‘Her natural resources will keep her buoyant.’
She smiled. ‘I hope so.’ Thunder pealed across the sky, making her snuggle up against him more closely. His naked, muscled torso was dripping with rain but that somehow made him all the more desirable. The deep pink shade of the poncho was so intimate. ‘And you left dear Lavinia to come running back to me? Such a noble man!’
‘She’s being particularly impossible today. Going on and on about the new technology.’
‘She’s moving in on you, Anton,’ Amy said. ‘She wants to show you how knowledgeable she is. What an asset she would be as a wife. And all this lavish entertainment she’s laying on—it’s designed to show you the wonderful life you could have together.’
‘We spend all our time together arguing, Amy.’
‘That’s the stick to go with the carrot. She’s demonstrating that it makes sense to join forces with her. She’s chosen you, can’t you see that? Fate has thrown twenty per cent of your corporation into her lap. You are an engineering and business genius, the handsomest man in the world according to Vogue, and just plain the most eligible bachelor in sight. She’s made marrying you her life’s mission—and what Lavinia wants, Lavinia gets.’
His deep blue eyes were watching her face with a strangely quizzical expression. ‘I had no idea you felt that way about me.’
‘Oh, come on!’ she exclaimed restlessly, laying her palm on his powerful naked chest. ‘With her twenty per cent and your fifty-one per cent, you’ll never have to worry about boardroom battles again. I’m surprised she hasn’t spelled it out just as clearly as that.’
‘Perhaps she’s hoping I would take her without her twenty per cent,’ he said gently.
‘And would you?’ she asked directly.
‘I’m much more interested in all these compliments you’ve just paid me—that I’m handsome, a genius…and an eligible bachelor.’
‘You know all that,’ she said impatiently. ‘Modesty is not one of your virtues.’
‘Maybe not. But I’m still somewhat surprised to hear all that coming out of your mouth.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she retorted. ‘Why should you be surprised?’
‘I had the impression you don’t think very much of me,’ he replied, still looking at her with that odd expression.
She gaped. ‘Don’t think very much of you? What made you think that?’
‘Well, every time I try to touch you, you push me away— or run like a rabbit. It’s plain you have some violent aversion to being close to me.’
Amy was dumbfounded for a moment. ‘Anton, not wanting to become your latest mistress doesn’t mean I don’t admire you passionately as a human being.’
His eyelids drooped. ‘Ah. I’m a genius, but physically unattractive?’
‘This is insanity,’ she said, half laughing in perplexity. ‘Of course you’re not unattractive! Haven’t I just said you’re the handsomest man in the world?’
‘According to Vogue.’
‘And according to every other female who lays eyes on you!’
‘Including you?’
He had fenced her neatly into a corner. ‘Yes, Anton,’ she said quietly, ‘including me.’
Her palm was still resting on his chest. He leaned close to her, his warm bare skin touching hers. ‘And so you run because…’
‘I told you already. Because I’m not going to be your toy.’
He brushed her wet, golden hair with his lips. ‘I’m confused. What am I—nice guy or monster?’
‘I never said you were a monster. I never said you were a nice guy, either!’
‘So what am I?’
‘You’re a hunter,’ she replied.
‘A hunter of what?’
‘Of whatever you want. Of success. Of women.’
He laughed quietly. ‘I thought you’d just been trying to explain how Lavinia was hunting me?’
‘Yes, that must be a new experience for you. It’s usually you doing the stalking.’
‘So you think I’m stalking you?’
‘Yes!’
‘So I can jump on you…and eat you up?’
A rumble of thunder prevented her from replying; and then it was too late. Anton was kissing her with the passion of a man who wanted her desperately. She clung to him, her hungry fingers running across the contours of his naked torso, nails digging in, pulling him closer to her.
Their tongues were tasting one another. Amy’s eyes were tight shut but she had never been so aware of who she was kissing—not some faceless figure in a fantasy, but Anton, the man she was growing to love so helplessly, the man she respected and cherished above all others.
She pressed her stomach against his, intoxicated by the naked contact between them. She wanted to tell him how much he meant to her, how frantic she was for his touch. All her caution was melting away like a sugar-cone castle in this tropical downpour.
And then she became aware of a bleating sound, like a lost and very bedraggled sheep.
They turned to see Gerda Meyer staring at them. Her yellow hair hung down in soaked sheets in front of her face but there was no doubt that she could see what was happening perfectly.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded in outrage, eyes popping.
‘We came to look for you,’ Amy said. ‘We thought you were lost.’
‘I was lost,’ Gerda said bitterly. ‘Everybody just abandoned me. But now it is I who have found you, it seems!’
Anton raised an eyebrow at Amy in amused commentary. But Amy did not return the smile. There was no question but that Gerda would report what she had seen to Lavinia— and a disenchanted Lavinia could only spell a great deal of trouble for Anton in the future.
The rain was not yet easing off, but it seemed preferable to brave the thunderbolts rather than try and fit three discomfited people under the one pink poncho, so they walked along the path to the port. Anton tried to hold Amy’s hand, but she pulled away from him, anxious not to give Gerda any further ammunition. ‘Please don’t,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not worth it!’
‘Amy, don’t pull away from me!’
‘Not in front of her! Lavinia can be very bad news for you, Anton. I could never forgive myself if I made things worse for you.’
Gerda, for her part, was evidently bursting for a little private chat with Amy.
She took Amy’s arm and drew her aside with a face like thunder. ‘What did you think you were doing back there?’ she hissed imperiously.
‘We were just sheltering from the rain,’ Amy said, attempting a desperate defence.
‘You were practically devouring him! I have never seen a woman kiss a man so shamelessly as you were doing! Did I not tell you that Lavinia and Anton are going to be married?’
‘Lavinia may have told you that that is her plan,’ Amy retorted before wiser council silenced her, ‘but she cannot speak for Anton!’
‘You little fool,’ Gerda snapped. ‘Do you want to ruin him? Do you really think he could be serious about you, a nobody, a junior employee? Do you think you are the first secretary who has fallen in love with him?’
The words bit into her heart like an axe. ‘No, I don’t think that,’ she said quietly.
‘The last one was so crazy about him it was embarrassing to everybody,’ Gerda went on, shaking the dripping hair out of her eyes. ‘You are even worse, getting in the way all the time, like a badly behaved child! All he wants from you is quick sex, can’t you understand that? You can have no idea how much trouble you are causing!’
‘I don’t want to get in anybody’s way.’ Wisdom made Amy bite her tongue and refrain from saying anything further. The last thing she wanted was to harm Anton. Whatever he wanted from her, and whatever his plans with Lavinia, she cared about him enough not to wish him harmed in any way.
Gerda’s eyes narrowed. ‘I see now! You think that once they are married, he will install you as his mistress in some lacquered palace in Hong Kong!’
‘What?’
Gerda chuckled
. ‘So, you are not so stupid as I thought! A business wife in France and a pleasure wife in Hong Kong? Oh, yes, he is man enough for that.’
‘Unfortunately, I’m not woman enough for such an arrangement,’ Amy replied icily.
‘Come, come. You needn’t play the grand lady with me, chèrie. I am a woman of the world. And I know men like Anton Zell. They want it all—and they always get to have it all.’
Anton Zell can have it all. The fact that she herself had used exactly those words to Anton a few days earlier did not escape Amy. She gritted her teeth. ‘I’m not a grand lady.’
‘No, but you are not stupid, either.’ Gerda’s shrewd glance contained a new respect. ‘Lavinia is a grand lady. She has money and power. But you have something else, something she will never have. Play your cards right, and it will work. As long as you don’t get in Lavinia’s way, she may even tolerate you!’
‘Tolerate?’
‘Empresses sometimes tolerate a concubine—or two,’ Gerda said with a malicious smile.
Amy hurried on, leaving the older woman behind. But Gerda’s vicious words were stuck in her heart like daggers.
The rest of the afternoon was dark and rainy. Amy could not be sure at what point Gerda Meyer spilled the beans to Lavinia—Lavinia was far too socially accomplished to give any great outward show of outrage—but there was no question that the beans had been spilled. The way Lavinia behaved as though Amy didn’t even exist confirmed that.
The downpour and several of the party having been marooned in the forest made for a somewhat subdued evening meal, punctuated by sniffs and sneezes. Amy made sure she avoided both Anton and Lavinia Carron; right now, she didn’t want to be alone with either of them.
It rained and blew all night. It seemed to Amy, in bed early, that the dawn would never come. She tried not to think about what might be passing between Anton and Lavinia as the lightning flashed and the thunder rumbled. Anton had said things about Lavinia that showed he was not blinded by her wealth and magnetism. But then, a man did not have to be in love to marry.
A man like Anton needed a strong wife, not a sugar-plum fairy. He might reckon that marriage to Lavinia would give him enough power to accomplish just about anything in life and that it was not necessary that she be a saint into the bargain.
And as for that searing kiss in the forest—he probably reasoned that he could pick many flowers along the way without losing sight of his main goal.
With these and similar thoughts she tormented herself, feeling more wretched and creating uglier monsters until the grey dawn brought relief and she could drag herself into the shower and try to rinse away the pain.
The breakfast-room did not appear to be a very joyous place when she went down. On the other hand, both Anton and Lavinia seemed to be in normal mood and were talking to one another quite cheerfully. Anton wanted to make an early start, so the leave-taking was mercifully brief.
The bags were soon loaded into the car beside the fountain with the snarling lions. Lavinia bestowed a kiss on Anton’s mouth that seemed warm enough. Then she turned to Amy, as though suddenly Amy had become visible again. She smiled thinly and said only five words, in a voice so quiet that nobody else heard:
‘Don’t get in my way.’
Amy said nothing in reply, but the look in Lavinia Carron’s eyes stayed with her for a long time—well until they were on the motorway back to Marseilles. The sky appeared bruised and there was still a steady rain falling, drumming on the canvas hood of the Mercedes.
‘Stormy night,’ Amy said at last, breaking the silence.
‘Yes,’ Anton replied.
‘Well,’ she demanded, unable to bear the suspense any longer, ‘what happened last night? Did she pop the question?’
Anton burst out laughing. ‘Of course she didn’t pop the question, you silly girl.’
‘Then she’ll be waiting until the chairman’s report in London,’ Amy said decisively. ‘She’s sweetened you up with boat rides and good food and fabulous entertainment this time. Next time, she’ll be carrying the big stick.’
He glanced at her with amused eyes. ‘You think she’s after my hide?’
‘Wait and see,’ Amy said gloomily. ‘Just wait and see.’
Chapter Nine
BY THE end of September they were in Vietnam.
Amy was getting used to the great Asian cities, with their vast metropolitan centres and immense populations. Saigon’s centre was featureless and busy. But once out in the suburbs, it still had the feel of a town with a heart. Instead of the districts of featureless apartment blocks that made up the suburbs of other Asian metropolises, she found charming, dilapidated streets of vintage old buildings that sprawled along the banks of the river.
It was rather like stepping back in time. The streets swarmed with bicycles and scooters. The cars all tended to be vintage models. Even the company car that picked them up from the airport was a forty-year-old Peugeot, rather than the battleship limos of richer cities.
‘What a dreamy place!’ she sighed happily to Anton in the car. ‘Aren’t we supposed to call it Ho Chi Minh City?’
‘People are tending to call it that now, but it’s taken a few years for the name to stick.’
‘I love it, whatever it’s called,’ she said, gazing out of the window. ‘It’s very different from Singapore or Hong Kong. Some parts look like bits of Paris that have been somehow dumped in Asia and left to soften!’
‘Even the colours are different,’ he agreed. It was true; the delicate yellows, pinks and lime-greens of the buildings blended in beautifully with one another along the tree-lined boulevards. ‘And notice how clean the streets are. The devastation of the war has made the Vietnamese very conscious of their environment. That’s one of the reasons I like dealing with them.’
They were not going to be staying in a hotel in Saigon, but in a company villa which the Zell Corporation had bought in the suburbs. She was curious to see what it looked like, since someone at Zell in Hong Kong had told her it was the most beautiful house he had ever been in—in fact, he had become quite dreamy-eyed at the memory.
Their car passed through tall, ornate iron gates and pulled up in a cobbled courtyard. Two maids, delicate Vietnamese girls dressed in black and white uniforms, came out to greet them and help them with their bags.
‘This is exquisite,’ Amy said with delight as she walked through the house. Indeed, it was more of a small palace than a villa, an intoxicating mixture of French empire and Forbidden City, with rococo mouldings and Oriental antiques, Buddhist silk hangings and dim oil paintings. Her bedroom was vast, with a four-poster bed in the centre of the room, draped with diaphanous voile.
The smiling maid opened the glass doors that led onto the garden. Amy stepped outside, bemused. The walled garden was huge, shaded by great trees with glossy leaves. She could see large and ancient bronze urns meditating among the shrubbery. In the centre was a pond, its surface covered with the pink and yellow flowers and emerald-coloured pads of water lilies. In the still water beneath, crimson and saffron fish drifted in a dream.
She sat on the edge of the pond and trailed her fingers in the water. She gazed at the strawberry-pink house. It belonged to a different era, with empire balconies and arches. Cream marble columns held up the portico. The windows and parapets were picked out in the same pale marble. It had been impeccably restored, and given a Riviera flourish, complete with pink stucco and striped awnings.
Anton came to join her. He had changed into jeans and a plain white shirt. He sat beside her on the wall. ‘Like it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what to say. It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.’
‘It belonged to a member of the French civil government. After the war it was expropriated. I bought it from the Vietnamese government five years ago.’
‘You have wonderful taste,’ she said.
‘Some day I might come and live here,’ he said. ‘At least part of the year, anyway. I have an ongoing l
ove affair with Vietnam.’
‘Then I’ll try and love it too.’ She smiled at him. The long shadow cast by Lavinia Carron had disappeared from between them. London was weeks away and she was determined to forget about it until the time came.
‘Come,’ Anton said as a gong sounded, ‘they want us to have lunch now.’
The meal was served in the long dining-room from ornate silver tureens, and was bewilderingly delicious. It started with little crab parcels fried in pastry wrappings, proceeded through a succession of elaborate dishes she couldn’t even begin to identify—sometimes it seemed to her she was eating French haute cuisine and then the next bite would take her to China—and concluded with a frozen dessert that had a taste that eluded her utterly.
‘It’s durian ice cream,’ Anton informed her. ‘Durians are those strange, spiky fruit you see on roadside stalls. The taste is delicious but they heat up the stomach, and the smell is—well, unique. Turning them into ice cream solves the problem.’
‘I’ve never had anything more exotic,’ she said honestly. ‘I think that was the best meal of my life.’
‘You’re starting to see why I love Vietnam,’ he smiled. ‘We’d better get out to the site. They’re expecting us.’
The refinery was being built to the east of Saigon, on the coast. The drive there took them through vast rice fields that glittered in the sun, fed by an endless watery network of irrigation canals, waterways and rivers. The countryside was so inextricably mingled with water, indeed, that the commonest means of transport to be seen were sailing vessels of every type imaginable.
They reached the coast after driving through hills of alternating jungle and sugar-cane plantations. The refinery was situated in the ceremoniously named Vung Tao Con Dau Special Zone and it was in the middle of an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Zone, however, was carefully landscaped so as not to spoil the scenery. Rolling green hills surrounded it; a few miles below, the resort town of Vung Tao spread out along a snowy white crescent of beach that reminded her of a huge slice of watermelon—if the sea had been pink instead of deep blue.
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