A Little Seduction Omnibus

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Dee, please...’ Beth began. She would have to tell Dee the truth.

  ‘I can’t stay, I’m afraid.’ Dee overrode her. ‘I only popped in to see how you were. I’ve got a meeting in less than an hour. We’ll go out for supper next week, but remember to ring me as soon as your order arrives...’

  * * *

  As she got in her car to drive away Dee was conscious of an unfamiliar heat burning her face. She glanced in her driving mirror, anxious to see if she looked as uncomfortably self-conscious as she felt. As a young teenager she had endured the misery of a particularly painful blush which it had taken her a lot of effort to learn to control.

  In fact, those who knew her now would no doubt be surprised to learn just how shy and awkward she had felt as a young girl.

  All that was behind her now. Her father’s death had propelled her into adulthood with a speed and a force that had left its mark on her almost as much as losing him had. The pain and anguish of those dark days still sometimes haunted her, no matter how hard she tried not to let them.

  Going back to her old university hadn’t helped, and the relief she had experienced at seeing even a vaguely familiar face at the cocktail party she had so reluctantly agreed to attend had negated her normal sense of curiosity, so that she hadn’t really asked very many questions of Alex Andrews, although she had noted how keen he had been to talk about Beth.

  It had been her father’s old friend who had brought up the subject of Julian Cox, though, asking, ‘Do you see anything of that Cox fellow these days?’ and then shaking his head before opining, ‘He was a bad lot, if you ask me. Your father...’

  Anxious not to reactivate painful memories for either of them, Dee had quickly tried to change the subject, but Alex Andrews, who had been standing with them at the time, had frowned and joined the conversation, asking her, ‘Julian Cox? That would be the man who Beth...?’

  ‘Yes. Yes...’ Dee had confirmed quickly. If she had to talk about Julian, she would much rather the conversation centred on Beth’s relationship with him rather than her own or her father’s. She knew that people thought of her as being cool and controlled. Outwardly maybe she was. But inside—no one knew just how difficult she found it sometimes not to give way to her emotions, not to betray her real feelings.

  ‘He hurt her very badly,’ Alex had said curtly.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Dee had agreed. ‘We...her friends...thought at one point that...’ She’d paused and shaken her head. ‘That was one of the reasons we encouraged her to go to Prague. We thought it might help to take her mind off Julian. As it happens, though, her feelings weren’t as deeply involved as either we or she had feared. I think once Beth realised just what kind of man he was she recognised how worthless he was, and how impossible it was for her to really care about him.

  ‘She obviously spoke to you about him,’ she had added curiously.

  ‘She told me that because of him she found it impossible to trust any man...not in those words, perhaps, but that was certainly the message she wanted to give me.’

  ‘Julian is an expert at destroying people’s trust,’ Dee had told him, looking away as she did so so that he wouldn’t see the shadow darkening her eyes.

  They had gone their separate ways shortly after that. There had been several old colleagues her father’s friend had wanted to talk with, and Dee had good-naturedly accompanied him, joining in their conversations even though there hadn’t been one of them under seventy years of age and the people and events they were discussing had had little relevance for her.

  Mind you, in many ways it was just as well that she hadn’t needed to concentrate too hard on what was being said. That had left her free to keep a weather eye on the room, strategically placing herself so that she had a clear view of the entrance. She hadn’t wanted to be caught off guard by the arrival of...of...anyone—Sternly now, Dee reminded herself that she had an important meeting to attend, and that she needed to keep her wits about her if she was to keep the two warring factions on her action committee from falling out with one another.

  A little ruefully she reflected on how something so therapeutic and ‘green’ as planting a new grove of English trees on a piece of land recently bought in a joint enterprise between the local council and one of her charities could arouse such warrior-like feelings amongst her committee members. Her father would have known exactly how to handle the situation, of course, and it was at times like these that she missed him the most. Chatting with his contemporaries, she had been so sharply aware of her loss, and not just of the father she had loved so much. Had he lived, what might she have been now? A wife...a mother...?

  Dee swallowed quickly. She could still become a mother if that was her ambition. These days one did not even need to have a lover to achieve the ambition, never mind a partner. But she had been brought up by a sole parent herself, and, much as she had loved her father, much as he had loved her, she had missed not having a mother.

  How often as a young girl had she dreamed of being part of a large family of brothers and sisters, and two parents? She had had her aunts and uncles and her cousins, it was true, but...

  Her agents had still not been able to find out what had happened to Julian after he had disappeared to Singapore.

  Dee moved uncomfortably in her seat. The cocktail party had reawakened old memories, old heartache and pain, old wounds which had healed with a dangerously thin and fragile new skin.

  * * *

  Alex smiled warmly as he heard his aunt’s voice on the other end of the telephone line.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Tired,’ his aunt told him wryly. ‘It’s meant hard work, getting this important order together for you.’

  * * *

  Beth was just about to close up the shop for the night when she saw the delivery van pull up outside, followed by a highly polished chauffeur-driven black Mercedes.

  It had been raining during the afternoon and the pavements were wet, glistening under the light from the Christmas decorations which the Corporation’s workmen had been putting up and which they were currently testing, prior to the formal switching-on ceremony the following weekend.

  On the counter in front of her Beth had a list of customers she intended to ring during the evening. They were the customers who had expressed an interest in the new glass. She had not, as yet, told them that it wasn’t going to be available.

  The van driver was heading towards her door. Uncertainly Beth watched him, her uncertainty turning to shock as she saw the woman climbing out of the rear of the elegant Mercedes and recognised her instantly.

  It was Alex’s aunt, the woman she had seen him with in Prague, looking, if anything, even more soignée and elegant now than she had done then. The exquisite tailoring of her charcoal-grey suit made Beth sigh in soft envy. If she had only added a picture hat and a small toy dog on a lead she could have posed for a Dior advertisement of the fifties. Very few women of her own generation could boast of having such a lovely neat waist, Beth acknowledged as Alex’s aunt waited for the van driver to open the shop door and then stand back, allowing Alex’s aunt to sweep through.

  ‘This is very good,’ she told Beth without preamble. ‘Alex told me that you had a good eye and I can see that he is right. That is a very pretty display of pieces you have in your window, although perhaps you might just redirect the spotlight on them a little. If you have some ladders I could perhaps show you...’

  Beth was too bemused to feel affronted, and besides, she had come to very much the same decision herself only this afternoon.

  ‘I have brought you your glass,’ she added, and then said more severely, ‘I hope you understand that we do this only as the very greatest favour because it is for family. It has been very expensive to pay the workpeople to work extra and push your order through. I have a rich—a very rich—oil sheikh who right at this mome
nt has had to be told that his chandelier is not quite ready. This is not something I would normally like to do, but Alex was most insistent, and when a man is so much in love...’

  She gave a graceful shrug of her shoulders.

  ‘I have come here with it myself since we do not normally sell our glassware to enterprises such as yours. We sell, normally, by personal recommendation, direct to our customers. That is our...our speciality. We do not...how would you say?...make so much that it can be sold as in a supermarket.’ She gave another dismissive shrug. ‘That is not our way. We are unique and...exclusive.’

  ‘Yes, you may put them here,’ she instructed the van driver, who was wheeling in a large container. ‘But carefully, carefully...

  ‘Oh, yes, I thank you. I nearly forgot...’ She thanked the chauffeur as he followed the van driver in and handed her a large rectangular gift-wrapped package.

  ‘This is for you,’ she told Beth, to Beth’s astonishment. ‘You will not open it yet. That is not permitted. You will open it with Alex—he will have one too—when you are together. It is a gift of betrothal—a tradition in our family.’

  Betrothal!

  Beth stared at her. Alex’s aunt was so very much larger than life, so totally compelling that Beth felt completely overwhelmed by her. By rights she ought to be telling her that there was no way she could accept the order she had just brought. She just couldn’t afford it. And she should also tell her that she resented Alex’s high-handed attitude in giving his family an order on her behalf without consulting her in the first place. And as for his aunt’s comment about a betrothal...

  ‘It is also very much a tradition that the men of our family fall in love at first sight. My husband, who was also my second cousin, fell in love with me just by seeing my photograph. One glimpse, that was all it took, and then he was on his way to my parents’ home to beg me to be his wife. We were together as man and wife for just two years and then he was killed...murdered...’

  Beth gave a small convulsive shiver as she saw the look in the older woman’s eyes.

  ‘I still feel the pain of his loss today. It has been my life’s work to do with the factory what he would have wished to be done. One of my greatest sorrows is that he did not live to see our family reunited. Alex is very much like him. He loves you. You are very lucky to have the love of such a man,’ she told Beth firmly.

  Beth simply had no idea what on earth to say to her, much less how to tell her that she had got it all wrong, that Alex most certainly did not love her.

  ‘This is good,’ she informed the van driver, who had now brought in what Beth sincerely hoped was the last packing case. There were six of them in all, filling her small shop, and she dreaded to think what the cost of their contents must be. Quite definitely much, much more than she could afford, with her empty bank account and her burdensome overdraft.

  ‘I really don’t think...’ she began faintly. But trying to stop Alex’s aunt was like trying to stop the awesome magnificence of some grandly rolling river at full flood—impossible!

  ‘You will please remove the covering,’ Alex’s aunt was instructing the van driver, waving one elegantly manicured hand in the direction of the boxes.

  Beth didn’t dare look at him. This was an egalitarian age, an age of equality in which, Beth suspected, the last time a man had removed something from its packing for her had been when her father had opened her last babyhood Easter egg. But to her astonishment, far from reacting with the surly resentment she had expected to Alex’s aunt’s request, the van driver immediately, enthusiastically complied. Beth acknowledged the uneasy suspicion crowding her already log-jammed thoughts: he must have been promised an extremely generous tip indeed.

  ‘No. No more,’ Alex’s aunt commanded, once the lids were removed and the van driver was about to delve into the polystyrene chips surrounding the contents.

  ‘First we must have champagne,’ she told Beth firmly. ‘I have brought some with me and we shall drink it from proper glasses. It is a small ritual I always insist on when we hand over a completed order...a superstition we have that it is bad luck not to do so.’

  ‘Er... I...’ Beth had some pretty champagne flutes made of the same glass and in the same style as her new window display. Quickly she went to get them, reflecting ruefully that it would be far more appropriate to be using Waterford crystal—only her personal finances did not run to such luxuries.

  Although Alex’s aunt did raise her eyebrows a little at the glasses Beth produced, to Beth’s relief she did not raise any objections.

  This whole situation was completely surreal, Beth decided dizzily as Alex’s aunt uncorked the champagne with a deftness that left Beth in awe. The van driver and the chauffeur had been dismissed, and only the two of them were left in the shop.

  ‘You will open this first box,’ Beth was instructed as Alex’s aunt removed the top package from the nearest packing case.

  Obediently Beth did as she was told, her fingers trembling slightly as she eased the carefully wrapped glass out of a box of six.

  The theatricality with which Alex’s aunt was surrounding the whole event was impossibly dramatic. Beth could just imagine the chaos it would cause if she were to react to every delivery they received like this. But once the glass was free of its covering, and she could see it properly, any irritation she had felt at Alex’s aunt’s high-handedness was banished.

  A soft breath of pure, awed appreciation slid from Beth’s parted lips as she drank in the beauty of the glass she was cradling. The shop’s lighting made every cut facet sparkle and shimmer with the rich cranberry colour of the goblet-shaped bowl, its stem clear and pure and worked with the most intricate design of trailing ivy and grapes.

  Here was a reproduction Venetian glass of truly outstanding authenticity, a fruitful marriage of ancient and modern. Wonderingly Beth ran her fingertips over it. It was, quite simply, one of the most beautiful glasses she had ever seen, if anything even better and richer than the original antique she had been shown by the gypsy.

  ‘It is good...yes?’ Alex’s aunt was saying, her voice softer and more gentle as she recognised what Beth was feeling.

  Beth looked up at her and saw in her eyes the same love that she herself always felt for a thing of such outstanding beauty.

  ‘It is very good,’ she agreed simply, blinking back the emotional tears that had filled her eyes.

  ‘Ah, yes, now I see why Alex has chosen you,’ she heard his aunt telling her. ‘Now I see that you are one of us. This is my own design, adapted from an original, of course. I think that the vine and the grapes are a truly authentic touch for a glass designed for wine. My cousins feel it is perhaps a little too modern, but I have brought for you also some much more traditional baroque designs. You will love them all.’

  ‘I will love them all,’ Beth confirmed shakily, ‘but I cannot possibly keep them. I can’t afford...’

  ‘I have to go. I am to have dinner with Alex’s parents this evening...’

  ‘Please,’ Beth begged her. ‘I cannot accept this order. I must ask you to take it away.’ As she saw the look of incomprehension darken Alex’s aunt’s eyes, Beth spread her hands helplessly and told her shakily, ‘I would love to keep it, but I simply cannot afford to pay for such an order...’

  ‘Did I not explain?’ the older woman asked her, frowning. ‘There is to be no question of payment.’ She added firmly, ‘This is a gift.’

  ‘A gift!’ Beth stared at her, the colour leaving her face, her chin lifting as pride stiffened her body. ‘That is very generous of you but I simply could not accept. For you to give me such a gift is...’

  ‘Oh, but it is not from me. I am a businesswoman,’ she told Beth sturdily. ‘Not even to my own family would I make such a gesture. My finest glass—and my order books and workforce totally disrupted to do it. No...it is Alex who makes the gif
t to you. I told him that he must love you very much indeed. I know he is not poor—his grandfather was a wealthy man, who prospered here in his adoptive country—but Alex is an academic who will never earn himself a fortune. But who can set a price on love? Although at first I was inclined to tell him that what he asked for was impossible, when he explained to me that without this order you would lose your business, which you love so very much, I could see that your pain would be his and I gave in to the sentimental side of my nature. I am sorry, but I really must go. And remember, you are not to open my gift to you until you are together with Alex. You and he will know the right time...’

  The glass was a gift from Alex. Alex had paid for all of this... As Alex’s aunt left the shop and headed for her Mercedes Beth stared around herself.

  It was impossible for her to accept, of course. Even more so now that she knew Alex had paid for everything out of his own pocket.

  Her heart started to race and thud erratically as she dwelt on the implications of what he had done.

  His aunt had seemed to assume that their feelings for one another were an acknowledged and established thing. Had Alex told her that? ‘He loves you,’ she had told Beth. ‘It is very much a tradition that the men of our family fall in love at first sight.’

  What if she was right? What if Alex had, as he had claimed, fallen in love with her...? She had been wrong about his motivation in trying to dissuade her from buying via the gypsies; she knew that now. What if she had been wrong in other ways as well? What if...?

  The doorbell rang, alerting her to the fact that she was no longer alone. As she turned round she started to smile in welcome relief as she saw that her visitor was her godmother, Anna.

  ‘My goodness, this looks very exciting!’ Anna exclaimed curiously as she closed the shop door behind her. ‘Ward and I were just on our way back from Yorkshire and I saw that the shop lights were on so I got him to drop me off.’

  Anna and her husband Ward were looking for a new house in the area, and in the meantime they were spending their time between Ward’s house in Yorkshire and Anna’s existing home in Rye-on-Averton.