A Lesson In Seduction

by Susan Napier

  Or was she? Luke had good reason to know that she wasn’t as vulnerable and unsophisticated as her tender expression of compassion invited him to believe. Her apparent openness was an illusion. To an actress of Rosalind Marlow’s calibre the lies would come tripping off the tongue. He might admire the act, but he didn’t have to believe in it.

  ‘No. No one.’

  The tight-lipped answer touched a painful chord inside Rosalind. She couldn’t imagine life without her large, loving family. The chord continued to resonate, reaching deep into the secrets of her soul.

  She could see the awareness of his loss still there in the back of Luke’s eyes, the ghostly reflection of an old bewilderment. And, behind that, an even deeper, colder, darker emotion that she couldn’t identify.

  ‘Relatives? Surely you had someone...?’

  There was a palpable tension in the set of his shoulders. “I was fortunate to be adopted,’ he said tonelessly, sliding his hand abruptly out from under hers and placing it out of reach in his lap.

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Rosalind quietly, undismayed by his physical withdrawal. Some people were natural touchers and others weren’t. The Marlows were an expressive lot, both physically and verbally.

  ‘Everyone should have a family, don’t you think? Even if it’s an artificially constructed one,’ she continued, her smile tinged with a fleeting wistfulness. ‘It’s our family that teaches us to expect love and trust and loyalty from those around us, so that when we go out into the world we’re not afraid to pass on our trust to others, to admit that we’re all interdependent...’

  ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls...’ he murmured.

  ‘Exactly! Although, actually, it’s “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee”,’ said Rosalind, a stickler for getting her lines right. She-was delighted to find out that he had at least a passing acquaintance with poetry. Perhaps he was still redeemable. ‘Have you read much John Donne?’

  ‘Enough to misquote him occasionally. The remnants of a classical education.’

  ‘Oh? Where did you go to school?’

  He named a private boys’ school, famous for its academic excellence and strict code of behaviour—also for the level of its fees. She wondered whether his parents’ estate or his adoptive family had paid for his education.

  ‘Were you a boarder?’ she contented herself with asking.

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  He uttered the words with pride, but Rosalind thought that packing young children off to live in institutions was a barbaric practice and said so. She shuddered delicately. ‘All the Marlows went to a state school, thank God, where we were relatively free to express our individuality. I could never have stood boarding-school. All those petty rules and restrictions. I would have rebelled simply on principle.’

  ‘Your parents didn’t set restrictions on your behaviour when you were a child? They didn’t expect you to adhere to minimum standards of decency and self-control?’

  There was a bite to his questions that made her a trifle defensive. The Marlow brand of home discipline might have been liberal but it had never been lax. ‘Yes, of course they did, but their rules were tempered with heaps of love and humour and a very broad tolerance, and we weren’t threatened with expulsion from the family if we did something wrong!’

  ‘I was never threatened with expulsion either.’

  ‘Probably because you never dared do anything wrong,’ dismissed Rosalind knowingly. ‘How did you manage in the dorm? Aren’t boarding-schools filled with budding little sadists and thugs who lord it over everyone younger and weaker than themselves?’ Her voice acquired a pitying husk. ‘You must have suffered more than your share of bullying—’

  ‘Must I?’ he interrupted crisply. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you’re not exactly built like a rugby player, are you?’ she said frankly, giving him the once-over. As her eyes settled back on his face she noticed his heightened colour and the tell-tale rigidity of the muscles in his jaw and—Uh-oh, she must have bruised his masculine sensitivities!

  ‘Actually you’re a bit like my brother Richard,’ she said hastily. ‘He got picked on for being a gawky kid-all elbows and knees and a chest like a chicken—but he wasn’t feeble by any means and the older he got, the more he appreciated his natural leanness. Women positively drooled over him when he got into the movies—’

  ‘How very reassuring, but your concern for me is quite misplaced,’ Luke said, with a cutting precision that rejected her backhanded compliment. ‘I was never a particular target for bullying, nor, I’m glad to say, indiscriminate drooling, which sounds equally unpleasant.’

  His words had more impact than he could know. Rosalind let her bright head drop back against her seat with a sigh.

  ‘Oh, it is, it is,’ she said moodily, thinking of all those salacious tales about her which had floated to the surface over the past week. She had once thought such rumours funny, hadn’t minded people entertaining themselves with silly exaggerations about her sex life. But the joke had somewhat lost its savour when it had become coupled with the knowledge that somewhere out there beyond the spotlight was a faceless man who regarded her as his own personal possession, who was obsessively collecting every scrap of knowledge about her, watching, waiting, gradually shaping and fashioning her to fit his private fantasies, turning her from a person into a...a thing that he might one day come to claim, perhaps violently...

  And because of that life would never be the same for Rosalind. She would never again feel quite as safe, never be quite as carefree and trusting as she once had been. Olivia had been frustrated by her twin’s refusal to take Peter seriously, but Rosalind had always handled her fears and doubts by laughing at them, by holding them up to ridicule and contempt, because to do otherwise would be to admit that they had unreasonable power over her.

  But this time her tried-and-true remedy had failed her. She had received a harsh lesson in helplessness that she had longed to repudiate. That was why she had gone streaking down to Wellington after that tantalising telephone call.

  ‘We’ve never met,’ the woman had faltered, after introducing herself only as Peggy, ‘but I believe we have a mutual...friend—someone who’s been writing a lot of letters to you lately—someone I’m worried about.’

  Rosalind’s heart had accelerated and she’d gripped the receiver hard. ‘You’re talking about Peter?’

  A deep, unsteady breath along the line had signalled her caller’s mingled nervousness and relief. ‘Yes. You obviously know who I mean. But I... I don’t want to get him into trouble...’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Rosalind honestly. ‘I haven’t made any sort of official complaint yet, if that’s what you’re asking. I was hoping the situation would resolve itself...’

  ‘Maybe it will. It’s just—I saw some of Peter’s letters to you, at his flat... I found photos, and things of yours—he has a whole room wallpapered with pictures of you; it’s almost like a shrine the way it’s set out. I think he’s more likely to harm himself than anyone else but I—You see... Oh, it’s so complicated...you can’t possibly imagine! I—I thought that you and I might be able to help each other, to help Peter, without there being a fuss or any ghastly publicity—’

  She broke off with what Rosalind thought sounded like a sob but then continued, her voice choppy with mistress. ‘It’s all so very awkward talking like this over the phone. This is terribly personal, you see, Miss Marlow. Not even my family knows—they mustn’t know—’

  Rosalind could hear the incipient panic building. Her informant sounded almost at the end of her tether. She might lose her courage any moment and hang up, leaving Rosalind none the wiser as to her, or Peter’s, true identity.

  ‘I agree; nobody else has to know. Would it make you more comfortable if we could meet, Peggy, and talk about it face to face?’ she interrupted gently, clamping down on the impulse to hammer urgent questions down the line. ‘Just the two of us, alone? Trust me, I don’t want any unnecessary publi
city about this either.’

  ‘Oh, yes, could we do that?’ There was a gushing sigh of immense gratitude. ‘But it needs to be right away and I live in Wellington .. : Her voice swept high again in tense frustration. ’My husband is in the Government, you see, and our comings and goings are sometimes monitored. I don’t have any excuse to come to Auckland at short notice and the family is bound to be curious and suspicious if I suddenly take it into my head to insist...’

  The woman’s ragged dignity and desperation triggered Rosalind’s compassion as well as her avid curiosity, especially after hearing that she was the wife of Donald Staines, a conservative pillar of the political establishment and self-appointed watchdog of New Zealand morality.

  Reading between the lines, Rosalind guessed that Mr Staines was an authoritarian husband who lived by a set of rigid, old-fashioned standards and expected his wife to be equally upright and unblemished in character. He had no truck with modern, namby-pamby psychology that forgave people their sins because they had been victims themselves, and, whatever Peggy’s involvement with Peter, it was obvious she feared she would receive contempt and condemnation rather than help and understanding on the home front.

  Rosalind had just got back from location. She had hardly even unpacked, but she didn’t hesitate. She threw a few things back into her bag and flew to Wellington that very evening, booking into the agreed meeting place as the ubiquitous ‘Miss Smith’. She was eager to shrug off her growing sense of powerlessness by seizing the initiative and taking assertive action instead of passively waiting for events to run their own course.

  The hasty trip turned out to be a massive error in judgement. Perhaps if she had been more sensible and less arrogant, and had sought professional advice before rushing off to slay her phantoms, then Peggy Staines would not have had her heart attack, or the accompanying stroke which had complicated her recovery.

  Hell!

  The burden of guilt now resettled crushingly on Rosalind’s shoulders. It all came down to choices and Rosalind knew that in the last few weeks she had made too many of the wrong kind: wrong personal choices, wrong career choices. Just about everything she did these days was turning out wrong, she thought, heaving a luxurious, self-pitying sigh.

  ‘Rosalind? Are you feeling ill?’

  She blinked and discovered that she had been frowning blankly out of the window of the plane at the vast blue nothingness. The sky was utterly clear, not a wisp of cloud in sight, and as her eyes dropped Rosalind could see the flattened contours of the Malaysian countryside below.

  A broad brown river snaked lazily across the blue-green landscape, looping back on itself to almost enclose fat teardrops of lush jungle. Where the jungle gave way to serried ranks of palm trees she could see narrower brown bands—dirt roads running in straight lines for kilometres through the vast palm-oil plantations. From above, the palms looked like clusters of multiarmed starfish, spreading their green limbs across the earth-bed beneath a crystal-clear sea of air.

  ‘Rosalind? Is something wrong? Why are you looking like that?’

  The harsh demand shattered her abstraction. She looked around. Luke James had removed his glasses and his naked eyes weren’t the least myopic as they drilled into hers. They were razor-sharp with curiosity, and with a jolt of alarm Rosalind recognised a shrewd intelligence at work. She hoped he wasn’t as perceptive as he was evidently observant.

  ‘Sorry...what was it we were talking about?’ she said, instinctively brandishing the shield of charming vagueness that had served her so well in the past. ‘I’m afraid my thoughts wandered off on a tangent. I tend to do that sometimes—my imagination is pretty wild...’

  He refused to be diverted. ‘Not very pleasant thoughts, whatever they were. From your expression, I thought the wing must be on file at least!’

  That explained his uncomfortably dissecting look. She must have given him a scare! Her mouth relaxed into a leasing curve.

  ‘Believe me, if anything was wrong with the plane you’d be getting a far more extroverted performance than a dreamy stare out of the window ! I’m a stage actress, remember ? I’m trained to dramatise events and exaggerate emotions. You can’t judge me by ordinary standards of behaviour...’

  He frowned, replacing his spectacles. Rosalind could see disagreement seeping into his expression and another question forming on his stern lips. For goodness’ sake, couldn’t he take the hint and lighten up? She wasn’t in the mood for serious conversation. She was having a holiday from deep and meaningful discussions!

  Determined to thwart him, she steamrollered on in a relentlessly light and frivolous vein until she saw his eyes begin to glaze over and his jaw stiffen against a yawn. Only when she was certain that she had successfully bored him to distraction did she lapse into silence. She turned back to the window to hide a small smile of satisfaction as he quickly opened his laptop on his knee and buried his nose safely in his own business again.

  She took a crumpled flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of her and pretended to read, but as the plane angled out across the South China Sea she found herself. seduced by the hypnotic flash and leap of the sun, dancing dimples of silver brilliance across the restless blue mantle. An occasional small fishing vessel and, as they neared Tioman, a sprinkling of raw, windswept rocks and tiny green-tipped islands jutting out of the sea provided the only visual interruptions.

  The plane banked for its approach and Rosalind caught her first glimpse of their destination. The narrow tongue of land widened as the plane continued to turn, revealing the full vista—tow, rock-strewn cliffs rising to steep, jungle-clad slopes which marched upwards and onwards into the hazy, mountainous interior.

  She pressed her nose against the window so that she could watch as the tumbled boulders and stony cliffs gave way to long, wide streaks of smooth, pale sand. The exotic greenery grew thickly to the very edge of the beaches, and was broken only here and there by clearings for human habitation.

  They descended further, flying across a bay where a long white jetty jutted out across the water. In the space of a few minutes the sea had changed dramatically, from a solid, opaque blue of fathomless depths to an exquisite, translucent cobalt as it skimmed over the sandy shallows to melt with scarcely a ripple onto the silky beaches.

  Exactly like the brochures! Rosalind thought with a rush of pleasure, sending out a mental apology to her mother for doubting that her enthusiasm would bear comparison with reality.

  The airport, when it hove into view, was tiny—a couple of alarmingly short concrete runways nestling at the base of the forested hills. A quicksilver thrill of exhilaration threaded through her veins. She couldn’t help a quick glance over at Luke James to check how he was coping with the idea of landing in a patch of cleared jungle the size of a postage stamp.

  He wasn’t. Instead, he was watching her, his back turned to the solid wall of greenery now whipping past the window. She was surprised by his cool composure until she realised that his fixed fascination was more likely to be a state of controlled panic. By focusing his concentration on Rosalind he was blocking out his awareness of what was happening outside the plane.

  Her own eyes were vividly bright, betraying the love of excitement that was intrinsic to her impulsive nature.

  By the time they had bumped down onto the uneven rummy and shuddered to a smooth halt beside the small, open-sided wooden building which served as a terminal Rosalind’s earlier annoyance with Luke was forgotten in her eagerness to explore her new environment.

  ‘It wasn’t so bad after all, was it?’ She grinned at him as they carried their bags the few metres from the shady terminal to the narrow, dusty road just outside the chain-link gates. ‘I thought that landing was going to be a hair-raising roller-coaster ride, but it was actually quite smooth and easy.’

  ‘Yes, I could see you were disappointed,’ murmured Luke acidly as he set his suitcase down under the shade of a leafy palm and watched most of their fellow passengers board a small blue
and white resort bus parked outside the wire gates.

  ‘well, maybe a little bit,’ she confessed, looking around for their own transport. ‘I happen to love roller coasters.’

  ‘That figures.’

  A typical accountant’s reply, thought Rosalind in amusement. Everything reduced to numbers. He’d probably never even been on one himself. Roller coasters definitely came under the heading of entertainment !

  She strolled over to where a snazzy-looking red motor scooter was leaning against one of the fence posts and ran her fingers wistfully over the white seat. ‘You don’t suppose...?’

  ‘No, I do not!’ He gave her hopeful suggestion short shrift.

  ‘Pity,’ she said, imagining how good the breeze would feed as they zipped along in the open. The air around them was very sultry and still, and she could feel the sweat beginning to trickle down her spine. She fanned herself with her hat. She couldn’t wait to get into her bikini and fall into that azure sea.

  They didn’t have long to wait. Just as the resort bus pulled away a large green and silver open-topped Jeep with a palm-tree logo embossed on the door tooled up in a cloud of dust and a slim young Malaysian man dressed in cool whites vaulted out with profuse apologies for his lateness. He had had to stop to assist a tourist who had had an accident with his bicycle.

  ‘I am Razak,’ he said, his dark, almond-shaped eyes widening at the sight of Rosalind’s hair glowing like molten lava in the full glare of the sun. ‘From the Tioman Palms...and you are Mr and Mrs...?’ He paused to look at the clipboard he had tucked under his arm.

  ‘He’s definitely a Mr but I’m still a Miss,’ Rosalind laughed. ‘We’re not married.’ The idea was deliciously absurd.

  ‘Oh!’ Razak’s curious gaze darted from Rosalind’s irrepressible grin to Luke’s smooth, unrevealing visage. He looked down at his list and frowned. ‘But—’

  ‘We merely travelled on the same flight’ Luke cut him off abruptly. ‘We aren’t together. We’re total strangers to each other.’