Craving the Forbidden

by India Grey

  ‘I’m fine.’ Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, she raised her chin and smiled brightly. ‘And you look gorgeous. There’s something about a man in black tie that I find impossible to resist.’

  Wasn’t that the truth?

  ‘Good.’ Jasper pressed a fleeting kiss to her cheek and, taking hold of her hand, pulled her forwards. ‘In that case, let’s get this party started. Personally, I intend to get stuck into the champagne right now, before guests arrive and we have to share it.’

  Head down, Kit walked quickly in the direction of the King’s Hall—not because he was in any hurry to get there, but because he knew from long experience that looking purposeful was the best way to avoid getting trapped into conversation.

  The last thing he felt like doing was talking to anyone.

  As he went up the stairs the music got louder. Obviously keen to recapture his youthful prowess on the dance floor Ralph had hired a swing band, who were energetically working their way through the back catalogue of The Beatles. The strident tones of trumpet and saxophone swelled beneath the vaulted ceiling and reverberated off the walls.

  Kit paused at the top of the flight of shallow steps into the huge space. The dance floor was a mass of swirling silks and velvets but even so his gaze was instantly drawn to the girl in the plain, narrow black dress in the midst of the throng. She was dancing with Ralph, Kit noticed, feeling himself tense inexplicably as he saw his father’s large, practised hand splayed across the small of Sophie’s back.

  They suited each other very well, he thought with an inward sneer, watching the way the slit in Sophie’s dress opened up as she danced to reveal a seductive glimpse of smooth, pale thigh. Ralph was a lifelong womaniser and philanderer, and Sophie Greenham seemed to be pretty indiscriminate in her favours, so there was no reason why she shouldn’t make it a Fitzroy hat-trick. He turned away in disgust.

  ‘Kit darling! I thought it must be you—not many people fill a dinner jacket that perfectly, though I must say I’m rather disappointed you’re not in dress uniform tonight.’

  Kit’s heart sank as Sally Rothwell-Hyde grasped his shoulders and enveloped him in a cloud of asphyxiating perfume as she stretched up to kiss him on both cheeks. ‘I saw the picture on the front of the paper, you dark horse,’ she went on, giving him a girlish look from beneath spidery eyelashes. ‘You looked utterly mouth-watering, and the medal did rather add to the heroic effect. I was hoping to see it on you.’

  ‘Medals are only worn on uniform,’ Kit remarked, trying to muster the energy to keep the impatience from his voice. ‘And being in military dress uniform amongst this crowd would have had a slight fancy-dress air about it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Very dashing fancy dress, though, darling.’ Leaning in close to make herself heard above the noise of the band, Sally fluttered her eyelashes, which were far too thick and lustrous to be anything but fake. ‘Couldn’t you have indulged us ladies?’

  Kit’s jaw clenched as he suppressed the urge to swear. To Sally Rothwell-Hyde and her circle of ladies who lunched, his uniform was just a prop from some clichéd fantasy, his medals were nothing more than covetable accessories. He doubted that it had crossed her mind for a moment what he had gone through to get them. The lost lives they represented.

  His gaze moved over her sunbed-tanned shoulder as he looked for an escape route, but she wasn’t finished with him yet. ‘Such a shame about you and Alexia,’ she pouted. ‘Olympia said she was absolutely heartbroken, poor thing. She’s taken Lexia skiing this weekend, to cheer her up. Perhaps she’ll meet some hunky instructor and be swept off her skis …’

  Kit understood that this comment was intended to make him wild with jealousy, but since it didn’t he could think of nothing to say. Sophie was still dancing with Ralph, but more slowly now, both of his hands gripping her narrow waist while the band, ironically, played ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. She had her back to Kit, so as she inclined her head to catch something his father said Kit could see the creamy skin at the nape of her neck and suddenly remembered the silky, sexy underwear that had spilled out of her broken bag yesterday. He wondered what she was wearing under that sober black dress.

  ‘Is that her replacement?’

  Sally’s slightly acerbic voice cut into his thoughts, which was probably just as well. Standing beside him, she had followed the direction of his stare, and now took a swig of champagne and looked at him pointedly over the rim of her glass.

  ‘No,’ Kit replied shortly. ‘That’s Jasper’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh! Really?’ Her ruthlessly plucked eyebrows shot up and she turned to look at Sophie again, murmuring, ‘I must say I never really thought there was anything in those rumours.’ Before Kit could ask her what the hell she meant her eyes had narrowed shrewdly. ‘Who is she? She looks vaguely familiar from somewhere.’

  ‘She’s an actress. Maybe you’ve seen her in something.’ His voice was perfectly steady, though his throat suddenly felt as if he’d swallowed gravel.

  ‘An actress,’ Sally repeated thoughtfully. ‘Typical Jasper. So, what’s she like?’

  Lord, all that champagne and he didn’t have a drink himself. Where the hell were the bloody waiters? Kit looked around as his mind raced, thinking of a suitable answer. She’s an unscrupulous liar and as shallow as a puddle, but on the upside she’s the most alive person I’ve ever met and she kisses like an angel …

  ‘I’ll get Jasper to introduce you,’ he said blandly, moving away. ‘You can see for yourself.’

  Just as Sophie was beginning to suspect that the band were playing the Extended-Groundhog-Club-Remix version of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and that she would be locked for ever in Ralph Fitzroy’s damp and rather-too-intimate clutches, the song came to a merciful end.

  She’d been relieved when he’d asked her to dance as it had offered a welcome diversion from the task of Avoiding Kit, which had been the sole focus of her evening until then.

  ‘Gosh—these shoes are murder to dance in!’ she exclaimed brightly, stepping backwards and forcing Ralph to loosen his death-grip on her waist.

  Ralph took a silk handkerchief from the top pocket of his dinner jacket and mopped his brow. Sophie felt a jolt of unease at the veins standing out in his forehead, the dark red flush in his cheeks, and suddenly wondered if it was lechery that had made him cling to her so tightly, or necessity. ‘Darling girl, thank you for the dance,’ he wheezed. ‘You’ve made an old man very happy on his birthday. Look—here’s Jasper to reclaim you.’

  Slipping through the people on the dance floor, Jasper raised his hand in greeting. ‘Sorry to break you two up, but I have people demanding to meet you, Soph. Pa, you don’t mind if I snatch her away, do you?’

  ‘Be my guest. I need a—’ he broke off, swaying slightly, looking around ‘—need to—’

  Sophie watched him weave slightly unsteadily through the crowd as Jasper grabbed her hand and started to pull her forwards. ‘Jasper—your father,’ she hissed, casting a worried glance over her shoulder. ‘Is he OK? Maybe you should go with him?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Jasper said airily. ‘This is the standard Hawksworth routine. He knocks back the booze, goes and sleeps it off for half an hour, then comes back stronger than ever and out-parties everyone else. Don’t worry. A friend of my mother’s is dying to meet you.’

  He ran lightly up the steps and stopped in front of a petite woman in a strapless dress of aquamarine chiffon that showed off both her tan and the impressive diamonds around her crêpey throat. Her eyes were the colour of Bombay Sapphire gin and they swept over Sophie in swift appraisal as Jasper introduced her.

  ‘Sophie, this is Sally Rothwell-Hyde, bridge partner-in-crime of my mother and all round bad influence. Sally—the girl of my dreams, Sophie—’

  An icy wash of panic sluiced through her.

  Great. Just perfect. She’d thought that there was no way that an evening that had started so disastrously could get any worse, but it seemed that fate had singled her
out to be the victim of not one but several humiliating practical jokes. Just as Olympia Rothwell-Hyde used to do at school.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Sophie cut in quickly before Jasper said her surname.

  ‘Sophie …’

  Sally Rothwell-Hyde’s face bore a look of slight puzzlement as her eyes—so horribly reminiscent of the cold, china-doll blue of her daughter’s—bored into Sophie. ‘I’m trying to place you. Perhaps I know your parents?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Damn, she’d said that far too quickly. Sweat was prickling between her shoulder blades and gathering in the small of her back, and she felt slightly sick. She moistened her lips. Think of it as being onstage, she told herself desperately as the puzzled look was replaced by one of surprise and Sally Rothwell-Hyde gave a tinkling laugh.

  ‘Gosh—well, if it isn’t that I can’t think what it could be.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘You must be about the same age as my daughter. You’re not a friend of Olympia’s, are you?’

  Breathe, Sophie told herself. She just had to imagine she was in the audience, watching herself playing the part, delivering the lines. It was a fail-safe way of coping with stage fright. Distance. Calm. Step outside yourself. Inhabit the character. And above all resist the urge to shriek, ‘A friend of that poisonous cow? Are you insane?’

  She arranged her face into a thoughtful expression. ‘Olympia Rothwell-Hyde?’ She said the loathed name hesitantly, as if hearing it for the first time, then shook her head, with just a hint of apology. ‘It doesn’t ring any bells. Sorry. Gosh, isn’t it warm in here now? I’m absolutely dying of thirst after all that dancing, so if you’ll excuse me I must just go and find a drink. Isn’t it ironic to be surrounded by champagne when all you want is water?’

  She began to move away before she finished speaking, glancing quickly at Jasper in a silent plea for him to rein back his inbred chivalry and keep quiet. He missed it entirely.

  ‘I’ll get—’

  ‘No, darling, please. You stay and chat. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  She went down the steps again and wove her way quickly through the knots of people at the edge of the dance floor. Along the length of the hall there were sets of double doors out onto the castle walls and someone had opened one of them, letting in a sharp draft of night air. Sophie’s footsteps stalled and she drank it in gratefully. It was silly—she’d spent the twenty-four hours since she’d arrived at Alnburgh freezing half to death and would have found it impossible to imagine being glad of the cold.

  But then she’d have found it impossible to imagine a lot of the things that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.

  A waiter carrying a tray laden with full glasses was making his way gingerly along the edge of the dance floor. He glanced apologetically at Sophie as she approached. ‘Sorry, madam, I’m afraid this is sparkling water. If you’d like champagne I can—’

  ‘Nope. Water’s perfect. Thank you.’ She took a glass, downed it in one and took another, hoping it might ease the throbbing in her head. At the top of the steps at the other end of the hall she could see Jasper still talking to Olympia Rothwell-Hyde’s mother, so she turned and kept walking in the opposite direction.

  She would explain to Jasper later. Right now the only thing on her mind was escape.

  Stepping outside was like slipping into still, clear, icy water. The world was blue and white, lit by a paper-lantern moon hanging high over the beach. The quiet rushed in on her, as sudden and striking an assault on her senses as the breathtaking cold.

  Going forwards to lean on the wall, she took in a gulp of air. It was so cold it flayed the inside of her lungs, and she let it go again in a cloud of white as she looked down. Far, far beneath her the rocks were sharp-edged and silvered by moonlight, and she found herself remembering Kit’s voice as he told her about the desperate countess, throwing herself off the walls to her death. Down there? Sophie leaned further over, trying to imagine how things could have possibly been bleak enough for her to resort to such a brutal solution.

  ‘It’s a long way down.’

  Sophie jumped so violently that the glass slipped from her hand and spiralled downwards in a shower of sparkling droplets. Her hand flew to her mouth, but not before she’d sworn, savagely and succinctly. In the small silence that followed she heard the sound of the glass shattering on the rocks below.

  Kit Fitzroy came forwards slowly, so she could see the sardonic arch of his dark brows. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  Sophie gave a slightly wild laugh. ‘Really? After what happened earlier, forgive me if I don’t believe that for a second and just assume that’s exactly what you meant to do, probably in the hope that it might result in another “accident” like the one that befell the last unsuitable woman to be brought home by a Fitzroy.’

  She was talking too fast, and her heart was still banging against her ribs like a hammer on an anvil. She couldn’t be sure it was still from the fright he’d just given her, though. Kit Fitzroy just seemed to have that effect on her.

  ‘What a creative imagination you have.’

  ‘Somehow it doesn’t take too much creativity to imagine that you’d want to get rid of me.’ She turned round, looking out across the beach again, to avoid having to look at him. ‘You went to quite a lot of trouble to set me up and manipulate me earlier, after all.’

  He came to stand beside her, resting his forearms on the top of the wall.

  ‘It was no trouble. You were depressingly easy to manipulate.’

  His voice was soft, almost intimate, and entirely at odds with the harshness of the words. But he was right, she acknowledged despairingly. She had been a pushover.

  ‘You put me in an impossible position.’

  ‘It wasn’t impossible at all,’ he said gravely. ‘It would have been extremely workable, if I’d ever intended to let it get that far, which I didn’t. Anyway, you’re right. I do want to get rid of you, but since I’d have to draw the line at murder I’m hoping you’ll leave quietly.’

  ‘Leave?’ Sophie echoed stupidly. A drumbeat of alarm had started up inside her head, in tandem with the dull throb from earlier. She hadn’t seen this coming, and suddenly she didn’t know what to say any more, how to play it. What had started off as being a bit of a game, a secret joke between her and Jasper, had spun out of control somewhere along the line.

  ‘Yes. Leave Alnburgh.’

  In contrast with the chaotic thoughts that were rushing through her brain, his voice was perfectly emotionless as he straightened up and turned to face her.

  ‘I gather from Tatiana that Jasper’s planning to stay on for a few days, but I think it would be best if you went back to London as soon as possible. The rail service on Sundays is minimal, but there’s a train to Newcastle at about eleven in the morning and you can get a connection from there. I’ll arrange for Jensen to give you a lift to the station.’

  Sophie was glad she had the wall to lean on because she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her up otherwise. She didn’t turn to look at him, but was still aware of his height and the power contained in his lean body. It made her quail inside but it also sent a gush of hot, treacherous longing through her. She laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Well, Major Fitzroy, you’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you? And what about Jasper? Or have you forgotten him?’

  ‘It’s Jasper I’m thinking of.’

  ‘Ah.’ Sophie smacked herself comically on the forehead. ‘Silly me, because I thought all this was for your benefit. I thought you wanted me gone because my face and my clothes and my accent don’t fit and because I’m not scared of you like everyone else is. Oh, yes, and also because, no matter how much you’d like to pretend otherwise, you weren’t entirely faking what happened earlier.’

  For a second she wondered if she’d gone too far as some emotion she couldn’t quite read flared in the icy fathoms of his eyes, but it was quickly extinguished.

  ‘No.’ His voice was ominously soft. ‘
I want you gone because you’re dangerous.’

  The anger that had fuelled her last outburst seemed suddenly to have run out. Now she felt tired and defeated, as the stags on the walls must have felt when the Fitzroy guns had appeared on the horizon.

  ‘And what am I supposed to tell him?’

  Kit shrugged. ‘You’ll think of something, I’m sure. Your remarkable talent for deception should make it easy for you to find a way to let him down gently. Then he can find someone who’ll treat him with the respect he deserves.’

  ‘Someone who also fits your narrow definition of suitable.’ Sophie gave a painful smile, thinking of Sergio. The irony would have been funny if it hadn’t all got so serious, and so horribly humiliating. ‘Gosh,’ she went on, ‘who would have guessed that under that controlling, joyless exterior beat such a romantic heart?’

  ‘I’m not romantic.’ Kit turned towards her again, leaning one hip against the wall as he fixed her with his lazy, speculative gaze. ‘I just have this peculiar aversion to unscrupulous social climbers. As things stand at the moment I’m prepared to accept that you’re just a pretty girl with issues around commitment and the word “no”, but if you stay I’ll be forced to take a less charitable view.’

  From inside came a sudden chorus of ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ Automatically Sophie looked through the window to where everyone had assembled to watch Ralph cut his birthday cake. The light from the huge chandeliers fell on the perma-tanned backs of the women in their evening dresses and made the diamonds at their throats glitter, while amongst them the dinner-suited men could have been the rich and the privileged from any era in the last hundred years.

  I really, really do not belong here, Sophie thought.

  Part of her wanted to stand up to Kit Fitzroy and challenge his casual, cruel assumptions about her, as her mother would have done, but she knew from bitter experience that there was no point. Inside, through the press of people, she could see Sally Rothwell-Hyde, all gleaming hair and expensive white teeth, as she sang, and suddenly Sophie was sixteen again, standing in the corridor at school with her packed trunk and her hockey stick beside her, watching through the glass doors of the hall as the other girls sang the school hymn and she waited for Aunt Janet to arrive.