by India Grey
‘Because I’ve just got out of bed.’
‘And you’re just about to rush into someone else’s while Jasper’s not here?’ Kit suggested acidly.
That did it. The contempt in his voice, combined with another wringing cramp, made her lose her temper. ‘No,’ she cried, hands clenched into fists at her sides, cheeks flaming. ‘I really am rushing to the village shop. In minus five temperatures and with stomach cramps that possibly register on the Richter scale, not because I want to, but because I’m about to start the period from hell and I am completely unprepared for it. So now perhaps you’ll just let me go before it all gets messy.’
For a moment there was silence. Complete. Total. Kit took a step backwards, out of the orbit of her anger, and Sophie saw the spark of surprise in his eyes. And then the shutters went down and he was back in control.
‘In that case you’re not going anywhere,’ he said with a faint, ironic smile. ‘Or only as far as the library anyway—at least you won’t freeze to death in there. Leave it to me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
Sitting in the car and waiting for the fan to thaw the ice on the windscreen, Kit dropped his head into his hands.
He had always thought of himself as level-headed. Rational. Fair. A man who was ruled by sense rather than feeling. So in that encounter how come he’d emerged as some kind of bullying jailer?
Because there was something about this girl that made him lose reason. Something about her smile and her eyes and the way she tried to look haughty but could never quite pull it off that made him feel far too much. And still want to feel more.
Her body, for a start. All of it. Without clothes.
He started the engine with an unnecessary roar and shot forwards in a screech of tyres. Lord, no matter how incredible he found it, she was his younger brother’s girlfriend and the only reason she was still here was because he’d ordered her to stay. That made two good reasons why he should be civil to her, so he’d better start by behaving less like a fascist dictator and more like a decent human being.
After that he could have a look through his address book and find someone who would be happy to supply him with the sexual release he so obviously needed before going back to his unit and channelling his energy into the blessedly absorbing task of staying alive.
Sophie managed to wait until Kit had left the library and shut the door before putting her hands over her burning cheeks and letting out a low moan of mortification.
Saints in heaven, why had she blurted all that out? She was supposed to be an actress. Why couldn’t she ever manage to act mysterious, or poised, or elegant?
Especially around Kit Fitzroy, who must be used to silken officer’s-wife types, with perfect hair and manners to match. Women who would never do anything as vulgar as swear or menstruate. Or lose their temper. Or kiss someone without realising they were being set up, or put themselves in a position where someone would want to set them up in the first place …
Women with class, in other words.
She let her hands drop again and looked up, noticing the room properly for the first time. Even seen through a fog of humiliation she could see straight away that it was different from the other rooms she’d been in at Alnburgh. There was none of the blowsy ostentation of the drawing room with its raw-silk swagged curtains and designer wallpaper, nor the comfortless, neglected air of upstairs. In here everything was faded, used and cherished, from the desk piled with papers in the window to the enormous velvet Knole sofa in front of the fire.
But it was the books that jolted her out of her self-pity. Thousands of them, in shelves stretching up to the high ceiling, with a narrow galleried walkway halfway up. Where she had grown up the only books were the few tattered self-help manuals that the women at the peace camp had circulated between themselves, with titles like Freeing the Warrior Woman Within and The Harmonious Vegan, and even when Sophie had managed to get hold of a book of her own from a second hand shop or jumble sale there had never been anywhere quiet to read it. She had always dreamed of a room like this.
Almost reverentially she walked along the bookcases, trailing her finger along the spines of the books. They were mostly old, faded to a uniform brown, the gold titles almost unreadable, but in the last section, by the window, there were some more modern paperbacks—Dick Francis, Agatha Christie and—joy—a handful of Georgette Heyer. Moving the faded curtain aside, Sophie gave a little squeak of delight as she spotted Devil’s Cub, and felt a new respect for Tatiana. Maybe they did have something in common after all.
In her embarrassment she’d temporarily forgotten about the pain in her tummy, but the dragging feeling was back again now so she took Georgette over to the sofa and sank down gratefully. At the age of fourteen she’d fallen spectacularly in love with Vidal, and known with fervent adolescent certainty that she would never find a man who could match him in real life.
Her mouth twisted into an ironic smile. At fourteen everything seemed so black and white. At twenty-five, it was all infinitely more complicated. Her teenage self had never considered the possibility that she might meet her Vidal, only for him to dismiss her as …
Her thoughts stalled as a piece of paper slid out of the book onto her knee.
Unfolding it, she saw straight away that it was a letter and felt a frisson of excitement. The date at the top was thirty years ago, the writing untidy, masculine and difficult to read, but she had no trouble making out the first line.
My Darling—
Technically Sophie was well aware that it was wrong to read other people’s letters, but surely there was some kind of time limit on that rule? And anyway, any letter that began so romantically and was found in a Georgette Heyer novel was begging to be read. With a sense of delicious guilt she tucked her knees up tighter and scanned the lines.
It’s late and the heat is just about bearable now the sun has gone down. I’m sitting on the roof terrace with the remains of the bottle of gin I brought back from England—I’d rather like to finish it all right now, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Marie throwing the bottle away in the morning. It was the one we bought in London, that you held underneath your coat when we ran back to the hotel in the rain. How can I throw anything away that’s been so close to your body?
Oh, how gorgeous! Sophie thought delightedly, trying to imagine Ralph writing something so intimate. Or doing anything as romantic as dashing through the rain to ravish the woman he loved in a hotel room.
Thank you, my love, for sending the photograph of K in your last letter. He’s growing up so quickly—what happened to the plump baby I held in my arms on my last visit to Alnburgh? He is a boy now—a person in his own right, with a real character emerging—such fearless determination! Saying goodbye to him was so much harder this time. I never thought that anything would come close to the pain of leaving you, but at least your letters keep me going, and the memories of our time together. Leaving my son felt like cutting out a piece of myself.
Sophie’s heart lurched and the written lines jumped before her eyes. Was K referring to Kit? Thirty years ago he must have been a small boy of three or four. Breathlessly she read on.
I suppose I’ve learned to accept sharing you with Ralph because I know you don’t belong to him in any real sense, but the fact that K will grow up thinking of R as his father makes me rage against the injustice of everything.
Why couldn’t I have found you first?
Her mouth had fallen open. Incredulously she read the lines again. After thirty years the sense of despair in them was still raw enough to make her throat close, but her brain couldn’t quite accept the enormity of what she was reading.
Ralph Fitzroy wasn’t Kit’s father?
The sound of the door opening behind her made her jump about a mile in the air. Hastily, with trembling, nerveless fingers, she slid the letter back between the pages of Georgette Heyer and opened it randomly, pretending to read.
‘Th-that was quick,’ she stammered, turning round to see Kit c
ome into the room carrying a bulging carrier bag. He was wearing the dark blue reefer jacket she remembered from the train and above the upturned collar his olive tan glowed with the cold. As he moved around the sofa he brought with him a sharp breath of outside—of frost and pine and ozone.
‘I sensed that there was a certain amount of urgency involved.’
He put the bag down on the other end of the sofa and pulled out a huge box of tampons, which he tossed gently to her. Catching it, she couldn’t meet his eye. The embarrassment of having him buy her sanitary products had paled into near-insignificance by the enormity of the discovery she’d just made.
‘Thanks,’ she muttered, looking round for her purse.
Taking off his jacket, he looked at her, slightly guarded. ‘You’re welcome. It’s the least I could do for being so—’ a frown appeared between his dark brows ‘—controlling. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, please—don’t be,’ Sophie said quickly. She meant it. The last thing she needed now was him standing here looking like the beautiful hero from an art-house film and being nice, wrenching open the huge crack that had appeared in her Kit-Fitzroy-proof armour after reading the letter.
He glanced at her in obvious surprise. ‘I anticipated you’d be harder to make up to,’ he said, delving back into the bag, pulling out the most enormous bar of chocolate. ‘I thought this might be needed, at least. And possibly even this.’ He held up a bottle.
‘Gin?’ Sophie laughed, though her heart gave another flip as she thought of the letter, and Kit’s mother and her unknown lover drinking gin in bed while it poured down outside.
Oh, dear. Best not to think of bed.
Kit took the bottle over to a curved-fronted cupboard in the corner of the room behind the desk. ‘Mrs Watts in the village shop, who under different circumstances would have had a brilliant career in the CID, looked at the other things I
was buying and suggested that gin was very good for period pains.’
‘Oh, God—I’m so sorry—how embarrassing for you.’
‘Not at all, though I can’t comment on the reliability of Mrs Watts’s information.’
‘Well, gin is a new one on me, but to be honest if someone suggested drinking bat’s blood or performing naked yoga on the fourth plinth, I’d try it.’
‘Is it that bad?’ he said tonelessly, opening the cupboard and taking down a can of tonic water. Sophie watched the movements of his long fingers as he pulled the ring and unscrewed the gin bottle.
‘N-not too bad this time. But sometimes it’s horrendous. I mean, not compared to lots of things,’ she added hastily, suddenly remembering that he was used to working in war zones, dealing with the aftermath of bombings. ‘On a bad month it just makes it, you know … difficult.’
‘There’s some ibuprofen in the bag.’ He sloshed gin into a glass. ‘What does the doctor say?’
‘I haven’t seen one.’ She wasn’t even registered with one. She’d never really been in the same place for long enough, and Rainbow had always been a firm believer in remedies involving nettles and class B drugs. ‘I looked it up on the Internet and I think it might be something called endometriosis. Either that, or one of twenty-five different kinds of terminal cancer—unlikely since I’ve had it for the last twelve years—appendicitis—ditto—or arsenic poisoning. I decided to stop looking after that.’
Kit came towards her, holding out a large glass, frosted with cold and clinking with ice cubes. ‘You should see a doctor. But in the meantime try a bit of self-medicating.’
There was something about the sternness of his voice when combined with the faintest of smiles that made her feel as if she’d had a couple of strong gins already. Reaching up to take it from him, she felt herself blushing all over again.
‘I don’t have many unbreakable rules, but drinking hard spirits, on my own, in the middle of the morning is actually one I try to stick to. Aren’t you having one too?’ she said, then, realising that now he’d fulfilled his obligation he might be wanting to escape, added quickly, ‘Unless you have something else you need to do, of course.’
‘Not really. Nothing that won’t keep anyway.’ He turned away, picking up another log from the huge basket by the fireplace and dropping it into the glowing grate before going to pour another gin and tonic. ‘I’m trying to go through some of the paperwork for the estate. It’s in a hell of a mess. My father isn’t exactly one for organisation. The whole place has been run on the ostrich principle for decades.’
‘So Jasper gets his tendency to bury his head in the sand from Ralph?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ He sat down at the other end of the massive sofa, angling his body so he was facing her. ‘And his tendency to drink too much and rely on charm to get him out of the more unpleasant aspects of life.’ He broke off to take a large swig of his drink and shook his head. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about him like that to you. To be fair, the womanising gene seems to have passed him by.’
‘Yes.’ Sophie’s laugh went on a little too long. If only Kit knew the truth behind that statement. ‘You’re right, though. He and Ralph are astonishingly alike in lots of ways.’
She took a quick sip of her drink, aware that she was straying into dangerous territory. Part of her wanted desperately to ask him about the letter, or more specifically the shattering information it contained, but the rest of her knew she would never dare make such a personal assault on Kit Fitzroy’s defences.
Silver eyes narrowed, he looked at her over the rim of his glass.
‘Whereas I’m not like him at all.’
It was as if he had read her thoughts. For a moment she didn’t know what to say, so she took another mouthful of gin and, nearly choking on it, managed to croak, ‘Sorry. It’s none of my business. I didn’t—’
‘It’s fine.’ Leaning back on the huge sofa, he tipped his head back wearily for a moment. ‘It’s no secret that my father and I don’t get on. That’s why I don’t feel the need to spend every minute at his bedside.’
The room was very quiet. The only sounds were the hissing of the logs in the grate and the clink of ice in Sophie’s glass as the hand that held it shook. Largely with the effort of stopping it reaching out and touching him
‘Why?’ she asked in a slightly strangled voice. ‘Why don’t you get on with him?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s always been like that. I don’t remember having much to do with him before my mother left, and after she went you’d have thought we would have been closer.’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘Exactly the opposite. Maybe he blamed me.’ Kit held up his glass, looking through it dispassionately. The fire turned the gin the colour of brandy. ‘Maybe he didn’t, and just took it out on me, but what had previously been indifference became outright hostility. He sent me to boarding school at the soonest possible opportunity.’
‘Oh, God, you poor thing.’ Just thinking of her own brief boarding school experience made Sophie’s scalp prickle with horror.
‘God, no. I loved it. I was the only kid in the dorm who used to dread holidays.’ He took a mouthful of gin, his face deadpan as he went on, ‘He used to call me into the drawing room on my first evening home and go through my report, seizing on anything he could—a mark dropped here, a team captaincy missed there—and commenting on it in this strange, sarcastic way. Unsurprisingly it made me more determined to try harder and do better.’ He smiled wryly. ‘So then he’d mock me for being too clever and on too many teams.’
Sophie’s heart turned over. She could feel it beating against her ribs with a rapid, jerky rhythm. The book, with its outrageous secret folded between the pages, stuck up slightly from the sofa cushions just inches from her right hip.
‘Why would he do that?’
‘I have no idea,’ Kit drawled softly. ‘It would be nice to think that he just wasn’t someone who liked children, or could relate to them, but his unbridled joy when Jasper came along kind of disproves that. Anyway, it hasn’t scarred me for life or
anything, and I gave up trying to work it out a long time ago.’
‘But you keep coming back here,’ Sophie murmured. ‘I’m not sure I would.’ She looked down at the crescent of lemon stranded on the ice cubes in the bottom of her glass, letting her hair fall over her face in case it gave away how much of a howling understatement that was.
‘I come back because of Alnburgh,’ he said simply. ‘It might sound mad but the place itself is part of my family as much as the people who live in it. And Ralph’s approach to looking after the castle has been similar to the way he looked after his sons.’
She lifted her head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘All or nothing—five thousand pounds for new curtains in the drawing room, while the roof goes unmaintained.’
Their eyes met. He gave her that familiar brief, cool smile, but his eyes, she noticed, were bleak. Compassion beat through her, mixing uneasily with the longing churning in her tender stomach. I know why it is, she wanted to blurt out. I know why he was always vile to you, and it isn’t your fault.
The moment stretched. Their gazes stayed locked together. Sophie felt helpless with yearning. The heat from the fire seemed to be concentrated in her cheeks, her lips …
She jumped out of her skin as the phone rang.
Kit moved quickly. He got to his feet to answer it so he didn’t have to lean across her.
‘Alnburgh.’ His voice was like ground glass.
Sophie’s hands flew to her face, pressing against her burning cheeks with fingers splayed. Her heart was galloping. From miles away, his voice reduced to a tinny echo, she could just make out that it was Jasper on the phone.
‘That’s good,’ said Kit tonelessly. Then, after a pause, ‘Ask her yourself.’
He held out the phone. Sophie couldn’t look at him as she took it.
