A Little Revenge Omnibus (7 page)

‘And she’s helping you, visiting factories with you...?’

‘She is a he,’ Beth told her shortly. ‘And as for helping me...’ There was a small pause. ‘Honestly, Kelly, men. I’m totally off all of them. Just because a person has a fancy degree and a whole string of letters after his name, that does not give him the right to try to tell me what to do. And as for trying to force me to visit factories that he’s chosen, with tales of theft and gypsies—’

‘Beth.’ Kelly interrupted her in bewilderment. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, it’s all right, I’m just letting off steam. It’s Alex, the interpreter. He’s half-English, as it turns out, and his grandparents left Prague for political asylum in the west when his mother was a child. Alex returned after the revolution to search for his family and he’s stayed on here.’

‘Sounds like he’s been confiding rather a lot of personal history to you for someone you don’t get on with,’ Kelly told her wryly.

‘Oh, he tells me what he wants me to know. He’s insisting that I visit a glass factory run by his cousins, but I’m not inclined to go. He obviously has a vested interest in anything I might buy. I’ve managed to track down somewhere that produces this most wonderful design I’ve seen, and he’s acting all high and mighty and trying to tell me that it’s all a con and that the stall-holder saw me coming a mile off. He says there isn’t any factory where they’ve told me to go and the glass I wanted to buy couldn’t have been genuine. He says it’s a well-known ploy to get hold of foreign currency that is often worked against naive people like me...

‘Oh, but Kelly, you should have seen this glass. It was wonderful, pure Venetian baroque, you know the kind of thing, and it would lend itself beautifully to being gilded for the Christmas market. I even thought that if the price was reasonable enough we could commission some special sets, hand-painted and gilded for special celebrations—weddings, anniversaries...you know the kind of thing...’

Kelly laughed as she listened to her friend’s excited enthusiasm. It was wonderful to hear that note back in Beth’s voice again, and even more wonderful that she hadn’t even asked once about Julian Cox.

‘Anyway,’ Beth was continuing determinedly, ‘somehow I’m going out to this factory by myself. I’m planning to give my guide, and for that you can read jailer, the slip. It’s obvious what he’s up to,’ she told Kelly scornfully. ‘He just wants to secure our business for his cousins. He claims that their factory could probably reproduce the glass if they had a copy of it...’

‘Mmm... Well, if that’s the case, it might be worthwhile sketching the glass and seeing if they can reproduce it.’

‘Never,’ Beth asserted fiercely. ‘There’s no way I’m going to have Alex dictating to me... No. I’ve seen the glass I want and I know where to get it, and I’m determined to get an exclusive supply of it and at the right price. After all, if we did commission Alex’s cousins, what’s to stop them selling our design elsewhere, putting up the price to us because they know we want it? Look, I must go; Alex is picking me up in half an hour. He’s insisting on making me walk over the Charles Bridge, and since it’s raining today he says it should be relatively free of other tourists.’

‘Sounds fun,’ Kelly teased her, smiling as she said goodbye and hung up. The others would be so pleased to hear that Beth seemed to be getting over Julian Cox.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
S
HE
LET
himself into the hallway of their rented house and blinked at the teeth-jarring, hard yellow paint of the room, Brough reflected that he would be glad when they could finally move into the large Georgian farmhouse he had bought several miles outside the town and which was presently undergoing some much needed renovation work. It had been empty for three years before Brough had managed to persuade the trustees of the estate of the late owner that there was no way anyone was ever going to pay the exorbitant price they were asking for it.

‘If they don’t sell it soon, they’ll be lucky to have anything there worth selling,’ he had told the agent crisply. ‘It’s already been empty and unheated for three winters, and if the government gives the go-ahead for the new bypass the area will be swarming with protestors just looking for an empty house to take over and make themselves comfortable in.’

Buying the house, though, had simply been the beginning of a whole spate of difficult negotiations. The property was listed, and every detail of his planning applications had to be scanned by what had felt like a never-ending chain of committees, but now at last the approved builder had started work on the property, and, with any luck, he should be able to move into it within the year, the builder had assured him cheerfully on his last site inspection.

For now, he would have to live with the last owner of his present house’s headache-inducing choice of colours.

‘Brough, is that you?’

He grimaced wryly as Eve came rushing into the hallway, her face pink with excitement as she told him breathlessly, ‘Guess what? Julian rang; he’s going to be free this evening after all, so he’s taking me out to dinner. Oh, Brough, I was so afraid he was going to be angry with me when you insisted that you couldn’t help him with his new venture.’

As he listened to her Brough could feel himself starting to grind his teeth. There was no point in wishing that his sister had a more worldly and less naive outlook, nor in blaming his grandmother and the old-fashioned girls’ school she had insisted he send her to for the part they had played in her upbringing. He might just as well blame their parents for dying—and himself for not being able to take on the full responsibility for bringing her up without his grandmother’s help.

He knew how upset his grandmother would be if she knew how ill-prepared the select, protective girls’ school she had chosen so carefully for her had left Eve for the modern world, and some day in the not too distant future Brough was afraid that his sister was going to have her eyes opened to reality in a way that was going to hurt her very badly.

As he’d thought a number of times before, there was no point in him trying to warn Eve about Julian Cox. She had a surprisingly strong, stubborn streak to her make-up, and was very sensitive about both her own independence and her judgement. To imply that Julian was deceiving her, that she was totally and completely wrong about him in every single way, was almost guaranteed to send her running into his arms, and not away from them, which would have been bad enough if what she stood to lose from such an event was her emotional and physical innocence—more than bad enough. But Eve stood to inherit a very sizeable sum of money from their parents’ estate when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday, and Brough was convinced that Julian Cox would have no compunction whatsoever about marrying her simply for that reason alone.

Brough had had Julian’s financial affairs thoroughly investigated. To describe them as in total disarray and bordering on the legally fraudulent was no exaggeration, nor was his emotional history any less murky. But, of course, Eve wouldn’t hear a word against him. She considered herself to be in love.

‘Oh, I’m so pleased. He was awfully upset this morning after you told him you really couldn’t help him... That was mean of you,’ she reproached Brough.

‘On the contrary, it was simply good business sense,’ Brough told her dryly. ‘I know how you feel about him, Eve but...’

‘Oh, Brough, please don’t start lecturing me,’ she begged him. ‘Just because you don’t want to fall in love...because you don’t have someone to share your life with...someone special...that doesn’t mean... I love him, Brough,’ she said simply.

Brough sighed as she went upstairs. He wished he could find some way to protect her from the ultimate inevitability of having her heart broken, but he suspected that even if he were to confront her with incontrovertible evidence of Cox’s real nature she would simply close her eyes to it.

Women! There was no way of understanding how their minds and, even more, their emotions worked. Look at Kelly. A bright, intelligent, beautiful young woman who was apparently as oblivious to Cox’s faults as his own sister. Not that he thought that Kelly’s other choice of male was any better—but for very different reasons. Harry was quite obviously an extremely estimable young man, the kind of man whom he would have been only too pleased to see dating his sister, but, as a partner for a woman of Kelly’s obviously feisty and quicksilver personality, surely a totally wrong choice. She needed a man who could match the quickness of her brain...who could appreciate the intelligence and artistry of her work...who could share the passion that he could sense ran so strongly through her at the very deepest level of her personality... A man who...

Abruptly he caught himself up.

Nothing he had experienced in his admittedly brief contact with Kelly had indicated that she had the kind of insecure, needy personality that would make her a natural victim for a man like Cox.

Eve, on the other hand, if he was honest, desperately needed to feel loved and secure, to have a partner who would incorporate into their adult relationship the kind of protective, emotional padding she had missed from the loss of their father and experienced in a different way at school. Eve needed a man who would treat her gently, a man with whom she could have the kind of relationship which he privately would find too unequal. The woman he loved would have to be his equal, his true partner in every aspect of their lives. There would have to be complete and total honesty and commitment between them, a deep, inner knowledge that they would be there for one another through their whole lives—he too had suffered from their parents’ death, he acknowledged wryly.

And Eve was wrong about him not wanting to fall in love...to marry. At the end of his present decade lay the watershed birthday of forty, comfortably in the distance as yet, but still there on the horizon. When he thought of himself as forty, it was not particularly pleasant to visualise himself still alone, uncommitted...childless... But the woman he married, the woman he loved...

Unbidden, the memory of how Kelly’s lips had felt beneath his flooded his body, sharply reminding him that if a male’s sexual responses were at their fastest and peak in his teens, then they could still react with a pretty forceful and demanding potent speed in his thirties—disconcertingly so.

The dichotomy he had sensed within Kelly at the ball which had so intrigued him had turned to a more personal sense of irritation this afternoon. Did she really think he was so lacking in intelligence...in awareness...that he couldn’t see how alien to her personality her relationship with Julian was? What the hell was it about the man that led a woman like her to...? It was almost as though he held some kind of compulsive attraction for her or had some kind of hold over her.

In another age it might almost have been said that he had cast some kind of spell over her—as she was beginning to do over him?

* * *

K
ELLY
PAUSED
IN
the act of picking up her keys. In the close confines of the flat’s small entrance hall she could smell the scent of her own perfume. Defensively she told herself that wearing it was simply second nature to her and meant nothing, had no dark, deep, psychological significance, that the fact that she was wearing it to, and for, a meeting with Brough Frobisher meant absolutely nothing at all.

She wasn’t a woman who was overly fond of striking make-up, nor strictly styled hair, but she did like the femininity of wearing her own special signature scent, even if normally she wore it in conjunction with jeans and a casual top.

Tonight, though, those jeans had been exchanged for a well-cut trouser suit—not for any other reason than the fact that wearing it automatically made her feel more businesslike. And that was, after all, exactly what this evening’s meeting was all about—business. And as for that small spurt of sweet, sharp excitement she could feel dancing over her vulnerable nerve-endings, well, that was nothing more than the arousal of her professional curiosity.

Hartwell china always evoked special memories for her. It had been the Hartwell china she had seen on a visit to a stately home as a girl which had first awoken her interest in the design and manufacture of porcelain, and it had been the Hartwell factory where she had first had her actual hands-on experience of working on the physical aspect of copying the designer’s artistry onto the china itself. And so it was only natural that she should feel this surge of excitement at the thought of seeing a piece which sounded as though it was extremely rare.

It didn’t take her very long to drive to the address Brough had given her. Rye-on-Averton was only a relatively small and compact town, virtually untouched by any effects of the Industrial Revolution and still surrounded by the farmland which had surrounded it way, way back in the Middle Ages.

Parking her own car and getting out, Kelly carefully skirted the expensive gleaming Mercedes saloon car parked in the drive and climbed the three steps which led to the front door. Brough opened it for her virtually as soon as she rang the bell.

Unlike her, he was unexpectedly casually dressed in jeans and a soft cotton checked shirt.

The jeans, Kelly noticed as she responded to his non-verbal invitation to come into the house, somehow or other emphasised the lean length of his legs and the powerful strength of his thigh muscles.

As a part of her studies at university she had, for a term, attended a series of lectures and drawing classes on the human body, and whilst there had been required to sketch nudes, both male and female, but that experience was still no protection against either the images which inexplicably filled her thoughts or the guilty burn of colour which accompanied them.

What on earth was she doing, mentally envisaging Brough posing, modelling for a classical Greek statue? That kind of behaviour, those kinds of thoughts, simply were not her.

‘It’s this way,’ Brough informed her, the cool, clipped sound of his voice breaking into the dangerous heat of her thoughts as he indicated one of the doorways off the hall.

The yellow paint in which the hallway was decorated made Kelly do a slight double-take, a fact which Brough obviously noticed because he commented dryly, ‘Bilious, isn’t it? Unfortunately its shock effect doesn’t lessen with time.’

‘You could always redecorate,’ Kelly pointed out austerely, refusing to allow herself to feel any sympathy with him, even in the unfortunate colour of his walls.

‘Not really. This house is only rented. I’m only living here until the one I’ve bought has been renovated.’

‘Oh, so you’ve moved into the area permanently, then?’

Kelly berated herself furiously as the question slipped out, her curiosity getting the better of her, but to her relief Brough made totally the wrong connection between her question and its motivation as he responded even more dryly, ‘Yes, we have, so I’m afraid you can’t look to our removal from town as an easy way of removing my sister from your lover’s life.’

‘It isn’t necessary for me to do any such thing,’ Kelly denied furiously through gritted teeth, momentarily forgetting her allotted role.

‘Eve believes he intends to marry her. How do you feel about that?’ he challenged her.

‘How do you feel about it?’ Kelly sidetracked.

‘He’s a liar and a cheat and most probably guilty of financial fraud as well,’ Brough told her bitingly. ‘How the hell do you think I feel about it?’

‘She’s your sister.’

‘Strange,’ he continued softly, ‘you don’t look particularly surprised—or shocked. Perhaps you like the idea of having a married lover, especially one whose wife is both extremely rich and extremely in love.’

‘No. That’s not...’

Immediately she realised what she was saying, Kelly stopped.

‘That’s not what?’ Brough goaded her. ‘Not what you want? He’s your lover...’

‘And Eve is your sister,’ Kelly pointed out again quickly. ‘My relationship with Julian is no one’s business other than our own. If you dislike him so much, disapprove of him so much, why haven’t you told Eve so?’

‘She’s too much in love to listen to me or to anyone else. What is it you see in him? What possible attraction can he have for any woman when he...?’

‘Why don’t you ask Eve?’ Kelly suggested.

Ridiculously, dangerously, she was actually starting to feel sorry for him. It was plain how worried he was about his sister, and with good reason, and it was equally plain that he felt helpless to do anything to alter the situation. Even so, she couldn’t resist punishing him just a little, both for what he thought about her and what he had said...and done...

‘It’s obviously hard for a man to see just what it is about Julian that appeals to our sex. Perhaps you feel jealous of him.’

‘Jealous...? Look, just because last night I kissed you, that doesn’t mean—’

‘I mean jealous because Eve loves him,’ Kelly interrupted him shakily.

‘You wanted me to look at this plate,’ she reminded him, anxious to return their conversation to a much more businesslike footing.

‘Yes. It’s in here,’ he told her, ushering her into a large, high-ceilinged room which was painted a particularly unpleasant shade of dull green.

‘Hideous, isn’t it?’ he agreed, correctly interpreting her thoughts. ‘The owner must be colour blind—or worse. You should see the bedrooms; the one I’m occupying is painted a particularly repulsive shade of puce.’