When she next opened her eyes, it was to find sunlight streaming into the bedroom, and she groggily realised that it was after ten in the morning.
Through sheer habit, she felt her stomach go into knots at the thought of having overslept. It was something she rarely did, if ever. Her father had never allowed it, and her body had adapted to suit from a very early age.
When she pushed open the slatted wooden window, it was to be greeted with the most perfect sight she had ever seen in her life before. The house was on the beach. White sand and turquoise sea were visible through a latticework of palm trees.
She dressed quickly, flinging on a black bikini, then she grabbed her sun cream, a pair of shades, her hat, a book and rushed out of the house.
‘About time you got up!’ she heard Ronnie’s voice from behind her, and she waved and laughed.
‘Where’s everyone?’ she asked.
‘Sunbathing, swimming, exploring! I’m back out in a couple of minutes. Can’t waste this weather!’
‘No. We might not see it again till summer rolls round in England. If it decides to!’
How on earth could a few hours on a plane make such a difference? She couldn’t believe that she had devoted so much time to feeling guilty about work, imagining the mounds of it collecting in her in-tray with relentless, sneering persistence, thinking about how much of her weekends would be eaten up in trying to reduce the swelling pile. As she stepped onto the sand and felt it slipping warmly through her bare feet, work seemed like something vaguely unpleasant that was happening millions of light years away.
Mary and Elizabeth, paired off as usual, were further along the beach, two portly figures modestly attired in dark-coloured one-pieces and shaded with broad-brimmed straw hats. Further along, Ronnie’s cronies were fooling around in the water.
Jessica waved and then found herself a more secluded part of the beach, under a palm tree, and she lay down on her towel and slowly plastered herself with sun cream.
The sound of the sea was lulling, a lazy, lapping noise as the water washed against the sand, ebbing away, with the steady in and out rhythm of something alive and breathing. She had brought her book with her, but the glare in her eyes was too strong to read comfortably, and after five minutes she gave in to the irresistible impulse to close her eyes and drift off. Sea, sun, sand, a cool breeze, tranquillity, and a deep, velvety voice in her right ear saying, ‘You have to be careful, you know. With your complexion, there’s a good chance you could end up looking like broiled lobster.’
Jessica’s eyes flew open to confront Bruno Carr standing over her, with two cold drinks in his hands. The vision was so unexpected that she blinked a few times, convinced that the heat must have caused some dreadful mirage to appear. On the fifth blink, she realised that this was no mirage.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said, sitting up, desperately aware of how much of her body was exposed in her black bikini. Every nerve in her body seemed to have gone on red alert, and, although she did her best to keep her eyes plastered to his face, she was all too aware of his muscular body, more tanned than she would have expected, and clothed only in a short-sleeved cotton shirt, unbuttoned, and a pair of trunks.
Thank goodness for her sunglasses! At least they offered her some protection from the shock of seeing him here. And where was her hat? She grabbed it from next to her and stuck it on, so that her face was instantly half covered.
‘Care for a drink?’ He handed her a glass of something long and cold, and she took it from him quickly with a bright, ‘Thanks.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she repeated, in a more normal voice. ‘I thought you said that you weren’t going to be coming.’
‘Did I?’ He looked at her with an expression of amazement. ‘You must have misunderstood. I said that I might not be able to come over for the full time, but as you can see...’ he sipped his drink, and, disturbingly because it threatened a longer stay than she wanted, sat down on the edge of her towel, so that she had to make a few imperceptible adjustments to further the distance between them ‘...I managed to make it over.’
‘So I see,’ Jessica mumbled.
‘Call me a fool, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing you without your handy working-woman face on. Efficient cool lawyer by day, efficient cool lawyer by night—didn’t make sense. So I rearranged my affairs to see if I could catch a rare glimpse of the only occasionally spotted Jessica Stearn—woman.’ He chuckled, thoroughly amused at his wit, and she refused to indulge him by responding.
‘Sometimes I wonder how you manage to be so successful,’ she said tartly, ‘when bird-spotting is such a great pastime of yours.’
‘I don’t think I said that. Quite.’ He shot her a dark, outrageously flirtations look and grinned. ‘Only one species in particular.’
Unable to find a suitable response to that, Jessica resorted to a look of complete disdain, which made him grin even more.
‘What do you think of it?’
‘Fine. It’s your house, after all.’
‘No,’ he said softly into her ear, which made her shift over a bit more in alarm, ‘I meant what do you think of the place, not what do you think about my being here.’
‘Oh.’ She turned to look at him, and before she knew what was happening he reached out and removed her sunglasses in one neat movement.
‘Could you please return those?’ she asked, opening her hand.
‘I dislike talking to people when they’re hiding behind dark glasses.’
‘I. Am. Not. Hiding. Behind. Anything,’ Jessica said stiffly, thoroughly unnerved, which of course had been his intention as she well knew. ‘The glare from the sun makes my eyes water.’
‘Rubbish.’ He stretched out on the towel next to her, and out of the corner of her eye she could see a few curious looks coming their way. Mary and Elizabeth had both stopped reading their books—what a coincidence—and were staring across in their direction, attempting to look as though they were admiring the general scenery.
‘You are going to start rumours,’ Jessica told him in a low, furious voice. He had shoved the sunglasses behind him, firmly out of reach.
‘What kind of rumours?’
‘Rumours...that...that...’ She spluttered into silence, and he gave her a slow, lazy smile.
‘I’m merely sitting down to have a chat with one of my employees.’
Jessica ground her teeth together in sheer frustration.
‘So...what do you think of this little slice of paradise?’ He lay down with his hands behind his head, and her eyes reluctantly followed the long, athletic lines of his body.
‘It’s beautiful. You’re very lucky to have this as a bolt-hole. Do you come here often?’
‘When I need to unwind.’
‘Good. Well.’ Making her mind up, she stood up and he promptly yanked her back down in such a smooth, unhurried gesture that she half toppled onto him, but managed to straighten herself with the speed of light.
‘Not so fast. I’m enjoying our little conversation.’
‘Glad one of us is,’ Jessica muttered indignantly.
‘And so are you. Why pretend? You might want to scurry away like a terrified rabbit...’
‘Me? A terrified rabbit?’
‘Oh, yes. Once you’re dragged away from your work—’
‘I am perfectly controlled, inside and outside the working environment!’ she snapped, cursing the heat that had flooded through her.
‘You mean, you’d dearly like to be. Your face lets you down, though,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘It’s too expressive.’
‘That’s never been a problem before I met you!’ she blurted out truthfully, horrified into sudden silence by the admission. ‘You...you...’
‘Yes? I’m all ears.’
‘Are absolutely insufferable. And I’m going to swim.’
She stood up and headed down towards the water, burning with embarrassment.
She shouldn’t have worn the bikini,
though she actually looked better with fewer clothes. She had the sort of long, slender body that was rendered shapeless by too many layers. She should, she thought, finally reaching the water’s edge with relief, have stuck to the one hideous one-piece she had brought with her, but then how on earth could she have known that he would turn up like a bad penny?
She would simply remain in the water, splashing about in an aimless fashion, until he vacated her towel. Every so often she glanced in his direction, half expecting him to come in for a dip while she was there, but eventually he eased himself off her towel, gave her a brief wave and strolled down the beach, stopping to talk for quite some time to Mary and Elizabeth, then further along to the remainder of the crowd whose high-spirited activities had become progressively more sluggish in the heat.
Jessica watched from the water, alternately floating on her back, then ducking and swimming under the cool, clear sea, then when the coast was clear she emerged with relief.
Why had he decided to come? Was it because he knew that his presence would throw her into a state of turmoil, and he found the condition highly amusing? He had said as much. He saw her as an object of curiosity and that thought stung. It made her feel like a freak and perhaps to him she was.
When she strolled back into the house an hour later it was to find an impromptu buffet laid out on the extensive back lawns, and Bruno holding court.
Ronnie, clad only in her bikini top, which had clearly been designed as a cleavage enhancer, and a colourful sarong skirt, was flirting in a kittenish manner, which involved lots of giggling, and even Carla, who was engaged and rarely strayed from the topic of her fiancé, was laughing at something Bruno was saying, and looking rather coy.
Jessica, having thrown some baggy shorts and an even baggier tee shirt over her bikini, helped herself to a plate of food and positioned herself on the sidelines, politely listening to Bruno’s amusing accounts of trips he had taken abroad and still burning from what he had said to her earlier on.
‘Sheep’s eyes,’ he was saying now, to an audience that appeared to be hanging on to his every word, ‘I assure you, are most definitely one of life’s more acquired tastes.’
He glanced in her direction, his eyes lingering momentarily on her outfit, which left everything to the imagination, and she feigned an interested look in what he had been saying.
‘And have you any unpleasant experiences to recount from trips abroad, Jessica?’
Of course, he would involve her in the conversation, wouldn’t he? Knowing that that would be the very last thing she wanted.
‘Well...there was the time I very nearly had my leg chewed off by a school of barracuda while swimming in the Indian Ocean,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘Fortunately I was rescued in the nick of time by a passing helicopter, which airlifted me to safety. The perfect rescue if it weren’t for the fact that we immediately flew into a freak storm and very nearly crashed. As it was the pilot lost control and fainted and I had to take over.’
‘No!’ Ronnie cried in amazement, and Jessica grinned at her.
‘You’re right. No. My trips abroad have all been spectacularly uneventful, I’m afraid.’ At which point, with lunch out of the way, the party broke up, going in different directions, mostly indoors to recover from the effects of the morning sun.
Jessica retired to a bench under a tree to finish eating, and gave a little sigh of resignation as Bruno approached her and then proceeded to sit down next to her.
‘This will start the rumour mill going,’ he said with amusement. ‘If this house had net curtains, then I’m sure a few of them would be twitching.’
‘Ha, ha, I’m glad you find the thought of that funny.’ She stabbed a piece of tomato and stuck it in her mouth.
‘Did you have a nice swim this morning?’ he asked, and she threw him a sidelong glance.
‘Very nice, thank you.’
‘I must say, I was impressed by your exciting anecdote about avoiding death by barracuda in the Indian Ocean. Well, until you said that you’d fabricated the whole thing.’
‘Which you had known from the start anyway,’ she said, sticking her empty plate on the bench next to her and wondering whether it was her imagination or whether he was flirting with her. It was hard to tell with a man like Bruno because he was intrinsically charming. He had the ability to invite the illusion that you were somehow special, simply because when he conversed he had the knack of making you feel as though every pore in his body were focused on whatever you might be saying.
You’d be a fool, of course, to be taken in by any such illusion.
‘True,’ he said lazily, stretching one arm along the back of the bench, and tilting his face up to the sun, which speckled through the leaves of the tree.
‘Because,’ Jessica said coolly, ‘hard-working career girls like me who have no time for anything exciting in their lives couldn’t possibly have exciting adventures, could we?’
Once the words were out of her mouth, she couldn’t quite believe that she had said them. What had possessed her? She sounded like a teenager suffering a fit of pique, instead of a mature adult who had her life totally under control.
It was just...that he made her feel, somehow, as though she had missed the boat somewhere along the line. As though there was a huge, exciting life out there, happening to other people, while she remained locked indoors, too scared to venture out. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way, but she knew that she never had until he had come along. He was just so damned charismatic. She had watched all the faces at lunchtime, focused on him, alight with enthusiasm.
‘That remark,’ he told her, not bothering to look at her when he spoke, ‘has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said, and everything to do with how you feel about yourself.’
‘That’s utter nonsense and you know it,’ Jessica muttered uncomfortably. Rather than risk going down this route of personal confrontation, from which, she knew, she would emerge the loser, she decided to change the topic of conversation altogether. She even managed to inject a note of cheeriness in her voice when she asked him about the island and the house.
‘Who maintains it when you’re not around?’ she asked. Aside from the house, there were extensive grounds, and they were well tended. She suspected that, in the tropics, foliage grew at a rate of knots. He would need a full-time gardener just to stop the place from becoming a jungle.
‘I employ three gardeners, who work all year rotund.’ He yawned, which made her feel like yawning as well. It was the heat. ‘And when I’m not here, Vicky and Sandy, the housekeepers who are here at the moment, come across twice a week by boat to make sure that everything’s ticking over nicely with the house. But it’s used frequently. Friends, family, et cetera.’
‘This heat is sleep-inducing, isn’t it?’ she said politely, already making her excuses for leaving, and he turned to look at her, reading her mind.
‘I always think there’s something particularly time-wasting about sleeping during the day, don’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Why don’t we go for a little walk? Something I want to show you.’
‘What?’ Panic.
‘Come on.’ He stood up and waited for her to follow suit, which she didn’t. ‘You make remarks,’ he said mildly, ‘about being thought of as unexciting, but you refuse to stray from your carefully monitored path, don’t you?’
‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ She looked up at him, shading her eyes with her hand.
‘I tell you that I want to show you something and your immediate reaction isn’t one of curiosity, it’s one of wariness. You act as though anything you aren’t familiar with is necessarily going to be unpleasant. Isn’t that why you didn’t want to come over here? Too scared to try anything out of the ordinary?’ He began walking away, and Jessica sprang to her feet and stumbled behind him, matching her pace to his, arms folded, with a look of tight-lipped defensiveness on her face.
‘I don’t think that’s fair!’ she
panted, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. Over her bikini, which she had kept on, the tee shirt was clinging to her body like a second skin.
‘No, but it worked.’ He raised his eyebrows tellingly. ‘That’s the problem about the truth. Gets a person running around after it, hell-bent on proving it’s a lie.’
‘That’s a ridiculous, homespun piece of amateur psychology!’
‘Well, you could always retire for a siesta,’ he said mildly.
‘I never said I wanted a siesta!’
They were inside the house now, which was thankfully much cooler, and she glanced briefly around to see whether anyone was lurking nearby, but wherever they were it wasn’t in the sprawling bowels of the living area.
‘Well...’ he stuck his hands into the pockets of his khaki-coloured shorts and appeared to give the matter some thought ‘...you could always retreat to the very furthest corner of the house with a book.’
‘You are...impossible!’
‘Because I’m doing you the great disservice of making you think? Truth hurts. Isn’t that how the saying goes?’
‘Because you think you can swan around making sweeping assumptions about other people! Because you think you have a right to air your views, whether someone wants to hear them or not!’ She started to turn away, and he reached out and caught her by her arm, spinning her around to face him.
‘Tell me something, has no one ever criticised you in your life before?’
Jessica stood absolutely still, red-faced and trembling. ‘In abundance,’ she heard herself say. ‘About the way I looked and the friends I never had because I was never allowed them, and the grades I got which were never quite good enough.’
‘Your father?’ Bruno asked quietly.
‘He was never satisfied. With any of us. I...I...’ Jessica bit her lip and told herself that if she cried, if she did the unthinkable and burst into tears, she would take a vow of silence and retreat to the nearest convent.
‘Which makes sense.’ He took a strand of her hair and pushed it away from her face. ‘Look, you go relax. I’ll see you later, I’m sure.’
He began walking away, and after a moment’s hesitation she ran after him and said, without preamble, ‘If the offer still stands, I’ll come with you to see...whatever it was you wanted to show me...’
The Baby Verdict Page 8
