And planning.
At the end of every summer all the household staff, estate workers and their families received an invitation to attend the party Marcus gave for them at the Hall. And every year her grandparents politely declined. They didn’t hold with such wasteful and unnecessary goings-on. They would never give her permission to attend, and while she lived under their roof she would do exactly as she was told. That had been drummed into her more times than she cared to remember.
Somehow she was going to go without them finding out.
Thankfully, they always went to bed early, so creeping out of the cottage after they’d retired for the night, wearing her old school coat over the wickedly expensive dress she’d dug deep into her savings to buy in Gloucester was the only option.
When the Hall came into view, all the downstairs windows flooded with light, she almost lost her nerve. She had wasted all her precious savings on frivolous underwear, the green silk dress that was far more daring than anything she’d ever imagined herself wearing, matching silk-covered high heels and a confusing mass of make-up that had demanded hours of secret experimentation before she had been able to achieve the right effect.
All of which would have to be continually hidden away—because if Gran ever discovered this evidence of what she would call flightiness there would be hell to pay!
And for what?
Just because Carl had asked her if she would be going to his uncle’s annual party. Probably because he felt sorry for her, knew she was denied the sort of fun most girls took for granted by over-strict grandparents. And for the sake of old friendship he’d joked about it. ‘If you don’t turn up I’ll come and get you!’ Not really meaning it. It was one of those things people said.
Hovering on the edge of the drive, feeling foolish, she suddenly realised what the change in him she’d seen back in June was. It was the patina of sophistication that came naturally to a young adult male with wealth, centuries of breeding behind him, looks to die for and a deeply entrenched certainty about who he was and where he was going.
Carl Forsythe had the world at his feet and he knew it. She might have gone and fallen in love with him, but he would never feel more than moderate friendship for his old playmate—the humble granddaughter of one of his uncle’s employees.
A feeling of hopeless misery wrapped itself around her heart as the bright embers of her hopes and dreams crumbled to ashes. Then her sense of self-worth emerged from where it had been hiding, prodding her forward, towards the main door which was flung hospitably wide.
She would go to the party. The money she had spent wouldn’t be completely wasted. Besides, she liked the way she looked. And there was little fear of her grandparents discovering her perceived sins.
Grandad never gossiped with his fellow estate workers and Gran never conversed with anyone who wasn’t a member of the chapel. A terse nod of acknowledgement was as much as most people got. In any case, she didn’t know what she was feeling so strung up about. Carl probably wouldn’t be there. He would have better things to do than hob-nob with a crowd of country bumpkins!
But he was there. Entering the huge, raftered inner hall after handing her old coat to the maid who was in charge of the cloakroom she saw him almost immediately. Head and shoulders above the rest, his crisp white dress shirt contrasting sharply with his dark dinner jacket, his strikingly handsome features tanned from a foreign sun, he made her heart stand still.
After a brief murmur of apology to the group he was with he walked towards her, his smile flattering in its sincerity, the sultry gleam of his eyes lingering on her face before dropping to skim her silk-clad body, making her flesh burn as though he was actually touching her…
It was still snowing, Carl noted as he collected the handsome five-foot-tall tree he’d cut earlier and left in the barn. It swirled, a pattern of wildly dancing flakes, in the beam of the powerful torch he carried. And it meant, he decided grimly, that Beth Hayley wouldn’t have been able to take the sneaky way out again and drive off, disappearing with his son.
Anger beat at his brain with the harsh insistence of a machine gun. If James wasn’t his son he was the Queen of Sheba—he’d stake his life on it!
The dates were right, exactly right, and the boy had his colouring, not his mother’s. He had spent an hour tracking down old photograph albums, searching for what he needed. Proof. He’d found it in the last shot that had been taken of him with his parents, only weeks before they’d been in the accident that had claimed both their lives.
The seven-year-old boy grinning at the camera could have been the twin of Beth’s son.
His son. He was damn well convinced of it.
His mouth hardened in a line of grim determination as he set out for the cottage. If he was right—and she’d have to come up with some cast-iron reasons why he wasn’t—then he’d move heaven and earth to claim rights over his child. How dare she keep his son’s existence from him?
He wouldn’t have believed the open, sunny-natured, almost painfully innocent girl he had tended to put on a pedestal capable of such duplicity.
Innocent! The word intruded, hammered at his mind. His steps halted as he closed his eyes on the knife-thrust of guilt, letting the snow-laden wind push against him.
That night. That fateful night he’d never been able to get out of his head. The images, the feelings of shame coming back to taunt him when he’d least expected it.
He hadn’t meant to seduce her, take away her innocence—he’d swear by everything he held dear that he hadn’t. Suggesting—no, demanding that she attend the annual party hadn’t been done with any dark ulterior motive. Simply a desire to see her have some fun for once in her sheltered life.
Her upbringing had been severely restricted. Seeing her friends outside school hours strictly forbidden. In case, he guessed, they’d led her astray. Her childhood friendship with him had only been tolerated because her dour grandfather had worked for his uncle.
So he’d believed his insistence that she join them had been motivated by compassion, conveniently forgetting that he’d been sexually attracted to her for some time but had been too young to know what to do about it.
He should have recognised the warning signals when he’d found himself watching for her arrival. He’d put his edginess down to jet-lag. He’d been back at the Hall a mere matter of hours since returning from Mexico, where he’d spent the last three months doing volunteer work for a charity which helped homeless children.
When he’d seen her arrive his heart had lurched, an anguished protectiveness taking him over. She’d looked so lovely standing there, the green dress skimming and flattering those lush curves, and so achingly vulnerable, too.
Her beautiful green eyes had been darkened by an apprehension he had never seen her display before, as if she had no right to be there, and her soft mouth had opened, her hands twisting together in front of her, as her eyes had been drawn to the party decorations that dominated the hall. She’d looked as if she had never seen anything like them in her life.
And the poor kid probably hadn’t.
Only she hadn’t been a child any longer.
Her heartbreakingly lovely face had lit up when she’d seen him, her huge eyes glowing like emeralds. He’d walked towards her, his heart thumping with pleasure, and they’d been playing a waltz—his uncle on the fiddle, Mrs Griggs the stout old housekeeper pounding the piano, and young Tom the stable boy on the flute.
Taking her in his arms, he had swept her into the dance. Holding her close had been heaven. He’d felt utterly, gloriously complete. They had moved together slowly, her full breasts brushing against him, thighs clinging. His hand had slid further down her back, holding her closer, and when the trio of players had launched enthusiastically into something modern and lively the older couples had left the floor to the youngsters who, he’d noted through eyes that felt decidedly unfocused, were dancing apart.
Compromising, he had rested both hands on her hips, keeping her swaying body against his, una
ble to relinquish this tormentingly intimate proximity. And Beth, with a tiny sigh, had looped her arms around his neck and pressed closer, so that he had known she must feel the engorged evidence of his desire. Through a dizzying red mist, he had known that she welcomed it. The way she’d tilted the feminine arch of her pelvis against him, parting her thighs just a little to accommodate him, had made his heart pound with suffocating ferocity.
The cessation of the music and his uncle’s announcement that supper was waiting in the dining room had come just in time to stop him completely losing it.
Even so, it had taken quite a time to get his body back under control. Loosening his grasp, he had inched them apart a little, just as she’d dropped her arms back to her sides.
His throat had tightened with an emotion he hadn’t been able to name as he’d seen her soft mouth tremble. There had been a rosy wash of colour on her cheeks and her eyes had been slumbrous, hazed, the look she’d flicked up at him through thick sweeping lashes oddly shy, uncertain.
‘Would you like to eat?’ His voice was thick because his breathing was still haywire.
‘Not hungry.’
A tiny bead of perspiration nestled in the tantalising cleft between her breasts. He wanted to put his mouth there, take that tiny drop with his tongue. Battling with the almost overwhelming urge, he shuddered convulsively. Both of them were overheated, on a different planet. They needed time out to recover from what had happened.
He pulled himself together. He had to stop behaving like a lust-crazed fool. He’d be leaving for North America in three days’ time, and by the time he came back, after his stint at university there, she would almost certainly have flown the uncomfortably rigid family nest and be making her own life. Their paths mightn’t cross again for years. If ever.
‘Stay right where you are,’ he instructed thickly. ‘I’ll find us something cold to drink.’
People had already begun to emerge from the dining room with heaped plates of fork food when he came back with a bottle of chilled wine and two glasses. ‘Let’s find somewhere cooler to sit.’
And quieter. He could explain about the degree course in Economics he was due to take, before joining his uncle in the family-owned bank, and find out what she meant to do after leaving school.
Take a friendly interest, nothing more. Show her that their earlier close friendship still counted for something, but dismiss what had happened on the dance floor as a simple aberration by not referring to it at all.
Leaving the heat, the sound of people enjoying themselves behind, he led her up the wide staircase to the first-floor landing, where a squashy two-seater sofa was placed between an ancient suit of armour belonging to one of his distant ancestors and a low table that carried a bowl of flowers.
His fingers weren’t quite steady as he poured out two glasses of the sparkling white wine. The lighting was more subdued here, but he could see the rosy flush that grazed her cheekbones, the slight trembling of her lush pink mouth. She looked adorable, her silvery blonde hair tumbling around her shoulders. The green silk of her dress left her arms and shoulders bare, and the straps that looped around the back of her neck were so delicately fragile they looked as if they would snap if he were to touch them.
Swallowing hard, he carefully placed the bottle and his glass on the polished surface of the low table and turned back to her, her glass in his hand. She bent forward hesitantly to take it and the dip of her neckline revealed the edge of her lacy bra, curving so lovingly against the creamy perfection of her breast.
Whether it was the unsteadiness of his hand or the trembling of her fingers he didn’t know, but drops of the liquid spilled on the fine silky fabric that shaped the lush globes of her breasts.
His throat too thick to get an apology out, his heart galloping, he felt in his pocket for a handkerchief. He hadn’t got one and, leaning forward, he used his fingers to brush away the offending droplets. Lightly at first, quickly. Until the fingers of both hands took on a will of their own and curved around the breasts that were peaking, spilling into his palms.
She was breathing rapidly, her lips parting, and his blood ran hotly through his veins as his hands shaped her, his fingers playing with the engorged nipples, his head spinning as this thing between them became a wild conflagration.
With a catch in his throat he brought his head down and kissed her, and he heard her low moan of pleasure as she responded with a generosity that made his heart quiver with emotion. Almost without knowing what he was doing, knowing only that this was the most perfect thing that had ever happened to him, something he had been unknowingly waiting for all his life, he swept her up into his arms and carried her to his suite of rooms.
He had never forgotten that night, or the beauty of it, he thought now, his mind jerked back to the present by a vicious gust of icy wind. But how could he reconcile the Beth who had blossomed so generously and sweetly for him on that long-ago night with the woman who had unconcernedly refused to respond to his letter, who had heartlessly deprived him of his own son? he thought with grim cynicism as he strode through the snow towards the lights of the cottage.
Were people never what they seemed to be? Was Beth, like his ex-wife, all sweetness and light on the surface and twisted and devious underneath?
Time to find out, for sure.
Propping the tree up against the side of the porch, he put his thumb on the doorbell. Beth Hayley had a whole load of questions to answer…
CHAPTER FIVE
IN WELCOME contrast to the bitterly cold night air Beth’s kitchen was warm, redolent of seasonal baking, mouthwateringly spicy and sweet. Terrina had boasted that she didn’t know how to boil an egg. Their sterile, elegant London apartment had been filled with the scent of her sultry perfume and Christmas had come in hampers from Harrods.
But he certainly hadn’t come here to mull over his ex-wife’s deficiencies in the home-making department, he decided grimly as Beth wordlessly took his ancient, snow-dampened sheepskin coat and hung it on a peg on the back of the kitchen door.
Her features had lost the softly rounded quality of her teenage years, were more finely drawn—even more lovely, he thought, an ache settling in the region of his heart. But she was very pale and her full lips were compressed, unsmiling.
He had kissed those lips. Held her and kissed her until they were both delirious.
Snapping that totally irrelevant thought aside with dark impatience, Carl demanded tersely, ‘Are James and Guy in bed?’
Unguardedly, Beth lifted her eyes to the beamed ceiling, and Carl recalled hearing those muffled scuffles and thumps after she’d sent them up to get changed the evening before. Remembered eventually hearing the sounds of their feet on the stairs, the way she’d tried to get him out of the cottage.
Because she hadn’t wanted him to get a good clear look at James.
And this morning she’d been on edge, spiky.
She knew he knew.
No wonder she looked pale. The eyes that had thus far refused to meet his own were dark-ringed and haunted.
Guilty conscience. He’d stake his life on it.
The thought that his son was sleeping overhead, unaware of his very existence, made his gut wrench with anger, pushing any compassion he might have felt for her clear out of sight. Controlling it took all his concentration, so he merely followed leadenly when she murmured, ‘Through here,’ and led him into a time warp.
A smile—unbidden, out of place in view of the fraught circumstances, and most certainly unwanted—curved his lips. The room looked as if it hadn’t changed in a hundred years. Pure late Victoriana. Terrina would have wrinkled her aristocratic nose and pulled her mouth down in distaste, while Beth fitted unquestioningly into the old-fashioned surroundings, as she would fit in wherever she happened to find herself.
Catching himself up sharply, he hardened his mouth. He didn’t know why he kept comparing her with the cold, grasping creature he had been misguided enough to marry. Despite appearances, and his m
isplaced long and fond memories of her, Beth was as sneaky and devious as his ex.
Closing the door behind him, he turned to face her. She was standing on the hearthrug, her back to the fire. She looked, he noted grimly, as if she was getting ready to face her own execution.
And she’d be right about that!
He paced forward, moving closer because he needed to be able to read her expression and find the truth.
Since the scales had fallen from his eyes a few short weeks after his marriage he’d become expert at knowing when a woman was telling lies, bending the truth to suit her own selfish ends.
He questioned, slowly and deliberately, so there would be no possible mistake about what he was implying, ‘How promiscuous are you?’
For a split second Beth’s blood ran cold, then bubbled hotly through her veins. The bone-clenching trepidation that had grown steadily worse while she’d waited for him was swept away in a flash flood of rage.
‘How dare you ask such a thing?’ Her eyes clashed with his. If she’d had a brick handy she would have thrown it at his head!
Yet Carl looked so coolly controlled, as if he hadn’t just asked her the most outrageous question he could think of. And to push the impression home he followed on flatly, ‘I got James’s birth-date out of him while I was fastening his seat belt this morning. If I’m not his father you must have gone from my bed straight into another’s. That would make you promiscuous.’
Beth felt the ground shake beneath her feet. She’d been sure he had strong suspicions, but she hadn’t known he’d questioned James about his actual birth-date. That would have made his suspicions a rock-solid certainty. She felt sick. Her hands flew to her mouth, her fingers trembling against her overheated skin.
‘Well?’ he prodded remorselessly. ‘Did your initiation into sex give you a taste for it? So much so that you hawked yourself around to get more of the same?’
His anger was cold, pent-up, dangerous. But hers sprang to answering, blistering life.
12 Stocking Stuffers Page 31