by Diana Palmer
“You’d be lucky,” she murmured coolly. “I don’t think much of casual affairs or people who have them.”
“I noticed.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “Shouldn’t we be going?”
“We should.”
He turned the car toward Back Wallop. He was glad he’d insisted that Della come along on this trip, although he wasn’t quite sure why. She appealed to him as none of his casual conquests ever had; probably because she was a unique commodity in his carefree life. Logan would say he was losing his grip on reality, but Chris thought he was only just finding a handhold. He realized as he drove down the narrow road that he’d never really thought ahead very far. Della made him think about houses in the country and flower gardens. He scowled, because they were unfamiliar feelings. He’d never felt them with other women. Not that his sort of woman would waste her time planting flowers, he mused. He wondered how Della would look in a blue silk gown, sprawled on black silk sheets….
The direction of his thoughts brought him crashing back to the present. He couldn’t afford that sort of lapse, not with this woman. She was the wedding-ring sort. He’d better remember it, too.
* * *
They arrived in the small village of Back Wallop fifteen minutes later and parked beside a news agent’s shop.
“Best place to ask questions, if we aren’t too obvious,” he pointed out, as he opened the door for her and helped her out of the small car.
“With our accents, we’ll blend right in,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.
He chuckled softly. “Never mind that. Just follow my lead.” He curled her fingers into his, tightening his grip when she pulled back, and walked her into the store.
“Mornin’,” the proprietor greeted them with a speculative glance. “Need help, guv?”
“Just directions, thanks,” Chris said with a warm smile. “The wife and I are over here to visit my cousins, the Duke of Marlboro and his wife, Lady Gail, but we just heard about Lord Harvey and thought we’d swing through Back Wallop on the way and pay our respects to Lady Harvey. Could you direct us?”
“Your cousin is the Duke of Marlboro, you say?” The man was impressed.
“Yes. Do you know Georgie?”
He cleared his throat. No, he didn’t, and even if he had he wouldn’t presume to call his lordship the duke “Georgie.”
“Lady Harvey lives just down the road in Carstairs Manor. It’s to the left just across the bridge as you round the curve. Can’t miss it. Sad about the old man.”
“Yes, it is. Thank you,” Chris said. “Ready to go, darling?” he added, pulling Della close to his side and looking down at her with an expression on his face that made her knees wobble. She colored again and nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Newlyweds, aren’t yer?” the shopkeeper said with a grin. “Anyone could see it. You’re in luck, there, guv, she’s a beauty.”
“Don’t I know it?” Chris murmured, with a wink in her direction. “Let’s get going, old girl. Thanks for the help,” he added over his shoulder.
“Sure thing.” The shopkeeper chuckled to himself, watching them go. Chris had put his arm around Della and pulled her close, so that she fit nicely under his arm. They looked good together, the tall dark man and the pretty little blonde woman. He sighed, remembering his own youthful marriage. He did miss his wife, he thought, and looking at the couple before him made the ache even deeper. How lucky they were, to have a whole lifetime together to look forward to.
Chris, unaware of the shopkeeper’s thoughts, pulled Della even closer as they paused at the passenger side of the automobile.
He tilted her soft round chin up with his fingertips and searched her confused gray eyes. They were soft as summer rain, he thought, oblivious to everything around them. She had a heart the size of the whole world, and she felt so right in his arms. He looked down at her bow of a mouth, pink and pretty and just slightly parted. It would be stupid to do what he was thinking. He realized that, even as his head bent and his mouth fastened gently onto those lovely pink lips. They were every bit as soft as he’d imagined, and they were just faintly unsteady under the gentle pressure. He hesitated, lifting a breath away to see what she wanted. Her fingers were against his thin shirt, barely touching, and then opening, pressing against his chest. The tiny movement was all the encouragement he needed. He bent again, and this time the pressure was neither tender nor brief.
Della felt her heart stop in her chest as his arm contracted and brought her much too close to his tall, fit body. His mouth was warm and hard and devastatingly expert. He did things to her lips that she’d never experienced with anyone else, arousing things that made her moan.
The sound brought him out of the trance he’d fallen into. He lifted his head, breathing a little roughly, and looked into her turbulent, shocked eyes.
“You don’t know much about kissing for a woman your age,” he said, with no expression whatsoever in his lean, handsome face.
She swallowed and tried to steady her breath. “I told you…”
“Kissing won’t get you pregnant,” he continued relentlessly. “Not even openmouthed kissing. You don’t like it at all, do you?”
She felt all too much on the defensive, gauche and untried. She glared up at him from eyes that were still half shocked. “It’s a public street!” she said on a nervous laugh.
“Yes, I know, and on a private one, you’d have fought me,” he said flatly. He eased her away, inch by inch. He was scowling, quiet, almost grim. There was a look in her eyes, in her face, that disturbed him.
“Shouldn’t we…go?” she asked breathlessly.
“Probably,” he agreed. He opened the door and seated her before he went around the bonnet and got in beside her. His lean hand hesitated on the switch. “Someone forced you,” he commented, staring at her. Her eyelids flinched. “Were you raped?”
She shivered. “Please…”
“Were you raped?”
She lowered her eyes to her lap. “Not…quite.”
“Someone you knew?”
“My fiancé,” she said dully. “When I broke the engagement two days before the wedding, because I caught him with one of my bridesmaids at the wedding rehearsal supper. He was missing during the toast. I stepped outside to look for him, and I found him, and her, in the backseat of his car.” She sighed. It felt good, somehow, to tell someone the truth. She hadn’t been able to talk about it with her grandfather. “He took me home. Grandad was out that evening, and when I told Bruce I wouldn’t marry him, he was furious and tried to have his way with me. Luckily, he backed down. He said I wouldn’t give out, so he found somebody who would, and it was just as well that I was breaking the engagement because he didn’t want to spend his life trying to get me aroused.”
The pain in her voice softened him. He stared at her quietly. After a minute, his fingers lifted to her short hair and touched it, lightly. “Sometimes people fall into relationships because they’re lonely, or frightened. But marriage has to have a physical as well as an emotional foundation. Did you ever want him?”
She shifted nervously. “Not…that way.”
“Then it would have been a disaster if you’d married him. Surely you know that now?”
She turned her head and looked at him. She seemed unusually vulnerable. “All that…is wrong,” she said. “Isn’t it? I mean, after marriage you’re supposed to, but outside marriage you…”
His hand stilled. “Don’t tell me. You were raised by missionaries.”
He was being facetious, but he didn’t know how close to the truth he was.
“Yes, my parents were missionaries,” she agreed, wide-eyed. “How did you know?”
CHAPTER THREE
Chris smiled ruefully after the surprise wore off. “Well, well,” he murmured. “So that’s it.”
“I guess you’ve forgotten more about love than I’ll ever learn,” she mused. She shrugged. “I told you I was a dead bust as a modern woman.”
�
��No, you’re not,” he argued. “You’ve got potential,” he added in a deep, sensuous tone. “All it needs is developing.”
“Are you volunteering?” she asked with a wry smile.
He tugged on a lock of her hair. “Don’t tempt me. We’ve got enough complications without adding that to them. Tansy, remember?”
She grimaced. “Sorry.”
“No harm done,” he said with a chuckle. He let go of her hair and cranked the car. “First we’ll find Tansy and solve her problems. Then we’ll have time to devote to our own.”
“I don’t have a problem.”
He gave her a look of mild astonishment. “You don’t like French kisses, and you don’t think that’s a problem?”
She glared at him. “It isn’t!”
He smiled slowly. “See what I mean?”
She decided that it would be best if she ignored him, so she tried it for the five minutes it took to get to the manor house.
“This is where things get a little sticky,” he said thoughtfully, as they sat at the closed gates where three carloads of reporters were camped out.
“Can’t you use the phone over there and tell her we’re lost and need directions?” she suggested.
“That wouldn’t work. I’ll guarantee every one of these newshounds has already tried that angle. I suppose the direct approach is always the best one.” He got out of the car, smiled genially at the reporters as he worked his way past them, and picked up the telephone at the gate. He spoke softly so that the reporters couldn’t hear him. After a minute he nodded, put the phone down and got back in the car with Della.
“She’s sending a man down for us. I described the car I’m driving,” Chris told her.
“What did you say that got her to open the gates?” she asked, astonished.
“I said that I was a relation of the Duke of Marlboro and I needed to speak to her urgently about her late husband.”
“And she believed you?”
He chuckled. “As it happens, we know each other,” he admitted. “I didn’t realize she’d married, which is why I didn’t recognize her as Lady Harvey. I knew her as just plain Clothilde Elmore.”
Della was immediately jealous and uncomfortable. He didn’t say that the woman was an old lover, but she probably was. She hated the thought of those other women, and that was dangerous. She had to remember that she was here on a job, and not to try to catch the eye of this reformed rake—if he was reformed, which she doubted.
“What are you going to tell her when we get to the house?” she persisted.
He stared at her amusedly. “You’re the reporter. Hadn’t you better start formulating some hard-nosed questions?”
“I guess I had,” she agreed, and pulled out her pad.
He covered her hand with his before the other reporters got a look at it. “Not here,” he said softly. “They can’t know we’re infiltrating.”
“Oh. Sure.” She put the pad up. “I’ll just do it mentally.”
He looked as if he had doubts about that, but he didn’t say another word. In a few minutes, a small car with two passengers shot down the driveway. One man came to Chris’s car and climbed in the back. The other man opened the gate. Chris shot through the opening before the reporters could push their way through. The gate closed to a chorus of jeers and catcalls from the frustrated onlookers.
“Neat, that,” Chris mused as he followed the other car up the long driveway.
“Damned vultures,” the man in the backseat muttered in a thick Cockney accent. “Poor Lord Harvey not even buried, and all this going on. The poor old man. He did so hate publicity.”
“Something I share with the late lord,” Chris muttered.
The man in the backseat took a good look at the driver in the rearview mirror. “I know you,” he said suddenly. “You’re that Deverell from America, the one who was caught in bed with…”
“Never mind,” Chris said icily. “That’s past history.”
“Well, sure it is, guv, but you must know how her ladyship feels now,” he added.
“Indeed I do,” Chris replied.
“She’ll be glad of company. Had to live like a hermit these past two days, what with the inquisition from the Yard and all.” He shook his head. “Poor old man, poor old lord,” he said sadly, “naked as a jaybird and floating in the river, all those people taking pictures of him. He was so stately, such a gentleman…. Deverell,” he repeated suddenly, staring at Chris harder. “You’re her son! It was your mother killed the poor old man!”
“My mother won’t kill a fly on her salad,” Chris said with utter disgust. “She may be a licensed lunatic, but she’s no murderess.”
The man looked vaguely placated. “You sure of that?”
“I’d stake my life on it. If Lord Harvey was murdered, my mother didn’t do it.”
“Had to be murder, don’t you see,” came the heavy reply. “Had a bruise the size of my fist on the side of his head. He drowned, but he was unconscious when he drowned they say.”
“He was hit on the right side of his head, too, wasn’t he?” Chris asked carelessly.
“Sure was. Right at the temple. The blow was so hard it broke the skull. Sorry, miss,” he added when he saw Della go white.
Chris glanced at her. “I told you that you were too soft for the sort of work you do, didn’t I?” he asked bluntly.
“What sort of work does she do, then?” the passenger asked.
“She’s trying to make it as a crime novelist,” Chris lied with a straight face. “But she gets sick at her stomach when she has to read about real crimes. I think she should write political thrillers, myself.”
“That’s my sort of book,” the passenger said smugly. “Politics is the most interesting thing I know about. Not that most of what you read in the papers is the truth. No, sir.”
“I’ll agree with that, having been a victim of the gutter press myself,” Chris said.
“It’s not all gutter press,” Della felt compelled to say.
“No, there are some good journalists,” Chris agreed. “But then, they don’t write for the tabloids!”
Which left Della without a comeback. She stared at the gray stone manor house with real interest. It was the closest she’d ever been to affluence on this scale. The place was surrounded by landscaped lawns and gardens, even a fountain where the driveway circled the house. There was an elegant porch with flower urns everywhere, and a huge garage and tennis court and swimming pool in the back.
“Nice gardens, aren’t they?” the passenger said. “The late Lord Harvey was an avid gardener, always puttering out there, he was.”
“My mother has the same passion,” Chris said, “although she rarely stays home long enough to indulge it. She lived over here some years ago, when I was in boarding school.”
“You have English ties, guv?”
“I’m a cousin to the Duke of Marlboro.”
“Well, I’ll be!”
“And a cousin to the ruling royal family, as well,” he added on a chuckle. “So you see, Great Britain isn’t so foreign to me, after all.”
“I should say not, sir!”
They pulled up at the front door and the passenger got out quickly to help Della from the small automobile, smiling at her shy thanks.
“I’ll put the car around back for you, sir,” the passenger said, taking the keys. “Just give us a ring when you’re ready to leave. Right-o, then.”
* * *
A butler answered the door and escorted Della and Chris into the elegant, antique-furnished living room, where the mourning Lady Harvey lay sprawled across the sofa in a gauzy rainbow-colored lounge dress that would have probably financed the entire annual budget of a Third World army.
Chris introduced himself, naming Della as his traveling companion with a finesse that made her blush. Lady Harvey extended her white arm and allowed Chris to kiss her knuckles with a continental air.
“So nice to meet you,” the former Clothilde Elmore drawle
d in a cultured accent. “I’m in mourning, you know, but I look terrible in black. Do sit down.”
“I’m sorry about your husband,” Chris said.
She waved a hand. “He was in his early seventies, you know, and his health was failing,” she said languidly. “Not that I won’t miss him, of course, but he was so much older than I.”
That was debatable, Della thought. The woman had obviously had several face-lifts, but her throat and hands showed her true age, and she was no spring chicken.
“I’m looking for my mother,” Chris continued. “I understand that she’s implicated in the homicide.”
“Homicide? What homicide?” Lady Harvey exclaimed, sitting straight up with a hand to her throat.
“But the tabloids…” Della began.
Lady Harvey burst out laughing, although there was an odd flush in her face. “Good Lord, I had no idea they were spreading such drivel. Harvey was waterskiing in the lake day before yesterday. He came loose, hit his head on the stern of the boat your mother was driving, and drowned. That’s all there is to it.”
Chris almost fell over with relief. “Thank God!”
“I cannot imagine how anyone could construe this as anything other than a tragic accident,” she continued curtly. “What motive would your mother have to murder him anyway? They were old friends through her late husband. The three of them were great pals, although they stopped corresponding when Cecil and I married, of course. I had nothing in common with such hijinks, quite honestly. Your mother was always in the middle of some outrageous circumstance.”
“She doesn’t know any other way to live,” Chris agreed. He scowled. “But if there’s no homicide, why is my mother being sought?”
Lady Harvey waved a hand. “I have no idea. The police questioned her, and myself, and went away. My attorney tells me that there is no evidence of foul play and no further investigation is warranted.”
“Then I’ve made a trip for nothing,” he said with a smile as he got to his feet. “I’m very grateful to you. But you say you have no idea where my mother might be?”