"By . . . marrying?"
"Yes. The arrangement need only last about six months, and I'm sure we like one another well enough to live together in friendly, impersonal harmony for that length of time."
He dropped a hand to Fern's waist and she could feel the warm pressure of his long fingers against her side, through the fine material of her blouse. The square base of his chin moved against her hair and Fern wondered why she felt such a sharp thrust of pain because Ross talked of an arrangement. In the circumstances the word was rather aptly chosen, but it had been much sweeter, hearing him say that he wished to marry her to protect her compassion.
"Ross—" His name fluttered nervously from her lips.
"Fern—" he imitated her with gentle mockery, and
she knew it was because his hand was resting near her heart and he could feel its scared, kittenish thumping. "I'm agreeable t-to your proposal." He sat very still beside her for a moment, then he spoke warmly, deeply : "It's the best way out of a ticklish situation, my dear, and I promise I shall do nothing to make you regret the trust you're putting in me." He held her in the bend of his elbow, in such a way that she was compelled to look at him and meet his searching, gold-flecked eyes. They ranged over her and his bold mouth curved into a slow smile. "I think I shall enjoy buying pretty clothes for you, Fern, and showing you off to my friends."
"No, I shan't want you to buy me things!" She was half shocked by the idea; a wife by arrangement didn't expect those kind of attentions.
"We'll see." He laughed at her, coolly self-possessed, even in this moment which Fern found calamitous and frightening; even a little mad. She was vaguely glad that he remained so, for her own composure had scattered into so many atoms and she could only rest in the bend of Ross's arm, her silver hair streaming over his brown arm, a pulse fluttering in her gently tanned throat, the pupils of her lavender eyes reflecting the bold, handsome face above her.
"We'd better start discussing practical matters." Ross withdrew his arm from around Fern and began to outline his plans.
He must first see about getting a special licence, afterwards they would arrange to be married without too much delay. His aunt was now well enough to dispense with a nurse and as he had some business to transact in New York they'd fly there for their ostensible honeymoon. "Do you fancy a trip to New York, Fern?" he asked.
"Yes, I think I should like that," she replied politely.
His eyes crinkled into that smile which was so particularly his own, humorous, whimsical, with the strangest hint of sadness shading it. "Will you always fall in so good-humouredly with all my plans?" he bantered. "If so, you're going to be a wife in a million."
"I'm going to be that anyway, Ross." Her answering smile was grave. "I don't imagine many girls land a husband by drugging him!"
He laughed. "Whatever it was you gave me last night it took away that vile headache."
"A headache that has turned out terribly troublesome for you." She touched his arm. "Ross, I could go away. I—I could go tonight—"
She saw the tautening of his obstinate jaw. "There's an old saying, my dear, that if universal charity prevailed, heaven would be here on earth and hell a myth. The world outside these walls is waiting to hand you a nasty, unearned slap round the face, not the charity that dwells in your own heart, which you extended to me last night. I won't see you hurt," he pressed a finger against her lips, "so hush your mouth, honey, as old Lila would say."
She accepted final defeat at his hands and let him pull her up out of her chair. He must have suddenly caught a whiff of the sea-spray which had drenched her hair on Curtis's yacht, for he said : "You smell like a mermaid. Have you been swimming?"
"I—I've been down on the seashore," she replied, wondering what it was about him that made her hesitate to say she had been with Curtis most of the afternoon. A hint of possessiveness, perhaps, in the way he held a strand of her hair to his nostrils?
They went upstairs, Ross to break their news to his aunt, Fern to change into her uniform. "I'll see you at dinner," Ross said, before entering his aunt's room. But Diana brought Jeff Lane back to dinner. Fern, hearing their noisy young laughter downstairs and strung up to a pitch of intense nervousness by the dramatic events of the day, excused herself from joining them. Diana would be full of excitement when Ross told her he was getting married, asking questions, forcing him to show Fern the kind of romantic attentions which their engagement did not justify. She chose to spend the evening upstairs with her patient and they watched television together until about nine o'clock.
When Fern said goodnight after making her patient comfortable, Edwina suddenly pressed a hand to her cheek and remarked that it was pale. With regard to this matter of marrying Fern, Ross had not been very forthcoming, assuming an attitude which had been proof against even his aunt's bulldozer methods of acquiring information. But he had made one illuminating remark. "I never meant to marry a selfish woman, aunt," he had said.
So Laraine was selfish, but if Ross still retained his old desire for her, then his marriage to Fern was not justified even in the face of possible scandal. That was what Edwina was thinking as she watched her young nurse. The girl was open-hearted, left vulnerable by a broken romance, and Ross was a good-looking devil with a great deal of charm.
"You're certain you want this marriage, child?" Edwina asked. "Ross isn't forcing you into it?"
"Oh no, he isn't forcing me!"
"Perhaps I should have used the word 'charming'?" Edwina suggested dryly.
Fern half smiled at that, then thrusting aside shyness she brushed her lips against Edwina's cheek. "Goodnight, Miss Kingdom."
Outside in the softly lit corridor Fern was startled to come upon Ross, smoking a cheroot beneath the window through which the handyman had seen him leaving her bedroom that morning. "Come on over," he invited, and Fern went and stood beside him. Stars twinkled beyond the open window in a sky of sable; the air was richly perfumed by sleeping roses and night-blooming jasmine. "Aunt Winna has told me about your young Englishman," Ross said. "Does he complicate our wedding arrangements in any way?"
Fern's hands clenched the skirt of her uniform. Strange that she had not given Ken a thought! "N-no more than Laraine complicates them for you," she told Ross.
He lifted his cheroot, drew on it and the piquant smoke slipped from his lips and mingled with the poig-
nant scents which were stealing up from the patio. "Love is a curious emotion, isn't it, Fern?" he quietly remarked. "We're so certain that once we fall in love a kind of door into a wonderland of happiness is going to swing open for us. I take it such a door once confronted you, with all its hidden allure?"
"It half opened, then closed in my face," she admitted.
"And now you're standing with your back to it, eh? You don't want any more frustrating glimpses into paradise? Well, I won't question your decision. I've made a similar one myself so we have that much in common."
He spotted the tiny dark shape of a garden fly on her white uniform and brushed it away. Her breast curved where his hand had momentarily rested, but it wasn't prudishness that made her draw away from him. They were involved in a situation which could throw them into a whirlpool of blind emotions, and a marriage of convenience, she told herself, was far better than one with its roots in the shifting soil of a transient passion. Passion was so base when it wasn't rarefied in the fires of love!
They were standing like that, suspended motionless in a suspenseful moment of time, when light young feet came running up the stairway. There was a swirl of coffee-coloured lace, then Diana appeared in the corridor.
"Oh—hullo, you two!" The girl's smile was impish and intensely interested. "Sorry to interrupt your tete-a-tete, but I'm getting something from my room to show Jeff." She looked straight at Fern. "Congrats on your engagement! I'm awful glad you're going to be one of the family, honey."
"Thank you, Diana." Then Fern jumped a little when Ross (probably with the intention of impressing his young step-n
iece), dropped an arm about her waist and kissed her rather cold cheek. "Go off to bed, sweetie, you're looking tired," he said. Then in a lower tone of voice : "You're cold with nerves, but there isn't anything to be nervous about, my dear. Sleep tight and stop worrying."
Fern said goodnight and went to her room at the end of surely the strangest day of her life. Strange, calamitous in almost the same way as that day during her childhood when Aster, her eldest sister, had met Bryony and herself from school because their widowed mother had been knocked down and killed by a car while out shopping and Aster, called home from the office where she worked, didn't want to run the risk of neighbours breaking the awful news to her young sisters before she did. Bryony had wept unrestrainedly, but Fern had shivered like a kitten in the cold and felt utterly empty inside.
She felt a little like that now and she jumped nervously when her bedroom door opened and Diana's voice said : "Are you awake, Fern? I'd like to talk for a while." Fern lay very still in the darkness without answering, breathing a sigh of relief when Diana decided she was asleep and withdrew from the room, quietly closing the door behind her.
She couldn't talk to Diana tonight. She just wanted this peaceful darkness, the cool linen of her bed and all the worrying problems of the forthcoming days held at bay for a while.
Within no time at all the news was all round Cap Flamingo that Ross Kingdom was going to marry his aunt's young nurse.
In some apprehensive corner of her mind Fern guessed that Ken would get in touch with her as soon as he heard the news. He did. He phoned the Kingdom house and insisted that she meet him in town for a talk. She tried to put him off and he at once replied that he was determined to see her; he would come up to the house if she refused to meet him.
His voice came raggedly along the line : "I wanted with all my heart to redeem that crazy mistake of mine in England," he said. "I'd have knelt in the dust that last time we met if you had agreed to forget what I can only think of now as a kind of raging lunacy. Fern, I must see you ! I must talk to you !"
Fern had some final shopping to do in town on Friday, so she agreed to meet Ken in the Hacienda Gardens, which were secluded and where they could safely discuss all this business without being seen.
With so much speculative talk accomanying her sudden engagement to Ross, she dreaded any further gossip which might be triggered off if she were seen openly with Ken. There were people in Cap Flamingo who knew they had once been much more than friends and she owed it to Ross to respect the bargain they had made. Their forthcoming marriage was certainly no more than that! It was so lacking in all the real romance which should surround the magical binding of two people in matrimony that Fern often wildly felt that she was embarking on something she would be bound to regret in the future.
As each day brought her marriage a little closer, and with this conviction haunting her, she grew almost tempted to pack her suitcase; to slip away from the Kingdom house and disappear out of Ross's life.
But something held her back.
She told herself it was her sense of duty. She had agreed to Ross's proposal and now everything was near enough arranged.
She wouldn't, or couldn't, admit to herself that she was trapped by the same compassion which had landed both of them in this predicament. Ross was not an entirely happy man and he seemed to want to lean a little against her, as though her compassion eased a yearning inside him which he was determined to deny.
CHAPTER FIVE
FERN entered the Hacienda Gardens where the air was drenched with the scent of flowers and alive with tinkling fountains and twittering birds. She glanced about her, a gloved hand held against her pounding heart.
"Hullo, Fern," said a quiet voice behind her.
She turned to face Ken. The muscles of her face felt stiff; they wouldn't relax into a smile and she watched him bite his lip. "Let's find ourselves a place where we can talk." He lightly took her arm and they ran down a flight of wide stone steps to a flagged path that led them to a rose covered arbour. There was a rustic seat inside the arbour and they sat down.
"Y-you're looking rather pale," Ken blurted out. His steel-blue eyes were fixed upon her face and she saw a wild host of questions in them, waiting to leap upon her it seemed.
"Ken," she spoke his name almost pleadingly, "I didn't come here to explain my actions or to sort over the broken pieces of our romance. I came because we're civilized people and we can't become enemies because I'm going to marry another man."
Ken flinched. "It's driving me crazy that tomorrow you'll belong to Ross Kingdom." He suddenly caught at her hands, held them insistently. "I can't believe there's nothing left of what you once felt for me . . . that he has suddenly taken my place in your heart. Look at me, Fern. Look right at me and tell me it isn't true what people are saying."
"W-what are people saying, Ken?" Strange how she was driven to ask, as though she needed to see if he would put it into words. He would only do so if he believed whatever gossip had reached his ears, but if he had ever really known her, and loved her, he would dismiss all the talk as beneath contempt. She watched his glance fall to the stone flags of the arbour, where fallen rose petals curled in the hot sun.
"I've seen Ross Kingdom swimming and playing golf at the Cap Flamingo country club," he said, and there was a thick note of resentment in his voice, blurring its usual crispness. "He's got just about everything, hasn't he? Looks, breeding, position, added to the benefits bestowed by an education at one of America's best colleges."
Fern's dark lashes sank down over her eyes and she
knew Ken had answered her, in his own way. Driven by ambition himself, it was almost understandable that he should believe she could marry for the reasons he would have married Rose Bramley. And his belief proved he had never really known her, and it was almost as important as love itself, she reflected, to know that your innermost self, your deepest desires and dreams were felt and understood by the man you wanted to share your life with. She trembled slightly when a couple of petals detached themselves from a full-blown scarlet rose and fell on to her skirt.
"The bride smiled through a shower of rose petals." That was how the newspapers always romantically put it, Fern thought.
Jealousy and frustration were tearing at Ken as he sat looking at her. At the delicate fragrance of her skin, the lavender eyes set with a jewel-like precision under the slender eyebrows that, like her lashes, were several shades darker than her silvery hair. His glance dwelt on her soft mouth and as male hunger clamoured in him, making him savage with longing to know again the sweet response of her lips, he felt he was ready in this moment to throw up everything for her, his job and the increasing responsibilities which would one day earn him a seat upon the directing board of Bramley's.
"Come away with me, Fern!" He released her hands and caught at her shoulders and the steel of his eyes seemed to be melting in the fire of his reawakened passion. "We belong together, not to other people. We'll forget Rose Bramley and Ross Kingdom. We'll pick up the pieces of our broken romance and make a whole new one out of them."
For a wild, brief moment she wanted the passion she saw glowing in his eyes. She wanted as he did those old enchantments known together in England. Walking arm in arm under the stars after seeing a play and eagerly discussing its merits. Punting on the river with the big snowy swans swimming by. Enjoying a quick game of squash at Bramley's sports club on a Sunday afternoon, followed by a lazy tea in the lounge of the club. . . .
Then, wildly, she was pulling free of his hands. "No! You can't mend broken things, Ken. The patched-up places always show, they'd always be there, perpetually reminding me that your love of money was stronger than your love of me . . . torturing you with doubts about my relationship with Ross."
"God, I'd never have thought you could turn the knife in a fellow's wound." Ken groaned the words.
At once she was sorry. She hadn't meant to hurt him, but he must understand that they could never hope to recapture all they had lost. The fi
rst sweet bloom had blown right off their love and the frost of disillusion had blackened its petals. "We'll go on being friends, Ken," she said, as gently as possible.
"You're asking a lot, aren't you, Fern ? You're not the kind of girl a man wants just for a friend." His hps twisted. "Hasn't Ross Kingdom already taught you that ?"
"Oh, Ken, there isn't any need to be petty a-and spiteful." Fern rose to her feet, straightened the jacket of her suit and caught up the hold-all which held her shopping. She was turning away from Ken when he suddenly leapt up, pulled her against him and crushed her mouth beneath his in a kiss that was deliberately punishing.
"I almost think I could have borne all this if I believed you loved this man you're marrying." He spoke fiercely against her mouth. "But your eyes aren't shining like those of a girl in love... they're full of shadows."
Fern wrenched herself out of his arms, still feeling the throb of her cruelly kissed mouth. "You're right about one thing, Ken," she spoke in an angry, shaken voice, "we can't be friends."
"I agree! It's all or nothing with us, Fern."
He stood thrusting a hand through his dark hair, disarranging its glossy smoothness, so that, tousled, he looked curiously boyish. Boyish and sullen, watching her as she took a compact out of her bag and repaired her smudged lipstick. Her hand shook a little and she thought of the bleak truth of the old saying that it was easier to pull down than to build. Neither she nor Ken
could stop pulling down what they had once started to build. He had removed the first brick, now the entire construction was crumbling inevitably to nothing.
Fern closed her compact, dropped it into her bag, then placed her bag inside the hold-all where among several other wrapped packages there lay a packet of paper-lace doilies for the pieces of wedding cake that would be cut tomorrow.
"Goodbye, Ken." She walked away from the man whose wilful ambitions had shattered their love and in a circuitous way brought about her coming union with Ross. The flagged path glittered hot under the sun and the scent of roses lingered in her nostrils all the way to the town centre, torturing and bitter-sweet. She felt horribly depressed, quite unable to face the thought of returning to the Kingdom house just yet, where servants and buffet-attendants would be bustling about; where her wedding outfit hung in the wardrobe in her bedroom and a tense, serious air hung about the man who would be her husband in less than twenty hours.
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