Out of Control

by Charlotte Lamb

  Charlotte Lamb

  Out Of Control

  No man would get close to her again!

  The scars of an adolescent indiscretion were still so raw that Liza kept her heart uninvolved in any relationships. A modeling career and business had given her material success and peace of mind. Then she collided with G. K. Gifford outside her Essex cottage and poof - there went her hard-won serenity. For this wealthy man had crashed into her life to break up his nephew's friendship with a "gold digger" and the chemistry between them had flared. Suddenly Liza felt alive-a wild, exciting feeling she quickly fought to subdue...

  CHAPTER ONE

  Liza would never have invited Bruno down to her cottage if she hadn't worked through her lunch hour the previous Friday.

  It was rare for her to have the chance; she was usually booked for lunch. She sent her secretary out to buy her some cottage cheese and an apple, deciding to eat them in the viewing-room while she looked at a video of one of her new models, to assess the girl's performance in her first TV commercial. Liza hadn't had time to see it until now.

  The outer office had been empty when she had walked through it—all the girls had been at lunch, except her own secretary, Maddie, who was operating the photo­copier, running off profiles of some of their models for a new customer.

  Settling in the dark after she had eaten, Liza watched the video a second time with the volume turned right down so that she wasn't distracted by the sound-track and could concentrate on the model's movements and facial expressions.

  Two minutes later she heard Joan Temple talking as she came through the swing door with the other typists. 'It's obvious—she's got a man down there—why else is she so secretive about the cottage?'

  Liza's head swung round and she froze, listening with a frown. They weren't talking about her, were they?

  'She never misses a weekend, no matter how busy we are! I suspect the guy's married, whoever he is, and either can't get a divorce or doesn't want one anyway. Nobody would spot them if they met out there in the wilds of Essex, the cottage is miles from anywhere, she admits that.'

  'But what about Bruno Morris?' Daphne said slowly, sounding upset. 'I mean, where does he fit in, if she's involved with another man? I thought it was serious with Bruno, that they'd announce their engagement any day. The Press seem to think so.'

  'Oh, the Press!' Joan said cynically. 'What do they know? They're simple-minded—look at the way they nicknamed her The Snow Queen just because she was too smart to get caught with anyone when the Press were around! They may believe that there was never a man in her life until Bruno came into the picture, but you can't kid me. I bet she's been having a secret affair with this guy down in Essex for years.'

  'But sooner or later someone would be bound to see them together,' protested Daphne. 'Nobody can have that sort of secret for long these days! The Press would have found out by now, if it was true.'

  'I told you, Liza is too smart to get caught!' Joan drawled. 'But you're right—the Press ought to know. Maybe someone will tell them, tip them off!'

  Liza's frown deepened and she heard Daphne give a gasp. 'You wouldn't, would you, Joan?' She sounded half horrified, half gleeful and Joan laughed.

  'It's a thought, isn't it? No, why should I spoil her fun? Good luck to her, that's what I say. Men have always played the field and got away with it. Why shouldn't we?'

  From a distance Liza heard Maddie call them. 'Come and give me a hand with these profiles, I want to post them off today.*

  Liza had thought herself hardened to being talked about. Before she had founded a model agency of her own she had been a top model herself; earning a small fortune in a mere two years of intense and highly paid work. She had attracted a lot of Press attention during that time and since; she was still a public figure because her agency had grown rapidly to become one of the best of the kind in the country.

  This gossip was different, though; Liza grimaced distastefully. It wasn't pleasant to know that people who worked with you talked about you in that vein when you weren't around to defend yourself.

  Was it just Joan, or were other people talking? A frown pleated her finely pencilled brows. Bruno had been rather persistent the other day when he was asking about the cottage. He had wanted to know all about it: what she did there every weekend, why she couldn't spend more weekends in London. Bruno was a city animal; he loved the ambience of a town: bright lights, parties, night­clubs, dancing and dinner in swish restaurants. He wasn't attracted to anything in the countryside except, perhaps, horses and then only on a racecourse. Not that Bruno rode or liked horses much; but he did gamble and Liza suspected he often lost large sums. He could afford it, or course; he was one of the Giffords, his uncle was G. K. Gifford, the head of the merchant bank and the chairman of an international consortium which owned a wide variety of companies. Bruno was a jet-setting playboy, if you believed the gossip columnists.

  Liza didn't. She knew Bruno better than that. He might be a light-hearted, rather spoilt young man with more money than was good for him, but he had quite a few qualities which endeared him to Liza. Bruno was kind and good-tempered, and he needed affection. No doubt people like Joan Temple wouldn't believe it, but he had never tried to talk Liza into bed, although they had been seeing each other for three months. Bruno didn't want sex; he wanted to have fun. He didn't want a passionate lover; he wanted a playmate.

  When they went out they danced and joked, laughed and chatted, and Liza never felt the slightest tension between them, no sexual magnetism or awareness.

  Bruno was like a teddy bear, he even looked like one— big and bulky with thick, curly, golden-brown hair and round brown eyes which shone when he laughed.

  It was easy to be fond of Bruno and hard to take him seriously as a lover, but the Press only saw the image. They created myths of childish simplicity and one of them was that Bruno was a jet-setting playboy. He certainly flew around the world a lot in jets. He certainly loved to play, and he was undoubtedly more a boy than a man, but the label the Press pinned on him was light years from the reality.

  Liza sighed, staring out of the window at the glass and concrete of the skyscraper opposite, without seeing anything of it.

  She couldn't let Bruno read maliciously angled gossip in the papers. He would hate that, and his family, the Giffords, wouldn't be too pleased either. Liza had never met any of them, but the bank were her landlords; they owned this whole building, all thirty storeys of it, and she did not want to offend them any more than she wanted to embarrass or upset Bruno.

  The solution was obvious, but she wished she could think of some other way out of the dilemma. The cottage was her sanctuary, her refuge, her private world, and she had never invited anyone from her other world down there. She liked to keep London and her public life well away. Having Bruno there might wreck the whole atmosphere for her for ever.

  No, I'm being absurd, she told herself impatiently. I'll ask him down for the weekend and he'll come because he has been so curious about the place, but, once he has been there and seen the windy, echoing solitudes of the marshes, the birds, the melancholy lavender and navy blue of the sky after the sun has set, the whisper of the tidal ebb and flow between the reeds and the cosy shabbiness of the furniture, Bruno will politely thank me for his visit, go back to London and never suggest coming again.

  She was right about Bruno's reaction to the invitation. 'I'd love to come! I've been dying to know what's so special about the place.'

  'You'll probably find it boring,' Liza told him frankly.

  'If you go back there every weekend it must have something!'

  'Oh, it does—but I'm just not sure you'll enjoy the peace and quiet as much as I do. After all, you rarely visit your family's place in Somerset, do
you?'

  'Hartwell? Oh, but that's different,' Bruno said, making a horrible face. 'It's big and draughty and smells of damp, and whenever I'm there I have to talk to some pretty boring people. My uncle's involved in local committees of one sort or another; local politics, you know, dinner parties and tea parties, farmers come to shoot rabbits over the land, and my uncle drags me round the farms. When he isn't in London at the bank, he's in Somerset playing at farming and he'd like me to follow in his footsteps, but that's not my scene at all.'

  'Well, you won't have to bother about local politics or dinner parties,' agreed Liza with amusement. 'We'll sail, though—I hope you're a good sailor. Can you handle a small dinghy, or haven't you sailed before?'

  'Done a bit,' Bruno agreed airily. 'I won't let myself get bonked by the boom, don't worry, and you won't have to fish me out of the river. Very often, anyway.'

  Liza laughed involuntarily. 'I can always tie you to the mast!'

  'So that I can go down with the ship when you sink her? No thanks, think again.'

  Liza felt more at ease with Bruno than she had ever done with a member of the opposite sex. Most men felt they had to make a pass at her; their macho self-respect demanded it. They always had to prove something; show they could 'pull a bird' who looked like her and had probably dated some very rich and powerful men. Too many men believed everything they read in the news­papers; they would have been incredulous if she had tried to tell them how quiet and hard-working and unglamorous her life had always been. Bruno didn't find that hard to believe because he, too, carried a label and a public image which didn't fit the man behind it.

  Liza sometimes suspected that if she and Bruno hadn't met in a very odd way he would never have asked her out. He would have taken one look at her elegant facade—the smooth blonde hair pulled back off her face into a tight chignon, the classy, expensive clothes, the cool, English, go-to-hell remoteness of her features—and he would have run very fast in the opposite direction. But she hadn't looked like that when they had met; she had been soaking wet and windblown because she hadn't been able to get a taxi on a raw March day when rain poured down from the black cloud centred right over that part of London. By the time she had walked to the office her chignon had been ripped apart and her hair blown everywhere, her thin raincoat was sodden and her silk stockings splashed with mud from passing cars. She had run towards the entrance of the office block with her head lowered against the wind and Bruno had come running from the other direction. They had collided right outside the doors. Liza was the lighter of the two of them; it was she who went flying and fell full-length into the gutter. Bruno was too solid; he merely rocked and swayed a moment before he hurried to help her to her feet.

  'I'm sorry,' he'd said. 'Come up to my office and I'll show you where you can wash and do something about your hair.'

  'Thank you, I work here too, and I can do without your help,' Liza had snapped and marched away with a dignity somewhat marred by having to limp because the heel of one shoe had come off.

  'Oh, come on, it was an accident, I'm very sorry,' Bruno said, pursuing her into the lift.

  That was when Liza first caught sight of her appearance in the mirror on the wall in the lift. She stared and began to laugh, and Bruno joined in. He had followed her out of the lift, and into her life, that casually, and he was still here.

  'Are we driving down?' Bruno asked her when they had dinner two days before the weekend. 'My car or yours?*

  'Mine,' Liza said firmly. 'I know the way, you don't. Once we're off the main road it's easy to get lost along the winding marsh lanes, and it isn't easy to explain the route, even with a map.'

  'I'm looking forward to it more and more,' Bruno said, grinning. But next morning, when Liza opened her paper at breakfast time, she found an old photo of herself splashed across an inside page and next to it a large picture of Bruno. The headline said it all. 'Romance for Jet-set Banker Playboy and Blonde Model', it ran, rather confusingly, since it had no punctuation and might lead some people to believe that Bruno was a blonde model! But Liza was in no mood to find that amusing. She read hurriedly, her face angry. There was nothing much in the story except cheap innuendo, but it did imply that she and Bruno were on the verge of getting married, and that was embarrassing to read. She wished she hadn't invited Bruno to the cottage for the weekend. What if he read this garbage and started wondering if she was trying to nudge him into proposing?

  Or, even worse, trying to compromise him by having him at the isolated cottage alone with her?

  She had lost her appetite. She drank a little strong, black coffee and left for the office. It didn't improve her temper to find the whole of her staff looking curious and fascinated, or to be met by grins every time she looked round.

  She decided to ring Bruno and cancel the plans for the weekend, but as she was considering how to explain the change of plan the phone rang.

  'Liza?' Bruno said miserably. 'Liza, I'm sorry, I can't come this weekend.'

  'I see,' she said, and she did see—very clearly. Bruno had read the morning paper; he had been appalled by the innuendo and he was backing out as fast as he could. She couldn't blame him and she wasn't hurt, but she felt depressed about the whole thing.

  'I've just had a phone call from my mother,' Bruno told her. 'I've been summoned down to Hartwell to talk to my uncle. Have you seen the paper today, that ghastly rag with the rubbish about us in it?' Liza made inaudible noises and cleared her throat to say she had. 'I thought you must have done,' Bruno said gloomily. 'Sick-making, isn't it? What loathsome brutes they are, they need shooting. Sorry about it, Liza, but don't brood over it. Lies, all of it, so that's what I'll tell Uncle.' He paused and groaned. 'God knows how he'll take it. He can be a cynical swine at times.'

  'Can he?' Liza sounded doubtful, which she was, because she knew next to nothing about his uncle, the manipulating, string-pulling all-powerful G. K. Gifford who lived in the fabulous Hartwell, a country house in the dreaming depths of Somerset. Bruno had told her more about the house than about any member of his family. Hartwell was within view of Glastonbury Tor, he said, but Liza had once visited Somerset and driven all over Salisbury Plain and the surrounding countryside. She knew that you could see the dark, pointing finger of Glastonbury Tor for miles and miles in all directions, so Bruno's vague placing of the house didn't help much to fix it in one locality.

  'God, yes,' Bruno groaned. 'He's worse than my mother, much worse. She runs straight to him if there's any trouble, and he always fixes it for her. They're very close, more like twins than anything else, so Uncle's always on her side.'

  'What does the G stand for?'

  'The G?' Bruno repeated in a bewildered way. 'What G?'

  'G. K. Gifford,' she prompted, and he laughed flatly.

  'Oh, that—George, would you believe? I think that's why my mother insisted on calling me Bruno—my father hated the name, but she always gets her own way, twists all her men round her little finger, my Mama. Her parents gave all their children such boring, old-fashioned names, so she was determined I shouldn't have a name like George.'

  'What's her name, then?'

  'Phillipa!'

  'What's wrong with that? I rather like it.'

  'Well, she hated it. She made everyone call her Pippa, and that suits her much better.'

  'Pippa—yes, pretty. Is she?' Liza had always been careful not to ask Bruno questions about his family; she hated people probing into her background and from Bruno's reluctance to talk about his she guessed that he felt the same.

  'She's not bad,' he said uneasily and she smiled, glad he couldn't see her. 'Anyway,' he said hurriedly, 'I'm very sorry I won't be coming for the weekend—you will ask me again some time, won't you?'

  'The invitation stands,' Liza said wryly, sure that he wouldn't want to come now, and half relieved because it meant that the cottage would not be invaded. Sometimes she felt as thought it was a time capsule, outside ordinary time and place; a small circle of peace for her alone.
She was afraid of what the arrival of someone else would do to that shining silence.

  'Maybe one day you'd like to see Hartwell,' Bruno said vaguely and she laughed silently, sure that his family would never extend an invitation to her. Didn't he know why he was being summoned down to face his terrifying uncle and his mother? Bruno was about to be told to drop her; she wasn't suitable. Liza could imagine everything they would say. 'A girl like that? Who is she, anyway? What sort of family does she come from? Has she any money, influence, power?' Bruno's family had all three and they would want his wife to come from the right circles, have the proper credentials for a future Gifford.

  'I wish I didn't have to go,' Bruno suddenly blurted out. 'If you knew my uncle 'He can't eat you!' 'He can try!'

  'Oh, poor Bruno,' she said gently. 'Stand up to him, you're a big boy now.' Twenty-three, to be precise, and a broad-shouldered, solid-fleshed young man who could play an aggressive game of rugger and had boxed at university, which made it all the more bewildering that he should be so nervous of facing a middle-aged man who spent most of his time hunched at a desk.

  'I must go,' Bruno said with a sigh. 'I wish you could come with me, Liza. I feel I can do anything when you're there.'

  Then, horrified by his own admission, he muttered goodbye and rang off before she could answer. Liza frowned, replacing the phone. Bruno wasn't getting too fond of her, was he? She was very fond of him and he made a good playmate, but it would never be a serious love affair on her side. She hoped it wasn't developing into one on his side, because she would only have to be frank with him and she would hate to hurt Bruno.

  Everyone in the office had read the stupid gossip in the paper, but nobody mentioned it to her directly; they didn't dare with Liza looking at them with frozen eyes and a remotely haughty expression. That was easy for her to assume; she had learnt how to look like that when she was modelling. It wasn't so easy when other newspapers rang up and wanted interviews, wanted a comment, a quote to put in among the acres of sheer invention they called a news story.