Jayne Bauling - Sophisticated Seduction

Bridget was restless that night, but at least there were no tears, mainly because she was too busy resenting Nicholas to spend more than a few minutes thinking about Loris, and then only to reflect that Nicholas was even worse than he was. At least Loris had seemed nice, but Nicholas had started out being offensive, and careless of her feelings, and had kept right on the same way.

Some sound woke her early in the morning, a telephone ringing, she thought, but by the time she was sufficiently awake and orientated to know who and where she was the house was silent and she soon went back to sleep.

When she woke again, she found Sita in the kitchen.

‘I heard your shower running, so your juice and coffee are waiting for you on the veranda, Bridget,’ she told her. ‘Mr Stirling is having his out there too.’

Bridget sighed, wondering what sort of mood she would find him in today, and taking a few seconds to check that no strangely coloured or patterned underwear was showing through her thin cotton dress, which was a deep shade of cream with touches of matching embroidery, calf-length and sleeveless.

But it seemed that it was her face that won her Nicholas’s attention this morning, at least to begin with.

‘You’re one of the few women over twenty I’ve seen who looks good without a scrap of make-up,’ he observed, perhaps meaning it as’ a compliment, but it seemed more likely, considering his reputation, that it was simply habitual for him to notice how a woman looked and comment on it, especially as he went on immediately, ‘My sister rang.’

‘Oh.’ Sinking gracefully into a chair, Bridget gave him a tentative smile, her dark green eyes hopeful. ‘Did she tell you anything?’

‘She did,’ he confirmed grimly. ‘Once she’d got over her horror at finding me here. It seems you’re right. The fool really believes she has fallen in love, and that was the reason for opting out of her Indian trip and sending you in her place—although I have to wonder how much encouragement, not to mention pressure, she had from you. Either way, there’s not much I can do about it at present, as she refused to tell me where she was except that it’s somewhere in the States. She wanted to talk to you, but I told her she’d have to try again later because you were still asleep. She’d got the time-difference slightly wrong, but she was too clever to be trapped into telling me even which time-zone she’s in.’

‘You could have woken me,’ Bridget suggested, betraying a trace of anxiety. ‘She might have had something important to tell me.’

‘Then she could have told me and I’d have passed it on.’

Briefly, Nicholas examined the way she had chosen to wear her hair today, in a single plait pulled to one side and hanging over her shoulder.

‘I’m not one of your relatives. I don’t need you running my life for me.’

Where had this touchy mood suddenly sprung from, making her feel she needed to keep on the defensive or surrender her entire life and personality to his direction?

Nicholas shrugged indolently, unperturbed by her resentment, and Bridget was aware of something tightening within her, in resistance to his forceful personality. He was casually dressed and he looked what she knew him to be—a virile, powerful man accustomed to running people’s lives for them.

‘Virginia seems to think you do.’ His expression had grown inimical. ‘She asked me to… look after you.’

‘She had no right to do that!’ Bridget was indignantly resentful.

‘I can assure you I found the request as unwelcome as you do, but, as I’ve told you, I do intend keeping an eye on you—for Virginia’s sake! I’m not having you messing up her business for her when I know how much it means to her. Incidentally, she also confirmed that you have recently been disappointed in love.’

He gave a quick, sharply derisive smile as he noted how Bridget stiffened, her face paling slightly. ‘Oh, she didn’t go into any embarrassing detail, if that’s what’s worrying you. She was far too busy kidding herself, and trying to kid me, that she was doing you a favour, sending you here; I suppose it was you who planted the idea in her mind in the first place as she so obviously had doubts about it… I’ve never understood why a change of scene is supposed to be a cure for a so-called broken heart. If it’s broken, it’s broken wherever you are, and will mend in its own good time. She hasn’t really got herself convinced, though; both her doubts and her guilt came through. Hence, I imagine, the demand that I look after you. You may have used her idiocy over this man and the excuse of your own broken heart to wangle this trip for yourself, but my sister is using you equally, Bridget.’

‘The way all your family use people,’ she retorted, thinking particularly of the way Loris Stirling had referred to both her and the woman he was expecting to tire of at some stage.

‘Is there something wrong with that?’ Clearly it was all right for Nicholas to criticise his relatives, but no outsider was permitted to do so. ‘If people are stupid enough to let themselves be used?’

‘Why not take advantage?’ she supplemented it for him caustically. ‘Some people aren’t as cynical as—’

‘Some people are just too damned trusting,’ Nicholas corrected her with all the cynicism of which she had been accusing him.

‘Don’t sound so condescending about it,’ Bridget mocked, in a tone of such sizzling rage that she scarcely recognised herself. ‘Where would you be in a world of cynics? If there weren’t people who let themselves be used, you wouldn’t have half the women you’ve got in your life. And what about your success—Stirling Industries?’

Rejection made his expression remote and she felt almost as if he had pushed her away physically.

‘I would never deny the former charge—’

‘Yes, I know, and I should never have said the other bit,’ Bridget rushed in, albeit with a trace of reluctance, her sensitive conscience compelling the admission, although she hated having to back down when he was so arrogantly sure of himself. ‘Your sort of industry is boring to me, but I do read about it and listen, in case I meet someone and have to talk about it, because people feel uncomfortable if you don’t understand, and sometimes they only know one subject… And I know absolutely everyone says it’s things like drive, initiative, integrity and caring about your personnel that have made Stirling Industries so big—built it up. And that was you, wasn’t it? It was a small domestic thing before. I thought your grandfather had started it, but you said he was an engineer out here. Your dad?’

Nicholas was studying her with faint, sardonic incredulity.

‘And his younger brother,’ he added eventually. ‘Oh, they’d probably have extended their activities in time, but the two of them, my mother and aunt with them, were killed when I was eighteen, my younger cousin only eleven, and the other two somewhere in between. The four of them were all on their way to India for a holiday when it happened.’

Then he seemed to dwell on some private irony, staring down into his half-full coffee-cup for a few moments.

Bridget wanted to reach out and touch him. He was so alone, and had been alone since he was eighteen, she suddenly knew intuitively, unable to share in the grief of the other three, Virginia, Loris and Adrian, because he had had to comfort them and take control, of the family and of the business, untimely head of both. But shyness prevented her because they were strangers.

Instead, she started to say, ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t have—’

‘No, you shouldn’t have,’ Nicholas agreed with a harshness she hadn’t heard from him before, but in the next moment he had resumed the interrogative manner with which she was more familiar. ‘What are you doing today?’