by Lynne Graham
An assistant joined the fray and Claire was persuaded. It would do for the wedding, she told herself. In no time it seemed that she had also agreed to a new coat, a rather stylish jacket and a flying suit that appealed to her new sense of what was fashionable. Hannah continued to remind her that Dane was expecting her to renew her entire wardrobe, and Claire selected some jeans and sweaters, a couple of washable silk shirts as well as an array of new underwear
‘You’ll need one evening outfit,’ Hannah insisted.
Claire allowed her companion to urge her into a strappy, electric-blue sheath dress, which of course had to have shoes and an evening purse to match. Then she firmly pronounced herself satisfied.
‘What’s your wedding dress like?’ Hannah pressed cheerfully over lunch in a quiet, exclusive restaurant. ‘And dare I ask about your future husband, too?’ She smiled. ‘You’re as secretive about him as some ladies are about their age. I gather he’s not in business. You didn’t seem interested in evening wear.’
Under Hannah’s warm, inquisitive gaze, she blushed. ‘It’s to be a very quiet wedding because of my grandfather’s recent death,’ she said hurriedly, for she hated to lie. ‘And I’ll wear an ordinary dress, not a gown … She was fumbling to think of something bland to say about her future husband when a slim, dark-haired man in a tailored grey suit stopped by their table.
‘You have to be Claire.’ He extended a well kept hand and gave Hannah a teasing grin. ‘What harm can I do, Hannah?’
‘Claire, this is Monsieur le Freneau,’ Hannah said reluctantly.
‘You see, I met Dane in the Dorchester and, since it’s hardly his normal haunt, stopped to ask what he was doing there,’ he proffered. ‘You can only be his cousin. Strange, Dane left me with the impression that you were an adolescent in pigtails.’
‘Claire’s about to be married, Monsieur le Freneau.’ Hannah’s tone was dry, disencouraging. ‘And you are, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, interrupting a private tête-à-tête.’
His smile hardened at the deliberate snub. ‘And when I’m almost family too, Hannah. I was married to Dane’s mother, brief though the alliance was,’ he retorted silkily. ‘But since I appear to be de trop, I won’t linger. Au revoir, Claire. We may meet again sooner than you think.’
She barely absorbed this unlikely forecast. He could not have been more than a few years Dane’s senior, and it was news to her that Eleanor had ever been married to anyone but Torio Visconti. As the raffish Frenchman moved on, there was a sharp little silence.
Hannah’s mouth was pursed. ‘Gilles le Freneau is one introduction that Dane wouldn’t approve at all.’
So Hannah had strict instructions, did she? Concealing her amusement, Claire just smiled. ‘Quite a charmer, and knows it, of course,’ she passed off lightly. ‘Was he really married to Eleanor?’
‘He was her fourth husband.’ Hannah’s mouth quirked at Claire’s astonishment. ‘You weren’t exaggerating when you said you didn’t know much about Dane’s life.’
‘Fourth?’ Claire echoed. ‘Good lord … I had no idea. What age was Dane when his father died?’
‘Seven. Torio was much older than Eleanor and she was actually quite happy with him. After his death she took Dane everywhere with her. She lived abroad most of the time. It’s hardly surprising that Dane grew up far too fast.’ She folded her lips as if doubting the wisdom of further confidences, and the waiter chose that moment to deliver their seafood starter.
Claire waited a minute and then said gently, ‘Would you mind telling me more? Did you work for Dane’s father?’
‘I became Eleanor’s social secretary when I was twenty-five,’ Hannah related quietly. ‘She was an astoundingly lovely woman but she didn’t have the character to match. If I hadn’t become so attached to Dane—don’t ever embarrass him by telling him that—I wouldn’t have stayed. Her life-style wasn’t to my taste, and I’m no prude. She loved to shock people. Wild parties, drugs, anything you care to name, Dane had seen it all long before he got free of her.’
Something told Claire that Dane would have coped. But she could not hide her concern. Her own misconceptions were manifold. She had always assumed Dane’s self-assurance came from having a bright, happy childhood with two adoring and proud parents.
‘Did she love him? Eleanor, I mean?’
‘In her own shallow fashion,’ Hannah allowed. ‘But she often pretended he was her younger brother. She was so terrified of getting older and losing her looks. He was raised like a miniature adult. He doesn’t know what family life is.’
‘I doubt if what he’s seen of his mother’s relatives made him feel any sense of loss,’ Claire mused unhappily. Dane had been dragged up in his gilded cage. He had been made tough and self-sufficient. A pang of pain touched her for the little boy he had never been.
‘I think he rather looks on you as the kid sister he never had. Why did he stop visiting Ranbury?’
‘He had a terrible row with Grandfather. I haven’t a clue what they fought about.’ She let a smile lighten her tense mouth, liking this stern, no-nonsense woman for her affection for Dane. ‘You know, I used to have the most enormous, elephant-sized crush on him.’
‘He’s far too good-looking for his own good,’ Hannah murmured, seemingly unsurprised by the admission. ‘How did he handle it?’
Claire laughed unaffectedly. ‘Well, he handled it so diplomatically that until a couple of days ago, I’d convinced myself he hadn’t even noticed! Still, I doubt if I embarrassed him. I was painfully shy.’
‘And you grew out of him,’ Hannah concluded.
Was there a small question there? She grinned. ‘Starved crushes die, Hannah, and even in the midst of mine I knew I might as well have aimed at the moon!’
It was late afternoon before Hannah took her back to the hotel. Impatient to see Max, Claire took complex instructions from a helpful receptionist on how to reach the Walker home without getting herself lost. The area was something of a surprise. It was a dismal housing estate, scarred by graffiti and litter, and she quickened her steps in the rain when a crowd of cold-faced teenagers shouted obscenities at her from a nearby entry. It was getting dark when she finally stood outside the tower block where the family appeared to live.
On the way up in the jolting, noisy lift, she reflected on the culture shock Max must have suffered coming from a country background to live in such a featureless, depressing place. There was no answer at the flat on the eighth floor and she rattled the letterbox anxiously. Max had a mother and a sister. Surely someone would be in?
‘Will you stop that racket?’ A sharp, female voice demanded, and Claire spun, hot cheeked, to see a plump but not unpretty face poking out from behind the door to her rear. ‘It’s obvious there’s nobody home.’
‘Do you know when someone will be? Look, I wouldn’t ask but I’ve come quite a distance and I’m leaving London again.’ It was strictly the truth. ‘It is important.’
The bottle-blonde looked her up and down. ‘He’s away for the week, visiting his family,’ she said truculently. ‘What’s it to you? You don’t look like you belong round here in your fancy clothes.’
Her unpleasantness seemed out of all proportion to the occasion. ‘I’ll call back,’ Claire answered with a forced smile.
‘Stuck-up bitch,’ drifted to her ears as she retreated back to the lift, distinctly red in the face. Well, Max, didn’t have very friendly neighbours. Maybe that woman had been drinking or something. She had talked as though Max was living alone. Had his family moved out? He hadn’t mentioned the fact in his last letter. Shaken by her inability to speak to him before she flew out to Paris with Dane, Claire slowly breathed in. She had expected time to discuss everything with Max. Now she was faced with making that choice alone, without recourse to his feelings.
After a visit to this horrible estate she saw even more clearly how hopeless things would be without money. He wouldn’t marry her to bring her here. Perhaps it was wisest that it should h
appen this way. Max might not like to openly encourage her to marry Dane, but deep down inside she was sure he would be grateful if she did. What other option did they have in the current unemployment crisis? It might be years before he found work and she couldn’t bear the prospect of waiting years more to marry.
Deep within her own introspection, she strolled out into the cold air again. To have waited so long to see him and then arrive to find him absent was frustrating, not to mention disappointing. In the darkness, she cut across the rough, open ground in the centre of the estate, eager to return to the bus stop.
She didn’t even hear her assailant. A violent shove sent her sprawling her length on the wet, muddy ground and then, while she was choking out a terror-stricken scream, a weight came down on her legs, a rough hand yanking cruelly at her hair. ‘Don’t make a sound,’ he warned.
She felt rather than saw the cold smoothness of a blade resting against her throat and she gasped helplessly as he hauled her arms out from beneath her. ‘No jewellery? Christ, you were hardly worth jumping! What’s in the bag?’
Another voice sounded and in a mad fear that she was about to be raped as well as robbed, the knife no longer touching her skin, she tried to throw him off her by suddenly arching. The blow to her head made her cry out in pain and then somewhere she heard a loud shout. She was suddenly freed and while she struggled, sick and dizzy, to put her wits back in order, a torchbeam shone down on her.
A pair of hands firmly helped her up out of the mire. Claire had never been so glad to see a policeman in her life, even though all the way back to the squad car parked on the road he berated her for walking across that particular stretch of ground.
‘I don’t need to go to hospital,’ she mumbled shakily. ‘I just want to go home.’
‘You’ll need to make a statement at the station first, miss,’ he ruled more kindly, and asked her name and where she lived.
‘The Dorchester,’ she stammered out.
‘The Dorchester what? Sorry, I don’t recognise the address. It’s not local, is it?’
‘The Dorchester Hotel.’
‘I think she’s concussed,’ he stage-whispered to his driver.
Claire gazed down at her mudcaked hands and clothes and had no doubt her face was little cleaner. She had to resemble a tramp. ‘I … I am staying there,’ she insisted. ‘They took my bag.’
‘Lost much?’ one of them asked conversationally.
She rammed down a shuddering sob. ‘Everything,’ she muttered, and it was true. All of Max’s letters and every penny she had religiously saved over the past year had been in that bag.
At the station she was pressed into giving Dane’s name as next of kin. Making a statement took very little time, for she hadn’t seen their faces, but she was amazed by the number of items she recalled being in her handbag.
‘Is someone collecting you, Miss Fletcher?’ the young policewoman asked at the end of it all. ‘You’ll be taken back to your hotel if there isn’t.’
While she was under the impression that she was waiting for a lift, Dane strode into the room like the wrath of God. And yet she was instantly cheered by the sight of him. He stood there for a split second, magnificent blue, blue eyes smouldering over her crumpled and filthy appearance in disbelief. A muscle jerked tight at the edge of his hardset mouth. ‘God, you’re not fit to be let out!’ he grated, extending an imperious hand. ‘You are finished with her? Good.’
‘But … but I don’t understand … how did you find …?’
‘They called me.’ He trailed her out of the police station as though she had been in there for committing a crime, and practically lifted her into the car. ‘Were you raped?’ he gritted.
She blinked dazedly.
Dane flicked the ripped shoulder of her jacket and searched her huge, darkened eyes. ‘I’m asking you …’ he began harshly.
She bent her head. ‘No … no, I wasn’t. They just took my bag,’ she whispered.
Dane thrust a glass into her shaking hand. ‘Drink it,’ he advised angrily. ‘I could kill you! I go to all that trouble to put you into Hannah’s capable hands, and what do you do? The minute her back’s turned you go sneaking off to one of the toughest areas in this city and get yourself mugged!’
‘I don’t think I want that.’ She pushed the glass blindly back at him. ‘I got thumped at the back of the head,’ she confided gingerly. ‘I doubt if alcohol would make me feel any better.’
Dane swore venomously. ‘I’ll get a doctor when I get you home.’
His fury wasn’t bothering her. She understood that it was a release for the anxiety he must have been under since the police contacted him, and ironically his arrival had had the most remarkably soothing effect upon her. She felt safe and secure. Max would have been highly embarrassed by the necessity of collecting her in such a state from a police station. Dane took everything in his stride.
‘I don’t need a doctor.’
‘I’ll decide that,’ Dane contradicted with rough emphasis. ‘You might have been badly hurt.’
Her head was pounding unmercifully and she gave way to the tears she had managed to wall back earlier. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed.
‘So you should be. When I lifted that phone and heard you’d been attacked …’ He slowly breathed out. ‘I thought you might have been sexually assaulted.’
He sighed and abruptly folded an arm round her. Claire tried to gulp back her tears. ‘I’ll get mud all over you.’
He pulled her against him regardless and her cheek was buried against his silk shirt-front, next to the solid, reassuring beat of his heart. Enveloped in the husky, familiar scent of him, several stray and quite inexplicable sensations assailed her. Her nipples tightened uncomfortably beneath her clothing and her hands curled inwards on themselves on a very powerful urge to cling to him. She stiffened defensively and immediately he withdrew his arm, tucking a hanky into her fingers and pushing her hair back off her forehead. ‘You’ll feel better once you lie down. I’m taking you back to the apartment. You don’t want to be alone in a hotel tonight,’ he told her. ‘But first I want to know what the hell you were doing in that locality. Did you get lost? It’s a ghetto, haunted by the type that hit on easy victims.’
Ruefully she pictured the likely reception she would receive if she told him that Max lived on that estate. It would give him a totally wrong impression of Max. Plenty of respectable people would be living there, but she doubted if Dane would see it that way. Cocooned as he was by wealth and biased as she already knew him to be against Max, Dane would only downgrade the man she loved further.
‘Well, Claire?’
She studied the dirty smears on his once pristine handkerchief. ‘I was trying to look up an old schoolfriend but I must have got the address wrong.’
‘You should have asked for the car.’
‘It would probably have been stripped to the chassis,’ she joked bravely. ‘Are you sure it isn’t inconvenient for me to come home with you? Did I interrupt a business meeting or anything? Hannah said you often worked until late.’
He met her troubled gaze wryly. ‘No and no, it’s not inconvenient.’
The limousine eventually rolled into an underground car park and Dane helped her out. For some reason that had her eyes swimming with tears again. He was treating her like Dresden china when she had made a thorough nuisance of herself, and she was well aware he had put her into a hotel to keep her out from beneath his feet.
‘You’re in shock,’ he drawled in the lift. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ In the bright, artificial light he bent down and touched her throat, his dark brows drawing together. ‘You’ve got a tiny cut there. What happened?’
She relived the cold nip of the knife against her shrinking flesh and shuddered. ‘He had a knife.’
His eyes blazed down at her. ‘I ought to shake you to bits, Claire. And where are your glasses? I believe vanity made you leave them off this morning but surely you wore them going out alone,’ he emphasise
d. ‘God knows, you’re blind as a bat without them. It’s sort of cute but …’
Cute? Cute? Coming from a masculine specimen six foot two tall with twenty-twenty vision and in the physical peak of condition, that had to be on a level with Atlas admiring a beansprout! She even bet every one of Dane’s teeth was his own and that he had never spent time with a woman who wore spectacles.
‘They got broken.’
‘Spares?’ he enquired, walking her down a thickly carpeted corridor to stop at the carved door at the foot.
She managed a laugh. ‘No!’
‘Then you’ll have to go back to that optician and get some new ones until the contacts are ready.’
The door was opened by a dapper little man in the white jacket of the superior manservant. ‘Thompson, this is Miss Fletcher. She’ll be staying a few days and, as you can see, she’s had a bit of an accident, so if you could call a doctor …’ Dane’s voice trailed off as he herded her past the older man’s stunned visage. Suddenly chuckling, he bent down to whisper, ‘I’ve always wanted to shock Thompson. I think I’ve finally managed it. He’s usually so poker-faced.’
She had no time to study her surroundings. He guided her into a spacious bedroom and straight through to an en suite bathroom where he proceeded to turn on the bath taps before peeling off her jacket, his fingers reaching for the zipper on her flying suit. Hastily, Claire covered his hand. ‘No … I can manage … thanks,’ she declared.
‘Why are you so shy?’ Dane regarded her quite seriously. ‘You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before.’
She looked up into calm, midnight-blue eyes and resisted the temptation to snarl back at him, for he’d been kind and perhaps he wasn’t conscious of how very insulting he could sound. ‘You haven’t seen me.’
Disorientatingly he threw back his silvery head and laughed. ‘OK, I’ll leave you to conserve your mystery in peace.’
He was still laughing when he went, and for the life of her she couldn’t see what was so funny. She hated the idea that he might find her so prim and inhibited that she cut a comic figure in his eyes. Sinking into the bath she forced herself to go back to that mortifying moment in Dane’s arms when her body had inexplicably reacted to his masculinity. That had never ever happened to her before … well, perhaps that wasn’t quite true. When she was sixteen Dane had had that explosive effect upon her, and she’d been shamed and embarrassed by a physical awareness she was too immature to cope with. She was even more uncomfortable with its repetition now, when Dane had simply been offering her the proverbial shoulder to cry on. Was she a little naïve about her own sexuality?