Kate Proctor - Bittersweet Yesterdays

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

‘YOU’RE joking, of course! Me? Your secretary?’ Lucy Preston flashed her stepbrother a look of horrified defiance across the huge, leather-topped desk separating them—a look completely wasted, it infuriated her to find, on Mark Waterford, who, having delivered his tersely worded bombshell, had turned his attention to one of the telephones beside him and began dialling a number.

‘Yes, you—my secretary,’ he snapped. ‘And I wasn’t asking your opinion, I was simply telling you that’s to be your position for the time being.’ With barely a pause, he launched into a rapid flow of French as his call connected, leaving Lucy leaning back heavily in her chair, her teeth almost grinding with fury.

She was twenty-three years old, she fumed to herself—not the accident-prone fifteen-year-old who had been abandoned to Mark Waterford’s despotic—not to mention vociferously reluctant—mercies virtually from the day her mother had married his father, James Waterford. The James Waterford, she reminded herself acerbically, of the fabled Waterford Consortium.

Lucy glowered across the desk at the man on the telephone. At fifteen she had been smitten by the most devastating of infatuations for her then twenty-two-year-old stepbrother—with his careless sophistication and rakish good looks he had seemed like the embodiment of her every romantic dream.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as they moved from the glossy dark thickness of his hair to the almost chiselled perfection of his features. She frowned with the effort of trying to pinpoint exactly what it was about him that drew women to him in their droves. Perhaps it was that intriguing blend of harshness and sensuality that was there, not only in his extraordinarily good looks but also in his personality. Or perhaps they were attracted by the broad streak of tyranny in him, to which she had been subjected, on and off, for the past eight years, she mused scathingly; if that was the case, they should all be certified, she decided, tensing perceptibly as he terminated the call.

Mark Waterford rose to his feet and proceeded to stretch. He was a tall man, well over six feet, and there wasn’t a square ounce of flesh on his magnificently proportioned body. He lowered his arms when he had finished stretching, his powerful shoulders flexing beneath the dazzling white of his shirt, then he returned to his seat. He gazed across at the slim figure of his stepsister, a dismissive impatience in the cold blue of his eyes.

‘Well, don’t lounge around here looking as though you’re about to doze off,’ he snapped. ‘I suggest you get your bits and pieces moved into my reception office.’

Lucy, who had been doing some rapid mental arithmetic and had come up with answers she found depressing, glowered over at him while biting back her inexpressible views as to what he and the entire Waterford Consortium could do regarding what she considered her enforced connections with them.

‘It’s hardly likely to do much for your image,’ she stalled, ‘promoting the typing pool’s equivalent of the village idiot to your secretary.’

‘It so happens that I’ve decided it’s high time something was done about that village idiot routine of yours,’ he retorted coldly. ‘And it’s a pose you’ll find yourself dropping pretty damn quickly around me, I can assure you.’

‘Oh, I see,’ gushed Lucy, glaring balefully at him. ‘You’ve decided to have another bash at furthering my education, have you?’

He tilted his large frame back in the leather swivel chair as he gave her a look of fastidious forbearance with which she was all too familiar.

‘Your education—or, to be more precise, your appalling lack of it—is and never has been of the slightest interest to me,’ he informed her with exaggerated patience. ‘But the unfortunate fact that you happen to be a peripheral member of my family—’

‘I’m not a member of your precious family!’ exploded Lucy. ‘The fact that my mother is married to your father has nothing to do with me! And another thing,’ she continued, every single one of her pent-up frustrations clamouring to have a say, ‘unlike you, I happened to have a completely open mind about their marriage at the time—I could hardly have been expected to foresee that my mother would lose her reason and waltz off and leave me at your mercy. I’d have been better off if she’d dumped me on the streets!’

‘Here we go again,’ he groaned, rolling his eyes in disbelief. ‘You’re like a stuck record. Damn it, on the streets is probably where you’d have ended up if it hadn’t been for my father!’ His eyes blazed their fury across the desk at her. ‘Your mother was up to her eyeballs in debt when she married him—’

‘You’re the one like a stuck record,’ Lucy practically screamed at him. ‘She didn’t marry him for his money! For heaven’s sake, how much convincing do you need? They’ve been happily married for eight years now and you still accuse—’

‘I’m accusing no one of anything,’ he cut in coldly. ‘I was merely pointing out the facts. And another fact is that I wouldn’t have been left here with you virtually on my hands if you’d behaved like any normal child and gone with them to the States as they wanted—so don’t give me any more of your sanctimonious hogwash about how open-minded you were about them marrying!’

‘I was fifteen , for heaven’s sake!’ shrieked Lucy indignantly. ‘It was only four years since my own father had died...the last thing I wanted was to be uprooted from England and all my friends.’

‘And how did you behave when you got your own way?’ he demanded witheringly.

‘I didn’t get my own way,’ she protested angrily, wondering why she had even bothered—no one had ever attempted to look at her turbulent teenage years from her point of view and Mark was the last person to do so now. ‘I was dragged from the school I knew and loved, and from all my friends, and dumped in a snooty boarding-school where I was a complete misfit!’

‘Damn it, how else could they have left you in England without sending you to boarding-school?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘And the fact that you couldn’t stand the place was hardly a reason for attempting to burn it to the ground.’

Lucy gritted her teeth and said nothing—what was the point in saying anything now when it had been her own obstinate pride that had condemned her all those years ago?

When Mark had been summoned to the school from his studies at Cambridge it had been impossible for her to judge which had hurt her most: the object of her secret adoration’s arriving with a sultry blonde in tow, or the crushing words with which he had greeted her.

‘This is all I need—you taking up arson!’

In her hurt confusion she had been unable to utter a single word. The fury that had erupted in him as he had taken her silence as total confirmation of her guilt had spawned a brainstorm of furious indignation in her which had eventually resulted in her screaming at him that she would make sure the place burned to a cinder if she had to remain there. Her immediate expulsion had removed any likelihood of her actually carrying out that mindless threat—but what had hurt her even more deeply was that her own mother, loving and concerned though she had been, had never once appeared to question her guilt either.