just glad that you came to your senses in time. You know what they say: marry in haste, repent at leisure.'
He was smiling broadly.
'Still, you were right on one count, it's high time you settled down.'
'We've covered this ground already, Alistair. Don't tell me that you're growing repetitive in your old age.'
'It breaks an old man's heart to think that he might die without seeing you settled. Your father would have wanted it.'
Conrad frowned, a shadow of doubt crossing his face.
'We mustn't keep you. You're beginning to look tired.' Emma rose and walked towards the door.
When Conrad joined her a few minutes later, he looked unusually unsure.
'I just don't know what to make of him,' he said thoughtfully. 'If I didn't know better, I'd have said that there was nothing wrong with the old warrior, but there's no doubt that he did have a turn when we were at that damned party, and who's to tell how serious it was? The wily old devil's certainly not letting on.'
'But why shouldn't he?'
'Why indeed?'
Emma thought she knew why. He simply didn't want to worry either of them. He especially didn't want to upset her, knowing as he did that she was still suffering from the death of her mother, but there was no way that she was going to put forward this theory, not with that cynical glint in Conrad's eyes. He naturally wouldn't give her the benefit of the doubt, and the very last thing she wanted was an argument with him. In fact, the very last thing she wanted was to be with him at all, especially now.
When they reached the sitting-room, she branched out with the excuse that there was still some unfinished work left for her to do.
'Really?' Conrad said disbelievingly. 'You must be a much slower worker than I thought.'
He turned his back to walk away and as he did so Emma glimpsed a faint smile on his lips.
He never gave up, did he? she thought, simmering with anger. He obviously found his own sense of humour at her expense highly entertaining. She slammed into the study and through sheer perversity spent the next two hours doing what could quite easily have been done in twenty minutes.
She was relaxing back in the leather swivel chair, her eyes closed, when the door opened and Conrad walked into the study. He lightly swivelled her chair round, and Emma's eyes flew open.
'Thanks for knocking,' she muttered.
'I did.' Conrad's blue eyes mocked her.
'Well, it must have been very softly,' Emma snapped. 'I didn't hear a thing. What do you want, anyway?'
Conrad looked at her with mock hurt, but she could see from the twist of his lips that he still found it highly amusing to have burst in on her and found her half asleep in the chair.
It crossed her mind that he must really wonder what she was doing to justify her pay packet, and she immediately decided that, since he wasn't employing her, then it didn't matter.
'That's not very polite. Especially when I came to ask you out to dinner.'
'Dinner?' Emma eyed him in frank amazement.
'That's right. I know a very good restaurant not too far from here—close to the airport, believe it or not.'
'I can't make it,' Emma replied spontaneously. Dinner with Conrad spelt trouble.
'Why not? Don't tell me you've got other plans for the evening.'
'Esther will already have prepared something,' she fudged. 'It's after six o'clock.'
Conrad smiled, but his eyes were intent on her. 'I told her not to. She's going to do something light for Alistair.'
'How nice of you to arrange the evening for me on my behalf,' Emma commented coldly. She felt like a rabbit caught in a trap. The glint in Conrad's eyes told her plainly enough that he was not going to take no for an answer—not that she could come up with any kind of excuse, anyway.
'There's something I want to talk to you about,' he said flatly, 'so you can stop trying to wriggle out of it. I've booked a table for eight, so we'll have to leave by seven-thirty. I'll meet you downstairs, and be prompt. I have an aversion to being kept waiting.'
With that parting shot he let himself out of the room, and Emma regarded the closed door with a sinking feeling. She had no idea what he wanted to talk about but she resented his presumption that it overrode any plans that she might have made, even if her plans were only to wash her hair and retire early to bed with a good book.
She lingered over her bath, topping up the water three times until she felt that if she didn't get out she would emerge looking like a dried-out prune.
She was already beginning to feel slightly apprehensive about being so close to Conrad without any easy escape routes to hand. She didn't trust herself. Not after the last time.
With a sigh of resignation she picked out what she was going to wear. A full rose-coloured skirt with a snug- fitting matching bodice buttoned down the front, which revealed as little of her as possible. With a flash of inspiration, she tied her hair back with a bright scarf which she had picked up on one of her rare jaunts into Scarborough, the capital of the island, and made up with a little blusher and eyeshadow.
When she stood back from the mirror, she was pleased with the overall effect.
Conrad was waiting at the foot of the stairs for her. She saw him before he had a chance to look around, and in that brief moment she allowed herself the luxury of watching him unobserved.
He really was blatantly masculine. His face was turned away from her, his hands thrust into the pockets of his charcoal-grey trousers, but even in that attitude he was arresting.
He looked around as she began descending the stairs, carefully because she was wearing higher shoes than normal. From this distance, she couldn't make out the expression on his face but she was aware that he was staring at her, and this time there was no smile on his lips.
She wondered what was going through that head of his. He must have seen a million women descending flights of staircases to meet him, in hotels, in mansions, at clubs, but even so the way that he was looking at her made her nervously self-conscious.
He looked at her as though she filled his senses, but of course she wasn't completely dim. Wasn't that part and parcel of the inveterate charmer? To treat a woman with undivided attention, as though she was the only one in the world? She stared back into his brooding, black-fringed eyes politely.
'I'm not late,' she offered brightly.
Conrad's serious expression didn't alter. 'So I see,' he drawled, 'though it would have been well worth the wait.'
'Thank you,' Emma stammered. Out of sheer embarrassment she began chatting quickly, asking him questions about the restaurant, about Tobago in general. Anything to have the conversation flowing on a level which she found manageable.
Once in the car she relaxed in the darkness, and let her thoughts drift over Alistair, his illness, Conrad, and her own feelings towards them. Where would it all end? It was amazing to think that less than six months ago
she had been in London, far away from all this. And before that... before that there had not even been any thoughts of Alistair at all, except as a shadowy figure whom her mother intermittently mentioned. Emma had no more expected to meet him than she had expected to meet Superman, even though she had speculated about him and the rift that had formed between her mother and him.
At least, from the point of view of Alistair, the journey had been worth it.
If in the process she had managed to ignite feelings which she had not even known existed, then it was something she would have to live with.
Besides, physical attraction didn't last. It was heady while it was there, but the effects wore off sooner or later, like the effects from drinking too much good wine. Conrad had succeeded in knocking her for six, but she would recover. It was no more than a sexual attraction, powerful though it might be.
The restaurant turned out to double as a small hotel as well, with guest quarters scattered among the creeping bougainvillaea and set back from the swimming pool.
They were shown to their table
in what Emma conceded had to be the most charming setting imaginable. The restaurant was simply a small cluster of tables and chairs set in two circular, open spaces which were sheltered from the rain by thatched roofs supported on wooden beams.
The proprietor came over to them, delighting Emma when he told her that in the mornings the guests would breakfast to the accompaniment of the tropical birds which flew to the tables on the offchance of nipping some fallen crumbs of bread.
it's idyllic,' Emma breathed to Conrad, when they were looking at their menus. 'So much nicer than those dreadful dark rooms in England that try and rake up a phony intimate atmosphere.' She wanted to add that in
timacy was where they were now, sitting at tables from which she could see the stars and the moon, but she refrained.
'Glad you accepted my offer, then?' In the flickering light of the candle, she saw him smile drily at her, and her nerves raced.
'Did I have much choice?' she rejoined lightly. 'This place really is exquisite, though. And yes, I'm glad I came.'
She read the menu with interest, settling for the local dish of the day, and relaxed in her seat. The silence between them was comfortable and she had a brief, aching sensation of never having been so happy before.
Over the meal, Conrad talked to her about his business, about his interests and about a hundred other little things in a way that was amusing and informative.
As the proprietor brought them their coffee, he leaned back against the chair and looked at her leisurely through narrowed eyes.
'Aren't you going to get around to asking what it was I wanted to talk to you about?'
Emma looked at him, suddenly realising that she had completely forgotten the point of the evening. She had been so taken with the wine, the easy flow of conversation, the unreal atmosphere, that his question brought her sharply back down to earth.
'I was about to get around to it,' she lied, twirling the stem of her glass. For some reason she felt wary. Whatever he was about to say was serious. It was written on the sculptured contours of his face.
'It's about Alistair, actually,' he began, and Emma frowned, puzzled. Was that why he had brought her here? To talk about Alistair? She thought that they had covered all that already, and, even if they hadn't, surely it could have been discussed back at the villa?
'You mean his illness?' she asked, baffled.
Conrad nodded. 'Basically, yes,' he concurred. 'It doesn't appear that he's getting any better. True enough, he's not getting any worse, and it's undoubtedly helped knowing that you're his granddaughter, and having you around, but I would have thought that he'd be making more of an effort to get back into the swing of things by now. He's never been one to let his ill health get the better of him. He's a great believer in the power of the fighting spirit. How else would he ever have risen to where he was if he hadn't believed in his own strength of mind?' He paused as though rehearsing in his head what he was about to say.
'Maybe you'll believe me when I say that he's iller than he's letting on,' Emma interrupted. 'Isn't it like him to try and make light of something serious?'
'I've given it some thought,' Conrad agreed, 'and I think that maybe you're right.'
Now that he had said it, Emma felt a chill sweep through her. It made the seriousness of Alistair's condition all the more painful. She realised with a start that Conrad's confidence that he was going to be all right had influenced her reaction more than she had admitted. She had had an inexplicable faith in what he said, like a child who instinctively believed an adult.
Silly, of course, especially as he was now agreeing with what she had suspected all along.
'If the prospect of continuing with his work isn't enough to get him out of that bed,' Conrad stated bluntly, 'then there's only one thing that will.'
'There is?' Emma repeated sceptically. If there was, then she sure as hell couldn't think of it.
Conrad stared at her impatiently, like a detective waiting for his loyal assistant to arrive at the right conclusion. When she continued to look at him blankly, he said flafly, 'Yes. You know what he wants so badly. Have all his none too subtle innuendoes gone completely over your head?'
Emma shook her head slowly. A nebulous thought was beginning to take shape, but it couldn't be...
'I can tell you see what I'm driving at. We're going to have to convince him that we're engaged and about to be married.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
'You're joking, aren't you.' It wasn't a question, it was a statement. Emma looked at Conrad, waiting for him to agree, to nod, to laugh, to do anything except sit there, unsmiling.
'I've never been more serious in my life.' He meant it, too, she could see that.
'But you can't be! It's the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard. It's ludicrous, absurd, downright stupid!' The words were tripping over each other. Emma gulped a mouthful of tepid coffee and made a face. On the few occasions that she had contemplated marriage, she had never once thought that it would be this way. Of course, men these days were practical; they proposed casually— going down on bended knee had been relegated to a thing of the past—but this was going too far.
She looked at him stubbornly, refusing to believe that he wasn't suddenly going to burst out laughing.
'Why is it ridiculous?' Conrad asked, his clever face scrutinising hers, almost as though she was the one who needed humouring.
'Why? I could think of a thousand reasons why!'
'Fine. Tell me about them.' He stretched back and looked at her patiently.
'All right,' she replied hotly, 'how's this for starters? He'll never in a month of Sundays believe us. I mean, it's hardly as though we hit it off from the start, is it? Don't you think he might just ask himself how come we've suddenly decided that we want to get married? One minute we're arguing with each other, the next minute we've decided that we'll celebrate our differences
by getting engaged! Don't you think it's a bit extreme? Would you buy that if you were in his position? However much you wanted to believe it?'
It sounded convincing enough, and she sat back triumphantly. Her heart was beating fast, so fast that if she hadn't known better she would have thought that the mere idea of being married to Conrad, of pretending, for heaven's sake, was enough to excite her.
Of course, that in itself was ludicrous.
'Why wouldn't he believe us?' Conrad asked lazily. 'Don't you think we can convince him that we're madly in love? I do.'
Emma flushed. 'You must be a good actor, then.' When he didn't reply, she rushed on, 'Anyway, even if by some miracle of short-sightedness he did believe us, what then?'
'I don't follow you.'
'What makes you think that it'll make a scrap of difference to his health?'
She didn't know why she was even bothering to pursue this line of conversation, but now that she had started she realised with alarm that it was becoming increasingly difficult to back down. She should have laughed the whole thing off from the start and simply refused to consider it.
'Think about it,' Conrad said in a patient voice that made her want to scream. 'He's been going on about it in one way or another for ages. If he thinks that his dream is finally going to be realised, it would give him something to live for, something to start recuperating for.'
Put like that, it made sense in a weird sort of way. The sensation of sinking was getting stronger. Emma rooted around for more objections. People didn't pretend to be getting married, for God's sake. She didn't know anyone who had ever pretended to be getting married.
Trust him, she thought, to come up with a fool scheme like that. His sharp mind was just the kind to bypass normal convention and settle on the quickest route possible, regardless of everyday scruples.
'I don't have to think about it. I can tell you without giving it any thought at all that I don't like the idea. He's my grandfather, and I just don't like the thought of deceiving him. It's underhand and it's dishonest.'
'You'd prefer to see him ill?'
Emma glared at him. Not only was he a dab hand at manipulating people, she thought sourly, he was pretty adept at manipulating words as well. He made her sound as though she was uncaring, merely because she had a few scruples!
'Of course I don't want to see him ill!' she retorted. 'I suffered enough when my mother died. Do you really think I don't feel scared stiff that I might suffer again if Alistair's condition worsens? It's just that what you're suggesting is unscrupulous.' In fact, typical.
'You don't think that the end justifies the means? If Alistair needs this push to recover, then I'm willing to do it.'
'Well,' Emma said sweetly, staring at Conrad's dark, brooding face, 'isn't that big of you? Of course, you're well used to arranged marriages, but have you thought that I might not be?'
'I would have thought,' he murmured equally smoothly, 'that you would have agreed to anything that might help him. You're his granddaughter, dammit. Naturally, I could be mistaken. Your great show of concern and affection might not be as genuine as you would have us all believe. It might just be a convincing little act, so that you can contrive to get some of Alistair's wealth to rub off on you.' His voice was soft, but he was watching her intently, his mouth set in a grim line.
Emma knew precisely what was going on in that head of his and she didn't like it. He had opted for the one
argument that was guaranteed to squash any further disagreements from her, and had pulled it out like a card which he had been keeping up his sleeve.
'That's not fair,' she mumbled, staring defeat in the face.
He smiled, a slow, relaxed smile, like a tiger that had successfully cornered its prey. He signalled for the bill, not taking his eyes off her face.
'All right, and what if he recovers?'
'When.'
'Have it your way. What do we do when he recovers?'
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