A Kiss by Candlelight

by Joanna Mansell

  Cathryn didn’t know quite what to say. And she certainly hoped she would never let him down, not after he had so openly declared his faith in her.

  ‘You’d better be off now,’ Sir Charles said, quietly breaking into the silence. ‘It’s a long drive down to Cornwall. Have a safe journey.’

  Cathryn said goodbye, and then slowly put down the receiver. Sir Charles’s feelings towards his younger brother certainly seemed to be very ambivalent. Something fairly dramatic must have happened in the past to have driven them so far apart. Sir Charles seemed to be taking the first steps towards healing that rift, though, and she wondered if Nicholas would ever unbend a little and allow himself to respond.

  Nicholas must have heard her put down the phone because he reappeared in the doorway a few moments later. ‘Ready to leave now?’ he asked. ‘Or are you trying to think up some other excuse for not going?’

  ‘Sir Charles wants me to leave the address of your house in his diary,’ Cathryn told him.

  He scowled. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘He wants to know where to get in touch with you. He is your brother,’ Cathryn reminded him. ‘It’s not so odd that he wants to keep track of you.’

  ‘It’s odd that he’s suddenly started to show all this concern,’ Nicholas replied briefly. ‘Anyway, the house doesn’t have an address.’

  Cathryn immediately looked at him with some suspicion. ‘What do you mean, it doesn’t have an address?’

  ‘It’s rather off the beaten track. It isn’t on any officially named road, and it doesn’t have a number.’

  ‘What happens when they want to deliver letters or parcels to you?’ she demanded, not sure that she believed this story he was spinning her.

  ‘All my mail is addressed to my London flat.’

  ‘Well—what if someone wants to get in touch with you urgently?’

  ‘They can’t,’ he said briefly. ‘That’s the whole point of having a place like this. It’s somewhere you can get away from everything and everyone.’

  ‘If it hasn’t got a number, has the house got a name?’ she asked with a growing frown.

  ‘It’s called The Beach House.’

  ‘How very original! I take it that if s on the coast?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ agreed Nicholas, and the glimmerings of a smile began to show around his mouth. ‘I’m not telling you anything else about it until we get there, though.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ she said, without the slightest trace of enthusiasm. ‘I do like surprises.’

  Nicholas picked up her case. ‘Let’s get going, or we won’t get there before dark. You fetch the car while I bring out the bags.’

  With a lot of reluctance—and quite a bit of trepidation about this entire trip—Cathryn made her way to the back of the house, and the garage where Sir Charles’s car was kept. She unlocked the double doors and swung them open; then she stood and stared at the sleek two-seater that confronted her. Although it wasn’t a new car, the paintwork gleamed, the chrome was positively dazzling, and it looked as if it were capable of passing almost anything else on four wheels.

  Very nervously, Cathryn got in and settled herself behind the wheel. The very low mileage told her how little Sir Charles had driven this particular car, and she wondered why he had bought it in the first place. It certainly didn’t seem to fit in with his image.

  She switched on the ignition, and the engine purred throatily into life. With great care, she eased the car out of the garage, knowing that an incautious touch on the accelerator would send it shooting off far faster than she wanted it to go.

  She drove round to the square and pulled up outside Sir Charles’s flat. Nicholas was waiting for her, but, instead of loading their bags straight into the back, he simply stood and stared at the car for several seconds.

  In the end, Cathryn got out. ‘Not quite the car that you expected your rather staid brother to drive?’ she said with a grin.

  Nicholas didn’t give her an answering smile.

  ‘This isn’t Charles’s car,’ he said slowly.

  ‘But—it’s got to be! I know I didn’t go to the wrong garage. Anyway, I had the right keys for it,’ Cathryn insisted.

  His face remained grim. ‘This car belonged to Charles’s wife,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘His—his wife?’ The smile vanished from Cathryn’s mouth.

  ‘Charles bought it for her just a few months before she died. It was a birthday present.’

  ‘Some present,’ murmured Cathryn under her breath. Then she uneasily touched the gleaming paintwork. ‘Does that mean we can’t use it?’

  Nicholas shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t think so. Charles must have known this was the only car in his garage. If he hadn’t wanted us to take it, he would have said so.’ He picked up her case and his own canvas bag; then stowed them into the back. ‘Can you handle a machine like this?’ he questioned her.

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘Just keep your speed well down until you get the feel of it,’ he advised.

  Cathryn had every intention of doing just that. In fact, she drove so slowly at first that she could sense Nicholas becoming impatient. Once they joined the motorway, though, she became more bold and pressed her foot down a fraction. Immediately, the car responded with a burst of speed that left her slightly breathless. She eased it back to just under the speed limit, and let the car cruise along with its full potential held well in check.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ she asked a few minutes later.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘It’s about Sir Charles’s wife,’ she confessed.

  Nicholas shot a quick glance at her. ‘What do you want to know? Or is it just a general interest in the competition?’

  ‘Competition?’ she repeated, puzzled. ‘Sir Charles’s wife is dead!’

  ‘Of course she is,’ he agreed. ‘And it’s often a hell of a lot harder to compete against the dead than the living.’

  ‘I’m not competing against anyone,’ Cathryn retorted. ‘I was just interested in knowing a little more about her. All I know is that she died five years ago. No one ever talks about her, though, or even mentions her name.’

  ‘Her name was Helena,’ said Nicholas, after a slight pause. ‘She and Charles had been married just three years when she was killed in a car crash.’

  ‘Was she driving?’ asked Cathryn, after a moment’s silence.

  ‘Yes, she was. And she was alone in the car. Not this car, of course,’ Nicholas added. ‘It was one of Charles’s other cars.’

  ‘What caused the accident?’

  ‘No one ever knew for sure. The weather was good and the road surface quite dry. She did have well over the legal amount of alcohol in her blood, though. The car ran straight off the road and wrapped itself around a tree. Helena was killed instantly.’

  ‘Your brother must have taken it very hard,’ she said softly.

  ‘He was devastated,’ Nicholas said a little roughly. ‘He adored that woman. From the day he met her, there was never anyone else for him. There never will be. In his eyes, she was absolutely perfect, and the only one he ever wanted. He wouldn’t even accept that she had been drinking before the accident. Right to this day, he keeps insisting that there must have been some mistake made during the tests.’

  Cathryn shook her head. ‘That doesn’t sound at all like Sir Charles.’

  ‘Everyone has their blind spot,’ replied Nicholas. ‘And Helena was his. That’s why you’re never going to get anywhere with my brother,’ he told her, his voice becoming a little grimmer. ‘Helena’s still got her dead fingers wrapped firmly around his heart.’

  Cathryn shivered a little at his words. They didn’t conjure up a very nice picture. ‘I don’t want to get anywhere with your brother,’ she replied in a low voice. ‘I enjoy working for him, but I’m not interested in him personally—and I’m certainly not chasing him because of his money.’

  Nicholas looked fairly sceptical. ‘If you’re telling the truth, that’s
just as well, because you don’t have a hope in hell of catching him. He’ll go to his grave still loving Helena. He was deliberately blind to her faults, and refused to let anyone disillusion him about her.’

  ‘Disillusion him?’ repeated Cathryn, drawing her brows together. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that Helena wasn’t quite the person that Charles imagined her to be.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You do like to dig into all our dark family secrets, don’t you?’ Nicholas remarked.

  She flushed heavily. ‘No one’s forcing you to tell me about them,’ she said defensively.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said with a shrug. ‘And perhaps it doesn’t really matter quite so much after all this time. Have you ever seen a photograph of Helena?’ he asked, rather unexpectedly.

  ‘Yes, of course. Sir Charles keeps a photo of her on his desk.’

  ‘What do you think of her?’

  ‘That she wasn’t exactly beautiful,’ said Cathryn slowly. ‘She was somehow too delicate-looking—those frail little bones, the big, childlike eyes, that fluffy pale hair. She was the type that men often go for, though. They’d want to look after her, protect her, I should think. She gave the impression of not being able to survive without a strong arm to lean on.’

  ‘You are perceptive,’ Nicholas said, with some surprise. ‘That was precisely what Helena was like. But she was mentally frail, as well as physically. She was either way up or way down. And she had a lot of weaknesses.’

  Cathryn wondered what those weaknesses were, but didn’t quite have the nerve to ask.

  ‘She was genuinely in love with my brother, though,’ Nicholas went on. ‘And she lived in dread of letting him down or in some way disappointing him. But at the same time she seemed to have the knack of getting into serious trouble. And she could never cope with it herself. She would always look round for someone to bail her out. Never Charles, though. Charles was never allowed to know about any of her mistakes. She couldn’t have borne it if his image of her had been shattered. And perhaps Charles couldn’t have borne it, either,’ he remarked to himself in a soft tone.

  ‘It sounds like a rather odd relationship to me,’ Cathryn commented.

  ‘Perhaps it was, but it seemed to work—up to a point.’

  Cathryn was dying to ask what point that was, but knew that she had already probed too far into something that was really none of her business. With reluctance, she dropped the subject and concentrated instead on her driving.

  After an hour on the motorway, she realised it was well past lunchtime and she was starving. Nicholas was reluctant to stop, but Cathryn simply ignored his arguments, steered the car into the next service area and then headed towards the restaurant. There were certain advantages in being the driver, and she had decided to make the most of them. Advantages were few and far between when Nicholas Ellis was around!

  After they had eaten, it was back on to the motorway again. Cathryn enjoyed driving, and especially this particular car. It responded to the lightest touch on the wheel, and would have roared off at a quite illegal speed if she had given it half a chance. Its only drawback was that it had originally belonged to Sir Charles’s wife, which made her feel faintly uneasy, as if there was the shadow of a ghost riding in the car with them. She tried hard not to think of it, and concentrated instead on controlling the powerful machine.

  During the hours of the afternoon, they headed on towards the West Country, following the motorway and then main trunk roads for most of the way. Since it was late autumn there was very little tourist traffic, and none of the hold-ups that snarled up the roads in the summer. They made another short stop well into the afternoon, but not for long. By this time, Cathryn was as anxious as Nicholas to reach their destination before night set in. Driving this car in the dark on unknown roads would be no joke.

  Eventually Nicholas directed her along a couple of minor roads, and she could sense that they were nearing the coast. There was a tang in the air; a hint of saltiness that grew stronger as they neared the still invisible sea.

  The road twisted and turned, winding through countryside that was already beginning to look a little desolate as the last of the summer colours faded. Then it began to descend and Cathryn could see the sea. She could also see houses, some of grey stone and some brightly painted, all of them tumbling towards a small harbour that sheltered maybe a couple of dozen boats.

  She had to admit that it was very picturesque. ‘Is one of those houses yours?’ she asked Nicholas, deciding that a couple of days here might not be so bad, after all.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he replied. ‘Pull up the car for a moment.’

  She stopped by the side of the road, just before it entered the village. Then she found Nicholas was pointing out to sea.

  ‘See that?’ he said.

  She realised he was directing her attention to a small island about a mile away.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘What about it?’

  ‘That’s where my house is,’ replied Nicholas.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cathryn thought he was joking. Before this, she hadn’t credited Nicholas with much of a sense of humour, but obviously he had one. Then she looked at his face, and found that he looked completely serious.

  ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ she said uneasily. ‘Right?’

  He frowned. ‘Pulling your leg about what?’

  ‘About your house being on that island, of course!’

  His frown deepened. ‘Why would I joke about it?’

  Cathryn didn’t at all like the way this was going. ‘How can you live on an island?’ she challenged him. ‘It—it just isn’t practical,’ she finished rather lamely.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Nicholas agreed regretfully. That’s one reason why I don’t spend as much time there as I’d like to.’

  But Cathryn still didn’t quite believe that this wasn’t an elaborate hoax. ‘You’ll be telling me next that you own the island!’

  Nicholas shook his head. ‘It’s owned by a friend of mine. I couldn’t possibly afford to buy it. I can only just afford the lease on the house. Paying for that, and keeping my flat going in London, just about stretches my finances to their limit.’

  It was slowly beginning to dawn on Cathryn that all of this was for real, and he really expected her to spend the next couple of days stuck on an isolated little island.

  ‘How many other people live there?’ she asked. If it turned out to have a fairly healthy population, then she supposed she might just manage to cope with this totally unexpected turn of events.

  Nicholas shrugged. ‘At this time of the year, we’ll probably be the only ones there.’

  ‘The only ones?’ squeaked Cathryn.

  ‘It’s a very small island, and it only has three houses,’ Nicholas told her, apparently undisturbed by her reaction. ‘One belongs to my friend, Hamish Ferguson, who owns the island, the second one is used by Hamish’s brother and his family, and the third house Hamish leases to me.’

  But Cathryn had already heard more than enough. ‘I’m not staying on a totally deserted island,’ she said with great firmness. ‘And there’s absolutely nothing you can say that will make me change my mind!’

  ‘I’m not even going to try,’ Nicholas answered, to her complete surprise.

  She blinked at him. ‘You’re not?’

  ‘Why bother?’ he said with a shrug. The solution’s very simple. I’ll head over to the island, and you can drive back to London.’

  Cathryn stared at him in sudden comprehension. ‘This is what you had in mind all along, wasn’t it?’ she accused. ‘You knew it would be a good way to get rid of me. That’s why you didn’t tell me in London that your house was stuck on some wretched island!’

  ‘My motives are rarely that complicated,’ he drawled. ‘The reason I didn’t tell you about the island was that I knew you’d refuse to bring me here.’

  Cathryn found herself caught in a complete dilemma. There was no way sh
e wanted to set foot on that island. How could she let Nicholas go there by himself, though? Especially after she had promised Sir Charles only this morning that she would stick with him?

  ‘If I go back to London, you’d really stay here by yourself?’ she said slowly.

  Nicholas didn’t hesitate for one moment. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But that’s crazy!’ she said angrily. ‘What if something happened to you on that island? Who’d be around to help you?’

  ‘No one,’ he said calmly. ‘As usual, I’d have to look after myself.’

  ‘You sound so blasé about the whole thing!’ she snapped back at him. ‘Don’t you have any sense of responsibility?’

  A glow of irritation finally began to show in Nicholas’s own eyes. ‘Yes, I have, but you and my brother seem determined to stop me from exercising it! You’re watching over me and mollycoddling me as if I were a child, and it’s driving me crazy. Charles still seems to think of me as the young brother he had to look out for and protect when we were kids, and he’s got you thinking along the same lines. Well, let me tell you something—I don’t need that kind of concern any more. Over the last few years I’ve been in dozens of hair-raising situations, and I’ve always looked out for myself and got myself out of them. All right, the last three months have been rough, but I’ve got through them, and I’m not about to crack up. If I were, I’d have done it by now. I’ll admit I’m grateful to Charles for getting me out of that hospital, and I’ve gone along with all this brotherly concern because, for some reason, he seemed to need to show it. But I’ve had enough! From now on, I’m taking charge of my own life again, and doing exactly what I want to do. You can either tag along, or you can go back to London and tell Charles that you’ve resigned as nursemaid!’

  It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make—and perhaps the most honest. For once, he was being completely straight with her, telling her exactly how he felt. And to her surprise she found herself sympathising with him.