Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire's Pleasure (16 page)

And, if so, under what circumstances.

For one difficult, painful, wonderful week she had felt as if it was her house, and she had allowed herself to care for it just as she cared for Felix. She had invested something of herself there as she had pottered about in that bright kitchen and torn her hands on brambles in the old walled garden.

The thought of Arabella returning as mistress of Easton was unbearable.

The only thing that was worse was the thought of her returning as mistress of Orlando.

There was what seemed to Rachel to be an entire uniformed squadron waiting to greet them on the tarmac as they pulled up alongside the small but luxurious plane. Orlando Winterton was certainly
somebody,
she realised, watching him from under lowered eyelashes as crewman after crewman saluted him. Not a flicker of emotion crossed his face. However, as the engines started and the plane began to gather speed along the runway, she noticed that his knuckles showed bone-white through his skin as his hands gripped the armrests of the cream leather seat.

‘Last night…’ She was looking straight ahead, and so missed the fleeting pained expression that crossed Orlando’s face. ‘Last night when you asked me whether I missed the piano…You knew the answer already, didn’t you? Because that’s how you feel about giving up flying?’

‘Yes.’

It was impossible to explain that feeling. He missed it viscerally. It had been so much a part of who he was, and defined the part of him that had died that day in Andrew Parkes’s office—the heroic, risk-taking, thrill-seeking part.

He closed his eyes briefly, tensing himself for the question that would inevitably follow.
Why did you give it up?

But she said simply, softly, ‘I can understand why. It must be an incredible feeling.’

Relief washed through him, but it was tinged with despair. Last night, when he’d kissed her in the corridor outside Felix’s room, he’d crossed a line. That was the moment when he’d accepted that he wanted her…not just at that moment, but for longer. For ever. But he hadn’t even told her the truth about himself yet.

He had to, of course. Soon. But…

God. How ironic. He was
afraid.
He, who had berated her from the moment they met for her own lack of courage, was frightened. And she had shown, time after time, that she was brave in ways he was only just discovering.

‘It is. There’s nothing like it,’ he said gravely.

But that wasn’t true either. Last night—with her hands in his hair, her mouth on his mouth, her legs around his waist—
that
had felt like flying, with the light coming up over the horizon and the dew forming rainbow diamonds on his wingtips. Holding her as she’d shuddered and cried out in his arms…
that
had felt like flying home into a clear pink and gold dawn.

As they inched their way through the Paris traffic she felt totally unprepared to return to reality. The world beyond the tinted glass of the car window seemed loud and aggressive, full of busy, indifferent people and glaring, garish sights and sounds. She sank back into the leather upholstery, closing her eyes and mentally searching for something to counter the assault of unfamiliarity and hostility. It was a trick she had been taught by one of her piano teachers, to calm herself down before a performance. All she had to do was pick an image and concentrate on it very hard, carefully filling in all the sensory details…

Standing holding Felix in the semi-darkness with Orlando. Close to him…looking down at Felix. Reaching out, feeling for Orlando’s hand, her skin brushing his—feeling its warmth, the reassuring heaviness and solidity of his hand, hearing the whisper of skin against skin. Breathing in…slowly, steadily…the
smell of warm, babymilk softness…and beneath it, like a haunting, bass note, Orlando’s dry, masculine scent. Lifting his hand, bringing it up to Felix’s head, raising her gaze to Orlando’s face…

He breathing quickened, and she felt her heart-rate double as her mind, too far advanced down that particular track, refused to be called to heel. But then she was aware of other things—of the car slowing, making a sweeping turn, coming to a standstill.

She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to let reality back in.

‘This is the hospital.’

The tableau of the couple with the baby in the darkened room faded, and she slowly opened her eyes.

Orlando was reaching for the door handle. She watched his long, elegant fingers deftly move along the walnut inlay of the door to locate it and, once they’d done so, hesitate. He turned his head back towards her.

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. It’s best that you go on ahead. I’ll send a message to the hotel if she’s up to seeing Felix.’

His eyes seemed very dark, opaque with emotions Rachel didn’t want to think about. Feelings that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the woman he was just about to see. There was a moment…a long, shimmering moment of unspoken possibility…when she wanted to find something to say that would sum up a fraction of what she was feeling. She didn’t blame him for going to Arabella. She knew out of the two of them the other woman had the greater claim, she had never been led to believe anything else. It was just that she would have liked, in this last few seconds before he opened the door and was swallowed up by the outside world again, to tell him how much it had meant to her, this enchanted time. How very, very much.

He turned his head, so she could see him in profile. She caught the movement of his throat as he swallowed. She bit her lip hard, knowing that if she were to speak the only words that would come out would be
I love you.

And then it was too late. He threw open the door and the world came rushing in, with a blast of sleet-edged air and a cacophony of city noise. Rachel watched him get out of the car in one lithe movement, his broad shoulders shielding her from the worst of the damp and cold for a second before he stood aside.

Her mouth opened in horror.

It was like an explosion inside her, spreading quickly outwards as the information was relayed to different parts of her body. There was a split second when it was just her eyes that registered the large poster on the building behind Orlando, advertising a concert that was taking place tomorrow night, and then the rest of her body caught up, going into full shock response as she stared at her own smiling face.

Orlando leaned back into the car—coming between her and Rachel Campion, concert pianist.

‘We need to talk,’ he said gruffly.

Rachel didn’t answer. Her mind was in uproar. Craning her head to look past him, she looked again to see if, in her shock, she had initially missed the part that said the concert was cancelled. Surely Carlos and her agent and the PR people should have publicised the fact that it wasn’t going ahead by now?

‘Rachel, please…’ Orlando’s voice was infinitely weary and seemed to come from a long way away. ‘I’m sorry to bring you all this way and abandon you like this…Look, I promise we’ll talk later.’

‘What? Oh. OK…’

Orlando’s face darkened. She sounded utterly distant, utterly preoccupied. He’d spent the entire journey feeling absolutely eaten up with remorse for his emotional cowardice, steeling himself for this moment. He’d tried to bridge the chasm that he’d created around himself—only to find that she wasn’t remotely interested in crossing it.

He straightened up and slammed the door, then waited until the car had pulled slowly away before he turned and went slowly up the steps to the hospital.

His head ached. Away from the familiarity of Easton, his reduced sight made every small thing a grinding challenge, so that just finding his way down the labyrinth of corridors towards the ward he was directed to triggered the same adrenaline surge he’d used to get during dangerous night-time search patterns over the North Sea.

He came to the end of a corridor, where it opened out into another high, elegant hallway. At the end was a desk. The nurse greeted him by name as he approached.

‘Ah…Monsieur Winterton? It’s good that you’re here. Mademoiselle de Ferrers has been asking for you.’

‘How is she?’

‘Well, physically she is improving, there is no reason why we shouldn’t discharge her in the next day or so, though mentally we are…concerned.’ Orlando detected a distinct edge of frosty disapproval in her tone. ‘She is finding it very difficult to come to terms with the fact that she will be scarred.’

Orlando felt as though an icy hand had closed around his throat. ‘Was it a car accident? Was she driving?’

The nurse had picked up a clipboard and was examining it. ‘No,
monsieur.
She had cosmetic surgery,’ she said tonelessly. ‘A breast-lift at an unregistered clinic in Switzerland. The surgeon was not aware that she had so recently had a child. It was too soon to do any kind of procedure, and unsurprisingly she suffered severe infection. She checked in here two days ago, and our doctors have done their best, but the scars may never disappear.’

The icy sensation dissolved, and was replaced by the much more familiar one of slow, burning anger. He managed a stiff smile.

‘Thank you for your help. Now—may I see her?’

What was Carlos up to?

Having delivered her to a suite the size of the average family home, the Armani porter dissolved away again. Rachel picked up Felix and looked slowly around her. The room in which she was standing was straight from a film set. Four tall sets of French windows opened out onto a wrought-iron balcony, each set framed by excessive amounts of sumptuous swagged silk. The walls were painted pale gold and inlaid with silk-damask panels, and the furniture was upholstered in the same shades of gold and ivory. The overall effect was swanky interior design magazine meets Madame Pompadour. Rachel wasn’t sure if she ought to be wearing a crinoline and a powdered wig, or designer hotpants and a feather boa.

The air was heavy with the scent of the hot-house flowers which were placed in fleshy arrangements on every polished surface. Opening a door at the far end of the room, she found herself facing an enormous bed, over which a cascade of grey and gold striped silk spilled down from an antique corona of twisted gilt leaves.

Miserably she surveyed it. It was almost indecently romantic—a bed for making joyous, decadent love in, she thought dully, for spending lazy, lust-drenched afternoons in and drinking vintage champagne…preferably from each other’s navels.

She turned away sharply as her mind veered straight back to last night, and her body obligingly provided an instant sensory replay. Darts of remembered bliss fizzed along her nerve endings as she recalled how he’d held her, running his brilliant, beautiful hands over her body, unleashing a storm of desire in her that had been almost violent in its intensity.

And the worst bit was, she couldn’t be sorry. Even knowing what she knew now, even being here, on her own in the most romantic city in the world, while he went to the bedside of the woman he loved, she couldn’t regret what they’d done.

Jiggling Felix absent-mindedly, she found herself standing in front of another closed door. She pushed it open, expecting perhaps a bathroom, and felt tears of self-pity spring to her eyes as she took in what it was.

Another bedroom, small and narrow this time, with a single bed covered in sensible blue and white check.

He’d booked a two-room suite. This must be her room.