It suddenly occurred to her that her employer had never seen her with her hair down. To him she was just Flynn, discreet, sexless, quietly running his household and overseeing the ongoing restoration of the former coaching inn while he jaunted about the world earning a luxurious living designing buildings that were the complete antithesis of Whitefield.
Vanessa, along with the other permanent staff, was merely one of the chattels that he had acquired when he had unexpectedly inherited a distant relative’s property and, after initially balking badly at the discovery that the late Judge Seaton’s butler was young and female, he had accepted the impeccable references supplied by the lawyer who had handled the judge’s estate. He had, however, made it quite clear to Vanessa privately that she was only acceptable in the position as long as the fact that she was a woman never impinged on the job. It never had.
‘Apart from being blonde, what does she look like?’ Vanessa asked in a strangled voice that tested a wildly implausible theory.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, his bluntness daring her to display any shock. ‘It was dark...I never saw her face. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what her name is; we didn’t get around to introducing ourselves! So, now that your prurient suspicions are confirmed, perhaps you wouldn’t mind answering my questions?’
His sarcasm went right over her whirling head. She was shattered by knowledge that her outrageous theory was right.
There had only been one woman in Benedict Savage’s bed last night and that woman had been Vanessa. But he didn’t know that!
‘I...but...I—’ Relief poured like adrenalin along her veins, throwing her into an even deeper moral dilemna.
As long as he never found out who the woman in his bed had been, Vanessa’s job was safe...
‘I’m not imagining things!’ he growled tersely.
Vanessa licked her lips. ‘Oh...of course not,’ she said, wondering how long her meagre acting skills would sustain her charade of ignorance.
He chose to take her placating comment as a piece of sarcasm and reiterated tightly, ‘She was here, damn it! It was late and I was thick-headed with jet-lag but I wasn’t completely detached from reality. I wasn’t hallucinating!’
‘I haven’t seen anyone except Mrs Riley this morning,’ Vanessa said, carefully avoiding any outright lie that could have unpleasant repercussions later. ‘Perhaps it was one of the resident ghosts, sir,’ she joked weakly.
‘I didn’t know we had any. Not that I believe in them, anyway.’
His scepticism was only what she expected from such a logical mind. You only had to look at the buildings he designed to see that his imagination was chained to the starkly realistic. ‘Oh, yes, people say that there are several—’
‘Female?’
She was disconcerted by his persistence over what had been a purely frivolous mention. ‘A couple of them, yes—’
‘Yellow-haired? Scantily dressed? A seductive siren luring a man towards the gates of hell and damnation?’
Oh, God, now she was certain that whatever they had got up to had been deeply sinful.
‘Er, I understand one of them was a guest murdered by one of the ostlers here at the inn—a...a dancing girl who was on her way to entertain at the goldfields at Coromandel...’
‘You mean a whore?’ He cut her gentle euphemisms to ribbons with cool contempt. ‘Well, that certainly fits.’
‘There’s no proof that she was a whore!’ Vanessa said hotly, not sure whether it was herself or the ghost she was supposed to be defending.
‘What about last night?’
‘W-what about last night?’ Vanessa quavered. Surely she hadn’t given him the idea she had expected money for whatever it was she had allowed him to do!
He looked at her impatiently, mistaking her horror for fear. ‘Forget about bloody ghosts. They don’t exist. So-called supernatural apparitions usually turn out to be the self-generated fantasies of people who are either gullible, publicity-seeking or deranged. You said you didn’t see anyone around this morning. What about last night? You were here then, weren’t you? Did you see or hear anything then?’
Oh, God... Her collar tightened again, squeezing her voice into a reedy squeak. ‘I was out. I went to dinner over in Waihi...’ No need to mention she’d been back, and tucked up cosily in his bed, by ten-thirty p.m.
‘Who with?’
In the three years she had worked for him he had never asked her a single personal question and Vanessa floundered, feeling that she was giving away a vital piece of herself with the information. ‘R-Richard—Richard Wells.’
‘The horse-breeder—from the property along the road?’ He frowned. He was obviously trying to remember his fleeting acquaintance with his nearest neighbour; he was probably also wondering what Richard saw in his sexless employee, Vanessa thought sourly, only to be proved wrong as he said sharply, ‘Not with Dane?’
Vanessa gasped. ‘Mr Judson? Of course not. As far as I know he’s at home in Auckland.’
‘Wellington, actually. So he didn’t tell you about his little arrangement...’ He resumed his pacing, looking slightly more relaxed, but Vanessa couldn’t allow her vigilance to relax correspondingly.
‘Arrangement?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He glanced out of the French doors towards the back of the house and suddenly halted with a jerk. ‘What the—? Whose car is that in the garage?’
Desperate for a change of subject, Vanessa moved up beside him to look out at the gleaming white car tucked under the open arches of what had once been the coaching-house stables. ‘Oh, that! It—’
‘What an incredibly beautiful beast of a car!’ His envious drawl cut her off, startling her with its hint of boyish eagerness. Benedict Savage, the last word in sophistication—boyish? ‘Isn’t it a—?’ He leaned closer to the glass panes. ‘Yes, I think it is...a 1935 Duesenberg convertible coupé...just like the one Clark Gable had custom-made. Who on earth...?’ He straightened, suddenly letting loose a rare laugh that sounded half annoyed, half admiring. ‘My God, I bet she arrived in it! That would just be Dane’s style. So that must mean she’s still here somewhere—’
Vanessa stared at him, confused by this added complication. ‘But...I thought it was yours.’
His head snapped sideways. ‘Mine?’ His eyebrows rose in a haughty disclaimer. ‘What on earth gave you that idea? You know very well I have the BMW.’
Yes, a precision-engineered, elegantly low-key car that had seemed perfectly suited to his introverted personality. And yet here he was, practically drooling over a flashy, red-upholstered brute whose every gleaming inch was flauntingly extrovert.
‘Well...I...it was delivered yesterday in your name, so I naturally assumed... I thought perhaps you’d bought it as an investment...’ It was the only explanation that had fitted his coolly calculating image.
‘It was delivered? By whom?’ As usual he cut swiftly to the heart of the matter.
‘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