by Flora Kidd
Dangerous Encounter
By
Flora Kidd
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
She knew nothing about sexual affinity.
Helen was frightened, and yet the pull she felt toward him electrified her.
"I know the name Magnus means great, but I don't think you're well named," she said acidly. "There's nothing great about deceiving a woman and then… to add insult to injury, sexually harassing her!"
Magnus drew back from her as if she had hit him, and his eyes narrowed warily.
"And when have I sexually harassed you?" he demanded.
"You didn't have to kiss me," she argued weakly.
"Agreed," he murmured, moving closer to her.
"I didn't have to. I did it because I couldn't help it," he replied, his voice still soft. "I did it to find out what you're really like behind that act you put on of being a cool, liberated type of woman about to indulge in an affair with another woman's husband."
Books by Flora Kidd
HARLEQUIN PRESENTS
304—MARRIAGE IN MEXICO
309—PASSIONATE ENCOUNTER
327—TOGETHER AGAIN
333—TANGLED SHADOWS
344—STAY THROUGH THE NIGHT
370—THE ARRANGED MARRIAGE
379—THE SILKEN BOND
400—WIFE BY CONTRACT
434—BEYOND CONTROL
447—PERSONAL AFFAIR
464—PASSIONATE STRANGER
485—BRIDE FOR A CAPTAIN
495—MEETING AT MIDNIGHT
520—MAKE-BELIEVE MARRIAGE
554—BETWEEN PRIDE AND PASSION
577—TEMPTED TO LOVE
592—DARK SEDUCTION
643—TROPICAL TEMPEST
657—DANGEROUS ENCOUNTER
HARLEQUIN ROMANCES
1865—STRANGER IN THE GLEN
1907—ENCHANTMENT IN BLUE
1977—THE DANCE OF COURTSHIP
1999—THE SUMMER WIFE
2056—THE BLACK KNIGHT
2146—TO PLAY WITH FIRE
2228—THE BARGAIN BRIDE
Harlequin Presents first edition January 1984
ISBN 0-373-10657-2
Original hardcover edition published in 1983
by Mills & Boon Limited
Copyright © 1983 by Flora Kidd.
CHAPTER ONE
The telephone on the desk rang shrilly and demandingly, once, twice, three, four times. There was no one in the office to answer it. On the fifth ring a young woman appeared in a doorway which opened into another room. She was about twenty-two, tall and slim, and her fair straight hair was tied back simply behind her neck to fall in a long silky tail down her back. Over her skirt and blouse she was wearing a white hospital coat, indicating that she was either a doctor or a laboratory technician. Her thin face was not exactly pretty, but her skin was fine and white and her bones were elegantly chiselled. She would blossom into beauty as she grew older.
On the sixth ring of the telephone bell she picked up the receiver.
'Glencross Regional Hospital Laboratory,' she said in a cool briskly professional voice which held just the slightest suspicion of a Scottish accent. 'Helen Melrose speaking.'
Someone at the other end of the line cleared his throat and then a familiar voice, also softened by a Scottish accent, spoke.
'Blair here, Helen. I was hoping I'd reach you first time and not the secretary.'
At the sound of the man's voice Helen's face changed its expression. It became wary and her large tawny-brown eyes narrowed. She bit the corner of her soft pink lower lip with the edge of well-shaped white teeth.
'I thought you'd phone me at the flat before this,' she murmured. 'You said you would. Is everything all right? Are we still going away for the weekend?'
'Do you still want to go away… with me?'
'I… I'd like to go away, but I'm not sure…' she began, but he interrupted her.
'I am. I'm looking forward to being alone with you. I can hardly wait,' he said, his voice deepening with emotion.
Helen's pale cheeks flushed with pink colour betraying her sudden inner excitement. Blair sounded like a man who was desperately in love, and she was glad there was no one in the laboratory office to notice her reaction to his verbal lovemaking.
'All right,' she whispered, 'I'll go away with you. You said on Monday that you'd like to leave this afternoon, about one o'clock. Will you pick me up at the flat?'
'No, I can't do that. Something has come up and I can't get away as soon as I'd hoped. Also I think it would be best if we travel separately. You could go ahead of me and I'll join you later, this evening.'
'But I don't know where we're going,' she reminded him with a laugh. 'You didn't tell me on Monday. You said it was to be a secret until we got there, that you wanted to surprise me.'
'Mmm, I did, didn't I? How romantic of me!' There was a note of mockery in the voice which was unusual, because Blair wasn't disposed to making fun of himself. 'Well, I can't keep it a secret any longer. We're going to stay in a castle on an island off the west coast, not far from Oban.'
'That sounds delightful, but I hope it isn't in ruins.'
'No, it's in pretty good shape. It's been renovated, but it's fairly isolated and that's why I thought it would be a good place for us to stay. Would you mind driving there by yourself?'
'No, not at all. I've never been that way before. And I do agree with you that it would be best if we left here separately without arousing any suspicions.'
'I thought you might.' Again there was a certain dryness in his voice that puzzled her.
'So will you tell me how to get there, please?' Helen asked.
'Of course. It's rather an awkward drive. Go from here across the river to Dumbarton and then take the road along the shore of Loch Long to Arrochar. From Arrochar go west and down Loch Fyne through Inverary to Lochgilphead, then turn north for Oban. When you're about five miles along the Oban road look for a signpost to the village of Ballacuish and follow that road as far as it goes, right to the sea. There's a jetty there and a crofter's cottage.' He paused for a moment, then added, 'Magnus will meet you there. I've told him to expect you. He'll take you over to the island of Carroch in the motorboat.'
'Who is Magnus?' she asked.
'You could say he's the caretaker of the castle.'
'Does he live in it?'
'Er… yes.'
'Then he'll be there while we're there. We won't be alone.'
'Do you mind?' asked Blair.
'No, not really.' Actually Helen was quite relieved that there would be other people in the castle. Magnus probably had a wife who was the housekeeper. 'Who owns the castle?'
There was a brief silence and she thought she could hear the sound of music in the background and also the clatter of dishes. Where was Blair? Not in his surgery at his house in Glencross, nor in his office in the gynaecological ward of the hospital, judging by the sounds she could hear.
'A relative of mine,' he replied at last. 'Look, Helen, I've got to go—I'm very busy this morning. I'll see you later, this evening at Castle Carroch.'
'When? What time? Just a minute—' she said urgently, but he had hung up.
She put down the receiver and stood for a moment frowning at the phone. She had wanted to ask him if he had a cold, because his voice had sounded different in some ways. It hadn't always sounded like his.
She laughed and shook her head, shaking away doubts and suspicions. Of course it had been Dr Blair Calder speaking to her. Only Blair would know he had invited her to g
o away with him for the weekend. She glanced at her watch. Another hour of work today, Friday, and then she could leave at noon to begin the long weekend holiday which was due to her. Returning to the laboratory, she sat down at the bench where she had been testing blood samples for their sugar content;
She was going away with Blair to spend two whole nights and nearly two days with him. She had committed herself at last to spending some time alone with the man who had been attracted to her ever since he had met her when she had first come to Glencross hospital to work as a lab technician nine months ago.
After that first meeting last September they had become friends quite rapidly, although he had done all the pursuing, but because he was still married most of their meetings had been clandestine—to protect both their reputations, Blair had said, and because he was suing his wife for a divorce and didn't want to give her a reason for suing him. Helen had been disappointed when she had found out he was married and had tried to back away from having any sort of friendship with him, but he had persisted in seeing her.
To become emotionally and physically involved with another woman's husband had initially offended Helen's innate puritanism as well as her secret romantic attitude to life. She had always hoped, when she had thought of falling in love and getting married, that it would be with a man who was as free from commitment to another person as she was herself, and that she would be the first with him as he would be with her. She hadn't reckoned on being pursued by someone like Blair, who had managed to overcome her objections to going out with him occasionally when he had told her about the emptiness of his marriage to Wanda Murray, a well-known singing and recording star.
'Heaven knows why I ever married Wanda,' he had confided to Helen one day last October when they had driven out to Loch Lomond to walk beside the famous loch, which had been smooth and placid that autumn afternoon, reflecting not only the blue of the sky but also the bronze and yellow of dying leaves. 'I must have been out of my mind. But then I was young and impressionable and in those days she was… well, she hadn't been hardened by success. She was only just beginning to be recorded. She started with a rock-n'-roll group, you know.'
'Yes, I have read about her,' Helen had replied. 'Where did you meet her?'
'Here in Glencross, as a matter of fact. She was at a party given for a friend of mine. The group Wanda was singing with played music for the dancing at the party.' He had sighed heavily. 'Yes, I was a fool in those days, believing that I had to marry a woman before I could have her. We were together only two years and then she walked out on me, said she couldn't get on with her career as a singer living here, that she had to go and live in London to be near the agents and recording studios. I'd just qualified as a gynaecologist and hoped to be appointed to a hospital in Glasgow, so I couldn't go with her. And that's when the splitting up began. For years we've lived apart, she in her apartment in London and me in the house up here.'
'Don't you ever meet?' Helen had exclaimed.
'Sometimes,' he had admitted. 'But it's ceased to be a proper marriage. She never does for me what a wife should do. She always puts herself and her career first.'
'Well, don't you put yourself and your career first?' Helen had challenged. 'Most men do, so I've heard.'
Blair had ignored her question and had continued to ramble on about how badly he felt Wanda had treated him.
'But one day soon, she'll give in and let me divorce her and then I'll be free again.' He had turned to her and had looked at her intently. 'I'll be free, then, to marry someone else,' he had added pointedly, 'someone less selfish, someone who will be a real wife. Someone like you, Helen.'
She hadn't risen to the bait—but then she hadn't refused to meet him and go out with him whenever he had asked her either, and every time they had met he had assured her that the time when Wanda would agree to let him divorce her was coming closer and closer.
'But it's getting harder and harder for me to wait for you, Helen,' had been his refrain every time he saw her, and his lovemaking had become steadily more and more demanding.
'I want you, Helen,' he had whispered to her only last Monday evening after kissing her rather violently as they had said goodnight in his car before she had gone up to her flat, and he had gone on to suggest that he stay the night with her. Somehow she had managed to persuade him that it wouldn't be to his advantage if he were seen leaving her flat the next morning and that if it were discovered he had been with her all night Wanda would have a good weapon to use against him in a divorce case.
'You're right, absolutely right,' he had agreed, much to her relief. 'But it makes no difference to the way I feel about you. There must be something we can do about it, somewhere we can go to be really alone together. When do you have a long weekend off?'
'This coming weekend.'
'I think I could manage to take some time off then, too,' he had said. 'We could go somewhere where no one will know us. I know just the place, and it won't be too busy this time of the year. When can you get away?'
'I finish at noon on Friday.'
'Good. I'll phone you later in the week to make the final arrangements. Say you'll come away with me, Helen. Please say it's what you want to do,' he had pleaded, taking hold of her hands.
She had hesitated, feeling that she had been pulled in two different directions at once. Part of her, the sensible well-brought-up young woman, had insisted that she should refuse his invitation and that to go away and stay with him in an isolated place was to court disaster for herself. Blair would overwhelm her with his lovemaking and she would become just another woman who had succumbed in a moment of weakness to seduction by a married man. She would break her own code of honour and offend her own deep-rooted sense of good morality.
But the other part, the warm, sensitive, extremely feminine woman who was longing to fall in love and be swept off her feet by a passionate lover, had urged her to accept his invitation, seeing the weekend holiday with him as an adventure in romance, something that might never come her way again, if she refused. So ignoring the warning put out by her conscience, she had given in to his pleading and had agreed to go away with him for the weekend if he could make arrangements.
She left the hospital promptly at noon and drove in her small car—a secondhand one which her father had helped her to buy so that she could drive to her parents' home in Dumfries whenever she had the weekend off and wouldn't be dependent on buses or trains—to her flat in the nearby seaside town of Seakirk. She hadn't told her parents that she had this weekend off because she knew they would expect to see her in Dumfries. They knew nothing about Blair yet, because she had decided not to tell them about him until he was divorced from Wanda and was free to marry again. Then she might take him to meet them. Only might, she thought now with a rueful smile. They wouldn't approve of her going about with him while he was still married, and they would probably have reservations about her marrying a man who was divorced too. For them marriage between two people lasted until death, and they had no time for the permissive behaviour of the present younger generation.
She heated a small can of soup for her midday meal and, after eating, packed the clothes she would need for the weekend in a suitcase. At just after one, dressed in dark green pants, a crisp cotton tartan-printed blouse and a grey tweed jacket, she drove away from Seakirk, which was on the wide estuary of the Firth of Clyde, and drove north, through Gourock and Greenock to Erskine, where she crossed the River Clyde to Dunbartonshire.
Although the morning had been clear and sunny the weather had changed quickly as it often does on the west coast of Scotland. Thin grey nimbus clouds had spread across the sky and the river was a slightly darker grey, and as she drove onwards, northwards and then westwards into the mountains of Argyllshire, through narrow passes and then along the shore of the wide sea loch of Loch Fyne, the clouds grew heavier, hiding the summits of the mountains.
Three and a half hours after leaving her flat she turned off the road to Oban from Lochgilphead on to
a country road which wound past lush green meadows where brown cattled grazed, on her way at last to Ballacuish. She came upon the village abruptly around a bend in the road. It was only a line of whitewashed cottages strung out beside the road, each one with its patch of garden. Then she was past them and the road was merely a gravel track which ended rather suddenly at the front door of a squat single-storey cottage built of stone and set at right angles to the sea.
There was a small van parked by the cottage, so Helen parked her car beside it, took out her case and locked the car's doors. Looking round, she noticed the jetty and began to walk towards it. In the shelter of the sturdy stone walls built in the shape of an ell, which jutted out into the water, a small black motorboat was tied up. Across the narrow strait of water lay several islands, some small and green, some more mountainous, dark blue shapes crowned with misty grey clouds.
'You wouldn't be Miss Melrose now, would you? Miss Helen Melrose?' asked a masculine voice behind her; a deep voice speaking with the cadence of the born Highlander. Helen spun round in surprise, the hairs pricking on the back of her neck. She hadn't heard him walk up behind her.
'Oh, you gave me an awful fright!' she gasped. 'Are you Mr Magnus?'
'Just Magnus,' he replied. 'There's no need for you to be calling me Mister. You are Helen Melrose, then?'
'Yes, I am.'
'You are not at all what I was expecting,' he remarked frankly, his glance roving over her. 'I thought you would be older.'
'You're not what I was expecting either,' she retorted, her chin going up at a defiant angle. She didn't like the way his vivid blue eyes were appraising her. 'I thought you'd be older too.'
His dark level eyebrows lifted slightly and a slight smile quirked his long lips, but he made no further comment. He wasn't as old as Blair, she decided, possibly in his early thirties, and he was tall and lean, dressed in navy blue corduroy pants tucked into rubber sea-boots and a plain navy-blue jersey with a crew-neck, which left his strong, suntanned neck exposed. Over the jersey he wore a bright yellow waterproof jacket, the sort often worn by sailors of yachts in bad weather. Its collar was turned up, forming a frame for his long-jawed, rather gaunt face. Dark brown hair coiled about his forehead and ears in wind-blown dishevelment. There was about him a reckless, free-booting appearance. He wasn't at all her idea of a caretaker, not at all staid and solid slow-moving and slow-thinking but dependable. No, not at all dependable-looking.
