lock before racing out into the hallway and up the stairs, taking them three at a time, her long legs comfortably stretching the distance.

The door to her employer’s bedroom was firmly shut but Vanessa ignored any qualms she had about invading his privacy and skidded inside.

The bed was in exactly the state that she had fervently hoped it would be—abandoned and very much unmade. Vanessa blessed the fact that Benedict Savage’s parents had raised him in a rich and rarefied environment that rendered him ignorant of the kind of basic domestic chores that ordinary mortals like Vanessa grew up performing for themselves.

She quickly ripped the top sheet off the bed, rolling it into a loose ball before dumping it on the floor and attacking the pillows, cursing their ungainly size as she struggled to remove the custom-made pillowcases. Her heart pounded as she spotted the long strands on hair that straggled across one of them. She had never realised that she moulted so much at night...or had it been because this time her head had been thrashing to and fro on the pillow in the throes of unremembered ecstasy?

Her mouth went dry at the insidious image of herself writhing beneath a sleekly tapered male body. Who would have thought that under the fashionably loose clothes a man in a sedentary occupation like architectural design would have a body so hard and compact? His skin had been glossy with health, rippling over lean, surprisingly well-developed muscles.

Furious with herself for letting her thoughts run riot, Vanessa wrenched anew at the stubborn pillowcases and shook them out vigorously before turning them inside out and throwing them on top of the sheet on the floor. She stretched across the bed and had just slipped her hand under the mattress to free the far corner of the sheet when the door jarred open, and a voice rattled chills down her spine.

‘What in the hell do you think you’re doing?’

She could feel one neatly manicured nail catch and tear against the mattress as she jerked upright and around, her sensible shoes skidding on the discarded linen, tangling her feet, so that with a cry of dismay she toppled helplessly backwards across the bed.

CHAPTER THREE

ANYONE else would have reflexively reached out and tried to prevent Vanessa’s fall, but Benedict Savage was a law unto himself. He didn’t lift a finger to save her.

He merely folded his arms across his chest and watched her bounce and come to rest before coldly rephrasing his question.

‘I asked you what you were doing in my room?’

The crisp pattern of his speech was slightly blurred by his rapid breathing. He had been running. What had occurred to her had obviously also belatedly occurred to him; he was here to attempt to sort fact from fantasy.