The Velvet Glove

by Rebecca Stratton

  Turkey had been Laurette's home for years, and the kindly Kayaman family her beloved foster-family—but now things were changing. The last of her foster-sisters would be getting married, so how could Laurette go on living in the same house with only her foster-father and his son Nuri? The Kayamans, it seemed, had a solution—but would Laurette agree with it?

  The Velvet Glove

  Rebecca Stratton

  CHAPTER ONE

  LAURETTE often despaired of ever doing anything which had Nuri's wholehearted approval. Even if she thought right back to when their paths had first crossed, she could not recall a single occasion on which he had viewed her with anything more encouraging than a look of resignation, and more often, much more often, she earned a look of stern disapproval.

  It had to do with her not being Turkish, she suspected, and also with the fact that her busy father had perhaps not given as much time as he might have done to teaching her what Nuri would consider were feminine attributes. She had to some extent run wild, she had to admit, but she had had a happy and uninhibited childhood and she regretted none of it.

  The problem was that so much freedom had instilled in her a fiercely independent and outgoing attitude that, to Nuri at least, was very definitely unfeminine, and during the past eight years, while she had been in the benevolent but strictly traditional care of the Kayaman family, he had made no secret of his disapproval.

  Her father, Angus Kearn, had spent a number of years in Cyprus with the British army, and had liked it so much that he vowed one day to return there. The opportunity arose rather sooner than he could have anticipated and in very unhappy circumstances, for only months after he left the forces his beloved wife was killed in an accident.

  Heartbroken and unable to settle, he had eventually taken his little daughter and gone back to Cyprus. He had no experience of running a hotel, but he was a hard-working man and a pleasant and outgoing one, and his venture as a hotelier thrived until, within a few years, he was a quite successful man, though still a lonely one.

  His loneliness was something he managed to conceal from everyone, except perhaps his growing daughter, for he was a man who made many friends, and his closest friend, rather surprisingly to some, was another ex-army officer. Refik Kayaman had been commissioned in the Turkish army until he returned to become head of the family export business, and it was perhaps the mutual memories of army comradeship that initially drew the two such different men together.

  It had been a curious friendship in a way, for apart from their army experience the two men had little in common—the Scot, a big, red-haired man, naturally boisterous even in his latter years, moderately cultured, though with no pretensions to studiousness, and the Turk, dark, serious and steeped in the culture and customs of his race. And yet the two men had become such excellent friends that, apart from Laurette who adored him, when Angus Kearn died it was Refik Kayaman who mourned him most.

  Refik Kayaman's wife was a Greek woman and his three daughters all took after her, with huge, softly innocent eyes and light skins, for they seldom exposed themselves to the sun as Laurette had done since childhood. They were all older than Laurette, but she got along well with the whole family, except possibly Nuri, Refik Kayaman's son.

  Angus Kearn had had no relatives apart from some unknown cousins somewhere in Scotland who probably did not even know of his existence, so that when he died Laurette, at thirteen years old, had found herself virtually alone in the world. It had been a natural thing to do for Refik Kayaman to take her into his house and the care of his wife and daughters.

  By then the two older daughters were on the brink of marrying and so Laurette became the close companion of Halet, the youngest, and their friendship had in many ways the same curious blending of opposites that had characterised their fathers'. Laurette was with people she knew and liked, and it had taken away some of the pain of losing her father—there was someone she could turn to.

  Refik Kayaman had seen to it that she finished her education with three years at a school in Europe, but she had always come back during holidays to the Kayaman home and found a welcome there. It was an arrangement that suited everyone well, with the possible exception of Nuri, who saw her as an undesirable influence on his sister.

  Laurette had wept as bitterly as any of the Kayaman daughters when Madame Kayaman died three years ago, and there had been no question of her doing other than go with the family to Turkey only shortly afterwards, when Refik Kayaman returned to his homeland, a fact that she sometimes suspected had been against Nuri's wishes—he had probably hoped she would stay behind.

  Laurette had inherited her father's bright, outgoing nature as well as his copper-red hair and blue eyes, and she sometimes felt that even her colouring contributed to Nuri's disapproval. He had always been much less tolerant towards her than his father was, for possibly the older man saw in her a reflection of his old friend, and made allowances accordingly; overlooking things that he would not have countenanced in his own daughters' behaviour.

  Those three years at school in Europe had taken the more hoydenish edges off Laurette's liveliness and given her a veneer of sophistication, but to Nuri, even after eight years of knowing her as part of his family, she was still a wild redhead who could and did arouse his not inconsiderable temper all too frequently. He sometimes claimed he did not understand her, which was probably true, but she often wished he would try harder.

  She wondered if he would have approved of her more if she spoke his language. After so many years of living in Turkey and in close proximity with Turkish people she probably should have made more of an effort, but the whole Kayaman family spoke such excellent English that she had never been obliged to learn in order to be able to converse with them. It had started, she supposed, when she first came to them very young and very bewildered, and in kindness they had used her language and never lost the habit.

  At the English school in Switzerland she had learned a smattering of French, but that language too she had not really bothered to absorb to any degree of fluency. In fact she had had a very comfortable and undemanding existence since her teenage years, and all of it due to the kindness and generosity of her father's old friend and his family.

  At twenty-one years old she was everything her father could have wished her to be. Petite, like her mother had been, and with a very feminine figure, she had a small heart-shaped face below her mass of silky-soft copper-red hair. Thick brown lashes surrounded her deep blue eyes, and her mouth was generously full and smiled a lot—she had no reason not to smile, except when Nuri was being unreasonable, like now.

  She attracted enough male attention to make her more or less indifferent to Nuri's attitude of cool detachment—at least she often told herself she was. As she looked at him now through her thick lashes, the expression on her small face was quite unconsciously provoking. She would much rather have been on the same easy terms with Nuri as she was with his sisters and his father, but she had no intention of changing her entire character to achieve it, and he had given the impression that nothing less would do.

  As he was his father's only son, it was to Refik Kayaman's sorrow that Nuri had not yet married and had a family of his own. The Turks set great store by family life and there had been opportunities in plenty, but Nuri was seemingly so involved with the family business now that his father had relinquished the reins to him that he appeared to have time for little else.

  His sisters, and particularly the two who were married, sometimes teased him gently about it, but he seldom did anything more than smile, and completely ignored their suggestions that he should take this or that eligible young woman for his wife. He had never, at least never within Laurette's hearing, yet deigned to make a verbal reply, or give a hint of his f
eelings in the matter.

  At thirty-three years old, he showed far more evidence of his father's Turkish blood than any of his sisters did. He was, Laurette supposed, an attractive man if one liked dark, brooding, hawk-like men, with the ability to induce shivers down the spine when he lost his temper.

  He was tall, as his father was, lean and rangy but as strong as steel, as she had reason to know, and he had long legs that had on more than one occasion in the old days brought him striding in pursuit of her and Halet when Laurette had led the two of them on some expedition of which he did not approve. He had never, to her knowledge, betrayed them to his father.

  His eyes were black and could glitter like chips of jet below the thick raven's wing of black hair that more often than not fell across his forehead, as it did now, and somehow the light business suit he was wearing only added to the darkly primitive look of him. His skin gleamed like dusky gold above the white collar of his shirt, and in some of her wilder fancies Laurette imagined how much more at home he would look in the old traditional Turkish costume and surrounded by a harem.

  His mouth was set firm as he looked across at her from beside the window, and the worst of it was that so far he had said very little. He simply stood and looked across at her with the harsh sunlight from outside diffused and softened and casting shadows across his arrogantly chiselled features so that she shifted again uneasily. However unwillingly she admitted it, he could make her feel incredibly gauche and uneasy simply by being silent, and she wondered if he realised it.

  'You think I'm an awful brat, don't you, Nuri?'

  She always found herself adopting a defensive and slightly challenging attitude with him, and sometimes wished she could appear more cool and sophisticated so that she could defy him without feeling like a bad-tempered child, defying authority. Somehow that steady, glittering black gaze always made her feel that way.

  'I think that you would have benefited from more discipline and less indulgence during your formative years, if that is the meaning of your question.'

  He always spoke such pedantic English—not because he did not have a full command of the language, but because he disliked her penchant for using slang phrases and words which he considered unsuitable for a young woman to use. Unfortunately the result had more often than not been to make her use slang and smart-alec quips that she would not normally have used.

  Once, just before Laurette left for school in Europe, he had reprimanded his youngest sister for using some vaguely impudent catch-phrase she had learned from her, and when Laurette had turned on him and accused him of being a bully as well as several other undesirable things, he had slapped her.

  It could still surprise her, even after all those years, that he had had the temerity to slap her, for it was the one and only time in her life that she could remember being struck in anger. She had cried bitterly, she recalled, but only after Nuri had gone and Halet had comforted her, and she wondered as she looked at him now if she had ever really forgiven that blow to her teenage pride.

  The present confrontation had come about because she had taken out the boat; a motor launch that she had driven on more than one occasion before, though never unaccompanied as she had today. She would have made certain that Nuri never knew about it, but some young man in another launch had tried to impress her with his own prowess by performing manoeuvres back and forth across her bow. A small error of judgment and the boats had touched, fortunately with no more dire result than some slight damage to the young man's boat, but in swerving to avoid him, Laurette had capsized and been brought home soaking wet, while the capsized launch was towed in.

  Dry and changed, she now sat on the fat cushions of the huge ottoman, curled up like a kitten and smelling of Floris bath essence, her copper-red hair still slightly subdued by damp, and curling into little wisps on her neck. If only Nuri had not been home when she came back, or if Baba Refik had been there, she would not now be faced with this interrogation by Nuri—at least not immediately. The boat was generally considered to be his only because he used it more frequently than anyone else did, but in fact she felt sure his father would not have objected to her using it.

  Curling her legs more tightly under her, she looked across at Nuri, almost resigned to crossing swords with him again. 'No harm was done to your boat, there's not even a scratch on the paintwork. When it's been dried out it will be as good as new, so you don't have to glare at me so balefully, Nuri!'

  'You think I concern myself only with the boat? Do you not realise the danger of what you did?'

  His attitude took her by surprise for a moment and she stared at him, her wide eyes curious. The idea of him being concerned about her had not even entered her head and she found it intriguing enough to muse on for a few seconds before she answered him.

  'I only had a ducking, Nuri, that's all.' She wished she could better define his expression, but with his back to the light it was difficult. 'I wasn't hurt, not even a bruise.'

  'Then you are very fortunate!' His firm deep voice left no doubt that he considered her stupid as well as fortunate, so she was not unprepared for his next dictum. 'You may not be so fortunate again, so you will not take out the launch on your own!'

  'Oh, but why not? You know I'm perfectly well able to handle it on my own!'

  'On the contrary it is clear that in certain circumstances you are not,' Nuri insisted, 'and you will not do so again. Do I make myself clear, Laurette?'

  'Oh, perfectly!'

  He appeared to ignore her sarcasm, which rather surprised her too, and turned back to the window again, presenting his broad back to her angry gaze. 'It needs only for some other young fool to try and impress you with his skill and you could easily be drowned or badly injured.'

  'Well, drowning me would save you a great deal of aggravation, surely, wouldn't it?'

  Her blue eyes were bright with anger, and yet she never really knew why she always got so angry with him. It had always been like this—a few moments together and they disagreed about something or other; usually something to do with the way she had behaved. Quite often she felt remorse afterwards, because basically she believed he cared for her well-being, but somehow she could never do anything about her response to him, and they quarrelled.

  He turned back to her, regarding her for a moment or two steadily, the expression in his eyes hidden by thick black lashes that always somehow looked much too feminine for that craggily masculine face. 'I wish that you would not make such remarks when you know quite well just how silly they are, Laurette.' His voice had that flat, harsh timbre that she recognised as barely controlled anger, and she felt a faint flutter of something that she refused to admit was regret. 'I want your promise that you will not take out the launch again unless you have someone with you.'

  'You, for instance?'

  He inclined his head in agreement. 'I suppose it will have to be, since I do not consider Halet a suitable companion on such expeditions.'

  'Poor Halet, I should think she'll be thankful when she's married to Hussein!'

  She should not have said that, she realised it as soon as the words were out of her mouth, and she saw Nuri's dark frowning anger that seemed to touch her even from the other side of the room. 'You think that marriage automatically gives a woman freedom to do as she pleases? Do you imagine that Hussein will allow her to behave as she likes simply because she is no longer in her family's care?' He came across and stood close beside the ottoman, looking down at her with fierce black eyes. 'You do not know Turkish husbands, kizum!'

  'I wasn't suggesting that she—'

  'You were suggesting that my sister would be well rid of her family's authority, Laurette—I am not a fool! More specifically, I suspect, you think she will be well rid of my influence!'

  'Don't yell at me, Nuri!' She felt oddly breathless suddenly and tried to find words to make him under stand that she had not meant to start this disagreement, any more than she meant to start others—it just happened. 'I wasn't—getting at you, I just—
' She shrugged helplessly and hugged her legs more closely up under her as she sat among the fat soft cushions. 'Oh, I don't know how to talk to you without us fighting!'

  Surprisingly he said nothing for several seconds, but stood over her like a lean dark Nemesis, casting his shadow across her. 'You could try, if you really wanted to, Laurette.'

  The timbre of his voice stirred something in her and she looked up at him swiftly, her eyes wide and questioning, darting over the dusky gold features searchingly, without quite knowing what she was searching for. 'It's difficult when I know you don't really approve of me,' she ventured after a few seconds. 'You never have, have you, Nuri?'

  'Approved?'

  He savoured the word as if he was unsure of its meaning in this context, then shook his head, and Laurette watched him curiously. There was something unfamiliar about him in this instance, something vaguely disquieting, and when he spoke again it was as if he chose his words very carefully.

  'It was rather like bringing a being from another world into our household when you arrived after your father's death. Even after all these years I cannot make myself believe that you are as one of my sisters, it is not possible for me. If you had been more like them, perhaps, quiet and obedient, I might have been able to look upon you as one of them, but —' He spread his large hands palms upward and heaved his shoulders in another shrug. 'As it is, you are so different that I find you too—disturbing.'

  It was not at all the sort of thing she expected of Nuri, and it was probably the longest speech he had ever made to her, so that she said nothing for a moment or two but sat with her eyes downcast in a fair, though unconscious, imitation of his sisters, not knowing quite what to say or do.

  His words lent themselves to several different interpretations, but the one that seemed most likely, coming from Nuri, was the one she found hardest to accept. It could be that he was telling her in a roundabout way that he would prefer it if she was to go, and no longer be part of their family, and when she looked up at him again there was a curiously childish appeal on her small face, and the uncertainty she felt showed in her eyes.