Dangerous Encounter

by Flora Kidd

  At the end of half an hour she was feeling fidgety and hungrier than ever, and Magnus hadn't bothered to come up, so she left the bedroom and crept downstairs to the kitchen.

  Magnus wasn't there, and she wondered if he had gone outside or whether he was in the lounge. But she wasn't going to look for him, not yet. She was going to cook a meal first—a proper dinner with meat and vegetables, with a dessert to follow. She would cook enough for the two of them and he could have some or not.

  She had always taken pleasure in cooking, having been taught by her mother, who was trained in domestic science and was still teaching at a high school near Dumfries, and soon she was completely absorbed in creating a meal from the ingredients which she found in the refrigerator and the cupboards. An hour or so later she was in the dining room, in the process of setting the table with the lace dinner mats and silver cutlery she had found in the sideboard, when she heard Magnus enter the house. For a moment she listened to End out which direction he would move from the kitchen, but heard nothing, so she took some long green candles she had found in a box on the sideboard and put them in the silver candlesticks which decorated the long refectory table. When everything was done to her satisfaction she stood back to admire the table, the shining wood, the glinting silverware, the delicate foam of the lace mats.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' Magnus spoke from the doorway, and she turned to face him.

  'Enjoying myself,' she said serenely. 'You have some lovely tableware. Some of it must be very valuable as antiques.'

  'It all belonged to my grandparents,' he replied coolly.

  'I've cooked enough dinner for the two of us,' she went on, 'because I thought you might like some too.'

  'Thank you.' He was still stiff and cool and he looking at her suspiciously. 'I've been over to the mainland,' he said abruptly. 'I phoned the Calder house at Callander from the Macleishes'. There was no answer, so I phoned Wanda's flat in London. Her maid said she'd gone away for the weekend. Then I decided to try Blair's house in Glencross.' His lips twisted wryly. 'Third time lucky,' he drawled. 'He was at home and he answered the phone.'

  'What did he say?'

  'He thought at first that I was someone from the local police station calling in with news about you. It seems that when you weren't at your flat yesterday, when he went there to pick you up, he started to look for you. He tried the hospital first and then he phoned your parents.'

  'Oh, no!' gasped Helen.

  'They, of course, knew nothing of your whereabouts, but when he couldn't locate you Blair phoned them again the next day and asked their permission to inform the police that you were missing and to ask them to look out for you and your car in case you'd had an accident somewhere.' Magnus's expression was sardonic. 'He's been in one heck of a tizzy and has stayed near the phone all yesterday, all last night and all today, waiting to hear from you or of you.'

  'But Wanda? What about Wanda?' exclaimed Helen. 'Isn't she with him?'

  'Oh, she turned up at his house just as she'd planned, but he refused to go away with her and this morning they had a row and she left the house in a huff.' Magnus ruffled his hair, sighed and looked suddenly weary and disillusioned. 'God knows if she'll go back now,' he said. 'I might as well have not bothered to help her.' A wintry smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. 'As Rabbie Burns wrote: "The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft agley," and my scheme to help Wanda seems to be very agley.' With a shrug he turned away and walked across the hall into the lounge.

  After a moment Helen followed him. He was in the process of pouring a generous measure of whisky into a glass.

  'Did you tell Blair what happened yesterday and why I wasn't at my flat when he went there to pick me up?' she asked.

  'No. I thought it best not to mention that I know anything about you.' He put the decanter down, drank most of the liquor in the glass at one gulp, and shook his head afterwards against the jolt of the raw spirit. 'Especially since he's asked the police to keep a lookout for you.' He gave her a glance which glittered now with hostility and poured more whisky into the glass. 'If I'd told him he would probably have accused me of kidnapping you and before we could do anything about it he'd have told the press. And that's the sort of publicity I can do without.' He gave her another sour look. 'And now I'm beginning to wish I'd never heard of you and that I'd never tried to help Wanda. I should have known better. It's not the first time I've rushed in where an angel would fear to tread, just to help her out of the messes she's got herself into by her own erratic behaviour. Women!' he added scathingly.

  'I'm sorry,' muttered Helen out of the turmoil of her thoughts, although she wasn't quite sure what she was apologising for. Why should she apologise to Magnus? He was to blame for the whole situation. If he hadn't been such a quixotic fool thinking he could help Wanda to save her marriage by preventing another woman from going away with Blair, Blair wouldn't be thinking she'd been abducted and he wouldn't have asked the police to look out for her, and…

  And she wouldn't have ever met Magnus and been drawn into the magnetic field of his personality. She wouldn't have met him and fallen in love with him to such an extent that her own behaviour had undergone a transformation in a matter of a few hours, and now she didn't want to leave him and go back to Glencross. Most of all she didn't want to have anything to do with Blair any more.

  'Excuse me, I think something might be burning,' she muttered, and hurried back to the kitchen. She was just in time to prevent the vegetables from catching on the bottom of the pan they were in, and for the next fifteen minutes she was too busy attending to the cooking to spare time for anything else and when she went back to the lounge the lamps were on to disperse the dimness which had crept into the room now that the sun was right round, to the north-west and about to set so that the south-facing side of the castle was in the shadow.

  Magnus was sitting at the desk. His jacket was off, his hair was in wild disorder and he was staring morosely at the thick sheaf of papers he had been reading the previous night and which Helen now guessed was the script for the film Max Fiedler and Leo Rossi wanted him to act in. Before him was the decanter and the glass which had been recently refilled with whisky.

  'Dinner is ready if you'd like to have some,' she said. 'I've roasted the sirloin of beef I found in the fridge, and there's roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding to go with it. I've also made a lemon pudding.'

  Magnus gave her a sidelong glance from under fiercely frowning black eyebrows.

  'I wish I knew what you're up to,' he growled at her. 'Did someone once tell you that the surest way to a man's heart is through his stomach?'

  'I'm not up to anything,' she retorted. 'I just think we should both have a decent meal.' She directed a scornful glance at the empty decanter. 'You might be able to operate on an empty stomach or when you're full of neat Scotch, but I can't. I have to have three meals a day, regularly, or… or I stop behaving sensibly.' Turning on her heel, she walked back to the doorway. 'I'm going to dish the food up now. Shall I put some out for you?' she asked, pausing but not looking back at him.

  'If you must,' was the ungracious answer. 'I wouldn't like you to feel all your efforts to cook were wasted.'

  She swung round then to glare at him, encountered a disturbingly mocking glance from brilliant blue eyes and turned away quickly to hurry back to the kitchen.

  When she carried a tray with two plates filled with meat, vegetables and Yorkshire pudding through into the dining room, Magnus was already there, sitting at the head of the table in the beautiful carved Jacobean chair, in the process of pouring red wine into two glasses. Helen placed a plate in front of him and put her own down in the other place she had set, which was on the side of the table, just to the right of his. Then she sat down on the long bench. The candles, which he must have lit, burned steadily, the light from their flames gleaming on polished oak and shiny silver, creating a golden glow in the middle of the dark room, giving everything a soft, rich look.

&
nbsp; 'I didn't know there was any wine,' Helen remarked.

  'Of course you didn't,' he retorted. In the candlelight his eyes were indigo, dark and mysterious. 'I always have a few bottles handy just in case I have a woman guest. It goes with a candlelit dinner, don't you agree? A very necessary preliminary to seduction.'

  A strong tingle of excitement danced along Helen's nerves and she looked down quickly at her plate. Picking up her knife and fork, she began to eat, giving the impression that she was not at all impressed by the challenge implicit in his mocking remarks or that she hadn't understood it, and for a while there was silence, as, both of them being ravenous, they ate the perfectly cooked delicious food.

  'That was very good,' Magnus announced, finishing before she did and pouring more wine into his empty glass.

  'Would you like some more?' asked Helen politely.

  'Yes, but I'll get it,' he said, rising to his feet. He left the room with his empty plate, returning with it piled with more meat and vegetables. 'I've left some for you,' he said as he sat down. 'You haven't drunk much of your wine. Don't you like it?'

  'Yes, but I'm not very used to wine. I drink it rarely.'

  'Only when you dine tête-à-tête, cosily with Blair, I suppose,' he sneered. 'Do you often cook for him like this?'

  'Not often. A couple of times only,' she replied.

  'But enough to show him what a good wife you'd be if only he were free to marry you,' he continued jeeringly. 'Oh, yes, I'm beginning to realise Wanda has left her move to get Blair back too late. She can't possibly compete with you. She can't cook and never has. Nor can she keep house. Singing and entertaining are all she likes to do. Being the supportive do-everything wife has never been in her line.'

  'Then why did she marry Blair?' Helen demanded. 'If she didn't want to carry out the promises she made when they were married why did she go through with the ceremony?'

  Leaning back in his chair, Magnus raised his wine glass to his lips and sipped, looking at her all the time, his eyes glinting with mockery.

  'Can't you guess?' he remarked, with a cynical twist to his lips. 'They met, fell in love, fell into bed together, and three months later she discovered she was going to have his child. She wanted the birth to be legal, so she coaxed Blair into marrying her.

  'Oh, I didn't know,' muttered Helen, suddenly flustered. Picking up her wine glass, she drank some of the smooth but rather heavy burgundy. 'I didn't know there was a child—Blair has never said anything about him.'

  'Her. Ailsa is nearly eleven now.'

  'Does she live with Wanda?'

  'Only when she isn't at boarding school. I believe she does spend some time with Blair, in the summer, at the house in Callander.'

  'How awful for her, being shunted from one parent to another,' sighed Helen.

  'Now, save your sympathy for someone who really needs it,' Magnus cautioned her softly. 'Ailsa doesn't need it. She's a tough child, quite able to hold her own in this world. And it's better that she should live the way she does than to be living with two parents who are always fighting.' He picked up the wine bottle and tipped it over her almost empty glass. 'But I can see I'm shocking your romantic idealism,' he remarked dryly. 'You believe in marriage, don't you?'

  'Yes, I do. Why shouldn't I? My own parents have been happily married for over twenty-five years and so have many of their friends and acquaintances, so it's easy for me to believe marriage can be successful. It doesn't have to fail, not if the partners love each other—I mean really love each other and are willing to give as well as take, don't bear grudges and truly trust each other.' She noticed he was looking cynical again and added defiantly, 'Oh, I don't expect you to understand. The sort of people you work with are changing partners all the time. Why, even your own mother…' She broke off, realising that she was about to make a prejudiced remark about his mother, and rose to her feet. 'I'm sorry,' she said stiffly, picking up their empty plates. 'I've no right to pass judgment on your mother when I don't know her. I'll go and fetch the pudding.'

  When she returned to the dining room Magnus was still sitting where she had left him, fiddling with his wineglass, scowling down at the wine in it. He moved back so she could put the dish of pudding in front of him and watched her sit down at the table.

  'My mother would like you, Eilidh,' he said quietly. 'She would like your no-nonsense attitude to life and your belief that love is the basis of all good marriages, because that's her belief too.' He picked up his dessert spoon and scooped up some pudding. 'She and my father were never married.'

  'Oh,' said Helen, inadequately, and ate some pudding. Smooth and creamy, delicately flavoured with lemon juice and rind, it melted in the mouth. 'Why not?' she asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

  'They intended to, apparently, but he was killed in an accident when he was making a film in Hollywood just before he was supposed to come here to marry her in Scotland.' His mouth quirked wryly. 'They'd anticipated the ceremony by a few weeks, although my mother didn't know she was expecting me until a couple of months after his death. That's why I use her name—her maiden name.'

  'Your father was an actor too?'

  'Yes. He was just making his name in films when he was killed.'

  'British?'

  'No. He was an American, from New York. Mmm, this is very good pudding, Eilidh.' He slanted her a glance of pure mockery. 'If you were to stay here much longer and cook meals like this I would really make you my prisoner and never; never let you go.'

  'How… how could you do that? Keep me prisoner, I mean,' she challenged. The wine she had drunk was singing a little in her head, making her reckless.

  'I'd make love to you all the time, except when you had to cook, of course. We'd live on kisses and lemon pudding,' he replied lightly.

  Helen laughed, delighted by such nonsense, and then was immediately overwhelmed by regret because it could never be. She would never be the prisoner of his love, because if he wanted her to be his possession he would have to become her possession, and she was quite sure he would never agree to such terms. He would never agree to marry her because he valued his freedom too highly.

  She sighed, unaware that she did, and let her spoon drop into her dish. She had eaten only a third of her helping of pudding, but suddenly she had no appetite for more.

  'What's the matter, Eilidh? What's making you sigh?' Magnus leaned across the corner of the table and covered her left hand which was lying beside her dish with his own right hand. The long fingers curled about hers comfortingly and once again she had the impression that he was her friend, that he was really concerned about her and wanted to help her.

  'I wish Blair hadn't told my parents that he couldn't find me. They'll be quite worried,' she muttered, which wasn't what she was wishing at all. 'I wish you'd told him that I'm here with you and asked him to tell the police to stop looking for me,'

  Gently his thumb stroked the delicate skin on the underside of her wrist. No one had ever done that to her before, and she was surprised by the exquisite sensations that such a slight caress could arouse.

  'We'll go over, then, and you can phone him from the Macleishes' house to tell him you're on your way back to Glencross,' he said softly.

  'But I don't want to—' she began, her voice barely audible, her cheeks burning suddenly as she faced up to the reality of her desire to stay with him, to lie close to him as she had that morning in the lounge and to feel again passion throbbing through him and herself expanding, opening and welcoming him. She pulled her hand from under his and stood up. 'It doesn't matter,' she said stiffly. 'I'll go and make some coffee.'

  In the kitchen, her nerves twanging with frustration because she hadn't been able to say to him what she really wished, she put on the kettle and set out coffee cups. She was secretly amazed all the time by her own behaviour when she was with him, the way she seesawed between aggressiveness and prudish shyness. Magnus was really dangerous for her to know, because he could change her from what she had been before sh
e had met him, from a cool, almost sexless person into a woman overflowing with sensual desires. How shocked her parents would be if they knew that when she was with Magnus she wanted to go to bed with him and make love with him, even though she had known him only about thirty hours, that she was bewitched by a man who wasn't interested in marriage and who was known for the affairs he had had with various film actresses.

  Her parents! They must be wondering where she was. How foolishly she had behaved! She should have gone with Magnus to the mainland when he had wanted to take her. If she had gone with him she would have been part way to Glencross by now and neither Blair nor her parents need have known where she had been or with whom she had been during the past day and night.

  She looked at the kitchen clock. Nine-thirty. The sun was setting and behind the curve of the moorland which she could see through the window the sky was a pale duck-egg green streaked with crimson and gold clouds. There was still time to go over to the mainland as Magnus had suggested and ask Archie Macleish to start her car.

  Picking up the tray, she carried it into the dining room. Magnus wasn't there and the candles were guttering, the tops of them melting away, wax running down their sides. Deciding he must have gone to sit in the lounge, Helen extinguished the candles with the antique silver extinguisher and carried the tray into the other room.

  He wasn't there either, so she set the tray down on the coffee table and sitting on the sofa poured coffee into the two cups, assuming he would come into the room eventually. Half an hour later the shadows in the corners of the room where the lamplight didn't reach were deep and purple, she was still sitting on the sofa and Magnus had not come. The coffee in the pot and the cups was cold.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Helen became aware that she was sitting tensely on the edge of the sofa and listening to the silence of the castle; listening for sounds of Magnus moving about. Where was he? Had he gone out again? If he had he must have left by the front door, because he hadn't come through the kitchen to the back door while she had been making the coffee. She glanced at the window. It was dark outside now. Was it too late to ask him to take her to the mainland? Would he be willing to cross the strait in the dark? The only way to find out was to ask him. But where was he?