Dangerous Love

by Jane Beaufort

  For the party at which the well-known portrait-painter had promised to put in an appearance Susan’s dress was a rather delectable confection in leaf-green velvet. She had seen it on a model, and the model had the same bright hair as herself, and the same rather childishly slender figure. Jennifer approved, but she was more whole-hearted about it when the hem had been raised, and the enchanting Empire line emphasised a little.

  Susan was lucky enough to run to earth a pair of fine suede shoes exactly the same colour as the dress, and as they had very high heels—stiletto, in fact—they gave her height, and her mother’s pearls emphasised the remarkable delicacy of her small round throat.

  Jennifer sprayed her with Chanel No. 5, and then attended to the final details of her own toilet. For two girls who shared a very unostentatious flat they looked remarkably opulent when they sallied forth at last, and even the taxi-driver looked them up and down when he decanted them outside the bijou house in Chelsea where, behind a gaily-painted front door and flower-boxed windows, a restless surge of people seemed to be filling every room.

  They sat on the hostess’s low French bed and retouched their faces—that is to say, several of the feminine guests were doing that at the precise moment that Jennifer and Susan arrived—and pirouetted in front of her mirrors; and the stairs, the dining-room, and the pocket-handkerchief lounge were crammed. There was a loud babel of voices and the pleasanter sound of ice chinking against glasses, and only Susan shrank from being pressed into the middle of this unknown crush. Jennifer was looking everywhere for Merlin Sinclair, and recognising one or two people smiled and nodded and was thrilled by the sight of the odd celebrity.

  Someone fetched the two girls a drink apiece, and then someone else claimed Jennifer, and bore her off to sit on the stairs, and Susan found herself up against one of the windows festooned with creamy net and long oyster-satin curtains. She sat down gratefully in the shelter of the curtains and watched a little group whose centre-piece was a girl with a chrysanthemum mop of black curls, wearing a striking scarlet dress, who was displaying a set of perfect little teeth and waving a glass with a cherry still bobbing about in it at all sorts of people who seemed eager to acknowledge her.

  Susan was fascinated by the faultlessness of the pearly teeth, as they flashed in that wide, scarlet-lipped smile, and she thought that the eyes were the most brilliantly alive she had ever seen, and the most glowingly dark and vivid. They brought another pair of dark eyes to mind, but in these there were stars that shone out blatantly, and in that other pair of eyes there was nothing but turgid darkness, and the sinister promise of mocking caverns into which, if one ever ventured, one would never return!

  That other pair of eyes came so vividly before her inner vision that she had to blink her own eyes in order to get rid of them; and then she turned away and focused instead on a man with a beard who was also receiving a lot of attention. He looked like an artist, and Susan was wondering whether he could be Merlin Sinclair when he lifted his glass and toasted the girl in the scarlet dress, and she smiled back at him alluringly while a blond man at her elbow observed a little dryly that Sinclair was hoping to add to his reputation by having another shot at consigning her to canvas.

  “And why not?” the girl in the scarlet dress murmured, sending an openly seductive velvet-eyed look straight across the room at the artist. “Only this time,” she added, regretfully, “Grandmother won’t pay for it!”

  “My dear Rosalie,” the blond man remarked still more dryly, “your grandmother is no doubt getting a little tired of footing your bills!”

  “I know,” Rosalie Freer agreed with a heavy sigh, “that’s why I’ve simply got to do something about it!” Someone else pressed forward to claim her attention, and the blond man—who was strikingly blond, and tall, and rather like a Viking, Susan thought—dropped back on to the fringe of things, and by the purest accident he knocked against the glass in Susan’s hand, and a good deal of the liquid bounced down on to her dress, as well as on to the carpet.

  “I do beg your pardon!” The pleasing formality of his apology appealed to Susan, and she thought that his eyes were the bluest she had ever seen—and possibly the nicest. He was so terribly concerned because her dress was likely to be ruined that she hastened to reassure him, having no back thoughts about the dress herself; and even if she had she would have forgotten them before

  his look of genuine perturbation.

  “It was my fault,” she said. “You didn’t see me ... I’m rather tucked away here!”

  His eyes asked her plainly why she was tucked away, when she looked like a dryad in her slim green velvet, with those burnished gleams in her hair, and her pretty feet curled round the spindly leg of her chair.

  “I don’t really know anyone here,” she explained, the delicate colour rising in a tide to her smooth cheeks before so much unaccustomed admiration. “At least, I know the friend I came with, but she’s disappeared. And I like watching people.”

  “Miss Willowfield likes to have the advantage of finding out all she can about a person before they discover her,” a cool, drawling voice cut in with meaning, and looking up Susan found the pair of eyes that had been recalled to her recently gazing derisively down into hers. Their owner was very sleek and well-groomed to-night, and there was little about him to remind her of the man in the shabby hacking-jacket who had sat watching her in the fireglow in the library at Storr when she entered it for the first time. “Isn’t that so, Miss Willowfield? You don’t like the advantage to be on the other side?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Susan made no attempt to answer him and the blond man merely looked at him in faint surprise. Then he bent and mopped at the front of Susan’s dress with his fine cambric handkerchief, and then insisted upon getting her something else to drink.

  Before he went away to get the fresh drink Justin Storr inquired in the same smooth, drawling voice:

  “Do you two know one another? Or haven’t you yet been introduced? You really should know one another because Bruce could be awfully useful to you, Miss Willowfield, and he might even double that twenty thousand of yours!” He glanced at the Viking-like man who was anxious to repair the damage he had done and place another glass in Susan’s hand, but keen also to be formally presented to her. “This is Bruce Fairburn, Miss Willowfield, and he is my favourite stockbroker! I never deal with anyone else. And I’m sure he’d love to become your favourite stockbroker, too!” Bruce Fairburn bowed.

  “Anything I can do for Miss Willowfield—at any time!” he said, “I’d be delighted to do! But, more than anything, I am delighted to know her!”

  His pleasant, manly smile convinced her of that, but Justin Storr’s teeth gleamed hard and white.

  “A conquest, Miss Willowfield,” he assured her, as the other man moved away. “And all because you’ve been doing something to your hair, and spent a lot of money on a dress that really becomes you! Which just goes to prove that money is important in spite of what a lot of jaundiced people who never succeed in getting their fists on any of it have to say about it!” Susan bit her lip so hard that once more she knew she had made it bleed, and she heard herself say in rather a muffled

  voice:

  “I hoped I’d never see you again! You must be the rudest, and the most unpleasant, man alive!”

  ‘Thank you.” He bowed with rather more grace than Bruce Fairburn, but his eyes glinted a little. “At least I am alive, and for a few seconds after you took that toss over Lady Luck’s head I wondered whether you’d survive! You looked so very small and inadequate lying there beside the path!” His eyes dropped to the very slight discolouration above her left eye, which even a new set of make-up had not quite disguised. “I see you’re still bearing the marks!” His voice changed. “I’m sorry about that, whether you believe me or not!”

  “I don’t believe you,” she told him, compressing her lips.

  “Perhaps you think I would have been happy to see you break your neck that morning?”


  “Yes,” she answered, “I think you’re the type of man who wouldn’t be at all upset if a girl broke her neck on top of being a nuisance to you!”

  “I might even contrive to get her neck broken for her, if she was a very serious nuisance?”

  She turned her face away from him.

  “Only you know the kind of things of which you’re capable,” she replied levelly and judicially. “Anyone like myself can only guess!”

  “Thank you,” he said again, and then Bruce Fairburn rejoined them. “Miss Willowfield has been recalling that I had an ancestor who left a lady to drown in a lake,” he said quietly and pleasantly. “She doesn’t seem to think that the Storr family has the best kind of characteristics.”

  “Except Sir Adrian,” Fairburn remarked quickly, looking down at Susan. “I’m sure you agree with me that Sir Adrian had all the right kind of characteristics, and was a gentle and charming old boy?”

  “I do,” Susan agreed fervently. “I think he was unusually gentle and charming, and I was very fond of him.”

  “I’m sure you were,” came the drawling, insidious voice that she was beginning to dislike more than any other sound she had ever heard. “Very fond indeed!” And then, as Rosalie broke free from the press around her and came across and slipped a hand inside his arm: “Hallo, darling!” he greeted her. “You mustn’t miss this opportunity to be introduced to Miss Willowfield, who now has the right to look upon Storr as a country retreat. She has consented to act as hostess for me when we give that big house-party you’ve been clamouring for! I thought, if we fill the place with her friends and mine— and, of course, yours, my sweet! —we can have a memorable time! And it will satisfy all the terms of my uncle’s will, especially if we announce our engagement and get married as soon as the frustrating formalities will permit us!”

  “You mean that?” She clung to his arm in unconcealed delight. “Oh, darling, you really mean it?” Her dark eyes positively danced. “Mummy will start ordering the wedding-dress straight away as soon as I tell her, and you’d better let her send the notice to The Times, otherwise you’ll make some sort of a hash of it.” She suddenly realised that she had made no attempt to recognise the casual introduction of Miss Willowfield, and she turned and looked at her with a brighteyed indifference that in itself was a reinforcement of Justin Storr’s insolence. And then, for an instant, a faint surprise showed on her face. “You’re rather young, aren’t you. . . ? I expected someone staid and secretaryish—although not too staid,” with a dimple appearing at the corner of her mouth, “since Justin will have it that you must have been very friendly with Sir Adrian to get him to leave you all that money! Definitely not strictly an employer and employee relationship!” “Rosalie!” It was Bruce Fairburn who rebuked her with a sharp note in his voice. “I don’t think you quite realise what you’re saying!”

  “Why?” Her glorious, thick black eyelashes fluttered at him, and the mischievous eyes peeped between the eyelashes. “Have I been indiscreet, quoting Justin? But you know he always thinks the worst of everything and everyone— including me sometimes!” She rested her head against him, and the black eyes grew languorous as she tilted it back and looked upwards into the dark, saturnine face of Sir Adrian’s leading beneficiary. “Don’t you, darling?” She touched his face with her finger-tips. “But the thought of being whirled into matrimony is so positively dizzying that I can think of nothing else, and I suppose I ought to be grateful to Miss Willowfield for making you so livid with an odd stipulation that you’d do almost anything to prevent her settling down at Storr!”

  “Even something as desperate as marrying you,” returning her look with a rather more languid ardour that made Susan wonder whether, such as it was, it was assumed. And then glancing once more at Rosalie she decided that such an exotically lovely young woman could command adoration, and if a man wanted a wife for a specific purpose, and to be mistress of a house like Storr, he could hardly make a more suitable choice. “And I’ve already risked Miss Willowfield’s neck on Lady Luck in an inspired endeavour to prevent her settling down at Storr!”

  “Have you?” Her eyes widened as they swung round to Susan, and then a gay burble of laughter left her lips. “I’d say that certainly was inspired, because Lady Luck’s an absolute little devil of a mare! I taught her a lesson the last time I was at Storr, but I don’t expect she’d remember it unless someone else carried on the good work. Are you accustomed to awkward mounts, Miss Willowfield?” she asked.

  “I’m terrified of horses,” Susan replied, with a kind of stark simplicity, and even Rosalie seemed temporarily at a loss. Bruce Fairburn’s blue eyes narrowed so much as they rested on Justin’s face that any other man might have felt slightly uncomfortable, but the new baronet remained utterly cool and composed. Bruce moved—and it was quite noticeable that he did so—just a little nearer to Susan.

  “If I were you, Miss Willowfield,” he advised gently, “I’d look upon Town life as a little healthier than the country, for the time being.”

  Susan made no reply, but she felt Justin’s harsh eyes rake her face, and she was glad when Jennifer created a diversion by coming hurriedly up to her and declaring that she had been looking everywhere for her. Which was rather an absurd statement, since the rooms were so small, and Jennifer had plainly been having quite an enjoyable time with the acquaintance who had pounced on her on arrival. But now she felt guilty because she had left Susan alone, and Susan was not the type to make friends easily. Although she had apparently picked up three in quite a short space of time, and it was not until Susan made the necessary introductions that she understood the situation.

  “Now this is interesting,” she declared, looking directly at Justin. “You’re the man who gave Susan that bump over her eye!”

  “I have been endeavouring to explain my reasons for causing a temporary disfigurement to Miss Willowfield,” he replied, with a quality of dryness that suggested he was no longer in an entirely amiable mood. “The accident was largely connected with her own obstinacy.”

  Jennifer nodded coolly.

  “I’m sure you like to think it was entirely due to her obstinacy.” She accepted a cigarette from Bruce Fairburn’s case, and when it was lighted looked along the tip of it. “We’re going down to stay at the Red Lion in Storr—I think Susan needs a break, and there are reasons why she doesn’t choose to take advantage of your uncle’s kindly provision for her—and I was wondering whether you’d place one of your horses at my disposal while we’re there?” She lifted her steady eyes and once again she gazed at him, and almost unwillingly he found himself admiring her striking Scandinavian fairness, and her tall, supple figure. Here was a young woman who might ride splendidly, he thought, and at the same moment his eyes dropped to her hands. They were strong and sure and artistic, but the tapering slenderness of them was not in the least deceptive. “I could probably handle your Lady Luck without receiving any minor bruises,” she said.

  He nodded at her.

  “You shall have the pick of my stables. But I’d recommend you to advise your friend to keep well away from them,” more curtly.

  “I will certainly do that,” Jennifer replied, and smiled at Susan. “I believe the Red Lion is quite comfortable.”

  “But Storr is more comfortable,” he told her. “You and Miss Willowfield must become my guests, and Bruce—you must help to swell our numbers, too!” A certain affability was creeping back into his expression, and he even smiled mockingly at Susan. “Miss Willowfield and I have had our moment of enmity, but there is no point in letting it develop into an obsession! You will give Mrs. Hollyhead the relief of making certain that I haven’t permanently disfigured you, won’t you, Miss Willowfield? And let her install you once more in the Sprigged Room, which she has decided entirely suits your personality!”

  Susan’s every instinct insisted upon her saying “No,” at once—in fact, she wanted to say “No” so vigorously that he would never dare to offer her his hospitality again
, and never wish to speak to her if they met by accident as they had met to-night—but Jennifer swung round and sent her one of her long, compelling looks, and at the same time murmured softly:

  “Why waste money on hotel bills, when Sir Justin is willing to be our host? Bury the hatchet, Susan, and let’s have a nice little break in the country!”

  “Yes . . . Bury the hatchet, Susan,” Sir Justin murmured, almost as softly, and once again as he looked at the girl with the soft fringe and the big grey eyes that revealed so much of what she was thinking there was a challenge in his eyes.

  Susan fought against it . . . She had yielded before, and the result had been disastrous, and it would be just as disastrous again if she yielded a second time. She simply couldn’t understand why Jennifer was forcing her into a position that she would loathe, and which would fill her with uneasiness every moment of every day. Sir Justin had warned her that he was not a nice enemy, and the situation was not really changed. His opinion of her could not have altered, and her opinion of him could never change. She was not even comfortable in his presence.

  She looked into his eyes—even if she had wanted to do so she could not have looked anywhere else but into his eyes in those moments—and she felt her spirit rise to the challenge. At least he should know that she was not the type who ever refused a challenge, whatever else he thought about her.

  “I liked Mrs. Hollyhead,” she heard herself saying mechanically. “I intended to go back sometime and thank her for the way she looked after me.”

  “Then what better time than the present?” Sir Justin murmured. “I’ll telephone Mrs. Hollyhead to-night, and make all the arrangements! I’ll even offer to drive you both down to Storr if you think you can trust yourselves to my driving!” with a return of the extreme dryness.