Beaumont Brides Collection (44 page)

He ignored the implied criticism and picked up her ‘chute. She flexed her shoulders and held back her arms for him to lift it on. He didn’t.

Now who was wasting time? ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, looking behind her.

‘Nothing. I’m just going to change this ‘chute.’

‘What’s wrong with it? I packed it myself and Tony said I’d made a perfect job of it.’

‘Then Tony must have had his mind on other things. I’ll get you another one from the store. Why don’t you wait outside?’

She glared after him.

It wasn’t such a hardship. He was six foot two inches of unadulterated masculinity. He might raise her hackles, but after the narcissism and hot house atmosphere of the theatre she had to admit that there was a rough hewn, unfinished freshness about the man.

Not that he was her type.

She liked sophisticated, well groomed men who knew how to treat a lady. Gabriel MacIntyre appeared to be the kind of old-fashioned chauvinist who preferred his women barefoot and pregnant. He probably had half a dozen MacIntyre babies to prove it.

And she made it a rule never to play house with other girl’s husbands. But men didn’t make it easy to be noble. Tony, lying and potentially cheating Tony, for instance, had looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

Ten minutes later, buckled, fastened, wired for sound so that every gasp of fright could be experienced vicariously by the television audience, she was hurtling down the runway in a noisy, comfortless aircraft.

She forced herself to smile. The fuselage had been fitted with tiny cameras to catch every fleeting expression and she was supposed to be enjoying herself. This was all good, clean fun.

Ideally they should all be chatting and laughing but thankfully it was too noisy. No doubt someone would add on the kind of jokey commentary that would make the studio audience roar with laughter. She smiled harder, hoping that she hadn’t chewed all her lipstick off. It was the performance of a lifetime.

Nothing could go wrong.

The cameramen, all experienced free-fallers, were relaxed as they circled the airfield gaining height, double checking camera equipment with the OB crew on the ground.

Mac was standing behind the pilot, waiting until they reached the right height. He turned for a moment and stared at her, his eyes thoughtful, his forehead creased in a deep frown. It was unsettling, but she met his gaze, challenged it. Then the pilot shouted something to him and he looked away.

Claudia tried to remember everything that Tony had told her. But her mind was a blank. And then, in the noisy cramped space of the aircraft, with the jump only minutes away, the letter that had been pushed through her door in the early hours of the morning floated back to the surface of her mind and began to fill the vacuum with its insidious poison.

What kind of sick mind did it take to do something like that?

To take so much trouble to find all the right letters in a newspaper, cut them neatly out then arrange them precisely, sticking them down one by one?

She tried to blot it out. It was rubbish, nonsense, some sick person’s idea of a joke. Any successful actress was bound to provoke jealousy. It was inevitable. Especially when her path was perceived to have been eased by famous parents; a mother who had been a legend, a father who had directed the play she was appearing in right now.

 The letter was nothing. She had torn it up and thrown it in the bin with the rest of the rubbish.

Everything had been checked a dozen times. She was jumping from a static line. The ‘chute would open automatically. All she had to do was go through the drill Tony had taught her. It was no big deal. She looked up as Mac tapped her on the shoulder. It was time to go.

Nothing could go wrong.

But her skin was slicked with sweat as she watched the camera crew jump out of the open doorway, moving away from the aircraft, getting into position to film her own exit from the plane. They made it look so easy. It was easy. She adjusted her goggles.

Nothing could go wrong.

Mac hooked her to the static line then guided her into place in the doorway. Below her the ground was like a picture from a storybook. Small, clean, beautiful.

The rushing wind tugged at her, eager to suck her into the void, but she held on, waiting for Mac’s signal. It seemed forever in coming and she glanced at him. He smiled reassuringly.

He’d picked a hell of a time to decide to be friendly, she thought, as at last he slapped her on the shoulder with sufficient impact to ensure she didn’t change her mind and mess up everyone’s day.

Then, as she plunged downward, dropping towards the Berkshire countryside, she quite suddenly recalled that Gabriel MacIntyre had changed her carefully packed parachute at the last minute. And no one else had seen him do it.

The fields, the hedges, the silver ribbon of river all seemed to merge and resolve into a sheet of cheap lined paper covered with a jumble of newsprint.

I’VE FIXED YOU, DARLING CLAUDIA. OR RATHER I’VE FIXED YOUR PARACHUTE. ENJOY YOUR JUMP. YOU WON’T BE MAKING ANY MORE.

*****

Gabriel MacIntyre stood in the open doorway of the aircraft and watched Claudia Beaumont fall, counting the seconds, releasing the unexpectedly held breath as the parachute streamed out behind her and the canopy billowed and spread as it filled with air.

He had been so angry when he had seen the envelope tucked in the ‘chute she’d packed herself, certain it was a message from Tony. It had been something of a shock when, in the privacy of the store room, he’d opened it and seen what was inside.

She was floating gently now, drifting slightly in the light breeze, the jeep with the ground camera crew chasing after her. He hoped that despite her apprehension she had managed to relax sufficiently to enjoy herself, but the irony of the situation was not lost on him.

Her celebrity had put her in a situation where she had been forced to do something she would gladly have avoided. While he had been forced to stand by and watch, instead of being out there, skimming the air for those few magical seconds, the closest sensation to flying a man could ever hope achieve.

He pulled a face as she hit the ground heavily, almost feeling the bone-jarring shock of a bad landing. She had been too tense to collapse and roll the way Tony would have shown her. She’d be stiff tomorrow. And if she’d cut her lip maybe it would be her understudy’s lucky night. He hoped she hadn’t. She had the kind of mouth that dreams were made of even when she was chewing of her lipstick with nerves.

He watched for a moment longer as the ground camera crew homed in on her, determined not to miss anything that would give the viewers a buzz, hoping that the cool Miss Beaumont would be sufficiently shaken to say something that needed a bleep.

That was always good for a laugh.

His lips twisted in disgust at his own feelings of superiority. He was taking their money for God’s sake, part of the circus whether he liked it or not. And what a circus it was.

He saw her rise to her feet, apparently unhurt by her heavy fall, then peeled away from the doorway, dropping into the canvas seat that Claudia had so recently vacated, rubbing at a knee that was never slow to remind him that he wasn’t quite the man he had been. Be patient, give it six months, the specialist had said and they’d look at it again.

He didn’t need six months. He knew he’d never jump again. Not and walk away.

He pushed the thought away, taking the envelope he had retrieved from Claudia’s parachute from his pocket, shaking out the pieces of a photograph and putting them together.

He’d seen the picture on the cover of one of the Sunday supplements a week or so earlier; Claudia Beaumont dressed and made up for a role that, according to the headline, her mother had once made her own.

Despite the artificial, stylised glamour of the photograph, the girl’s almost luminous beauty shone through and he could see why someone as gullible as Tony had been bowled over.

He had thought himself utterly immune to anything that obvious, but when she’d put her head out of that ridiculous little car and looked up at him with those huge silver fox eyes he had been uncomfortably aware of his own stampeding testosterone.

He’d been so busy defending himself from her siren beauty that he’d bawled at her like a barrack square bully instead of checking to see if she was hurt.

His mouth twitched in an involuntary smile. She hadn’t needed anyone to look out for her. Miss Claudia Beaumont might look like an angel but she was quite capable of giving as good as she got. Sometime within the next half an hour he would have to apologise to her and he had the distinct feeling that when he did she would be laughing at him, knowing precisely why he had responded in the way he had.

Was there a man alive who wouldn’t?

He looked at the photograph again. It had been cut into six pieces. Arms, legs, head, each neatly severed from the body. The effect was distinctly chilling and obviously calculated to scare Claudia silly.

It had to have been Adele.

When she was happy, contented, at peace with herself and the world, she was a delightful young woman. Jealous, she was a tiger, quite capable of reacting to any threat to her marriage with that kind of over-the-top gesture and she had been at the airfield yesterday evening, blazing with indignation and fit to kill.

He shrugged, pushed the envelope back in his pocket wishing he’d never got involved in this pantomime. The money the television company were paying for the use of his field, his team, would help to underwrite the cost of training a bunch of written-off youths into a talented free fall team, but when he had been approached with the idea, he hadn’t anticipated someone like Claudia Beaumont as part of the package, disrupting their lives.

He shifted uncomfortably. Maybe he was misjudging the woman.

Once Tony had set eyes on her it was inevitable that he would start thinking with his hormones and it was quite possible that Claudia hadn’t known that he was married. She hadn’t erupted like Adele when he had told her, but the anger had been there, just for a split second before she had covered it with that cool dismissal.

He looked up as the pilot caught his attention.

‘How’d it go?’ he mouthed over the noise of the engine.

‘No problems.’

No problems. He may have had doubts about Claudia Beaumont’s morals but there was certainly no doubting her courage. It took courage to jump when you were frightened out of your wits. And she had been frightened despite all that brittle-edged bravado. He’d seen too many first time jumpers to miss the signs.

Men usually went through with it because they didn’t want to look stupid in front of their mates. Claudia Beaumont would have looked stupid in front of millions of television viewers. And from what he’d heard, she hadn’t been given much of a choice to start with.

He bit down hard. She didn’t deserve his sympathy because he certainly wasn’t misjudging the situation that had developed between her and Tony. Damn the man. Why the hell couldn’t he grow up and realise just how lucky he was?

The aircraft wheels touched down on the runway with a bump and a screech and moments later they were taxiing on to the apron in front of the hangar, followed by the jeep that had brought Claudia and the rest of the crew in from the far side of the field.

He lowered himself through the door, taking care to put his weight on his right leg first and by the time he had turned Claudia had taken off the helmet and goggles and her hair was flying about her face. Even with a slightly swollen lip and a graze beneath her left eye she looked incredibly beautiful as she held the flirtatious film crew at bay with an easy grace.

He was impressed.

He really hated having to admit it, but he was seriously impressed by her composure. He’d seen grown men throw up, cry even, with relief that it was over. That they were still alive.

Then she saw him and her smile faded to be replaced with a tiny frown as he stepped forward to help her down. After a moment’s hesitation she put her hands on his shoulders and he gripped her waist. It fitted comfortably between his hands and as he lifted her, her hair swung forward enfolding him in some faint exotic scent that mingled with the everyday scents of clean fresh air and bruised grass that clung to her jumpsuit.

She was tall for a woman, no featherweight as she hung momentarily above him, yet he would rather have held her than let her go. And when he set her down, his hands remained at her waist.

She didn’t move but remained perfectly still within the circle of his arms, that tiny frown still puckering the wide space between her eyes and without thinking, Gabriel MacIntyre bent and kissed her.

Her mouth tasted the way he knew it would, honeypot sweet, seductively so and he had a momentary sense that quite suddenly everything was right with the world. Then she stepped back, raised her hand and slapped him. Hard.

For a moment nobody moved. Then one of the camera men grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry mate, for a small consideration we’ll edit that bit out.’

CHAPTER TWO

GABRIEL MacIntyre’s cornflower blue eyes darkened. It was like a shadow crossing the sun and Claudia, heart pounding from an adrenalin rush that sent her blood zinging through her veins, saw it and was glad.