by Lynne Graham
‘Don’t be so childish,’ Elaine snapped.
Chrissy had an alarming vision of being used as an excuse for Elaine to pursue Blaze. She cringed at the idea. Elaine was as relentless as a pitbull. She had caught Blaze the last time by popping up virtually everywhere he went. People had laughed at her but Elaine hadn’t cared. She had wanted Blaze and she had got him even if she hadn’t got him for as long as she had counted on. The end always justified the means in Elaine’s book.
‘If you don’t know, you won’t be tempted to tell Dad,’ Chrissy said levelly.
‘I don’t really care. I was hardly planning to come visiting,’ Elaine told her thinly. ‘You can’t be this poor, surely?’
‘Offering me a loan?’
‘Hardly.’ Money might drain through Elaine’s fingers like water, but she was not given to charitable impulses.
Chrissy sighed. ‘I suppose I ought to tell you. I needed the job because I have a child to keep.’
Halfway back into the Porsche, Elaine froze and stared at her in horror. ‘A child?’
‘A child,’ Chrissy confirmed.
‘How could you be so stupid?’ Elaine practically spat at her. ‘You really do want to let us down a bucketful, don’t you? As if Belle wasn’t bad enough!’
Chrissy drove back to Westleigh with a lot on her mind. Elaine had presented her with a mystery. What business with the old man? What hadn’t been whose fault? Elaine had spoken of fault in the plural. She had also said that Blaze wasn’t that fond of the old man. That rather narrowed the field. Could Elaine have been referring to the late Lord Whitley, Blaze’s grandfather?
But, strive as she might, Chrissy couldn’t see any further connection. The old earl had died of a heart attack about two months after Blaze had ditched her sister. Chrissy had been finishing her last term at boarding-school during that period. Elaine had had her wedding the week after Lord Whitley had been buried, and it had been that same week, Chrissy reluctantly recalled, that she had stumbled quite accidentally on Blaze and learnt to her cost that people weren’t always grateful for help and understanding.
Hamish barred her attempt to drive to the back of the Hall. ‘Only horse-boxes are allowed in the yard,’ he told her fiercely.
‘I’m sorry.’ For Floss’s sake, she forced a placatory smile.
‘The guv’nor’s looking for you,’ Hamish snorted.
She got halfway through the front door when a tall man with fair hair appeared out of a doorway and reached out to take her bags. ‘Here, let me help you.’
Smiling at the pleasant stranger, she said, ‘I’ll go and grab another two.’
‘I’m Pierce Balfour, one of your new neighbours.’ Transferring the bags to one hand, he extended the other. ‘And you can only be Chrissy—’
‘Perhaps while you’re trying to chat her up, Pierce, you might enquire what she was doing in the pub during working hours?’
Chrissy collided with icy sapphire-blue eyes and gulped. ‘I was only in there ten minutes—’
‘Hamish saw you.’ Lounging in the doorway, Blaze dealt her a grim appraisal. ‘You kick up your heels on your own time, not mine.’
‘It won’t happen again,’ she muttered tightly.
‘When are you on your own time?’ Pierce inserted with interest. ‘New faces are at a premium round here. I’d like to take you out to dinner.’
‘She comes complete with passion-killing toddler,’ Blaze drawled with sardonic bite. ‘And right now she doesn’t have any time of her own.’
Her cheeks burning, her temper on a short fuse, Chrissy reached for the bags Pierce had taken and marched them down to the kitchen. On her way back for the next two, she heard Pierce saying rather uncertainly that this wasn’t the nineteenth century and had he been joking about the toddler? On her next passage past, she had to strain to catch Blaze enumerating the lethal dangers of endeavouring to have a casual affair with a single mother. Such women got too attached too quickly, clung like superglue and made you feel a heel by the end of it.
Fizzing with rage, Chrissy unpacked the groceries in record time. She couldn’t remember when she had last had a date. Just as well. After that little lot, Pierce would take cover if she so much as looked in his direction! Whoever had said that women were the worst gossips had got it wrong.
She recognised Blaze’s footsteps. She didn’t turn round. ‘Do you want lunch?’ she asked icily.
‘I said it for your own good. I was thinking of Rosie. He doesn’t like kids.’ His lazy drawl was quite unapologetic.
‘Lunch?’ she repeated rawly.
‘You shouldn’t hang around the pub either. It’ll give the locals the wrong idea about you.’
That was it. Chrissy whirled round, hair flying, and fixed him with a shimmering look of loathing. ‘I was not hanging around the pub!’ she blistered back. ‘And I d-don’t want or n-need your interference in my personal life!’
‘Your personal life is an unholy mess,’ he murmured drily. ‘You need all the interference you can get.’
‘Really?’ She was shaking with anger, frustrated suddenly by her inability to tell the truth about Rosie’s parentage. ‘What you’re saying is that my l-life is a mess because I have Rosie… Did your mother feel the same way about you?’
He didn’t bat a single lush dark eyelash. ‘My mother was two weeks off her wedding when she found my father in bed with his secretary. She might have cancelled the nuptials but she never got over him,’ Blaze volunteered with astonishing cool. ‘When I was five, she told me that Jaime was the only man she’d ever loved, but that didn’t stop her from jumping into bed with every passing stranger in the hope of replacing him.’
Chrissy had paled, her anger mysteriously ebbing away. She was dismayed on his behalf, shocked that he could be so frank. She knew precious little about Lady Barbara Kenyon. She had died long before they’d moved to Berkshire, leaving Blaze to be brought up by his grandfather. But, come to think of it, she did vaguely remember someone once saying of Blaze that he was ‘wild like his mother’.
‘What age were you when she died?’ she heard herself ask.
‘Eleven.’
‘What were you like?’ Helplessly she studied him, searching that beautiful bone-structure for a shadow of the child he had been.
‘Too pretty for my own good,’ Blaze mocked. ‘I was thrown out of every major and minor public school between here and Land’s End. I had to be tougher than all the rest to survive.’
There was a curious stillness between them. She was thinking that there was nothing pretty about him now. Maturity had toughened those still startling good looks with a raw masculinity and blatant self-assurance that gleamed like polished steel. But still she was disturbed by that glimpse of just how alone he must have been as a child. She was beginning to understand where the cynicism came from.
‘Hell, you’re compassionate too,’ Blaze drawled softly, reading her vividly expressive face with lazy amusement. ‘You’re like chocolate with a melting centre—all soft and warm. Be warned that most men with sob stories are trying to get laid.’
She was infuriated by the rush of heat she could feel surging up beneath her fine complexion. ‘H-hardly in this instance,’ she managed.
‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a virgin,’ Blaze mused, subjecting her to a mortifyingly intense appraisal. ‘But then the only place you’d find a virgin of your age these days is in a convent…’
‘Tell me…do you have to bring s-sex into every dialogue?’ Bravely, she raised her chin on the dry challenge.
He burst out laughing. ‘I could never understand why your family made such a thing of your stammer! I find it really appealing. As to why s-sex wandered into the dialogue, surely that’s obvious? It was on my mind.’
Cursing her skin colouring, Chrissy found it necessary to turn away. Her stammer appealing? A most novel viewpoint from a male who was so famed for his penchant for incredibly beautiful and flawless women. He was teasing her, pla
ying with her, like an embarrassing older brother, she told herself. He thought she was a prude about sex because she still blushed like an adolescent. It amused him. That was all.
It would probably amuse him even more if he realised that he had been spot-on as regarded her sexual status. Then she had not exactly been spoilt for choice or opportunity. Had she stayed on at college, she might have met someone, but Rosie had put paid to such freedom. In addition, both her mother’s and Elaine’s experiences would have put a guard on her own behaviour. It really wasn’t a very good idea to leap into bed with someone you didn’t know very well. Indeed, these days, it could well be a life-threatening experience.
‘Floss is coming to your rescue,’ Blaze murmured, his tone oddly harsh. ‘Around me, Chrissy, strive to recall that I’m a bastard by birth and by nature.’
‘I’m not in any danger of forgetting that,’ she said breathlessly, but she was, because he was confusing her, blurring her image of him, once so starkly drawn. She really didn’t know what he was likely to do or say next. He still wasn’t keeping to the boundaries she had expected, and he had to be incredibly conceited to think that he had to keep on warning her off.
‘I’ll skip lunch. I’m off to Newmarket for a couple of days. The builders will be back on Monday. Keep an eye on them and…yes, the furniture is now due this afternoon. Decide where it’s all going to go…’
As Floss came through the door with Rosie, Chrissy turned. ‘You want me to decide?’
Blaze elevated a winged dark brow. ‘I don’t want to be hassled,’ he told her. ‘All I want you to do is turn this place into a comfortable home.’
‘All?’ she repeated. ‘I’m not qualified to do that! You need an interior designer…’
‘The door’s already been shown to two of them.’ Floss entered the conversation with humour.
‘And you think that I could do better?’ Chrissy demanded of Blaze.
‘I don’t see how you could do worse. You could pick out a kitchen,’ he informed her with rampant impatience. ‘Something suitable.’
‘But I don’t know what you think is suit—’
Hamish cut her off. ‘Ready, guv’nor?’
Dazedly, Chrissy watched them head out. Her head was spinning.
‘Show him a horse or a woman and he’s in his element. Show him a house and he can’t get out the door quick enough.’ Floss laughed. ‘He wants you to wave a magic wand for him.’
I’d sooner break it over his head, Chrissy reflected in exasperation. When it was obvious that he had strong likes and dislikes, he had no right to land her with such a task! She didn’t want that responsibility. Mind you, if it hadn’t been for that angle, she might have thought the prospect would be tremendous fun.
‘I’m sorry about Hamish.’
Chrissy tensed as Floss gave her a rueful look. ‘It’s because of who your dad is. It’s not personal, like, not really,’ she insisted uncomfortably. ‘But you see, Hamish and I worked for Lord Whitley all our married life. He was a decent old stick even if he was difficult. He didn’t deserve to be taken advantage of like that—’
‘Like what?’ Chrissy prompted. She didn’t know what the older woman was talking about but she desperately needed to find out.
Floss frowned. ‘You don’t know…you really don’t know?’
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,’ Chrissy admitted. ‘But please, I’d like to know.’
Floss sighed and looked uneasy. ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I’d known. Hamish could tell you I was born with my foot in my mouth. Don’t worry about him. He’ll come round to you. He’s just a stubborn old cuss—’
Chrissy wanted to scream her impatience. ‘Floss, what has my dad to do with Lord Whitley?’
‘It’s not my place to tell you,’ Floss said, her discomfiture unhidden as she moved towards the back door. ‘And don’t you be asking Blaze. There’s no sense in stirring him up again, no sense at all. You don’t need to worry about it anyway. Blaze wouldn’t have given you the job if he’d held it against you.’
Floss was immovable. Clearly she believed that she had been dangerously indiscreet and nothing short of an earthquake was going to budge her from that position. Chrissy, plundering her memory for even a shadow of vital information that she didn’t have, watched Floss leave with an explosive sense of frustration.
Don’t ask Blaze! Well, she hoped it wouldn’t come to that but, one way or another, she had to get to the bottom of the mystery for her own peace of mind. What hadn’t Blaze held against her? Something sufficiently serious and unpleasant enough to silence the effervescent and friendly Floss…undoubtedly the same something that her sister, Elaine, had been so determined not to discuss. And that in itself was worrying. As a rule, Elaine was refreshingly frank about her darkest doings.
Chapter 4
Chrissy was dressing Rosie when Blaze strolled into the kitchen. Startled, she fumbled with the last button on her sister’s sweater before she straightened, murderously conscious of the short, faded nightshirt she wore and the wildly curling tangle of hair she had not yet managed to comb. ‘When did you get b-back?’
Rosie, whooping with noisy toddler pleasure, threw herself at Blaze. He scooped her up with a soft laugh of amusement. ‘Late last night.’
Chrissy skimmed an uneasy hand over a slender hip. Brilliant blue eyes were trained on her and she flushed. ‘I dress her down here because it’s warmer…’
‘Did I say there was a problem?’ For a split-second, his jewelled gaze probed her with disturbing intensity.
She felt hot all over. ‘I’ll get dressed and make breakfast,’ she mumbled, moving past him in a rush.
‘No hurry. I’m curious…’ At the top of the stairs, she halted and reluctantly turned as he drew level with her in one graceful step.
‘About w-what?’ Her fine brows had a pleat of anxiety now.
‘About this.’ He stilled in the open doorway of his bedroom. ‘How did you do it?’
‘Do what?’ she prompted as she reached for Rosie, but Rosie wouldn’t come.
Blaze planted a hand to her taut spine and propelled her deeper into the room. ‘I was tempted to tip you out of bed in the early hours and ask you—’
‘Ask me what?’ Her small teeth worrying at her lower lip, she spread a troubled glance round the carefully furnished room in search of some glaring oversight that might have attracted his attention. She had spent all day yesterday on this one room, picking out the pieces from the truly staggering amount of antique furniture and boxes that had been unloaded two days earlier. It had never occurred to her that he might own such a vast amount of furniture.
‘Floss was never in my bedroom at the Manor in her life, so it wasn’t her,’ Blaze drawled. ‘So how did you do it? I was staggered when I walked in here last night. This may be a different house, but this is an exact replica of the room I grew up in… Hell, you even have the same ornaments on the mantelpiece!’
Horror had frozen Chrissy to the spot. She was paralysed, her shocked gaze glued to the fine Dresden figurines he had indicated with an incredulous hand. A shudder ran through her. She couldn’t believe what she had done without being aware of it, subconsciously using photographic recall to recreate the room in which they now stood. She couldn’t believe that she could have been that stupid…
‘You can’t have seen my bedroom at the Manor…’
Chrissy had lost every scrap of natural colour and she was trembling, tiny little tremors of shock powering through every inch of her body as she struggled to hold back an agonising replay of the past and simultaneously conceal the truth from him. Every aspect of his bedroom at the Manor was indelibly stamped into her memory banks. Unable to look at him, she parted her dry lips. ‘Oh, b-but I d-did!’ she gasped in a fearful rush. ‘One of th-those t-tours on an open day.’
‘Our private rooms were never on view.’
‘I s-saw it,’ she insisted in desperation, wishing the ground would open up and swall
ow her.
‘Are you feeling sick?’ Blaze demanded abruptly. ‘You look ghastly.’
She heard someone on the stairs and spun round to greet the interruption with gratitude. Hamish paused in the doorway. He slung her a scandalised look from fiercely narrowed eyes and his mouth closed tight as a coffin lid as he pointedly glanced away.
‘Chrissy?’ Blaze prompted.
Flushed to the roots of her hair by a tide of burning pink, Chrissy grabbed Rosie and ducked past Hamish. ‘I’ll g-get breakfast on!’
‘Get dressed first,’ Blaze advised carelessly. ‘No need to give the builders a cheap thrill.’
She had to splash her face with cold water to cool down. Had she known he was back, she would never have come downstairs other than fully dressed! He had made it sound as though she was flaunting herself! But that mortifying reflection paled to nothing beside that glare of moral outrage on Hamish’s horribly expressive face. He had surprised her in her nightie in Blaze’s bedroom. Her goose was now cooked with Hamish for all time.
Blaze, evidently oblivious to the atmosphere, sat down at the kitchen table to eat what could only be described as a working breakfast with Hamish opposite.
‘The Jockey Club…champion hurdler…novice chase… summer at grass…Sandown…’ The unfamiliar terminology of the racing world drifted past her in snatched phrases as she quietly topped up the men’s coffee and got on with the dishes. It was an effort to keep her hands steady. Deep down inside she was still breaking up. Blaze had put a crack in the dam wall she had built three years ago. Behind it she had carefully buried the debris of that long-ago night.
But it was coming back whether she wanted it to or not. It had been the night before Elaine’s wedding. Chrissy had been driving back from checking the flowers in the church and she had taken a short-cut through the rarely used back entrance of Torbald Manor. It had shaved four miles off her journey.
Round the first corner on that private lane, she had had to jump on her brakes. A silver Porsche with its bonnet scrunched up against a huge oak tree had blocked her passage. Naturally she had recognised the car and naturally, like any good citizen, she had stopped at what was clearly the scene of an accident. Her heart in her mouth, she had peered into the dark interior, but the car had been abandoned.