Too Scared To Love

CHAPTER TWO

ROBERTA regarded him with a trace of alarm. As far as she was concerned, being au pair to Grant Adams’s daughter in no way gave him an invisible right to quiz her on her personal life, but the look of intent on his face, inches away from hers, disturbed her.

She lowered her eyes and wished that he would remove himself to another part of the room. His daunting masculinity so close to her made her feel slightly giddy and out of control and she didn’t like it.

‘I don’t think,’ she said carefully, ‘that what goes on under this cool exterior of mine, as you put it, has anything to do with my job here. I’m being paid to look after your daughter for four weeks, and that’s precisely what I shall do. I happen to be very good at my job.’

‘I never said you weren’t.’

She could feel his breath warm on her face, and it seemed to go to her head like incense. That, coupled with the relentless, demanding glint in his eyes, made her hackles rise even further and she had to control herself against another unaccustomed surge of anger.

‘Then I don’t see that there’s anything further to discuss,’ she said evenly, raising her eyes to his.

‘You really would have made a great schoolteacher.’

‘And I resent your constant insults!’ she snapped.

‘Me? Insults? I thought that you were the one doing that.’

‘What do you mean?’ She eyed him levelly, inwardly cringing from that intangible sense of unquestioned power that radiated from him.

‘What I mean, my dear Roberta Greene, is that you feel free to make sweeping generalisations on my relationship with my daughter, but the minute I suggest that I try and discover what makes you tick, you instantly clam up. Surely you can see it from my point of view. I know nothing about you.’

‘I come with references,’ Roberta interrupted him, realising that her choice of words made her sound like some kind of prize dog proclaiming its pedigree. ‘Your mother will have copies of them all—’

‘But what do they say about you?’

‘That I’m experienced in this,’ she said evenly. ‘I’ve been an au pair now for two years. There’s not much else I can tell you, except that you must trust me with Emily.’

He stood up and walked back to the armchair by the desk, and Roberta breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t realised how much she had been affected by his proximity until she felt a swift release of tension that made her body sag.

Poor Emily, she thought sympathetically. She was probably scared stiff of her father. He certainly didn’t seem the sort who had a great deal of patience, and that was the one virtue that most adolescents needed in abundant supply.

‘I don’t suppose I have much choice, do I?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Roberta answered it nevertheless.

‘You could always ask me to return to England,’ she pointed out. ‘After all, you didn’t hesitate to do that when you thought—’

‘When I thought that you had conned your way over here on your physical similarity to my wife,’ he finished for her, and she nodded. He shrugged. ‘I know how to handle gold-diggers,’ he said abruptly. ‘It pays to be ruthless.’ The hard inflexion in his voice made her shudder.

‘I’ll bear that in mind when I’m dealing with your daughter,’ Roberta said mildly.

Her eyes met his, and for the first time he smiled, a genuine smile that lent his face such extraordinary charm that she was almost knocked for six.

‘I really would love to know what makes you tick,’ he commented lazily, and she stood up, in no way prepared to let his idle musings force her into a position of defensive anger again.

She didn’t need anyone prying into her life. Right now, it was all too sensitive a subject for that. Not that she would have been inclined to have told him anything, anyway. She was not given to sharing confidences, least of all with a man who gave off warning signals that even a deaf person would have been able to hear.

‘And I really would love to get some sleep,’ she said politely, with a cool little smile on her lips.

‘I take it that was a “hands off” remark?’ he asked with amusement. Any minute now, Roberta thought with hostility, he’ll start referring to me as quaint, or an oddity.

‘If by that you mean that I don’t intend to discuss my personal life with you, then yes, you’re absolutely right.’

She began to move towards the door when his speculative drawl stopped her in her tracks.

‘Same colour hair, same eyes, but you really are nothing like my late wife at all. Unless, of course, you’re an extremely fine actress.’

Roberta didn’t turn around. She found his words offensive, because when she thought of that woman in the portrait she thought of everything that was wild and exciting. To have the differences between them pointed out to her was tantamount to telling her that she was as dull as dishwater.

Nobody likes to think that they’re dull, do they? she told herself.

‘If I were an extremely fine actress,’ she said, staring straight ahead of her, her back to him, ‘I wouldn’t be an au pair. I’d be in the acting profession.’

‘I hope so,’ he said, conversationally enough, ‘because, as I said, I can be ruthless when it comes to gold-diggers.’

There was no answer to that one, and Roberta left the study, shutting the door quietly behind her, quickly running up the stairs until she got to her bedroom.

It was late, and she hadn’t slept for hours, what with the long flight and the inevitable waiting around at airport terminals, but she didn’t feel tired at all. Her mind felt as though it had been suddenly thrust into overdrive, and as she undressed and lay on the huge bed her thoughts flitted tantalisingly and aggravatingly back to Grant Adams. Odious man. Not only had he seen fit to insult her, but he had also seen fit to laugh at her.

She had only met a few North Americans in her life. They had been full of joie de vivre and terribly extrovert. She wasn’t like that, but her natural reserve wasn’t a matter for amusement, was it?

She had always been quite reticent. She wondered now whether that hadn’t increased over the past eight months.

She cast her mind back over everything that had happened to her recently, for the first time not feeling her stomach contract at the thoughts racing through her mind.

Her mother’s death she could face now with less of that desperate sense of loss. The pain was duller, more of a lingering sensation of sadness.

She had been very close to her mother. From as far back as she could remember they had been a twosome. Her father had died when she was only eighteen months old, and her mother had never remarried.

‘It could never be the same,’ she had once told her. ‘I loved him too much to ever give my heart to someone else. It would have seemed like a betrayal.’

So they had tackled life together, hand in hand, and when she died quite suddenly nine months ago Roberta had been shattered.

Now, looking back, she could see that Brian’s entrance into her life had come when she least needed it. She had been vulnerable, unprepared, emotionally in need of support, and he had swept through her like a whirlwind. Blond, handsome, charming, he had wooed her with flowers, surprised her when she least expected it.

Roberta stared upwards at the ceiling, allowing her mind to roam freely for the first time over her huge mistake, not trying to shut it away somewhere safe where it couldn’t touch her.

We all make mistakes, don’t we? she told herself.

How was she to know what he really was? She had had no experience of men, after all. Physically, her life had been a closed book as far as that was concerned. When he didn’t pressure her into sleeping with him, she had been relieved and delighted. It had been one more point in his favour, so his requests to borrow some money, small amounts to start with, had hardly caused a ripple.

He had told her that he was an actor, struggling to get parts.

Now, as she lay in bed, she found that she could actually think of his lies with a certain degree of resigned cynicism, instead of with that choking bitterness.

Of course he hadn’t been an actor, though he should have been one. His performance with her was deserving of an Oscar. He had softened his borrowing with little, thoughtful, romantic gestures, and like a fool she had swallowed it all hook, line and sinker.

She had let herself be lulled into a false sense of security, had even begun discussing marriage, and he had encouraged her in that. So, when he raised the subject of buying a house together, it had seemed reasonable enough to her. He had persuaded her that she could keep on her mother’s place, renting it out, as an investment, and they could use the better part of the money left to her to buy into a new property.

They would be cash buyers; they would have no problem finding somewhere. The market was depressed; they could find a bargain.

His arguments rang in her ears as though they had been spoken just yesterday instead of three months ago.

And she had fallen for them.

‘You make the cheque over to me,’ he had told her. ‘I have some money of my own in savings. I’ll make one cheque out to the solicitors. No point in creating unnecessary paperwork.’ He had worked out in detail how much money they jointly had, and his tone of authority, his tender, clucking dismissal of her shadowy doubts had persuaded her in a way that nothing else could have.

The memory of it made her flush with bitter shame. How could she have fallen for someone so obvious? But she had. Like a naïve fool, only realising that she had made a massive error of judgement when he abruptly vanished from her life. She had tried calling him, but the number had been disconnected. She had gone round to his bedsit, but he had flown the coop.

The new tenants had stared at her and shrugged their shoulders. This was London, they had said, of course we don’t know where he’s gone, we were only happy to have got the flat.

Disillusionment had given way to anger, and then to bitterness. Of course, she had eventually gone to the police, but by then she had resigned herself to the fact that she had kissed sweet goodbye to her money.

She could recall the interview with the chief inspector in minute detail, and it still had the power to make her cringe. She had known precisely what had been going through his head. Gullible dupe who has no experience of life, or of men, and gets taken in by the first clever conman who comes along and plays upon her insecurities. He had seen her as pathetic. She was convinced of it and she had looked at herself through his eyes with humiliation.

But, she now thought, didn’t every cloud have a silver lining? She thought of Grant Adams, and of that glimpse of suffocating charm that had flashed across his face. If there was one thing that Brian had done for her, it was to make her immune to men like Grant Adams.

Even before Brian, she had always been a self-contained person. Now she guarded herself and her emotions with rigid control. She might have been a fool once, but lessons were there to be learnt from. She would never be a fool again.

It was late the following morning before she woke up, after the sort of restless night that came from sleeping in different surroundings.

It was warm in the room, but as she drew back the curtains she could see the cold outside clutching at the trees and buildings.

Emily burst into the room as she was preparing to get dressed, and Roberta said automatically, ‘There’s such a thing as knocking.’

Emily’s long black hair had been dragged away from her face and was hanging down her back in a pony tail, but her face still wore that suspicious, defensive expression.

‘You work here,’ Emily replied. ‘Why do I need to knock?’

‘I wish I could follow that argument,’ Roberta replied, vanishing into the en suite bathroom to wash her face and then reappearing to apply some light make up at the dressing table.

‘Anyway, you should have been up hours ago.’

‘Should I?’ she asked drily. ‘If I had known that you were that eager for my company, I would have set my alarm clock.’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘Actually, I got to bed quite late last night. I met your father and we remained chatting for a while.’ Chatting, she thought with a silent laugh. What a way to describe that explosive encounter between them.

‘You mean he came home?’ Emily’s voice expressed a cynicism that sounded out of place in someone that young. ‘Before midnight? How good of him. Normally we cross each other in passing. He’s always on the way out somewhere.’

There was a wealth of bitterness in her voice and Roberta looked at her with surprise.

‘Shocked?’ Emily asked. ‘You wouldn’t be if you knew him. I suppose you fell for all that laid-on charm, did you? He seems to have a talent with women, not that I can understand why.’

‘That’s a bit unfair.’ Roberta shrugged herself into some clothes, making sure that she had enough underlayers to protect her from the weather outside. ‘And in answer to your question, no, I didn’t fall for all that laid-on charm.’ Not, she thought, that he had used any on her anyway, but she wasn’t going to say that.

Emily was staring at her suspiciously, as though ready to argue the point, but Roberta wasn’t having it. She switched the subject skilfully away from Grant Adams, and on to the infinitely safer topic of Toronto and what there was to see.

By the end of a very tiring day, they were at least on speaking terms, even though it was a case of treading carefully in order to avoid initiating one of Emily’s sulks. Roberta had discovered quite quickly that Emily was adept at them, although they would last only a short while, to be replaced usually by a battery of forthright questions which left Roberta feeling exhausted.

‘I thought I was direct,’ she said, as they relaxed later that afternoon in the kitchen in front of a cup of coffee, ‘but you’re leagues ahead of me.’

That extracted a grin from Emily, which vanished almost as soon as it had formed. ‘I can see why you didn’t go for Dad,’ she said. ‘He’s not into direct women. He likes them coy and brainless.’

‘Do I really?’

‘They both turned at the sound of his voice. Emily with surprise, and Roberta with an expression of amusement at his daughter’s reaction.

He walked into the kitchen, slinging his coat carelessly on to the counter and sitting down opposite them.

Roberta looked at him with detachment, thinking that he really was remarkably attractive. Last night she had been too caught up in her emotional reaction to his behaviour to have really examined him, but she could see now that he was the sort of man who had probably spent a lifetime turning heads. And, she thought, agreeing with Emily, spending his time playing with coy, brainless women. He had a lean, arrogant hardness about him that no doubt attracted hordes of them. She smiled, and he said in a cool voice, ‘What’s the joke?’

‘Joke?’ She threw him an unreadable look. ‘I was just thinking, that’s all.’

‘About Toronto? Or about the brainless women that I go for, according to my daughter?

Emily was looking between them.

‘What are you doing home so early, anyway?’ she asked, her mouth downturned as she stared at him, and he frowned.

‘I thought you might have been pleased to see me.’ There was impatience in his voice.

‘Why? You think showing up at a reasonable hour now and again helps to remind me what you look like?’

Grant frowned heavily. ‘I don’t think that remark is called for, young lady, and—’

‘And what?’ she muttered mutinously. ‘Are you going to pack me off to bed for punishment? Or tell me that I can’t have any pocket money?’ She sniggered, happily oblivious to the flush of anger that had darkened his cheeks.

‘We had a lovely day,’ Roberta said, suspecting that if she didn’t interrupt soon she would be witnessing an almighty clash.

Grant ignored her completely. He was staring at his daughter and she was staring back at him, her green eyes angry and defensive.

‘When are you going to realise, young lady, that being rude isn’t charming or endearing, it’s just aggravating and rubs people up the wrong way.’

Emily stood up, her face flushed. ‘You should know all about that!’ she shouted. ‘You specialise in it!’ With that she ran out of the room, and Roberta looked towards the door worriedly. She didn’t have a great deal of experience in dealing with adolescents, but she did know that Emily would probably lock herself in her bedroom and burst into tears.

She stood up to follow and Grant said tightly, ‘Sit down.’

‘But—’ she began, and he cut into her with a hard voice.

‘I said sit down! I didn’t come back here at this hour to be subjected to my daughter’s ill manners.’

Roberta sat back down and glared at him. ‘What did you expect? You hardly spend any time with her. You can’t think that the odd early return from work is going to fill her with delight.’

‘And I don’t need you to start preaching to me again,’ he muttered, pouring himself a cup of coffee. ‘She’ll calm down. What did you two do today, then?’

‘We went to the Eaton Centre and browsed around. And how do you know that she’ll calm down? I think you ought to go to her bedroom and talk to her.’

‘And I think you ought to stop playing at being an amateur shrink. When I need advice, I’ll consult a professional.’

Roberta looked at him, bristling, and he said with lazy amusement, ‘You’re wearing that school-ma’am look again.’

‘Because I don’t happen to agree with how you react with your daughter?’ she burst out.

Grant’s mouth tightened into a forbidding line. ‘I didn’t employ you to voice opinions. I employed you to make sure Emily behaves herself in my mother’s absence.’

‘The two go hand in hand.’ She gave him a conciliatory smile. ‘She’s unhappy, can’t you see that? She’s suffered not having a mother-figure. I’m sure most children do—’

He slammed his coffee-cup on to the table and the liquid spilled over the rim, leaving a wet patch. ‘She damn well doesn’t need a mother-figure!’ he ground out. ‘She’s already had a mother-figure, enough to last her a lifetime.’

Roberta’s eyes widened at his tone of voice. She had touched on a raw nerve here. Her mind flashed back to his reaction to her when he had spotted her physical resemblance to his wife. Was that why he filled his time with women? Because no one could ever live up to the woman he had married and loved?

What had she been like? She bit back the compulsive desire to ask, knowing that that would definitely cause a major explosion.

‘And I hope you’re not entertaining any thoughts of putting yourself in that position,’ he said tersely.

She looked at him with bewilderment. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t give me that innocent stare. You already know that my wife and you share certain physical attributes, even if they are only superficial—’

The gist of what he was saying became patently clear and Roberta felt a rush of blood to her head. ‘You may think so!’ she snapped. ‘Emily has made no mention of any similarity!’

‘Emily rarely notices anyone but herself. Subconsciously, I’m sure she’s drawn the inevitable comparisons. All I’m saying is that I hope you don’t intend to exploit that fact. I hope you don’t let it slip your mind that you’re an au pair and not a prospective mother-figure for her.’

‘Is that a warning?’

‘It’s a piece of advice. You may have come here in good faith, but now that you know the situation there’s nothing to stop you from manipulating it to your own advantage.’

‘Nothing except a few principles,’ Roberta informed him coldly. She could have laughed aloud at his train of thought if she wasn’t so damned angry at his assumption. Involvement with a man? Good grief! She had had enough of the male sex to last her a lifetime.

‘Principles can become very elusive when there’s financial gain in the offing,’ he said with infuriating calm. ‘I’ve seen it in action and, believe me, it’s not a pretty sight.’

‘Well, you can rest assured that I have no intention of doing any such thing,’ she said briefly, thankful that the hot emotion which he seemed to arouse in her had not deprived her of her power of speech. ‘I’m not after your bank balance. In fact, I don’t find you or your money the slightest bit appealing.’

Her words seemed to echo in the kitchen, and she could have kicked herself. She didn’t want to indulge in any conversation that strayed from the strictly professional subject of his daughter with this man, yet here she was, saying the first thing that came into her head.

‘Now there’s an admission,’ he drawled, his green eyes flickering with faint mockery. ‘I was wondering what sort of man appealed to you.’ The savagery had left his face completely. Now she wished heartily that it was back there because it was far easier to handle.