Susan Napier - Savage Courtship

‘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.