by Penny Jordan
‘Wait and see. It’s a surprise,’ he told her teasingly as he slid into the driver’s seat next to her and started the engine.
A surprise.
Beth looked suspiciously at him.
‘This isn’t just a ploy to get me to visit your cousins’ business, is it?’ she accused him. ‘Because if it is...’
She stopped as she saw that Alex was frowning at her.
‘No, it isn’t a ploy,’ he denied. ‘Although why...what is it that makes you so mistrustful of me, Beth? Is it this man, the one who hurt you?’
‘He didn’t hurt me,’ Beth denied. ‘I never loved him. I just... From the moment I arrived here you’ve done nothing but flatter me and flirt with me...’
‘And that makes me someone you can’t trust?’ Alex asked her quietly.
Something about the way he was looking at her made Beth feel slightly ashamed.
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Alex. Where are we going? I don’t...’
‘Wait and see,’ he repeated, and then added softly, ‘Tell me about yourself, Beth.’
‘There isn’t anything to tell,’ she protested shakily. ‘I’m not someone who’s either interesting or exciting.’
‘You are to me,’ Alex assured her with a soft emphasis that made the tiny hairs on her skin lift in sensual awareness.
Beth hadn’t intended to do what he asked, but somehow or other she discovered that she was, albeit a little reluctantly at first.
‘Your family sounds very much like my own,’ Alex interrupted her at one point. ‘My mother was always very conscious of the fact that she had no family of her own in England. The Czech people are very extended-family-conscious.’
They had left the city now, and were climbing through the hills—not that Beth could see much of them because of the heavy black clouds. The rain was causing rivulets of water to run down the surface of the road, carrying with them bits of debris. In the distance she could hear thunder which, although it didn’t exactly terrify her, was not something she enjoyed.
‘The weather is a lot more severe than was forecast,’ Alex commented frowningly at one point, when he had had to drop the car down to a low gear to drive through a deep pool of water which had collected in the dip in the road.
‘Perhaps we should turn back,’ Beth suggested uneasily. She still had no idea where they were going, but they were well into the hills now, and the villages they were driving through were small, little more than clusters of houses, many of them unoccupied. Alex had explained to her that most people owned houses in the villages but because they worked in the city were only able to use them for weekends and holidays.
They were climbing higher now, through a grey, mist-enshrouded landscape that made Beth shiver a little involuntarily. Where on earth was Alex taking her?
‘You’re looking apprehensive. There’s no need,’ he reassured her, and then added wryly, ‘You’re safe with me, Beth, but has it occurred to you that you might not have been had you agreed to accompany your gypsy friends to wherever it was they claimed they were going to take you?’
Beth bit her lip and looked studiedly out of the car window. Alex seemed to think that she had given up her plans to go and visit the glass factory, but she hadn’t...not that she intended to tell him that—or anything else about her intentions. Why should she?
‘Not much further now,’ he told her as he changed down a gear for the steep hill they were climbing.
Beth gasped, instinctively clinging onto her seat as they crested the mist-shrouded hill and then abruptly started to drop straight down, the road in front of them almost perpendicular, she was sure. At the bottom they had to ford what amounted to a racing stream of swirling water.
Alex grimaced when he saw her expression as she looked out of the car window.
‘It’s the rain,’ he told her. ‘This culvert makes a natural channel for it. In the old days there was actually a river here, but it was diverted.
‘No questions,’ he warned Beth as she started to open her mouth. ‘Please close your eyes. We’re almost there.’
Almost where...?
Beth was just about to object when a sudden ferocious clap of thunder made her close them instinctively. The intensity with which the rain was drumming down on the car roof suddenly seemed to treble as they started to climb again. Beth could see the jagged flashes of lightning behind her closed eyelids, but the ferocity of the storm which was raging around them made her feel too apprehensive to open her eyes.
‘Where are we going?’ Beth protested, unable to keep the betraying tremor out of her voice.
‘It’s a surprise,’ she heard Alex repeating to her. ‘Have you still got your eyes closed?’
Obediently Beth nodded, then gasped as the car rattled noisily over what sounded like a wooden bridge and started to climb a steep hillside, before levelling out, crunching over gravel and then coming to a halt.
‘You can open them now,’ she heard Alex saying softly in her ear, his voice sending delicious little shivers of sensation, like subtle harbingers of pleasure to come, along her sensitive nerve-endings.
Quickly Beth opened her eyes, and then widened them in stunned awe as she took in the splendour of her surroundings.
‘Where on earth are we?’ she whispered a little hesitantly. ‘It looks like a castle...’
‘That’s exactly what it is,’ Alex replied promptly.
Stunned, Beth stared at the creamy white walls in front of her, with their small slit windows and their dome-capped turrets. Too solidly built to be the fairy-tale castle of a little girl’s fantasies, this one was built much more on the lines of an awesome stronghold. A curtain wall surrounded the courtyard they were in, and as Beth swivelled round she could see the steep incline they had climbed to reach the plateau area of the courtyard. In front of them a flight of stone steps curled away around the side of the building, and two huge arched wooden doors were ominously closed in front of them.
‘What are we doing here? What...what is this place?’ Beth asked.
‘Want to take a closer look?’ Alex invited her, opening his own car door.
Bemused, Beth nodded.
The air outside was colder than she had expected, and wetter. The rain she had heard beating down on the car roof during the drive had intensified in severity, striking her exposed face and legs so hard it almost hurt.
The mountainside the castle was built on was so high that it was actually above the mist. On a clear day the view must be awesome, Beth acknowledged. Right now she felt almost intimidated by the savagery of the lashing rain and the noise of the thunder rumbling in the distance.
‘Quick...this way,’ Alex told her, sheltering her in the curve of his arm as he hurried her towards the massive double doors. Once they reached them Beth saw that a small door was cut into them, which Alex unlocked with a key he produced from his jacket pocket.
Once through the door and out of the rain Beth saw that they were in a huge stone-flagged hall, with a fireplace along one wall that was almost the size of her sitting room at home. If anything the air inside the hall was even colder than outside it.
‘I hadn’t realised the weather was going to be quite so bad as this when I planned this trip,’ Alex told her ruefully as he led the way to the back of the hall and into a narrow passage.
As she followed him up a dark flight of stone stairs Beth felt almost as though she had strayed into an Alice in Wonderland setting.
The stairs turned and twisted, illuminated by the light from heavy wrought-iron fittings, flickering hazardously as though threatening to go out at any second, and then suddenly they were stepping onto a large wood-floored landing area, with larger, more graceful windows and an intricate design set into the parquet of the floor.
‘This is the more modern part of the castle. It was built on i
n 1760 by I forget which ancestor. My aunt gets quite severely cross with me for not being able to remember all the details of our family history. I suspect she thinks I don’t pay attention when she’s relating it to me.’
‘Your aunt...your family owns this?’ Beth gasped. He had already told her about the family’s castle, of course, but she had not expected anything so grand!
‘It’s not so unusual—not here,’ Alex told her easily. ‘There are families who, after the repatriation of property following on from the Velvet Revolution, now own a handful of such places. Fortunately for us we only ever owned this one. I say fortunately because the cost of maintaining such homes can be prohibitive, as you can imagine.
‘In my family’s case we were fortunate in that much of the original furniture had been left in situ, and the castle had been lived in by a government official—or rather a succession of them—rather than simply left empty. Some of the more valuable pieces have gone, of course, and the paintings—family portraits in the main.
‘As with many others of its type, the renovations to the original castle were done at the height of the influence of the Hapsburgs; there is a very strong Viennese influence in the decor of the state apartments. Let me show you.’
Still trying to take in the fact that this place, this castle, belonged to Alex’s family, Beth followed him in bemusement as he led the way through a succession of rooms that made Beth feel as though she had stepped back in time. Although she was familiar with the style and decor of many of the great houses at home, the intricately lavish rococo plasterwork which decorated the walls and ceilings of the rooms she walked through made her gasp a little in wonderment.
In one room, a salon of elegant proportions, she couldn’t help staring in delight at the soft watery green of the paintwork. Mirrors alternating with pastoral scenes decorated the walls, and hanging from the centre of the ceiling was the most magnificent chandelier she had ever seen.
‘Ah, yes, that was how the family originally came to own the castle in the first place,’ Alex told her ruefully. ‘They made chandeliers for the Hapsburg court.’
‘Does your family actually live here?’ Beth asked him in an awed whisper.
‘When they are here, yes. Although the state rooms are only used on formal occasions. The whole family comes and goes pretty much at will, although during the working week my cousins and my aunt stay in Prague, where they own a large apartment. This is the drawing room the family uses,’ Alex informed her, taking her through into another elegantly proportioned room which, whilst still magnificent, was less heavily decorated than the rooms she had just seen—and more comfortably furnished.
‘Are any members of your family here now?’ Beth asked him curiously.
Alex shook his head, frowning as he saw the way she shivered and then going over to the fire which was made up in the grate. Kneeling down to remove a box of matches from a pretty covered box, he lit the fire.
‘No. My aunt would have been here, but there was a burglary at the factory recently. Some antique glass was stolen—my aunt is very distressed. She blames herself. My cousins, her sons, have been urging her for some time to have a more up-to-date burglar and security system fitted at the factory as the collection of antique glassware they have there is quite unique. They have samples of the kind of glass they make going back right to the late 1600s—but my aunt, who is very much a traditionalist and a matriarch of the old school, wanted to wait until their current night-watchman, who is approaching retirement, had actually left.
‘She told my cousins that it would offend Peter’s pride if they were to install a security system whilst he was still there, and she didn’t want to hurt him by doing so. Now she says that because of her stubbornness not only has a priceless collection of glass been stolen, but, even worse, Peter is in hospital with concussion, having been hit on the head by the gang who broke in.’
‘Oh, no!’ Beth couldn’t help exclaiming in distress as she listened to him. ‘Will he...the night-watchman...be all right?’
‘We hope so. But until she knows that he has recovered my aunt refuses to leave the city.’
‘Does she know you’ve brought me here...to her home? Will she mind?’
Alex shook his head.
‘It was her suggestion that I do so. She is immensely proud of our family tradition and of this place.’
‘Yes, I’m sure she is,’ Beth agreed.
The heat from the fire was beginning to warm her chilled body, but she still winced as lightning tore a jagged line right through the thick greyness of the mist outside. There was a loud clap of thunder and then almost immediately another flash of lightning.
‘Don’t worry, we’re safe in here,’ Alex comforted her, adding more prosaically, ‘Are you hungry?’
Beth discovered a little to her own surprise that she was, and nodded.
‘You stay here, then,’ Alex instructed her. ‘I shan’t be long.’
He was gone about fifteen minutes, long enough for Beth to be curious enough to wander around the room studying the family photographs decorating the highly polished surfaces of the heavy wooden furniture.
In one of them an unexpectedly familiar face stared back at her. Picking it up, she studied it.
She was still holding it a few seconds later when Alex returned, carrying what looked like a large picnic hamper.
‘Is this your aunt?’ she asked him, holding the photograph she had been studying out to him.
‘Yes. It is,’ he confirmed, smiling at her. ‘How did you guess?’
Beth said nothing. She wasn’t going to tell him that she had known because she’d recognised the woman as the same one she had seen him with in the hotel in Prague, and then at the opera, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him just what assumptions she had made about the two of them. It had never occurred to her that the elegant and obviously expensively dressed woman might be a member of Alex’s family, and not a rich tourist for whom he was working.
‘Food,’ Alex informed her as he put the hamper down. ‘I’ll just—’ He broke off as the thunder crashed again and all the lights suddenly went out.
Cursing, Alex told her ruefully, ‘I should have guessed this might happen. Fortunately my aunt always keeps a supply of candles to hand in every room. The electricity supply here is notorious for its unreliability, and these storms don’t exactly help.’ As he spoke he was pulling open the drawers in a pretty sofa table and setting candles in a couple of heavy silver candelabra on the mantelpiece above the fire.
‘We’ll have to picnic in here, I’m afraid,’ he told Beth as he placed one on the table behind the sofa. Outside it had suddenly gone very dark, the wind driving the rain so hard at the windows that Beth could hear the fierce sound it made.
‘Perhaps we ought to make our way back to Prague,’ she suggested nervously, remembering how hazardous their journey to the castle had been.
But Alex seemed to misunderstand the cause of her apprehension, coming to stand close to her as he asked her softly, ‘What is it you’re afraid of, Beth? Not me?’
‘No, of course not,’ she denied, and then, for some reason she couldn’t understand herself, she discovered that she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at him, and the feeling that was curling up right through her body had far more to do with a dangerous sense of forbidden excitement than with any kind of fear.
There was something undeniably erotic about being here alone with him in this timeless place, and the lack of the modern amenity of electric light, the softness of the fire and candlelight, only served to highlight the sensation that filled her that she might have been transported back in time, to a time when for a young woman to be alone with a young man had been a very, very dangerous thing indeed.
‘No, not you,’ she said a little breathlessly.
‘Then this, perhaps,’ Alex suggested, clos
ing the distance between them and taking her in his arms and kissing her, gently at first, almost reverently, and then far more passionately as she swayed closer to him and her heartbeat picked up and echoed the fierce rhythm of the driving rain and her own equally stormy driving inner yearning.
‘We should go back,’ she protested shakily when Alex released her mouth.
‘We can’t, it’s too late,’ he told her, and Beth knew that he wasn’t really talking about their actual journey from the castle. ‘We can’t go back, Beth,’ he reiterated as he touched her mouth with his fingertips and then traced its trembling shape with his finger. ‘Not now...’
‘I thought we were going to eat,’ Beth reminded him. Her lips felt dry, clumsy, reluctant to form the words, reluctant to do anything that would increase the sensual pressure of Alex’s fingertips against her lower lip but equally reluctant to deny herself the pleasure of it.
‘You’re...hungry...?’
The smouldering look which accompanied his comment, the way his gaze dropped from her face to her body, made Beth’s heart race.
‘I... I...’
‘You’re right. We should eat,’ Alex agreed tenderly, reluctantly releasing her. ‘Come and sit down by the fire.’
He pulled a chair up for her and Beth allowed him to guide her into it. She wasn’t used to being treated so protectively, to being so cherished. One part of her loved it, another feared and suspected it. She didn’t dare allow herself to fall into the trap of believing that any of this was real, that Alex’s treatment of her, his tenderness towards her were genuine. They weren’t. She mustn’t allow herself to forget that he was simply using her, and that all she felt for him was, quite simply, a healthy physical female desire. She must not allow her thoughts or emotions to become clouded by the romanticism of the situation.
Alex picked up the hamper and carried it over to put it down on the floor between them.
‘Come and sit down here,’ he told her, dragging a couple of soft cushions off the sofa and piling them up against one of the chairs. ‘It will be warmer. The chair will protect your back from the draught...’