by Penny Jordan
His words brought her back to reality, reminding her of the low opinion he had of her. Tears ached in her throat. A brief knock on the bedroom door stiffened her body, and Zach got up with a muffled curse.
‘Telephone, Colonel,’ Tamara heard Johnson call. ‘It’s Miss Julie.’
Julie! Tamara turned away from Zach, burying her face in the rumpled bedclothes, overcome with the pain of her own self-delusion.
‘I see your fiancé’s back.’
The words were like a douche of cold water, and Tamara stiffened in her chair. They were having lunch and these were the first personal words Zach had spoken to her since that night in her room. She was in no doubt that he regretted the incident and wanted to make it plain to her that it had been nothing more than an aberration brought on by physical desire for a woman—any woman!
‘I saw him this morning.’ Zach told her. ‘He was out riding—with his secretary.’
Somehow Tamara managed to go on eating without betraying her shock, although the food tasted like sawdust and she felt she would never be able to swallow it.
‘You didn’t know, did you?’ Zach goaded. ‘It seems to me that he’s nowhere near as keen to marry you as he ought to be. Never mind, you still hold the final trump card, don’t you?’
‘Miss Julie’s arrived, Colonel.’
Not for the first time Tamara blessed Johnson’s timely interruption. She had heard from Mrs Wilkes, whose daughter had given birth to another son, that Zach had asked her to prepare a room for his friend. It was a room several doors down from her own, and Tamara had been fiercely relieved to know it wasn’t the one adjacent to Zach’s, which Mrs Wilkes had told her was part of the master suite which Zach occupied. Not that that really meant anything. There was nothing to stop Julie sharing Zach’s bed, or he hers.
When he went to welcome her, Tamara took herself off to the library. They had almost completed the third chapter. The book had come on extremely well, and after the earlier incident Zach had taken care to ensure that Tamara was not overworked.
She was checking some typing when he walked in, a vivacious redhead at his side, her smile faintly chilly as she surveyed Tamara.
‘So this is what keeps you chained to the country!’ she complained, her sapphire blue eyes hardening over Tamara’s face.
‘Yes,’ Zach agreed blandly, ‘my book. Nothing else would keep me away from you,’ he assured her, sliding his arms round her waist and pulling her against him, before kissing her.
Tamara felt sick. She tried to concentrate on what she was doing, but all she could see was Zach’s face, Zach’s body, Zach’s arms round another girl.
‘Darling,’ Julie purred when he eventually released her, ‘that’s what I call a welcome! I’m beginning to think you weren’t fibbing after all when you said you missed me.’
‘How long can you stay?’ Zach heard him asking her as they left the room.
Tamara didn’t hear the answer, but the next few days were sheer purgatory. It seemed that no matter where she went to escape from them, be it in the house or the grounds, she was fated to come across Zach and Julie, more often than not in one another’s arms.
‘T’ain’t right,’ Mrs Wilkes sniffed one morning, when she had been summoned upstairs and ordered to prepare a breakfast tray by Julie, who was still apparently in bed, although it was gone ten o’clock. ‘Fancy piece with nothing to her but a flighty mind. The Colonel’s a fool if he ties himself to that one.’
‘He’s a grown man, Mrs Wilkes,’ Tamara reminded her in a hard voice. ‘And now you really must excuse me, I want to try and get this chapter finished.’
As Mrs Wilkes confided to her daughter later, she knew when she wasn’t wanted—and why!
On the third evening of Julie’s visit Tamara excused herself from dinner. At breakfast the following morning she handed Zach the completed three chapters—perfectly produced by the word processor.
‘If you don’t mind I think I’ll return to London this afternoon,’ she told him calmly. ‘After all, I’ve done the job I came to do …’
‘Oh, but I do mind,’ Zach said lightly. Julie was still in bed, and during her visit for some reason Zach had taken to delaying his breakfast until Tamara had hers. She daren’t let herself think about the reasons for such a deviation from his routine, nor to wonder whether it had anything to do with the hours spent with Julie after she herself had gone to bed.
Tamara refused to respond to the goad. She had the feeling that he was deliberately baiting her, but she couldn’t understand why. He had Julie now, so why continue to torment her?
‘Nigel promised you to me for two to three weeks,’ Zach reminded her.
‘But we’ve finished the chapters.’
‘We could do some more. Nigel would be delighted if we did.’
Tamara couldn’t deny that.
‘Why the rush to get away?’ Zach asked her softly. ‘I could feel mortally offended, especially when I’ve gone to the trouble of inviting your fiancé over here this morning.’
Tamara choked on her coffee, her face devoid of all colour. Malcolm here! She closed her eyes in anguish. Dear God, what was she going to do? The fabrication of her engagement wouldn’t last a second in Zach’s probing presence, and once that was gone he was fully capable of rending into shreds what was left of her pride and self-respect, to say nothing of discovering about his baby. Her hand went to her stomach.
‘Thinking today might be a good time to tell him, with witnesses there to make sure he does the right thing?’ Zach goaded, noticing the betraying gesture.
‘I hate you!’ Tamara burst out impulsively, pushing back her chair and rushing out of the room. ‘I hate you!’
Upstairs she thought wildly of simply walking out and driving off in her car, but some inherent and stubborn streak of courage would not let her. If she was to be denounced and humiliated then let her at least have the guts to face up to it.
The morning dragged by. It was just after eleven when Tamara heard the sound of horses’ hooves on the gravel drive. She was standing in the hall, almost rooted to the spot, two bright coins of colour burning in her cheeks, when Zach observed lazily,
‘Well, aren’t you going to go and say hello to him?’
Moving like a robot, Tamara walked towards the door. For a moment the sunlight dazzled her as she stepped outside and towards the drive.
‘Tamara! Good God, what on earth are you doing here?’
Tamara looked upwards, shielding her eyes. Malcolm was riding the hunter he kept in his parents’ stables and alongside him, looking very trim and supercilious, sat Karen Austruther on an obviously highly-strung thoroughbred mare.
Tamara, who liked horses but was faintly alarmed by them, stepped back instinctively, her eyes widening in sudden fear as Karen’s horse suddenly reared, pawing the air, the sharp whistle of her crop as it sliced through the air and across the animal’s flanks bringing it forward in a furious bound, its eyes rolling threateningly.
What happened next was a confused blur to Tamara afterwards. One moment she was a safe distance away from the horses, trying to think of how she was going to explain her presence to Malcolm, without betraying to Zach that their engagement was over, the next, she was staring upwards in terror while Karen’s horse reared over her, its hooves glinting in the sunshine as it came down over her, slowly … slowly … and she was unable to move.
‘Mellors!’ It was Zach’s voice, furious and authoritative, that broke the paralysing spell; his arms that snatched her from danger to deposit her, trembling uncontrollably, a safe distance away from the prancing animal.
‘For God’s sake, man,’ she heard Zachary saying angrily, ‘why the hell didn’t you do something? She could have been killed!’
Karen’s acid laughter filtered into the morning air. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! She wasn’t in any real danger. She ought to have moved out of the way. She doesn’t begin to know the first thing about horses, that’s all.’
They all stopp
ed talking as a car suddenly came down the drive. On a wave of relief Tamara recognised Nigel’s BMW and started to hurry unsteadily towards it as it came to a halt and Nigel climbed out.
‘Tamara, my dear girl. … I wrapped up the Italian business sooner than I anticipated and decided to come and see how things were going here.’
‘She’s just had an unpleasant shock,’ Zach explained quietly. ‘I believe you were just about to leave,’ he added implacably to Malcolm and Karen.
‘But I wanted to talk to you about the hunt,’ Malcolm blustered. ‘See here … I think it’s time you began to see reason. There are people living round here who don’t care much for the idea of having a gang of young hooligans about the place …’
‘Yes,’ Karen piped up in shrill tones. ‘My father is a J.P. and he doesn’t approve at all. It’s just not the done thing round here, I can assure you.’
‘No?’ It seemed to Tamara that Zach’s voice was dangerously quiet, and she shivered within the protection of Nigel’s supporting arm. ‘Well I can assure you, Miss … whatever your name is, that there are people round here who have a damned sight more compassion for their fellow human beings than you appear to have, and they have a hell of a lot more pull than your father.’
Karen wheeled her horse round and cantered down the drive, Malcolm following her.
‘Do you honestly think you can be happy with that life; with those narrow-minded views?’ Zach demanded harshly of Tamara as he drew level with her. ‘Because I damned well don’t!’
She couldn’t look at him. She turned to Nigel and said painfully, ‘I want to go home. Please can we?’
CHAPTER TEN
‘IT’S going to be fantastic,’ Nigel exclaimed with a satisfied sigh as he replaced the final sheet of typescript. He had been reading the first three chapters of Zach’s novel, and although it was only a week since Tamara had returned to London, her part in the preparation of the typescript seemed to belong to another lifetime.
She felt she could never do enough to show Nigel how grateful she was for his prompt action on that final, dreadful day of her stay with Zach. Competently and cheerfully he had whisked her away from the scene of her humiliation without giving either Zach or Malcolm any opportunity to question her.
‘You’re looking better,’ he approved when he had finished reading. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine,’ Tamara assured him. She was beginning to get over the early morning nausea which had made her life such a misery in the first weeks of her pregnancy and although as yet there was scant outward alteration to her body, inwardly she was aware of the baby’s growth, and the knowledge filled her with a warm inner glow. She caught sight of a newspaper on Nigel’s desk and her colour faded a little as she saw the photograph of Zach and Julie, and the caption beneath it.
‘Zach’s plans for his house are beginning to catch the attention of the Press,’ Nigel commented. ‘Have you heard anything from him since you left?’
‘Ought I to have done?’ Tamara parried lightly.
There was pity and something else—admiration perhaps—in Nigel’s eyes as they surveyed her downbent head.
‘Not really, I suppose, but I thought he might have wanted to thank you for the excellent work you put in on his manuscript. It can’t have been easy, rushing it through so quickly.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Tamara agreed, thinking of the afternoon she had fallen into an exhausted sleep over her work and how she had woken up to find Zach in her room.
About Zach himself she tried hard not to think, but it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes the memory of him would sneak up on her unawares, her mind forming a mental image of him and superimposing it on whatever she was doing.
Later in the afternoon the phone rang. Tamara picked up the receiver absently, then shock jolted through her as she recognised Zach’s voice as he asked to be put through to Nigel.
The conversation lasted a good twenty minutes, and when it was over Nigel came into her office, raking fingers through his hair, his expression perturbed enough to make her heart thud erratically.
‘Anything wrong?’ she queried. ‘He hasn’t changed his mind about the book, has he?’
‘No, nothing like that. He wants you to go back and work for him,’ Nigel told her baldly. ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ he assured her when he saw the consternation in her eyes. ‘I told him it wasn’t on; that I was too busy to manage without you.’ He wasn’t going to add to Tamara’s worries by telling her that Zach had more or less held him to ransom over the completion of the manuscript on time if he refused to send Tamara down to work for him. ‘Apparently he’s got some bee in his bonnet about no other secretary being able to produce work of the same high standard as yours. You know how difficult some authors can be,’ Nigel reminded her ruefully, speaking from personal experience. ‘If everything isn’t exactly to their liking they can’t work.’
What was more to the point was probably that Zach had been unable to find someone he could browbeat into working as hard as she had done, Tamara thought irately; or someone he could derive so much pleasure from taunting. She had noticed that quite often after he had been particularly savage with her his output of work almost doubled; something to do with a sudden extra flow of adrenalin into the bloodstream, perhaps.
‘Don’t worry,’ Nigel comforted her a second time. ‘I’ve told him there’s just no way I can spare you to work for him right now. I even offered to try and find him a replacement, so you’d better get on to some of the agencies and see what they can come up with. I know it’s none of my business, but are you sure he’s indifferent to you, Tamara? Bearing in mind what you told me it seems strange that he should want you working for him.’
‘He enjoys tormenting me,’ Tamara said bitterly. ‘I suppose it’s his way of punishing me, because wanting me made him aware of a weakness in himself and he despises weakness.’
‘Mmm. Well, I don’t suppose we’ll hear anything more about it now. Get James Deacon on the phone for me, will you, I want to talk to him about the dust jacket for the new Brian Balfour.’
* * *
London was sweltering under a minor heatwave. It had begun just after Tamara returned to London, and so far had lasted five days. Listening to the weather forecast as she dressed, Tamara heard that the weather was likely to break during the day with violent thunderstorms late in the afternoon.
Outside in the street, the heavy oppression and sultry heat reminded her sharply of St Stephen’s. Because of the heat she was dressed more casually than usual in a thin tee-shirt that moulded the slightly fuller curves of her breasts and hugged her narrow waist, and a toning button-through skirt made of comfortable heat-resisting cotton.
Nigel gave her an admiring smile when she walked into his office. ‘You look cool and fresh,’ he exclaimed enviously. In contrast he was dressed in a formal although lightweight suit, its jacket discarded to lie haphazardly on top of the filing cabinets, his tie loose and the top button of his shirt unfastened.
‘I’ve got a board meeting at ten,’ he told Tamara, ‘but it shouldn’t take more than an hour.’
With Nigel out the office was relatively quiet. Tamara dealt briskly and efficiently with the half dozen telephone calls she received, and then remembered the letter the postman had handed her as she stepped out of the flat that morning.
The handwriting, on expensive cream notepaper, was unfamiliar. She studied it for a moment before opening the envelope.
The letter was from Dot Partington, and guilt smote Tamara as she remembered promising faithfully to keep in touch with her. The letter was long and chatty, bringing the older woman vividly to mind. To make reparation for her earlier forgetfulness, Tamara extracted some of the notepaper she kept in her desk and started to write back.
In her letter Dot had asked if Tamara and Malcolm had yet set a date for their wedding. Rather than lie, Tamara wrote back that her engagement was off, without specifying why, explaining that she had given Malcolm his ring back on her ret
urn from holiday.
The letter was finished long before Nigel returned from his meeting, which had gone on longer than anticipated. When he walked in he was frowning.
‘Something wrong?’ Tamara queried, knowing that he liked using her as a sounding board for his frustration when the caution of the other board members got too much for him.
‘Not really. Get Zach Fletcher on the phone for me, will you?’
Tamara knew better than to question him further when he was wearing that particular preoccupied look. She dialled Zach’s number with shaking fingers, her stomach churning sickly while she waited for someone to answer.
Instinctively she had been bracing herself against hearing Zach answer, and hearing Julie’s clear high voice instead was like a shock of icy water. She stammered a little over Zach’s name and almost forgot to explain why she was calling, the omission bringing a chagrined flush to her too pale face, which she was thankful Zach was not there to see. The moment she heard his curt, ‘Fletcher,’ she put the call through to Nigel without speaking. The red light at the base of her phone which indicated that Nigel was still talking seemed to be on for a very long time. Another author arrived for an appointment and when he had been waiting for over ten minutes. Tamara did what she usually did in such circumstances, which was simply to scribble down a message informing Nigel that his appointment had arrived, and walk quietly into his office to place it on his blotter. As she opened the door and walked in she heard Nigel saying bitterly,
‘Look, I take your point, Zach, but I don’t like the way you went over my head. I told you I couldn’t spare Tamara and I meant it. Now I’ve just had half the Board hauling me over the coals this morning for being obstructive.’ He looked up, saw Tamara’s white face, and said quickly into the receiver, ‘Look, I must go now, I’ll speak with you again,’ and then he hung up.
‘Was that true?’ Tamara demanded through dry lips, the original purpose of her intrusion forgotton. ‘Was that why you had to go to that meeting this morning? Because you told Zach I couldn’t work for him?’