by Penny Jordan
Mrs Mayers’ son didn’t sound like the kind of man who would neglect to check up on his mother’s prospective employee. And once he did and he discovered what had happened, surely he would not allow his mother to employ her. Could she take the risk of that kind of rejection? Would it be fair of her to expose Mrs Mayers to her son’s anger when he discovered the truth?
And yet, being with her today was like being given a taste of warmth after enduring the most icy cold. Perhaps the work would not tax her skills and abilities to the full, but it would give her an opportunity to regain the self-confidence she had lost during the months leading up to the trial. It would give her the chance to put the past behind her and start life afresh.
People in the kind of circle Mrs Mayers obviously moved in were hardly likely to concern themselves with the affairs of a young woman such as herself. There would be no knowing looks, no questions.
She let herself into her bedsit and was immediately struck by the contrast to Mrs Mayers’ sitting-room. Her aunt and uncle’s home was comfortably furnished, but it lacked the warmth that Mrs Mayers’ home possessed.
Stubborn was how she had described her son, and yet, listening to her, Lark had known immediately how much she loved him. It was there in her voice, in her smile. She had once known that kind of love, before her parents’ accident.
If there was one thing she detested, it was people who consistently felt sorry for themselves, she told herself fiercely. And yet it was through no fault of her own that she had become involved in Gary’s dishonesty.
Gary had escaped from the consequences of what he had done, but he had unfairly left her to face them. Deliberately, or simply because he had panicked and known no other way of protecting his mistress? Lark was convinced that Lydia Meadows was his mistress, just as she was convinced that it was for her benefit that he had been stealing from his company.
But Gary was dead, and she would have to stop thinking about the past and put her mind on the future.
She sat down tiredly. Could she take the job with Mrs Mayers? And what about Mrs Mayers’ son?
She had been aware of a slight inflection of uncertainty in Mrs Mayers’ voice when she spoke about him. Did that mean that she herself was not sure that he would approve of her choice of employee? If he did not, where would that leave Lark?
Mrs Mayers had assured her that the decision was hers and hers alone, but it had been obvious to Lark that she respected her son, and no doubt valued his judgement…
Her head was starting to ache, and she pressed the palm of her hand to her temple wearily. She couldn’t make a decision now. She would have to sleep on it. She wished there was someone with whom she could discuss what was happening—a friend whom she might confide in. But she had no close friends.
Her aunt and uncle had frowned on her bringing friends home when she lived with them, and those friends she had made at university had now all gone their separate ways.
She hadn’t been in her new job long enough to make new friends. Or was it simply that her aunt and uncle’s reluctance to admit new people into their lives had rubbed off on her, and that she had been wary of allowing anyone to come too close to her? She had once been accused of that by one of the young men she had met at university. But friendship hadn’t been what he’d wanted from her.
At six o’clock she made herself beans on toast—a meagre meal that would have to suffice until breakfast the following morning. Her slenderness was getting very close to the point where she was almost becoming thin. If she took the job with Mrs Mayers she would never have to worry about where her next meal was coming from… She refused to listen to the tempting inner voice.
She wasn’t going to take the job simply for selfish reasons. She had liked Mrs Mayers too much to do that. She could help the older woman, she knew that. From a quick glance at the files Mrs Mayers had shown her, she had realised that they were in a muddled and disorganised state, but she had felt that there was something that Mrs Mayers was holding back, something that was worrying the older woman, and she very much suspected that that something was Mrs Mayers’ son’s reaction to the news that his mother was employing a young woman who had only by the skin of her teeth escaped receiving a prison sentence.
She remembered how evasive Mrs Mayers had been when she had asked her about her reasons for approaching her with the offer of this job. Lark suspected that the truth was that Mrs Mayers had somehow or other learned in conversation with her solicitor what had happened, and that out of the kindness of her heart she had immediately and unthinkingly suggested that she could offer Lark a job. That was the kind of woman she was.
But Lark felt that she owed it to her to point out the problems that she might be storing up for herself by taking her on. And yet wasn’t the job exactly what she needed? And with the added benefit of living accommodation thrown in as well?
It wasn’t just the luxury of the house that drew Lark. It was the warmth that seemed to pervade it. A warmth that she guessed sprang from Mrs Mayers herself. Lark had found herself wishing that she might have had an aunt or a godmother like the American woman. Someone to whom she could have turned when her parents were killed.
How cold and withdrawn her aunt seemed when compared with Mrs Mayers. Or was it simply that she herself was far more sensitive to such things since the ordeal of the last few months? It was true that since she had grown up there had been an enormous distance between herself and her aunt and uncle, but she had put it down to the fact that she was growing up rather than to any lack of emotion for her on their part.
Now she knew the truth. They had never loved her in the way that she had always believed they did. In fact, they had resented her, and very deeply. That had been made abundantly clear to Lark following Gary’s death.
It didn’t take her long to clear up after she had eaten. She was still wearing the clothes in which she had gone for her interview. She ought to change out of them and press them so that they would be ready to wear the next time that she needed them. If she ever needed them again…
She had just changed into an old pair of jeans and a warm sweatshirt when she heard someone knocking on her door. Visitors were such an unusual occurrence that it was several seconds before she could actually accept the fact that it was her door which was being knocked on.
She went to open it and then hesitated uncertainly. While she hesitated, the knocking increased in volume, its imperative summons demanding that she open it immediately.
The man standing there was instantly familiar to her, but the shock of seeing him so totally unexpectedly robbed her of the ability to do anything other than simply stand and stare, her heart giving a gigantic leap and the breath squeezing out of her lungs as she looked into James Wolfe’s cool grey eyes.
Her first panicky thought was that somehow or other there had been a mistake and that he had come to drag her back to court. Her fear of that thought was so great that she actually started to try to close the door.
But, as though he had anticipated such an action, he stepped into the room, forcing her to move back or risk coming into physical contact with him. If he had appeared formidable in court, it was nothing to the effect he was having on her senses now.
Somehow, being stripped of his court robes had invested him with an even more intensely masculine aura. As he reached out to push her door closed behind him, her attention was caught by the sinuous strength of his wrist. A gold watch glinted discreetly in the dim light of her room.
She watched him tensely, unable to understand what he was doing here, and yet too shocked to frame any coherent questions.
‘You should never open your door without finding out who’s on the other side of it,’ he reproved her casually. ‘Not these days—not in London.’
Weakly, Lark collapsed on to her shabby, lumpy settee.
‘What are you doing here?’ Her voice sounded cracked and strained, artificially high and totally unfamiliar. She noticed that her hands were shaking and, to hide it from him, she f
olded them and tucked them underneath her. She didn’t want to betray any weakness in front of this man, but she realised immediately that he had seen the small, betraying gesture.
Something flickered in the depths of his eyes. Triumph? No, it hadn’t been that. Then what? Compassion? No, never, not from a man like James Wolfe.
‘What are you doing here?’ she repeated huskily. ‘Or can I guess?’ she demanded bitterly, her brain suddenly working properly. ‘You hated it, didn’t you, that the case was dismissed? You wanted them to convict me.’ Suddenly she was back inside the court room, the silence around her charged with expectations, as the jury waited for her to respond to his allegations.
She drew a quivering breath, unaware of his frown as he studied her, unaware of anything other than the terror of the moment when she had known that no one would believe her. That, innocent as she was, innocence on its own was not going to be enough.
‘Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now,’ she told him harshly, dragging herself back to reality.
There was a moment’s silence, and then he asked quietly, ‘Is that how you’re going to spend the rest of your life? Living in the past?’ His question startled her. It wasn’t the reaction she had been expecting at all, but before she could say a word he continued derisively, ‘But then, what else can you do, living here? You don’t have a job, you don’t have anything, do you?’
He had come here deliberately to taunt her, to remind her that, although she might have escaped conviction, she was still being punished as he quite obviously considered that she should be. But he was wrong, she did have a job.
Lark didn’t stop to weigh the consequences, to remember how she herself had had doubts about the wisdom of accepting Mrs Mayers’ generous offer. Instead she told him with fierce pride that he was wrong, that she did have a job. Her eyes flashed fierce signs of fire, her hands clenching into small fists as she stood up to face him.
He didn’t look as surprised as she had expected, but then, of course, he was adept at concealing his true feelings; that would have been all part of his barrister’s training.
‘You see, despite what you tried to do to me, there are still people around who can recognise the truth when they hear it.’
An odd expression crossed his face. If she hadn’t known better she might almost have believed that he was amused, and then suddenly he leaned forward, his hand touching her throat, sliding up over her skin to her jaw, cupping it firmly.
The shock of his unanticipated touch scalded her into immobility, while her pulse jumped frantically beneath her skin and her heart surged heavily against her breastbone. She knew that he was going to kiss her, and yet she refused to believe it. It was unthinkable, impossible, unimaginable, and yet when his mouth touched hers it was as though some part of her had always known that one day there would be a man who would kiss her like this, who would make her pulses race and her blood burn, who would caress her mouth with his own, and in doing so possess her more thoroughly than any other man before or after him.
Her senses reeled beneath the force of it, her mind a total blank, as he kissed her with slow thoroughness, not rushing or forcing her, his mouth tasting hers with voluptuous delight. His hand still supported her neck, his thumb gently caressing her pulse. His body didn’t touch hers. He made no move to hold her closer or to touch her in any other way, and yet she trembled as much as though he had caressed every single inch of her.
He released her slowly and deliberately. She came back to earth to hear him saying softly, ‘Delicious.’
Her eyelids felt weighed down. It was an effort to open them and look at him. He was smiling at her, his mouth curving half mockingly. His eyes looked more silver than grey, liquid like mercury.
She wanted to reach out and trace the shape of his mouth in wonder and awe, still lost in the mystery of what had happened between them, and then he said in amusement, ‘What’s wrong, Sleeping Beauty? Has no one ever kissed you before?’ And immediately she realised exactly what she was doing and wondered how on earth she would ever be able to forgive herself for being so stupid.
‘You had no right to do that,’ she told him painfully, appalled by the folly of her own actions, and yet her heart was still thumping, the effect of his touch still bemusing her senses. She had been kissed before, of course, but never in a way that had affected her so strongly.
‘No right at all,’ he agreed affably, cutting across her thoughts. ‘But that didn’t stop both of us enjoying it.’
Enjoying it? Lark almost choked on her chagrin, but what could she say? She had enjoyed it, more than enjoyed it, she admitted, shivering as she remembered how she had abandoned herself to the sensation of his mouth moving against her own.
It was because it had been such a shock, she told herself defensively. For him to kiss her had been so out of character, the very last thing she had anticipated.
‘I want you to leave,’ she told him stiffly, standing up and walking over towards the door. Her whole body felt as though she had been subjected to a terrible fever, her joints actually feeling as though they ached. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation.
To her relief he made no demur, but it wasn’t until he had actually gone and she had locked the door behind him that she realised that she had never really discovered exactly why he had come in the first place. What if he should come back? Panic hit her. She didn’t want to see him again. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even think about why she was so terrified at the prospect.
There was only one way she could escape. She would have to take Mrs Mayers’ job. Even if he traced her there, she wouldn’t be so alone, so vulnerable. He would never kiss her like that while she was living with Mrs Mayers. He would never dare to arrive on Mrs Mayers’ doorstep and demand entrance.
Had his kiss been his personal way of extracting payment because the case had been cancelled? She shivered, hugging her arms tightly around herself.
He was certainly arrogant enough to do something so unorthodox, but there hadn’t been anger in his touch, nor resentment. So why, then? She shivered again, knowing the answer but not wanting to admit it. There had been that brief moment of time in the court room, that exchanging and mingling of glances that had contained more than mere acknowledgement of one another as adversaries.
Too inexperienced to judge its value properly, she had nevertheless been aware of that brief arcing of some indefinable emotion between them, some sensation of almost physical communion, generated by their mutual awareness. But she had dismissed it, not wanting to recognise its potential.
She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself for instinctive comfort. She would have to take the job now. She wasn’t going to allow herself to dwell on exactly why she felt this need to protect herself, and if Mrs Mayers’ son disapproved, well, that was his problem, she told herself defiantly.
CHAPTER THREE
WHY on earth was she spending so much time agonising about taking the job which, in her heart of hearts, she was forced to admit might have been tailor-made to get her out of her present dilemma?
The reason was quite simple. She liked Mrs Mayers. The older woman had stressed right from the start that she knew all about the court case and that she didn’t want to discuss it.
Lark had taken her words at face value, only too glad to meet someone at last who was prepared to judge her on herself and not on what she had read in the papers about her. But would the same hold true for Mrs Mayers’ son? Somehow, she doubted it very much, and there was the crux of her dilemma.
With every word she had said to Lark about her son, Mrs Mayers had betrayed her love of him, and mixed with that love had been just the tiniest tinge of awe, Lark was sure of it.
She wouldn’t go as far as saying that Mrs Mayers was in fear of her son. Lark would hate to be the cause of any trouble between them, and yet, if she didn’t accept Mrs Mayers’ offer, what on earth was she going to do? And that was before she had even begun to try and analyse exactly why James Wolfe had come rou
nd to see her.
She told herself that she had hated the way he had brazenly demanded entrance to her flat, the way he had so calmly and arrogantly assumed that she would welcome his attentions. Attentions! She laughed bitterly and wryly to herself.
What a very old-fashioned word for what was in effect a very modern sin. She had no doubt at all about what James Wolfe had wanted from her. She remembered with sick distaste several newspaper men who had haunted her doorstep until they realised that there was simply no way she was going to respond to their advances.
They had been at first amused and then annoyed to discover that she was not in the least flattered by their propositions. She had been astounded to discover that they seemed to take it for granted that she would be only too happy to go to bed with them. Common sense had warned her that they would laugh in her face if she had told them she was simply not that kind of girl, which happened to be the truth.
She was twelve years old when her aunt took her on one side and gave her a lecture about the ways that good girls did and did not behave. Her aunt had left her in no doubts whatsoever as to what her fate would be if she ever dared to stray from the straight and narrow path she had just outlined to her.
As a teenager, Lark had struggled with her own inner rebellion when she’d discovered her cousin was not expected to adhere to the same rigid moral code. Now she considered it was too late for her to indulge in the kind of teenage experimentation she had then been denied.
At university, she had been too busy to have much time to spend with friends of the opposite sex. In her first month at work, she found that she had discovered a certain fastidiousness that put her out of step with many of her peers. Perhaps that was why the thought of working for Mrs Mayers was so tempting. It would be a totally non-threatening environment—something that she needed badly after the traumas of the past few months. Something that she needed badly because it would provide an escape from James Wolfe.