by Sara Craven
But a man who might also be waking up at any moment. Wanting to have ‘a serious talk’. And perhaps more...
Well, she could tell herself that certainly wasn’t going to happen, but he might insist, and she wasn’t sure she could fight him off—or, if she was honest, that she’d even want to.
She pressed her clenched fist to her mouth to stifle a little moan of shame.
Calm down, she adjured herself fiercely. Forget what you’ve done—and particularly said—and use whatever’s left of your brain to get out of here—fast.
Before he gets round to telling you that he’s married, or only in the market for a Friday night girl when he’s in London. Or checks that you’re on the Pill...
Suddenly she felt very cold. And scared. At the same time knowing for certain she didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say.
Remembering too the dream that had so suddenly and providentially woken her.
Bella, she thought with horror. Oh, God, I was dreaming about Bella...
Carefully, she edged across the bed and put her feet to the floor. Heart drumming, she collected up her scattered clothing and tiptoed into the other room, dressing quickly and clumsily, alert to any danger sound from the bedroom.
She even remembered there was a trick to the lock and opened the door to the corridor smoothly and silently.
Halfway down, the lift stopped and, for one frozen moment, she thought Zandor might have found some way to recall it, but the doors opened to reveal two girls in neat green uniforms with cleaning trolleys. They immediately apologised and pressed the button for her to continue her descent, but Alanna saw the swift knowing look they’d exchanged and felt she’d just lost a layer of skin.
In the street outside it was overcast and chilly enough for Alanna to huddle into her jacket as she tried to get her bearings and work out where she’d find the nearest bus stop or Tube station.
But as she hesitated, a black cab cruised to a halt beside her. Its light was off, but the middle-aged driver leaned across, frowning, and spoke to her.
‘Bit early to be on your own, young lady. What’s the trouble? Had a row with the boyfriend?’
Alanna bit her lip. ‘Something like that,’ she returned defensively.
‘I’m on my way home,’ he said, ‘but if the Wandsworth direction’s any good to you, I can drop you off somewhere.’
‘That would be brilliant,’ she accepted unsteadily.
He was as good as his word, setting her down at the end of her road and flatly refusing to take any payment.
‘Glad to help, love. I hope someone would do the same for my daughter if they found her wandering around at this time of day.’ He smiled at her. ‘And make that fellow grovel.’
* * *
As it was Saturday, the other tenants were in no hurry to rise, so Alanna didn’t have the usual fight for the bathroom. She turned up the temperature of the shower until it was only just bearable and scrubbed herself rigorously from head to toe as if it was possible to scald away his touch.
She only wished the same tactics could clear her memory. Make her feel clean again mentally as well as physically. Except it was too late for that. She’d behaved like a fool, and worse than a fool, and now she had to live with the consequences, she told herself shuddering.
Whatever they might be.
Drying her hair in front of her room’s solitary mirror, she found she was studying her reflection with a kind of odd detachment. Trying to work out what it was that had prompted first the loathsome Jeffrey Winton and then Zandor to regard her as fair game.
I must be giving off signals, she thought, biting her lip. Indicating somehow that I’m ‘gagging for it’, in the revolting phrase I heard one of the guys in my year at uni once use.
But I never thought it could ever apply to me. More proof of my total stupidity.
Because it was one of the reasons I was determined not to sleep around but to wait until I was in a loving, committed relationship.
Another serious reason being Bella, she thought, swallowing past the tightness in her throat as the word ‘loving’ stung at her brain.
Or that’s what I told myself. Perhaps, in reality, it was just that I’d never been seriously tempted before.
But, as a result, I made a conscious decision not to go on the Pill, relying instead on my own self-control to keep me safe.
Which has always worked perfectly—until last night.
She took a deep breath. She had planned to work on a script this weekend, but knew she couldn’t promise to give it her best if she stayed here alone, brooding. Thinking the unthinkable.
So—she’d find herself some company, the best in the world.
She dressed quickly in jeans and a loose cotton top, then got out her leather shoulder bag, filling it with a spare shirt, a change of underwear, her night things, and, finally, the script.
She swallowed a cup of black coffee and a slice of toast, then, after stuffing everything she’d worn the previous evening into a garbage sack and depositing it in an outside bin, she set off for the railway station.
An hour later, she was walking up the lane towards her parents’ cottage, noticing as she reached the gate that there was a ‘Sold’ sign on the house opposite.
She also discovered that instinct hadn’t played her false. Although it was still early, her mother, clad in loose cotton trousers and a floral blouse, mug of tea in hand, was patrolling the front garden, ready to deal death and destruction to any weed unwise enough to raise its head among her flowers.
Alanna leaned on the gate. ‘Hi, Ma,’ she called lightly. ‘Stand by to repel boarders.’
Mrs Beckett started, then hurried down the path, wreathed in smiles. ‘Darling, what a lovely surprise. Daddy will be absolutely thrilled. He said last night it was time you came down again. The thought must have reached you on the ether.’
I wish, Alanna thought with a pang as she unlatched the gate and was received into her mother’s embrace.
‘He’s about to put together some bacon sandwiches,’ sad Mrs Beckett happily. ‘I’ll tell him to do a couple of extra rashers.’
‘I’ve already had breakfast,’ Alanna protested.
‘Indeed.’ She was swept by a comprehensive maternal glance. ‘Then you’ll have to manage another. You’ve obviously lost weight, and you’re looking a little frayed round the edges, my love. In need of some TLC, I’d say.’
Alanna smiled back at her. ‘OK, Mother, dear, I know when I’m beaten.’
As they walked round to the kitchen door, she added, ‘I see the Eastwoods are moving. Isn’t that rather unexpected?’
‘Unexpected but understandable.’ Mrs Beckett gave her a sideways glance. ‘Have you still not heard from Bella?’
‘No, not a word since she dropped out of uni.’ Alanna paused. ‘But, oddly enough, I was thinking about her quite recently.’
‘Picking up the vibes, perhaps,’ her mother said grimly. ‘She’s pregnant.’
Alanna halted. ‘Again?’ The word escaped her before she could stop it. ‘Oh, Lord, I didn’t mean that as it sounded.’
‘Well, you’re not the first to say it. Bob and Hester are distraught. And this time she intends to keep the baby.’
‘So she and the father are together?’
Mrs Beckett gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘For that she’d have to know his identity,’ she returned drily. ‘That’s why her parents are moving—to support her.’ She sighed. ‘Apparently it was someone she met at a party. She’d been drinking as usual and they didn’t swap phone numbers or even names. And now she’s messed up her life a second time—all for a one-night stand with a total stranger. Can you imagine?’
She threw open the back door and addressed her husband, busy at the stove. ‘Harry, look what the morning breeze has blown in.’
She turned to Alanna. ‘Well, give him a hug, darling. Don’t just stand there as if you’d been pole-axed.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
YET POLE-AXED WAS
exactly how she’d felt, Alanna remembered wryly, standing there her mother’s sun-filled kitchen, already weighed down with guilt, and now hardly able to believe her ears.
She and Bella had been at school together, in the same year and the same class, but never that close although their parents were friends.
By sheer chance they’d also ended up at the same university, but there their paths had divided with Alanna reading English, while Bella had opted for History.
Their social lives were very different too. Alanna, naturally shy, had concentrated on work, while Bella, with her stunning blonde looks, had soon moved into the fast lane.
There she’d met Charlie Mountney, elder son of a viscount, already in his third year, and they’d instantly become an item.
‘Well, I hope she has fun,’ said Alanna’s roommate bluntly. ‘Because that’s all it ever is with Charlie. After his Finals he’s off to manage the family estate in Staffordshire and duly marry the girl next door.’ She paused. ‘If Bella’s a mate of yours, a word of warning might not come amiss.’
‘Oh, I think it might,’ Alanna had returned lightly. ‘I’m sure Bella knows what she’s doing.’
But she’d been wrong, because only a few months later, Bella had suddenly dropped out of her course and disappeared, allegedly suffering from glandular fever, while Charlie was soon seen around campus with a pretty redhead from the second year.
‘By all accounts, Bella was getting too intense,’ said the roommate. ‘And with no engagement in sight, she played the “I’m pregnant” card and Charlie said “Deal with it” and walked.’
She shrugged. ‘She’ll be back one of these days, sadder and wiser.’
But that hadn’t happened and when Alanna arrived home for the summer vacation, she learned that Bella had indeed undergone a termination and subsequently lapsed into an acute depression, screaming at her anguished parents that Charlie was the only man she would ever love. Begging them to contact him and tell him so, and, this time, to make him believe it.
‘But how can we?’ Hester Eastwood had sobbed to Alanna’s mother. ‘It’s obviously all over. She has to accept that and get on with her life.’
Yet, as Alanna had later discovered, this was easier said than done.
But at the time, she thought bitterly, smug little prig that I was, I actually wondered how Bella could have been such a fool. Taken such a risk with her future.
In fact, heaven help me, I treated her as a kind of Awful Warning.
Well, on that morning a year ago, she’d found out. Had become desperately, agonisingly aware that she’d been equally foolish—equally reckless. Equally lacking in any justification for her behaviour.
Because, for all she knew, she also could be about to break her parents’ hearts with the news that, having had unprotected sex, she too was expecting a child by a complete stranger, with hard choices to be made that would affect them all for ever.
As for Bella, discharged from the clinic, she’d moved to London, found a job with a publicity outfit, and re-started the high life. Relations with her parents had remained strained however, as she openly blamed them for failing to talk her out of the termination.
As if anyone had been able to talk Bella out of anything.
Poor things, she’d thought then, only to realise as she sat at the kitchen table, struggling to eat her bacon sandwich and talk brightly about how work was going, that people in the village might be saying that about her own parents before long.
She’d endured nearly ten days of silent misery until, by some miracle, her period had arrived absolutely on time.
And as she wept tears of shamed relief she made a vow that if, as it seemed, she couldn’t resist temptation—or that, a propos Jeffrey Winton, she was giving out the wrong kind of vibes—she would from that moment on put herself quietly and firmly out of temptation’s way and try to emit no vibes at all.
But the entire experience had left her feeling vulnerable, which was why she’d snatched at the chance of moving in with Susie.
Yet now, just when she’d thought it was safe to venture back into the real world, all this had to happen. By some cruel twist of Fate, Zandor had reappeared in her life—or at least on its periphery—and that only on a strictly temporary basis, she reminded herself with steely determination.
And his unexpected departure tonight had to be a good sign—an indication that, having been proved wrong, he would be taking no further interest in the Harrington family’s entanglements.
Anyway, that was what she would hope, at the same time firmly quelling the faint quiver of apprehension deep within her, suggesting it might not be that simple.
And, more disturbingly, why this could be so.
* * *
‘Tasty,’ said Susie approvingly. ‘In fact, very tasty indeed. Well done that girl.’ She paused. ‘That is, of course, if you’re in it for the long haul, because it strikes me that Mr Gerard Harrington will take some getting to know, and it will cost you time and effort to find his secret side.’
Alanna poured herself more coffee. It would, she decided ruefully, have made life easier if Susie had been off playing squash as she often did on Sunday mornings so that the flat would be empty when Gerard insisted on carrying her bag from the car, as she’d known he would.
It had been a muted departure from the abbey. Neither Gerard’s grandmother nor his mother had appeared at the breakfast table, and Alanna had waited in the hall while he dashed upstairs to say his goodbyes, and accordingly was caught there by Joanne insisting they swap home and work addresses, telephone numbers and emails.
‘You’re part of the family now so we must keep in touch,’ she’d declared ebulliently.
The mess deepens, Alanna thought dismally, as she complied. And Joanne’s going to be so disappointed.
During the drive back to London, she’d reiterated her insistence that there should be no further announcements, public or personal, of the supposed engagement, and Gerard had reluctantly agreed, protesting that she should at least have an engagement ring.
‘Perhaps,’ Alanna conceded. ‘For the time being. But only to be worn when we’re with your family.’
Which, she hoped devoutly, would not be any time soon. And what she really needed was to extricate herself from the entire situation before it became any worse.
The first potential complication, of course, had been Susie, at home and waiting to be introduced. But, to Alanna’s relief, Gerard, while accepting coffee, had smilingly declined Susie’s subsequent cheerful offer of pot-luck lunch and departed, no doubt to mull over the events of the weekend, and its aftermath. As she would have to do herself.
Now she said composedly, ‘I doubt he has one.’ Apart from this joint effort, she thought, before adding, ‘Anyway the keeping of secrets is no big deal for the Harringtons as I found out after five minutes with his cousin Joanne. Lovely, but a self-appointed mine of information.’
‘Everybody has something to hide,’ said Susie darkly. ‘And this particular Harrington is no exception, mark my words.’
‘Duly marked.’ Alanna hesitated. ‘As for the long haul—that’s still debatable.’
‘The weekend something of a strain?’
‘Something,’ Alanna agreed.
‘The grandmother more old witch than good fairy?’
‘Along those lines.’
Not that it would have mattered too much if she’d been in love with Gerard, she reflected, because then she’d have been prepared to fight for him tooth and nail, whatever Niamh Harrington—or any other family member—threw at her.
So, her pride had been damaged. So what? Was that frozen look of Mrs Harrington’s face sufficient justification for tangling herself in this web of deceit?
Zandor’s abrupt departure was a totally different matter, an achievement which made any kind of inconvenience worthwhile. That was what she had to remember.
She drew a deep breath, then said more briskly, ‘But, for the time being, I really need to co
ncentrate on work, which has its own tricky side just now. For instance, tomorrow I have to turn down a good script by an unknown to make room for a lousy one from a Big Name. A prospect I don’t relish, and a battle that I really needed to win.’
Susie grimaced. ‘Sounds ominous.’
Alanna nodded. ‘It feels it too. The fact is, I have to establish myself more firmly in the editorial team, in case the company is bought out. And I think Hetty would have fought a better fight for Gina Franklin than I did—and come out victorious at the end of it,’ she added despondently.
‘Don’t run yourself down.’ Susie gave her a light punch on the shoulder. ‘Put the weekend and its negatives behind you, and decide that from now on everything’s coming up roses.’
Dodgy things, roses, Alanna thought wryly, often arriving with a full complement of greenfly, rust, black spot and the odd thorn. But she could only hope for the best.
* * *
Monday’s interview over lunch with Gina Franklin went far better than she could have hoped. The girl was obviously deeply disappointed, but Alanna managed to convince her that the rejection was solely on economic grounds, and because she still believed the book would sell, recommended an up and coming literary agency, hungry for new talent.
However, when she got back to the office, she found a palpable feeling of tension in the air.
‘Bookworld has just gone online saying TiMar International have bid for us, so watch this space,’ Sadie from Non-Fiction informed her at the water cooler. She snorted. ‘Nice if we’d heard it first.’
Alanna frowned. ‘Who are they?’
‘Big, still growing, and based in America,’ said Sadie. ‘Their main interests are in television and other media and their production companies have put out loads of successful series drama and documentaries, but they also have sidelines in the tourist industry and other stuff.
‘Now, they’re apparently looking to extend into book publishing, which may or may not be good news for us.’ She sighed. ‘I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.’
