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

‘OK, I’ll tell.’ She nodded her head slowly. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’ There was a pause while she struggled to find the right words. ‘Like I said, Michael wanted to go out that night and I didn’t, and it was more than about the fact we couldn’t afford it. It was a filthy night. The weather was awful…snow and ice.’

She took a slow, shuddering breath and stared at him as she forced herself to face up to the truth for the first time. ‘Just awful. I said that it wasn’t a good night to be out driving…but he wouldn’t listen…He just wouldn’t listen!’

Guy nodded as the strands of her story began to be woven together, beginning to make some sense of her guilt.

‘I told him to be sure and ring me when he got to the pub, only the phone call didn’t come, and I wasn’t sure if he was sulking because he was angry with me…and…’

‘And?’ His voice was soft. Too soft. How could you resist a voice that soft?

‘And when I rang the pub…’ Sabrina bit her lip ‘…they said they hadn’t seen him. So I thought he must have changed his mind about going there, never dreaming…never dreaming—’

‘Never dreaming that the inconceivable had happened,’ he said carefully, ‘and that he’d never be coming back again?’

His words were edged with anger, and an emotion it took her a moment or two to recognise. Pain. ‘That’s right,’ she agreed slowly.

‘So you think that you should have stopped him from driving that night?’

‘Of course I should have stopped him!’ she shot back bitterly, but Guy shook his dark head.

‘Don’t you know that we can’t govern other people’s lives?’ he demanded quietly. ‘Or decide their destiny. You could have stopped him from going, but how do you know that he wouldn’t have been hit by a bus on his way to work the next day? Maybe,’ he added, with slow deliberation, ‘maybe it was just his time.’

Her lips froze. ‘His time?’

‘To die.’ His mouth hardened.

‘Fate,’ she elaborated painfully. ‘That’s fate.’

‘Yeah, fate.’

She stared straight into the burning silver gaze, dazzled by it. ‘You honestly believe that?’ she whispered, and he gave a hollow kind of laugh.

‘Sometimes it’s easier to think of it that way.’ He shrugged. ‘Easier for the living to let go and carry on. And you have to let go, Sabrina, you have to—you must realise that. Don’t you?’

‘But I feel so guilty!’

‘Because he’s dead and you’re alive?’

His perception took her breath away. ‘Yes.’

He gave a brittle smile. ‘But nothing can change that, Sabrina. Nothing can bring him back. You owe it to yourself to let go. And to Michael.’

‘Yes.’ She sighed with a kind of surrender made all the easier by that luminous look of understanding. ‘Yes.’

He watched as the thready breath made her lips tremble, he saw her wide-eyed look of trust, and he knew what she wanted and needed more than anything else at the moment. Pure animal comfort. Even if doing it would half kill him.

He drew her into the circle of his arms and hugged her tightly against his chest, the wetness of her tears warming his skin through his shirt. Her breasts were soft and pointed and her hair was full of the scent of lilac, and it took every bit of his self-control to dampen down his instinctive desire as he smoothed the bright strands down with a distracted hand.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ he muttered, and prayed for his body not to react to her proximity. ‘I promise you.’

Through her tears it occurred to Sabrina that his kindness and understanding were just two more facets of a complex personality which perplexed and intrigued her more with each day that passed. And that simply wasn’t on the agenda. Her stay here was only temporary, she reminded herself as more tears spilled onto his shirt.

Guy let her cry until her sobs became dry and shuddering, and then he went and made her some hot chocolate, sitting in front of her like a determined nurse while she drank it.

He thought how unselfconsciously provocative her movements were. Thought that she shouldn’t look that sexy with eyes bright red from crying and hair which was matted by those tears. But sexy she looked. Extremely sexy.

‘So.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Are you going to let it go now, Sabrina?’

She couldn’t have said no, even if she’d wanted to, not with that silver gaze compelling her to start living her life again. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I am.’

‘Good.’ He smiled. ‘And are you going to let me take you out for dinner next week?’

She forced herself to remember that the question wasn’t as warmly intimate as it sounded. ‘Sure,’ she said lightly. ‘Is this the client dinner?’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘I have a Middle-Eastern potentate I’ve just bought a picture for. How would you like to have dinner with Prince Khalim?’

‘Prince Khalim?’ She gulped. ‘Just how many princes do you know, Guy?’

He smiled. ‘Khalim is my oldest friend. I’ve known him since schooldays—it was through him I got most of my contacts.’

‘But, Guy—’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he soothed. ‘You’ll like him—a little old-fashioned perhaps, but he’s a nice guy.’

FOR the next week, Sabrina was in a complete state of nerves. What on earth did you wear if you were going out for dinner with a prince?

She rang her mother and explained her predicament.

‘Good heavens,’ said her mother faintly. ‘A prince? You’ll never want to come home to Salisbury at this rate!’

Sabrina winced at how her mother had unerringly hit on the truth. She couldn’t imagine wanting to either, but that had everything to do with Guy and nothing whatsoever to do with a Middle-Eastern potentate.

‘What do I wear, Mum?’ she repeated patiently.

‘You’ve got lots of lovely clothes! Just be yourself,’ said her mother. ‘My goodness—wait until the neighbours hear about this!’

‘Well, I don’t want you to tell them,’ said Sabrina stubbornly. Because however much she wished otherwise, one day soon she was going to have to go back and live at home, and she would do herself no favours whatsoever if she arrived with Guy Masters’s magic dust still clinging to her skin.

She even tried to quiz Guy about the correct dress code one evening when he arrived home even later than usual and had been in a snarling temper. She produced a huge tureen of soup, and he stared down at the steaming bowlful and suddenly went very quiet.

‘You don’t like home-made soup?’ she asked nervously.

Guy looked up. The soup looked perfect. Damn it—she looked perfect, standing there in a pair of white jeans and a white T-shirt, with her bright hair caught back in a ponytail.

‘Haven’t had a lot of experience of it,’ he said shortly. ‘My mother used to open a can.’

Sabrina pushed some cheese across the table towards him. ‘Wasn’t she keen on cooking, then?’

It was an such an artless question that Guy found himself uncharacteristically answering it. ‘Not particularly. And we were always…moving,’ he said slowly. ‘So a lot of her time was taken up with settling into new places.’

‘You make it sound quite nomadic, Guy.’

‘Do I? I suppose it was when you compare it with living in one place all your life.’

‘Like me, you mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, you did, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said carefully, as some warning light in his eyes told her to go back to the safer subject of cooking, rather than the potential minefield of childhood.

She sawed through a crusty loaf and handed him a huge chunk of it. ‘My mother was so busy going out to work that she never had time to cook properly, except at weekends.’