Beaumont Brides Collection (Wild Justice, Wild Lady, Wild Fire)

by Liz Fielding

  Taking a firm grip of herself, she asked, ‘Aren’t you afraid that I might pay it into the bank? Once the salaries are drawn and this month’s loan repayment made, I won’t be able to give it back to you if I change my mind.’

  His mouth tightened into a thin dangerous line and he dropped his hand to his side. ‘I wouldn’t advise anything so rash, Miss Beaumont.’

  Tension finally overwhelmed her and she giggled. ‘I was joking, Mr Devlin.’

  ‘Were you, Miss Beaumont?’ He handed her the portfolio, his eyes expressionless. ‘I’ll see you here on Friday at twelve. We’ll see who’s laughing then.’

  *****

  Luke Devlin did not turn as the door opened behind him and his cousin joined him by the window. Fizz Beaumont was crossing the car park and the two men watched her. She had a natural unstudied grace that even the stark lines of the pin-striped suit could not disguise.

  ‘I’d say she’s a bit of a handful on the quiet,’ Phillip said, breaking the silence.

  ‘Quiet?’ A wry smile twisted Luke Devlin’s mouth. ‘That’s generous considering the way she went after you.’

  Phillip shrugged, that wasn’t what he had meant, and he was pretty sure that Luke knew it.

  ‘She’s a good looking girl. Vivid.’

  ‘She certainly wasn’t what I expected,’ Luke agreed, turning to watch as the old, but still dangerous looking sports car that she drove roared throatily into life.

  The report he had commissioned on the Beaumont family and now safely locked in his desk, had described Felicity as being quite different from the rest of her family. She was apparently reserved, leading a quiet life mainly involving the radio station owned by her father and with no theatrical ambitions.

  Having met the girl, he could certainly see that she wasn’t like the rest of her family. But quiet and reserved seemed way off line.

  Both her parents were well known actors, famous for playing opposite one another in long running West End hits, much loved by the public at large until her mother, Elaine French, had retired. Edward Beaumont’s career had taken a downturn until Elaine’s death had generated waves of public sympathy and the kind of publicity that made him bankable once more.

  Luke’s mouth tightened as he recalled the newspaper clippings showing the apparently grief stricken Edward at her graveside with his two daughters. Claudia, already making a name for herself in television, was over-the-top tragic in black. Felicity, about fourteen years old, gawky and awkward, had been unreadable, private. And her life had stayed private. His file was full of photographs of the rest of the family, but she appeared in very few and even then only, it seemed to him, as an afterthought.

  She lived alone in an apartment in Broomhill, with no obvious romantic attachments. She had the title of Station Manager of the local radio station franchised to her father, but the general opinion seemed to be that the job had been manufactured for her by her father because she had not succeeded in a theatrical career despite a brief spell at RADA.

  Compared to her Technicolor family, Felicity had come across on paper as oddly monotone and anonymous. He had almost dreaded what he planned to do to her.

  But she wasn’t monotone. She had a golden, butterscotch voice, an excitingly generous mouth, eyes like hot sapphires. And a disconcerting habit of trembling when he touched her. Vivid. Yes, it was a good word to describe Felicity Beaumont.

  His researcher had got her quite wrong.

  But then he hadn’t uncovered other things about Edward. The Beaumonts were good at covering their tracks. He’d just have to dig deeper. There had to be something to account for the difference between appearance and reality.

  ‘It’s not too late to drop this, Luke.’ Luke Devlin turned and looked down at his cousin. The older man’s face showed real concern. ‘Why don’t you just let it go? Forget it. Juliet would have never wanted this.’

  Luke peeled away from the window and crossed to the desk. ‘Come on, Phillip,’ he said, impatiently, when he saw his cousin still staring down into the car park. ‘I need your figures. Just how much is it going to cost me?’

  Phillip Devlin turned away from the window. ‘Too much.’ Then he shrugged. All the Devlins had a stubborn streak, but Luke made the rest of them look like putty. ‘The whole place needs refitting with modern machinery,’ he said. ‘It’ll cost a fortune. I don’t know why you bought the place.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ For a moment the two men’s eyes clashed. ‘But we have to pay for our fun.’

  ‘Revenge is a wild justice, Luke. Unpredictable. Take care the price you pay isn’t more than you can stand.’

  *****

  Fizz did not return to the pier. She didn’t want to see her father. She was in no fit state to see anyone. The confrontation with Luke Devlin had left her wrung out, emotionally drained. After seven years without so much as a flicker she had thought, in her innocence, that she was quite safe from that overwhelming charge of passion. She had been so certain that no one would ever have that effect on her again.

  She gripped the leather wrapped steering wheel until her knuckles showed white and clamped down on her teeth to stop them chattering. But the trembling was unstoppable and as she edged the car forward into the traffic her foot slipped on the clutch and she stalled. There was an immediate chorus of impatient drivers behind her. For a moment she didn’t even hear them. She just wanted to get home. Lie in a warm bath until the shivering stopped.

  She reached forward, restarted the engine, but the traffic was backed up from the ring road and once caught in the one way system there was no escape. She switched on the radio. Andy Gilbert’s familiar voice immediately filled the car, warning drivers to stay off the ring road if at all possible. ‘... police are in attendance and traffic should be moving shortly. In the meantime for those of you stuck out there here’s something soothing ...’ He moved smoothly into his patter and a few moments later the car was filled with music.

  Fizz dug about in the glove compartment for a scarf. Her car, so old that it was a classic, had once been a glamorous head-turner, but now its shabby soft-top let in a draught that today seemed to come direct from Siberia and the heater only worked when it felt like it.

  She knew she should give serious thought to buying something small and sensible that cost less to run. She would, she promised herself. Once she had sorted out her sponsorship problems.

  There was no scarf, so she turned her collar up and chilled through by emotional stress as much as the cold, she continued to shiver as the traffic edged slowly forward a few feet at a time until she reached the cause of the problem, a commotion in front of the town’s leading hotel.

  A white limousine was drawn up before the entrance and a crowd of photographers and reporters were clustered about it, as well as hundreds of excited girls.

  A gasp went up from the crowd as the occupant of the limousine emerged and with the most brilliant smile framed by golden hair that spilled around her fur-clad shoulders, she turned and waved enthusiastically to her fans.

  For a moment Fizz stared at the young actress. So that was Melanie Brett. Genuinely youthful, fresh and heartbreakingly pretty. It was, she discovered, painfully easy to understand why Luke Devlin would want to give her everything her heart desired.

  Once clear of the traffic she headed up the hill to her apartment in an old house that overlooked the bay and the town that rimmed its shore.

  Everything looked so uncomplicated from up here, so simple. Neat rows of beautifully preserved Georgian houses lining the pebble dash of the south beach, the clean black lines of skeletal winter trees that made the town’s famous parks seem almost dead from this distance.

  Close up she knew that under the bare branches would be deep drifts of snowdrops and the promise that the banks would soon be spread with a purple, white and yellow carpet of crocuses.

  Beyond the parks spread the tangle of the town with the new shopping mall at its centre and further east, the Wynds, narrow alleyways full of exciting lit
tle shops that sold exotic and precious things from all over the world. A popular hunting ground for collectors even in the winter.

  She remembered Devlin’s disparaging comparison of her new restaurant with the cosy bistros in the heart of the Wynds. Had she really been that wrong?

  As she walked down the road to the shop on the corner to pick up the evening paper, her eyes came to rest on the long arm of the pier stretching out above the golden sands of north beach, its elegant ironwork tracery gleaming under a new coat of paint. At its furthest point the domed shape of the pavilion, now the home of Pavilion Radio, stood out bright against the grey of the sky.

  Of course she had not been wrong. People loved the pier and no trip to the sea could ever be complete, even in winter, without a bracing walk along its sixteen hundred feet.

  ‘Hello, Fizz, you’re early today. Just the Post is it?’

  ‘Please, Arthur. No, wait.’ She picked up a bar of chocolate from the display and grinned self-consciously as she handed over her money. ‘I’m in need of a little comfort. This is the closest I’m likely to get.’

  ‘That would make a good name for a chocolate bar,’ he said with grin, walking with her to the door. He nodded down at the pier. ‘It’s a grand sight these days,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Her father and Michael Harries had set up the Pier Trust, both of them working so hard to restore it. Grants, money raising concerts anything to raise the funds. After she had abandoned her fledgling film career, running home to lick her wounds in private, her father had dragged her along to help, refusing to allow her to hide away at home, moping.

  She still remembered the ache of hands and back from painting what had seemed like miles of wrought iron tracery. But the hard backbreaking work had given her a purpose to get out of bed each morning and when the local radio franchise had been announced it had seemed to her the obvious place for it to be.

  Visible to the entire town, a constant reminder that the pier was not just some museum piece to be grumbled over as a costly reminder of bygone days, but a living part of Broomhill Bay.

  Fizz and her father had often joked that they each supported the other. The rent the radio station paid to the Trust for the pavilion that had once housed the Winter Gardens was used to keep the pier in good repair. And the pier held up the radio station. But for how much longer?

  She turned to the newsagent. ‘Can I ask you a question, Arthur?’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘If someone offered to pay you to employ a really good looking girl-’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ he said, heavily sarcastic.

  ‘No, listen. Someone really glamorous, a girl that would bring men out of their way to buy the morning paper from your shop, just for the chance of a smile. What would your reaction be?’

  Arthur looked at her a little oddly. ‘Pay me you say?’

  ‘Give you her salary and some more money for yourself.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’ She raised her eyebrows and he shrugged. ‘No one ever does anything for nothing, Fizz,’ he said. ‘I’d have to ask myself what he was up to. What was in it for him? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes, Arthur. I rather think it is. Thank you.’

  Once inside, Fizz flung off the unaccustomed suit, filled the bath and submerged herself in the deep scented water. A shower would have warmed her just as efficiently, washed away the disquieting scent of Luke Devlin that seemed to have seeped into her very pores. But she needed more than that.

  She needed to rid herself of his touch with its skin prickling sensation of heightened awareness. And a bath was comforting. She needed that. She reached for the bar of chocolate, broke a piece off and let it slowly dissolve in her mouth. Not that she was in any real danger.

  It was obvious that the man was utterly wrapped up in Melanie Brett. And why not? It was easy to see how she had captured what passed for Luke Devlin’s heart but she wasn’t particularly keen on letting him use her radio station as a toy, a plaything for his lover. Not if she could help it.

  Of course she would like to have Melanie in “Holiday Bay”. But on her own terms. She broke off another piece of chocolate. If she could raise the money some other way, maybe she could.

  Later, warm but guilt-ridden at her self-indulgent chocolate binge, Fizz made some tea and carried it to her small desk set in the bow window overlooking the sea. Then she took a deep breath and reached for the telephone.

  ‘Julian? It’s Felicity Beaumont.’ She wasn’t used to phoning men and asking them out so she didn’t give herself time to flunk it. ‘I’ll be in London tomorrow and I wondered if we might have lunch?’

  Julian almost fell over himself to accept. ‘I’d love to see you, Fizz. Any time.’ He sounded so eager that she felt a complete heel. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him. She liked him very much. He was good looking, charming, had all the attributes any girl might seek in a partner. The trouble was she wasn’t looking for a partner. She knew he liked her and it was unfair to use him like this, but life wasn’t fair and she didn’t want him to back out. ‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s my treat,’ she said, quickly. ‘But could you suggest somewhere? It’s a while since I was in London.’

  He mentioned a restaurant that Claudia had been raving about and she winced. It was bound to be horrendously expensive. But information didn’t come cheap. ‘That sounds lovely. I’ll book a table for about half past twelve, shall I?’

  ‘Great. Are you staying in town? I’ve got tickets for a new show.’ He was like an eager puppy scenting a treat and she wasn’t prepared to take the responsibility for raising Julian’s hopes any further.

  ‘I’m not quite sure of my plans, Julian,’ she said. ‘Can I let you know tomorrow?’ After lunch he might not want to speak to her ever again.

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  But when she walked into the restaurant at a little after twelve-thirty the next day Julian looked less like an eager puppy than a disgruntled basset hound. He rose to his feet as she approached the table, but his smile was perfunctory.

  ‘You’ve heard,’ she said, without preamble, sinking into the seat the waiter held for her.

  ‘About the Harries takeover? Yes, I’ve heard. And I imagine this lunch is not because you wanted to see me, but because you wanted to talk about your loan.’ He was stiff with hurt pride.

  ‘So, why didn’t you telephone and cancel?’

  ‘I tried, but you had already left your office.’

  ‘Oh.’ Then, ‘Oh, do sit down, Julian, everyone’s looking. We can have lunch surely? And if you insist I won’t say a word about the takeover.’ He sat, but with an ill grace. ‘But you did say that I was to ring you, night or day, if I needed advice or help,’ she reminded him. ‘You appointed yourself my personal banker, remember?’ She put her hand over his on the table and for a moment he stared at it. ‘I’m asking for your help now.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me what you wanted when you phoned?’

  ‘I’m sorry. The truth is I wanted to see you face to face. It is important, Julian and if we get into trouble ... well, you did recommend acceptance of my proposals to your board.’

  ‘You mean it’s my head on the block as well?’

  The idea did not seem to bother him much. But then he bore the same name as the bank, even if it was at some remove. Instead he surprised her with a sudden grin.

  ‘What if I pay for lunch and we forget business? Who knows, I might yet dazzle you with my wit, stun you with my charm, tempt you into bed with my winning smile -’

  ‘Your wit and charm are undeniable, Julian.’

  He turned his hand and grasped hers. ‘Then come with me to the theatre tonight,’ he urged. ‘You can catch an early train back in the morning -’

  He’d missed out the bit in between. The important bit. ‘Your wit and charm are undeniable, Julian,’ she repeated, ‘but I’m not so sure about your plan to tempt me with your winning smile.’
/>   ‘You’ve got to give a guy a chance.’

  ‘I can’t think why.’

  ‘Well, forget the winning smile. I won’t put a hand out of place if you’ll come. Promise.’

  ‘That rather depends on your definition of “out of place”,’ she pointed out. ‘And I’m staying with my sister tonight. She wants to talk.’

  ‘That won’t take all evening.’

  He was right about that. When she had phoned to tell her sister she would be town, Claudia had been almost desperate for her to stay over so that they could have a long talk. But she had probably already forgotten and Julian deserved something for being treated so shabbily. ‘All right, but I’ll hold you to your promise to keep your hands to yourself.’

  ‘You do realise that tickets for this show are like gold dust? You’ve no idea what I could get the girls in the office to do for them.’

  ‘I’ve a fair idea,’ she said. ‘Perhaps, after all, you’d better save them for a rainy day.’

  ‘Actually I think I’d rather have your company even with the embargo on hands. Of course, if you should suddenly feel so overcome with gratitude that you change your mind, just say the word.’

  ‘And what word is that, Julian?’

  For a moment their eyes locked and then Julian shook his head, releasing her fingers as he admitted defeat. ‘I don’t know who broke your heart, Fizz, but if you don’t pick up the pieces and at least try to glue it back together he’s won.’

  ‘Love isn’t a contest, Julian. There are no winners or losers. And sex is no substitute.’

  ‘But it’s fun,’ he assured her, eagerly. ‘Try it, you might like it.’ It was odd how he reminded her of some soft little puppy. A golden Labrador.

  Luke Devlin on the other hand was pure Doberman.

  The waiter sensing a hiatus in the conversation stepped in. ‘Are you ready to order, sir?’

  Julian ordered for them both and insisted on treating her to champagne, refusing to talk about business until they had eaten. Afterwards, as they warmed themselves on brandy she brought up the subject of the takeover again.