Mistress by Mistake. KIM LAWRENCE

notion of his perfect uncle being personally acquainted with fumbling robbed Daniel of his last remaining powers of articulation.

      If Nick and his companions, carefully selected for their ability to spread gossip, hadn’t entered the room at that moment Eve had no doubts she’d have been ignominiously expelled from the house.

      Nick Gordon didn’t have to call on his excellent acting ability to display shock. After a brief moment of startled amazement, tinged by a degree of irritation that his excellent plan would have to be ditched, he swiftly assessed the situation and recovered his poise. Damage limitation was the best he could hope for, he decided regretfully.

      ‘Clear out, you lot,’ he announced casually.

      It didn’t occur to Nick that his contemporaries wouldn’t follow his instructions. He didn’t even glance around to see them leave. Eve found herself envying her sibling’s casual ability to inspire obedience.

      ‘What’s going on here?’

      ‘Nick, isn’t it?’ Drew Cummings looked at the tall dark boy with a frown of recognition. ‘Did you have anything to do with this little initiation ceremony?’

      ‘You all right, Eve?’ Nick said anxiously, ignoring the older man. She looked a bit fraught. Eve took everything so seriously. She really should lighten up, he decided disapprovingly, but he’d never have asked for her help if he’d known it was going to upset her like this.

      ‘Does it look like I’m all right?’ All right? Eve bit back a hysterical giggle that rose inappropriately to her tight throat. ‘Will you sort this out—now, Nick?’ Her soft, attractive voice rose a quavering octave.

      ‘You know this girl, then?’ Drew was looking from brother to sister with hard suspicion. Conspiracy theories began to solidify suspiciously in his head.

      ‘Of course I know her. She’s my sister.’

      ‘Do you get your kid brother to pimp for you often, angel?’

      A gasp that came from somewhere was loud in the pregnant silence. Eve turned her head and had the brief impression of scalding scorn in those impossibly blue eyes. When Nick’s plans went wrong they did so thoroughly, but this present situation was in league of its own.

      Let him sort it out. She was out of here. Her first faltering steps turned into a sprint hampered only by the ridiculous heels. She knew her tears were only the irritating outward display of sheer, inarticulate fury, but she wasn’t going to let this monster see them and think otherwise.

      The door she’d been hammering on for almost the past five minutes finally swung open. Eve watched Theo’s expression change from initial lack of recognition to open-mouthed shock.

      ‘Say a word and you’re dead,’ she promised him venomously, just as the grin was beginning to form. ‘I forgot my key.’

      The grin was swiftly deleted. ‘New look, Evie?’ He gave an appreciative leer.

      ‘If we’re talking make-overs…?’ She allowed her eyes to run speakingly over the tall, rangy figure of her lodger. ‘Do the words ‘‘ageing hippie’’ strike a chord?’ Head high, slender back ramrod-stiff, she stalked up the stairs trying to ignore the sounds of inexpertly muffled laughter. ‘I’ve had a very bad day!’ she yelled in warning over her shoulder.

      The carpet beneath her feet was beginning to get thread-worn. It wasn’t the only thing in the big Victorian house that needed replacing—a circumstance that sometimes kept her awake late at night. When her parents had died five years earlier the first thing the solicitors had suggested was putting the rambling old building on the market.

      But how could she have wrenched her thirteen-year-old brother away from the only home he’d ever known? He’d already lost his parents, and if they’d moved house he’d have had to change school too. She’d known there wouldn’t be enough left after the debts were settled to buy a place in the same area. Their parents had had many admirable qualities, but a knack with money had not been one of them. Eve had been fiercely determined that no matter what happened Nick wouldn’t suffer—he’d have all the advantages, bar loving parents, that she had had.

      When she’d told the solicitors about her idea they’d regarded her with the sort of superior scorn that some people reserve for teenagers.

      Impractical, they’d said. Not economically viable. Well, they’d been wrong, she thought with satisfaction. Five years on and Theo was their only long-term lodger, and, with a few exceptions, they’d been lucky with the succession of people who’d rented the other two rooms in the ugly Victorian monstrosity she’d always called home.

      Right now they had a lady librarian in her early thirties and a postgraduate engineering student in his twenties as well as Theo, whom they’d known since they were children. She didn’t actually know at what point she and Nick had accepted him as extended family.

      Eve had asked Theo once why he stayed, and he’d laughingly told her he was too lazy to move. He’d used to look at property, but he’d stopped pretending some time ago that this was a short-term measure. There had been a few wagging tongues when he’d moved in—she hadn’t yet been nineteen and he wasn’t exactly in his dotage—but unkind gossip had been the exception even then. Now it was non-existent. Eve thought maybe they—she and the other residents of 6 Acacia Avenue—filled a gap in Theo’s life, a gap where, but for a cruel twist of fate, there would have been a wife and children.

      The old place ate up the cash, of course, so at the end of the day they weren’t much better off financially, but they coped. Actually, she was better off financially at the moment than she’d dared hope, since Nick had won a prestigious scholarship that was going to ease the financial burden of his three years at university considerably.

      ‘Do something reckless with it, Evie,’ he’d advised when she’d suggested spending the money she’d been putting aside for his education to replace the leaking flat roof on the kitchen extension.

      ‘Reckless,’ she said in disgust to her reflection in the mirror on the old mahogany dressing table. She pulled the back of her hand across her crimson-stained lips. This was the last time she let her silver-tongued sibling persuade her to do anything!

      ‘I’ve planned it with military precision, Evie. Nothing can go wrong.’ Nick had played expertly on her soft heart. Soft heart, she thought once again with a disgusted snort—soft brain, more like! Nick’s meticulous planning had gone wrong—big time.

      She blamed herself for being so easily conned. She should have known things were getting out of hand when Nick had produced the expensive designer outfit belonging to his latest girlfriend’s sister and suggested she go into the kitchen to change. She ought to have kicked up a fuss when the girlfriend had produced cosmetics from an apparently bottomless make-up bag. To her amusement the teenager had been scandalised when Eve had casually confessed she didn’t actually bother with make-up normally.

      In fact, if it hadn’t been for a miserable-looking Daniel saying, ‘She doesn’t have to do it, Nick,’ she might well have chickened out there and then. Stripping off the borrowed finery, she wished she had done just that, and been saved the most embarrassing, humiliating experience of her life.

      That man, she silently fumed as she tightened the draw-string waist of her loose combat trousers with unwanted viciousness. No wonder poor Daniel didn’t confide his personal problems to an insensitive brute like that.

      Recalling the flick of those icy cold blue eyes made her feel grubby and guilty all over again. She rubbed fiercely at the rash of goosebumps on her forearms and shuddered. No, she told herself firmly. I refuse to let that feeble excuse for a guardian make me feel like this. I’m not the one who should feel guilty. If Mr Marvellous hadn’t been so busy polishing his own ego he might have noticed his charge was suffering a major dose of teenage angst!

      Now, of course, she could think of several choice phrases which would have cut that musclebound bully down to size. What had she come up with at the time? ‘This isn’t