by Pamela Kent
“I’m sorry, Lady Hannaford,” Elizabeth Tempest said, and observing the colour that rushed into her face Janine felt quite sorry for her.
Lady Hannaford waved a hand.
“It’s all right, my dear, but remember in future … two lumps for Jan—that is to say, Miss Scott.”
Tim rose and went over to the trolley where the nurse-companion was wielding the heavy silver teapot. While Janine forced herself to listen to Lady Hannaford’s next burst of expressed opinion in connection with her sister and her brother-in-law she realised that Hannaford was making soothing noises in the ear of the pretty nurse, and from the way in which she recovered her composure and even brightened up after a moment or so it was fairly obvious that the noises he made were very soothing.
Lady Hannaford wagged a finger at Janine.
“Mark my words, there will be trouble at Sandals one of these days.” She drove her point home with a silver apostle spoon, which she actually tapped against Janine’s wrist. “All that talk about seeing things! … It’s an indication of a mind that is becoming deranged! And why is it becoming deranged? Because of loneliness and inconsideration. In my opinion your brother-in-law is a most inconsiderate man … If he had any sense at all he would realise that a young woman like Christine needs variety and affection, and how can she get affection when he’s away so much? And now Tim tells me that Hay woman has reappeared on the scene—”
“Aunt!” Tim’s voice, for once, was sharp as a whiplash as he interrupted the flow, and the fact that he did so proved that his attention had not been entirely concentrated on Elizabeth Tempest … in fact, far from it. He crossed the floor and shook his head warningly at his aunt. His brown eyes were quiet and displeased, and there was little or no indolence at the corners of his mouth. His voice held a reproving note.
“What I told you yesterday, Aunt, was not intended to be repeated,” he observed, while obviously striving to appear as if he was humouring her as well as cautioning her. “Put like that it’s pure, malicious gossip, and we have absolutely no proof that Mrs. Hay hasn’t some important business on hand at the moment with Stephen Blair.”
“Tush!” Lady Hannaford sounded peevish. “That wasn’t the way you put it to me yesterday …” And then she followed his glance in the direction of Elizabeth and was discreet enough to lower her voice. “All right, I’m a scandalmonger … an old gossip! But you can take it from me there’s no smoke without fire, and at one time there was quite a lot of suspicious smoke arising out of that unsavoury case the papers made so much of.”
She leaned towards Janine and patted her knee lightly.
“It’s perhaps as well you weren’t in England at that time, my dear,” she said. “But your sister unfortunately was, and I’ve an idea that that’s when all her troubles started.” She was attempting to keep her voice low, but she wasn’t very successful. Elizabeth Tempest carefully averted her face and nibbled a cucumber sandwich with great delicacy while her patient threw discretion to the winds. “Anyway, why does the woman suddenly turn up here …? And if everything was completely above board why didn’t Stephen introduce her to you yesterday …?”
Janine wished she knew the answer to that, but as there seemed little likelihood that she would do so she concentrated on removing cake crumbs from her lap and pretended that she wasn’t very much affected by her hostess’s warning. She had to make allowance for age … age, deafness, curiosity and possible boredom, but anything that affected her sister as closely as Stephen’s possible entanglement with another woman was not a subject she proposed to discuss seriously with anyone at the moment.
Not even Tim, when he took her home. And, for once, Tim was unusually silent, a little morose, even a little curt with his answers whenever she addressed him. He behaved, she thought, as if he had something rather badly on his mind.
All the same, she couldn’t resist mentioning Elizabeth Tempest to him. She remarked that his aunt had been rather unkind to her for once—even a little unfair—because it was the easiest thing in the world to do to forget how much sugar a comparative stranger took in their tea.
“I’m afraid I never remember such things,” she remarked, staring complacently ahead of her through the windscreen. “And Elizabeth does try so hard to please Lady Hannaford, doesn’t she?”
To her considerable amazement Tim fairly exploded.
“Well, and what if she does?” he demanded. “It isn’t a crime, is it, to try and please an old lady? Elizabeth is one of the most patient creatures alive, and my aunt is jolly lucky to have her—and not some starched dragon who would treat her as if she was barely human and decline to put up with her whims!—and I never miss an opportunity to tell her so. After all, Elizabeth is pretty, charming, and a firstclass nurse … She doesn’t have to put up with Tor Park and the back of beyond. If you think nursing a demanding old woman like my aunt in a lonely house on Dartmoor is fun, well, you’d better try it yourself … Only you don’t happen to be a nurse, do you? You’re a schoolmarm with an uncertain temper and an excellent opinion of yourself!”
“Well!” Janine exclaimed, staring at him as if she was not entirely certain she had heard aright, and then actually turned pale after flushing violently for a moment. “I do seem to have said the wrong thing, don’t I? And what I was actually doing was defending Nurse Tempest! I had no idea you felt so strongly about her that even the smallest criticism from your aunt where she is concerned affects you!”
“Don’t talk rubbish,” he said tersely.
“I’m not talking rubbish.” She moved a little farther away from him along the seat. “I’ve always thought Nurse Tempest everything you’ve said … pretty, charming, and efficient, and the only thing I can’t agree with you about is that your aunt is inconsiderate. She’s an invalid, and she’s a right to be touchy sometimes.”
“Just as you and Chris have a right to pick holes in Elizabeth if you feel like it?”
“Oh! So to you she is Elizabeth!”
“Well, and why not?” He glanced sideways at her in an arrogant manner, his square chin in the air and his dark eyes gleaming as if his temper was barely under control, and he disliked her thoroughly in any case and had long hoped for an opportunity to tell her so. “I call you Jan … My aunt seemed to think that was perfectly all right! Although my original idea about calling you Jane was the sounder one, I think. Jane can be vinegary as well as sweet … the cognomen for an old maid as well as a lover’s rhapsodies.”
“Thanks,” Janine said, with tightening lips.
He stopped the car a few yards from the main gate of Sandals, and turned and regarded her with his dark brows meeting in a frown above the bridge of his nose.
“You don’t have to sit there looking as if I’ve offended you mortally,” he observed. “So far I haven’t made it absolutely clear whether I consider you’re vinegary, or a subject for a lover’s rhapsody.”
“If I were you,” she returned, striving unsuccessfully to open the door on her side and slip out into the road, “I’d go back to Nurse Tempest and soothe her ruffled feelings. I noticed you made a brave attempt to do so during tea, but it’s just possible it didn’t work. She could still be upset and needing your shoulder to cry on. You probably make a habit of offering it to the less vinegary types for that and other purposes, so don’t let me detain you …”
But his hand shot out and he grasped her wrist, and at the same time he put back his head and laughed as if his ill-humour was in process of abating … had, in fact, vanished as if it had never been.
“Why,” he exclaimed, in sudden triumph, “I believe you’re jealous!”
“Don’t be absurd.” She struggled as he determinedly held her in her seat, and because her eyes were smarting badly all at once she blinked them to keep the tears back, and also to ease the pain. “I couldn’t care less what you think about Elizabeth Tempest or—or any other woman! Stephen warned me that you like your lady friends to be undemanding, and that you prefer them in batches rather than
to have to devote much of your time to any one in particular—”
“Stephen said that?” Tim’s voice sounded low and amused, but his dark eyes glinted dangerously.
“Yes.” She averted her face so that she couldn’t see the look in his eyes, but the grip of his fingers hurt her. “I wish you’d let me go!”
“What else did Stephen say to you about me?” Tim’s voice was not so amused, and with his other hand he caught hold of her chin and forced her face towards him. She caught her breath as she saw his thin, dark cheek a bare inch or so from her own.
“Nothing.”
“Do you make a habit of discussing your friends with Stephen? Does his opinion matter to you still?”
“You know very well what I think about Stephen!”
“You’re not by any chance in love with him still, are you?”
“In love with him?” Her brightly-tipped eyelashes flew upwards, and the clear transparency of her eyes was a revelation in itself. “I never was in love with him!”
“You only thought you were?”
“I must have been mad! It—it was because we saw rather a lot of one another …”
“And can you only fall in love with a man you see a lot of? Could you, for instance, fall in love with a man who forced his way into your bedroom without knowing you and said he was going to call you Jane? A man with a lot of lady friends and a disinclination to get involved with them?”
Once more she tried to avert her face, but he declined to permit her to do anything of the kind. Very gently—almost with a kind of silken gentleness—he repeated his question.
“Could you, Jane? Have you never heard that there’s safety in numbers, and that when a man’s heart is as resistant as stone until the right girl comes along he simply can’t afford to be snatched up by some enterprising member of your sex who wouldn’t let it trouble her if he never fell violently in love with her? I’ve never imagined I’m much of a catch, Jane, but ever since I accepted the miracle that little girls with freckles and pigtails grow up into enchanting females I’ve wanted to love one of them so desperately that it would hurt unbearably if she turned me down. I don’t know whether you ever had pigtails, and I should say it’s improbable that you ever had freckles, but that night I woke you up out of your beauty sleep I knew that the Great Moment had arrived for me … You probably didn’t notice it,” with his whimsical, twisted smile, “but my heart jumped right out of my body and I left it lying there on the carpet beside your bed!”
“Oh, Tim!” she whispered, while her whole face coloured delightfully as he held it in his hands—and then because she couldn’t help it she giggled. “In—in that case I must have trodden on it when I got up the next day!” she exclaimed.
He pinched her soft chin with his lean brown thumb and forefinger.
“If you did you almost certainly stooped down afterwards to gather up the pieces,” he speculated. He added: “Being very feminine!”
She smiled at him. It was a tremulous smile, and her eyes were still uncertain.
“So you think I’m feminine?”
“I think you’re adorable!”
“Am I meant to take you seriously?”
“Absolutely seriously.”
“It could be awkward for you—afterwards—if you change your mind about that. A woman is permitted to change her mind, but a man …”
“Don’t worry,” he said, a certain stony decisiveness overspreading his face, while his brown eyes watched her, “I never change my mind once it’s made up. That’s why I’m rather slow at making it up … sometimes!” The expression of his face altered, and a flicker of impatience showed up plainly in his eyes. “But why are we wasting so much time …?” his arms imprisoning her with sudden fierceness. “Is it you who needs time to change your mind? Haven’t you made it up yet, Jane? Because if you haven’t I can’t allow you much more time!”
Shyly she put up a hand and touched his cheek.
“We’ve only known each other a very short while!”
“Does that matter?”
“No.” The breath was coming faster between her parted lips, and her eyes were appealing to him. “But I don’t want to make any more mistakes. It’s too important!”
“Of course it’s important.” She felt him straining her against him, and his lips were moving lightly over her hair and her eyes and the smooth sides of her cheeks. They were very gentle, almost womanishly soft. And then they took possession of her mouth, and they ceased to be gentle or soft … they were the hard, masculine, demanding lips of a man who had made up his mind.
Janine gave a kind of gasp, like a swimmer diving in at the deep end, and thereafter clung to him almost desperately. He kissed her comfortingly, reassuringly.
“You silly little sweet,” he said. “It takes such a lot to convince you …” And then, “Oh, my darling, my darling!”
Chapter XII
HOW long they sat there in the lane, within a stone’s throw of the main gates of Sandals, Janine never afterwards had the least idea, but the rays of the sun were becoming mild and diffused by the time she was capable of taking note of such matters, and she realised with a shock that it must be getting on for dinner time.
“Chris will be wondering what has happened to me,” she murmured. “She’ll be telephoning Tor Park to find out.”
“And my aunt will inform her that we left there a decade or so ago, and we haven’t been seen since,” Tim murmured beside her ear. His eyes were like warm golden-brown pools in which she felt she might drown every time she ventured to lift her own to them. She felt that she wanted to drown … She would be happy to drown in Tim’s eyes, and if it meant oblivion for the rest of her life—well, that was all she craved. Under the influence of the most tremendous emotional upheaval she had ever known in the whole of her life—her pallid affair with Stephen didn’t even merit being regarded as an affair by comparison—she found it impossible to remember that there had been occasions since her acquaintance with Tim had begun when the brown depths of his eyes had puzzled, bewildered and even infuriated her because she had been so desperately afraid they were merely mocking her and making fun of her.
But, with Tim’s arms round her, she knew that the one thing he would never do would be make serious fun of her. He might quiz her occasionally, provoke her sometimes, but the instant the glow started spreading like a secret form of illumination at the backs of his eyes, and the warmth reached out to engulf her, she would know that she was safe, and Tim was a rock to cling to.
Tim whom she had so wilfully underestimated, although his aunt understood him perfectly, Elizabeth Tempest admired enormously, and even Chris was strangely fascinated by … And that set her wondering how Chris would react when she heard the news that her sister had captured the evasive future owner of Tor Park.
Captured, but not agreed to marry … for so far there had been no talk of marriage.
“You—you never struck me as the sort of man who would ever settle down,” she said, when it was possible to talk coherently. “Although you did say something to me once about wishing you had never sold Sandals because you were thinking about settling down. At that time I thought you were planning to make Nurse Tempest the mistress of any establishment you finally settled on.”
He put a finger under her chin and lifted it.
“So you really have been jealous of Elizabeth?” he murmured, while the old disconcerting twinkle appeared in his eyes … a highly gratified twinkle on this occasion, however. “Are you prepared to believe me when I state categorically that Elizabeth and I are good friends and nothing more?”
“If—if you say so,” she answered, burrowing her face into his shoulder to avoid betraying how intensely jealous she had been of Elizabeth at times. But he refused to allow her to hide and forced her face out into the open again.
“I meant it when I said all those things about Elizabeth. She is nice, she is charming,” he told her. “But so is your sister Chris … So are thousands of other wom
en!”
“And you’ve never been tempted by any one of them?”
“Not one.”
“At one time I suspected you of having a weakness for Chris,” she confessed. “Even to-day I thought you were desperately anxious that she should accompany us to Tor Park to have tea with your aunt.”
“I did think it would have been a good idea if she had come with us,” he admitted. “But my principal intention was to try and arouse jealousy in you. You see,” with rather a wry twist to his lips, “I was by no means certain of you. You haven’t exactly gone out of your way to make a fuss of me, have you?”
“And you’re accustomed to having women making a fuss of you?”
He took her by the shoulders and shook her gently.
“Stop having an inferiority complex,” he ordered her. “I love you … I love you so much that it hurts!” with a slight catch on the words.
“Oh, Tim!” she breathed.
“And so far I haven’t heard you say in so many words that you love me!”
“I do, I do,” she assured him, abandoning herself to this glorious new sensation and winding her arms about his neck. “I love you so much that I simply can’t imagine what would have happened to me if it really had been Elizabeth or Chris you liked.”
“There’s one thing you’re forgetting,” he remarked, a little soberly. “Chris is a married woman.” He lowered his cheek to her hair. “Oh, darling, we really are wasting time. When—when will you marry me?”
“Then—then you really do want—?”
“What else?” he demanded, a little roughly, with his mouth very close to hers. “Either you were not brought up at all nicely, or you expect very little. I want to marry you immediately … and by immediately I mean immediately!”
She clung to him in a kind of laughing ecstasy.
“What about all your future plans for travelling abroad? For looking for lost continents …?”
“There no longer are any,” he assured her. He smothered her hair and face arid neck and shoulders with kisses. “And if there were I’d take you with me to look for them.”
