Sharon Kendrick - London's Eligible Bachelors - The Unlikely Mistress

‘I said that you were…’ She hesitated and now the gaze became laser-sharp, lancing through her. ‘A friend.’

His mouth twisted into a cool smile as he held the door open for her. ‘A friend?’ he mocked.

‘What should I have said, then? A lover?’

‘That certainly would have been more accurate, wouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t think so, Guy. It’s in the past tense now.’

She slid her legs into the car. Actually, she had wanted to say ‘acquaintance’, because that had seemed more accurate than ‘friend’, though it hadn’t really seemed appropriate either—not in view of what had happened. ‘Acquaintance’ implied that you didn’t know somebody terribly well, and yet she knew Guy Masters exceedingly well. Sabrina swallowed. In certain respects, anyway.

She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead while he drove into the city and parked. And in the dim, ugly light of the concrete car park he looked down at her.

‘You haven’t asked me why I’m here,’ he said suddenly.

‘Maybe I’m afraid of what your answer will be.’ She lifted her shoulders a little. ‘Why are you here?’

‘That’s just it.’ He gave a short laugh and shook his head as he locked the car doors. ‘I don’t know!’

With a chill wind blowing in their faces, they walked right into the centre of the city, with the cathedral spire dominating the skyline and drawing them in like a magnet.

‘Want to go inside?’ she asked softly.

He glittered her a dark smile. ‘You know I do.’

Yes, she had known that, just as she instinctively knew that he didn’t want a guided tour, not today. The stiff set of his shoulders said, Stay away, quite clearly.

So she walked around the huge empty cathedral with him, quickly turning away when he paused to stare up at the altar and an indescribable sadness seemed to harden his beautiful face into stone.

And that was grief, she recognised painfully, a grief too bitter to intrude into.

Outside, the wind whipped her hair into ribbons which curled over her cheeks and Guy found his fingers itching to brush them away.

‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said abruptly.

She felt the sinking sensation of disappointment. ‘OK,’ she agreed.

But as he drew up at the end of her street he made no move, taking the key out of the ignition and turning to look at her.

‘So what happened?’ he asked quietly. ‘To Michael?’ he persisted softly. ‘How did he die?’

There was silence.

‘It was a car crash,’ she said eventually. ‘He wanted to go out for the evening, and I didn’t. We were supposed to be saving up. He tried to change my mind, but I wouldn’t. He…’ This bit was hard, but she forced herself to continue. ‘He said that I was a control freak.’

His eyes narrowed with interest. ‘A control freak?’ he echoed softly. ‘Is that so?’

She supposed that he didn’t believe her, and how could she blame him? She hadn’t exactly behaved like that around him, had she? ‘Well, that’s the most peculiar thing—I do like to be in control, yes. Normally.’

‘And so do I,’ he said, his voice as bitter as the recrimination in his eyes. ‘Perhaps we just bring out the worst in each other.’

And the best, she thought suddenly. The very best.

‘We had a row,’ she remembered, her voice slowing painfully. ‘A blazing row. And Michael got angry and he stormed out, and…and…that’s when he crashed. He was killed instantly.’

Guy nodded, his grey eyes narrowing perceptively. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said slowly. ‘So you carry all the guilt, as well as the grief, do you, Sabrina?’

‘If only I hadn’t been so rigid,’ she said bitterly. ‘If I’d gone with him then it might not have happened.’

‘And it just might. That’s a pretty heavy burden to carry, you know, Sabrina. What with that and our little fling you could soon find that feeling guilty becomes too much of a habit.’

She unclipped her seat belt angrily. ‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to—’

The truth?’ he drawled, and something in the way he said it stopped her in her tracks.

‘Do you think I feel good about myself?’ she demanded. ‘Letting a man who was virtually a stranger make love to me, and so soon—’

And so thoroughly, he thought longingly. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he interrupted coolly. ‘I thought we’d already done the regret trip, Sabrina.’

‘We?’ she queried. ‘You mean you feel bad about what happened, too?’

‘What do you think?’

Sabrina looked down at her lap. So now she knew.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she realised aloud, but he shook his head.

‘Oh, yes, you do,’ he said softly. ‘You haven’t seen my flat, or met my family, or seen where I work—but none of that is important. You’ve seen me at my most—’ He bit the word out as if he didn’t like it very much. ‘Exposed.’

‘Like every woman you’ve been to bed with, you mean?’

He shook his head. ‘That night was something outside my experience. Like you, Sabrina, I like to be in control—and on that occasion I most definitely wasn’t.’

‘Guy,’ she said suddenly, and something in the way she said it made his eyes narrow.

‘What?’

‘Who were you thinking about—back there in the cathedral?’

He stilled. Usually he would have blanked such an intrusive question, but hadn’t he just been asking her questions just like that?

‘I was thinking about my father,’ he said slowly, feeling her suck the admission from him. ‘He died a long time ago,’ he said, and then his face hardened. ‘But we’re not here to talk about me, are we?’

‘Apparently not.’ She shrugged listlessly.

‘What you need to face up to now is that it happened! Everything. Michael died and we made love all night long, and however much you might want to unwish that—you can’t. Fact. End of story. The important question is where do you go from here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted brokenly.

His mouth tightened as he saw the dark shadows thrown onto her pale skin by her sharpened cheekbones. ‘I’m taking you out to lunch,’ he said grimly.

She shook her head, more tempted than she should have been. ‘I can’t. I usually have lunch with my mother on Sundays.’

‘Then bring her along.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Why not? She eats lunch, doesn’t she?’

Sabrina nodded, surprised and pleased. Michael wouldn’t have dreamed of issuing such an invitation—he’d seen parents as nothing but authority figures, just hell-bent on stopping you enjoying yourself. ‘I’m sure she’d be delighted,’ she said truthfully.

‘Then let’s go and find her,’ he said, still in that same grim voice.

Sabrina’s mother was as pleased by the invitation as her daughter had anticipated, especially when Guy chose a restaurant on the very edge of the city, one which neither of the two women had ever visited before.

‘Oh, we couldn’t possibly—it’s much too expensive!’ protested Mrs Cooper.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Guy patiently.

‘And we’ll never get a table,’ put in Sabrina.

The grey eyes glittered. ‘Want to bet?’

And of course he got a table—how could she have ever doubted for a moment that he wouldn’t? Men like Guy Masters always got tables.

Sabrina tried very hard to eat her shrimp salad and lobster with some element of appetite, but it was unbelievably difficult to concentrate on the food when there was such a distraction on the other side of the table.

Her eyes kept straying to the dark gleam of Guy’s hair as he sat and chatted to her mother. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone and she could just see the faint shadowing where the dark hair began.