Sweet Bondage

by Dorothy Vernon

  Anger rose in her, sending the blood rushing through her veins. She had a sudden urge to lash out at him, but as she couldn’t match up to him physically she controlled her itching fingers and attacked him verbally. ‘I didn’t make the first move, remember? Don’t make me a scapegoat for your conscience, if that’s what’s troubling you. You were pretty quiet on the subject of brotherly loyalty a minute ago. It was convenient to forget a lot of things while you were having your fun.’

  His mouth compressed in a way that had her biting her lip and bitterly regretting her outspokenness. She would have regretted making that passing reference to his brother in any case, even without fear of reprisal, because her anger wasn’t really the malicious kind. She knew how desperately worried he was about his brother’s condition and she didn’t want to add to his burden.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘That was hitting below the belt. It wasn’t even true.’

  ‘On the contrary, it was a fair comment. I did forget a lot of things I should have remembered. I also made the first move. But that doesn’t absolve you from all blame. You’d make a saint go off the straight and narrow, and I’ve never professed to be a saint. I’ll admit that my judgment has taken a knock.’

  ‘That’s magnanimous of you,’ she scoffed.

  His mouth tightened. ‘I was aware of how you charmed my brother half out of his mind. From the moment he first met you he talked of no one else and acted like a besotted boy. I would have been amused by it all if it hadn’t been so pitiful. I thought he was showing a weakness of character, being unduly susceptible to allow himself to get into that state over a woman. Poor Ian, I see I’ve been hard on him. He didn’t stand a chance. I completely underestimated you. I had no idea you were such a danger to mankind. I should have realized when Andy—your most recent conquest—took a tumble for you.’

  ‘I thought you were my most recent conquest,’ she couldn’t resist flinging at him, bridling at his sarcasm and arrogance.

  His eyebrows rose derisively. ‘My apologies for touching you. I did enjoy the experience; you know how to please a man. But I can promise you that it won’t happen again.’

  How dare he be so insulting! ‘Thank you. I’m delighted to hear it.’

  ‘Have a care,’ he warned. ‘My patience isn’t unlimited and neither is the amount of rope I’m prepared to give you. As I was saying, there won’t be a repeat. You can look as beguiling as you wish if it pleases you to keep in practice. I’m up to all your tricks. You can look at me from under your lashes and flaunt your luscious body at me, but I’m not buying.’

  She did look up from under her lashes, she realized, but not in a coquettish way, as he was suggesting, but only when she was shy or unsure of her ground. As for the other accusation, she did not flaunt herself. ‘My body is not for sale.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t have it as a gift.’

  She was too emotionally overwrought to answer that outrage. Anger and tears vied for first place. The former had proved to be a useless weapon against him, making not the slightest dent in his composure, and she’d long since decided that the latter were unthinkable. She would not break down and weep in front of him no matter how much effort it took to control the weakness.

  She didn’t realize that she was looking at him from under her lashes again until her grabbed her by the arms in a demonstration of icy fury and commanded, ‘Don’t do that. You don’t have to prove anything. I’ve already admitted that your powers to attract a man are immense, but now that I’ve got your measure they won’t work. I can put up a strong line of resistance.’

  ‘So you have nothing to worry about!’ she retorted, thinking how unfair it all was. She dropped her eyelids so he wouldn’t see the tears that were gathering in her eyes. ‘You’re hurting me.’ The hard fingers bruising her flesh were nothing to the inner pain, but her emotions were getting more and more difficult to hide and she would rather he thought she was wincing from physical hurt than mental torture.

  He released his hold immediately, looking taken aback, as if he hadn’t realized he was using violence on her. He made no apology; neither was there any intimation of it in his eyes. Just cold condemnation.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘As if I’ve committed some deadly sin.’

  ‘That’s only because I acted to prevent it.’

  ‘Prevent it?’ she said, perplexed. ‘You mean because you had the willpower to stop just now? No matter how far that had gone it wouldn’t have been a sin against your brother.’

  ‘Come off it, Glenda. You know that’s not what I’m talking about. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m not Glenda, so I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a little ridiculous in keeping up the subterfuge?’

  ‘It isn’t a subterfuge. I mean nothing to your brother and he means nothing to me.’

  ‘That’s true, whatever else is false. I know he means nothing to you. You’ve not even troubled to ask about him. My God, but you’re hard. A stone would have more feelings.’

  ‘I have feelings,’ she declared passionately. ‘I’m sorry about your brother. I should have said something, I know that, and I’m sorry about that, too. But it wasn’t through lack of compassion. I’d be saddened to hear of any stranger being dragged from the mangled wreckage of a car. And that’s what your brother is to me—a stranger.’

  ‘You’ve slipped up badly there, Glenda. But before I go into that I must compliment you on your acting ability. You almost had me believing that you were telling the truth for a minute there.’

  ‘I am telling the truth,’ she said wearily, trying not to let his bitterness and contempt get her down, knowing she was getting the backlash of the concern and anxiety he felt for his brother.

  ‘Perhaps you’d care to tell me how you know that Ian was involved in a road accident, then? I most certainly didn’t go into the details.’

  ‘Angus told me. You’ve been too busy accusing me of things I know nothing about, condemning me out of hand without a hearing, to tell me anything. I’ve had to piece the story together in dribs and drabs.’

  ‘Oh, really!’

  Setting her jaw, she continued. ‘This is what I’ve got so far. The wedding date was set, but then Ian was involved in a serious accident, as a result of which he’s in hospital on the danger list, and if he lives there’s no guarantee that he’ll ever walk again. His fiancée decided that she couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of her life with—and I’m sorry I’ve got to word this so cruelly—with a cripple. So she wrote to Ian, breaking off the engagement, a letter which you intercepted. I think it’s lucky that you did. There’s no knowing what it might have done to him; a bombshell like that shouldn’t be delivered until he’s strong enough to take it. Believe it or not, I admire you for what you’re frying to do. Ian’s got enough to contend with at the moment and I think it’s noble of you to take the law into your own hands to spare him further heartache and disillusion. As far as I can see, there’s only one thing wrong with your plan, and that’s picking me up instead of Glenda.’

  ‘Not again.’

  ‘Yes—but for the last time. I intend to have my say and after this, I promise you, never again. I got this cockeyed notion of taking the boat out and trying to escape to help you. It was in my mind to go to Glenda and plead with her to see Ian through this black patch. She must have loved him once to have agreed to marry him, so I had every hope of convincing her to stand by him now, while he’s so desperately ill. Then, later, when he’s more able to bear up, she could please herself. It would be odds on that her indifference would show through by that time—I should imagine that sort of thing is difficult to hide—and Ian might want to get rid of her. That’s what I hoped to do, but it didn’t work out. I tried and failed. It’s on your conscience now. When you present me at Ian’s bedside, which is presumably what you intend to do the moment he’s well enough to know his visi
tors, he’s going to think his mind is affected, or yours, when, instead of his loving fiancée, he sees me.’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  ‘Quite finished. Of course you won’t believe a word I’ve said. I didn’t expect you to. You’re a self-opinionated, pompous bigot who can’t conceive the possibility that—just for once—you might be wrong.’

  6

  On legs that were undeniably shaky, she walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Once she reached the privacy of her bedroom she collapsed on the four-poster. The down-filled quilt billowed up in protest at the weight of her body and soaked up the tears that flowed unchecked from her eyes.

  She could hardly believe that she had spoken to Maxwell like that. If that outburst hadn’t convinced him, nothing would. But not one glimmer of belief had softened the awesome look on his forbidding face. Despite the granite squareness of his chin she had thought that if she chipped away long enough she would eventually get through to him, but now she finally accepted defeat. She had meant what she’d said. Enough was enough and she was definitely calling a halt. She’d told him repeatedly that she was Gemma Coleridge without making the smallest impression on him. No one could say she hadn’t tried or blame her for giving up. Let him go on thinking she was Glenda Channing. It was nothing to her if his poor brother got the shock of his life at having a strange girl foisted on him as his fiancée!

  Who was she trying to convince? Of course she didn’t mean it, Ian had suffered enough without that

  and she couldn’t possibly take that hardhearted attitude, but what could she do to make things right? How could she get Maxwell to believe that she was telling the truth?

  Too many things had been against her from the start. She had been driving Glenda’s car and carrying Glenda’s handbag. Coincidence? Or had it been a deliberate plant? Maxwell had never once wavered in his version, which was that he had been on the Ash-le-dale road waiting for her, that is, waiting for Glenda, by prearrangement. Could it be true? Had Glenda said that she would meet him and then changed her mind? He had admitted that he hadn’t met Glenda before, so the arrangements must have been made by letter or telephone.

  When they’d talked in the cafe it had been obvious to Gemma that Glenda was deeply distressed about something. She had even asked if talking about it would help. Glenda’s reply had been along the lines of, ‘It’s all been talked out and decided upon, but not by me.’ And then, if Gemma’s memory served her correctly, she’d said, ‘I shall very probably take the course I’ve been told I must take, but that’s not the point. It should be my decision.’

  At the time Gemma had assumed that her father had been laying down the law about something. Clifford Channing would certainly try to talk his daughter out of entering into a marriage with a partner who was not in peak physical condition. What if Maxwell had offered to help her go into hiding to escape her father’s persuasion, but then Glenda had had a change of heart about going with Maxwell? Perhaps she knew how intensely Maxwell felt and what lengths he was prepared to take to safeguard his brother’s peace of mind and so, rather than meet him to tell him she was backing out, she had hatched this plot for Gemma to be there in her place. Perhaps she had been afraid that he wouldn’t let her back out. Perhaps the whole idea of planting a substitute had come to her as she had overtaken Gemma on the road into Ashford. She could have watched her park her Mini in the square, then taken her own car to the garage, where she’d left it in the forecourt before going in search of Gemma. Ashford wasn’t all that big and even if she hadn’t spotted her in Betty’s Cafe she could have made her way back to the square and waited for Gemma to return for her car. There had been nothing wrong with Glenda’s car, of course, and her urgent need of transport had been a pretext, all part of the plot to get Gemma to change cars and then be picked up in her place. The more Gemma thought about it the more likely it seemed that she had been set up. She couldn’t get over Glenda’s deviousness. If she was right, then even taking the wrong handbag had been deliberate on Glenda’s part.

  What a gullible fool she’d been, tripping over herself to help Glenda out. Oh, yes, she’d been an easy victim. How Glenda must have laughed at her willingness to be duped. And could she really blame Maxwell for the attitude he was taking with all the evidence that was piled against her?

  Angus would be coming again tomorrow to bring the newspapers. Perhaps there would be something in one of them about her disappearance. She wouldn’t make the headlines, as Glenda would have done had she disappeared without a trace, but surely even a nonentity like herself was worth a couple of lines of space? If she could show Maxwell the report that a girl called Gemma Coleridge was missing from home—the name she had been insisting all this time was hers—then surely he would have to believe her.

  She felt better now that she had this tiny hope to cling to, even if it did bring with it the sad reminder that people would be worrying about her. Miss Davies, Barry, her neighbors in the village—if only she could have got word to them that she was all right. Glenda would know, if not her exact whereabouts, pretty much what had happened to her. But having gone to such elaborate measures in the first place, would it suit her purpose to speak up?

  Sighing over the problem, seeing no way round it at the present moment, she decided to take a bath and wash her hair, hoping it would soothe her tangled nerves and soak out some of the tension.

  Closing the bathroom door, she began to feel sorry for herself because Maxwell hadn’t believed that Andy had set the pace and had blamed it on her ‘immense powers to attract a man.’ He had called her a danger to mankind. Was she a danger to him? Did he find her attractive?

  The winsome little face that stared back at her from the bathroom mirror didn’t excite her. Milk and roses complexion, that was good, but her mouth was too full and her dove-gray eyes too widely spaced. Her lashes were long and thick and a darker gold than her hair. They swept down and she could no longer see her face in the mirror, nor could she see the shadows her eyelashes cast on her cheeks. Gold-tipped silky cob-webs, demure, yet tantalizing, lifting her face from solemnity into caprice and emphasizing the sensuality of her full, rose-pink mouth.

  She ran her bath and, after only a momentary hesitation, tipped in some of the perfumed, very definitely feminine bath essence she discovered on the bathroom shelf. Morag’s or Fiona’s? She sniffed. Fiona’s, she thought.

  She wondered about Fiona, what she was really like and the exact nature of the relationship she shared with Maxwell. Maxwell obviously admired her a great deal—but in what way? Was his affection strictly cousinly and, if so, would it stay that way? Men in Maxwell’s position were obliged to marry to produce an heir. What traits would he demand in a wife? She knew the answer to that without even probing for it. All the traits that too-good-to-be-true Fiona possessed!

  Her hair said a golden thank you for being washed. If she had one vanity it was her hair. It was long, and in keeping with her self-willed nature, went its own way, which was rather limiting when arranging it. The styles she admired in the glossy magazines were not for her. It either did its own thing, falling in gently bouncing waves to her shoulders, or let her wind it into a height-giving top knot with tendrils that escaped round her face and the nape of her neck. It made her look like a child playing at being grown-up. In the mistaken belief that it made her look older, she put it up now, even though it was still slightly damp. She thought that if she looked more mature on the outside she might feel more confident inside. She needed all the props she could find to handle the delicate situation she found herself in.

  Instead of putting the jeans and sweater back on she thought she’d wear the red housecoat Maxwell had put at her disposal. True to his word, he had dug up something to tie it up with, a rope-type belt which she knotted round her waist, lifting the excess of material to blouse out above it.

  The smell of something cooking drifted up from the kitchen, making her realize how hungry she was. It must be something to do with the air, but she
had never eaten so much. If she went on like this she feared for her trim waist. Not with too much distress, though, because she was too thin and any extra weight would be welcome.

  She paused for a moment at the head of the stairs to look down into the somber reaches of the dimly lit hall. How quickly the days drew in. In a little while it would be completely dark. She deliberately filled her mind with frivolities to shut out the feeling that someone was watching her. Outside, the wind had risen to rush through the Scots pines, making an eerie, whining sound, like the distant skirl of bagpipes. Down in the hall it was unnervingly, chillingly silent. A shadow moved in the murkiness and she tensed, her heart jerking uncomfortably before quickening its beat. Ghosts had a predilection for old houses and Scottish history included more than its share of tormented souls walking down the centuries seeking retribution, carrying feuds beyond the grave.

  The shadow moved again and she released her breath in a laugh. It wasn’t a ghost that stalked her, freezing her feet immobile and holding her its frightened prey. It was Maxwell. She wondered what had gone through his mind as he stood looking at her, the light behind her making her hair a golden aureole. Why hadn’t he spoken to make his presence known?

  Afterward she would never know exactly how it happened, what combination of things was responsible. Her unnerved state of mind, the dim lighting, the length of her borrowed housecoat. One moment she was walking down the stairs with confidence, the next her foot was seeking stability where there was none. She tried to regain her balance and she might have achieved it but for the hampering folds of the housecoat. The soft material clung tenaciously to her thighs and wrapped round her legs like a thing suddenly possessed with life and bent on punishing her for having the temerity to wear someone else’s property. She couldn’t have been more surprised if Fiona had stepped out of the shadows and pushed her down the stairs. She missed three steps to every one she contacted and landed in a heap at Maxwell’s feet.