by Liz Fielding
‘He never saw you play?’ He shook his head. ‘Life’s a bitch isn’t it?’ she said, and it suddenly occurred to Brodie that being abandoned by your mother as an infant couldn’t have been a great start in life, no matter how many silver spoons nanny had to feed you with. ‘Did your mother never remarry?’ she asked.
‘No, she always said that Dad was too big an act to follow. But once I was off her hands she went to live near her sister in Canada.’
‘She must miss you terribly.’
‘She doesn’t have time. Meg, her sister, had half a dozen children and they’re well into the second generation now. I’d have to start competing in the baby stakes to persuade her to come back.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘It requires two, Emmy.’ He glanced at her. ‘The right two.’
‘You’re a “till death us do part” man, are you?’
‘If you don’t at least start with “till death us do part” as your goal there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point. Marriage is enough of a lottery without being handicapped by a lack of commitment.’
‘I suppose so. I guess I had a lucky escape when Oliver chose the money.’ Emmy glanced at Brodie and discovered that she, too, was the object of thoughtful contemplation. ‘Oh, look, here comes our supper.’ She smiled brilliantly at the young waiter and he blushed, and when she caught Brodie’s eye again, he was no longer regarding her thoughtfully, but with exasperation.
‘Do you have to do that?’ he demanded.
‘What?’
He just shook his head. ‘It’s not kind, Emmy.’ She continued to stare at him, eyes wide. ‘Nor is that,’ he said, suddenly angry.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BRODIE sat back while the man served their food, taking the chance to regain mastery of a libido racketing out of control. What on earth was Emmy playing at? Was it unconscious? Had she no idea of the effect she had on him? Or was she doing it deliberately to distract him knowing damn well that he was in no position to respond to the signals she was flashing at him?
The way she had kissed him outside the hotel had been a no-holds-barred, one hundred per cent effort and for a few giddy moments he had forgotten everything but the way she felt in his arms, the way they seemed to fit together like two halves of the same piece, how desperately easy she would be to love. Well, he had urged her to be convincing, so perhaps he’d deserved everything she’d thrown at him.
But any more convincing and he’d have found it hard to remember the reason they were in France, to have left her downstairs in the hotel lobby when the only thing on his mind had been a bed that seemed to be taking on vast proportions, filling their suite, filling his head with thoughts of Emerald Carlisle that had nothing to do business and everything to do with pleasure.
His desire for her, fired the moment he had set eyes on her, had now settled in a permanent dull ache that made him feel too small for his skin, made him long to be able to tear off his clothes and jump into the harbour to cool off.
The situation was intolerable and a sane man would be wishing himself anywhere but here. But he wasn’t. He couldn’t think of anywhere he would rather be, which made the thought of what would happen tomorrow unbearable. Either way. Because whilst he was determined to carry out Gerald Carlisle’s instructions to the letter, he couldn’t bear the thought of Emerald being hurt again. No matter how lightly she had brushed it off, rationalising it as a lucky escape, he knew that Oliver Hayward’s faithlessness must have hurt her very badly.
And he despised Gerald Carlisle for the kind of heavy-handedness that had made it inevitable. It had obviously been a holiday romance, the kind that flares and dies as quickly, leaving precious bittersweet memories, a few old photographs to be smiled over years later when the kids found them stuffed away in a box in the attic.
Her father had destroyed all that.
‘Tell me about your job, Emmy,’ he said, abruptly as the waiter reluctantly moved away. When she didn’t say anything he looked up. She was regarding him with a slightly puzzled expression, rather like a puppy that has been yelled at but has no idea why. He wanted to wrap her in his arms, kiss her, tell her that everything would be fine. But he couldn’t do that. There were no guarantees, even if he could figure out exactly what she wanted. All he really knew was that she was determined to get to Kit Fairfax before him. ‘Please,’ he added, aware that he had been curt, that as his throat had tightened with longing his words had come out more like an order than a conversational gambit.
She continued to look at him for another thirty seconds before she finally lowered her eyes and picked up her fork. ‘I told you, I’m a trainee at Astons, the auctioneers. I’m doing the rounds at the moment, you know, three months in each department.’ She toyed with her fish. ‘But I want to specialise in toys and automata. Mechanical toys,’ she added, uncertainly, not sure that he’d understand.
‘Little singing birds in cages, that sort of thing?’
She laughed, breaking the tension. ‘That sort of thing,’ she agreed. ‘And a whole lot more. Some are wonderfully elaborate groups of figures, beautifully dressed musicians, clowns, beggars even. They were always rare and prized.’ She pulled a tiny moue. ‘Rich men’s toys, Brodie. They cost a fortune even when they were first made. The very finest ones were made here in France.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that. Do you collect them?’
She gave him an odd look. ‘Do you really think that Hollingworth would let me loose with that kind of money?’
‘I couldn’t say. He doesn’t discuss his clients’ business with me unless he wants a legal opinion. Your petty cash hardly comes into that category, Miss Carlisle.’
‘Hardly petty cash, Brodie. But it’s academic anyway. I believe the best pieces should be in public collections where they can be properly cared for and everyone can enjoy them. Too much wonderful stuff is locked away, never looked at until it has appreciated in value sufficiently to be auctioned on for someone else to repeat the process.’ She was positively glowing with fervour, her red curls glowing like a halo under the lights. ‘It’s such a waste.’
‘You could buy one and donate it to the V&A,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe it would make the place less sobering…’
‘The Victoria and Albert Museum, Brodie, is sobering in the right kind of way. It makes you stop and think. All that work, the skill, the dedication of centuries of craftsmen, some of them working for just pennies to make useful things as beautiful as the heart could aspire to, things that the people who made them could never afford to have themselves…’ She broke off, slightly embarrassed. ‘Actually I did buy a little automaton a few months ago. It’s just a moth-eaten little monkey with some cymbals, with a very simple movement. It needs some work but a craftsman I know is going to help me to restore it.’
This was safer ground, for both them. ‘How do you go about that?’ Brodie prompted. But she needed little encouragement as her enthusiasm for her subject carried her away.
Describing the mechanical figures she had seen, amazing finds unearthed in barns, the fabulous prices some had made at auction, carried them easily on through fish and a melt-on-the-tongue apple tarte, to coffee and cognac.
‘I’m sorry, I just get carried away once I start,’ she said, eventually. ‘I’ve bored you rigid.’
Recalling the animated manner in which she had described her job, her enthusiasm, her obvious love for her work, he shook his head. ‘You don’t know how to be boring, Emmy.’
‘Was that a compliment?’ she enquired, so doubtfully that Brodie laughed out loud.
‘Now you’re just fishing. Come on, I think it’s time we went back to the hotel. You’ve a big day ahead of you tomorrow and I’d like to make an early start.’
‘You’re a glutton for punishment, Brodie. Don’t you ever just turn over and lie-in for half an hour?’
Yesterday his response would have been to offer to lie in all morning if she was prepared to join him, but flirting with her was no longer an option.
He wanted her too much.
‘You’ve clearly never slept on a sofa,’ he said, taking care to keep his voice expressionless.
She had, but not in circumstances she was willing to discuss. ‘I’d offer to swap, but you’d undoubtedly think I was planning to tiptoe out and make a run for it the moment you were asleep,’ she said.
‘Now why on earth would I think a thing like that?’ he enquired, gently.
‘But then again,’ she continued, ignoring his question, ‘you did make the reservations, so presumably you knew what to expect.’
‘I wish. Come on, let’s go and look at the boats.’ She looked doubtful. ‘Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to shanghai you.’
‘Shanghai me?’
‘Slip you a Mickey and whisk you aboard while you were senseless.’ She still looked puzzled. ‘Don’t you ever watch old movies?’ he asked. She shook her head. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing. A Mickey Finn,’ he explained, ‘is something slipped into a drink to knock you out. Once you’re unconscious you get smuggled aboard some boat that’s just leaving harbour and by the time you wake up you’re miles out to sea.’
‘But why?’
‘In your case to whisk you out of harm’s way.’
‘Kit would never harm me,’ she said, her eyes pure gold in the reflected light. ‘Unlike your friend Mickey,’ she added, solemnly. Then a dimple appeared at the corner of her mouth and he wanted to kiss it so badly that it hurt.
He caught her hand and they ran across the road. Her fingers were long and slender, the bones seeming impossibly fragile beneath his broad palm, stirring in him a desperate longing to protect her. What was it about this girl? His spiralling need for her made him feel like a boy, awkward, foolish.
She wasn’t the first woman who’d turned his head. No man could reach thirty without making a fool of himself more than once. But she was the first woman he’d ached to love and yet whose desires and needs he knew he would always put above his own.
Tomorrow he was very afraid that he would lose her. But if Kit Fairfax was strong, if he was the man she wanted, he knew he would do everything in his power to help them. Was that the difference between lust and love?
For the moment, though, he held her hand as they wandered back towards their hotel along the edge of the harbour and she seemed perfectly content to leave her fingers curled about his.
It was one of those perfect bittersweet moments to store up against an empty future, he thought, as his hand pressed against the small, hard circle of gold that she wore on the third finger of her left hand, the tiny diamond that Kit Fairfax had given her as a token of his love. She’d been fiddling with it unconsciously all evening, as if clinging to what it represented. Brodie punished himself with that thought. But he didn’t let go.
‘Is that the boat you would like to be on?’ Emerald asked, stopping to point to one of the larger yachts.
He dragged his thoughts back to the harbour and less dangerous thoughts. ‘Yes, that’s her. Not exactly the QE2,’ he observed, turning to lean on the rail, tucking her hand beneath his arm, ‘but she’s quite a beauty.’
‘Yes, she’s lovely. Perhaps in the right company I wouldn’t notice the motion.’She turned to look up at him. ‘Tell me, Brodie, if you could sail away right now, where would you go?’
He stared out across the harbour, listening to the rattle of the rigging as the yachts rose and fell on the water, remembering sun-filled days when he still had everything to prove. He’d proved it. Worked his way out of a pit village until he was standing in the south of France with an heiress on his arm. And he was suddenly faced with the realisation that unless she was his, none of it meant anything.
‘Brodie?’
She was looking at him, waiting for an answer. Where would he go?
‘“The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set!”’
Brodie quoted the words softly, yet with such an intensity of feeling that Emmy suspected his real reason for working as a deck-hand owed more to some romantic schoolboy notion to visit the magical isles of Greece than any disinclination to stack supermarket shelves. Beneath that lawyer’s stern exterior there beat the heart of a poet, an adventurer.
But then she had known that from the moment she set eyes on him. And he had confirmed it by not betraying her. Lord, how she hated deceiving him! One more day. Just one more day…
It took every ounce of determination to instil a teasing note in her voice. ‘I ask for an itinerary and I get Byron,’ she said, with forced lightness. ‘Don Juan, no less. You’re not exactly boring yourself, Brodie.’ Then a yawn caught her by surprise.
‘Not boring, huh?’
Her face, illuminated softly by the lights of the boats and the reflections off the water, filled with sudden laughter. ‘No, Brodie,’ she said. ‘Whatever else you could say about today, it was certainly not boring.’ She stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you for being so kind about the car.’
Kind? She left him bereft of words. What had she expected him to do? Shout at her? Shake her? He loved her for heaven’s sake. Loved her. In twenty-four hours she had swept into his life and turned it upside down. And he knew without the slightest doubt that he would gladly die for her.
Yet tomorrow he had to do everything in his power to persuade a man she thought she was in love with not to marry her. If he succeeded would she think him kind then?
Or was she simply trying to disarm him?
He resisted the temptation to turn his head, shift the kiss to her mouth. Instead, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the tips of her fingers.
‘Just don’t do it again,’ he said, thickly, turning her towards the hotel.
‘No,’ she promised. ‘I won’t.’ And neither of them had been talking about her attempt to escape in his car. ‘Brodie?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Tomorrow, when we get to the farm, will you let me talk to Kit first? Just for a few minutes?’
He glanced down at her, but she was looking straight ahead, avoiding his eyes. He guessed that answered his question. ‘No, Emmy,’ he said, his heart like lead in his chest. ‘If he loves you, you’ve got nothing to worry about.’
Emerald, lying tucked up in the huge bed all by herself, lay awake and worried. She simply had to speak to Kit before Brodie started on him or all her plans would come crashing down around her ears.
She fiddled with the ring she was wearing. The wretched thing didn’t fit properly and she had to keep bending her finger to stop it from slipping off. Well, one more day and she could take it off and good riddance, but first she had to get to Kit, explain the situation to him before Brodie turned on the pressure. And this time there must be no mistakes. She needed a proper plan rather than making a grab for freedom when a chance presented itself. She’d tried that three times and it hadn’t got her anywhere.
Not quite true. If she hadn’t taken the chances when they offered she would still be mouldering at Honeybourne. As it was, she was in France with Brodie.
Emmy’s smooth brow puckered momentarily into a frown. Tom Brodie was very special, a strong man who didn’t use his strength to bully her like her father.
She could hear him moving about the other room, as wakeful as she was. What was he doing? Just pacing about, unable to sleep on that wretched sofa? It was the second night he’d been forced to surrender his bed to her. She was six inches shorter than him and fifty pounds lighter. The least she could do was offer, sincerely this time, to change places with him.
She eased herself out of bed, padded across the darkened room and opened the door a few inches. Brodie had come to rest in a large armchair on the far side of the room. He was wearing the thin track suit bottoms but hadn’t bothered with a t-shirt and
the golden light from a lamp on the table behind him pooled on the silken skin of his shoulders, throwing the sculptured lines of his chest into sharp relief, hinting at the darker cruciform shadow of body hair.
He was so beautiful that her heart clenched with the longing to throw open the door and run to him, fling her arms about his knees and beg him to sail away with her to his wonderful islands. If he would just look up so that she could see his eyes, unguarded as he suddenly noticed her. Then she saw the open file on his knees. He wasn’t about to look up, he was too absorbed in Mark Reed’s file to be aware of her presence, too busy trying to work out what kind of man Kit Fairfax was and just how likely he was to take the money and run.
A mixture of emotions boiled up in her. Resentment, mostly, but with an under-tug of something raw and painful. Brodie was supposed to be her knight in shining armour. He was. Or rather he had been. But tomorrow would be different.
And if tomorrow was going to produce the results she wanted, she had better start thinking instead of dreaming.
She eased the door shut and climbed back into bed.
So far she had relied on chance, taken her opportunities as they presented themselves. But now she would have to make things happen and for that, she needed a plan.
It didn’t take a lot of thought; she was running out of time and there wasn’t much choice. She abandoned any thought of trying to creep past him while he was asleep. The risk was too great and if she failed, he would make certain she didn’t have another chance.
No, she would wait until Brodie was taking a shower in the morning. He was sure to let her use the bathroom first. Then, once he was at his own ablutions she would have a few moments in which to escape. She’d only take her handbag, leaving her overnight case, her make-up on the dressing table, so that he wouldn’t be immediately suspicious.
Maybe she should leave her handbag, too? All she really needed were the euros she’d hidden from him, a lipstick and her little diary with directions to the farmhouse. Nothing that wouldn’t slip into the pockets of her jeans.
If only she could have been sure she had enough money for a taxi, but she didn’t know how far the village was from Aix. How far the farmhouse was from the village. Kit had been terribly vague about distances; extracting the directions from him when he was absorbed in his work had been like drawing teeth.