by Kim Lawrence
‘I’ll keep that in mind, Emily,’ he replied gravely.
Rat! she fumed. He’d smirk on the other side of his face. He’d find she could be a very unpleasant house guest.
‘Music?’ he asked as she maintained a fulminating silence.
She pursed her lips and shrugged. The strains of Debussy failed to soothe her intense fury. The feelings of impotence to resolve the situation made her want to rant and scream, but she wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of seeing how far he’d actually shaken her. Isolation and Luke were a combination she instinctively knew she should avoid.
He only stopped once during the rest of the journey and that was only when she explained the urgency of the request. He still looked remarkably alert considering how far he had driven on top, if he was to be believed, of a plane journey. She felt as spent as a limp rag, emotionally and physically.
‘Ullapool,’ he said as they passed through a small village that nestled picturesquely on the shores of Loch Broom. ‘You can see the Russian fishing fleet out there—’ he gestured seawards ‘—when the mist clears.’
‘It isn’t permanent, then,’ she returned with a sarcastic drawl.
They’d driven through the night and the hazy morning light revealed a damp landscape covered in a thick, obscuring cloud of mist. Mountains loomed threateningly indistinct, dark, monstrous shapes, and the sea was a sound, an expanse of emptiness. Used to tame, governable, neatly hedged fields, she sensed that there was an empty canvas which was just veiled, and found it awesome.
‘Wait and see.’
‘I won’t be staying long enough,’ she retorted. ‘Is it far? I’m tired.’ She felt bone-weary, the toll of the past hours beginning to tell with a vengeance.
‘Twenty-five miles. So if you thought Ullapool was the back of beyond, think again,’ he advised.
She was almost grateful that the weather conditions and the single track road that hugged some precipitous drops at times eliminated the need for her to think up any defensive replies. Luke needed all his concentration for the task of getting them safely to their destination. Emily, who at times felt inclined to shriek as they encountered yet another tortuous bend, was impressed by his calm handling of the big car.
Emily stared around the large, sparsely furnished kitchen. A large stone ingle-nook took up an entire wall. A cast-iron wood-burner nestled comfortably in its centre, a pile of chopped logs conveniently stacked to one side.
To her amazement there were all the modern conveniences, neatly disguised for the most part by doors that matched the rustic pine kitchen units. The beamed roof was low, but the light Mediterranean colours made the place seem light, airy and welcoming.
‘It’s very nice,’ she said, her voice reflecting amazement.
Luke dumped the bags he’d carried in on the long refectory table. ‘What had you anticipated, no electricity or running water?’ He looked at her face. ‘O thou of little faith; as if I’d expose a delicate little flower like yourself to such indignities.’
The delicate flower swung a wild punch which he side-stepped. ‘Next you’ll be expecting me to thank you.’
‘Thanks from a Stapely? Hardly. In the meantime, help me fetch the things in.’
She watched him pick up the envelope propped in the centre of the table and open it. His eyes scanned the contents. ‘Fetch your own things in,’ she retorted petulantly. As always, the way he said her name gave the impression that it left a nasty taste in his mouth. She’d seen his name inscribed in capitals on the envelope, probably perfumed paper, she thought scornfully, assuming instantaneously that the author of the missive was female.
His eyes darkened as he tucked the note in his trouser pocket. ‘If you want your stuff, get it, Miss Stapely. I’m not your lackey. And if you’re going to explore, be careful; this is the only habitable room down here. I’m renovating it room by room and some of the floors are hazardous,’ he informed her.
‘I want to go home, Luke,’ she said, the plaintive winning out over the aggressive in her quavering voice.
He placed the last of his burdens on the flagged floor and shut the heavy oak studded door. A door built to keep out the most severe of elements. His eyes swept over her slight figure thoughtfully. ‘I’ll light the fire,’ he said as she shivered, her arms clamped around herself to retain heat. He moved over to the inglenook. ’matches in the bottom drawer of the dresser.’
The imperious way he held out his hand, apparently certain that she would jump, refuelled her sense of injustice. ‘I told you I want to go home,’ she repeated. The high-handed way he’d coerced her into being here was still almost impossible to take in. The fact that she was almost incidental in the exercise was an added insult; just an instrument to twist the knife in her father’s flesh…it was disgusting!
‘I thought you’d been cast off, a homeless stray,’ he murmured with his back still to her. He stayed crouched beside the fire and rolled up his sleeves. Her eyes, with a will of their own, were drawn to his forearms; the fine sprinkling of dark hairs was in danger, she realised furiously, of making her stare like some witless idiot. ‘Or was that just a cosmetic exercise? Had you planned to go back in a couple of days and be Daddy’s good little girl? I’m sure even Gavin will seem acceptable once he’s seen the error of his ways.’ He turned his head, his blue eyes glittering with contempt.
His derision cut through her bewildering fascination with certain mundane details of his person. ‘I’d sooner marry—’ Her eyes glittered and her chest heaved as she searched for the worst fate she could imagine ‘—you than Gavin.’ Her brief feeling of triumph faded as she encountered the very disturbing expression that flickered into his eyes.
‘That would be something to write home about, wouldn’t it, sweetheart?’ His smile was subtly sensuous. ‘Was that a proposal?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped, unbalanced by his response. ‘Where are the matches?’ she said, more to divert him than to be a willing little helper. The gleam of ironic laughter in his eyes made it abundantly clear that her tactics, like her unease, were as easy for him to read as foot-high type.
‘Bottom drawer of the dresser,’ he said after holding her defiant gaze for a moment. ’thank you.’ Unnecessarily he caught hold of her hand as he took the box, his thumb moving over the blue-veined inner aspect of her wrist.
Her wide, startled eyes were captured by his for a split-second before she snatched her hand away. Neat electricity travelled to her toes. Contact gone, the current was broken—but not the unpleasant aftereffects. She sat in a high-backed Windsor chair, her knees feeling incapable of supporting her at that moment.
‘Why exactly do you hate us so much?’
There was a hiss and the kindling caught fire. His eyes were gem-hard when he turned. With the elegance that was such an integral part of him he straightened up. ‘Us?’
She took a deep breath; the taboo subject had been broached and she intended to get to the bottom of it. She was no longer a child to have her questions smiled away. ‘You know exactly what I mean,’ she said impatiently. ‘What particular sin have the Stapelys committed?’ It had puzzled her half her lifetime. It was no normal antipathy he felt, something much more complex. Beneath his casual contempt there was always something which eluded her.
‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t know?’ His voice was tinged with incredulous scorn.
‘I know your mother was disowned by her adoptive mother, and she ran off because…’ She felt suddenly embarrassed at cold-bloodedly discussing Luke’s history as though the people involved were characters in a novel as opposed to people with feelings. Did her curiosity sound crude and clumsy? But she was suddenly sure that it was relevant to the present, and she had conceived a strong, dog-like tenacity to get to the bones at long last.
‘She was pregnant with me,’ Luke supplied, his lips forming into a cynical smile. ‘Hackneyed but accurate. There’s no need to get all coy—I can recall several occasions when you flung that fact
at me in moments of pique.’
Emily took a deep breath, a swift, horrified denial springing to her lips. ‘I…’ Mortified, she realised his accusation was unpalatably true. She had been a little brat at times.
‘My mother supported us both until I was ten. I won’t bore you with the details of a life which by your standards would have seemed impoverished,’ he drawled. ’she found out at that point that she had a disease which was likely to leave me an orphan prematurely.’
Emily found herself straining to listen to his unemotional narrative. Her eyes grew dark at the dilemma which had faced this unknown woman, and part of her wondered whether she who had never had to face such harsh realities could have coped even up to that point, bringing up a child alone. She felt a surge of inadequacy when faced with such self-sacrifice.
‘So she swallowed her pride and decided to turn to her family. The old lady was long dead and lacking any direct heir—at least one she would recognise. She had left the lot to your father, her nephew, with the proviso that he would take responsibility for her grandchild in the event of my mother’s demise. Charlie pointed out that my mother had not at that point died.’ He raised his eyes to her horror-struck face, and his expression was inflexibly hard, as though his features were hewn out of marble rather than flesh and blood. It was at that moment she realised the depth of his hatred, his rage.
The realisation was a profound experience. Luke’s contempt, his casual derision, all took on a new dimension. Had she been stupid not to look below the surface before? The question swirled together with a multitude of others in the chaotic morass of speculation that shook her to the foundations…challenged all the parameters of her life.
‘I won’t go into the details of just how much she suffered,’ he said, his voice aloof, only his eyes alive with an active fury that added momentum to the warning bells of disquiet in her head. ’she was a tough woman, but I watched her grow weaker, frailer. I was impotent to help. Shall we just say I made a vow a long time ago to adminster a suitable punishment?’
‘You were a child,’ she protested huskily.
‘Childhood is a modern concept. Children are capable of great passion just as some adults are capable of insipid apathy.’ He looked at her, contempt twisting his expression.
She couldn’t doubt that his comment was intended to be personal, but she was too preoccupied by his revelations to react to the fact. ‘Are you using me?’ Crazy ideas that her present situation had been contrived for his own malignant purpose refused to retreat, even though logic told her the suspicion was misplaced. If the tender scene in the conservatory had been a shock to her, there couldn’t have been any way for Luke to have predicted it. No, he had just taken the heaven-sent opportunity it presented to him to inflict as much pain on the Stapelys as possible, and she had been almost co-operative from his point of view… stupid from her own.
Luke’s eyes were blantantly mocking. ‘I thought we’d already agreed that this was a mutually beneficial arrangement. You knew you were a contrivance, so why the wide-eyed horror now?’ he drawled.
‘I have agreed to nothing; I’ve been coerced. Besides, that was before…’ she began falteringly. What he’d said was true, but then it hadn’t had the same significance. She hadn’t been prepared for the depth, the shocking intensity, of his revulsion. His attitude had always seemed to spring from a certain perverse desire to challenge her parents’ blinkered, smug outlook on life, but this dark hatred that had taken seed all those years ago was quite different. It had been there all along beneath the urbane exterior, a core of lethal ire, a passion that craved justice. She wasn’t at all sure any more, looking at a face stripped bare of all languid cynicism, just how far he was prepared to go in his crusade. She shivered, suddenly aware of the cold in the room that seemed to seep from the stone walls. The isolation was like an emptiness in the pit of her stomach.
‘Before you caught a glimpse of the real world?’
‘None of this seems very real to me,’ she said, her voice filled with the weariness that made her droop quite literally with lassitude. ‘I didn’t ask to be spirited away here; in fact, I specifically told you I wouldn’t come. You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said from the outset. What is it with you? The gospel according to Saint Luke?’ She shook her head. ‘Why can’t you let the past die?’
‘Like my mother?’
‘You said before that my father killed your mother. But she took her own life, Luke.’ She felt no urge, especially at the moment to defend her father, but the injustice of that accusation still bothered her.
‘She couldn’t provide for me any longer,’ he replied in a cold, clipped voice. ‘Charlie had made it pretty clear that he was only going to honour his obligations to the letter. A little light on morality, Charlie, isn’t he?’ he said, watching her pale face with narrow-eyed implacability. ‘Can you imagine the desperation that made her step out under that bus? She did it for me, Emmy, so that I could have a home, food, safety—all the things you, sweetheart, have taken for granted all your life.’
She raised her dark-rimmed eyes to his face in startled enquiry. ‘Is that why you’ve decided to ruin my life?’ she flung.
He caught the back of a chair, his knuckles white against the dark wood. It made a discordant sound on the stone-flagged floor. ’melodramatic, don’t you think? Especially when all I’ve done is be incredibly helpful and get lumbered with a sulky neurotic who expects to be waited on hand and foot.’
‘What? Is this a case of the sins of the fathers?’ she snapped back, her throat aching with the sheer injustice of his casual accusations. ‘I wish I’d never allowed you to persuade me to take part in this farce originally!’ If she’d known from the outset how far he was prepared to go, she’d have known better than to take his offer of help. How could I have been so stupid? she wondered incredulously.
‘About time you decided to take responsibility for your own actions, Emily. You were eager enough to preserve your precious pride, as I recall. It didn’t take any persuasion on my part. You always seem willing to take the easy way out.’
At that moment she knew it would be easier to face the indignity of being jilted than endure another second of Luke’s company. ‘Wasn’t that what your mother was doing—paying for the consequences of her own actions? Or is it the money that bothers you? Dad getting the money that should have gone to you.’ His fingers dug into her forearms, cutting through to the bone, stilling the impetuous words that had emerged in her desire to challenge his scalding scorn.
She hadn’t for an instant meant her acid remarks. In fact the knowledge that her own father was capable of such cold-blooded, corrupt behaviour made her want to weep. Her attack had been more defensive, but her choice of weapons ill-considered. But she wanted desperately to hurt him as much as he had her. To be nothing but a pawn to be manoeuvred by two manipulative men was mortifying.
‘The idea of the sins of the father being visited on your head is a concept growing in attractiveness by the instant,’ he said grimly. The look of rage in his eyes made her grow defiantly rigid; even though his fingers were making her nerve-endings scream in pain, she would die rather than let him see how truly frightened she was in that instant. ‘You are his favourite. As much as Charlie,’ he drawled the name with distaste, ‘can care about anyone, he cares for you, the baby of the family, cosseted, indulged.’
Confined, stifled, given objects, not love, she wanted to add. ‘I can appreciate continuity,’ she said instead, her voice shaking with emotion. ‘After all, your mother’s sins visited on you; why not blame her?’
‘You little bitch,’ he said slowly. ‘You have fewer scruples than I gave you credit for. In some people’s eyes it might be considered more a sin to select a breeding line cold-bloodedly than to give yourself without reservation in a moment of supreme passion, giving without a guarantee of anything. But then, you Stapelys think a lot of breeding lines and pedigrees, don’t you? My mother only fulfilled expectations—but what can
you expect of a stray who can’t trace its ancestors back to William the Conqueror?’
She felt dizzy, unable to look away from the contemptuous azure gaze. His initial accusation made her instinctively want to scream denial. It hadn’t been like that with Gavin. Perhaps she hadn’t felt the blind love that she’d heard such a lot about, but the fact was that she’d given up waiting for a bolt from the blue to strike her. Once she’d nursed the usual fantasies, but they’d stayed just that. The self-inflicted suffering which followed the trauma of an infatuation at the tender age of sixteen had made her distrust her own instincts, shy away from emotional experimentation.
Eventually she had accepted the incident as a oneoff. Either she wasn’t capable of grand passion or the emotion had been exaggerated beyond all recognition by a kind of mass wishful thinking.
‘I think you’re talking about sex,’ she sneered. Pulling her actions apart pragmatically, she could see that to some Luke’s accusations might seem almost justified. What was wrong with friendship, common interest and compatibility as reasons for marriage? It had to be more lasting than a brief chemical explosion—that made for temporary insanity.
‘Never the twain shall meet, hey, Emmy?’ A sudden mellowness, a huskiness that was caressingly smooth, had entered his voice, and the transition from steely wrath was disorientating.
Staring up at him, she was aware of a heaviness in her eyelids, an urgent desire to melt quietly into the golden grip of lassitude that swept over her like ripples on a still lake, growing in urgency. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you’re a romantic,’ she retorted, fighting the drowning sensation. She could see her own features exaggerated like a caricature in his eyes—strangely hypnotic eyes.
Luke’s eyes were travelling over her face with an almost reluctant intensity, as if he was submitting to a need he rejected and resented. His gaze rested on a spot on her throat where a pulse visibly beat with erratic force.