world? But he seemed so sure of himself, and so utterly condemning that he couldn't have made it up. Her mind whirled as she tried to think where he could have got hold of such an improbable idea, unless—she blanched. Unless that was the story her stepfather had put out to explain her disappearance! Oh, surely not. Mark, she suspected, might be capable of such a thing but not Charles. She couldn't bear to think he had come to hate her so much he would spread such a story.
She wanted to shout, It isn't true, none of it. It was Charles Latimer who threw me out.' But she found she couldn't do it. When Charles had instructed Mark to tell her he didn't want to see her again, perhaps he believed she would try to find her mother. But then Mark had known she had done no such thing. Wouldn't he have told his father she had been accepted for nursing training by a London hospital? He had promised to try to persuade his father to relent towards her.
Bethan shook her head in confusion. Whether her stepfather had known what she was doing or not, he must have felt himself justified in telling everyone she had gone to her mother in America. Did she really have the right to call him a liar now, even to protect herself? Hadn't she done enough damage to his name ten years ago?"
'How could I have gone to my mother when I had no idea where to find her?' she prevaricated. doubt if I'd even recognise her now.'
'There are ways and means of tracking people down if you're determined enough. And I didn't have any difficulty in recognising you, Bethan,' he jeered. 'Did you really think I wouldn't?' He was standing very close now, towering over her like some accusing, vengeful god, and she couldn't retreat further with the desk at her back. The sheer aggression of his dark shadowed jaw intimidated her, the antagonism oozing from every pore making her tremble. No one had ever looked at her
with such scorn before, and that it should be Fraser Laurie doing so now hurt unbearably.
'So let's stop the play-acting, shall we?' His hands gripped her shoulders, his fingers digging painfully into her still-tender back. 'We both know you're not a nurse. What I don't know is why you're pretending you are. Why have you turned up in England again, Bethan? And why here in particular? Just what are you up to?'
'I'm not pretending! I am a nurse.' Tears of pain at his punishing grip and frustration at his unjustified suspicions swam in her eyes, making them gleam like emeralds. 'I've been a nurse for the last ten years,' she insisted, her mouth trembling.
He couldn't seem to take his eyes off that trembling mouth, so unknowingly inviting, and for the first time a flicker of uncertainty crossed his face as the tension between them tightened so that neither of them seemed able to move.
Bethan's heart seemed to skip a beat and then accelerate its pace and crazily she wanted to touch him, to trace the planes of his face that she had never entirely forgotten. 'Fraser ...' she breathed.
Instantly the uncertainty was gone to be replaced by a cold savagery. 'A nurse? When I know you haven't an ounce of compassion in your body? You'll be claiming next that it's pure coincidence that you turned up here.' He pushed her away from him in disgust and she lurched backwards across the desk.
Levering herself upright Bethan knew she was near to collapse, her weakened state allowing no reserves to combat her emotional turmoil, especially in the face of Fraser's blank refusal to believe a word she said. Her face paper-white, her head bowed, she said dully, 'I can't make you believe me, but it's true all the same. I'm an experienced nurse and when I took this job I had no idea Mrs Ruston was related to you. If I had known, nothing would have induced me to come here.'
'As you say, you can't make me believe you, and I
don't.' His voice was cold but his hands tightened on the back of one of the leather chairs, betraying his anger. 'Get out of my sight, you lying little bitch. Go on, get out before I do something I might be sorry for.'
For several frozen seconds Bethan stared at him, then on shaking legs she fled from the room. Somehow she made it up the stairs to her bedroom and flung herself on the bed, too shocked and hurt to cry, feeling as weak and drained as ever she had in hospital.
It had been a day of shocks, first the unexpected meeting with Fraser when she had almost made herself believe that meeting was going to be postponed indefinitely, then seeing him with the woman he intended to marry and realising she was still as powerfully attracted to him as she had been all those years ago. And now this implacable hostility, his scathing condemnation of what he believed her to be, some scheming little tramp.
She still found it unbelievable and deeply hurtful that her stepfather should have told such an untrue version of what had happened, that he should have deliberately turned everyone against her to save his own face. It was so out of character. Perhaps when he had sent her away he hadn't trusted her to stay away. But surely -he must have known she would do nothing to embarrass him further? Had he really found it necessary to tell everyone she had just disappeared, run out on him, gone to join her mother in America? That was such an unlikely story to have told when he knew very well her mother wouldn't have welcomed her. After all, she thought bitterly, her mother had had little enough time for her even before she had deserted them both to run off to America with her film-star lover.
And yet Charles Latimer must have told such a story or Fraser wouldn't be so sure of himself, so contemptuously ready to call her a liar. He seemed convinced her arrival at Vine House had been deliberately planned for some devious purpose of her
own, though what he thought she meant to do, or even why she should want to do anything, she couldn't imagine.
Lying in the darkened room staring blindly up at the ceiling, Bethan told herself it shouldn't matter what Fraser thought of her. But it did. It mattered very much. His indifferent rejection of her love ten years ago had lacerated her, but his distrust—even hatred—of her now seemed to shrivel her very soul. It was as well he had told her to go or she might have been tempted to clear herself in his eyes. And that was something she couldn't do, for to tell the truth, that it was her stepfather who had thrown her out and not she who had deserted him, would show the man to whom she owed so much to be a liar.
Somehow she found the strength to drag herself off the bed and to begin to pack, Fraser's bitter, 'Go on, get out of my sight,' ringing inside her head. She had no idea where she could go. Perhaps the pub in the village would put her up for the night, and maybe they could find a taxi for her in the morning to take her to the nearest railway station. Where she would go from there she neither knew nor cared, as long as it was as far from Vine House and Fraser Laurie as possible. It meant she would have to leave without Saying goodbye to Lorna and she deeply regretted that, but no doubt Fraser would find some acceptable explanation.
She should have known the contentment of the last few days was too good to be true, she thought as she thrust her belongings haphazardly into her suitcase. Not until now, when she was leaving, did she admit to herself how much she had needed the period of convalescence Dr Fielding had insisted on, how much she had gained from the peaceful way of life at Vine House, from the friendship of people like Lorna Ruston and the Flowerdews. Closing her suitcase she slipped on her jacket, her face wet with tears. She wiped them
away with the back of her hand and left the room, closing the door behind her and walking quietly along the passageway.
She had just reached the bend in the stairs when the study door in the hall below opened. Shocked into immobility—because she had assumed Fraser had gone to bed—Bethan faltered to a swaying halt. At dinner and also during her traumatic interview with him in his study, he had been wearing a formal dark suit, but now he had taken the jacket off and the thin cotton shirt was stretched across his powerful shoulders and chest, and that brought back forcefully the few moments when he had held her powerless in the grip of his strong, hurtful hands.
His face darkened as she hesitated, his cold grey eyes raking her, taking in the shabby cotton jacket and the suitcase dragging at her arm. 'And where the hell do you think you're going?' His
voice was quiet but no less menacing for that.
Bethan gathered her remaining strength and came on down the rest of the stairs. After all, he couldn't hurt her any more, could he? 'Does it matter?' she said tiredly. 'You told me to go, so I'm going. I haven't said goodbye to your aunt—I didn't want to disturb her—but I'm sure I can leave it to you to explain why you no longer want me in the house.'
He strode across the hall, snatching the bag out of her hand. 'I meant you to get out of the room, not out of the house,' he ground out. 'What are you trying to do, make me out as callous as you are, turning you out at this time of night?'
She wanted to protest that she'd never done a consciously callous act in her life but tension and near exhaustion had her bowing her head and saying defeatedly, 'Very well, I'll wait till morning.'
She reached to take her bag back from him, but he held on to it.
'It's in character, I suppose,' he bit out. 'Running
when the going gets tough. But you're not getting away with it this time.'
As he obviously didn't mean to relinquish his grip on her suitcase Bethan drew back a pace. She just couldn't think straight when he was so near, so aware was she of his intimidating masculinity; the spicy scent of the soap—or was it the aftershave?—he used, the sheer size of him, six feet of bone and muscle to her own skinny five feet four—and the fierce antagonism that kept coming at her in waves. In fact she didn't seem able to make her mind work at all, for he seemed to be talking in riddles.
'I don't understand what you want,' she muttered.
'That makes two of us, because I'd give a lot to know what it is you want, Bethan Latimer Steele. but I promise you I mean to find out before I let you leave here.' He started for the stairs, taking her suitcase with him, and Bethan had no alternative but to follow.
'And there's one thing I can promise you ' she began, but Fraser hushed her with a movement of his hand, hissing, 'Keep your voice down, for God's sake. Do you want to wake my aunt?'
He marched straight into her room and dumped the suitcase on the bed. 'Well, Bethan, what is it you can promise me?'
That you're wasting your time. I want nothing from either you or your aunt,' she said wearily.
'Still keeping up the fiction that you're just a harmless working girl? Well, maybe it's a fiction we ought to encourage in public, for Lorna's sake. It might do you good, at that, to actually have to work instead of living off others.' His long arms snaked out, his hands gripping the tender flesh of her upper arms, pulling her close until his implacable face was only inches away. 'You contrived this situation, Bethan, cheating your way into this house, worming your way into my aunt's affections. Oh yes, it hasn't gone unnoticed that she's become very fond of you in a
ridiculously short space of time. And she's usually such a good judge of character too,' he added insultingly. 'But then you've had ten years to polish up the winning ways you practised on me when you were a child. So, much as I'd like you out of this house, I'm not going to risk upsetting Lorna. I'm not even going to ask you how you managed to persuade Hugo Fielding to recommend you for the job of looking after her. The damage is done now. It'll do her more harm than good to know the truth about you. But let me tell you this, Miss Steele.' He dragged her even closer until the outline of his hard body was imprinted on her own. 'You hurt Lorna and you'll wish you'd never been born!'
Her heart was pounding thunderously against her ribs and she could hear the rushing of her blood in her ears. Her face was dead white beneath the red-gold aureole of her hair, her green eyes wide as she gazed up at him with an unconscious plea for mercy.
'God! You still look like an innocent child.' His mouth twisted with an expression that in any other circumstances she might have taken for pain. 'But we both know you're not.' He thrust her away from him, flinging her back on to the bed where she fell like a rag doll. `How many men have you had, Bethan, since I nearly gave in to temptation and took you myself? How many men have tasted the delights of your delectable but rotten little body in the last ten years?' He loomed over her like some terrible condemning judge and fear blocked her throat, making it impossible for her to deny his shattering accusation or to say a word in her own defence, because for several terrifying moments she was afraid he was going to use her as the kind of woman he had accused her of being.
But then he turned abruptly on his heel and strode to the door. 'You can stop acting like a virgin facing rape,' he jeered, turning to look at her where she still lay unmoving on the bed. 'I have no intention of falling
into your predatory little hands. So whatever your motive for insinuating yourself with Aunt Lorna, just forget it. You were hired to do a job and I'm going to see that you do it impeccably, and believe me, I'll be watching you every step of the way.'
The door closed behind him but it was several minutes before Bethan could find the strength to drag herself off the bed. She undid her suitcase and took out her nightdress, pushing the bag into the wardrobe to unpack again later. Undressing, she pulled the nightdress over her head and crawled back into bed, her mind empty, as if, like a shell-shock victim, it had taken more than it could handle and had cut off out of self-defence. Exhaustion claimed her and she fell into a deep pit of unconsciousness.
But in the morning when she woke it was to instant awareness, with no protective numbness to block out the memory of the things Fraser had said to her the night before. The two terrible scenes replayed themselves over in her mind in all their shocking detail. Fraser believed the story her stepfather and stepbrother had told to explain her absence after her trial ten years ago—that she had walked out on her adoptive father, the man to whom she owed so much, had allowed him to .pay the swingeing fine the court had imposed on her conviction for drunken driving and then had uncaringly deserted him as her mother had before her, that she had taken herself off to America to be with her mother and apparently to abandon herself to a life of depravity, moving on from lover to lover. It was almost funny! Almost. She bit her bottom lip to stop its trembling.
And yet, believing all that of her, he was insisting that she stayed on here in his aunt's home. Bethan shivered. Weeks—months perhaps—of that suspicion and hostility beating her down, and she unable to defend herself against it. 'Absolutely no stress,' Dr Fielding and Lorna's GP had said. For a few moments hysteria threatened to get the better of her before she
fought it down. Little did they know that the stress couldn't have been much greater if they had sent her back to Beirut!
A hot shower did little to lessen the tension that gripped her at the thought of facing Fraser again. She unpacked the suitcase she had packed so hurriedly the night before and dressed in a pair of washed-out cotton trousers and shirt before going reluctantly downstairs to the kitchen. Perhaps Fraser would be working by now and she wouldn't have to see him until. this evening, she thought hopefully.
But that hope was dashed when she found him at the kitchen table eating his breakfast. 'Good morning, Nurse Steele.'
Molly Flowerdew raised her eyebrows at his formality and the coldness in his voice, but she was standing behind him at the stove and didn't see the derision in the grey eyes that raked Bethan's shabbily dressed figure. 'Very workmanlike,' he jibed, but his tone implied, 'But you don't convince me.'
He looked very workmanlike himself in denim jeans and a short-sleeved sweat-shirt, but Bethan didn't comment on it. Her quiet, 'Good morning,' encompassed them both, and when Molly suggested she might like a poached egg for her breakfast she shook her ?lead quickly, asking instead for toast, knowing she would be hard put to it to eat even that in Fraser's condemning presence, and ignoring the housekeeper's protest. But she was very much aware of his sardonic expression as Molly fussed over her, and although he made no more cutting remarks she was almost limp with relief when he stood up with a sarcastic, 'Well, some of us have to work,' and made for the back door.
`What's up with him?' Molly wanted to know when the door had closed behind him. 'You upset him or somethin
g?'
'You could say that.' Bethan wondered what the kindly housekeeper would say if she knew he believed
her to be a lying little tart who had never done a day's work in her life but lived off her many lovers. think he's a bit put out because I was engaged while he was away and he didn't get a chance to vet me first.' She suggested the most likely excuse that came to mind.
Molly didn't look convinced, but said no more as she prepared her mistress's tray.
Bethan made the same excuse when Lorna asked her what Fraser had wanted to talk to her about the night before, knowing her patient would undoubtedly be upset if she told her the truth. She managed to make light of the interview and Lorna soon forgot about it as they discussed what they would do that day.
The lines of pain etched into the older woman's face spoke of a restless night, and to ensure Lorna didn't overtax herself Bethan suggested a gentle stroll in the knot-garden where she encouraged her patient to talk about the different flowers and herbs that grew there. Later she drew up two loungers in the shelter of the summerhouse looking out on to the swimming-pool and there they had their coffee, staying until it was time for lunch, a meal which Fraser did not come in to share, much to Bethan's relief.
When she had tucked Lorna into a rug on one of the sofas in the sitting-room for her afternoon nap, Bethan stretched out on the other one for her own rest, a habit she had formed over the last few days rather than going up to her room. But today she felt too tense to sleep, too restless to lie still and yet too reluctant to disturb Lorna to risk leaving the room. So, half an hour later, the sound of a car pulling into the drive followed swiftly by an imperative rat-tat on the door came as a welcome diversion.
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