Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire's Pleasure (5 page)

Where a glance could make you tremble—not from fear, but with longing.

Where a touch could make you shiver—not with revulsion, but ecstasy…

She was suddenly aware that she’d come to a standstill in the middle of the kitchen, her arms full of produce. This was totally ridiculous, she thought wildly, giving herself a hard mental shake. Her life was in turmoil, and all she could do was fantasise about a man she hardly knew.

A man she hardly knew who was expecting her to cook dinner for him.

As if waking from a trance, she looked down at the bizarre items in her arms and let out a small exhalation of outrage. What was she thinking of? What the hell was she supposed to do with all this stuff? She was a pianist, for God’s sake—a highly trained professional whose hands were exceptionally precious instruments, insured for thousands of pounds. She didn’t
cook
…

Tossing her hair back from her face, she marched defiantly across to the island unit, intending to deposit the stupid green stuff and hunt down a takeaway menu instead. But as she approached she felt herself falter. The precariously balanced armful of ingredients slipped and tumbled onto the worktop, rolling to the floor as she saw the crimson pool of Orlando’s blood still on the marble slab.

She stopped dead. And then stepped closer, stretched out a hand, and trailed her finger slowly through the dark red. She looked at her finger, at the glossy bead of his blood shining on its tip, as dark and precious as a ruby. There was something agonisingly intimate about it.

His blood.

The essence of him.

A shudder rippled through her.

‘Everything all right?’

Orlando’s voice from the doorway startled her from her thoughts, sent her hand flying to her throat in terror and confusion and shame.

‘Yes…yes, of course.’

He came forward, dressed in a faded checked shirt, two fingers of his left hand bound up with gauze. ‘You don’t seem to have got very far.’

‘No.’ Making a conscious effort to steady her breathing, she lifted her chin and met his eye. ‘I’m still clearing up. And I’m afraid I have no idea where to start with this. I’ve never cooked anything in my life, I don’t know how to—’

He cut her off with a sharp, scornful sound. ‘Then it’s high time you learned.’

Rachel swallowed hard. Reaching for a cloth, she briskly wiped up the blood from the chopping board and shook her head. ‘No. I’m no good at things like that…practical things.’

He gave a curse of pure, undisguised exasperation. OK, so Arabella might have been something of an
über
-achiever, but this girl seemed to take the word
incompetent
to a whole new level.

‘What on earth makes you say that?’ he said scathingly.

‘How about twenty-three years of experience?’ she retorted hotly. ‘Or should that be twenty-three years of
in
experience? I’ve never done anything remotely domesticated!’

He couldn’t see her toss her head, but he could certainly imagine it from the indignant tone of her voice, and maybe a little from the rustle of her heavy hair. Turning his mind resolutely from the mental images that instantly flared into life, he smothered a sneer.

‘So now’s your chance.’ He picked up the knife. ‘Come here.’

‘No!’

Orlando froze. There was no mistaking the genuine anguish in her voice. For a long moment neither of them moved. He suddenly felt very, very tired.

‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked heavily, and then he remembered he was still holding the knife. ‘Jeez, Rachel, I’m not going to hurt you for God’s sake…!’

‘I didn’t think you were,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just…’ How could she explain that it wasn’t that kind of fear, the fear of harm, that was causing her to tremble so violently, but fear of losing control. How could she explain that when she could hardly understand it herself?

He sighed. ‘Come and stand here…’

Tentatively she took a step towards him, stopping a few feet away so he had to take her hand and draw her forwards. Gently, firmly, he positioned her in front of the marble chopping board and replaced the pepper he’d started to slice. She wondered if he could feel the frantic beat of her heart throbbing through her body, vibrating in the tiny space that separated them.

‘Now…take hold of the pepper,’ he said tonelessly. He was standing right behind her, and his voice close to her ear made a shiver run through her. She picked up the pepper in one shaking hand, holding onto it as if it was her last connection with reality.

‘Good. Now, in the other hand pick up the knife.’ His tone was carefully blank, but she could sense the tightly controlled frustration behind his words. Biting her lip in shame, she picked up the knife, watching the blade quiver in her uncertain grip until Orlando’s hand closed over hers.

She gasped.

His arms encircled her, safe, strong, and she had to muster every inch of self-control she had to prevent her from leaning back into his embrace and letting her head fall on to his chest.

‘No, I
can’t
!’

She dropped the knife with a clatter and clenched her fists. Instantly he stepped backwards, and she turned round in time to see his uninjured hand go to his head, his fingers raking through his hair in a gesture of wordless exasperation.

‘I’m sorry…’ she said lamely. ‘It’s just…it’s my hands. I have to be careful. They’re…precious…’

He suddenly went very still.

‘Precious?’

For a moment she watched as he half-raised his own hands, gazing downwards at them, at the fingers of the left one held rigidly in place by the bloodstained gauze. And then he turned away.

Precious.
God, her shallowness took his breath away.
Her
hands were precious. Jeez.

She was unreal. His hands…His hands weren’t just precious, they were his lifeline. This spoiled little girl would never understand that.

Not that he had any intention of her finding out.

And then suddenly Orlando was there, naked to the waist and standing between her and Carlos, shielding her, until the next thing she knew her wedding dress was scarlet with his blood. All she could do was hold his lacerated hands, knowing as the blood kept flowing that she had brought this on him.

Earlier on in the kitchen she had felt dizzy as his bare chest had been revealed…too shocked and too shy to take in what she was seeing. But while her conscious mind had been having a fit of the vapours it seemed her eyes had missed nothing—noting every muscle, every sinew, every inch of delicious flesh. And they had chosen the dead hours of the night to revisit them all in disturbing detail.

Her pulse raced, and her body twitched and throbbed with strange, uncomfortable sensations. In the thick silence she could hear nothing but the thudding of her heart.

Until her stomach gave a deafening rumble.

The sound broke the spell and made her laugh out loud with relief. Of course—she’d eaten virtually nothing all day, which totally explained the bizarre feelings that buzzed through her nerve-endings.

She was hungry, that was all. So hungry.

She had no idea what time it was, but food suddenly seemed like an imperative. She longed for the normality of hot buttered toast or a cup of tea. God, a chocolate biscuit seemed like the most desirable thing in the entire world…

Apart from Orlando Winterton’s chest. And his sinuous back. And his green, green eyes…

No! Resolutely she swung her legs out of bed and strode to the door.

It was bitterly, bitterly cold, but she kept going, too nervous and jumpy to want to take the time to retrace her steps and retrieve her clothes. Silver light flooded the corridor, and passing window after window she saw a full moon, swathed in diaphanous drifts of cloud trailing languidly across the star-spiked sky. Rachel slipped noiselessly down the stairs and stopped, suddenly disorientated and wishing she had paid more attention earlier, instead of concentrating on Orlando Winterton’s bloody hands…

Bloody hands.
The words made images she was trying to forget come flooding back, and again she experienced that painful fizz inside her, as if someone had just pressed an electrode to her heart.

Blindly she stumbled in what she thought was the right direction for the kitchen. But there were so many doors. She opened one door and hesitated on the threshold, trying to get her bearings. The room was huge—surely running the whole length of one side of the house—and in the silver-blue shadows nothing looked familiar. The walls were high and dark—possibly black—the furniture a mixture of beautiful antiques and startlingly modern pieces. But all of this faded into the background as her eye was drawn to a curved bay window in the middle.

In it, bathed in moonlight as if spotlit on a stage, stood a piano. A grand piano.

Without thinking she found herself crossing the room towards it on cold, silent feet, tentatively reaching out a finger and running it gently down the keys, so that a soft rattle was the only sound that resulted. They felt smooth, solid, expensive…everything that a good piano should be.

She let her finger come to rest on Middle C. And pressed.

The sound was rich and mellow, and it flowed right through her, reverberating against her tautly stretched nerves. Her stomach tightened, but her hunger was forgotten. Suddenly all that mattered was this instrument and the need to lose herself in its exquisite familiarity. Heedless of the biting cold, she sat down, placing her bare feet on the chill metal pedals, letting her fingers rest deliciously on the keys for a second and closing her eyes in relief.

After a day of confusion, this, at last, was something she could understand and control. This was her way of interpreting the world, expressing emotion—the only way she had ever been shown and the only way she knew.

The moonlight turned her hands a bloodless blue as they began very quietly, very tentatively, to play. Without thinking she found the piece that was flowing from her fingers was Chopin’s
Nocturne in E Minor,
its haunting notes flooding the night and filling her head with memories.

Memories she hadn’t allowed to surface before, but suddenly wouldn’t be suppressed any longer.

Closing her eyes, she gave in to them. Gradually she became aware that the keys were slippery with wetness and she realised she was crying, her tears dripping down onto her hands. She played on, not feeling the cold.

Compared to the ice inside her, it was nothing.

Technically.

Tonight they seemed to slide across the edges of his vision and dissolve without penetrating his mind.

The Middle Eastern border situation he was dealing with was balanced on a knife-edge. Hired as a consultant on aerial tactics and weapons deployment by the government, he was monitoring the situation on an hour-by-hour basis, grimly holding out against sending planes into an area where they had about as much chance of surviving as a pheasant over the Easton beech woods in shooting season.

As he knew all too well. It had been on a similar raid that Felix had been shot down. Or that was the supposition: they’d never even recovered his plane.

Sighing, Orlando got up and went to stand at one of the long windows, feeling a gust of cold air as he pulled back the curtain and looked out. Around the relentless blackness in the centre of his vision he could see the courtyard was bathed in moonlight.

With something that felt almost like a physical blow he recalled Felix’s kindness that last time when he’d come home on leave, at the time when Andrew Parkes had given Orlando his diagnosis. Felix had accepted it with resignation, and for the remainder of his leave had treated Orlando with a horrible gentleness bordering on respect. When he had said goodbye it had almost as if he knew it would be the last time.

He’d had no intention of their relationship carrying on as before, Orlando realised now. As far as Felix had been concerned, if Orlando wasn’t the big brother he could compete with and look up to, he was no brother at all. Nothing.

Orlando leaned back against the wooden shutter, tipping his head back and banging it softly, rhythmically, against the paneling. The pain reminded him that he was still alive. Sometimes he felt that he was disappearing, that just as the world was fading before his eyes, so he was fading from the eyes of the world.

Somewhere in the distance he could hear music. Maybe he’d finally lost it? he thought with savage desolation, striding to the door and pulling it open.

But he hadn’t imagined it. Music was rippling through the dark rooms of the sleeping house, filling the empty spaces with sweet, sad resonance. With emotion. With life.

In the doorway of the grand salon he stopped, his breath catching in his throat. The effect of the music in the moonlit stillness was profound—it vibrated through him, smashing down defences he had spent the last year building. The room was inkblack washed with silver, and he turned his head, so that at the edge of his vision he could see her.

She had her back to him, her head tilted up so that her glowing red hair cascaded down over the thin slip of pale silk she was wearing. He could see with startling clarity the gleam of her bare shoulder in the moonlight, the shadowed drape of silk at the narrow part of her waist, just before it swelled out into sumptuous fullness. Hungrily, helplessly, his eyes sought her, desperate for more; but, as always, the instant he looked directly at her she disappeared into the black vortex in the centre of his vision. He felt his hands ball into fists of frustration as the music tugged invisible chords inside him, reawakening the feelings and needs he strove so hard to annihilate.

He was hardly aware of crossing the room, was conscious only of the thudding of blood in his veins beneath the soaring swell of music that was flowing with perfect fluency and exquisite grace from her fingertips.

Her
precious
fingertips.

He felt a moan of realisation escape him. Oh, God. He’d been so wrapped up in himself that he hadn’t given her a chance to explain what she’d meant. He’d thought she was some silly, pampered princessy type, who didn’t want to damage her false nails, but she was a
pianist
…

Remorse and self-loathing stole through him. His bandaged fingers throbbed and ached as he gripped the table beside him, waiting for this unwelcome, stinging insight into the man he had become to subside.

The music filled his head, each lovely, liquid note echoing inside the empty spaces of his heart. Until he noticed, above the piano, another sound.

An inhalation. A soft, swift gasp of indrawn breath.

He waited a few seconds. And heard another. The girl sitting a few feet away from him was creating that miraculous, moving music while crying her heart out very quietly.

He didn’t want to go to her. He wanted to leave the room and go back to his study and his work. He wanted to wall himself up again, pack his heart in ice and put his needs, his desires, back in the past.

He wanted all of that, and still he found himself going towards her. It felt as if he was crawling over broken glass, but he couldn’t stop.