by Isobel Chace
‘It was!’ Tony assured her dryly.
‘Are you now warmer?’ the stranger put in casually. ‘If you are, I think we had better go now.’
Megan smiled up at him. ‘Yes, let’s go,’ she said.
‘When will I see you again?’ Tony asked plaintively as they made their way through the door.
‘Another time,’ the stranger answered him curtly. ‘This is no place for a young lady to be at this hour of night.’
‘She’s a singer!’ Tony laughed.
‘So she has told me,’ the stranger said flatly. ‘It is not what I would choose for any young relative of mine—’
‘But I do sing,’ Megan confirmed eagerly.
‘That is something I shall speak to your parents about. Now you will please tell me their address and I shall take you home.”
At another time, she would have resented his arrogance, but now all she could feel was relief that she didn’t have to see Tony again and that she didn’t have to struggle home by herself on the suburban trains at that time of night.
‘My parents live in Kent. If you’ll see me to Victoria Station—’
‘I prefer to take you home.’
She blinked. ‘But it will take you ages!’
‘We will take the car,’ he answered simply. ‘My hotel is not far from here. Do you mind walking a short distance?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ she said in a small voice. ‘But you don’t have to go to so much trouble.’
‘I know I don’t.’
‘Then—then why?’ she asked.
‘Because I choose to do so,’ he said unanswerably.
She walked beside him in silence for a long moment. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ she objected. ‘I’m Megan Meredith.’
‘Megan?’ he repeated. ‘I have not heard this name before. Is it English?’
‘Welsh,’ she said.
He pulled his coat closer about him against the still falling snow. ‘That is why you sing?’ he suggested.
‘I suppose so,’ she admitted.
‘I am Carlos Vallori Llobera.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘I am Spanish,’ he added unnecessarily.
‘You look Spanish,’ she told him.
‘I do?’ He sounded surprised.
She wished she hadn’t spoken. ‘You’re so tall,’ she said by way of explanation.
‘Like Don Quixote?’
His pronunciation of the name was strange to her and it was a moment before she realised whom he meant. ‘I suppose so,’ she said.
‘I am more like him than Sancho, don’t you think?’ he said.
She chuckled. ‘Yes, you are. I can’t imagine you riding on a mule!’
‘Why not?’ he countered.
‘No, no, it would have to be a very fine horse to look right.’
He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. ‘So?’
‘Yes, of course!’ she went on impatiently. ‘A mule would be far too humble a mount for you!’
He frowned at her. ‘Are you always so indiscreet in your remarks?’ he cautioned her.
She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Are you?’
‘I didn’t mean to tease you,’ she added. ‘Only you must see that you’d look better on a horse than on a mule?’
‘I am sure I should,’ he agreed. ‘What I meant was that it is easy to see why this young man of yours thought you wanted his attentions.’
‘I don’t see why,’ she said. ‘I hardly know him.’
‘You hardly know me,’ he pointed out.
Megan gave him a mystified look. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said gruffly.
He laughed out loud. ‘I am telling you that it is unwise to flatter unknown males when you are alone with them,’ he reproved her. ‘It may lead to other undesirable incidents.’
She felt herself blushing. ‘I wasn’t flattering you!’ she denied.
‘No?’ He dismissed the matter easily, pointing out his hotel to her. ‘I will fetch the car,’ he told her. ‘You will be quite safe here, in the light from the hotel.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed mechanically.
‘You are not nervous of the dark?’ he probed.
She was, but she had no intention of admitting such a weakness to him.
‘No.’
‘Good.’ He gave her a long, grave look and then walked away from her, down some side street, leaving her on her own with the snow fluttering down around her.
She didn’t know why she was letting him drive her to her parents’ home. The fact that he was tall and elegant, and never for a moment considered that she might refuse to fall in with his arrangements, had nothing to do with it. She had argued with better men, she told herself, even if they hadn’t been as arrogant as this Spaniard. Perhaps it was just that she liked the feeling, after all, of some knight in shining armour carrying her away into the winter night. He looked the part for that, she thought. Haughty and unbending and full of Spanish honour! She had never met anyone quite like him before and he intrigued her, though how she was going to explain him away to her parents, she simply could not imagine.
For a knight, his charger, in the shape of an extremely expensive-looking Mercedes car, was a delight to behold. Megan slipped into the front seat beside him, rejoicing in the warmth that enveloped her. It gave her a queer feeling to be on the right side of the car, but she supposed that was because he usually drove in Spain and not in England.
‘Where to?’ he asked briefly.
She swallowed, once more aware of how very far she was taking him, a stranger, out of his way. ‘Tunbridge Wells,’ she said.
He didn’t appear to be surprised, or particularly concerned.
‘Do you return there every night?’ he asked her.
She shook her head. ‘I share a room with a friend.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘And this friend, does she have charge of you?’
Megan giggled. ‘Good heavens, no! We were at school together. Alice—I was at school with her too—found it for us. It’s fairly near her place. We were all going to share with her, but she—it wasn’t convenient,’ she ended lamely, hoping that he wouldn’t ask her why.
‘Is she, too, as young as you?’
Megan grinned at him. ‘We’re all of age!’ she said, rather smugly.
‘You too?’ His disbelief was obvious.
‘I’m eighteen!’ she exclaimed.
‘That is no age at all,’ he snubbed her. ‘One of my sisters is also eighteen, but I should not dream of allowing her to run round Madrid, or London, on her own! If you had an unpleasant experience this evening, it was no more than to be expected—’
‘Tony didn’t mean anything!’ Megan protested.
The Spaniard gave her an impatient look. ‘I find it shocking that young women should be left defenceless to deal with young men who don’t mean anything,’ he said brutally.
‘Isn’t that rather old-fashioned?’ she retorted.
‘Not at all. Some kinds of behaviour are a matter of taste rather than fashion.’
Crushed, Megan sought to explain herself. ‘Alice introduced me to Tony,’ she began.
‘And this Alice? Is she a respectable person?’
Megan doubted that he would consider Alice respectable in any way. ‘She’s nice,’ she compromised.
‘But not respectable?’
Megan thought of the men Alice knew and then with relief of the man she had decided to marry, a man with a title and an ex-wife lurking somewhere in the background.
‘She’s marrying very well,’ she said defensively.
The Spaniard glared at the snow falling on the road ahead of him.
‘She would not in Spain!’ he claimed grandly and with finality. Megan, stealing a look at his autocratic countenance, could well believe him. But then neither she nor Alice were living in Spain.
CHAPTER II
Megan never knew what the Spaniard
said to her parents. She had spent a fruitless few minutes in the driveway of her parents’ home trying to persuade him that her mother and father would have gone to bed long since and that the last thing they would appreciate was being disturbed at that hour. He had not listened at all.
‘I think they will wish to see me,’ he had said firmly. ‘They will want to assure themselves that you are home and they will also be interested in something else I have to say to them.’
‘Something else?’
‘It will be better if you go straight to bed,’ he had gone on. ‘You must be tired after all your adventures.’
‘You mean I look awful?’ she had retorted crossly.
He had switched on the light in the car by opening his door and had taken a good look at her.
‘No, not awful,’ he had said kindly. ‘But very young and very tired.’
‘That means the same thing!’ Megan had sighed, hurt.
‘No. To look young is charming. Before you washed your face you looked awful, but not now.’
She had blushed, suddenly aware of his dark eyes studying her face. ‘I didn’t wash for you!’ she had insisted sharply. ‘I never wear much make-up except when I’m performing!’
He had got out of the car without further comment and had gone up to the front door, firmly ringing the bell although she had kept on telling him that she had a key of her own. When her father had come to the door, the collar of his dressing-gown all awry, the Spaniard had touched her cheek with a finger and had pointed up the stairs.
‘Goodnight, Megan Meredith,’ he had said.
Megan had looked to her father for support, but he had looked so astonished at the sight of his visitor that Megan had known that he was not at all interested in her reactions.
‘But—’ she had begun by way of protest.
‘Goodnight, nina.’
She had resented the endearment—at least she had supposed it was an endearment—almost as much as his imperious tone of voice.
‘Goodnight, senor!’ she had answered crossly. She had started up the stairs, pausing as soon as she had thought she was out of sight.
‘Senorita!’ his voice had carried up to her. ‘You want something?’
‘No!’ she had denied. ‘Nothing at all!’
Megan had listened in vain for some protest from her father, but apparently he had made none. Disconsolate, she had gone to her room, thinking how much she disliked her Spanish rescuer, but when she had slept, she had dreamed about him and in her dreams she had not disliked him at all.
It was inevitable that she had overslept the next morning. She had meant to be the first one downstairs and to have taken her mother her breakfast in bed, but when she opened her eyes it was gone ten o’clock and the blue light on the ceiling had told her immediately that the snow had come to stay.
Megan hurried out of bed, pulling on jeans and a sweater, and rushed down the stairs as fast as she could. Her mother was in the kitchen and she called out to her as she went past in search of her father.
‘Megan!’
She wondered briefly whether she should ignore her mother’s commanding voice, deciding that she had better not. She went reluctantly back to the kitchen.
‘Sit down, Megan,’ her mother ordered.
‘I want to go and look at the snow,’ said Megan.
‘Your father and I want to talk to you—’
‘It’s all right, Mother. I won’t be going back to the Witch’s Cauldron. I don’t think Tony would have me back anyway.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ her mother said dryly.
‘Yes, but one has to begin somewhere!’ Megan burst out.
Her mother looked at her, an odd expression in her eyes. ‘I like your Spaniard,’ she said irrelevantly. ‘He’s coming to lunch today.’
‘But we don’t know him!’
‘Now, Megan, he took a lot of trouble on your behalf last night. He’s quite right too when he says that you shouldn’t be on your own in London at your age. We’ve worried about you quite a bit recently and we should have done something about it—’
Megan glanced up with startled eyes. ‘He had the effrontery—’
‘He was right,’ her mother interrupted firmly.
‘I can look after myself!’
‘Famous last words!’ her mother jeered lightly. ‘He wouldn’t say how or where he came across you last night, but it didn’t sound as though you were making out very well at that moment.’
Megan flushed. ‘I was already convinced about the Witch’s Cauldron. I had agreed to come home, hadn’t I? What right has he, a total stranger, to interfere with what I do?’
Her mother sighed. ‘He’s bringing his sister with him today.’
‘I shall go out!’ Megan declared.
‘You will not,’ her father said quietly from the kitchen door. ‘He was kind enough to bring you home yesterday and you will be here to thank him for that.’
Megan subsided into her chair, defeated. ‘But don’t you mind that he should lecture you about me?’
To her surprise, both her parents laughed.
‘Well?’ she demanded hotly.
‘No, we didn’t mind,’ her mother said mildly. ‘To tell the truth he was something of a relief to us—’
Her parents exchanged glances and laughed again.
‘Quite a relief!’ her father said with feeling.
‘I don’t see why,’ Megan objected.
‘He’s not just coming to lunch,’ her mother explained. ‘He has a suggestion to make to you. That’s why he’s bringing his sister with him.’
‘What suggestion?’ Megan asked hollowly.
‘He prefers to tell you himself,’ her father answered easily.
Megan stared at them both in complete astonishment. For the last year or so she and her parents had indulged in a kind of entrenched warfare whenever they had been together, they disapproving of everything she did, she disliking the restraints they had tried to impose on her. But they had never relinquished a jot of their parental right to criticise her to anyone else before, and it wasn’t even that they knew anything about the Spaniard!
‘He doesn’t approve of me,’ she said uneasily. ‘He thinks I should be closeted at home until some man comes along and deigns to marry me. And what’s more,’ she added on a rising note of indignation, ‘he thinks you should be doing the closeting!’
‘Is that wrong?’ her father asked reasonably.
‘It’s archaic!’ Megan commented graphically.
‘Well, I think he’s right,’ said her father. ‘We shouldn’t have allowed you to take off for London on your own.’
‘Why not?’
‘Alice,’ her father said flatly.
‘Alice?’ echoed Megan.
‘She’s never been a good influence and I don’t like the people she’s introduced you to in London—’
Megan blinked. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘I think you know,’ her father answered steadily.
‘But I’m not like that! I’m not silly!’
‘No, but you’re young. Enough said, Megan. I prefer the ideas of this Spaniard of yours.’
‘Well, I don’t!’ Megan retorted mutinously.
‘You haven’t heard them yet,’, her mother pointed out gently. She looked out of the window at the snow-covered garden. ‘I thought you wanted to go out and look at the snow?’
‘Making a snowman?’ her father asked, grinning.
Megan shrugged her shoulders, not entirely mollified by this change of subject. ‘I might,’ she said, her voice still prickly.
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Mr. Meredith offered.
Megan smiled suddenly and held out her hand to him. ‘Okay, you’re on!’ she agreed. ‘But you’re not to give up halfway through because you’re cold like you did last time! This one has got to be finished properly!’
Her father grunted. ‘That’s right, blame me! Who was the one complaining of frostbite that’s what I’d like to
know!’
Still grumbling, he climbed into his thick winter coat and accompanied her out of the back door and down the slippery garden path, prodding at the deep snow with the toe of his Wellington boot to make sure he wasn’t trampling over one of the flower beds in error.
Inevitably Megan did most of the work. She set to with a will, as determined in this as she was in everything else, piling the snow up higher and higher.
‘If you make him much taller you won’t be able to reach the top of his head,’ Mr. Meredith objected, contenting himself with standing and watching her.
Megan cast him a look filled with mischief. ‘I want to make him as tall as Senor Carlos Vallori Llobera!’
‘So you know his name, then?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’
Her father chuckled. ‘Touché. I never can get the hang of foreign names. I’ll get him to write it down for me some time and learn it from that!’
‘Why bother?’ Megan asked languidly.
‘I think I’ll be hearing it again pretty often in the future,’ her father answered. ‘He’s that sort of man.’
Megan lifted enquiring eyebrows. ‘What did you talk about last night?’
‘That would be telling!’
‘I don’t think it’s nice to talk about people behind their backs,’ she observed reprovingly.
‘Tell that to him!’ her father recommended.
‘I will,’ Megan said grimly. ‘I have a lot to say to that man!’
But her father only laughed. ‘I daresay he’ll have something to say to you!’
Megan was unexpectedly nervous at the thought. He had only seen her in the dark and he hadn’t thought much of her then. ‘Perhaps I’d better change,’ she said aloud. ‘Perhaps I’ll wear—no, I can’t! I left it in London. I haven’t anything fit to wear down here!’
‘I don’t see anything wrong with your trousers,’ Mr. Meredith put in.
‘If they were trousers!’ Megan said scornfully. ‘But they’re jeans!’ And I’ve had them since I was fourteen. ‘Bout what they look like!’
‘About what you look like!’ her father teased her.
Megan tossed a snowball at his head, knowing that he hated it when the snow crumbled and ran down the back of his neck.
‘You behave like it too!’ he complained, shaking his fist at her and making her giggle. ‘In fact I think you were more grown up when you were fourteen!’
