‘You would have gone on in the bidding?’
‘Yes, of course. If it means a lot to Serena,’ he blustered and overcoming with marked hesitation the parsimony instilled by his late father continued, ‘Perhaps you will consider letting me buy it from you.’
‘John, it doesn’t matter. Really it doesn’t,’ Serena urged quickly, guessing at what Adam was trying to achieve. She pulled at John’s sleeve. ‘Didn’t you say you had to go and check on the loading of the machinery?’
‘Golly, yes,’ John agreed, glancing at his watch and showing himself remarkably simple to distract. ‘You’re a treasure for reminding me. Perhaps Mr Carmichael will look after you while I go and do it.’
‘Oh no, John!’ Serena’s protest was too vehement, and realising how strange it must sound, she hastily improvised, ‘Adam’s too busy, aren’t you?’ Her expression, hidden from her escort, held dire warnings of the consequences of accepting John’s tentative suggestion.
But it served as a challenge to Adam, who came back smoothly, ‘Not at all. I’d be delighted.’ He smiled disarmingly at a hesitant John. ‘You run off and look after your combine harvester and I’ll take care of Serena... for you.’
‘Baler, actually,’ John laughed nervously, and when Serena failed to voice any more objections, reassured her, ‘I won’t be long, darling. See you soon.’
The moment the younger man was out of earshot, the inevitable explosion occurred. ‘What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing, Mr Carmichael?’
‘It was Adam a few minutes ago,’ he recalled musingly, maddeningly calm in the face of the anger flaring to life in the eyes upturned to his. ‘Does the worthy John know his prospective bride has such a fiery temper—not to mention such unladylike language?’
‘Don’t try to distract me,’ she seethed. ‘That tactic seems very effective as far as the boyfriend’s concerned,’ Adam continued in the same vein. ‘What do you mean?’
‘From art to farm machinery in one fluid movement,’ he commented, his mouth lifting at the corners with a suspicion of amusement. ‘Very manageable—or perhaps he wanted a let out?’
‘Are you trying to imply that John was avoiding making you an offer for the painting,’ she fumed, hands on the hips of her black dungarees, ‘because if you were...’
‘Nothing was further from my mind,’ Adam lied outrageously, raising his hands in submission to her warlike stance. ‘However, we’ll let him vindicate himself, if you like. I’ll let him have the painting for, say,’ he paused for mental calculation, ‘eight and a half thousand.’
‘Quite the wheeler-dealer, aren’t we?’ she muttered with heavy contempt, not realising she was being played with.
‘Not particularly. I could get a lot more for it in a London gallery. Anyway it’s purely academic,’ Adam murmured pacifyingly, but his smile was met with hard hostility. Certainly no invitation to offer the truth. She’d be looking for the twist, and probably finding one, two seconds after he admitted he had bought the painting to return to its rightful owner. Instead he said, ‘I don’t think the money will be forthcoming.’
Said to gain reaction and he was suitably rewarded with a taunting, John may not flaunt it, but he could buy you several times over, I bet.’
‘I doubt it, Princess,’ Adam responded unruffled. ‘Is that why you consider him such good husband material— because he’s rich and... careful?’
‘No, it isn’t!’ she almost shouted her denial, not missing the slur that translated ‘careful’ into ‘mean’.
‘Then why?’ he wanted to know. He could hardly say what was in his mind—what’s he got that I haven’t got?
But perhaps Serena partially homed into his thoughts, or maybe it was her struggling to maintain her defiance, anger out of stride with his reasonable tone, that made her state defensively, ‘He’s a better man than you’ll ever be.’
‘In a certain sense I would not deny that,’ Adam concurred, now having to keep his own temper on a tight leash while she trampled over his pride. ‘He’s kind, tractable, polite and incredibly dull, I should imagine. Have I missed out any of his more sterling qualities?’ he jibed knowingly, and for a split second the widening of her eyes, spitting fury and frustration, made him think the whole hall—auctioneer, helpers and few remaining customers waiting to settle—were about to hear her answer, loud and reverberatingly angry.
She visibly swallowed it down and caught him off balance as she drew very close to him, waited till he inclined his head slightly and then whispered confidingly, ‘He’s also fantastic in bed!’
The knife turned another inch and he felt physically ill. His hands went out to painfully grip her upper arms before she could walk away with her victory, and for a moment as the blood hammering in his head blotted out reason, there was a very real danger that Adam would be the one to supply a public scene.
As his vision cleared, he was rescued by the sight of Serena biting down on her bottom lip. Sliding his hold to one wrist, he pulled her behind him, out of the house, across the courtyard until they were well out of range of anyone else’s hearing at the top of a short flight of steps leading down to the front lawn. And there he backed her against a stone parapet.
‘I don’t believe you!’ Adam sounded menacing, a bare step from violence as he dared her to repeat her assertion.
But she dared, and perhaps she wouldn’t have been the girl he loved if she hadn’t, returning flippantly, ‘Do you want details?’
‘I was not referring to your milk-and-water boy-friend’s prowess as a lover,’ he ground out, winding her hair round one hand and tugging hard. ‘I don’t believe that my virgin princess in her little-girl dungarees has ever lain with a man, far less had violent, passionate love made to her.’
‘I couldn’t care less what you think,’ she cried back, colour flushing her cheeks that could have been down to temper or embarrassment. ‘My affairs are my own concern!’
She gave the word affairs a meaning that made him once again wish to strike her. He yanked her head further back and growled, ‘You’d better be lying!’ and any girl with a fainter spirit would have recognised it as a demand for her to shut up, as was the pressure with which her hair was gripped.
If Serena Templeton recognised it, she chose to ignore, coming back with a reckless, ‘That’s for me to know.’
‘Finish it!’ he ordered, but this time she stared uncomprehendingly up at him; only Adam felt she knew exactly what she was doing to him—more than teasing but a fine instinct for torment. ‘Presumably for me to find out, eh? Well, don’t worry, I promise I shall.’
He caught her hand as it was in mid-air about to make vicious contact with his face, releasing his grip on her hair. What her next move would have been he wasn’t to find out, for they were separated by the tooting of a horn as John spotted them from his Range Rover. For an instant her resentment appeared to switch to the source of the interruption before she sprang back from him.
‘You look disappointed,’ Adam tested the impression she had given, before she managed to erect her guard. ‘Perhaps you have a taste for fighting.’
‘Don’t be absurd!’ she snapped back, but without her usual force or conviction. Her next words, as near to appeal as she had ever come, seemed to suggest an embarrassed guilt.
‘If... if John saw us, if he says anything, we were... fooling, right?’
‘I wasn’t fooling,’ said Adam with quiet warning, as her attention wavered nervously between himself and John, alighting from the Rover with a female passenger. ‘Nevertheless your wish is my command, Princess.’
His half-bow earned him a withering glance, but she submitted to his guiding hand at her elbow as they went forward to meet John, Adam taking notice of the younger man’s companion with an admiring, ‘Who’s your competition? She’s quite a dish!’
‘I think she approves of you too,’ Serena commented with acid sweetness on the encouraging smile turned on by the other girl for Adam’s benefit as they approached.
The smile slipped as the brunette acknowledged Serena, purring, ‘Delighted to see you, Serena. What a pretty playsuit so sweet!’
The compliment, so innocent at face value, served to draw attention, by contrast, to her own more mature figure and style of dress—an elegant, well-cut trouser suit. With bold features, highlighted by carefully applied make-up, she might once have appealed to Adam.
‘This is Serena’s cousin—Adam Carmichael. Adam, a next-door neighbour of mine—Caroline Stamford,’ John diffidently performed the introductions.
‘Naughty Serena,’ Caroline murmured playfully, stretching a beautifully manicured hand out to Adam, ‘keeping such a delicious man to yourself!’
Serena remained silent, but Adam accepted the feminine flattery with a charming meaningless smile. ‘How do you do, Miss Stamford?’
‘Caroline, please,’ the older girl pressed, letting her hand linger in his for longer than politeness dictated. ‘Are you staying in Yorkshire?’
‘For a while,’ Adam answered her question but not the signals the brunette was sending.
‘In that case, we must see you more often,’ Caroline rebuked lightly, but there was something very purposeful in her rider of, ‘That is, if young Serena can bear to share you around!’
‘Steady on, Caro!’ John protested mildly at the suggestive coupling of Serena and her cousin—as he thought of Adam.
‘Darling Serena knows I was only teasing,’ Caroline replied with a smile that was immediately cancelled out by the heavy condescension in the glance she gave Serena.
‘I seldom take anything you say seriously, Caroline... darling,’ Serena purred in a faultless imitation of the other girl’s husky tone.
Unperturbed, Caroline curled one hand round John’s arm with an easy familiarity and smiled engagingly at both men. ‘What do you do for a living, Adam? Something terribly adventurous, I’ll bet,’ she simpered, managing to convey her approval of his hard-muscled physique by stopping just short of batting her black, unbelievably long eyelashes.
‘I’m a writer of sorts,’ Adam replied equably, inwardly amused by the he-man image he had just destroyed and turning his smile on the wrong girl.
‘Oh, how fascinating!’ Caroline exclaimed, obviously delighted at the possibility of claiming acquaintance with a celebrity. ‘Under what name do you write?’
There was no mistaking the laughter Serena was struggling to control as Adam’s gaze remained on her while replying blandly, ‘My own.’ He didn’t resent the humour, only the fact that she rarely shared it with him.
‘Oh, really?’ For several seconds Caroline’s extreme self-confidence slipped. ‘My apologies, Adam, but I don’t often get the time to read. Too busy on the farm, you understand.’
It was Adam’s turn to stifle amusement at the incongruous vision of those scarlet-tipped fingers toiling on the land.
‘You’re a farmer too?’ he returned with a creditable straight face, having once again caught Serena’s eye.
‘Yes, my father’s and John’s lands are adjoining.’ Caroline supplied the information to Adam, but it was an almost forgotten John she looked up at, when she delivered an additional, ‘Together they would make one of the biggest estates in the county.’
At this John went an unbecoming red, and Serena came to his rescue. ‘It’s getting late, John,’ she reminded him softly, ‘Perhaps we’d better be going.’
He was not given the chance to answer for himself before Caroline interceded, ‘I hope you don’t mind, sweetie, but John’s offered me a lift back to my place with a horse that I bought on impulse at the farm auction.’
‘Won’t it be a squash in the Range Rover?’ Adam quipped, growing to dislike the way Caroline Stamford talked to Serena, but the witticism was lost on the older girl, her good looks marred by a slightly vacant expression.
‘Caro bought one of the horse boxes that was up for auction as well,’ said John by way of explanation, and cast an apologetic look in Serena’s direction. ‘You don’t mind, do you, making the detour?’
Adam recognised an opportunity and quickly took it. ‘Serena can come back with me.’
‘Well, if it’s no trouble,’ John mumbled reluctantly, caught between wanting to keep Serena with him but apart from his former girl-friend.
‘Don’t be silly, John—they’re living in the same house, aren’t they?’ Caroline chipped in.
‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind, Serena?’ the younger man queried rather helplessly.
She shook her head, and Adam wondered if she could not trust herself to speak. If she refused to go with him, it would seem odd to John, and she seemed to strain at being very correct in front of him. But he wasn’t taking any chances.
‘Then if you’re ready, Princess?’
‘Why do you call her that?’ Caroline’s curiosity was roused, and along with it the memory of Serena and Adam Carmichael standing very close together just before John had pomped the horn.
‘Just a pet name, isn’t it, little one?’ He circled Serena’s small waist with his arm, as if to affirm the closeness of their relationship, gambling that she would not create a scene by wresting out of his grasp. He won his bet, but the heart that beat frantically above his fingers communicated her fury at his action.
‘So sweet to see such affection between cousins, I loathe most of mine,’ Caroline drawled. ‘Don’t you think so, John?’
Adam was wise to the game she was playing, but he doubted if the younger man was aware he was being manipulated into distrusting Serena.
‘We’re not really—cousins, I mean. Well, maybe of the kissing variety.’ Adam replied, making the most of the situation.
‘I thought we were leaving,’ said Serena, barely civil in her tone.
Adam successfully foiled John’s attempts at getting Serena on her own for a moment, as he escorted her to his car, and the second he had slammed his door he drove off, leaving a bemused John to Caroline Stamford’s not-so-tender mercies.
Waiting for the eruption, he anticipated the bittersweet pleasure an argument would bring. Even in a rage, Serena was more captivating then any woman he had ever met. As though she sensed his expectancy, and was bent on cheating him, the first ten miles of the journey were accomplished in a tense silence which Adam eventually broke.
‘John’s a pretty willing fellow,’ was his opening gambit.
And as if she had been waiting for it, Serena was ready, snapping back, ‘For willing substitute weak, yes?’
‘You’re too quick for me, Princess,’ Adam replied pleasantly. ‘God knows how John keeps pace.’
‘I don’t...’ she stopped mid-sentence.
‘You don’t what, Serena?’ he pressed, flicking her a sideways glance.
‘You’re so damn clever, you tell me!’
Adam slowed the car before saying, ‘I think you were about to say something to the effect that you don’t reveal too much of your intelligence to John as you know he couldn’t cope.’ She gave no indication whether she agreed with him or not, but her silence was telling. ‘Do you believe you can be happily married to someone with whom you can never really extend yourself for fear of making him feel inferior?’
‘So now we’re an expert on marriage too,’ she scoffed, still staring rigidly ahead of her.
‘No, I’ve just been around a little longer than you,’ Adam said patiently. ‘Imagine what’s going to happen when you have a fight.’
‘We don’t fight.’
‘How dull!’
‘How ridiculous!’ she mimicked.
They fell silent for several minutes and Adam knew she had drifted away into her own thoughts. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to pursue the topic; the idea of Serena tying herself to the young farmer he had met that afternoon appalled him, but he had difficulty separating genuine concern for her welfare from hard jealousy. He hadn’t been very successful earlier.
Her next question, almost devoid of animosity, surprised him. ‘What did you mean—about ha
ving an argument?’
‘Nothing, Princess. Just my own bitterness spilling out.’
‘I want to hear it,’ she insisted.
Adam tried to read what was going through the pretty little head turned towards him, but he couldn’t concentrate on driving and Serena at one and the same time. There was no contest; he slowed down and pulled into the next layby.
Switching off the engine, he moved slowly round in his seat. He still had her full attention and he wondered if he had gained it by voicing doubts she had already formed.
He strived for an impersonal note that wouldn’t offend as he explained, ‘I would say you are much brighter than John and that’s going to show every time you argue about anything—inevitable in the best of marriages, and without our own problem in getting along, I think you have a fair amount of rage inside you.’ She looked on the verge of hot denial so he continued quietly, ‘It comes out in your paintings, Princess. Either you learn to turn the other cheek or you end up putting the other person down. Do you think John could live with that?’
‘Why the sudden concern for John?’ she countered suspiciously.
‘It’s not. It’s for you, little one,’ Adam replied, softness in his eyes and voice. ‘One of the most common responses when a man finds himself up against a woman a lot smarter than he, more articulate, is one of physical violence. A primitive but effective way of re-establishing male dominance.’
‘You’re talking rot,’ she protested indignantly, ‘with regard to John anyway.’
‘Maybe, but sometimes, Princess, when I’m very near to slapping you instead I try to get my revenge verbally. What’s John going to do when you dig your sharp little claws into him and draw blood?’ he reminded her how hard she could push when she was in a temper.
Her eyes were swiftly lowered, and she mumbled, ‘It’s not like that with John.’
Leaning forward, Adam cupped her chin in his hand till her eyes, shadowed with uncertainty, were level with his once more, and asked quietly, ‘What’s it like, Serena?’
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