by Lucy Gillen
"Yes, of course you would!" His fingers tightened for a moment on her arms, then he dropped his hands and stepped back to allow her to pass him. He walked with her to the door of the cottage and stood for a moment with her on the shaded step, a
crease of anxiety between his brows as he looked down at her. "You will come again, won't you, Isa?" he asked, and she nodded.
"I'll come again," she promised, but wondered even then if she had made a promise it would be better not to keep. Suddenly Toby's warnings were running around her brain again, and this time they were not so easy to still.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT was one morning before breakfast, while Isa was brushing her hair prior to going downstairs, that there was an insistent rapping on her bedroom door and she turned from the mirror frowning curiously, the hairbrush still poised in one hand. There was a hint of urgency in the knocking and she held her breath for a moment wondering if something could be wrong with Lady Carmichael.
She walked over and opened the door, and her frown of anxiety changed to surprise when she saw Toby Carmichael standing there, a strangely speculative look on his face and a hint of a smile banishing any chance of there being something wrong with his grandmother.
He looked freshly shaved and smelled pleasantly of aftershave, and he was fully dressed except for his racket. A white shirt added depth to the colour of his tanned features and fitted smoothly across his broad chest, while hip-hugging dark blue trousers with flared legs gave him a slightly nautical look which was further suggested by his stance. Feet slightly apart on the slip mat in front of her door, he looked as if he was prepared to carry her off, pirate fashion, and her heart responded to the suggestion by hammering unmercifully hard in her breast.
Isa blinked at him uncertainly and his smile
widened. "Good morning," he said, in a cool quiet voice. "Can you cook?"
For several seconds Isa stared at him blankly, almost believing she must still be asleep and dreaming, although there was certainly nothing ethereal about Toby's distinctly physical presence in her doorway. Also she detected unmistakable signs of impatience and she nodded hastily, blinking as she sought reasons for his asking such an extraordinary question at that hour in the morning.
"I—I don't think I quite understand," she said at last. "You asked if I—"
"If you can cook," he confirmed. "Can you?"
"Yes, I can, but—I don't understand why—"
"You don't have to understand anything at the moment," Toby interrupted impatiently, "except the rudiments of frying a basic breakfast, eggs and bacon, that kind of thing. Can you cope with that?"
"Well, yes, of course," Isa said in a slightly breathless voice, "but if you'd—"
"Good, you're needed!" Toby informed her cheerfully. He raked a frankly appraising gaze over her trim figure in its cream cotton dress and ignored her puzzled expression, one brow raised enquiringly. "You were about to come downstairs, weren't you?" he asked.
Isa still stared at him, not yet sure what it was all about, the brush held in one hand in front of her, like a weapon of defence, its original purpose completely forgotten as she tried to make some sense of the situation. "Mr. Carmichael," she said in a strained voice, "I just don't understand! Why
do you need me to cook breakfast? Where's Mrs. Grayle?"
Toby heaved a great sigh, as if he sought patience in the face of incredible stupidity. "It's a long story," he told her with every appearance of showing restraint. "We've had a catastrophe in the domestic department, and unless you can cook we'll all go hungry. All you have to do is provide some sort of, sustenance to keep us going until lunch-time, after that I can probably find someone to stand in. Do this now and we'll be forever in your debt!"
"Oh, I see, it really is a crisis!" Isa hesitated no longer, although she would have liked to question him about the cause of Mrs. Grayle's inability to perform her usual chores. If it was an emergency, as he suggested, she was willing enough to provide breakfast. Aunt Carrie had been as fastidious about teaching her to cook as about everything else, so she had no doubt about her ability to cope.
She hastened to complete her half-finished toilette, pulling the brush through her hair as she walked back across the room and pausing only to take a last look at her general appearance. Turning to smooth down her dress she caught sight of Toby's reflection in the dressing-table mirror, his brows drawn into a frown of impatience. She met the imperious glint in his eyes as she put down the hairbrush and lifted her chin, daring him to say anything.
"All right, Isabella," he said in a deceptively soft voice, "you look suitably sweet and neat, now will
you please hurry?"
Isa flushed, her eyes bright with resentment. "I am hurrying, Mr. Carmichael," she told him, "and I don't see—"
"You don't have to see," Toby interrupted, "but I have an early appointment this morning and in the interests of good manners I can't interview a client when I have an empty stomach !" He touched her cheek lightly with one finger tip and she drew back hastily. "I'm starving, Isa !"
"Well, I'm sorry!" She stuck her chin in the air as she swept past him in the doorway, angry as much because her senses responded to him so willingly as because of his arrogant assumption that she was prepared to cook breakfast for him. "I'm not employed to cook for you," she reminded him with a flash of bravado. "I'm employed as a companion to—"
"You're employed to do as you're told!" Toby retorted, his eyes glittering. "Now come along, for heaven's sake!"
Ira glared at him. "For two pins I'd refuse!" she told him, and he laughed.
"You do and I'll sack you on the spot !" he warned.
"You wouldn't dare!"
The words were spoken before she realised the full audacity of the challenge, and she saw the swift glow of half amused anger in his eyes as he looked down at her. "You think not?" he asked, and Isa shook her head.
"Lady Carmichael wouldn't let you," she told
him, confident she was right.
For a second he did nothing, then he laughed again shortly, and shook his head. "Just don't put that to the test!" he warned, and she gasped aloud when his fingers curled suddenly around the soft upper part of her arm and dug in hard as he turned her round.
She was hauled along beside him the full length of the landing to the top of the stairs, and instinctively pulled back against the relentless grip on her arm. "You're hurting me!" she protested as they started downstairs, and once again he laughed at her efforts.
"I'm not civilised when I'm hungry," he told her. "So the sooner you get me fed the sooner you'll restore my good humour! I haven't time for the polite will you, won't you bit, not with poor old Grayle waiting in agony for the ambulance to come, and my stomach begging for satisfaction—there simply isn't time to argue the issue!"
Isa stared. "The ambulance?" she echoed, and he nodded.
"I explain later," he said. "Right now just take my word for it that you're desperately needed!"
Isa prised his fingers from her arm and continued downstairs. "All right!" she said, and he laughed.
"That's my girl !" he said encouragingly. "Now you go and wrap a pinny round your dainty middle and wield the frying pan while I see Mrs. Grayle safely into the ambulance—it sounds as if it's arrived."
She barely ,had time to see the crew of the ambulance come in through the open front door before Toby gave her a swift and insistent push through another door into the kitchen. It was the first time Isa had been into the kitchen and she spent a moment or two looking around her, getting her bearings and marvelling at the modern and expensive equipment to hand.
After a moment she found a frying pan and heated it, then put in rashers of bacon from the huge refrigerator. She added two eggs, since Toby had said he was hungry, and she was making toast when the kitchen door opened again and he came in. Turning a face, pink flushed from the cooker, she asked anxiously after the housekeeper.
"Is Mrs. Grayle all right?" she asked, and he raised a brow.
"She can hardly be 'all right' when she's just been taken off in an ambulance," he pointed out with what she felt was unnecessary fastidiousness. "She'll be lucky if she hasn't a broken leg at least, and slip's hurt herself internally too, apparently, poor soul."
His sympathy surprised Isa enough to make her overlook his sarcasm, and she spent a moment wondering just how the accident had happened. There was no sign of disorder in the immaculate kitchen, so obviously it must have occurred somewhere else. "What happened?" she asked, and Toby shook his head, perching himself on the end of the kitchen table.
"She seemingly fell from a chair in her bedroom,"
he told her, "although heaven knows what she was doing climbing on a chair in her bedroom. I couldn't get much out of the poor old soul, but I heard her yell, right along where I was." He slid from the table suddenly and came striding across towards her with such an air of purpose that Isa blinked at him in surprise.
Reaching round her, he pulled the grill pan from under the gas and blew hard at the flames that licked up from the slices of burnt toast. "I prefer my toast brown, not black," he said, handing her the smoking grill pan with the charred remains. "I hope this isn't a sample of your cooking, Isabella!"
Blaming him in part for distracting her, Isa looked at him resentfully. "I've already cooked you a perfectly edible breakfast, Mr. Carmichael," she told him, brushing the hair back from her flushed face with the back of one wrist. "You have nothing to complain about! Where are you going to eat it?"
He looked around at the long, scrubbed wooden table «and cocked a questioning brow at her, a glitter of laughter in his eyes and just touching his mouth. "You'd rather I had it right here, wouldn't you?" he asked, but gave her no time to answer. "O.K., just give me something to eat and I'll settle for eating it in the kitchen—I don't care as long as I get something soon!"
Without another word Isa found a knife and fork and laid a place for him at one end of the table, then set the bacon and eggs she had cooked for him down in front of him with a resounding thud on the
bare wood. "The toast won't be long," she told him coolly, refusing to be angry. "The butter's in that big pot dish there in front of you !"
"Thank you!"
She ignored his sarcasm and watched him rather anxiously as he began to eat. His claim to be ravenously hungry was apparently no exaggeration, for he ate the bacon and eggs in a very short time and then asked for more toast, and it gave her a curious sense of satisfaction when he at last leaned back in his chair, seemingly replete.
He eyed her for a moment, his eyes gleaming wickedly with laughter, missing nothing of her flushed cheeks and dishevelled hair, or the big checked apron that tied around her waist and met at the back. She had eaten nothing herself and had no intention of doing so until after he had gone.
"Aren't you hungry?" he asked, still watching her steadily, and Isa shook her head.
"I can have mine later with Lady Carmichael," she told him.
I see." He tipped back his chair on to its back legs and seemed suddenly to have forgotten that early appointment he had been concerned for earlier. "I suppose you'll lay a decent table in the morning-room," he suggested, "and do it in style. Not rough it in the kitchen, like I had to!"
"You didn't have to!" Isa denied swiftly. "It was your own idea!"
He laughed and the sound of it shivered along her spine as she hastily avoided his eyes. "You're touchy, aren't you?" he said.
Isa resented the suggestion, although she supposed it was true in a way. She was almost always touchy when he teased her about anything, and this morning she felt particularly vulnerable. "I don't think so," she argued automatically. "After all, you did come and practically haul me downstairs before I had time to get up properly. You informed me I had to cook your breakfast, then blamed me when the toast burnt!"
His eyes gleamed with laughter, and Isa could cheerfully have thrown something at him. "Ah! Poor little Isabella!" he said softly.
There was an insolent, challenging arrogance about him that gave her the strangest sensation, and she did what she could to still the frantic urgency of her heartbeat when he got up from the table suddenly and came round it to stand in front of her. His eyes went slowly from the top of her dark head, down the soft curves that were accentuated by the apron tied tightly about her waist, down to the slim legs that were bare and tanned to a light golden colour by the sun. There was a kind of smouldering sexuality in the scrutiny and she felt her head spinning from the impact of it as she reached behind her for the support of the work-top beside the cooker.
"Isabella!"
He said it softly, almost like a caress, and his deep voice shivered through her like a physical sensation. One hand reached out and slid round her waist drawing her towards him irresistibly, until her body recoiled instinctively from the warmth of his
flesh through the thin shirt he wore. His other hand slid beneath the hair at the back of her neck and held her head firmly, then he bent his head and just touched her lips with the sensual warmth of his mouth.
It was a teasing, almost a taunting gesture, and Isa felt again that flutter of panic she had experienced when he kissed her before. She tried hard to wriggle free, but uselessly, for his mouth was no longer teasing, but firm and demanding, drawing resistance from her as he pressed her close to the unyielding force of his body.
How long she stood like that, her whole length curved to his, her head spinning with a chaos of unfamiliar and disturbing emotions, she had no idea, but she clung to him like a drowning child and wanted it never to end. It was the insistent ringing of a bell that brought her joltingly back to earth and she opened startled eyes, turning her head swiftly with her mouth still tingling from his kiss.
"Please--don't!" She whispered the plea when Toby turned her face to him again and brushed her lips lightly with his own just as the discordant summons interrupted again and made her start guiltily.
The bell was one of many arranged along a board above the kitchen door, and it jangled persistently as she stared at it, taking a moment or two to realise that it was Lady Carmichael's bell sounding such an urgent summons. Isa shook her head, pushing against the broadness of his chest where her hands still lay curled tightly over the steady thud of his heartbeat.
He broke his hold on her with obvious reluctance and she moved away, glancing up swiftly in startled disbelief a moment later when a soft chuckle drew her attention from the jangling bell. "Saved by the bell !" Toby quoted, and Isa stepped back quickly, her cheeks brightly flushed as she trembled on the brink of uncertainty.
Yet again she had been foolish enough to allow herself to be swept along into a situation she could not control, and for a brief moment she hated him. For his ability to touch her as deeply as he had for those few minutes and for deluding her into believing that the moment was something special when actually it was merely another brief flirtation and probably of no more importance to him than a hundred other such kisses.
The realisation was hard to swallow after the emotional upheaval of a few seconds before and she only just resisted the urge she felt to slap his face hard. But she had tried to retaliate like that once before and been frustrated—there was no reason to suppose that she would be any more successful this time.
Instead she turned quickly and fled from the big kitchen on legs so weak and shaky that they threatened to let her down. She would never again let herself become involved with Toby Carmichael in anything as disturbing as the last few minutes—no matter what the temptations!
Whether or not Lady Carmichael would have had
any objections to her grandson indulging his pas-
sion for conquest with her companion, Isa did not know, but she fervently hoped that the old lady need never hear about it. Isa had managed to keep things well under control ever since the first time Toby had kissed her, when he caught her trespassing in the wood, and she was almost as angry with herself as with him for letting the same thing happen again.
O
ne kiss was perhaps of no great importance in itself, but it disturbed Isa to think that Toby Carmichael could have such a devastating effect on her will power. In her rather sheltered existence with Aunt Carrie she had met very few young men at all, and certainly no one like Toby, and it had never occurred to her that any man could create such havoc as he did simply by kissing her. Aunt Carrie, she felt sure, would never have approved of him.
Lady Carmichael was kind to her in her own way, but Isa saw her as a woman of strong moral principles, and if she saw Isa as an undesirable distraction for her grandson it would be natural enough for her to want the distraction removed. She did not know'for sure that the old lady would see things in that light, but neither was she prepared to risk her present comfortable position for the sake of a brief flirtation, however exciting the prospect might be.
Sunshine streamed in through the tall windows of the sitting-room and the old lady closed her eyes against its dazzle while appreciating its warmth. As so often happened when she appeared to be asleep, she spoke without opening her eyes and Isa looked
up swiftly at the tone of her question. "Have you been seeing a lot of young Burrows lately?" she asked.
Isa hesitated, for almost certainly Toby must have been her informant, it couldn't have been anyone else, and she hated the idea of his carrying tales to his grandmother—it was so out of character somehow. She licked her lips, uncertain just where such interest would lead. Perhaps Lady Carmichael saw an attachment to Chris Burrows as an insurance against too much interest in her grandson.
"I suppose Mr. Carmichael told you about us," she ventured.
"It doesn't matter who told me," Lady Carmichael said firmly. "I may be confined to the house, child, but I am not cut off from the world completely." The sun lent a pale golden sheen to the autocratic features, and the closed lids had a thin transparent look, but there was nothing weak or senile about her at all, and Isa scarcely resisted a Mile when the original matter was doggedly returned to, despite its personal tone. "Well?" the old lady urged. "Have you been seeing young Burrows a lot lately?"
