Read His Temporary Mistress for Free Online

Conversations halted, backs were straightened, small groups dispersed. There was absolutely no doubt that he ran the show and she wondered how her sister could ever have thought that she could get away with trying to steal information from him. Perhaps she had never personally met him, but surely Phillipa would have realised, even if only through hearsay, that the man was one hundred per cent hard line? But then Phillipa had been busy losing her head to a guy who had spotted a way in to making a quick buck via a back door. Her sister, for once, had found herself being the victim of manipulation. Chances were she hadn’t been thinking at all.
    Her coat was back on because she had expected them to be walking to wherever he was taking her for lunch, but in fact they headed down to a lift that carried them straight to an enormous basement car park and she followed him to a gleaming black Aston Martin which he beeped open with his key.
    ‘Tell me the sort of food you like to eat,’ he said without looking at her.
    ‘Is that the first step to pretending we know one another?’
    ‘You’re going to have to change your attitude.’ Damien was entirely focused on the traffic as he emerged from the underground car park into the busy street outside. ‘Two people in a relationship try to avoid sniping and sarcasm. What sort of restaurants do you go to?’
    He slid his eyes across to her and Violet felt a quiver of something sharp and unidentifiable, something that slithered through her like quicksilver, making her skin burn and prickling it with a strange sensation of awareness .
    This was a business deal. They were sitting here in this flash car, awkwardly joined together in a scheme in which neither wanted to participate but both were forced to, and she could do without her nervous system going into semi-permanent free fall.
    She needed to hang on to her composure, however much she disliked the man and however much she scorned his ethics.
    ‘I don’t,’ she told him evenly. ‘At least not often. Sometimes after work on a Friday night. I’m an art teacher. I haven’t got enough money to eat out in fancy restaurants.’ She wanted to burst out laughing because not only did they dislike each other, but they were from opposite sides of the spectrum. He was rich and powerful, she was...almost constantly counting her pennies or else saving and the only power she had was over her kids.
    Damien didn’t say anything. He had never gone out with a teacher. He leaned towards models, who moaned about not being paid enough...but usually it meant for the purchase of top end sports cars or cottages in the Cotswolds rather than fancy meals out. Most of them wouldn’t have been caught dead in cheap clothes or cheap restaurants. They earned big bucks for strutting their stuff on catwalks. In their heads, there was always a photographer lurking round the corner so getting snapped looking anything but gorgeous and being anywhere but cool was unacceptable.
    ‘When you say fancy... ’ he encouraged.
    ‘What do you call fancy?’ she asked him, because why should she be the one under the spotlight all the time?
    He named a handful of Michelin-starred restaurants which she had heard of and she laughed with genuine amusement. ‘I’ve read about those places. I don’t think I’d make it to any of them, even for a special occasion.’
    ‘Really,’ Damien murmured. He altered the direction of his car.
    ‘Really. Your mother will be very curious to discover what we see in one another. How would we have met in the first place?’ For a few seconds she forgot how much she disliked him and focused on the incongruity of the two of them ever hitting it off. ‘I mean, did you just see me emerging from the school where I work and decide that you wanted to come over for a chat?’
    ‘Stranger things have been known to happen.’
    But not much, Violet thought. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’
    ‘Heard of Le Gavroche?’
    ‘We can’t!’
    ‘Why