A Scandalous Engagement. Cathy Williams

burst out laughing. If only he knew. But the fact was that Curtis Greene knew nothing at all about his brother. He had never taken the time to find out.

      ‘What’s so damned funny?’ he asked with narrow-eyed suspicion.

      The ghost of a smile which had curved her lips upwards turned into a grin which became even broader as she watched his expression go from hostile suspicion to outright wrath. She began to laugh, throwing her head back and giving full vent to the sound that had become so alien to her over the past two years. She laughed until the tears rolled down her face, and then she subsided into giggles, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands like a child. Eventually she sobered up enough to look at him.

      ‘I haven’t laughed so much in years,’ she said in a sudden, confiding outburst. ‘Thank you.’

      ‘My pleasure.’ There was naked curiosity in the cool blue eyes now, but instead of trying to slake it he lowered his eyes for a few seconds, then returned his gaze to her face.

      ‘But I don’t get the joke.’

      ‘The joke, Mr Greene, is not just that you’re utterly and hopelessly wrong about me. It’s how utterly and hopelessly wrong you are. I’m not after your brother’s money, or anyone else’s money for that matter. I learned the hard way that money doesn’t buy anything that really makes a difference.’ She paused, shocked that for the second time this aggravating, misguided man had almost succeeded in reaching a place in her that very few people had reached thus far. If any.

      ‘Very philosophical for a girl of…eighteen? Nineteen?’

      ‘Twenty-six, actually.’

      ‘Then what is your relationship with my brother?’ he demanded.

      ‘What business is it of yours?’

      ‘What business is it of mine? What business is it of mine?’ he spluttered, wearing the expression of someone who could hardly believe what they were hearing. ‘God, woman, you’ve got some bare-faced cheek!’

      ‘Oh, sorry.’ Now that his mask of thunderous wrath had slipped, she allowed herself to relax. The atmosphere had altered between them. She couldn’t quite work out how, but she suspected that it was because however much his logic tried to tell him that she was up to no good, his instincts were telling him otherwise. And, peripherally, he was not accustomed to being answered back. She sensed that in some strange, intangible way. He was a man who had prematurely assumed a mantle of power and had grown to accept the respect and subservience it would have brought him.

      She knew enough from Andy to piece together Curtis Greene in a way she would not have been capable of doing had she simply met him out of the blue. She knew that he had been the first born, the love-child of his parents when his mother had been only a girl herself. The marriage that had ensued had been going for quite some years before two more children had been produced. By the time his parents had died, in a light aircraft accident, Curtis had been a young man in his early twenties, and without warning had found himself catapulted into a dynasty which he had proved himself more than equipped to handle. More importantly, he had found himself surrogate parent to his two younger siblings and, from what she had gathered, had fulfilled his role through the iron rod of discipline rather than the gentle hand of love.

      His past had made him the person that he was today, just as it had made his brother the person he had turned out to be.

      She found that she was staring at him, mentally trying to piece him together in much the same way he had been trying to piece her together earlier on, and she only snapped back to the present when he said roughly, ‘He’s my brother. I have to look out for him.’

      ‘In which case, you have nothing to fear from me.’ She lowered her eyes and half smiled to herself as she played the secrets she held in her head. ‘Andy and I are simply very good friends. Two people who get along.’

      ‘I find that difficult to believe.’

      ‘Why? Men and women can have very satisfying relationships that aren’t based on…’

      ‘Sex?’ He shot her a slow, crooked smile and she felt her breath suddenly quicken. From her previously secure vantage point, she now experienced a disconcerting slip in her mental resources. Something about his smile, the way his mouth curved when he murmured that one word, the sudden change in the tenor of his voice, made the room seem much smaller and very hot.

      ‘Yes. Quite.’ She cleared her throat and adopted an expression of mature concentration.

      ‘Even when they share the same bed?’ he enquired mildly.

      For a few seconds she had to think about that one, then her face cleared. ‘Watching television in the same room. Your brother and I aren’t sleeping together, and you have a sordid mind if you can’t believe that.’

      ‘I prefer to call it experienced.’

      ‘Then I guess that we just agree to differ.’ She shrugged, tugging back the reins on her imagination, which threatened to veer off down those experienced paths to which he had alluded. Oh, yes, she had heard all about Curtis Greene’s experience. There had never been a time, she had been told by Andy one evening, when the drink had overcome his natural reserve about his brother, when Curtis had not had an adoring female at his side. For experienced male she preferred to read practised womaniser.

      ‘So,’ she asked into the growing silence between them, ‘how long do you plan on staying in London?’ A particularly tactless question, she realised, as soon as she had uttered it.

      ‘Long enough to have a word with my brother.’ He stretched out his long legs in front of him and crossed them lightly at the ankles. ‘A very serious word.’

      Jade licked her lips nervously and felt a protective rush of feeling. This visit was going to shock Andy to the core. He wasn’t ready to deal with Curtis and all the demons associated with him. Not yet.

      ‘I don’t suppose you’ll listen to a word I tell you, but can I ask you not to be hard on Andy?’

      For some reason he seemed to find the request amusing.

      ‘Not be hard on Andy? Since you two seem to be so touchingly close, you must know that I’ve been in charge of his welfare from the time he was eight years old and I was an old man of twenty-one?’

      His eyes darkened and she caught something in there, the shadow of regret, but the moment was fleeting enough to make her doubt what she had seen. He leaned forward, his body rigid, and hit one open palm forcefully with his closed fist. The subdued violence behind the gesture made her wince. It also made her determined to fight this man all the way, if only to protect his brother.

      ‘Being hard was the only way to teach Andy how to cope with his wealth, how to cope with life. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a bloody tough world out there, and when our parents died, it fell to me to teach him how to cope with it.’ His eyes glittered.

      ‘Well, he’s not a child of eight any longer,’ Jade said steadily, ‘and maybe he’s learnt whatever lessons he needed to learn to give him the strength to go his own way.’

      ‘Is that the sort of claptrap psychobabble you’ve been pouring into his head? As one good friend to another? Feeding him with idiotic notions about running away from the rat race and doing his own thing with bits of clay and oil paint?’ He laughed acidly. ‘You must have thought you’d hit jackpot in my brother.’

      ‘I told you, I’m not interested in Andy for his money.’ She heard the trace of contempt in her voice, and knew that he had caught it as well, from his sudden stillness. ‘And I haven’t fed him with any notions of doing anything. In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s got a mind of his own!’

      ‘And he’s suddenly decided to veer away from his very lucrative job running the family business so that he can become a hack painter. All without any persuasive support from you, his very good and very platonic friend. Now, why do I find that so hard to believe?’

      ‘Because you have a