by Liz Fielding
‘Plenty of men were willing to comfort the grieving widow,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think they had anything very permanent in mind.’ That was when the body armour started. The severe dark clothes, a cool frosty look that kept the office Romeos at bay, until the habit of saying no had become a way of life.
‘It’s hard to believe.’
Telling him seemed to have lifted a burden from her and she found that she could smile. ‘Well, there was Jim Matthews. He wanted to marry me you know.’
‘Oh?’ There was a sudden fierceness to his voice. ‘And were you tempted?’
‘Not even remotely. But he was difficult to convince. He thought it was a wonderful idea to have a twenty-four hour a day captive secretary. He found it difficult to understand my reluctance, but once Jim gets something into his head he’s difficult to shift.’
‘I have some sympathy with the man. I intend to marry you myself.’ He kissed her to demonstrate just how serious he was. ‘But I think you’ll find he has something else on his mind these days.’
‘Why?’ She was suddenly suspicious. ‘What have you done?’
‘I have a contact in the States who publishes picture-book horror stories. Jim’s over there now working out a deal for a dozen books.’
Tara laughed. ‘That’s why I haven’t been able to get hold of him.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you wanted him out of your life.’
‘I thought I’d have one more try at convincing him of that. But you’ve apparently done it for me. Is there anything you can’t make money out of?’
‘In this instance there was no money involved. It just seemed like a good way of getting rid of a rival.’
‘He was never a rival.’ He said nothing. ‘Do you want me to prove it?’
* * *
Tara woke to an unfamiliar buzzing. She frowned, turned over and then she saw Adam through the open door of the bathroom. She lay for a moment savouring the pleasure, the intimacy of watching him shaving. Then the razor stilled and he was there, a towel wrapped around her his hips, smiling down at her.
He paused for a moment in the doorway. ‘Hello, sleepyhead.’
She had thought she would feel shy, but she didn’t. She held out her arms to him and he moved swiftly across the room and kissed her. She tangled her arms around his neck and encouraged him wantonly. But a few minutes later he removed himself with reluctance.
‘I hate to interrupt you, my darling, when you’re so obviously enjoying yourself, but it’s half past nine. We should both be somewhere else.’
‘What a pity you’re so strong willed,’ she murmured and stretched languorously.
‘Tara!’
She laughed, delighted. ‘I just wanted to be sure you weren’t that strong willed.’
Tara showered and slipped into a soft pink shirtwaist dress, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders. His eyebrows were expressive as she walked through into the kitchen and helped herself to the coffee he had made. She returned the compliment, raising her eyebrows at his dark business suit, fresh shirt and tie.
‘Are you always so well prepared when you call on a lady in the middle of the night?’ she asked, a teasing light dancing in her eyes.
‘My bag was in the car. But I’m afraid I’ve scandalised your neighbours. I think every one of them must have put out their milk bottles in order to have a better look.’
Tara was unconcerned. ‘You can hardly blame them after the racket you made last night.’
‘Perhaps not.’ He grinned. ‘Shall I go round and apologise to them all?’
‘Er, no. I don’t think so, but you could get Janice to send someone to repair my door. You do still have Janice?’ she asked.
‘Janice has been a lot harder to shift than the first two. But her job’s quite safe now. I don’t want you in the office. I have other plans for you.’
‘Oh?’
‘You might well say “oh”, my lady. I wasn’t that well prepared last night, which is why I plan to marry you at the earliest possible moment.’
She lowered her lashes. ‘Did you ask me to marry you, sir? I have no recollection of it.’
‘That’s odd. I distinctly recall mentioning it twice,’ he replied. She sipped her coffee. ‘Oh, I see. You want the whole bit. Down on one knee?’ She kept her eyes averted so that his sudden move took her by surprise and when her eyes flew open he was indeed upon one knee before her. He took her hand. ‘Will you marry me, my lady? I’ll love you and cherish you—’
‘Adam, get up!’ she laughed. ‘I didn’t think you’d do it.’
‘I only plan to do this once, Tara,’ he swore, emphatically. ‘So it might be a good idea to say yes with all possible speed, before I abandon you to a life of horror with Jim Matthews.’ His eyes glinted wickedly. ‘Maybe you’d prefer to have his slimy green monsters morning, noon and night.’
‘No!’ she said with a shudder.
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘Positive.’
He stood up. ‘In that case...’ He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small jeweller’s box. ‘... maybe this will help you make up your mind.’ He opened it to reveal a solitaire diamond that the sun streaming in through the window lit with a thousand fires. He slipped it on her finger and kissed her hand.
‘Adam, it’s beautiful.’
‘Can I take that as a yes?’
‘You know it is.’ He pulled her into his arms and for a long time neither of them said anything.
The urgent peel of the telephone finally parted them. ‘It’ll be Beth, wondering if I’m ever coming to work,’ she said.
‘Shall I answer it?’ he offered.
‘No!’ She dived across the room and grabbed the phone and Adam bent to pick something from the carpet. It was a ribbon. A red ribbon.
He saw her puzzled expression. ‘Every knight is entitled to carry his lady’s colours, Tara. And yours are most definitely red.’ He touched her flushed cheeks.
‘Tara? Are you there?’ Beth’s voice said plaintively. But Tara didn’t answer. She replaced the receiver without saying a word and went into his arms.
* * *
Beth said nothing when Tara arrived after lunch. She had seen her partner arrive in Adam’s car and she sat with a smug, contented expression as if the whole thing had been her idea. One look at Tara’s flushed and happy face had been enough to convince her that everything was right with the world. A second glance had taken in the ring and all the day’s conversation had revolved around the coming wedding.
They had called at the register office on the way into their respective offices and confirmed that if they wished to be married by licence the wedding could take place a couple of weeks after their application.
Tara made no outward show of her disappointment when Adam suggested they needed a little longer to give them time to make all the arrangements. But three weeks on Friday hadn’t felt quite like the “earliest possible moment” that he had promised.
And he was distracted when he called at the office later that afternoon. Sensing he had more than dalliance on his mind, Beth withdrew on an errand to the bank to give them some privacy.
‘I have to go away, Tara.’ He raked back his hair. ‘I’m not sure when I’ll get back, but I’ll be there for our wedding.’
There was a cold little spot of fear deep in her heart. She didn’t want to let him out of her sight, terrified that something would go wrong, that fate would once more dash the cup of happiness from her lips.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
He leaned across the desk and kissed her mouth and she knew with absolute certainty that he had no intention of telling her. ‘Janice is organising everything. Flowers, cars, reception. You don’t have to do a thing.’
She sat behind her desk, her hands neatly folded in front of her, a picture of serenity, while inside she felt quite sick. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’
His answering smile was all on the surface. She ha
d seen him do that at meetings when underneath a thousand thoughts were churning away. Something had happened since this morning. Something he didn’t want her to know about.
‘Will you call me?’ she asked, as he paused in the doorway, and recognised desperation in her voice.
‘I’ll try, my darling. Now I must go, or I’ll miss my plane.’ He walked quickly back and kissed her again and as if he sensed her unease he drew her from her chair and held her. ‘I love you, Tara. I’ll always love you.’ But apparently not enough to trust her.
If she had had the wedding arrangements to attend to it might have been different. She would have had something to occupy her mind in the long light spring evenings. But Janice had taken care of everything and Jane was holding the reception at her home.
Tara had been there, met her bearded explorer husband, but they hadn’t volunteered any information on the whereabouts of the man she was about to marry. And she couldn’t bring herself to ask. But one mystery had been cleared away. The newspaper photograph of Jane with the baby and Adam. It had been a story on the arrival of Charles Townsend’s son while the famous man was hacking his way through the rain forests of South America. If she had only read it she would have known then.
Adam called her once, sounding weary, a second time as if he was talking from the ends of earth on a line that crackled and hissed and made anything but the commonplace courtesies impossible. Any whispered love words were swallowed up by static. Or perhaps he never murmured them.
* * *
‘You look beautiful, Tara.’ Jane made the slightest adjustment to the ivory curve of veil that swept from her hat over her eyes. ‘Quite perfect.’
‘Thank you.’ At Jane’s insistence she and Lola had spent the seemingly endless night before her wedding with her future sister-in-law and her husband. Now it was time to go. She turned her head and saw her reflection in the long mirror. The simple silk dress, the tiny veiled hat, the single red rose in her hand.
She sat pale and silent in the rear of the car, twisting the diamond around the third finger of her right hand, its temporary home until after the wedding. Last night she had been certain he would phone. But he hadn’t. She had no idea if he was even back in the country. She was so certain that something had happened to him that the nerves stabbed through her like spears.
* * *
When they arrived at the register office the sudden quiet was enough to confirm her deepest fears. The arrival of the bride before the groom was not a good omen.
Everyone made a great effort to make a joke of it. Jane seemed unperturbed, but then her only concern at the moment was the welfare of her son and her husband.
‘Mr Blackmore and Mrs Lambert?’ The registrar looked around him expectantly.
Charles intervened. ‘There’s been a slight delay. I wonder if we could just wait—’ Everyone turned at the hurried sound of feet on the stairs.
‘Hello. Am I late?’ Adam kissed her cheek and took her hand. ‘The traffic from Heathrow was murder.’
In his presence all the nameless horrors evaporated like the early morning mist on a hot June morning.
‘Timed to a hair’s breadth, I’d say,’ Charles Townsend’s voice boomed across the vestibule.
But Tara’s eyes for the moment riveted on Adam, were slowly drawn slowly to the two people standing behind him.
Older, greyer, smaller than she remembered, but so familiar. She took a tentative step towards them.
‘Aunt Jenny?’ She took another step and then she was in the older woman’s arms, hugging her. She turned to Lamby and he held her for a moment. ‘I don’t believe it.’ The tears sprang to her eyes. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Adam came and fetched us, Tara.’
She turned to him. ‘You did that? For me?’
He smiled down at her. ‘I knew you’d want them here.’ The registrar cleared his throat. ‘Although if we don’t make a move right now I think this gentleman may make us wait a few more days.’
The party made a move, but Adam held her back. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to raise your hopes. I didn’t know if I could find them and if I did, I couldn’t be sure they would come.’
‘Who could ever resist you?’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘Why did I ever think of you as a black knight?’
‘I’m sure I gave you every reason.’
‘No. You’ve always been my true knight errant, Adam. Always there when I needed you.’
‘I always will be, my lady.’ He cradled her face, stole a kiss.
‘Darlings,’ Jane said, ‘you’re supposed to wait until after the wedding…’
‘Forever and day, Tara,’ he said, then took her hand and walked her in front of the registrar and repeated his promise for all the world to hear.
More from Liz Fielding…
ELOPING WITH EMMY
TOM Brodie regarded the man sitting behind the ornate desk. It was the first time he had met Gerald Carlisle; clients of such importance were usually dealt with by partners who had pedigrees as long as his own.
Brodie was the first to admit that he didn’t have a pedigree of any kind. What he’d achieved in his thirty-one years had nothing to do with family background, or the school he’d been to, it had been in spite of them.
It was the source of infinite satisfaction for him to know that one of the City’s oldest law firms, the august legal partnership of Broadbent, Hollingworth and Maunsell, had been driven to accept him because of their desperate need for sharp new brains to drag them out of their Dickensian ways, bring their systems up to date and drag them into the twenty-first century.
They’d tried offering him a consultancy. They’d tried a lump sum fee. He’d watched them wriggle with a certain detached amusement as they’d tried to buy his brains without having to take him and his working class background into their hallowed establishment, well aware that they needed him far more than he needed them. Which was why he’d refused to consider anything less than a full partnership.’
One day, quite soon, he would insist that they add his name to the discreet brass plaque beside the shiny black front door of their offices; Broadbent, Hollingworth, Maunsell and Brodie. They wouldn’t like that either, but they’d do it. The thought made listening to Gerald Carlisle’s worries about his tiresome daughter almost bearable.
Gerald Carlisle was not his client. Brodie was too egalitarian in his principles, too forthright in his views to be let loose around a client who had a family tree with a tap root that reached down to the robber barons of the middle ages, with land and money as old. It didn’t worry him. He had his own clients, companies run by men like himself who used their wits and their brains to create wealth instead of living off the past. Companies that brought in new money and big fees. It was the reason for his confidence about the brass plaque.
But today was the twelfth of August. When Carlisle’s call for help had come through to the BHM offices, Tom had been the only partner at his desk. Everyone else had already packed their Purdeys and headed north for the grouse moors of their titled clients. It was tradition apparently, and BHM, as Tom was constantly reminded, was a traditional firm with old-fashioned values which apparently included shooting game birds in vast numbers in the middle of August.
Tradition also required that when a client of Gerald Carlisle’s importance telephoned, he should speak to a partner; and so he had put through to Tom Brodie.
Gerald Carlisle, however, did not wish to discuss business over the telephone and so Tom had regretfully cancelled his dinner date with the delectable silver-blonde barrister with whom he had been playing kiss-chase for some weeks and driven to Lower Honeybourne.
Now, with the dusk gathering softly beyond the tall windows, he was sitting in the panelled study of Honeybourne Park, an impressive stone manor house set in countless acres of Cotswold parkland, while Carlisle explained the urgency of his problem.
‘Emerald has always been something of a handful,’ he was saying. For “h
andful”, Brodie thought, read “spoilt”. ‘Losing her mother so young...’
Anyone would think, from Carlisle’s hushed tones, that his wife had expired from some tragic illness rather than running away with a muscular polo-player and leaving her young daughter to the tender ministrations of a series of nannies. She had been a bit of a “handful” too — still was if the gossip columns were to be believed. Like mother, like daughter apparently.
‘I can see your problem, Mr Carlisle,’ Tom said, his face blank of expression. He was well used to keeping his feelings to himself. ‘I just don’t understand what you want me to do about it.’
Upon hearing the man’s proposed solution and the part he was expected to play in this, Brodie sincerely wished that he, too, had had some pressing engagement at the other end of the country that had taken him out of the office today.
‘Doesn’t your daughter have a say in this?’ he asked.
‘You don’t have to concern yourself with my daughter, Brodie. I’ll deal with her. All I want you to do is talk to this...gigolo...and find out how much it will take to buy him off.’
Buy him off.
Beneath that smooth aristocratic exterior, Brodie decided, Gerald Carlisle was a bully. He didn’t like bullies and for just a moment felt a surge of sympathy for Carlisle’s daughter, and for the young man she had declared it was her intention to marry. But only for a moment because he didn’t doubt that she was a spoilt brat who had to be regularly bailed out of trouble. Maybe, for once, she should be left to get on with it, stew in a broth of her own making and learn a lesson the hard way.
For one giddy moment he was tempted to suggest such a strategy, just to see the look on Carlisle’s face. But it wouldn’t do. Emerald Carlisle was an old-fashioned heiress on a grand scale. He knew that because BHM managed her Trust. Or rather Hollingworth did. Personally. It was that big.
Even a man of his egalitarian principles understood that a gigolo could not be allowed to prosper at the expense of one of BHM’s most valued — and valuable — clients. At least not while he was responsible for her.
Carlisle pushed a file across the desk. ‘You’ll find everything you need to know about Fairfax in there.’