A Scandalous Engagement

by Cathy Williams

  Still, as he approached Andy’s work she felt her stomach clench in anticipation of his dismissal of it. However much bravado Andy displayed when it came to his brother, crushing criticism of what he had done would probably be the most effective way of turning him off art for life.

  He moved from canvas to canvas, and in the silence Jade determined to argue the obvious talent in front of them until she turned blue in the face. In fact, she was about to let a bit of the drink do some talking when he turned to them and said simply, ‘They’re very good.’

  ‘Good?’ Andy’s voice was recriminatory, but his expression told a different story. He was chuffed by his brother’s words and was resorting to bluster. ‘Good is very nearly an insult when it comes to evaluating an artist’s work. It’s almost as bad as describing Mother Teresa as nice.’

  Curtis looked amused by this. ‘I haven’t seen any artwork of yours since you were twelve and gave me three of your pictures as a birthday present. I’ve still got them.’

  Which brought a flush of bright red to Andy’s cheeks and had him close to choking with embarrassment.

  ‘But you’re right,’ Curtis went on smoothly. ‘Good’s bad. How about thought-provoking? The way you’ve painted photo-real people in weird settings with abstract backgrounds. Pulls you up short.’

  ‘They’re wonderful, aren’t they?’ Jade said warmly. On the canvas facing her a middle-aged woman, dressed in a fairy’s costume, held an iron raised over an ironing board, and behind her birds soared against a translucent blue sky.

  ‘So do I pass the test, big brother?’ Andy asked in a hearty voice, with just the smallest shadow of doubt behind it.

  ‘I’ll let you know once you’ve sat the written exam,’ Curtis answered drily, and before the conversation could be continued one of the tutors came hurrying up behind him and explained that he had come to drag Andy away.

  ‘Methinks,’ Mark Vender said excitedly, ‘you have impressed a bigwig with your genius, my lad. How are you enjoying our little parade of talent?’ he addressed Curtis, in passing.

  ‘Surpassed expectations,’ he said succinctly, and they watched as Andy disappeared through the hall into one of the adjoining side rooms. Jade looked around nervously and wondered how she could manoeuvre an exit. The wine, far too much, had made her feel a little too woolly-headed for her liking. She was getting dangerously close to considering Curtis Greene as appealing, which, even in her less than sober frame of mind, was something she knew she should steer well away from.

  ‘And yours?’ he asked in a low voice.

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your work?’ he reminded her.

  ‘Oh, please, no,’ Jade stammered.

  ‘Why not? I’ve already seen something of it, or have you forgotten? In my second role as plumber?’ He cupped her elbow with his hand and steered her towards the main hall. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly come over all shy about your masterpieces?’ he murmured into her ear. She remembered the feel of his mouth on hers and felt a warm flush invade her body.

  ‘Referring to them as masterpieces isn’t going to have me rushing to show you what I’ve done,’ she responded tartly, before slumping back into dismayed awareness of his hand at her elbow. Out of the corner of her eye she could see various of the students, some of whom she knew, looking at her with interest. No doubt there would be questions as soon as she showed her face in college the following Monday.

  Despite the image they liked to create of themselves as free thinkers with a casual, nonchalant attitude to the rest of the human race, people who were above the petty things in life, she knew that they were much the same as everyone else. They loved gossip to a man, and since they had become accustomed to seeing her as the quiet, hardworking one, without much of a wild social life, they would be intrigued at Curtis’s presence at her side. What it was like to bathe in the reflected, albeit totally unreal glow of someone else, she thought, smiling weakly at a couple of girls who were on the same course as she was.

  ‘Here we are, then,’ she said roughly, standing back just in case he got it into his head to discuss her work with her. ‘And please don’t say anything,’ she ordered, addressing his back and dying to see the expression on his face as he looked at them.

  ‘Not even if it’s a compliment?’ he asked, back turned away, amusement in his voice.

  ‘I’m no good with compliments.’

  ‘That’s not an attractive trait in a woman.’ They were still speaking to one another sotto voce, and she hoped that no one would amble along too close to realise that. Fortunately the room was clearing. Clumps of people were still standing around, mostly students who were making the most of the last free run of cheap wine, but nearly everyone else was vanishing, probably to get something to eat. Andy was nowhere to be seen, and she decided that that was a good sign. Meant that the bigwig, whoever he might be, was impressed enough to spare more than ten seconds’ worth of chat.

  ‘I’m not aiming for attractiveness,’ Jade said firmly.

  ‘Course you are; you just don’t want to admit it.’

  ‘You never told us that you knew so much about art,’ she accused, swerving away from the line of conversation they had been proceeding along.

  He had moved closer to the illustrations and was examining them minutely. He couldn’t possibly be that interested in them, she thought. He was doing it to get on her nerves.

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You led us to think that you were a philistine.’

  ‘Correction,’ he said, straightening up but not turning to look at her. ‘You arrived at your own conclusions without bothering to find out if you had any evidence to back up your assumptions.’

  ‘A bit like you, then.’

  ‘Touché.’ She heard a chuckle in his voice, then he swung round to face her. For a second she had to blink away the illusion that he was even more alarmingly sexy than she recalled from five minutes back. ‘So what now?’ He looked at her, head tilted, and she stared back at him in bewilderment.

  ‘You like your brother’s art. You reassure him that he’s done the right thing. You bond with him and then everybody lives happily ever after?’

  ‘Actually, the question was a bit more prosaic than that,’ he said wryly. ‘I mean, what shall we do now?’ He looked at his watch, then back at her. ‘I take it Andy’s disappeared for the count?’

  ‘Looks that way.’ She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

  ‘And my stomach’s telling me that it’s time to be fed.’

  ‘Then I guess you’d better feed it.’

  ‘I hate eating on my own. I do it when there’s no other option, which isn’t too often, but really I think that meals for one in restaurants are rather sad affairs. Don’t you?’

  ‘I can’t say that I’ve given it much thought,’ Jade hedged. She didn’t care for the thought of having a meal out with him. Her counsellor had told her that she would need to make the effort, bit by bit, to resume her social life, and she felt that she had come a long way, but dinner with Curtis Greene was going a little too far.

  It occurred to her that the only man she had eaten out with for well over two years now was Andy. Ever since Caroline had died, and during that brief but dreadful time when she had nursed her sister, her personal life, she could now see, had been on hold.

  She looked at Curtis Greene and wondered what he saw when he looked back at her. He had no idea of the undercurrents flowing through her like toxin. He suspected that there was more to her than met the eye, but suspicions were a long way away from knowledge.

  What he would see would be a reasonably attractive fair-haired woman, with enough hang-ups to make her blush whenever he looked at her a bit too hard and enough insecurities to make her hang back at the smallest and most insignificant dinner invitation.

  Perhaps he thought that she now considered herself irresistible because he had kissed her. She had never over-rated her level of attractiveness. Just the opposite. She had u
nconsciously downplayed it, content to be labelled the brain while Caroline got credit for the looks. She could remember from a very early age all the lavish compliments that had been paid to her sister. Her curly blonde hair had always been gorgeous, her wide blue eyes had always been beautiful, and as she had grown into curvaceous adolescence and her body had taken shape, she had developed a talent for turning heads, the sort of talent that came with a self-confidence that had been lovingly nurtured from childhood.

  In the background, Jade had happily hovered, with her straight blonde hair and her brown eyes, veering away from showing off her figure, choosing clothes that camouflaged, and edging away shyly from her sister’s gregarious band of friends.

  The thought that Curtis Greene, with his supposedly vast experience of the opposite sex, might actually be laughing at her as the plain Jane with an over-sized ego was appalling.

  ‘Are you asking me to have dinner with you?’ Jade questioned bluntly. ‘Because if you are, then why not? I’m fairly hungry, and anyway, I need something to sop up all the wine I’ve drunk.’

  ‘Which is the most gracious acceptance of a dinner invitation I’ve personally heard in a long time.’ He grinned at her, and she returned a supercilious little smile.

  Adult behaviour was fine, but flirting, she thought, was not on the menu. Not that she felt she had any skills in that particular direction anyway.

  ‘Do you want to find my brother so you can tell him what you’re doing?’ His eyes were shuttered when he asked this and Jade shook her head.

  ‘If I’m not here when he resurfaces then I expect he’ll get the message that I’ve left.’

  ‘I admire independence in a relationship,’ he murmured, moving to guide her towards the exit. ‘I’ve never seen the point of two people who behave as though they were destined to be Siamese twins. Freedom to manoeuvre is very important, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Jade said distractedly, as yet more pairs of curious eyes focused on their journey to the door, ‘if what you’re suggesting is freedom to sleep with whomever you please whilst involved with someone else.’ She succeeded in tugging her hand away on the pretext of brushing her hair out of her face, and, that done, she primly clasped her fingers together around her purse.

  ‘Do I strike you as the sort of man who would do something like that?’ he asked, helping her into her coat and watching as she resumed her protective stance.

  ‘I have no idea whether you are or you aren’t. I hardly know you at all.’

  ‘Then I assure you that I’m not,’ he murmured huskily. ‘Now, where would you like to eat? I’ve lost touch with what’s on in London.’

  ‘In which case you’re with the wrong person,’ Jade said truthfully, stepping out into the freezing night air and gritting her teeth together as the cold seeped through her heavy coat and settled lovingly against her skin. ‘I don’t do a great deal of eating out, and when I do, it’s usually in very cheap places.’

  ‘I thought you said that you had a good job before you chucked it all in?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Jade answered awkwardly.

  In the rush of hailing a taxi, and then deciding where to go, she’d hoped that the issue would be forgotten, but as soon as they were seated in the back of the car he turned to her, leaning his head against the window, and commented neutrally, ‘You mean they weren’t paying you enough? Was that why you decided to leave and spread your wings doing something completely different?’

  ‘I was being paid very well, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Then surely you must have wanted to spend your money on good food and clothes and holidays and all the trappings most people work for?’

  ‘No…I…I worked long hours…I was usually too tired at the end of the evening to do anything else but head home, have a shower and slump into bed.’ Of all the reasons she could have coughed up for hanging onto her money, she had chosen the most pathetic. Now that she had stuttered out her feeble excuse, she was besieged by thousands of bigger, better and more exciting ones. She risked a glance in his direction, thanking God that the darkness in the taxi prevented him from reading the mortification on her face, and could just about make out his expression of surprise. Or was it pity? Or was it a touch of both?

  When he didn’t say anything, she could feel herself begin to bristle.

  ‘Go on!’ she snapped, folding her arms and glaring at him. ‘Why don’t you just come right out and say it instead of sitting there…trying not to burst out laughing?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That I’m drab, dreary and hopelessly dull!’

  ‘You’re complex, challenging and incredibly sexy.’

  Complex? Challenging? Incredibly sexy? Was this his version of sarcasm? It certainly couldn’t be the truth because she knew that she was none of those things. She continued to glare witheringly at him while her mind fumbled its way into some kind of order.

  ‘Did you have a nice time at the exhibition?’ she asked desperately, and he burst out laughing.

  ‘Very nice, thank you,’ he said meekly.

  The taxi was pulling up in front of the Italian restaurant which he had recommended, despite the fact that he claimed to have forgotten the London restaurant scene, and almost as soon as it drew to a standstill Jade pulled open the door and more or less tumbled out.

  ‘Here we are. Not the finest, but one of my favourites from way back when. I always make a point of coming here at least once when I get the chance to come to London.’ He pulled open the door, stepped aside to allow her to pass, and from under her lashes she quickly scoured his face to see if she could detect any residue of snickering laughter there, but he met her glance with an easy smile and a slight inclination of his head.

  ‘I have an idea to put to you,’ he said, as soon as they were seated.

  From behind the large, ornate menu, Jade peered at him cautiously.

  ‘And you can stop looking as though any idea I suggest might involve walking on a bed of nails or jumping through hoops of fire.’

  She lowered the menu a few inches and tried to look superior.

  ‘Now that I’m back in London, at least temporarily, and now that I see that Andy isn’t about to pack in his art course and return to the bosom of the family company, I think it might be a good idea if we do something…along family lines.’ He appeared to find this description lacking, because he frowned, and then continued, taking his time, ‘It was something of a tradition, on New Year’s Eve, for our parents to throw a huge party at their house in Scotland for all their friends. Admittedly I’ve lost touch with some of them, and true New Year’s Eve has come and gone, but it occurred to me while we were walking around the exhibition that something lavish might be nice. I’ve been away for a long time. Andy barely knows the Scotland house…what better?’

  ‘Why are you asking for my opinion?’

  ‘Because,’ he explained with exaggerated patience, ‘you’re going to be the one to convince Andy that it’s a good idea. It’s time we healed rifts, and a party of old friends and new might be amusing, to say the least. I can get the housekeeper there to sort the place out, get bedrooms ready, and we can fix it for two weeks’ time.’

  ‘What happens at these parties?’ Jade asked faintly, putting down the menu.

  ‘A long weekend of good food, good wine, some fishing if the weather permits.’

  ‘It’s winter!’

  ‘Best time to be in Scotland,’ he said, amused at her look of horror. ‘Bracing. Toughens you up.’

  ‘Well, yes, all right, I’ll suggest it to Andy…’ It was a good idea. Getting to know one another would be easier, she supposed, in the company of other people. Less opportunity to lock horns.

  ‘And naturally I expect you to be there,’ he added casually, signalling for a waiter to come and take their order.

  ‘Me? Why? I’m not part of your family.’

  ‘Tut, tut, tut. Now don’t downplay the role you occupy in my brother’s life. Andy can invite
some of his other friends; you won’t be walking around in a daze of unfamiliarity. Besides…’ he shot her a winning smile ‘…you’ll be playing hostess.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JADE looked at Andy and then groaned aloud.

  Thinking about it, there had been several pointers that Curtis’s little scheme was not going to go smoothly, and this was now the icing on the cake.

  To begin with the idea had been greeted with lukewarm scepticism by Andy, who had announced that he barely knew any of the names of the old family friends who’d used to frequent their parents’ parties.

  ‘You seem to forget, big brother,’ he’d said with unfailing tactlessness, ‘that by the time Sarah and I arrived on the scene their interest in us was strictly on the nominal side. I remember my teachers at boarding school a damn sight better than I remember any of their Scottish fellow trend-setters. Anyway, they’re probably all dead, or else old and decrepit.’

  Which had opened up yet another simmering family argument, culminating in an enraged Curtis bellowing that it was time his brother grew up and Andy storming out of the room.

  Jade, who now no longer seemed to have the time to dwell on her own problems, had taken on the role of inveterate peacemaker, tossed as she was in the middle of these hostilities, and it had taken the cunning of a fox to bring them both back down to earth. At one point she was reduced to yelling, ‘Shut up!’ at the top of her lungs, simply to quell the never-ending string of accusations and counter-accusations.

  ‘You,’ she had said, standing at the dinner table with her finger pointed at Curtis, who had glowered but remained silent, ‘can hardly accuse your brother of acting like a child when you’re barely doing any better yourself!