Spindrift

by Rebecca Stratton

  SPINDRIFT

  Rebecca Stratton

  After all, he was related to her...

  So why all the fuss, wondered Bryony. True, they were not blood relatives, but Bryony had always thought of Dominic, her stepbrother, as just that—a brother.

  Now her friend Marion was implying that things were otherwise ... and Bryony, despite her ardent denials, began to wonder if her feelings for Dominic were something more than brotherly.

  Especially that surprising day when he swept her into his arms and kissed her....

  CHAPTER ONE

  Out at sea a trading schooner ploughed its way through the deep blue Caribbean, the white foaming wash of its progress dancing around it and giving the impression that it floated on a reflection of the blue sky with its spindrift of white cloud. It was a seemingly lazy progress, but in fact the trade winds made for excellent going, and the effect on the eye was stunning.

  The small trader was fully rigged and most likely making for Guadeloupe and the port of Basse-terre, and with its sails billowing in the brisk wind and seen against the ever-changing background of sea and sky it was a sight that had changed little in a hundred years.

  It was a sight that had become familiar to Bryony Charn during the past eight years, and one which never failed to attract her, although her attention was rather more casual today than it usually was. She sat with Tim, her half-brother, beside her, hugging her knees and watching the trader with absent eyes, only vaguely aware of the matchless beauty of it.

  In the shadow of the coconut palms her face was thoughtful. The same palms grew in a green fringe all around the island’s beaches, bowed into sweeping curves, so that their rough hairy trunks almost touched the sand in places, where the winds had blown them low in to obeisance. White sand that glittered diamond bright in the hot Caribbean sun.

  In such a setting life could be idyllic, but at the moment Tim was unhappy, and when Tim was unhappy it was inevitable that Bryony was too. Although he was two years older than she was, the two of them were so near in age and so much younger than most of the family that a rapport had grown up between them that is more often found between twins.

  Tim was a Charn, just as she was herself, but the island was Laminaire property, and they were constantly kept aware of it. The original Laminaire to inhabit Petitnue was reputed to have been the product of an Algerian pirate and one of his pretty French captives and, looking at Dominic, the latest of the line, Bryony could quite easily believe it was true.

  There was a dark, rakish arrogance about him that stirred the imagination and encouraged it to indulge in fantasies about swashbuckling, dusky-skinned buccaneers who took what they wanted and gave no quarter. To Bryony, Dominic Laminaire was the most discomfiting feature of Petitnue as well as its owner, and yet she could not imagine the island without him.

  Bryony had never really known what stroke of chance originally brought Rupert Charn, the young Englishman who was to be both her and Tim’s father, to this tiny and beautiful island in the Caribbean, but his arrival had changed his life and made it possible for Bryony to be there now.

  Only a month after his arrival he had married the young widow Laminaire and become at once both husband and father, for his new wife already had a three-year-old son. In less than a year he had a son of his own, and ten years later still another son was born, one who cost Louise Charn her life. It was Timothy, this younger son, who now sat with Bryony, pondering on his future so gloomily.

  Bryony herself was the only child of an ill-fated second marriage, also contracted in haste but much less successful. The young Englishwoman he married while she was on holiday in the West Indies had become homesick and returned to England and never came back, so that Bryony was ten years old before she saw her father.

  It was soon after her mother died that a tall, tanned stranger came and whisked her away to this strange and exotic world where she found herself suddenly part of a family that included her father and two halfbrothers as well as a grown-up stepbrother. A man whom she could never somehow consider as in any way related to her, even by marriage.

  By the time Bryony arrived tension was already growing between her father and Dominic, his stepson. Dominic was a Laminaire and considered himself the natural successor to his father. Rupert Charn, who had run the plantation since his first marriage, saw no reason to relinquish the reins to his stepson, but at twenty-six Dominic thought it high time he came into his own, and there was constant friction between them by the time Bryony came.

  The situation had resolved itself a little less than two years later when Rupert Charn died, and Bryony had passed, apparently quite automatically, to the guardianship of his stepson, Dominic Laminaire. Petitnue was back in the hands of the Laminaires, as it had been for centuries.

  Dominic was twenty-eight by then and much too busy to take on the tutoring of a twelve-year-old girl as her father had done, so there had been little she could do about his sending her to school on the British island of Dominica—a little English school where she had learned what utter loneliness meant for the first time. She still remembered how she had wept each time she was returned there after her monthly weekend visits.

  By the time she was seventeen, just over a year ago now, she had made up her mind that she would not go back to school, and she had taken the bull by the horns and informed Dominic of the fact. Surprisingly he had not opposed the idea, but agreed that she had all the schooling she needed, even though it had done little to subdue a fairly rebellious nature. Since then she had lived at home and managed to make herself both useful and happy; the latter because of her close relationships with both Tim and her sister-in-law.

  Jules, the elder of her half-brothers, was married, and it had made a great deal of difference having Jenny living on the island. Another woman in the family had given her a confidante, and she always took her grievances to Jenny, a fact that Jules often teased her about. He was very fond of his young half-sister, and called her and Tim the heavenly twins.

  ‘Have you spoken to Jenny?’ The question was inevitable, for Tim too often aired his grievances to Jenny’s willing ear. ‘If you tell Jenny and see what she says, then see Dom—’

  ‘I’ve told her.’

  Tim looked inconsolable and also a little sulky, Bryony noted with some surprise. He was good-looking, as their father had been, and rather wilful, which was a trait he had probably also inherited from Rupert Charn, who had let little stand in his way when he really wanted something.

  ‘And?’ Bryony prompted him, letting a handful of glittering white sand run through her fingers while her blue eyes watched his face. ‘What did she say you should do?’

  ‘Think it over very carefully.’ His slightly mocking imitation of his sister-in-law’s gentle tones made Bryony frown; she liked Jenny. ‘I don’t know why I bothered; you know neither of them will go against Dom when it comes to the point!’

  It was true, Bryony had to admit; she had suffered from the same sense of frustration herself on more than one occasion, and she had never become so involved in anything as Tim was at the moment. He often went with the schooners to Basse-terre, and it had been during one of these trips that he met and, so he claimed, fallen in love with a schoolteacher quite a number of years older than himself.

  Dominic had declared him too young to know his own mind, and certainly too young to marry a woman of well over thirty, which was what he was anxious to do. Secretly Bryony had to agree with Dominic, although she would never have said so, for she was much too fiercely loyal to Tim.

  ‘Would you like me to speak to him?’

  Heaven knew what made her offer, for Dom was less likely to listen to her than to Jenny, but she had spoken impulsively, as she so often did, and she could not go back now. Besides which Tim, ju
dging by his expression, seemed to think she had some chance of succeeding. He tapped his excellent teeth with a thumbnail as he considered for a moment.

  ‘Would you, Bry?’

  He must be fully aware of the fact that she already realised how rash she had been, but she shrugged and laughed, as if it worried her not at all. ‘If you think it will do any good!’

  Tim regarded her for a moment; a small slim figure in a blue cotton dress, her copper-red head bare because her wide-brimmed hat lay on the sand beside her. She was already pretty and would probably develop into a beauty in a very few years from now, but at the moment she had a childlike vulnerability that was very appealing, and Tim saw her from the masculine point of view and smiled.

  ‘Oh, I think you could do a lot of good,’ he told her. ‘Just be sweet and nice, Bry, and he’ll listen to you.’

  Looking at him over her shoulder, Bryony pulled a face, tossing back the coppery hair in a gesture of unconscious defiance. ‘I’m not sweet and nice, Tim, and I couldn’t fool Dom into thinking I was, but I don’t mind doing what I can to help.’

  ‘Thanks! After all, I’m old enough to know my own mind and old enough to please myself who I marry—it isn’t as if he has any right to put his foot down.’

  ‘But you don’t have the nerve to tell him so!’ She could not resist the taunt, though she did not blame him in the least for feeling as he did.

  The older he got the more darkly arrogant Dominic Laminaire became, and yet she knew he could be so gentle and understanding if he chose to be. He had insisted on sending her away to the English school in Dominica, but he had explained his reasons to her very patiently and kindly, and he welcomed her home each time she came with love and a genuine warmth, the memory of which she clung to all the weeks she was away.

  ‘Do you have the nerve?’

  Tim’s grey eyes challenged her as he pushed himself up off the sand, and Bryony shrugged. She put her hands in his and let him pull her to her feet. Standing beside him made her appear even tinier, for both Rupert Charn’s sons had inherited his lean height as well as his good looks. Brushing down her dress, she did not look at him when she answered. It was a question she had been asking herself during the past few minutes, but she shrugged with apparent carelessness.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘He can’t eat me!’

  Dominic Laminaire was French. He had never absorbed the Englishness of his stepfather, nor his half-brothers who had both been educated at English schools in the islands. There was barely four years’ difference in age between him and Jules, and yet somehow he always seemed so much more mature, for both Rupert Charn’s sons had fair Anglo-Saxon colouring and boyishly good-looking features. Watching him through lowered lashes, Bryony thought no one, not even Dom himself, could claim he was good-looking.

  He was tall and lean and had a craggy ruggedness that is sometimes much more attractive than mere good looks, and he was dark. His hair was not quite black, thick and very slightly curled, and his eyes were grey with thick short black lashes that quite often served to hide what was in his eyes, and he was tanned to a dusky gold that seemed to give truth to the Algerian pirate myth. He also had an earthy sensuality that Bryony found increasingly disturbing.

  A plantation can be both hot and dirty, and Dominic showed signs of being both as he stood in the window with his back to the light, looking at Bryony. Perched on the very edge of his desk, she was wishing she had not made that rash promise to Tim to intervene on his behalf, and especially that she had not chosen to catch Dom when he came in from the fields. He was hot and tired and looked as if the last thing he wanted was to be appealed to by a young girl with obvious doubts about the cause she was pleading.

  While she waited for his response, Bryony pondered on the man himself. He should have married long since and provided Petitnue with its next generation, but so far he had given all his energies to making the island pay its way as it never had before in its history, and to bringing up his young half-brother and Bryony, and sometimes she felt very sad about it.

  She couldn’t see his expression properly and she wished he would stand where she could judge him better. ‘You’re simply doing this because it’s what Tim wants, aren’t you, Bryony?’

  He always put everything so neatly into a nutshell and made it sound far less important than it was. ‘Tim’s so unhappy, Dom. You have no idea how he feels.’

  For a second only Dominic’s wide and slightly crooked mouth tipped into a smile that gave a momentary gleam of warmth to his eyes too. ‘Tim’s feeling his feet—sowing his wild oats, or whatever other well-used adage you care to use. He thinks he’s in love, and—’

  ‘How do you know he isn’t?’

  She slipped the question in with breathless haste, and a frown flitted between black brows for a moment. ‘At twenty? And with a woman of thirty-five? I doubt it, Bryony, I doubt it very much!’

  ‘But you don’t know! How can you know, you’ve never—’

  She stopped there, aware that the grey eyes were watching her closely, waiting for her to complete that rash assumption, but she could not go on with it. She had never really known just what Dom’s relations were with her own sex; he frequently visited other islands on business, but there was nothing to say he did not sometimes mix business with pleasure. It was a possibility that had not seriously occurred to her before, and she felt strangely and inexplicably embarrassed suddenly. The way he was looking at her now seemed to suggest it was very possible, and that made it worse.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dom, I didn’t mean to be—’ She shrugged uneasily, then lifted her chin and tossed her coppery-red hair back over her shoulders in a gesture designed to challenge his opinion. ‘But you should realise how Tim feels. He’s your brother, and you should have a little sympathy with his feelings.’

  ‘I have every sympathy with his feelings.’ Dominic took a thin dark cheroot from a case and lit it, the flame of the lighter carving new dramatic lines on that craggy face while he bent over it. Then he blew smoke from his lips and looked across at her steadily. ‘I simply cannot condone a hasty marriage by a boy who’s scarcely out of school to a woman who is almost old enough to be his mother! In all probability that’s what is behind all this, and I can sympathise to some extent. Mama died when he was born and he’s never been coddled and spoiled by a woman—he’s only had men to bring him up. He probably sees her as a mother figure and he’s not old enough to tell the difference!’

  ‘Oh, Dom, that’s not fair!’

  ‘Fair?’ He mused on her accusation for a second, then shrugged as if he half admitted it. ‘I’m being sensible, Bryony, that seems to me to be more important at the moment than being fair, if it means stopping him from doing something he’ll most likely regret later on. You must see the sense of that, surely.’

  So much of what he said was true, and Bryony hated to have to admit it, even to herself. But no matter what her common sense told her she was, as ever, guided by her heart, and she could not do an about-face and desert Tim’s cause now. Feeling rather as if she had been backed into a corner, her instinct was to be defiant, and she got up from the edge of the desk and faced him.

  ‘He could always just go away and get married without asking you, or saying anything about it at all, you know! And if he suggests it I shall encourage him!’

  ‘Bryony!’

  She had turned and was on her way to the door, but his voice had an edge that she recognised with a slight catch in her breath as she turned to face him once more. He ground out the cheroot in an ashtray on the desk, and she could not help watching the long hard strength of his fingers that crushed the thinly rolled tobacco into a heap of smoking shreds that smelled pungently in the small room. Having called her attention to him, he stood for a moment with a hand in his pocket and studied the smouldering mess in front of him.

  ‘I hope you aren’t thinking of doing anything silly, Bryony. I know Tim is old enough to please himself, but he’s too young to tie himself for life to a wo
man so much older. I doubt if he really knows whether or not he’s in love with her.’

  ‘I believe he is!’

  He shrugged his broad shoulders as if he doubted her conviction, but was willing to concede the vague possibility. ‘If he is, then it won’t hurt to wait a while, will it? True love doesn’t wilt in the face of opposition, does it?’

  Being asked to pass judgment on a subject she had to admit she knew virtually nothing about took her by surprise, and Bryony shook her head slowly, conscious of a flush of colour that was bound to be noted. ‘I—I don’t know, Dom—how could I?’

  ‘How could you?’ He repeated it softly, and Bryony noticed he was smiling, though it was a wry and rather tight smile that found no reflection in his eyes. ‘When next you go into a huddle with Tim, suggest to him that he waits for a while—it can’t hurt if it’s the real thing, as he claims, and if it isn’t—well, he’ll give himself time to find out before it’s too late. He’ll know better, and be in a better position to support a wife, in a couple of years.’

  ‘A couple of years!’

  Dominic laughed. Shaking his head, he thrust both hands into his pockets and watched her with an expression in his eyes that was far too deep for her to understand. ‘Does that seem such a long time to you, Bryony?’

  ‘It’s a long time to wait when you’re in love with someone.’ She caught the swift flick of one dark brow and hastily amended what she had said. ‘At least I imagine it is.’

  She noticed him looking at his watch, and he came round the desk, putting an arm about her shoulders as he led her to the door of his office. The arm was firm and warm on the coolness of her own skin through the thin cotton dress she wore, and he smelled of dust and heat and a masculine scent she had never noticed quite so strongly before.

  ‘Don’t let Tim involve you too deeply, Bryony. I know you two are closer than any of us, but I’d hate you to get caught up in something you can’t handle.’

  ‘I don’t understand—what could I get caught up in?’