by Susan Barrie
But only half-way!
Inga’s fair-skinned face turned absolutely scarlet. And then her cairngorm eyes flashed defiance at Sir Luke. Martin, being very English, was horrified at being caught red-handed in such a situation. He couldn’t even think of anything to say to excuse himself.
But Inga could. Her Swedish accent became very apparent as she addressed Sir Luke.
‘I’m sorry, Luke ... I really am sorry, but I’m going to marry Martin! I love Martin!’
She said it as if she dared him to find fault with such transparent honesty.
Sir Luke had no intention of finding fault with anyone. He turned on his heel and walked out by the way he had come, and Melanie followed him. She quite literally ran after him because she was suddenly seriously alarmed for him, and the shock he had just received was an appalling one.
‘Sir Luke! Sir Luke!’ she called.
But he ignored her and got into his car and drove off down the drive. She followed in her Mini. Outside the gates of Willow Farm he slowed abruptly, and she very nearly cannoned into him. She gathered that he was stopping to speak to her and leaving her engine running she slipped out and ran along beside his car.
He looked at her with a pair of mildly amused dark eyes. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Are you trying to prevent me committing suicide?’
‘No, I—’
‘Go back and turn off your engine,’ he ordered. ‘And then leave your car to be collected - I seem to be making a habit of having your car collected! - and join me on this vacant seat.’ He patted it.
‘B-but—’ she stammered:
‘Do as I say!’
She obeyed him. Although she left her car in a slightly dangerous position, partially blocking the entrance to Martin Vidal’s drive, she obeyed him to the letter, and then returned to his more impressive vehicle and took her place meekly on the seat beside him. She was feeling horribly embarrassed, and her hands were actually shaking with agitation, but Luke was so plainly not in the least upset that she could hardly believe it. She gazed at him in a kind of obvious agony of pity, ready to pour out all her sympathy over him like neutralizing balm, when he actually laughed and patted the hands that were gripping one another in her lap.
‘Well, go on,’ he urged, ‘say it. Say how sorry for me you are!’
‘I am! I’m terribly sorry!’
‘Because you’d set your heart on my marrying Inga?’
‘You know very well that everyone—’
At that he looked slightly annoyed.
‘If by “everyone” you mean Mrs. Larsen, then you have not been making a mistake,’ he said as he frowned at the instruments on his dashboard, and then switched off his own engine so that they sat in absolute silence under the trees. ‘Mrs. Larsen is an extremely practical woman — or was until she met Anstruther! - and she saw in me a very desirable son-in-law. Oh, my dear, dear Melanie, I’ve never been in the least deceived about Mrs. Larsen’s intentions. But I’m a very cautious man, you know, and although it’s true that I did at one time toy with the thought of making Inga Lady Charnock
- because my mother is always plaguing me to provide her with a grandson, and I’m so difficult to please that until a few weeks ago I’d never even been on the fringe of falling in love, and was much more concerned with the practical aspect of matters as they affect me - I put the thought away from me on a certain night rather more than a month ago, when a certain young woman with a smut on her cheek refused to tell me who she was!’
Melanie stared at him unbelievingly.
‘You - you can’t mean that I had anything to do with changing your mind?’
He bent towards her whimsically and lifted one of her hands. It was small, but the tips of the fingers were square and obstinate, and not nearly as well cared for as the lovely gleaming fingertips of Miss Larsen.
‘You did have a smut on your cheek that night,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, but—’
‘You are so full of buts. And you are a very stupid young woman. You don’t appear to know that you’ve had me at your feet ever since I arrived at Wroxford.’
She shook her head in a dazed way. ‘That can’t be true. You asked me to leave—’
‘You insisted on leaving!’
‘And you were cruel about my piano.’
‘I couldn’t see any point in your removing it when sooner or later it would have to be returned to the Priory.’
A wild confusion overtook her, and she started to tremble. She was remembering how he had looked at her that night -
that night when she was playing the piano....
But this was obviously a case of smarting under a sudden blow, and she wasn’t going to be a case of rebound. Not purely and simply, anyway.
‘Sir Luke,’ she pointed out to him, ‘it isn’t absolutely certain yet that you’ve lost her. She may change her mind! And Martin may change his mind, too.’
His face hardened in a way that vaguely frightened her.
‘Ah! ’ he exclaimed. ‘So it’s Martin you’re thinking of, is it? I forgot that he’s your childhood sweetheart—’
‘He’s nothing of the kind! We’re simply old friends!’
‘But very good friends.’ She would never have believed that his dark eyes could blaze with such unconcealed resentment and jealousy ... or was it really jealousy? ‘Would you like me to go back and punch him on the nose for you? Would you like me to tell Inga what I really think of her ... — What I really think of her! That she’s stupid and rather brainless and occasionally quite insufferably rude!’ His eyes continued to glitter alarmingly. ‘I can recall one occasion when she refrained from asking you how you were, although everyone else had had the decency to do so, and made eyes at your boy-friend in addition to ignoring you! I can recall with what difficulty I prevented myself from asking her there and then whether she could make it convenient to leave ... and you might as well know that it was her mother who stopped me! Her foolish but rather likeable mother, who would have been so upset if I’d done anything of the kind! And there was that other occasion when she turned you out of your room—’ Melanie breathed huskily, ‘But you couldn’t have minded then.’
‘Couldn’t I?’ He regarded her as if he pitied her for her stupidity ... not to be taken so much exception to as that of Inga Larsen, but stupidity nevertheless. ‘You’ve led a sheltered life, Melanie,’ he pointed out to her, ‘and you don’t appear to understand that falling in love has nothing to do with childhood friends like young Vidal. You may well be the type that bestows its affections early, and doesn’t change. But I was extremely cautious when I was young, and I’ve kept mine intact. If young Vidal is the heart and core of your existence—’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she returned with a show of impatience, ‘you know very well that he isn’t.’
He smiled.
‘I thought I did. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure you haven’t treated young Vidal rather badly ... and that’s why his devotion has suddenly turned against you, and his eye has been cast in another direction altogether. And this time, apparently, he’s going to be lucky.’
‘I hope so,’ she said, more huskily, ‘I sincerely hope so. I’m really very fond of Martin.’
‘Fondness is a condition of mind and not heart,’ he told her. ‘I’d hate it if I thought you would one day say you were fond of me.’
She peeped at him between her lashes, while a rather warm colour began to seep into her cheeks.
‘You were saying?’ she reminded him. ‘You were saying that you objected to Miss Larsen turning me out of my room...’
‘Ah, yes.’ He sat back in his corner of the car, lighted a cigarette, and regarded the tip of it as if it was likely to be a source of inspiration. ‘I see you’re going to demand from me a full account of a situation you do not understand. Well, I’m prepared to humour you. I’m prepared to give you an almost day-to-day account of what happened to me from the moment I arrived here. I was greeted by confusion, and I met you. I thought you were a
housemaid, and you had a smear of coal dust on your cheek. Nothing in life has ever fascinated me so much as that smear of coal dust. Do you know,’ regarding her with a sudden bright twinkle in his intensely dark eyes, ‘I badly wanted to wipe it off for you.’
‘Did you?’ She put back her head and looked up at him, sudden acute pleasure in her face, while her lips fell a little apart.
‘What would you have done if I’d offered to wipe it off?’ ‘Thought you were being cheeky, I expect—’
‘To a housemaid?’
‘I didn’t think of myself as a housemaid. I was merely lending a hand, and of course I had the advantage of knowing who you were.’
‘Yes, you did, didn’t you?’ He frowned. ‘And I was not even honoured with a confession of who you were.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she dimpled penitently. ‘But I admit I thought you were rather taking over in a big way on the night you arrived.’
He looked suddenly and absurdly anxious.
‘You mean you took an instantaneous dislike to me?’
‘No, no.’ She shook her head. ‘I merely thought you were a bit spoiled, perhaps.’
‘And when did you cease to think I was a bit spoiled?’
‘The following morning, when I decided you were extremely arrogant ... and thoroughly indulged almost certainly all your life!’
He frowned. He ground out his cigarette in the car ashtray, leaned forward and took both her hands and gripped them hard.
‘Melanie,’ he said huskily, ‘spoiled or indulged, arrogant or otherwise, no more and no less than I am, I want to cut all this nonsense short and ask you to marry me. I would have asked you the morning after you walked out on me ... at the Bell Inn, if I hadn’t been fairly certain you’d refuse me. And when I found you in the cottage and took you back to the house it was just as if things were working out my way. But I didn’t see much softening in your face, and absolutely no sign of capitulation, so I stooped to a most unworthy trick and allowed you to think what I knew you had been thinking all along, and that was that I had made up my mind to marry Inga. I did in fact use her, and I’m not entirely sorry, for if anyone is spoilt she is, and she was small-minded enough to treat you as if you were a thing of no account ... why, she even wanted me to send you back to the Bell in order to get rid of you! And if you think that was jealousy on her part, well, it wasn’t. Even at that stage she thought nothing of carrying on a discreet flirtation with Chris Winslow, who accompanied us to the Priory because she insisted on it ... and Richard Culdrose was another of her favourites. He makes women feel good, apparently, and flatters them when they want to be flattered! Why, he was very much taken with you!’
‘Was he?’ But she wasn’t interested in Richard Culdrose. He had asked her to marry him ... something that she had never even dreamed would happen to her, and she still couldn’t be entirely certain about him. If he was in love with her why had he followed Inga that afternoon? Or was it her, Melanie, whom he had followed?
‘Tell me,’ she asked quietly, while she allowed her hands to rest in his, ‘when you went to Willow Farm just now was it to collect evidence?’
He smiled slightly.
‘A little evidence, perhaps. I wanted to try and make the discovery whether Inga was serious about Vidal. If she was I intended to give them my blessing. But you were there, too, and you had to be dealt with first.’
‘As you are dealing with me now?’ she asked.
He nodded.
She turned as if to leave the car.
‘I think you’d better deal with Inga first,’ she said almost primly, but he reached across and caught her and drew her with a sudden blaze of anger into his arms. He held her so tightly that she could hardly breathe, and he forced back her head by fastening his fingers in her hair, and as he looked furiously into her eyes he demanded: ‘You think the truth isn’t in me? You think I’m a liar?’
‘I -I—’
‘You’re so inexperienced you don’t know when a man’s in love with you? Is that it? Is that it? Or is it Vidal—?’
‘No, no.’ She could barely speak, but she managed to get that out. ‘You know it isn’t!’
‘You’ve said that before! But I have no proof, any more than you have proof that I—’ He released her suddenly. ‘All right, we’ll go back into the house and see how the other two are getting on. Perhaps there’s a chance for you yet ... and perhaps there’s a chance for me!’
‘Luke!’ she gasped.
He opened the car door nearest to him and slipped out into the road. She followed and clutched at him.
‘Luke!’ she begged. ‘I didn’t really doubt you—!’
But his expression was adamant, and he was turning away from her towards the open gates of Willow Farm when she stumbled and gave her ankle a slight twist, and whimpered softly.
Instantly he turned, his face more revealing than she had ever seen it, swung her up in his arms and held her against his heart.
‘Oh, my darling,’ he cried, ‘you’ve hurt your ankle again!’ Smiling contentedly, she lay in his arms and looked up at him. She even wound her arms about his neck as she whispered:
‘If I did I’m very glad! You’re so difficult to handle. Violent things have to happen before you come to heel!’
‘Come to heel?’ He looked down at her with smouldering eyes. ‘Then you didn’t really hurt your ankle? It was a trick?
A device?’
‘Perhaps.’ But the smile in her eyes as she lay against his heart was complacent and unafraid. ‘Put me down on my feet and we’ll both find out.’
A car was approaching them along the road from the village, and he waited until it had passed out of sight - the driver craning his neck curiously to find out why a man and a girl were behaving so unconventionally beside a public highway - to answer her.
‘I’ll do that when we get back to the Priory.’ He carried her round to her seat and placed her in it. Then he got back into his own seat. ‘The carpets are soft there, and it won’t hurt you if I let you fall. But you might as well know that I’ve no intention of letting you out of my arms for a full half-hour once we get back to Wroxford, and the very first thing I intend to do once we’ve acquired a degree of privacy is ... kiss you! Have you ever been really kissed yet, Melanie?’ he inquired almost casually as he slid in his gears. ‘And I don’t mean a kiss like the odd peck you’ve no doubt occasionally received from Martin Vidal!’
She looked sideways at him, and her blue eyes were
languid with happiness ... languid and shining at the same time.
‘Not really, Luke,’ she admitted softly.
‘Luke darling,’ he instructed her, with a touch of impatience.
Luke darling,’ she echoed him, very submissively.
‘Then do you find it hard to wait until we get back to the Priory?’ he asked.
She stared straight ahead through the windscreen, and she answered him with a breathless note of excitement in her voice.
‘Yes, darling.’
His foot pressed down lightly on the accelerator.
‘Then have patience, my sweet, because we’re nearly there. Oh, Melanie, my beloved, we’re nearly home!’ he told her.