by Anne Weale
He seemed to read her mind. He said, with a smile, 'Now you're worried that I'm about to present you with an exorbitant bill for my services. But I made the new setting for my own pleasure.'
'It's terribly kind of you, Raoul. I never dreamt of having a ring custom-made by one of the Santerres. But apart from your skill there s the gold...'
He put her hand on the banquette between them and gave it a friendly pat.
'The gold's an investment from which I may reap rich dividends if you become a designer for us. But first you have to learn something about the materials we have at our disposal, and what can and can't be done with them. For example, most rose quartz is full of what we call inclusions, which are particles of foreign matter. For that reason it's usually carved or made into beads. Talking of your ring, when you go to England it would be interesting to find out whose crest you have there. There's a shop in London which specialises in heraldic objects—crested silver and porcelain and so on. They find lost heirlooms for people. They would probably recognise that crest.'
'If it's English. It might be French, or Italian. I'd love to know how it found its way to a thrift shop.'
During dinner he told her about his mother's collection of antique cameos, most of them cut from agates unlike the nineteenth century and modern cameos which were almost all cut from shells.
The evening flew by as, prompted by her eager questions, he talked with knowledge and enthusiasm of the world's finest jewels from their origins in remote mines through the workshops of master craftsmen to vitrines in museums, or bank vaults, or the rich women's jewel-cases from which they were sometimes stolen to be broken down and refashioned.
'I'm afraid I've bored you,' he said, taking her home.
'Not for a second. You're as riveting as Madame Bernier.'
He laughed. 'That's carrying flattery too far.'
'No, I mean it,' she told him seriously. 'I enjoyed her lecture enormously, but I'm more interested in the things you've told me tonight. James and Emily spend hours talking about computers, and I can see that, to them, it's the most fascinating subject in life. But it leaves me cold. Well, no, that's an exaggeration. There are some aspects which interest me. But I could never be a programmer, and Emily is bored by needlework.'
The block where James had his apartment had a high level of security with two porters on duty round the clock so that it was impossible for any unauthorised person to sneak into the building while the porters' desk was unattended.
Raoul accompanied her to the elevators. She wondered if, as it wasn't late, he was hoping to be asked up for a nightcap. But having no sitting room of her own, it was impossible for her to entertain her dates. Up to now, she hadn't wanted to.
'Thank you again for an excellent evening,' she said, holding out her hand.
'Thank you for being such an excellent listener.' He turned her hand palm uppermost and brushed it lightly with his lips. 'Goodnight, Summer.'
When, using her key, she let herself into the apartment, the double doors between the lobby and the living room were wide open. During the day they usually were, but at night they were more often closed.
She had intended to go straight to her room, but instead she found herself looking at James who was sitting in a chair facing the open doors. He was listening to someone on the telephone, but he beckoned her into the room and she couldn't ignore the signal.
Dropping her muff on a chair, she unclasped the collar of her cloak. There had been a beautiful cloak clasp in the collection of Fabergé objects at Santerre et Cie. It had consisted of two octagonal panels, linked by a chain. The centre of each panel had been set with a sherry-coloured citrine framed by rose diamonds surrounded by a diamond trellis on a ground of pale blue enamel. The panels had been bordered with green and red golds chased with laurel leaves. Raoul had taken the clasp out of its glass case to show them his grandfather's initials on the back of it.
As she took off her cloak, James said to the person on the telephone, 'Yes, very well. That suits me. Goodbye.' He replaced the receiver and stood up. 'You've been dining with Santerre, I believe?'
He had been out all day. Emily must have told him when he came in.
She said, 'Yes, and learning some fascinating things. Do you know about the Merensky Reef in South Africa?'
'It rings a bell. Is it a platinum mine?'
'Yes. How clever of you. I'd never heard of it.'
'I've been around longer than you have. I'm about to have a glass of Armagnac—will you join me?'
She didn't think he had beckoned her into the living room in order to have a drink with him, but she said, 'Thank you—yes. I've never been sure of the difference between Armagnac and Cognac.'
'They're both brandies, but made in different areas of France. Armagnac used to be the name of a province in the south-west. Have you read The Three Musketeers?'
'Yes.'
'D'Artagnan, the leader of the King's Musketeers, was a real person—Charles Castelmore, Seigneur D'Artagnan. He was a Gascon, and Gascony was part of the province of Armagnac. When I was a small boy I was a great admirer of the Musketeers' wrists of steel and iron thews. Perhaps that's why I've always preferred Armagnac to Cognac. Some people think it's an inferior brandy. It's not. It's just different and less widely advertised.'
Occasionally he would say something which would make her warm to him. Now, the picture of him as a child, losing himself in the adventures of Alexandre Dumas' dashing swordsmen, just as Emily used to lose herself in tales of knights and fair ladies, was unexpectedly touching.
He brought her a tulip-shaped glass, not very large but, she noticed, of very thin glass. Her glass and his own were only about a third full.
'Never trust a man who gives you brandy in a huge balloon,' he told her. 'He's an ostentatious fool who knows nothing about brandy and probably not much about anything. If the glass is too big, the fragrance of the brandy is thrown off before it reaches your nose. An even more heinous crime, which one sees in far too many restaurants where they should know better, is for the glass to be heated over a flame. It ruins a fine brandy. The makers of Remy Martin don't approve of warming the glass with one's palm, but most connoisseurs disagree with them on that point.'
She watched him hold the glass near his nose, give the liquid in it a slight swirl, and inhale the aroma as he was drinking. She followed suit.
'What else did you learn from Santerre?' he asked, some moments later.
'Oh, innumerable things. Apparently the finest sapphires come from Kashmir. They were discovered in a valley fifteen thousand feet up in the Himalayas. There'd been an avalanche. When the snow melted, these wonderful blue crystals were lying on the earth. But sapphires come in other colours, too. Green... violet... purple... pink... yellow.'
'You seem to have had an instructive evening. Did he tell you much about himself?'
The question was casually put, but she sensed that now they were coming to the point of the conversation.
'A certain amount, yes,' she said warily.
'Is he married?'
There was a pause. Raoul's marital status was something which had never occurred to her.
She said, 'No, I'm sure he isn't. If he were, he wouldn't have asked me to have dinner with him.'
He gave a harsh laugh. 'For naïveté, there seems to be little to choose between you and Emily. I should think if a count could be taken of all the men in Manhattan who are spending this evening with women other than their wives, the total would be quite substantial. Santerre's not a boy. He's thirty at least, and engaged in a very successful family business. Isn't it likely he would be married?'
'He's never mentioned his wife.'
'There are circumstances in which men don't,' he said caustically. 'Girls with any sense ask, in an indirect way. It can save a lot of trouble later on.' He paused, looking down at her with frowning impatience. 'Would it upset you if I told you he was a married man?'
'Yes... yes, it would... very much. I—'
&n
bsp; 'You can relax. He isn't. I checked him out earlier this evening. But it's time you were more on your guard. The men you meet aren't to know how guileless you are. They're likely to assume that a good-looking girl of your age knows most if not all the answers.
She said angrily, 'Raoul Santerre is interested in my potential as a designer, not as a bed partner. You may view every woman in that light, but not all men do.'
'Which just goes to prove how little you know about men. All men—unless they're homosexual or exceptionally happily married—look at any attractive female with an eye to bedding her. It's a law of life,' he said dryly. 'Women do the same thing. Don't tell me you haven't noticed that Santerre's not a bad-looking guy. Would you have dined with him tonight if he'd been fifty and paunchy? No. You'd have found some excuse.'
'If he'd been fifty, I should have expected him to be married. What do you mean: you checked him out?'
'I talked to someone who knows him. Up to about a year ago he had a girl living with him, but apparently that's over now. He has no involvements.'
'I don't think Raoul's personal life is any of my business—or yours. I'm sure you'd be most annoyed if you found someone had been prying into your private life.'
'It would depend who was prying,' he answered. 'If I were dating a young girl, I'd expect her father to make enquiries about me. Don't tell me you're not a young girl and I'm not your father. You're a virgin, and I in the only watch-dog you and Emily have. As long as you're under my roof, I'll keep the same eye on you that I shall on her later on.'
Summer said stiffly, 'Your enquiries about Raoul may have been made from excellent motives, but they weren't necessary. The fact that I—I haven't slept with anyone doesn't make me some kind of halfwit. I agree that two years ago I was glad to be extricated from a slightly tricky situation with Hal Cochran. Today I should never get into that kind of awkward corner.'
She paused, waiting for his comment. When he said nothing, she went on, 'As far as Raoul is concerned, whatever you may say about men's attitudes to women, he's interested in me as a prospective designer. Tonight's dinner wasn't a date. It was exactly like a business lunch... a pleasant way of discussing some of the technicalities of jewellery design. We had very little personal conversation.'
'Yet you've admitted that it would have upset you to find out he was married?'
'Yes, but not because it matters to me whether he's married or not. I just feel that, even in business relationships, there are certain things which aren't done. Had he been married, I should have expected him either to bring his wife with him, or to ask me to dinner at their apartment. I think an honourable man tries to avoid situations which could be misinterpreted. For a married man to have dinner with a single girl, however innocently, could cause malicious gossip which might reach his wife and make her unhappy.'
Again James received this in silence, his expression inscrutable.
After a moment, she added, 'When you say I admitted it would have upset me, you make me feel as if I were on the witness stand and you were the attorney for the prosecution. I hope you're not going to take that attitude with Emily when she's older. You'll be making a mistake if you do. If you badger her about the men she meets, you'll only make her secretive.'
They were standing in the centre of the room. As she finished speaking, he turned and strolled across to the expanse of uncurtained glass which always made her feel as if she were on the flight-deck of a space ship hovering above Manhattan's soaring towers of light.
He was dressed for an evening meal at home in a cashmere sweater over a Madras shirt. The soft canary-coloured cashmere seemed to emphasise the hardness and fitness of the body it clothed. His free hand was thrust into the pocket of his pants, pulling the fabric tighter across his muscular buttocks.
Watching him, wondering what he was thinking, she found herself thinking that d'Artagnan of the steely wrists and iron thews probably hadn't been any more powerful than her employer. In another age, he would have been a horseman and swordsman. Being a twentieth-century man, he played tennis, skied, sailed and windsurfed. But if the circumstances ever arose that he had to fight for his life, she felt sure he would be just as dangerous an adversary as the Gascon aristocrat. She had felt his power in the pool at Baile del Sol, and that had been only a fraction of his full strength. And yet he was capable of gentleness. She had a mental picture of his long fingers stroking Emily's hair after her bout of asthma at Fort Myers.
He swung to face her. 'I shall never alienate Emily because she trusts me,' he said. 'We have our disagreements from time to time but they don't disturb our basic liking for each other. With you, it's a different situation. You're always on the defensive.'
He came back to where she was standing. 'I can only conclude it has to do with the first time I kissed you. Although I should have thought that subsequent kisses would have cured any lingering trauma caused by mine. You have allowed your various men-friends to kiss you, I assume?'
Her face, still golden from the Florida sun, became peach-coloured as the blood burned in her cheeks under his quizzical scrutiny.
'Naturally,' she said huskily.
'Did you enjoy it?'
As she opened her mouth to protest that it was none of his business, he added swiftly, 'Don't flare up at me. I'm asking a serious question. There has to be some reason why you're always on edge when I'm around. You are, aren't you?'
Made uneasy by his closeness, she turned away and moved, as he had, to the windows. Attempting casualness, she said, 'You needn't worry. You haven't damaged my libido. I just happen to be reserving it for someone I really care about.'
'That makes sense—provided the man you have in mind isn't such a paragon that no flesh-and-blood guy can ever match him. There aren't too many sans peur et sans reproche types about, you know.'
The reference to Bayard, the knight without fear and above reproach, brought her swinging round.
'If Emily has said that I'm waiting for a Bayard, she's wrong. The man I'm waiting for isn't a paragon. He'll have his faults as I have. You don't believe in love. I do. I grew up with people who loved each other. Their kind of happiness is worth far more than all this'—with a gesture encompassing the beautiful room and its spectacular outlook. 'I'm not so idealistic that I think love can make even poverty bearable. But I do believe that a couple in fairly modest circumstances can be wonderfully happy if they love each other—happier than millionaires surrounded by every possibly luxury except love.'
He sat down on the arm of a sofa.
'Perhaps; but you can't be sure your parents would have continued to be happy had they lived. I agree with John Ciardi's definition of love as a label for the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged and the mutual dependence of the old. I'd prefer to avoid the second phase and, when I'm old, I'd sooner have a pretty nurse than a querulous elderly wife.'
'What about your dynasty? How will you found that without a wife?'
'That's a problem I'm working on. Would you like some more brandy?'
'No, thank you. It's time I was in bed.'
As she placed her glass on a table near where he was sitting, he said, 'What's happened to your ring?'
Surprised that he had ever looked at it closely enough to notice the change, she said, 'It's been re-set.'
'May I see?'
Before she could slip it off and hand it to him, he reached out a long arm to take hold of her wrist and draw her closer.
'Mm... an improvement on the silver setting,' he remarked. 'Did Santerre have this done for you?'
'Yes, the other setting offended his jeweller's eye.'
He looked up at her. 'Is your pulse always this rapid?'
'You make me nervous,' she admitted, standing beside his outstretched long legs, wishing he would let her go.
'I wonder why?'
There was no answer to that; she didn't know herself why he was the one man with whom she was never at ease unless someone else's presence ensured that he wou
ldn't do anything unpredictable.
His tawny glance slid from her face to the rounded contours of her breasts under the cream crêpe de Chine she had worn for Madame Bernier's lecture. His strong hand slipped from her wrist to imprison her fingers.
'Relax,' he said softly. 'I don't bite.'
She felt as if she were hypnotised; unable to speak or move—scarcely able to breathe—until he chose to release her from the powerful aura of his masculinity. She had never been more aware of a man's body; the wide, muscle-armoured shoulders stretching the soft yellow cashmere, the solid wall of his chest, the flat stomach, the long hard thighs.
Her own body was supple and firm now, but close to him she felt fragile, her muscles puny compared with his, her strength feeble if ever he chose to exert his against her.
As she was thinking how easily he could overpower her, he lifted his free hand and very gently brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
'You have a beautiful skin.' He was looking into her eyes. She could see the gold flecks on his irises.
'Thank you,' she murmured on an uneven breath. Her heart seemed to have stopped beating.
His hand uncurled, sliding round to the back of her neck, there to caress her nape as softly and delicately as he had stroked her hot cheek. It was impossible to look away. She was trapped by his stare and his touch.
His long fingers spread and slid upwards to hold her head still while he leaned slowly closer and trailed his lips from the top of her cheekbone down to the curve of her jaw.
A shiver ran through her. Her eyes closed. In a movement outside her control, her free hand rose to his shoulder. As his mouth hovered not far from hers, she felt her other hand released and his arm thrown round her, pulling her off balance, making her fall on to his thighs.
Although she was now more experienced than she had been the last time this happened, other men's kisses were no preparation for the arms and lips of the man she had loved in secret for almost two years.