Façade

by Jessica Steele

  Though it was with jumping nerves that she made it down into the hall. Not sure in which room Ellis would be, or even if she wanted to find him, she stayed in the hall a further few minutes to admire several of the superb landscapes adorning the walls.

  The sound of a footfall behind her had her jerking round, the control she wanted coming a second too late for her to control her jerky movement. Though she did her best to cover it when she saw that Ellis, in fresh lightweight sweater and slacks, did not appear exactly ecstatic that she had decided to come down. But on remembering the sight she must look to him, any expression he wore was better than that he should collapse into helpless laughter at the picture she presented.

  'I came out without a comb,' she tossed at him airily as, not a word passing his lips, he indicated that she should precede him into what turned out to be his drawing room.

  Still without a word, Ellis closed the door to the room, his eyes taking on a speculative light, she thought, that she had adopted an airy manner which was at odds with the blushing, choky-voiced woman she had been upstairs not too long back.

  Trepidation started to bite when, silently, he found her a comb and handed it to her. She knew then that she had made a mistake in leaving that upstairs room. But, about to tell him that she would return to that room upstairs to tidy her hair, suddenly she saw, and recognised of old, that glint in his eyes that told her he had something to say and that whether she disappeared for five minutes, or for however long, she would not be leaving his house until he had said it.

  She clamped nervous fingers hard on the comb in her hand lest she dropped it, and made herself stand just where she was to pull the comb through her still damp tresses. But her eyes were wary on his when, as she handed the comb back to him, he had still not spoken, but seemed to be waiting until he had her undivided attention.

  Not wanting to hear it, whatever it was he had to say, nerves attacked as the comb she had just given him went into his back pocket, so that she was the first to speak. Though without knowing how, she still managed to keep her voice airy, as she said:

  'My things are nearly dry by now, I expect?'

  'Not quite,' he replied, his tones level, but his eyes fixed on her. 'Sit down, Sorrel,' he added quietly—and added what she had been afraid of: 'I think we might spend the time while waiting in having a little chat.'

  Sorrel sat down, purely because if she didn't, he would know for sure that she was all on edge. 'Why not?' she replied, with an insincere smile that from his calculating look she saw didn't cut any ice. 'Your landscapes are quite something,' she said when he too was seated. If they were going to chat a little, then she was determined that she was the one who was going to be in charge of what it was they chatted about. 'Tell me, Ellis,' she went on, intending to enquire about the artists—only she did not get the chance.

  'No, Sorrel,' he denied her, 'you tell me,' and giving her no time to try to head him off, whatever it was he wanted to know, 'How come,' he went straight on to ask, 'that with you being so close to this man who pays your rent—this man who pays for your mode of transport and the clothes you wear, apart from that robe you have on, that loving this man dearly, as only last night you told me you do…' He paused, but only briefly, his expression stern as with his eyes refusing to let her look away he read the mystification in hers to know what he was getting at; then cleared that mystery for her. But he nearly sank her, when he leaned forward in his chair and ended smoothly, 'Tell me, Sorrel—how come you're still a virgin?'

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Though she had been trying to act so cool, Ellis's cool question had made her coolness a non-starter, and sent Sorrel's thoughts darting in all directions. She damned him, as she damned her delay in joining him downstairs. For her reluctance to leave her upstairs sanctuary had, she saw, given him ample time, since she had blushed a fiery red, in which to come to the conclusion he had.

  'I'm…' she began, halfway to telling him that she was not a virgin. His steady look, that look that said that he knew damn well that she was, stopped her.

  'You're—?' he prompted, not, she was sure, endeavouring to help her out, as he asked softly, 'You're not going to tell me otherwise, are you, Sorrel?'

  'I wouldn't dream of telling you anything,' she flared, in a corner and not liking it. How did he know? she was asking herself. Her response to him that night, save for that isolated moment when shyness had grabbed her when he had started to admire her naked body, had been all womanly, or so she had thought. But with control coming to her at long last, though she no longer managed to sound airy, 'I'll go and wait upstairs until my things are dry,' she told him.

  She had not hung about. But he was at the door before she could get to it, his cool look gone, as in sudden anger, he roared:

  'For God's sake stop running away!'

  'Don't you yell at me!' she fired straight back. 'And… and I'm not running away,' she defended.

  'No?' he questioned, his look tough, but his tone quieter.

  'No,' she said tautly. 'I merely thought to let you see, without having to offend you,' she inserted, finding a trace of comfort in sarcasm, 'that I have no wish to answer your personal questions.'

  Her sarcasm glanced off him; she doubted it had even touched him. But he was not letting up. Though his voice was once more even, his look steady again, as he asked:

  'Personal questions bother you, do they?'

  Damning him and his inventor's mind that looked beyond the apparent, and went digging until everything could safely go ahead without the chance of a snarl-up, Sorrel, her attempt to leave frustrated, lost her cool and lost her temper, and in consequence showed him the open wound in her that had never completely healed.

  'You have no right to ask personal questions of me,' she blew. 'No right whatsoever!' And, too heated to let him get a word in, her hurt there for him to see, she blazed, 'You gave up any right to ask anything concerning me when you offloaded me eight years ago!'

  As soon as she had come to a storming finish, she wanted her words back—there had been just too much pain in that last sentence. She knew that he was aware of that pain too; it was written there in his face, in the way his hand stretched out to her as though he would ease that pain.

  Desperately trying to get herself under control, swiftly she turned away. But Ellis, his hands clamping down on her shoulders, made her turn, made her face him as he refused to let her run away, although she was in the same room with him. And with his hands on her, his touch was of no help in her need to find a cool exterior.

  'God, how I must have hurt you!' he breathed. And in the next second he was tilting her chin, and she was being made to look at him. There was some emotion in those dark eyes that held hers which she could not fathom, nor was she to fathom, as he told her quietly. 'But there was no other way, Sorrel. You knew how it was with me,' he went on, when she didn't know anything of the sort. 'I could have ended up hating you had I…'

  'Don't lose any sleep,' she deliberately cut him off, ignoring the fact that his mouth had firmed at her offhandedness. His manner of talking to her was making her weak when she could not afford to be weak. She was at pains then that he should not see how very deeply she had been hurt, or how long that hurt had lasted. 'I was over you a long time ago,' she lied.

  'You may have got over that hurt, over me,' his short tone came, she knew, from his patience wearing thin rather than from any laughable idea that he didn't like the thought that she had got over him, 'but,' his patience was recaptured, his voice level again, 'it has left a mark on you, hasn't it?' And, not letting her get in this time, 'I was right, wasn't I, Sorrel—you don't trust me, or any other man, an inch, do you?'

  Sharply she pulled out of his hold. She'd had it with him, with his questioning. To answer just one question would mean he would have another half a dozen questions queuing up to be voiced.

  'I'll live with it,' she snapped. They had come a few yards away from the door, and she took a few rapid steps back to it. But before she coul
d get the door open, he was challenging smartly:

  'Why are you in such a tearing hurry?'

  Belatedly, she realised that her action in trying to get away from him with all speed was hardly the action of a woman who couldn't care less about him. That such action might be construed as her being fearful of his penetrating questions had her fingers sliding from around the door-handle, her departure delayed as she half turned to tell him:

  'I'm in no hurry. It's just that…' At that point, she dried up. For Ellis had come up to her and was looking at her with an understanding which she did not understand—until he supplied:

  'It's just that you're nervous of me?' And suddenly there was no aggression in him, his tones were almost gentle as, 'But is it me you're nervous of, Sorrel—or yourself?' he asked, his question telling her that she should be racing back to the comparatively safe haven of the Drurys, dressed as she was if need be.

  But his voice was again seducing her.

  'I…' she choked. But as an argument, it didn't even get started.

  'Are you afraid that should you find yourself in my arms you'll respond as you did before?' he asked, a question which five minutes ago would have had her agitated and firing up at him, but which now, with his eyes gently hypnotising hers, seemed to nullify all agitation in her. Though he had no need to remind her of the time he was talking of as he went on, 'Like you did that time when that certain naivety in you should have told me what I saw only today? Are you afraid,' he asked her, his voice gone to be, oh so very quiet, as he made her face her fears, 'that you might in that situation, forget that you have no trust in me, but that if I had you responsive in my arms again, this time you might hold nothing back?'

  Mesmerised by him, she seemed to take an age before she could find anything to reply. A mixture of wanting him to stay talking gently to her, to ease her gently into trusting him again, was getting confused with some desperate warning that was trying to make itself heard in her head. What he was suggesting was nothing but the truth of what she was feeling, she had to own. But as for long wordless moments she looked back at him, she saw a danger that she might be weak again. It was then that she sent her confused thoughts seeking to remember how it had been that she had been able to hold back before. And then the memory struggled through of how she had told him she had been playing at responding to him purely to get her own back, at last, albeit that in the face of his non-aggression, there was no anger in her either, and she found her voice to answer only one of his charges.

  'You know quite well why I—er—made you believe I was responding to you that time,' she said, trying to stir his anger, needing his anger because the way she was feeling now was not the way she was supposed to feel, and his anger, she thought, would soon give a hiding to the soft wishy-washy person now in charge of her who refused to let the real Sorrel Maitland get through.

  'Ah yes,' he agreed, to her dismay with a smile in his eyes, and not a particle of anger to be seen. If anything, his good humour was restored!

  'I'd better go,' she tried. 'My things are bound to be dry by now.'

  'It's still tipping down outside,' Ellis thought to mention, that smile in his eyes starting to dance, although it was solemnly that he said, 'Even that very fetching undergarment you have on beneath that robe will get soaked if you go out again in this.'

  His remark made her pull the crossover fold of the robe a little closer, just as if she thought some of her coffee-coloured lace was showing. And the smile that had begun in Ellis's eyes was suddenly there to quirk his mouth, though the only comment he made was to remind her:

  'You know you're not expected back to lunch.'

  Sorrel fought a silent battle not to ask the question that hovered on her lips. Fought, and lost. 'What are you suggesting?' she heard the softer person who had taken charge of her ask.

  'Nothing more,' he assured her, 'than that you stay and have lunch with me.'

  'You—er—don't have a luncheon engagement or anything?' she found herself asking, a picture of the blonde he'd been dancing with last night again popping from nowhere into her head.

  'My whole day is at your disposal if you want it,' he offered. And while her world suddenly came alive again as all shades of jealous green got hit on the head, she found that Ellis was actually teasing a smile out of her, when he coaxed, 'Eat with me, Sorrel—I do a fantastic line in cheese sandwiches.'

  Her eyes lingered on her curving mouth, obscuring for the moment the reminder that she had brought her own sandwiches. But she had still not said she would stay to lunch when awareness came, and she asked:

  'What happened to the packet of smoked salmon and caviar I brought with me?'

  'It got soggy,' he replied promptly.

  Knowing full well that he was lying, for rain to her knowledge had never yet sogged its way through plastic packaging, suddenly Sorrel wanted to giggle. Though she tried to keep her face straight when, giving in for no other reason than loving him, she did not seem able just then to listen to the sense of what her head would have told her, and murmured:

  'One does tend to get a little tired of too much smoked salmon and caviar.'

  But she had to smile when a pleased look crossed his face. Though she tried to think nothing of it when, as if he could not help himself, Ellis gave a light kiss to the tip of her nose, for in the next second he was moving from her and growling:

  'Any good with a bread knife?'

  Unable to find the strength she needed to leave him solitary to eat a cheese sandwich, Sorrel replied, 'The best,' and went with him into the kitchen.

  Lunch was not bread and cheese, however, but consisted of tinned soup, steak and salad, followed by cheese and biscuits. To complement one of the best meals she had ever enjoyed went a delicious wine.

  Having had more than one or two qualms to start out with as the impervious-to-his-charm person she wanted to be stabbed her with the occasional dart, be it the wine Ellis had served with the meal, or be it his easy manner, Sorrel found she was beginning to feel relaxed.

  They had conversed on every subject apart from their two selves. The beautiful landscapes she had seen in the hall had come under discussion. Ellis, she discovered, owned paintings by known and unknown artists, having bought his paintings because he liked them, and not, as with some people she knew, for the impressive name of the artist.

  'Had enough?' he asked, when she refused his offer of anything more to eat.

  'I shall need that walk back to the Drury's,' she smiled. And, thinking it about time she made tracks back, 'I'll give you a hand with the washing up, then I'll be…'

  'In the best households, the male of the species reads the paper while the washing up gets done,' he cut her off with a grin.

  'So, chauvinist, I'll leave them to drain,' she said, another smile tugged from her at his sauce. But Ellis was right there with her at the sink when she plunged her hands into soapy water.

  The washing up, to her mind, was done in record time, and she was soon leaving him to collect her trouser suit from where it had been shaken out after coming out from the tumble-drier, and had been left on a hanger in the hope of the remaining creases falling out of it.

  'I can probably run an iron to earth if you want to press it,' said Ellis, following her into the laundry room, and observing the way she was surveying her ruined suit.

  'It'll be all right,' she answered, keeping her eyes on her suit. By the sound of it, he was in no hurry for her to go. But common sense ordered that while lunch had gone far better than she would have expected, it had been a self-indulgence on her part which would be better ended.

  Though she had to own to feeling just a little piqued that Ellis made no attempt to persuade her to change her mind about staying the half an hour longer it would take to press her suit into any sort of respectability.

  Her suit on its hanger in her hand, she moved past him. But before she could exit through the kitchen door, her pride high at the contrary thought that far from trying to delay her, Ellis was tryin
g to get rid of her, her pride was to be mollified when, his voice unhurried, he said:

  'Come into the drawing room when you're dressed— I'll have some coffee ready.'

  Sorrel went up to the room she had used before, well pleased with the way things had turned out. Not that she had looked for an invitation to share Ellis's lunch. Indeed, had she known at the start of her walk that he would come out of his house and take her in out of the rain, she would never have set out.

  She shrugged into her linen trousers, grateful that they had not shrunk, and reflected that what had begun with Ellis firing personal questions, had gone on to be a friendly, if impersonal, lunch where nothing out of the way had been said to upset her.

  Knowing that she was likely to hoard the memory to her of the impersonal friendliness she had shared with him when this time of utterly unpredicted self-indulgence was over, she buttoned up her crumpled jacket, and decided to leave her hair down the way it was. A brisk walk across the fields and, with luck, if the Drury clan had not returned, she could go unseen to her room to set about reinstating the person she wanted the outside world to see.

  She left the bedroom musing on the point that with her make-up gone, washed off by the rain, for a very brief space of time so too had been washed away the stiffening she had needed for any confrontation with Ellis.

  True to his word, he had a tray of coffee waiting when she joined him in the drawing room. He rose to his feet when she entered, but sat down again when she seated herself opposite him.

  She smiled at him as he handed her a cup of coffee, thinking that that word confrontation just didn't apply any more. With Ellis being impersonal, she had no need to get uptight. She still felt as relaxed as she had over lunch. Here they were, two civilised people sitting drinking an after-lunch cup of coffee and, given that her suit had seen better days, with Ellis not bringing anything personal into the conversation, civilised was how they were going to remain.