‘And you do not have any brothers… or sisters…?’
Courage tensed slightly as he seemed to hesitate over the last two words, giving them a very subtle underlining.
‘No,’ she told him curtly. ‘My parents did not have any other children.’
That, at least, was the truth… And as for the rest… Well, a stepsister was not, after all, any real blood relation, and there had certainly never been any sisterly feelings between her and Laney. Contempt and hatred for Courage on Laney’s part, and fear and loathing on her own.
Now that she was older the fear and loathing had gone, to be replaced by an enormous sense of sadness coupled with an equally intense sense of relief—and guilt… Guilt because she had escaped, because she had Gran, while Laney…
As a child she had only seen the closeness which existed between Laney and her father—Courage’s own step-father—as something which excluded her and threatened her relationship with her mother. Because her mother had done everything her second husband had told her, and Laney had tauntingly warned Courage that she was going to tell her father to send Courage away.
It was only later, as she grew more mature, that she had recognised the possible meaning of those nocturnal visits her stepfather had paid to Laney’s room, the real foundation of the intense closeness which had existed between them.
She shuddered now to recall how easily she could have fallen into the same trap as her stepsister. Fortunately, she had been far too terrified of her stepfather to take him up on his offers to come to her room and ‘talk’ to her.
‘Let me help sort out this problem you and Laney are having. You’re sisters now and you should love each other. I want you to love each other,’ he had insisted softly. ‘Then I can love both of you. You mustn’t quarrel with Laney, Courage. She’s older than you. You must listen to her, let her help you.’
The cruel, manipulative nature of her stepsister, which had made her own early teen years such a misery, could, she acknowledged now, have been not so much a character defect as a direct result of the other girl’s relationship with her father. Courage had no proof that he had been sexually abusive to Laney, but what she knew now as an adult, coupled with her own younger self’s intuitive fear and distrust of the man, made her suspect that he could have been.
And her feelings were not just a whim, not just her jealousy over the way he had taken over her mother, shut Courage out; she was positive of that.
Her mother’s second marriage was the one thing she and Gran never discussed. Her grandmother was of the old school and believed that if you couldn’t say something good about a person then you shouldn’t say anything at all.
Courage had been so shocked when she had heard the news of her mother’s death, but in reality her true mother—the mother she had loved and who had loved her—had disappeared in the early months of her second marriage.
‘No… I don’t have any siblings,’ she repeated firmly.
‘No husband… No partner… No children.’
He was making statements rather than asking questions—after all, she had already supplied all that kind of information on the application form she had filled in, prior to being summoned for this interview—but Courage still responded as though he were questioning her.
‘Isn’t that rather unusual… in these days?’
Courage focused on him. What was he implying? That she was lying—concealing the truth? Or did his question go deeper, probing the foundations of the most personal aspects of herself?
‘Unusual, but not unknown… Not in the hotel trade,’ she responded calmly.
It was, after all, true. The hours she worked and the constant travelling were just two of the reasons why it wouldn’t have been easy for her to form a close, emotional, sexual relationship with a man; up until she had moved back to her grandmothers her ‘home’ had been a room in whatever hotel complex the company had posted her to, and her ‘commitment’ had been the major and most important commitment in her life—the one she had made to her career. But when it had come to making a choice between that career and her grandmother…
Her employers had told her that if she should change her mind at some stage in the future they would be more than happy to welcome her back, and had in fact pleaded with her not to go—especially Gunther, the eldest son of the Swiss family who owned the hotel chain.
‘It says on your application form that you left your previous post for personal reasons.’
‘Yes,’ Courage agreed. ‘I wanted to return to England to be with my grandmother, who is suffering from a… heart condition. She… she brought me up when… when my mother remarried and I…’
‘You what? You feel you owe it to her to repay what she did for you? That’s a very old-fashioned ideology, if I may say so.’
‘I’m a very old-fashioned person,’ Courage re- sponded coolly, sensing the cynicism behind his words. ‘But in actual fact no, it isn’t duty that brought me back. I happen to love my grandmother and I want to be with her. Left to her own devices, she’s all too likely to take on too much… to overtax herself and—’
‘Is her condition treatable?’
‘There is an operation, but the waiting-list is very long and she isn’t a priority case. Private treatment is out of the question, but if Gran can be persuaded to take things easy, preserve her strength…’
‘You do realise that you’re vastly over-qualified for this job, don’t you?’
‘I need to earn my living…’
‘Well, you certainly won’t earn much of one stacking supermarket shelves… Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of outfit you’re wearing right now. Chanel, isn’t it?’
‘A copy. I had it made when I took a business trip to Hong Kong,’ Courage corrected him gently. ‘Hotel management doesn’t pay anything like enough to buy Chanel.’
She had intended the words only as a small rebuke, a subtle warning that his comments were not either welcome or necessary, but the long, thorough look he gave her coupled with his Laconic, ‘No, it doesn’t,’ made the hot, angry colour sting her skin.
There were a variety of ways of interpreting his remarks, none of them particularly charitably inclined towards herself, and all of them variations on a theme. It was pretty obvious, she decided, that she was not going to get the job.
Without saying as much, Gideon Reynolds was giving her the distinct impression that he was trying to get under her skin and manoeuvre her into some kind of angry outburst with his subtle insults. Why, she had no idea. Perhaps he was just that kind of man, and that was the way he liked to enjoy himself. Well, if he did that was his problem, but there was no way she was going to allow him to manipulate her.
As she waited for him to dismiss her and tell her that the interview was over she was frantically trying to work out how many part-time jobs—working behind bars, stacking supermarket shelvcs and doing whatever else might come along—she could find the time and the energy to take on. At the moment…
‘How does your grandmother feel about the fact you’ve given up your career to come home and look after her?’
His question surprised Courage into looking directly at him, something she had been very careful not to do, she recognised unwillingly. His eyes were flint-grey, hard like the coldest northern seas, threatening that immense danger could lurk beneath their deceptively calm surface.
‘She doesn’t know. She thinks I’ve taken an extended holiday to think about my future career path. That I may give up my international job because I don’t want a permanent position in Hong Kong.’
She saw the way his eyebrows