by Isobel Chace
‘Thank you, I’d love to. I didn’t know you were getting married.
Fatemeh nodded. ‘My parents arranged it many years ago. I have seen him sometimes when he has come home with my brothers. He is very handsome! He is a civil engineer and very clever! When he finished at university he had to spend some years working for a village community as his national service and to repay to the country the cost of his education, but now he can work anywhere and there is nothing to delay our marriage.’
‘But are you in love with him?’ Stephanie asked.
‘I shall be when I know him better. He is right for me, and I know that I like him. Our families have always been friendly together. That is a good thing when two people are to marry.’
‘I’d want to be in love before I married anyone,’ Stephanie mused. ‘And I’d want him to be in love with me!’
Fatemeh looked wise. ‘It is different for you,’ she said. ‘You meet and talk to many men and so it is easy to decide for yourself whom you shall marry, but it is all the same in the end, I think. However often you meet a man, you cannot know what it will be like to be married to him until you are his wife. What more do you know about Mr. Ruddock than I know about my fiancé?’
Stephanie’s heart missed a beat. What did she know about Cas Ruddock? Only that he was the most wonderful person in the world!
‘Mr. Ruddock—’
Fatemeh giggled, well satisfied with her friend’s reaction. ‘I have seen the way he looks at you! For once the imaginative Miss Gloria Lake is right! There is something between you, no? You like him very much?’
‘Very much,’ Stephanie admitted.
Fatemeh giggled again. ‘That is how I like the man I am to marry too! But I am more fortunate, having my family to arrange it all for me, while you must wait for Mr. Ruddock to decide it all for you.’ She put her head on one side, her eyes as bright as a bird’s. ‘Or has he already made up his mind to have you?’
Stephanie presented a scarlet face. ‘Of course not! He doesn’t think about me like that at all! He’s my employer—nothing more than that!’
Fatemeh drew the loose flap of her chador across her face, holding it in place with her teeth while she adjusted the folds of her skirt. ‘So,’ she teased, ‘you think of him just like you think of your father—’
‘Fatemeh!’
The Persian girl shook her head at her, her eyes flashing with laughter. ‘You mustn’t mind my knowing, Stephanie. Your secret is safe with me! And Mr. Ruddock he already knows, doesn’t he?’
‘I hope not!’ Stephanie gasped.
‘But why? He is a kind man and he knows you are alone here and he won’t take advantage of you.’ She frowned, looking thoughtful. ‘If you are afraid of that, I will ask my father to speak to him for you—’
‘No, please don’t!’ Stephanie was appalled by the very idea.
‘Well,’ Fatemeh shrugged, ‘you have only to ask!’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Stephanie said weakly, ‘but Cas would think I’d gone mad! I hardly know him, after all!’
‘It’s not necessary to know well to like what one has seen,’ Fatemeh retorted. ‘You liked Isfahan the first day you were here!’ She shrugged again. ‘Have you been up on the roof? It’s beautiful up there! Would you like to go?’
It was indeed beautiful. Seen through a silver filigree of chinar, the tile-work glowed almost as if it were alive, and was perfectly reflected in the absolutely still pools below.
‘One never comes to the end of Isfahan!’ Stephanie said dreamily. ‘You are lucky to live here all the time!’
‘There is nowhere else I want to live,’ Fatemeh agreed. ‘When I am married, I shall have to go away from time to time, but I shall always come back here. I want my children to be Isfahanis too. They do not speak such beautiful Farsi in other cities. It is important to know beauty when one is young and then it grows inside one all one’s life!’
Perhaps that was true, Stephanie reflected. When the time came, she would hate to leave, that she did know. Isfahan would always hold a corner of her heart, and it couldn’t be entirely, because it was there that she had met Casimir Ruddock. She wouldn’t allow herself to think that! But her cheeks burned nevertheless and she made a play of admiring a new view of the tiled dome that had become so familiar to her in case the other girl should notice her confusion.
‘We must go to work,’ Fatemeh broke in on her thoughts. ‘If you will walk with me, I’ll send my maid home. She’s waiting for me downstairs.’
Stephanie was intrigued. ‘Do you never go anywhere alone?’ she asked.
‘I am fond of my maid. She has looked after me since I was a little child. I should be lonely without her. It’s much nicer to do things in company. I like to have a lot of people around me.’
Certainly there was nothing servile about the maid’s attitude to her young mistress. She issued a spate of commands that Fatemeh listened to with her usual calm expression, nodding her head at intervals in agreement.
‘She hasn’t entirely accustomed herself to my working,’ she explained as the two girls walked together down the street. ‘She was harder to persuade than my parents were that it would be good for me to see the new world we are creating here. She still would prefer me to be at home like my sisters and entertain my friends for tea!’
‘What about after you marry?’
‘I shall have my husband’s home to look after,’ Fatemeh said with dignity.
Stephanie knew a moment’s envy of the Persian girl. She could think of nothing she would like better than to look after the home of the man she loved. She would do it well too! She would make a much better housewife than secretary, she thought ruefully.
The lift was still out of order. Ali came forward with a long and detailed explanation of what the electrician had done to cure the trouble but all to no avail. ‘He is getting a new panel to put in instead of this bad one,’ he added with an engaging grin. ‘But with all the wires sticking out, it is now not safe to use at all!’
Stephanie returned his grin with a malicious smile of her own. ‘And how long is it going to be before we can use it?’ she asked.
Ali was undismayed by the implication that the electrician would make it as long as possible. ‘Insha’allah, all will be well tomorrow!’
‘Or the day after that?’ Stephanie retorted.
Ali allowed himself a pained shrug of his shoulders. ‘Insha’allah,’, he repeated.
‘Allah has nothing to do with it,’ another voice said crisply behind them, and Cas emerged from the stricken lift with a quick smile for Stephanie. ‘Fetch me a screwdriver and I’ll do it myself!’
Stephanie started for the stairs, trying not to laugh, but he called her back, beckoning her into the lift beside him.
‘I don’t understand anything about electricity,’ she told him hastily.
‘You don’t have to! All you have to do is hold what I tell you to hold and pass me the screwdriver when I need it!’
‘All right, just so long as you don’t blow us all up!’
‘Oh, ye of little faith!’ he taunted her, making the most of his extra inches to look down his nose at her. ‘Just for that, you can wait till the bitter end and we’ll go up in the lift together!’
It was interesting to see how quickly he worked, his fingers confidently manipulating the tangle of wires that lay behind the panel, sorting them into their right groups with a speed and efficiency that delighted her. In no time at all he had the problem sorted out and was replacing the panel on the front, screwing it firmly back into the wall of the lift.
‘Right,’ he said to Ali, ‘you can turn the current back on now.’
The Iranian hurried to do so and Cas pushed the button for their floor and the lift glided smoothly upwards without any further trouble. Cas leaned against the side and surveyed Stephanie with a slight smile. ‘What are you giggling about, young lady? Didn’t you think I could do it?’
‘I never doubted it for a moment!’
He grinned at her. ‘If you’re going to tell other people what to do, it pays to be able to do it yourself.’ He looked more closely at her. ‘Sleep well?’ he asked her.
‘I woke early. I’m all right,’ she added. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
‘It’s getting to be a habit,’ he responded. ‘You won’t break me of it easily.’
But then she wouldn’t want to! She felt immeasurably cheered as she walked away from him into her own office, searching in her bag for the key to the locked door. Without bothering to put away the last of the files, she cleared a place at her desk preparatory to typing the letters Cas had dictated to her the day before. But she found the clutter disturbing and, a little irritated by her own need to have everything neat and tidy around her, she stood up again and began to sort what remained of the papers, clearing them out of sight as fast as she could.
So intent was she on what she was doing that she jumped when the intercom buzzed on her desk and Cas’s voice came through, sounding stern and unfriendly. ‘Come in here a moment, will you, Miss Black?’
She went at once, every instinct telling her that something was badly wrong. As she went into his room, she knew at once what it was. In his hand he held the letters which she had found the day before and had hidden in the bottom drawer of the file in her office, the letters which had included the one from her father cancelling the equipment they had been waiting for so long.
Cas was sitting at his desk, not looking at her. Then he turned the full force of his bright blue eyes on to her.
‘Did you leave these on my desk?’ he asked her. And then again, as the silence grew between them, ‘Well, did you, Miss Black?’
CHAPTER VI
Her face was grey with shock. How could they possibly have got on his desk? She shook her head miserably.
‘I hid them,’ she confessed. ‘I didn’t want you to see them!’
‘Well, it appears that somebody else did,’ he said. ‘You little fool, Stephanie! Why didn’t you tell me about them the moment you found them?’
‘I don’t believe my father wrote them!’
‘Don’t you?’ he said grimly. ‘Then who did?’
It was the most important thing in the world that he should believe her. ‘I didn’t type them—’
‘Are you quite sure of that?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I never saw them in my life before yesterday. Though they were typed on my machine—at least I think they were, and they have my initials on them. But I didn’t type them, and I’m almost sure my father never dictated them either!’
‘I see.’ He was silent for a long moment. ‘You realise I shall have to follow this up? I shall have to find out if they were ever sent out as coming from your father, and I’ll have to send a full report back to London.’
‘Yes,’ she murmured.
‘It puts your father in the front line of suspects as far as the culprit who overturned your office is concerned too.’
‘Yes,’ she said again.
‘Why the devil didn’t you tell me all about it last night as I asked you to?’
Stephanie licked her lips nervously. ‘I don’t know,’ she managed. ‘I didn’t know what to do! But I realise I can’t go on working for you—under the circumstances. I’ll give you my letter of resignation later in the day.’
‘Getting in first?’ he jibed. ‘Okay, Miss Black, it looks as though I shall have to do without you in the office. Now sit down, before you go and faint on me, and let’s talk about you and me. Feeling better?’
If anything she felt worse. She hoped desperately she was not going to faint. She sat up very straight and tried to think of something else besides the pounding in her head and the black spots before her eyes.
‘Is there anything to talk about?’ she asked.
He came round the desk and placing a hand firmly on the nape of her neck, ruthlessly pressed her head well down between her knees. ‘Stephanie, my love, don’t you know that modern young ladies take anything in their stride without swooning away? Smelling salts went out with Queen Victoria, and I haven’t any feathers to burn under your nose either. Come on, nothing is so bad that we can’t face it together!’
‘But this has nothing to do with you!’ she protested. ‘Cas, you’re breaking my neck!’
‘You’re lucky I didn’t do so the moment you walked in here! I had hoped you trusted me—’
‘I don’t know you!’ she pleaded. His hold on her neck was as relentless as ever and, far from feeling faint any more, she was getting crosser by the minute as she suspected that he was enjoying her discomfiture.
‘That,’ he said calmly, ‘can be remedied.’ He pressed her head still lower and then finally allowed her to assume a more upright position, smiling at the scarlet indignation on her face. ‘How you hate to have your dignity upset!’ he teased her. ‘But at least you don’t look as though you’re going to faint on me any more!’
She eyed him resentfully, automatically rearranging her skirts and patting her hair back into position. ‘There are times when you are very unlikeable!’ she shot at him. His quiet acceptance of this unpalatable truth drove her into further, more reckless speech. ‘I hate you!’ she said with passion.
‘Like hell you do!’ he retorted.
She watched, fascinated, as he bent his head towards .her, and was quite unbearably disappointed when he changed his mind and took up his position behind the desk again.
‘This isn’t the time or the place for our own affairs,’ he said as he sat down. ‘We’ll sort them out somewhere else. Meanwhile, Miss Black, I am not going to accept your resignation, but I am going to suspend you from working in these premises pending my enquiry into these letters. Now, think hard, Stephanie! Is there anything else I ought to know before I let you go?’
‘Yes! I want to know how the letters got on your desk. I didn’t put them there, so who did?’
‘That’s what I mean to find out.’
‘How?’
He raised a thoughtful eyebrow. ‘I’d like to think you trusted me to do my best for you. Is that asking too much?’
His blue eyes held hers and she had the strange sensation that he could look right inside her and could read her inmost feelings, feelings that she didn’t understand herself they were still so new to her.
‘Wh-what?’ she said vaguely.
‘I was asking if you could bring yourself to trust me to look after you?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She wrenched her eyes away from his with an effort. What on earth was she talking about? There was nothing ‘of course’ about it! He was a stranger, an American! And it didn’t matter at all! She was fathoms deep in love with him and she’d trust him with the last breath in her body. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Give me your keys and go home until I come to you.’ She gave him an uncertain smile. ‘What about your letters?’
‘Fatemeh can do them. She’ll have to take your place temporarily.’ He stood up and she thought anew how large he was and that he only had to look at her for her heart to turn over inside her. It was only a physical attraction, an acute awareness of him as a man, that she had never experienced before, and she could only hope that she was not about to make a crashing fool of herself by having the sort of crush on him that she ought to have learned how to manage in her adolescent days.
‘Why not Gloria?’ she said in a commendably even voice.
‘I think Fatemeh will suit me better.’
Stephanie stood up too. ‘Fatemeh is getting married soon. She’s invited me to her wedding. What will you do then?’
He put out a hand and cradled her cheek. ‘I’ll manage. Now give me the keys and we’ll go along to your office together and pick up your personal things. Do you think you can amuse yourself until lunchtime without going into a decline because I won’t let you go on working?’
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I’m quite modern in some ways.’
He grinned. ‘You could have fooled me!’<
br />
‘Why? What’s so old-fashioned about me?’ she demanded. ‘I can’t see that there’s anything to laugh about!’
‘Can’t you? That’s because you can’t see your face!’ His laughter was very gentle, though, and she thought she would be hard to please indeed if she were to resent it. ‘Go home, honey,’ he went on, ‘and cook us something delectable for our lunch, after which I’ll take you out for the afternoon. Okay?’
She gave him a smile that was more than a little shy. ‘I thought you’d be angry with me for not telling you about the letters. I’m sorry, Cas.’
‘A little disappointed. But I’ll win your trust yet, my love. I’m old-fashioned too, you see. I don’t like to see too much independence in a woman, not when I’m there to do her worrying for her. I have my pride too!’
‘But I’m a stranger to you,’ she objected. ‘Why should I depend on you when I’m the one who’s in trouble?’
He ran his hand through her hair, mussing it up to his satisfaction. ‘Can’t you guess?’
She chewed at the inside of her lip, shaking her head, suddenly rather nervous of him, ‘Please don’t, Cas.’
‘Meaning you can guess, but you’re not going to be drawn?’
‘Meaning that I like to keep my hair neat!’ she retorted. ‘I don’t like it all over the place!’
His chuckle made her blush. ‘I think it looks cute. It makes you look like a windswept child! And you ought to be grateful. It got you off the hook and you haven’t had to admit a thing—not this time!’ He threatened to tousle her hair once again, but she stepped back too quickly to allow it. ‘I take a personal interest in how you keep your hair,’ he teased her.
She was immediately indignant. ‘That doesn’t give you the right—’ she began, the more heatedly as she made the discovery that she hadn’t really minded half as much as she thought she should have done.
‘It’s a right I choose to take!’ he countered, smiling. She had no answer ready for him. She gave him a quick, frightened look; her mouth gone dry, wondering what other rights he might choose to take and, even more, whether her already weakened defences were going to stand the strain. If he were less attractive to her, or if she could meet him on equal terms—but, in her heart of hearts, she knew that none of these things would have made any difference at all. She had been lost from the first moment that the urge to please him had been stronger than her need for caution and an orderly existence. She, who had always taken the long view, was now incapable of seeing anything but him and, heaven knows, he was large enough to block out the rest of the world if he’d a mind to!
