Highland Mist (8 page)

Euan’s expression hardly altered, but his voice had a meticulous coolness as he asked:

“And you don’t object to him being older than Toni is?”

Celia shrugged.

“No, not really ... no, I don’t think I do. And the main thing is that she’s had a kind of crush on him ever since she was tiny, and now I think she absolutely adores him. It may be May and December, but I’m sure he adores her, too,” with smooth complacence.

“I see,” Euan said, his mouth thin. There was a knock on the door, and a woman who was the exact antithesis of what is known as a “guid Scots body”, being thin and rather sour-looking and obviously hailing from Lancashire or the Midlands, brought in a tray of tea. She said she thought Celia would be glad of it after a journey, and looked at Celia as if she was hardly attracted by what she saw.

“I always say there’s nothing like a good cup of hot tea,” she remarked.

Celia attempted to freeze her with one of her disdainful looks, disliking familiarity in servants.

“I spent the night in Inverechy,” she observed, “and that is only a few miles away. I should hardly call that a journey.”

Euan accepted the hint, while still looking a little bleak about the mouth.

“Ask your husband to bring in a tray of drinks, Mrs. Briggs,” he instructed.

“Very good, sir.” She glanced at the tray of tea. “And what will I do with this? Shall I take it away, or will the young lady have some when she comes in from the garden?”

Euan glanced out of the window at the neglected wilderness, running between the house and the shore of the lake, that was the garden. Something told him that Toni would not come in very quickly from the garden.

“You can take it away,” he said curtly.

CHAPTER TEN

Toni wandered in the garden, and made her way down to the edge of the loch. It was all so beautiful, and all so overlaid with the gossamer charm of spring, that she had some excuse for prolonging her exploration of her unknown Great-Uncle Angus’s property, which he had left to her mother.

But actually it was Celia herself who had made her curiously loath to return to the house. For the first time in her life her mother had surprised her. She had thought she knew all the reactions, and the various methods of drawing attention to herself and achieving pet ambitions, of the only parent she had ever known, but now at last, Celia’s behaviour was perplexing, to say the least. She was not running true to form at all, for although she loved masculine admiration and was always at her best in the company of the opposite sex, she usually confined any amorous incidents to circles where her opposite number was likely to know all the rules, and was round about her own age, if not older.

Charles was certainly younger than she was, but then Charles occupied a special and unique position. Charles was the man Toni was certain her mother was in love with, and she had every intention of marrying him one day. Or so Toni believed.

Euan MacLeod was not many years younger than Charles Henderson, but he was a different type altogether. He didn’t strike a fresh acquaintance as a flirtatious type (anything but, Toni would have said, at her own first meeting with him), but he was much more essentially male than Charles, much more a dominating type of male, forceful, arrogant, perhaps self-centred. Charles was inclined to pamper himself, but he was not self-centred. He could be kind and thoughtful and very gentle on occasion ... but then so also could MacLeod,
on occasion,
she thought swiftly!

But what was her mother hoping to gain from developing a friendship with him? Toni had a vivid mental picture—which came between her and the lovely larkspur blueness of the loch—of Celia slipping her hand through his arm, and looking up at him with a special kind of provocation in her eyes. Occasionally she looked at Charles like that—but only occasionally, when he seemed to be slipping a little in his attentiveness—and usually it had the desired result of bringing him right down to her feet. But Euan MacLeod could hardly be expected to become a suppliant at her feet ... unless her attraction for him was on the verge of becoming the kind of attraction she had for Charles!

His face gave away so little, yet from the very beginning he had seemed to find it remarkable easy to talk to Celia—much easier than he had found it to talk to her daughter! And even before meeting her he had replied to her letters, as if some charm she exercised was contained in her correspondence; and the very first evening of meeting her he had talked to her almost exclusively, rented her house from her for no particular reason, and invited her—and Toni—to become his guest.

Why should a young man do that, even if the woman in question was beautiful and still much more desirable than many younger women? Much more desirable, that is, when carefully groomed and made up ... perhaps not so much on waking, when she was denuded of her exquisite facial mask, or wrapped in a terry-towelling bathrobe on her way back from the bathroom.

Toni hoped she wasn’t being disloyal or catty when she allowed herself this sudden reflection, while watching a mass of clouds forming about the head of Ben Inver; but it was true, and quite apart from that she was appalled by the thought that Celia herself might be laying herself open to bitter disillusionment ... if it was
she
who was aware of some potent charm in the man with the hard blue eyes and the touch of red in his hair, who was now their host.

And, in any case, what would Charles think?

Oddly enough, as she stood there with a sudden chill wind blowing full into her face from off the loch, and watched the clouds gathering and darkening and spreading about the hoary head of the giant Ben Inver, it didn’t greatly concern her what Charles thought, or would think, if Celia was heading for a most unsuitable infatuation; and she wasn’t only concerned with the problem of how Celia would recover from it—for somehow she was certain that infatuation and Euan MacLeod were poles apart—but a queer feeling of distaste—almost an acute feeling of distaste—every time she even thought of her mother and the leading beneficiary under the terms of Great-Uncle Angus’s will in close association with one another seized her, and actually shook her slightly.

It made her delay going back to the house until the first drops of rain were descending from the spreading clouds, and when she turned to run back along the weed-grown paths to shelter she almost collided with her host, who had come to look for her.

“Your mother and I were wondering what had happened to you,” he snapped, and then took her by the arm and raced her to the shelter of a summerhouse—one, had she but known it, in which Great Uncle Angus had loved to sit and watch the storms break over the lake—and by the time they reached it the rain was coming down in earnest, and drumming like machine-gun fire on the roof of the summerhouse.

“A spring storm,” Euan explained, “that will blow itself out almost before you’ve got your breath back.” She was panting from the race up the steep slope. “But it could have soaked you through long before you reached the house if I hadn’t run into you.”

“In that case I’d have had to go straight up to my room and change,” she said lightly.

She could almost feel him frown.

“You do attract bad weather, don’t you?” he said. “And you’re not very clever at avoiding it.”

She glanced at him, at his cool, aloof features, and the little cleft between his brows.

“You don’t think I’ll catch pneumonia this time, do you?” she said, slightly amazed at herself because there was almost a jibing note in her voice. But she was conscious of the most extraordinary irritation because he could be so critical with her, and with her mother he was so smooth and suave. Why, he hadn’t even helped her off with her coat when they arrived ... but he had made quite a ceremony of doing that very thing for Celia!

“You didn’t catch pneumonia last time,” he remarked curtly.

“No, I know.” Her tone sounded slightly abject. “But that was because you looked after me so well!”

They stood in the doorway of the summer-house, and the skies emptied themselves of a short, sharp storm. The surface of the loch—blue as a blaze of larkspur only a few minutes before, and as unruffled as a mirror—became turbulent as an exposed sea, and the frenzy of the waves that rose up and hurled themselves upon the shore astounded Toni. They actually were waves, several feet high, and if a fisherman had been caught in this squall he would have been lucky if he got back to land without a spill. But—because fishermen are usually weather-wise—there were no boats on the loch, and no disaster occurred.

Suddenly Toni shivered. With the going in of the sun it had turned very cold, and she had left her coat inside the house. She was wearing a fine wool dress that was not nearly adequate to protect her against that sudden lowering of the temperature, and Euan saw her shivering and was quick to remove his coat and put it round her shoulders. She protested at once, but he spoke to her sharply, as if she was a child.

“If you won’t wear suitable clothing you must have it reinforced. I’m not in the least likely to catch a chill.”

She could smell the faint scent of tobacco that rose up from his coat, and in the midst of a feeling of confusion because once more he had had to put himself out on her behalf—and, incidentally, deprive himself of a warm article of clothing because she was so exceptionally fragile—she knew a most comforting sensation of pleasure because of the warmth of the coat and the promptness with which he had offered it.

Although, as she realised afterwards, he never offered things; he just did things according to the sudden need, or what he considered to be the sudden need.

“I expect the sun will be out again in a minute,” she said, her teeth still chattering just a little. “It was so warm when we arrived.”

“You mustn’t be deceived by a burst of sunshine in this part of the world,” he remarked critically, as if she was the type who could be deceived by anything. “These are northern latitudes, you know, and not the South of France. We never know when we’re in for a cold spell, or even a hard spell, despite the season. I hope you’ve brought some sensible shoes as well as those thin things you’re wearing,” looking down disapprovingly at her hand-made shoes of softest leather, that had cost Celia quite a lot of money, and were advertised in the glossy magazines as “Ideal for country walking”.

“Oh, yes.” She looked down meekly at her shoes. “I’ve brought brogues.

“Well, that’s something,” he admitted grudgingly. “And if you hadn’t been in such a hurry to start off exploring this place I’d have advised you to put the Wellingtons on this morning.” A scud of wind and a flurry of rain came in at the summerhouse door, and he saw her draw his coat around her. He put an arm across her shoulders and kept it there protectively. “You’re such an inadequate person, somehow,” he remarked, frowning above her head. “About as substantial as a windflower. I hope that fellow Henderson will look after you properly when you’re married to him.”

“Married to him?” She put back her head quickly against the warm softness of his thick sweater ... that had probably cost more than her shoes, for nowadays he looked the part of the man who had inherited money.

“Yes.” He was staring almost serenely at the loch. “I said that’s what you would do, didn’t I?—marry him. And your mother’s got it all planned.”

“My mother’s got it—planned?” She wrinkled her brows in amazement. “You must have misunderstood something she said.”

“And good little girls always do what their mothers tell them!” with a mocking twist to his lips.

Toni’s brows wrinkled still more, and then her expression grew quiet and thoughtful. What
was
Celia’s game? And what had she said to Euan MacLeod to mislead him into believing there was a plan for her to marry Charles? When there was no plan at all, and Charles was Celia’s property! “Charles is an old friend,” she said stiffly.

“You said that before,” he remarked.

“And I mean it.” She moved away from his arm, or tried to, for he wouldn’t allow it, and ordered her to keep still.

“The storm is passing, and the sun will be out in a minute. Don’t be so touchy on the subject of this man Henderson. I gather you’ll pine away if he doesn’t arrive this week-end? But he will, for it’s obvious he can’t keep away from you, either, and that’s why I predict you’ll be married some time this summer.”

She dragged herself away from his arm, and he let her go and grinned at her crookedly.

“Your mother called it May and December, but I don’t think that’s quite kind. He isn’t more than five years older than I am—perhaps less—and you’ll probably start growing up quite soon. Although with a mother who still looks about nineteen there isn’t as much hope of that as there might be!”

With which curt observation he strode out of the summer-house, and she saw that the sun was shining. More, she could feel it warming her through and through, and she took off his coat and handed it back to him without opening her lips or uttering a sound. In a remote kind of silence they walked back to the house, and there Celia was waiting for them and looking petulant because she had been left alone for fully half an hour.

“I can’t think why you wanted to go wandering about before lunch,” she said to Toni. “Mrs. Briggs has shown me my room, and I’ve done some unpacking, but I think you ought to come and look at yours, because I’ve an idea I might like to change over with you. Mine is on the weather side of the house, and you know I can never sleep if there’s any disturbance in the night. That storm just now, if it had happened at night, would have kept me awake for hours in my present room. And I’m sure you don’t mind in the least which room I have, do you, Euan?” she asked, smiling at him sweetly.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Of course not. You must settle the matter between yourselves.”

“So sweet of you,” she murmured, “to give me the room with the bathroom. But Toni’s is such a sunny room, and I love sun?!”

“And Miss Drew doesn’t?” Euan said, rather dryly.

Celia sent him rather an inscrutable look from her glorious dark blue eyes. They were eyes that seemed to be deliberately searching his face, and were just a tiny bit baffled.

“Oh, call her Toni,” she said, as she had said more than once before. “I do hate this awful formality between friends.”

“Host and guests,” he corrected her, looking oddly formal himself. “There are at least a dozen bedrooms here, so if you don’t like the ones you have you must take your pick. The entire house has been cleaned from attic to basement, so they’re all ready for occupation. And some of them get the full benefit of the morning and afternoon sun,” he added to Toni.

She thanked him.

“I’ll probably keep the one I’ve got. Or the one Mummy doesn’t like.”

His blue eyes looked up at her from the foot of the stairs. They were hard and mocking and, surprisingly, just a little contemptuous. And why he should hold her in contempt she couldn’t think. Until she remembered:

“
Good girls always do what their mothers tell them
!”

She flushed.

“I’ll probably pick a sunny room.”

His eyes continued to mock her.

“What initiative!” he commented. And then he added, “Toni!”

That night they dined in a room that was almost oppressive with magnificent solid oak furniture, and although the sideboard was crowded with Georgian silver that caught every ray of light from the pendant chandelier, the room remained sombre even after they were seated at the table.