by Susan Napier
'I wouldn't have thought that this was your kind of place,' she said stiffly. 'I mean, I remember reading somewhere that you don't approve of hunting or fishing for sport.'
'Been looking me up?' Deverenko asked innocently, and she remembered something else. The comment had been made in an exclusive interview with the author of his biography, which she had guiltily dipped into in a spare moment after lunch. She held his gaze with difficulty, her eyes going smoky with the effort of controlling a blush.
Thankfully Miles got her off the hook. 'Where's Tim? School?'
'It's Saturday, Miles,' said Clare drily. Every day was a work day to her boss; the two were indivisible as far as he was concerned. 'Tim is out with the dogs.'
'Oh. Well, at least I'll get to spring my surprise twice! Look, Clare, you check Davey in and I'll get Shari to give my suite a quick once-over while I collect a few things.' Miles's needs were simple: he tended to live out of a suitcase even at home. 'You'll be on the staff side of the lodge, but only for a few days,' he explained to the dark man who was still watching Clare give a good imitation of being cool and collected, 'and you'll have all the private facilities that you'd have in a guest suite. I have a few things to get on with, so I'll see you later…'
Ignoring the impulse to follow him, Clare braced herself. 'Come into the office and I'll find the book.' Unfortunately the first book that sprang to sight was the glossy Deverenko biography on top of a filing cabinet. She bustled over and heaped a pile of spread sheets over it before she searched out the register. Deverenko didn't say a word, but when she looked up at him there was an amused gleam in his eye that told her he had seen the book and drawn his own egotistical conclusions.
She wished he wouldn't stare so. His eyes were like magnets, drawing her awareness, interfering with her concentration. She sat down at the desk and opened the register. In her hurry to get him out of the room, which suddenly seemed small and airless, she rapped out the necessary questions like a police interrogator.
'And how long do you wish to stay?' she asked, with pen poised over the book. All this was duplicated on the computer but, given the famous names that appeared on its pages, the register was in the nature of an institution, an autograph book crammed with parting comments, both witty and prosaic.
'How long can you put us up…or should that be, put up with us?' he countered, and for the first time Clare became aware of his companion. Deverenko's magnetic aura had been so strong that nothing else had registered.
'I… no more than three weeks,' she said, looking at the figure hovering in the doorway, an uncomfortable tightness easing in her throat as she rioted that it wasn't a woman but a lanky adolescent. She forced her fingers to relax around the pen. So what if he had come with a woman friend, a lover? It would have been nothing to her! 'But surely you won't want to stay that long, anyway?'
'Trying to get rid of me already, Clare?' Deverenko murmured chidingly. 'What would your…employer...say about that?' He was leaning on the desk, his shaggy head almost level with hers. In a soft grey sweater, shabby with age but definitely angora and therefore no doubt hideously expensive, and dark rubbed-corduroy jeans, he looked most unlike the elegant figure he had cut at his concert, and the party afterwards. He looked much more earthy, accessible… much more dangerous…
'My employer—' she laid the same emphasis he had on the word, denying him the answer to his subtle question about her relationship with Miles '—leaves the running of Moonlight to me.'
'So we're your guests, rather than his. We shall know who to look to for our comfort and well-being…'
'Just the two of you?' Clare asked hurriedly, transferring her gaze to the sulky-looking boy in the doorway again.
'Just the two of us,' Deverenko confirmed, turning and extending a hand. 'I should have introduced you. Clare, this is Tamara, my daughter. Tamara, this is Clare Malcolm, Tim's mother…'
Ah, that relegates me to my proper place—of secondary interest to my son, thought Clare wryly as she coped with the shock. Not a lanky boy, after all, but a gawky, adolescent girl, tall and thin with a punk-inspired crew-cut that didn't at all flatter her square face with its strong nose and jaw and blemished skin. Having seen pictures of Deverenko's wife, Nina, who had been killed in a plane crash four years earlier, Clare felt her heart go out to the girl. Nina Deverenko had been a great beauty—a small, delicate Frenchwoman of Russian extraction, and a fine musician in her own right, a pianist who often used to accompany her husband. Tamara, it seemed, favoured her father in looks, and Clare realised that she had already antagonised the girl with her surprise. Dark, sullen eyes stonily rejected her greeting, while thin shoulders bunched in dislike beneath a scruffy brown leather jacket. She wore jeans like her father, but with none of his panache.
After mumbling a few words which could have been anything, the girl turned her sullen face towards her father and asked him something in a language that Clare couldn't identify. Her voice was unmusical, oddly rasping, with a faint, whining undertone.
'In English, please, Tamara,' her father corrected her. 'I doubt that Clare understands Russian.'
He would have done better to chastise his daughter for her rudeness in their own language, thought Clare, as she watched the girl's olive complexion darken. Tamara must be at least twelve, but certainly no more than fourteen—not child enough to accept public correction easily, but a long way from being adult enough to accept it gracefully. She was obviously already excruciatingly aware of her own shortcomings, and the inevitable comparisons that her parentage invited.
'I said, what do we have to stay in this dump for?' Tamara repeated defiantly. 'I thought this was supposed to be my holiday! What are we supposed to do all day, stuck here in the middle of hicksville? According to that old guy, there isn't even a pool or TV.'
The 'old guy' being Miles, Clare presumed. 'There's the lake,' she pointed out as she sorted through her drawer to find the extra key to Miles's suite, although people rarely bothered with locked doors at Moonlight.
'And Rotorua's not far away. There's plenty to do and see there.'
'Boring! Smelly geysers and boiling mud. I've seen it all before and in better places than this.'
Clare recognised the blasé attitude. Few people brought their children to Moonlight—it was an adult retreat—but the ones who did come had a sophistication beyond their years, the natural arrogance of those born to wealth and privilege used to being pandered to in order to gain their parents' favour. Some of them were nice kids under all the gloss, others were already irredeemably spoilt. She wondered which Tamara would turn out to be.
'Why don't you take a wander around and see what there is on offer?' her father suggested.
'Why? What are you going to do?' Tamara demanded suspiciously.
'Sign in, and then go and have a lie down in our room,' he told her patiently. 'I still feel jet-lagged from our London flight. You can come and rest, too, if you like.'
'No, thanks.' Tamara revealed she had some manners after all, albeit grudging ones. 'I guess I'll just have a look around and see what there isn't,' With a last baleful look at Clare she slouched out. Clare got the impression that, if Deverenko hadn't issued the invitation to rest with him, his daughter would have insisted on sticking by his side.
'I'm sorry.' Deverenko sighed when the sound of the girl's footsteps faded. 'Tamara's going through a difficult stage. I had already planned to come down here when she… got some extra time off school, so I had no choice but to bring her…'
Suspended, thought Clare, reading between the lines of his unease and Tamara's defiance. 'You hadn't booked,' she pointed out. 'Surely you could have postponed your visit? I would have thought your first obligation was towards your daughter…' Her voice trailed off as the dark gaze narrowed on her face.
'So it is, but she has to learn that she can't manipulate me as easily as she seems to manipulate her teachers. I hadn't booked, Clare, because I wouldn't have put it past you to go off on holiday yourself if you foun
d out I was coming down. Virginia said that with the renovations going on she didn't think I'd have any trouble persuading Miles to invite me down.'
The answer to her unasked question was the one she had expected.
'And just why are you here, Mr Deverenko? And don't tell me it's just to relax between tours!'
'If you can't call me David, you'd better settle for a deferential 'maestro',' he taunted her excessive politeness. 'Since you seem too in awe of me to treat me like a normal human being.'
'You still haven't answered my question, David.'
'All in good time. Aren't you going to show me to my room? I meant it when I said I was tired.'
'Yes, of course,' Clare said automatically, handing him his key and showing him out of the office. Actually, he did look rather worn. There were shadows beneath his dark eyes and a slight hollowness to his cheeks that had not been there the last time she'd seen him. Some of his exuberant vitality was missing, or at least dimmed. 'When did you arrive from London?' she asked, as they traversed the foyer and turned down the narrow, echoing hallway which led to the staff wing of the sprawling lodge.
'The day before yesterday. I'm used to air travel, it usually doesn't affect me too much, but we were doing some recording in London as well as the concerts, and I had two engagements in New York to fit in, thanks to the curse of Concorde. I have an American tour coming up next month, so I told Efrem—he's my manager—to extricate me from any minor engagements until then. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I refuse to perform the miracles I did when I was twenty… I'm thirty-five,' he offered her sidelong assessment.
'You look older,' she told him as she opened the door to Miles's twin-bedroomed suite.
He chuckled. 'Is that the truth, or are you just trying to emphasise your disapproval of me? What have I done, Clare, besides avail myself of your hospitality, to make you dislike me so?'
'I don't dislike you; I don't know you.'
'That's why I'm here.'
'What?' She swung around from her pretence of surveying the spick and span lounge.
Deverenko tossed his keys on to a kauri coffee-table and strolled across to look out the window at the splendid view of the glassy lake. 'You were right. You accused me of presumption, of making judgements about you and Tim without knowing anything about you. I'm here to remedy that.'
His dark eyes were a challenge that Clare didn't dare meet. 'You and I got off on the wrong foot—partly my fault, partly yours. But I don't think Tim should suffer because of our differences—'
'Tim's not suffering—'
'Sorry, poor choice of words. I mean, before either of us make a final decision about the other, I think we should get to know each other with open minds. Mmm?'
The prospect was appalling. Clare could feel herself begin to blush and turned away, but not quickly enough for his observant eye.
'Do I embarrass you? I don't mean to. The intimacy I suggest is intellectual rather than physical. You would not be compromising your position with your…er… employer.'
'My lover, you mean!' she was goaded by his delicacy to snap.
'Do I? Are you lovers…you and the 'old guy', to borrow my daughter's phraseology?'
'That's none of your business.'
'It would be if Miles Parrish had some stake in Tim's future. If, for example, he were to become the boy's stepfather.'
'Miles and I are not contemplating marriage at this time,' she clipped, still holding out the protective possibility. 'But even if we were, any decision about Tim would be mine.'
'Is that fair? Not to share the responsibility for him? Does not the family unit depend for its stability on all members sharing equal love and responsibility? Otherwise there can be conflict and resentment. Both natural and stepchildren should surely be treated equally.'
Clare ran a nervous hand through her hair, tucking it back behind her ear and then flicking it forward again when he stared at the exposed curve of her neck. 'How did we get into this ridiculously hypothetical discussion?' she asked shakily, wishing she wasn't so self-conscious in his presence.
'I was trying to find out whether you were serious about Miles Parrish. Does he know about this kissing cousin of yours in Auckland with whom you wrestle in gardens?'
Clare's mouth made a little 'O'. He was making her sound like a promiscuous tart—she who had never looked at another man since Lee had died! The dimple quivered on the verge of discovery, and her hand came up to depress it.
He was laughing at her. 'I am terrible, no? You are interested in neither of these two men. You only dally with them. The thought of anything serious makes you want to laugh.'
'No, it's your words that make me want to laugh,' she said quellingly. 'You speak better English than I do, so why do you put on this mock-Russian accent?'
'Habit. People expect it. They find it endearing.'
'Well, I merely find it irritating.'
'You find me irritating?' he suggested.
'Yes!'
He tilted his head to one side. 'But it is an interesting friction, no?' he said slyly, his accent so thick you could stand a spoon in it. 'It makes one tingle in such unexpected places…'
Clare could feel herself blushing again, as much at the wicked look in his eye as at the infuriating accuracy of his remark. She hurried over and threw open the bedroom doors. 'Both rooms have en suite bathrooms and there's a small kitchenette for making tea and coffee but no cooking facilities. If you need maid service you can dial Shari on 002. 001 will give you an outside line, and the switchboard is computerised so you can direct- dial your toll calls if you like and they'll be automatically added to your bill. We can arrange any tours you like. The fishing season here has ended, but we can arrange a trip to Taupo if you want to fish, and we have several guides on call for hunting—'
'And what number do I dial to call you?' Deverenko was studying the card by the telephone in the lounge. Miles had a fetish for phones, and they were scattered liberally around the lodge. Suddenly he found it and began to laugh. 'I'm not surprised. 007. Do you have a secret hankering for a life packed with danger, sex and gratuitous brand-names?'
'It was Miles's idea,' she said repressively. 'Of course, heaven forbid you should admit to such whimsicality yourself.' His teasing was interrupted by a savage yawn.
'You should be in bed,' she said automatically, and was suddenly visited by an unexpected vision of that compact, muscular body sprawled across Miles's big double bed, all that aggressive maleness dissipated in the little-boy innocence of sleep.
'I know. I feel like I'm sleep-walking. What's the arrangement about meals here?'
'Dinner is at eight, but if you can't be bothered dressing you can have it served here.'
He pulled a tired face. 'How dressed does one have to be?'
'Not formal, if that's what you mean. People who come here to stay are generally trying to escape that sort of routine. We're pretty casual. Breakfast is at eight, lunch at one, but any time you're hungry you can get a snack from the kitchen—providing you go there yourself. Grace—she's our cook—likes to see who she's feeding. It's a help-yourself bar, too, except in the evening when Kerry's there. The key to the wine-cellar is behind the bar—whatever you take, just write it down and leave it on the spike under the counter.'
'Heavens, how does this place make money?' he conquered another yawn to ask.
'Wait until you see your bill,' Clare dimpled. 'You're going to be paying through the nose for the privilege of getting to know me.'
The dark eyes blinked at her with sleepy amusement. 'That appeals to you, doesn't it? Well, I have no objection. I'm a fairly wealthy man… and I always make sure I get value for my money. So just be warned, Clare. If I suspect I'm being screwed for your entertainment, I may well decide to return the favour.'
It seemed, for a moment, that the double entendre had gone right over the top of her innocent head, and he began to laugh. Then her frown was swamped by a wild blush that touched him with tender remorse. The litt
le pink bow of her mouth trembled as she attempted to frame her outrage and he hastened to apologise.
'I'm sorry, Clare, put it down to fatigue…I shouldn't have added crudity to my sins against you, but you blush more exquisitely than any woman I know. I can be a brute and a pig when I'm tired. Actually, I have the utmost respect for you.'
'A simple sorry would have done. You don't have to lay it on with a trowel,' said Clare acerbically, recovering her poise.
'Then I'm forgiven?' he asked gravely.
She looked into melting dark eyes and felt a tiny tug, deep inside. This man reminded her too much of what it meant to be a woman, and a shy and inexperienced one at that.
'Certainly not.' She turned on her heel and left.
His startled laughter pursued her into the hall. It sounded like the soft ripping of silk, appropriately so, thought Clare as she fled back to the safety of her work. David Deverenko seemed intent on tearing a large hole in the carefully worked fabric of her life. Already be had unravelled a few threads. If he knew how really vulnerable she was, she would be lost. At all costs, she must maintain her assured front.
And the first thing she must do was to learn how not to blush!
CHAPTER FOUR
To Tim's great disappointment neither Deverenko nor his daughter were at dinner that night; but the next morning, when Clare called into the kitchen on her way to breakfast, she found him there sipping coffee and chatting to Grace as if they were old friends. It was a crisp, cold morning, and Clare's manner was equally cool. She had been caught by surprise yesterday, but today she was fully in control of all her responses and she returned Deverenko's greeting with the same calm hospitality she extended to all the guests at the lodge.
'Did you sleep well?' she enquired automatically, accepting Grace's offer of a fragrant cup of coffee.
'Beautifully. I feel completely refreshed, and once Grace feeds me I shall be utterly at peace with the world.'