by Lynne Graham
On her way back to her own car, she had heard the sound of glass shattering somewhere near by. She should have ignored it, minded her own business. Later she had told herself that. Instead, in the best tradition of interfering busybodies, she had walked off the lane into the trees. It had been a clear, moonlit summer’s evening, warm enough for bare arms and a light dress. She had found Blaze slumped beneath a tree, shivering as though he were in a force-ten gale and freezing. There had been a thin trail of blood on his temples and a blackening bruise. A whisky bottle had lain broken several feet away and even in the open air the smell of booze had been powerful.
Although she would never have approached Blaze in normal circumstances, the situation had urged her to take charge. ‘You’ve had an accident…you need a doctor—’
‘This is private property.’ There had been a slight but definite slur, marring those invariably clipped vowels. ‘Go to hell!’
‘I can’t leave you here like th-this,’ she objected vehemently.
‘Why not?’ Angling his tousled dark head up with a groan of discomfort, he focused on her with feverishly glittering eyes.
‘I just can’t! You’ve had an accident—’
‘So?’ An insolent brow quirked with innate superiority.
‘You should be in hospital, and you shouldn’t have been drinking in your condition.’
‘Sorry, Nanny…will strive harder tomorrow.’
He looked so staggeringly vulnerable in spite of the backchat. Unexpectedly, her eyes prickled with moisture as she recalled that he had just buried his grandfather. Clearly he was upset. Clearly, contrary to all the reports that he and the old man had rejoiced in mutual hatred, he was distressed by his grandfather’s death. She crouched down beside him. ‘I’m really sorry a-about your loss,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Loss? That’s a lower-middle-class euphemism if ever I heard one! If I post the old boy as a missing person, do you think it would bring him back?’
‘I didn’t mean to be c-clumsy.’
‘I’d like to say sorry,’ he whispered as if she weren’t there.
‘I could go up to the Manor and call an ambulance.’
‘Sorry for existing…always blamed me for that, never Barb. I was an immaculate conception, do you know that?’
‘If you let me help you up, I could take you home,’ she said in desperation.
‘Women always want to take me home.’ He was shivering more violently than ever. ‘And I don’t even know you.’
In the state he was in, he hadn’t recognised her and, oddly enough, that knowledge made her bolder. Reaching down, she planted a determined hand on his arm. ‘Come on,’ she pressed bossily. ‘I’ll take you back up to the Manor.’
‘Cold,’ he admitted.
He staggered upright at her urging but half fell against her, pinning her between the tree and his own hard body. With difficulty she extricated herself and directed his faltering steps back to the lane. He got into her car with surprising docility and she drove on to the grass verge to get past the Porsche.
Torbald Manor was in complete darkness. She rang the antiquated front bell.
‘Nobody in,’ he mumbled. ‘Sent everyone home.’
‘Have you a key?’
She got him into the house through the rear courtyard. A maze of passages finally brought them into the vast front entrance hall. He collapsed at the foot of the stairs, seriously worrying her. Coaxing him upright again took time and she helped him upstairs, digging directions out of him to find his bedroom. There, she gratefully espied a phone and was in the very act of dialling the local doctor when Blaze abruptly realised who she was.
‘Good God,’ he slurred, reaching for her without warning. ‘It’s little Chrissy Hamilton…and to think that I had you down as shy!’
‘I d-don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Struggling to pull free of the frighteningly strong grip of those hard hands, she gasped, ‘You’re hurting me!’
‘And that wasn’t supposed to be part of the experience?’ He laughed derisively, scanning her hotly flushed face with feverishly bright eyes. ‘Chrissy Hamilton in my bedroom, desperate to play nurse…surprise…surprise,’ he gibed thickly.
Almost hypnotised by his brilliant gaze and trembling, she mumbled, ‘I don’t understand—’
He yanked her closer, his wide mouth clenched in a savagely hard line. ‘Save the game-playing for the teenage boys, sweetheart… You think I don’t know what you want?’ he murmured with an insidious drugging sweetness at odds with that blatant stare. ‘You think that those huge green eyes don’t talk enough for you? When you look at me like that, I know exactly what you want…’
Her brain was sluggish, her physical response to his proximity already sentencing her to baffled paralysis while she struggled to comprehend what was wrong with her. The heat of his hard body was warming hers, the all-male scent of him in her nostrils, a crazily intimate experience. She was holding her breath as though she was afraid to breathe, every muscle in her slender length unnaturally taut, a throbbing tension entirely new to her making a nonsense of her ability to think.
And then he kissed her.
It sounded like a silly line in a song, she told herself, sinking back to the present with a deep shudder of recollection. And in the same moment she had been engulfed by raw sensation, so powerful and so overwhelming that she had lost control, surrendering herself utterly and completely to the rough, invasive heat of his hard mouth on hers. Seconds…that was all it had taken, seconds in which to learn that her body had feelings and desires quite divorced from the power of her intelligence. Never until that moment had she understood how devastating sexual desire could be, and that she should have had that humiliating discovery forced on her by Blaze Kenyon would have been punishment enough.
For he hadn’t even wanted her! He had believed that she wanted him. He had been cruelly, coldly scoring a point. His look of revulsion as he’d thrust her back from him would live with her forever. He hadn’t had to say that she was fat and utterly without the smallest attraction; that look had said it for him. Stumbling, she had fallen back against the bed and he had had her cornered. Then the verbal beating had begun and, throughout, stricken by horrified paralysis, she had cowered there, looking everywhere but at him, and somehow during those minutes every aspect of that bedroom had become brutally imprinted in her memory.
She had tried so hard not to listen but Blaze had been remorseless. He had told her that he wouldn’t touch her with a barge-pole, that she was a very silly little girl, who had just made a gigantic fool of herself, and that if he had been in any fit state to drive he would have dragged her home and informed her father what she had been up to. Her father would have slaughtered her on the doorstep. In terror, she had shivered and shaken, making no attempt to defend herself, because her physical response to him had demolished her only defence in advance.
‘Get the hell out of here,’ he had finally slurred, staggering back as if he was finding it difficult to stay upright. And she had fled, sobbing and sick to the stomach with the taste of raw humiliation he had dealt out without quarter.
‘Chrissy…are you OK?’ Dragged from that nightmare of recollection, Chrissy flinched back in horror when her distant eyes focused abruptly on Blaze. ‘What the hell is the matter with you this morning?’ he demanded. ‘I said I want lunch early.’
‘F-fine,’ she stammered.
His ebony brows drawn together in a questioning frown, he grabbed up his jacket and strode out, Rosie tagging at his heels.
Chrissy unfroze and raced out after them. ‘Rosie!’
Blaze swung round. ‘She can tag along for an hour, get some fresh air. I’ll send her back pronto if she gets under my feet,’ he asserted.
‘The yard’s no place for a child,’ Hamish intervened, grim-mouthed.
‘But this child lives here.’ Blaze enveloped the five starfish fingers straining up to his hand with a cool air of finality. ‘She might as well start learning wha
t she does and doesn’t do out here now.’
Chrissy gritted her teeth. Maybe Rosie’s slavish adoration flattered him, but sooner or later her demands would irritate rather than amuse, and then Chrissy would be forced to play the bad guy, struggling to keep one very persistent toddler out of his hair. Didn’t he realise what he was doing? Why was he encouraging Rosie? When Blaze got bored, her sister would be hurt.
She was baking when Hamish walked in, his weather-beaten face set in a pugnacious scowl. ‘You think you’re so clever,’ he condemned fiercely, taking up a militant stance on the other side of the table. ‘You’ve even fooled Floss. She always likes to think the best of people. She doesn’t want to see what’s going on under her nose—’
Her cheeks warming, Chrissy straightened. ‘You misunderstood what you saw this morning, Hamish—’
‘I’ll give you a free word of advice,’ Hamish cut in harshly. ‘Get back to wherever you came from and stay there! You’re not welcome here.’
The force of his loathing hit Chrissy hard. She was in shock. She had known that Hamish neither liked nor approved of them, but, naïvely, she had not been prepared for so open an attack. Pale and tense, she began, ‘I th-think—’
‘Yes, you sit down and you think hard. There’ll be no rich pickings here for either you or your sister!’ Hamish told her roughly. ‘You had your lot when the old man died and there’ll be no more. Don’t you listen to Floss talking about forgiving and forgetting. Blaze hasn’t forgotten. When your sister came dancing up to him at Newmarket, he played her like a fish on a line, just like he’s playing you!’
‘My sister?’ Chrissy’s head was spinning. ‘Elaine was at N-Newmarket?’
‘Aye, serving herself up on a plate,’ Hamish imparted crudely.
Chrissy was shattered by the revelation that Elaine had already contrived to meet up with Blaze again. He hadn’t mentioned the fact either. A deep flush banished her pallor, for she was mortified by the older man’s derision. But that sensation was short-lived as she registered that Hamish evidently cherished none of his wife’s inhibitions about referring to whatever had happened three years ago.
‘Rich pickings?’ she repeated with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Three years ago, your sister waited until Blaze was abroad and then paid a call on Lord Whitley with your father. All very friendly, it was, I’m sure,’ Hamish sneered. ‘It was easy to sucker in an old man in his eighties—’
‘“Sucker in”?’ she repeated unsteadily.
‘You know exactly what they did!’ he condemned bitterly.
‘I genuinely d-don’t!’ Chrissy insisted hotly.
‘Blaze had dumped her and she wanted her own back, was that it?’ Hamish demanded fiercely. ‘Everybody knew Lord Whitley liked a game of cards. The old boy was a gambler but he didn’t have the money to back up some high-rolling poker game! Your father took him for thousands—’
Chrissy swallowed with difficulty. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Between them, your father and your sister killed him,’ Hamish condemned bitterly. ‘Lord Whitley was a gentleman. He saw those losses as a debt of honour but he couldn’t settle up. He didn’t have the money and your father dunned him like a debt collector!’
‘I d-don’t believe you…I d-don’t believe you,’ Chrissy mumbled in shaken repetition.
‘The shame and the worry of it all brought on that heart attack. He was a very healthy old man until that card game,’ Hamish asserted wrathfully. ‘He was too proud to ask Blaze for help, and ever since Blaze has blamed himself for bringing your sister into the old man’s radius. That’s how they talked their way through the door—using Blaze as a reference. Lord Whitley thought he was just playing a little poker with friends. He was eighty-five years old. It was a filthy, dirty scam! They couldn’t touch Blaze, so they chose an easier prey—’
‘No!’ Chrissy raised unsteady hands to cover her damp, hot face. She felt physically sick. She wanted to say that she didn’t believe it could have happened that way, but she couldn’t forget how enraged her father had been when Blaze dropped Elaine. And when Jim Hamilton wanted to hurt anyone, he hit their bank balance. But to approach an old man with a known weakness for gambling with the deliberate intent of fleecing him…and then to plague him to pay up money that he didn’t have? Would even her father stoop that low? She didn’t want to remember her father’s bone-deep resentment of the upper classes. He had been born with it, and his loathing had intensified when many of those same people had repeatedly refused invitations to his home. Never had it occurred to him that it was his personality, not his background, which was his biggest handicap.
That loathing had gone underground when Blaze had started seeing Elaine. Jim Hamilton would have forgiven much had Blaze proved properly appreciative of his daughter’s charms and married her. Indeed her father would have exulted in Elaine’s becoming Mrs Blaze Kenyon. There would have been no more cracks about the upper classes then. But Elaine had been shot down in flames like so many ambitious girls before her.
White and trembling, Chrissy collided with Hamish’s grim, unforgiving stare, wanting so badly to be able to defend her family but horribly aware that her father would have been perfectly capable of plotting such a revenge, and Elaine equally capable in her bitterness of colluding with him.
‘If it wasn’t for that wee lassie of yours, I wouldn’t be warning you off,’ Hamish admitted harshly. ‘Blaze is a total bastard when he’s crossed and he has a long memory. He’ll break you and your precious sister before he’s finished. If you can’t see what’s coming, you’re a fool, and only a fool would ever have come up here!’
He left her standing there in a state of shock. Her mind could not yet embrace the full enormity of what her father and her sister stood accused of. Had they known that Lord Whitley wasn’t a rich man? Chrissy hadn’t known. She had simply looked at Torbald Manor and assumed that the Kenyons were wealthy, but, with the hindsight of maturity, she could appreciate that an ancestral home and a title did not necessarily mean a very large bank balance. The Kenyons might well have been struggling like so many other landed families simply to hold on to what they had and survive. And yet Blaze appeared to be anything but cash-poor now.
Then what relevance did that have to the past? It in no way condoned what her father and sister had done. Suddenly, Chrissy couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. Washing the flour off her hands, she sped off to find Blaze.
She had to trek up to the jumps where the grooms were working the horses. It was a cold, crisp day with more than a hint of frost. The breeze clawed her hair into wild tangles. By the time she drew level with Blaze, she was shivering and wishing she had stopped to collect her coat on the way out.
‘Kissy!’ Rosie announced, yanking at the hem of his waxed jacket to attract his attention.
His dark head turned, impatience stamped on his striking features. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded bluntly. ‘I’m busy.’
Briefly she studied her mud-caked shoes and then she threw her head back. If she didn’t tackle him now, she might not get a chance later. The builders would be all over the house. ‘I want to know—’
‘Yes?’ he prompted shortly.
‘I…I want to know if it’s t-true that my father took your grandfather f-for a lot of money in a poker game…and then pestered him for payment,’ she shot at him in a stammering rush.
The brilliant sapphire eyes narrowed. Disorientatingly, there was no change of expression, nothing whatsoever to tell her whether or not she had taken him by surprise. ‘You didn’t know… Who told you?’ he probed almost lazily.
‘I d-don’t think that’s relevant…’
‘Hamish,’ he mused.
Her small hands clenched into fists. ‘Is it true?’
‘Forty thousand quids’ worth of true,’ Blaze told her, utilising the same disturbingly unemotional intonation.
‘F-forty thousand pounds?’ she
gasped incredulously, unable to credit his apparent calm. ‘There must have been some sort of misunderstanding—’
‘No.’ With that one silky word, he cut her off mid-sentence.
She collided with drowningly blue eyes and her throat closed over, making it hard for her to swallow. His expression hadn’t changed but the temperature had dropped below freezing. It was like coming up smash-bang against a wall of ice. She found that she couldn’t take her eyes off him. It was terrifying, chilling and yet oddly compulsive. Behind the ice burned a savagely implacable force of will intriguingly at war with the cool, dispassionate front he wore for the world.
It had been a mistake to tackle him without forethought. She had acted on impulse, something she did all too often, she conceded with exasperation. But she was still attempting to come to grips with what Hamish had told her.
‘Satisfied?’ he pressed impatiently, patently unconcerned by her visible distress.
‘But you gave me a job,’ she whispered in helpless bewilderment.
A broad shoulder lifted in an infinitesimal shrug. He quirked an ebony brow. ‘So?’
Her cheeks reddened fiercely. He was well aware that she had had nothing to do with what had happened, yet did he really cherish no animosity towards her for the blood that ran in her veins? She wanted to smash the ice holding her at bay. She wanted to know how he really felt, and the snarling force of her own sudden frustration astonished her. She wanted the truth, not a macho pretence of indifference.
‘It was a long time ago,’ he murmured with silky emphasis.
‘Don’t do that!’ she burst out, emerald-green eyes welded to him in raw frustration. ‘Don’t lie to me!’
A tiny muscle clenched taut at the corner of his wide, sensual mouth. Her percipience had surprised him. ‘Why should I lie?’ he demanded softly.
‘I…I don’t know.’ Abruptly she raised unsteady hands and pushed her wildly blowing hair back from her wind-stung cheekbones, her beautiful eyes fixed pleadingly on his savagely handsome features. ‘You s-stay away from my sister!’ she told him with sudden ferocity.
