Then he switched on the light by the door and proceeded to look around him coolly, calmly and unhurriedly, while Katherine fumed impotently on the sidelines.
She had decorated the small place as prettily as she could on a limited budget and working around quite a few inherited bits of furniture, some of them rather too heavy for the room, but which, for reasons which she could not explain, she had felt compelled to keep.
The décor was mostly green, a safe colour, she knew, and the only flashes of startling colour were on the walls—pictures which she had picked up from various junk shops over the years, a few Mexican plates which evoked the odd aroma of foreign shores, and lots of flowers from the garden. Pink, yellow, white, red—great bunches of them heaped into vases.
‘Happy?’ she asked in a tight, angry voice. ‘Satisfied now that you’ve forced your way into my home?’
‘Never satisfied,’ he said smoothly, turning to face her with his hands in his pockets, ‘until you tell me about the man you left me for.’
‘Then you’ll have to lead a life of discontent, because I don’t intend to do anything of the sort.’ She deposited her bag on the coffee-table in front of the sofa and then sat down on one of the upright chairs and stared at him with antagonism. ‘Why does it matter, anyway?’ she asked angrily. ‘Why does something that happened six years ago matter?’
One minute he was lounging in the centre of the room, dwarfing it, the next minute he was bending over her, his hands on either side of the chair, and his face was a mask of dark fury.
‘Because,’ he grated, ‘no one has ever walked out on me before. Because I can usually read people. Because what I read in you didn’t add up to what you did.’
His face, only inches away from her own, sent shivers of panic through her, but she said coldly enough, ‘Oh, so what we have here is a massive case of wounded pride, is it?’
‘I can only suppose that this man was someone utterly undesirable,’ he ground out, and she flinched back. ‘Was he, dammit?’
She didn’t answer; there was no answer. There was no man. But she could never tell him the truth because that would have been even more damaging than the lie.
‘Is that why you’re running behind this David character?’ he asked. ‘Demeaning yourself in the process?’ He gave a bark of cruel laughter and straightened up. ‘I saw the way you looked at him when he admitted that there was nothing going on between the two of you.’ He began prowling through the room, like a tiger in a cage, and just as dangerous. ‘You were furious. It must be galling to have spent four years throwing yourself at a man who’s not interested. And what a man! Tame, unexciting.’
‘You don’t know him!’ she snapped defensively, and he turned round to stare at her with a witheringly cold look in his eyes.
‘You’d eat him alive,’ he said, followed by something in very rapid French which she didn’t begin to understand. ‘It would be like pairing up chalk and cheese and expecting a happy outcome.’ He laughed again, and there was the same sharp, cruel edge to his laughter that had been there before, which made the blood rush to her head.
‘And what about you?’ she asked heatedly.
No one, she thought, could rouse her the way this man could. She was normally such a placid person. How could she change into this fiery creature when in his presence? She looked at him with deep loathing.
‘What about me?’
‘You and that young girl! Someone prepared to have a night out with a perfect stranger! Do you think that you’re really qualified to make sweeping observations on other people’s relationships when your own is so odd?’ She took a deep breath and carried on in a rush. ‘It’s OK for you to have a free and open relationship, is it? But wrong for other people?’ She laughed angrily. ‘You must really love her to let her do precisely as she likes.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said softly, coming close to her, standing over her. ‘I love her a great deal. She’s my sister.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘OF COURSE I’m his sister.’ Jacqueline Duvall drained the last remnant of her frothy coffee with every indication of enjoyment.
It was Saturday morning and she had come over to apologise, she said, for her behaviour a few evenings ago. Katherine had answered the door to her and her surprise at seeing the girl on her doorstep had been so evident that Jack had burst out laughing, a high, merry laugh that lit her face up and showed how young she really was.
‘Why didn’t he say so from the beginning?’ Katherine asked, pouring them both another cup and spooning the frothy cream on top. She sat down and looked at the other girl, and realised that, now that she knew, she could see the similarities between Dominic and his sister. Both were dark, both striking in their different ways, except that whereas Dominic’s good looks were hard and vaguely forbidding, his sister’s were fresh and open.
‘I have no idea.’ Jack shrugged. ‘This coffee is delicious. I could keep drinking it forever. I’m mad about coffee, addicted to it.’ She paused and then reverted to the subject of her brother as though she hadn’t digressed. ‘Dominic is strange sometimes. Not easy to fathom. I really do not know why he didn’t tell you from the beginning that he and I were brother and sister. Perhaps he wanted to make sure that you didn’t—how do I say it?—take a fancy to him.’
She said that without any overtones of malice. Just a statement of fact.
‘Why should I take a fancy to your brother?’ Katherine asked politely, but it was an effort to drag the corresponding smile to her lips.
Jacqueline obviously didn’t know a thing about their briefly shared past. She would only have been a teenager at the time, living in another country, wrapped up in parties and boys.
The other girl looked at her with vast amusement and Katherine immediately felt obliged to say in starchy self-defence that not every woman was automatically interested in a man simply because he happened to be passable-looking.
‘He’s immensely rich too,’ Jack pointed out, arching her eyebrows.
‘Money and good looks aren’t necessarily going to turn every woman’s head.’
‘You must be the exception!’ She laughed gaily. ‘He has women falling over him.’
‘Perhaps some of them are short-sighted,’ Katherine mused, grinning at the thought that that conjured up.
‘Not so you would notice! Anyway,’ she continued artlessly, ‘Dominic has had his fingers burnt once with a woman. He’s very careful now.’
Katherine’s heart speeded up. Was she referring to her? Had Dominic perhaps mentioned her without naming names? She tried to stifle the thrill that gave her.
‘What woman was that?’ she asked casually, sipping some of her coffee.
‘His wife, of course. An awful woman.’ The beautifully shaped mouth turned down with remembered distaste. ‘She married him because she was in love with the idea of being married to Dominic Duvall. All the cachet that that entailed! The important friends, the pictures in the newspaper at regular intervals. When Dominic couldn’t stand it any longer and said that he wanted a divorce, Franise did the one thing to hurt him most. She took Claire away. Changed her name to Laudette. Tried to prevent him from seeing her as much as she could.’ The girl shuddered. ‘Then the accident. It is good that he has Claire now, but he is a bitter man.’ She stood up and gathered her khaki-coloured knapsack from the chair. ‘You are a nice woman. Don’t make the mistake of falling for him. You would live to regret it. Yes, I am sure,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘that Dominic was warning you off by letting you think that I was not his sister.’ She shrugged her shoulders elegantly. ‘But you’re far too sensible, anyway, aren’t you? David says that you’re unflappable.’
‘Oh, yes.’ The forced smile was back on her lips. ‘Very sensible. Highly unflappable.’ Bed at nine every night, flat shoes, open fire and a good book during winter, gardening in summer. What an exciting person I am.
‘I would like very much to see him again,’ Jack said hesitantly. ‘He says that you and he are not…’
&nbs
p; ‘No, we aren’t…’ Katherine smiled, feeling old in the face of this youthful enthusiasm. ‘You needn’t ask my permission,’ she said, and Jack smiled back with relief.
‘Please, don’t tell Dominic about David,’ she said on her way out, as an afterthought. ‘He can be a little over-protective about me. He thinks that men are only interested in me for one thing. My inheritance. I have stopped arguing the point with him.’
‘It’ll be our little secret,’ Katherine said obligingly, walking out of the house with the girl and standing at the bottom of the path to wave her off.
The minute she was back in the house, she gave full rein to the anger that had been simmering away inside her.
So he had wanted to warn her off him, had he? He had wanted to make it clear from the very start that she shouldn’t entertain any misplaced ideas about rekindling what they had had, had he? Perhaps he had imagined that an ageing woman, on the shelf, as she undoubtedly was, might get it into her head that a six-month fling, six years ago, was reason enough to think herself still desirable.
She did the housework with venom, and then, on the spur of the moment, she jumped into her car and headed off to his house on the outskirts of the town. She knew where he lived from Claire: it had been one of those snippets of information which had slipped out in conversation. She had no need of the address because she knew the house by name alone. Everyone in the town would. It was one of those houses, of which there were only a handful, which had a history all of its own.
She had no idea whether he would be there or not, and she didn’t care whether he would want to see her or not. She just wanted to get one thing straight with him, and that was that she was not some kind of laughable threat to him.
It irked her that he had felt the need to warn her off, in however subtle a manner. Didn’t he think that his manifest dislike for her would be enough? Did he imagine that she was so thick-skinned and so desperate that she would pursue him now as the lost chance which she could recapture?
The house was a huge Victorian mansion set back from the road and hidden by trees. The drive swept down to the house, past a small cottage which, rumour had it, had once housed a mad relative of the landowner several decades before, and past a block of stables, now disused.
Katherine drove past the cottage and past the stables as quickly as she could comfortably go on the gravel, and stopped the car next to the BMW, which was carelessly parked at an angle in the courtyard.
She was hardly thinking straight at all. She knew that Jack had meant no harm in warning her off her brother, just as she had meant no harm in explaining why he was wary of women. Jacqueline Duvall was one of those people who generously believed that the truth couldn’t possibly hurt.
She slammed the car door behind her, glared at it as it stood there, small, apologetic, in need of a wash, and then stormed towards the front door.
It was almost a shame that there was no doorknocker, but there wasn’t. It was a bell, one of those old-fashioned ones which she could hear ringing through the house from outside and, after she had fumed on the doorstep for half a minute, the front door was opened by a middle-aged woman who looked at her curiously and seemed about to say that they weren’t interested in buying anything.
Something in Katherine’s face must have made her realise, though, that the slim woman in the brown dress and sandals was not interested in selling anything.
She said a little dubiously, and without fully opening the door, ‘Yes?’
‘Mr Duvall. Is he in?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case, may I see him?’
‘Who is it, may I ask?’ the woman asked suspiciously. She spoke in broken English, and Katherine realised that this housekeeper had probably come from France with him. Had probably known him for years. Was that why she was so suspicious? Did she have a lot of experience of unwanted women showing up on the doorstep and demanding to see the master of the house? That made her fume a little more.
‘Miss Lewis,’ Katherine said clearly. ‘Claire’s teacher.’
‘Ah.’ The brow uncreased and she opened the door to let her enter. ‘Monsieur Duvall, he is in the office, working.’ She shook her head as though she had some very distinct thoughts on that but wasn’t about to voice them to a stranger. ‘Claire, she is not here. She is out.’
She led the way out of the great hall, with its heavy, dark banister which swung upstairs, and the myriad doors leading to various rooms, all shut.
Katherine looked around her, feeling slightly dwarfed by the high ceilings and the immense proportions. It was smaller than a stately home, but still large enough, she was sure, to get completely lost in.
The elderly woman was walking ahead, muttering under her breath in indistinct French, through a large, sunny room, decorated in shades of yellow, through what appeared to be another small hall, which clearly led out to the side of the house, and down two steps into a kitchen, which had been fitted with every modern convenience known to mankind and in the middle of which was an impressive bottle-green Aga.
Very domestic, Katherine thought, not prepared to be anything but acid. Not that the lord and master probably knows how to knock up anything more complicated than a boiled egg.
There were two other rooms, tiled in a dark red stone, in which there were cupboards, two fridges, a freezer and enough storage space, she thought, to house the entire contents of her modest dwelling. Then the woman knocked on a door, which looked as though it should have led to the courtyard—simply because it was hard to believe that the house actually continued. But it didn’t.
It led, down one step, to the plushest room Katherine had ever seen.
It was exactly like an office, but with all the expensive trappings of a home. The carpet was white, as were the walls, which were beamed at the top, and there were small paintings by the far doorway, through which she could see more stairs. Did the house never end? she wondered.
She almost forgot to be angry. In fact, she was so taken aback by the grandeur of the place that she had almost forgotten why she had come in the first place.
She remembered soon enough, when Dominic appeared in the doorway and stood there, staring at her, expensively casual in a short-sleeved cream shirt and a pair of dirt-green trousers.
‘Well, well, well,’ he drawled. ‘What a surprise.’ He looked neither surprised nor particularly pleased to see her, and she stuck her chin out defiantly, feeling more like a teenager than a grown woman.
‘I want to have a word with you, Dominic Duvall,’ she said, with her hands on her hips.
He replied smoothly, looking behind her, ‘That will be all, Lise.’ The door closed quietly behind them, and he said calmly, ‘I dislike scenes in front of Lise.’
‘How noble,’ Katherine retorted. ‘And is she used to that sort of thing happening? Women barging in to create scenes with you?’
‘Ah, so we’ve established that you’ve barged your way into my house to create a scene.’ He spun round on his heels and headed up the stairs, and she had no option but to follow him.
The staircase, unlike the grand affair in the main hall, was tiny and narrow.
This part of the house was clearly pre-Victorian. The upstairs room, which housed a large desk of stripped pine, a computer terminal, two telephones and a fax machine, was heavily beamed and quite small.
He perched on the edge of the desk, folded his arms and looked at her with mild interest.
‘I take it that you haven’t beaten a path to my house to tell me something about Claire’s progress at school?’
‘That’s right.’ She walked towards him with her arms folded. ‘I’ve come here to tell you, Mr Duvall, that you are way out of line if you think that you need to warn me off you. You may go through life imagining that you’re irresistible to every member of the opposite sex, but when it comes to me you’re about as irresistible as a bowl of congealed porridge.’
‘Since when?’ He raised his eyebrows with something which looked insulting
ly like amusement, and she could have slapped him.
‘Since now,’ she told him, ‘which is all that counts.’ She hoped that she was being meaningful enough, because the one thing that infuriated her even more than him thinking that he needed to warn her off was him thinking that she still hankered after him.
‘And why,’ he asked, ‘have you suddenly decided to climb into your car and storm round here to tell me that you’re not interested in me?’
Katherine glared, and hoped that he wasn’t thinking along the lines of the lady who doth protest too much.
‘I had a visit,’ she said, ‘from your sister.’
‘Ah.’ His face relaxed into a crooked smile.
‘You could have told me that she was your sister when we met. There was no need to pretend that she wasn’t. Did you think that I might leap at you because, at the age of thirty-one, I might feel that I’m gathering cobwebs?’
She hadn’t quite meant to say that and, now that she had, she realised awkwardly that it put her at a disadvantage.
‘And do you?’ he asked softly, lazily. ‘Why,’ he continued, changing the subject and at the same time managing to convey that he would get back to it just as soon as it suited him, ‘don’t I get Lise to bring up some coffee? Or would you prefer tea?’
‘This was not meant to be a social call.’
‘Which is hardly any reason to refuse a cup of coffee.’
‘I’ll have tea,’ she said, slightly deflated and somehow blaming him for this state of affairs.
She could deal with him when she was in control, the teacher at the front of the class, or else when she was furious, because fury left little room for thought. It was much harder to deal with him when she was on the receiving end of his formidable self-control, or, worse, that crooked smile that could charm the birds from the trees. That made her feel girlish, and girlishness was something that confused her because it wasn’t a part of her life.
Again, without warning, she had the oddest sensation of wanting more than she had, of glimpsing a star when she had come to believe that there were none. It was a stirring deep inside her that shifted everything just a little out of focus.
The Price of Deceit Page 6