“Stop trying to compare me to the men you’ve known, and start coming to your own conclusions! I am not your father!” he snapped. “And if all you’re looking for is a replacement for him, you can forget it!”
That came as an unexpected slap; she hated how he had seen through her wariness to the self-doubt her pride had not let her fully acknowledge. Nikki exclaimed violently, “Looking for a replacement! God forbid! If anything, my father taught me what to be wary of, and what to avoid in a man! I’m not looking for anything—I’m quite content with my life just the way it is, thank you!”
“Content?” he replied sharply. “Oh, yes, I can see how you would be content in your tidy little life, unchallenged, unprovoked, untouched. How safely you have everything arranged for yourself, and what a pity that real life doesn’t conform to the neat pigeon-holes you’ve laid out!”
Incredulous anger seared her words with a harsh bite as Nikki snapped, “How do you know what my life is like? You know some of my past, not all of it. You think you understand me. Well, you don’t. Not yet; not at all!”
“You think I don’t know you?” he returned, with a softness far more dangerous than his explosive anger. “Or that I can’t see the deeper reasons for what you do? You think I didn’t feel your withdrawal when I kissed you yesterday, or that I don’t know what you were really warning me about when you told me of Heissenger and your father, and why you keep trying to compare me to either man? That is a convenient illusion, but not one you can hide behind.”
A thousand-watt lightbulb flashed in her head. She could certainly take her own sweet time about it, but if she was smacked in the face hard enough with a fact eventually it got past the thick skull and sank in.
Well, of course. He was as attracted to her as she was to him, but because of his greater experience he’d seen it far before she ever came to the slow realisation. A swift-paced mental flashback reawakened the memory of the knowledgeable amusement in his eyes that very first night they’d met—of how she had kissed him on the cheek, and he had kissed her on the mouth.
From that moment on her memory shot ahead like a film fast-forwarded to the delicate dance he had conducted in Peter’s office yesterday, reading her reactions better than she read them herself, advancing inch by inch and retreating instantly at the first sign of a freeze-out. This was a depth of truth she had never before experienced, nor knew how to deal with, and how did she feel? Miserable, confused, reeling inside with the shock of confrontation, and unable to think clearly about what the future held in store for her. The midnight train was still journeying towards an unknown, unseen horizon. Nikki was the midnight train, hurtling even faster along an unbeaten track, and she didn’t know where she would stop or how, for Harper was the driver.
Instead of retreat or denial, she again took refuge in attack. “Far be it from me to contradict you, since you seem to know all the answers!” she snapped. “After all, you’ll only believe what you wish to!”
And suddenly his own anger seemed gone, as completely as if it had never been. He replied coolly, with a deep frown, “Is that how you see me? No, Nikki. I don’t believe what I wish to. I believe what I am shown. You need have no worries while you stay at my house—nothing is going to happen between us that you don’t want.”
That was when he made another rare mistake. It was entirely the wrong time to adopt such a patient, paternalistic attitude, and absolutely the wrong thing to say.
He acted so bland, she thought bitterly, so unaffected, so very much in control. A man with his universe made to order, and some men got too used to giving orders. How could he know what she did and didn’t want? He would assume command of the situation, with that arrogant presumption he had for believing he always knew best, and with a sudden intensity that rippled through her like wildfire she hated the indomitable quality of that control and knew a dark, passionate desire to rip it to shreds.
The midnight train picked up speed. She could almost hear the wind shriek.
“Darling,” she drawled, her white heat evolving into a pointed sardonicism, “I could have told you that.”
He sucked in a harsh breath, a small, tell-tale reaction. Then he smiled a tiny violent smile that shook the earth, and she felt as if the driver of the midnight train had just taken his hand off the brake.
Harper’s home in the outskirts of Oxford was a veritable mansion, but Nikki had already seen enough of his lifestyle to be prepared. After parking, he dragged out her suitcase while she climbed out of the car on legs made numb by the cataclysmic ride and stared in bemused pleasure at the sprawling Victorian house. It was everything she would have guessed from his eclectic personality: well maintained and gracious, nestling in a fenced six-acre plot like a jewel in an ornate setting of luscious colour. The front landscape was superb, and she knew the back garden would be just as impressive.
The front oak door was curiously enough the most battered part of the outside appearance, and the explanation was soon made self-evident as it crashed open on well-oiled hinges.
As the man beside her made some kind of exasperated murmur, out hurtled a small cannon-ball that crashed straight into Harper’s legs with no discernible slackening of speed. Nikki winced. The cannon-ball resolved itself into a human boy with dark hair flopping into very dark brown eyes, already possessed of a hectic grace that would, with maturity, develop into a devastating pantherish stride.
“Hello, sport,” said Harper as he reached out with easy affection and ruffled the boy’s head. As she watched, assembling first impressions with lightning speed, she could see the family resemblance, which was quite unmistakable. “Been misbehaving as usual?”
His nephew chose to ignore that, and instead demanded, “What took you so long?”
“I told you on the phone last night, remember?” replied Harper with no sign of impatience. Presumably, Nikki thought drily, his impatience was reserved for recalcitrant adults. “I had to pick up a friend of mine who’s going to be staying here for awhile. Nikki, meet Charles.”
“Hi,” she said, as the boy’s eyes turned to fix her with a gaze unsettlingly like his uncle’s, direct and piercing.
“Hi,” he said, summing her up with that one glance. “What happened to your hands?”
“I hurt them,” she said simply, with a quick look at Harper, who nodded in approval.
“I can see that!” he retorted, to which she muffled a laugh. “I meant how did you hurt them?”
“Manners,” Harper warned with a stern weariness that did not cloak the affectionate indulgence beneath it. “Charles, tell Anne we’ve arrived and ask her to scrounge up some coffee, will you? We’ll take it in the rear lounge.”
“OK.” The boy turned to go, then sent her another dark look from under frowning brows. “My name’s Charles,” he advised her. “Not Chuck, not Charlie, not Chas. Just Charles.”
Considerably startled, and struggling now to hide her laughter, Nikki managed to promise with due gravity, “I’ll remember.”
“Good,” he said with immense satisfaction, then turned to race back into the house in the same headlong, reckless fashion he had exited in.
Harper raised his voice in a deep shout, the unexpectedness of which made her jump. “And mind the—”
The door slammed with such force that she could have sworn the sturdy oak trembled, and both of them winced that time. After the boy had disappeared, Harper shook his head in smiling resignation and set an easier pace towards the house. He asked, as Nikki fell into step beside him, “Well, what do you think of him?”
The charged atmosphere that had built up in the car had quite dissipated upon their arrival. She felt as if she wanted to be disappointed, but was too shaken to feel anything but relief. With a slight grin, she replied, “He’s not exactly ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ yet, but just give him another ten years and I think he’ll manage it.”
“No truer
word has been spoken in jest,” he said ruefully, even as his face softened. “Think you can put up with him while you’re here?”
“I think he’s delightful,” she said in all honesty. “How did he come to be living with you?”
“My sister Grace died shortly after he was born six years ago, and Charles’s father was a Middle-East correspondent who was killed shortly after that, so I’ve more or less adopted him. Best thing for all concerned, really. Between them, my mother and Anne, my housekeeper, keep an eye on him through the week while I’m in London, but he’s got more than enough space to spread without driving any one of us too crazy.”
He spoke in such a casual, offhand manner, simply explaining the facts of his lifestyle, but Nikki turned and stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. It must have been an extremely difficult time for all of them, especially for Harper, who had assumed guardianship of a tiny baby.
They must be more like father and son than uncle and nephew, and the image of him gently holding a small infant close to his breast was so evocative, so unexpectedly moving that she felt her throat go dry. Ah, but he would be a splendid father, stern and steady and eternally loving. Harper was the kind of man dynasties sprang from.
He led her without fuss through the massive front hall and directly up the front staircase. Nikki’s mind whirled with the rich varied decor that was a perfect blend of traditional and modern, even down to the well-polished wooden floors upon which were thrown rugs containing a light pastel design. Harper was a living ghost throughout the entire house that reflected his tastes and personality.
“I’ll put you in one of the back bedrooms,” he said over one broad shoulder, “and you can see how you like it. You can move later if you’d prefer to go out to the flat over the garage, but for now it might be easiest to be under the same roof where the meals are cooked.”
“That sounds wonderful,” she murmured as she trailed behind him. The upstairs seemed to be a rabbit-warren that branched off the main landing, the halls she glimpsed small and therefore by necessity completely devoid of any furnishing except for the pictures hung on the walls at tasteful intervals. Her head craned back and forth greedily as she walked past a fortune in priceless art. “How many bedrooms do you have?”
“Seven and a half,” he told her and she chuckled.
“How can you have half a bedroom?”
“There’s a very small room that was originally intended as a nursery. It’s right by Charles’s, and he claimed it last year for his toys.” He stopped at the door at the end of the hall, which had taken a left turn, and he sent her a slight smile. “I’ve put you on the other side of the house from him, but he has no sense of social courtesy and will probably sniff you out at the soonest opportunity.”
“I stand warned.” Then he threw open the door and she gasped with delight. The bedroom he had chosen for her was most charmingly decorated in an adaptation of the traditional Victorian style and completely feminine without being frilly, wallpapered with a pattern of tiny rose-buds that complemented a marble-topped rosewood vanity table. The wardrobe was gleaming mahogany, a piece of art in itself, but what captured her affection was the canopied four-poster bed piled high with embroidered pillows. There was a small fireplace opposite it, and across from where she stood were French doors that led out to a balcony.
“Do you like it?” he asked, smiling now with pleasure as he watched her expressive face.
“Harper, it’s beautiful. I love it.”
“Good.” He pointed to a small door close to one side of the fireplace. “You’ve a water closet over there, but don’t worry. It’s fully modernised, and there’s a shower and bath installed. If you’d like to leave your things for now, Anne will be up to unpack while we have coffee and something to eat.”
She wanted to explore her bedroom and run out on to the balcony to look around, but reluctantly she postponed the urge. “That sounds wonderful.”
“What delightful manners you have. I suppose it’s too much to hope for that some of it will rub off on to Charles,” Harper remarked with an ironic quirk of his eyebrows. “Speaking of which, he ought to come hunting for us any moment now.”
And, naturally, he was entirely correct. At the top of the staircase they collided with the boy, who scowled in perfectly believable surprise. Before she could help it, Nikki’s infectious, irreverent laugh bubbled out. Charles’s face assumed a carbon copy of Harper’s own haughty arrogance, at which she laughed even harder, and then the boy’s façade cracked and he grinned at her with an irrepressible charm that was all his own.
From that moment on, Charles was Nikki’s voluble shadow throughout the afternoon. Harper settled himself in the rear lounge, a quiet, unobtrusive presence that flicked through the pile of his personal post which had collected through the week, while Nikki was dragged over every inch of the downstairs, from the kitchen to the library, and even all over the carefully plotted expanse of the back garden.
She met the housekeeper Anne, a greying woman in her fifties whose brisk, no-nonsense attitude concealed a heart of gold, and Anne’s laconic Welsh husband Gavin, whose weather-beaten face lit up when she praised the grounds which were his pride and joy. They lived in a two-bedroom, self-contained basement flat that had been converted from an original storage cellar, accessible by a panelled door propped open in the kitchen. Anne snapped indiscriminately at both Charles and the writhing chaos of three cats and two straggly scraps of dogs that resided in the warm, airy kitchen, then turned to say with a robust laugh to Nikki, “They have this entire huge house and six acres to lose themselves in, and where do they congregate? Right under my feet!”
“One word from you and they do as they like!” agreed Nikki, blue eyes sparkling at the housekeeper. Charles did not deign to respond. He was sprawled most inconveniently in the middle of the kitchen floor, the sturdy length of his thin body folded on to itself as he reverted from his unsettling precociousness into frankly childish behaviour.
He was playing with one of the dogs, a floppy little nothing of a thing with anxious, eager eyes and a frantic tail. Nikki noticed the gentleness in the boy’s small hands as he murmured to the animal, and her heart melted. The Beaumont males certainly knew how to crawl right past her inherent reserve, in one way or another, and they didn’t even have to work at it. All they had to do was be themselves.
Supper was a simple affair of cold meats and salad, served with an excellent Moselle wine. Charles was allowed to stay up past his normal bedtime, and the boy grew very merry, until at last Harper hustled him upstairs for a bath and story-time.
Left to her own devices, Nikki wandered upstairs as well to the privacy of her bedroom, and spent some time in pleasurable exploration of its charms. Anne had been up some time earlier, and she found that all her things had been unpacked and neatly put away in the wardrobe and dresser, while her cosmetics and hairbrush were arranged on the rosewood vanity table.
She had just decided to take a shower and had stripped off her sweater when a quick knock sounded at her door, and she turned in the middle of the room, calling out, “Come in.”
Harper poked his head around the corner, a startling intrusion into the intimacy of the surroundings. But his smile was cool and uncomplicated as he asked, “Are you retiring for the evening, or would you like to come back downstairs?”
Nikki checked her watch. It had just gone nine o’clock, and she replied, “I’m not ready for bed yet. I just want to have a shower first, and then I’ll be down again shortly.”
His dark eyes studied her rather clinically. “Can you manage all right with your hands? If you want help with washing your hair, all you have to do is say so.”
She flushed; she could feel it as a creeping warmth rising over her face and was extremely annoyed with herself for the reaction. “I—are you sure you wouldn’t mind?” she stammered, then went an even deeper colour. Perhaps she had misunderst
ood, and he had meant to send up Anne.
His smile had deepened with subtle amusement at the furiously dark colour staining her cheekbones, and he pushed her door open to enter leisurely. “If I had minded,” he said mildly, “I wouldn’t have offered in the first place. Got any shampoo?”
“Er—it should be in the bathroom,” Nikki said, and whirled to go and look. Her shampoo and conditioner had been put on the shelf in the bath.
Harper had followed, and the tiny water closet became decidedly cramped. There was barely enough room for two bodies; when Nikki straightened with the bottles held gingerly, she brushed back against the hard length of Harper’s body. His large hands, warm and strong, settled on the slim curve of her waist, then his fingers curled around her T-shirt and started to lift it.
Nikki’s arms clamped to her sides, and she said breathlessly, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Sure it is. You don’t want to get your clothes wet,” he chided, coaxing her arms up. His touch was a velvet slide against her highly sensitised skin, raising goosebumps, and her body clenched against a betraying shudder. He asked, mockingly solicitous, “What’s the matter, don’t you have a bra on?”
“That’s not the point!” What a quandary she was in, dying to squirm at this powerfully sensual onslaught, and just too proud to give in. Her body felt as stiff as a board.
“Why don’t you enlighten me, then?” he purred, his lips brushing her ear.
This was far more, both better and worse, than what she’d bargained for.
Harper took advantage—when did he not?—of her confusion and deftly edged the bright T-shirt over her black head. It sailed to the floor. Though she was wearing a bra, Nikki’s arms folded across her chest in an instinctively protective manner. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he reached for a fluffy towel and handed it to her. She buried her hot face into it as he pushed her over to the waist-high sink and silently urged her to bend over it.
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