Sophisticated Seduction. Jayne Bauling
loving me, had been pointed in my direction by Nicholas, to keep me happy. I was furious, and it was after that that Nicholas set me up with Ginny’s, to keep me out of trouble and my mind off men, because I was never satisfied, he said.
‘But since then I’ve run my own life, started and ended my affairs for myself without any help from him. But this! I remember once some woman Nicholas was involved with had set out determined to join the Stirling family; it turned out she’d deliberately provoked her husband into giving her grounds for divorce so she’d be free before engineering a meeting—she actually admitted all this in a fit of pique when Nicholas foiled her.
‘Anyway, when Nicholas made it clear that he wasn’t interested in marriage, she quite coolly transferred her attention to Adrian—Loris’s older brother—as one Stirling was as good as another in her book. But Nicholas was even cooler, the way he extricated Adrian and sent him off to run the American office. I suspect he’d try the same on me and Mortimer. I can’t risk it!’
Virginia gestured expressively, and Bridget could see her point. Nicholas Stirling sounded the most ruthless of autocrats, at least where his family was concerned.
She liked Virginia, and if she herself couldn’t have the love she had dreamed of, so unrealistically, at least she could help Virginia have and keep hers.
Thus she had agreed to this Indian trip, confident that she could handle the buying and prove herself an asset to Ginny’s, doing her best to soothe the doubts Virginia so obviously had. She had arrived in New Delhi to find that Virginia did in fact still rely on her brother, or Stirling Industries, for some things in addition to using the company house, as the head of Stirling Industries’ Indian interests, Mr Bhandari, had insisted on making all Bridget’s domestic travel arrangements for her, brushing aside her embarrassed protests with the assertion that he always did the same for Virginia on her trips.
Tonight, thoughts of Loris were relentlessly intrusive again, invading her mind, tormenting her as they had done so persistently in the days and nights preceding her departure from England, which had mercifully coincided with one of those periods when Loris didn’t contact her—presumably in deference to the possessive Pagan. Since then, the novelty of her surroundings and the responsibilities of her job had provided some relief, but now the ache had begun again, somehow stirred by Nicholas Stirling’s arrival.
Surprisingly, Bridget had found herself unable to shed any tears over Loris, but that too was now suddenly at an end, she discovered as hot tears welled, filling her eyes irresistibly and tightening her throat. Her mouth worked and finally she had to yield to the hurt and humiliation she felt.
The house was situated towards New Delhi’s outskirts and not for the first time Bridget heard the howl of jackals from the hills outside the city, the sound seemingly so full of a profound, poignant grief that she felt her own to be trivial and was abruptly furious with herself—lying here in the dark, sobbing in her bed for an impossible dream, just like the teenager that horrible man Nicholas Stirling believed she was.
But crying had given her unhappiness a looser, more manageable feel, and the emotional release ensured that she slept well and woke with her plans for the day bubbling round in her mind.
Of course, Nicholas Stirling’s presence in the house remained a flaw, but perhaps he and Wanda would sleep late.
As she had formed the habit of doing, Bridget took a tray bearing a glass of mango juice and a pot of coffee out to the table on the long covered veranda with its ornately fretted arches on the side of the house away from the road. The garden here was a formal, symmetrical one, tiled walks running between massed roses which she had been told bloomed for most of the year, and the morning was already hazy with heat.
She had just put down her glass and was pouring coffee when Nicholas Stirling appeared on the veranda, carrying a tie and the jacket of his lightweight suit.
‘So you’re still around?’ He dropped them over the back of a chair and stood surveying Bridget challengingly. ‘I suppose you’ve also told Sita Menon that she’s not required in the mornings? Presumably you don’t eat breakfast either?’
Bridget experienced a frisson of complex emotion as she stared back at him, unable to look away although normally her natural shyness would have had her dropping her eyes after a moment or two. He looked so dark and strong, and yet the vigorous impression was at odds with the jaded, cynical expression in the grey eyeseyes that had seen everything and believed nothing.
‘I accept that I’ve inconvenienced you, but neither Sita nor I could know you were arriving,’ she submitted tightly. ‘Mr Bhandari didn’t mention that you were coming.’
‘He didn’t know,’ he admitted shortly.
‘I hope you’re not expecting me to provide breakfast for you?’ she mocked, adding gently, ‘Although I suppose it’s almost certain that someone like you can’t cook! What about Miss—Wanda? Is she still in bed?’
‘I wouldn’t know. She isn’t here,’ he returned caustically, and his sudden slashingly savage smile was a taunt. ‘She went to a hotel in the end. Your presence here must have inhibited her, or perhaps she balked at the idea of being a corruptive influence on one so young.’
‘Oh.’ Disconcerted, Bridget spoke without thinking. ‘Is that why you’re still in such a bad mood this morning?’
In talking about her brother on various occasions, Virginia had drawn a picture of a man accustomed to having women fall into his bed for his pleasure whenever he wanted them, although he seemed to be discreet in his affairs, his liaison with the fashionable wife of a mainstream rock star the only one to have invited the more prurient attentions of the media.
As she regarded him from beneath the screen of her long eyelashes, potent was the unsought word that came drifting into Bridget’s consciousness. Then her face flamed as she registered its true meaning.
Of course, the thought was prompted by the way he had suddenly been looking at her, as if his thoughts were a kind of reverse, or the other side of hers, and he was contemplating her as some kind of recipient of his maleness—and rejecting her!
‘No, you won’t suffice at all, although it seems you have heard of frustration, as I presume that’s what you’re alluding to,’ he observed with cold amusement. ‘But I’m not here to satisfy your juvenile curiosity. As for breakfast, I’ll get something when I go out. I want to talk to you.’
He had dropped easily into the chair opposite her, and now he took several seconds to scrutinise her once more, rejecting her all over again, Bridget noted with automatic relief. She probably still looked eighteen to him this morning, with her hair gathered loosely up into a ponytail that fell straight and silky from the top of her head, a few strands already escaping to frame her face, which was again untouched by make-up because she had discovered that even the little she occasionally wore melted in the Delhi heat. She was wearing a white sleeveless cotton top tucked into a short, straight skirt in dark pink, her low-heeled court shoes the same colour, her lightly tanned legs bare and delicately golden-brown, wonderfully long and slender, her arms the same shade and very slim. Earrings were her only jewellery, plain little hoops of fine silver.
‘Mr Stirling—’
‘I have to accept that you do work for my sister,’ he overrode her arrogantly. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, because Anand Bhandari wouldn’t have allowed you to have the keys. So what I want to know is how you conned Virginia into handing over one of her most cherished projects to you.’
‘I didn’t!’ Bridget began indignantly. ‘She asked me to do it because she couldn’t.’
‘Why couldn’t she?’
It was the question Bridget dreaded, and she hesitated, torn between her dislike of lying and loyalty to Virginia.
‘Because she… she has fallen in love.’ Surely it could do no harm to tell him that much?
Nicholas Stirling’s brief laugh was drily sceptical.
‘Virginia