RAPTURE OF THE DESERT by Violet Winspear
Chrys didn't trust men, and she had no intention of allowing herself to fall in love with one and sacrifice her career as a ballet dancer as a result. And when an unhappy accident meant that she must rest for a year and forget her dancing altogether during that time, she was even more determined not to get involved in any romantic situation. It was not, therefore, the best time for her to meet Anton de Casenove, who was just the type of man she most needed to be on her guard against — half Russian prince, half man of the desert; a romantic combination. Conscious of his overwhelming masculine appeal, Chrys hurriedly got a job that would take her right away from him, into the heart of the Arabian desert. But Anton de Casenove was a determined man . .
Printed in Great Britain
All the characters in this book have no existence Outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the
same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure
invention.
First published 1972
This edition 1973
@ Violet Winspear 1972
For copyright reasons, this book may not be issued on loan or otherwise except in its original soft cover.
ISBN 0263 71437 3
CHAPTER I
"You have my answer," said the man who was dressed all in grey, with even a distinguished dash of it through his hair. "A year from today and you might dance again. The fall you had from those railway steps was a serious one and you might well have been killed, or crippled for life. But luck and skill were on your side and the operation which you underwent was almost a total success. It will become a complete one, if for the next twelve months you set aside your career in ballet and turn to some less strenuous occupation."
"A whole year! " The girl in the chair at the opposite side of Van Harrington's desk looked at him as if he pronounced for her a life sentence away from her beloved dancing. Indeed it was her life. Since the age of seven she had worked and slaved for love of the dance, and now at twenty-two she was a recognized soloist, and only a few weeks previous to her accident she had danced in Russia at the Bolshoi Theatre where the stage was so wonderfully spacious, so made for those dramatic ballets which were for her the breath of life.
"Dancing is all I know," she said tensely.
"Unless you wish to undo all the skilful work which has made you fit again, then forget that you are a dancer, Miss Devrel. A year is not forever."
"You said cautiously that I might dance again, Mr. Harrington. Your verdict doesn't sound conclusive."
"Medical men are rather like bankers." His smile was brief but kind. "We are cautious with our handouts. I have given you back a sound enough body, but you must be careful not to squander your strength. You could return to your career next week, and be again my patient in four weeks. Wait a year and we will see then —"
"But a year away from dancing could mean the end
for me! Unless a ballet dancer's body is kept continually in practice there is a gradual lessening of speed and grace." Chrys Devrel drew a sigh of near despair! "If you say I must stop dancing, then I'm finished."
"Nonsense! " Now he spoke sharply, as if scolding a child. "Life has many things to offer an attractive young woman. Your heart won't easily break, but your body could be ruined for good unless you accept my advice. Well, Miss Devrel, what are you going to do?"
She avoided his stern gaze by looking down at her hands, slim and clasped together as if they sought to comfort each other. "You don't give me much choice," she said at last. "I must swallow the bitter pill of a ruined career in order to keep my bodily health. I — I'm not altogether a fool, so I shall have to abide by what you say."
"You will make me a firm promise?" He rose to his feet and came round to where she sat. Chrys stood up and she felt numb inside as he took her hands in his. "Come now, young woman, give me your word that you will not perform a single pirouette for the next twelve months."
"I wouldn't dare a single ballet step," she replied. "One alone would lead me on to dance and dance, until I dropped. That's how much I love to dance! "
"You have, perhaps, never tried to love anything else because to dance was all-sufficing. Now you have to face an alternative. Now you have time and leisure —"
"No, I shall need to work," she broke in. "The clinic and the operation took most of my savings. I have to find a job, but heaven alone knows what I'm suited for! I dare not find work in a theatre — my will-power isn't strong enough for that."
The surgeon gazed down at her, his look an effortless one, because she had dark gold hair framing a white, slender, purely-boned face. The small lobes of her ears were pierced by small gold rings, and her eyes were intensely blue. She gave an impression of being fragile,
but in reality she was supple as fine silk and equally resilient.
She tilted her chin. "Something will come along, I daresay, but I can't promise to give it my devotion or my love Thank you again, Mr. Harrington, for all your kindness."
He walked with her to the door of his consultation room. "Goodbye, Miss Devrel. As I said before, a year soon passes."
"I suppose it does, "she said, but as she left him and made her way down the stairs to the front door she knew that even a week away from the barre could rob a dancer of some of her skill. She smiled absently at the woman who opened the door for her, and as she stepped into Wimpole Street she felt as if it might as well have been raining instead of looking so bright and cheerful. She walked to the end of the street and there she hailed a cab and asked the driver to take her to the St. Clement's Hotel, where she was meeting her sister for tea.
Dove took life as it came and had never bothered about a career. Dove had wanted only to marry, and in a couple of weeks she would walk up the aisle and look glowingly expectant and content.
Chrys sat back against the leather upholstery of the cab and breathed the tang of cigar smoke left by the previous occupant. Life for her had become so tangled up since that awful moment at Fenchurch Street Station when she tripped on the steps there, while running to catch a train. She had fallen backwards, all the way down to the hard ground, crushing a couple of the fine, intricate bones in her spine. The pain had been unbelievable, and the fear of never walking again had been like a nightmare from which she had seemed not to awake for hours and days.
The cab swept through Soho, so unnaturally quiet at this time of the day, and made its way past a towered church that looked so old in the sunlight. She noted the time by the church clock and knew that Dove would al-
ready be up in the penthouse lounge, gazing dreamily from the wide windows, or studying that sweet and simple engagement ring of hers. With that unimpaired grace which had made it too easy for her to believe that she would soon be able to dance again Chrys stepped out of the cab and paid the driver. She felt his eyes on her face, but it meant little to her that like Van Harrington he found the bones, and the shape and the colour of her eyes, a pleasing blend.
She turned and walked into the hotel. She crossed the carpeted foyer to the express lifts and pressed the button of the one that would take her up to the lounge. Dove would be sympathetic, but she would be like the surgeon and say that Chrys should count her blessings. Her health was restored and she could walk. Dove would smile that dove-like smile of hers and insinuate that Chrys find a beau and enjoy the pleasure of falling in love.
There was a little twist of a smile on Chrys's mouth as the lift doors opened and she stepped out and saw her sister composedly seated on a long couch by the panoramic windows, the sun on her smooth young profile.
Dove turned instinctively a
s if she felt the sudden tightening of the bond between them. A smile broke on her soft pink lips and she jumped to her feet. Her hair was a lighter gold than Chrys's, her eyes a gentler blue, and the curve of her chin was less obstinate. She was the pretty sister, the more popular one with the young men of Westcliff, their home town. She had not the haughty tilt to her head that made Chrys seem too distant to touch. Her lips were not those of a passionate and talented spirit.
She was like her name, a dove, and Chrys loved her, but could never be half so sweet, or ready for the tender delights of love with a young executive who, quite literally, adored his bride-to-be.
The sisters embraced, and then a waiter came to take their order. "Tea and cream cakes," said Dove, who in
a couple of years would be plump and quite unconcerned.
"Well, darling?" She studied her sister's composed but very white face with concerned eyes. "What was the great man's verdict?"
"I must give up dancing for a year, or find myself flat on my back again." Chrys spoke through forcibly controlled lips.
"Well, that isn't too bad." Dove squeezed her hand. "A year will soon go by and then you can start again, if that's what you truly want."
"I can think of nothing else to want." A thread of emotion broke through the control of Chrys's voice. Dove had never really understood her temperament; her need to find poetry and passion through the medium of the dance. Dove could only see life through the eyes of an average young woman seeking security and protection by marrying a nice, steady, loving man. Dove was not — artistic.
Chrys sighed and gazed from the windows at the panorama of London. Somewhere in that teeming city she must find another occupation and hope it would keep her busy enough, and at the end of the day tired enough not to pine after the ballet company and the people she was so in tune with. God, but it would be awful not to be among her own sort, living a life that was never dull or humdrum. There was magic in the air breathed by those connected with ballet. There was beauty of movement, and the drama of temperament.
"Heaven knows what I shall find to do! " Her blue eyes burned with resentment and unshed tears, but unlike Dove she never found it easy to relieve her feelings by weeping. She was much more inclined to give way to temper.
The waiter arrived with a tray on which stood tea things and a plate of delectable pastries. He arranged the pot and cups on the table in front of them and withdrew.
"Shall I be mother?" Dove giggled a little, for it was
an open secret that she planned to start a family as soon as she was married to Jeremy.
"Yes, do enjoy yourself and get in some practice," said Chrys, a trifle scornfully. "Honestly, Dove, have you never wanted to do something exciting with your life?"
"I consider marriage a very exciting thing " Dove poured the tea, and with a smile of anticipation she selected a cream and honey slice, almost purring with pleasure. "One of these days, Chrys, you're going to fall in love with a bump, and it will so shake you that you won't know whether you're on your head or your heels. I hope I'm around to see it happen."
Chrys stirred her tea moodily. "I just love to dance, and can't believe that any man could offer me the delight I feel when I spin across a stage and stretch my body to the very limits of its endurance."
"Heavens, it sounds such hard work." Dove forked pastry into her pink mouth. "I've never known you to relax, Chrys. In fact the only time I've ever seen you flat on your back was during those weeks you spent in hospital. D'you remember what Nan used to call us when we were kids? The Persian tabby, and the sleek alley cat! She wasn't far wrong, was she? I like comfort and being pampered. But you like to go prowling among the arty types of London, alert and sleek as any alley cat, but without the amoral temperament. Have you never been attracted to a man?"
Chrys reviewed in her mind the various men she had met during the course of her career. Some she had admired for their artistic abilities but she couldn't remember losing a heartbeat over a single one of them. "Perhaps I'm frigid," she said, with a cynical smile. "Well, Dove, have you any ideas about what I should do while my career goes to pot in the coming year?"
"Don't say it like that, Chrys! As if your life is half over." Dove stopped eating pastry like a gourmand and regarded her sister with fond, and faintly, anxious eyes. "Look, darling, there is a job you can tackle if
only you'll shake off your moodiness and try to be interested in other things beside Swan Lake and being the Pavlova of the Seventies. I wouldn't mention it before you saw Van Harrington and heard what he had to say about your future —"
"A job?" Chrys broke in. "Not in that darned office of Jerry's?"
"Don't call him Jerry," Dove pleaded. "It makes me think of that strip cartoon, the one about the cat and the mouse. No, pet, this has to do with Jeremy's aunt, the one who travels a lot, and who used to go on 'digs' with her husband. It's a sort of mania with her. France one month, Scotland the next, and like as not Romania for good measure! Well, my darling spouse-to-be was telling me that she's been left in the lurch by her travelling companion, a mousy little woman who suddenly ran off with an American bartender in Paris. Jeremy said his Aunt Kate was livid. She has this journey all fixed up for the East, and can't seem to find the right person to keep her company — Chrys, the job would be better for you than some nine-to-five office routine. You'd be bound to hate that."
"And prefer being companion to some bossy globetrotting woman?" It seemed so mid-Victorian, so absurd a role for her, that Chrys had to laugh. "Not on your life, dear sister! I'm not cut out for dabbing eau de cologne on an elderly brow, and reading the saga of Barchester while the train speeds through some uncomfortable Eastern landscape. I'd hate trotting round bazaars, being mousy and obedient."
"But I don't think Aunt Kate is like that at all," Dove objected. "Jeremy says she's his favourite aunt and quite a worldly sort of woman. She once wrote a thriller about the tomb of that Egyptian boy king — king of the moon, wasn't he? It was a best-seller, I believe. And she knows lots of interesting people, and helped to get refugees out of India not so long ago. You'd be bound to like her."
"H'm. "Chrys sat thoughtful, her face at its most
pensive and therefore its most beautiful; the classic, half-enchanted face of the ballerina. "I couldn't stand a fluffy type of employer, or a butch with bobbed hair We once had a choreographer like that, and she came to my dressing-room one rehearsal morning and made a pass at me."
"No! " Dove's eyes widened to such an extent that they threatened to fall out. "Whatever did you do?"
"Told her frankly that because I wasn't sleeping around with men that didn't mean I preferred the company of a woman. She hated me after that. Those sort of women harbour grudges, unlike men who take a slap if they make an unwanted pass and then shrug it off."
"I'd be terrified of the people you've known, Chrys." Dove gave a little shiver. "Why don't you find a nice young man and do what I'm doing? Marriage isn't so bad."
"It's a tie." Chrys poured herself some more tea and added milk but no sugar. Instinctively she was still looking after her svelte dancing figure. "And meeting all sorts of people is all part of living. I'd sooner have my eyes open than closed to the oddities of life."
"Yet," murmured Dove, "you look so unworldly. A little like Undine when you dance the part. Part enchanted. In some ways I believe you shrink from love because it means sharing yourself with another person."
"Yes, perhaps," said Chrys. "Men can be terribly demanding. Even your Jeremy will expect you to live for him. He'll often take you for granted, but heaven help you if you ever show him a moment's disinterest. He'll go out on a binge, or find himself a blonde to flirt with."
"Don't you mean a brunette?" Dove smiled and touched her fair hair with her ringed hand, very much in love and incapable of finding Jeremy anything but a perfect and adoring male. It was at that moment, as the sunlight slanted through the large windows and touched the faces and the hair of the Devrel sisters,
that both
of them became conscious of a pair of eyes upon them.
So direct a gaze that it had to be felt, and when met, unavoided.
It was Dove, whose interest in men was more personal than her sister's, who glanced across the lounge and caught her breath so hard that Chrys was obliged to look as well.
He sat alone smoking a cigar, and the very perfection of the dark grey suit he wore made him seem illimitably foreign. His eyes dwelt on her face with not a flicker of the dark lashes, and there was something so long and lean and inimitably graceful about his body that Chrys thought at once that he must be a perfect dancer. Her gaze sped to his feet in hand-tailored shoes; long narrow feet to match the hand holding the dark cigar.
Then again his eyes were looking directly into hers and a strange shudder had swept through her before she even realized that a stranger could invade her being with his eyes alone.
She looked quickly away from him, hating herself for a coward, but aware that she had just met the eyes of a man who knew women as an English stockbroker knew the pound note!
"Chrys, you're blushing! " There was an exultant note in Dove's voice, albeit she whispered, as if the lone male might have ears as penetrating as his eyes. "Isn't he something! And fancy seeing him here at the St. Clement's."
"Who the devil is he, then?" Chrys felt annoyed with herself for letting the glance of a mere male shake her. "He's too abominably good-looking to be respectable, that's for sure! "
"Darling, do mind your voice," Dove hissed. "I saw his picture in the Daily Star yesterday. They say he only cares about horses, cards, and fine living. He travels all over the world, so he must be very well off."
"No doubt he's a card-sharp," Chrys rejoined.
"With those eyes he can probably strip the cards to their last diamond."
"But I don't think he's one of those —" Dove cast him a hasty glance, and at once he inclined his head, with its thick hair like smoked silver, and a quiver of amusement ran round the bold line of his lips.
"Oh! " It was Dove's turn to blush. "Oh, I do see what you mean, Chrys ! "
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