Hotel Mirador

by Rosalind Brett

  “And you can’t wait to leave Morocco!”

  Sally lifted a hand. “I don’t belong here, as you seem to. I ... I know you’re feeling pretty terrible, and I also know that I’m half responsible for it...”

  “Half!” he ejaculated unpleasantly. “You’re the whole works, honey.”

  “That’s not fair. It was through me that Lucette came here, but the rest was up to you. If anyone had suggested that you’d fall in love with her and get hurt I’d have thought it the joke of the year, but...”

  “And it would have been. Lucette is a charming idiot and as unstable as they come. To me, until that last day, she was just that—an attractive little joke.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Sally said flatly. “You’ve behaved like a humorless bear since she left.”

  “I’ve felt far worse than that,” he returned forcibly. “How could you lend yourself to that plan of Mike’s? I know you did nothing to further it—you’re not capable of that—but you knew what was going to happen to Lucette, your own friend! You let her lounge there on the terrace waiting for a disaster of which she had no inkling. Even if you knew only a little, you should have warned her.”

  “But I knew nothing!” Sally retorted. “I was as much taken by surprise as she was. I didn’t speak because I was afraid of worsening matters. How dare you think I’d harm Lucette! You ... you...”

  “Hold on!”

  She turned furiously away as the steward brought the tray of drinks into the room. Dane waved him away and began pouring, but the moment the door had closed he set down the bottle and turned to her.

  “Lucette had a word with me while her husband was attending to the luggage at the airport. She said you practically admitted knowing what Mike and Cécile were up to.”

  “I knew nothing whatever. Why should she say that?”

  “God knows,” he said savagely, and took a turn about the room. “Unless ... well, unless she was afraid I had too good an opinion of you.”

  Sally’s mouth was dry. “Lucette doesn’t think of me like that.”

  Dane’s manner had changed a little. “You really hadn’t any notion at all of what Mike was planning?”

  “None.”

  “Well,” with an angry sigh, “that’s a relief, anyway. It was a comparatively small thing, but it was there, a little wound that kept getting rubbed. I didn’t want to believe it, but I didn’t see that Lucette had anything to gain by lying.”

  “She was hurt and humiliated—and I wasn’t as sympathetic as I should have been. I suppose I was too shocked at the way she had treated the man she married.” She paused, bit at the inside of her lip. “Then you didn’t ... really care for Lucette?”

  “Heavens, no,” he said impatiently. “She was gay, and at the end I must admit I felt sorry for her. Her husband seems a good chap, but he’ll be stern with her from now on. She needs it.”

  By now, Sally was a little dazed and worn. “Do you think we might have that drink?”

  He gave her a glass containing a spot of gin, topped it with orange and ice and then poured whisky for himself. He lifted his glass and said, “To honesty. I can use some from you right now.” And he tossed off half the drink.

  She sipped gratefully, and knew that the tiny proportion of gin could not possibly be responsible for the cautious little glow within. She had been wrong about his feeling for Lucette. Was it possible...?

  He asked bluntly, his eyes watchful, “Had you said goodbye to Tony before I arrived?”

  “No. No, I hadn’t.”

  “No kisses at the plantation?”

  “Not one. Tony and I aren’t that way about each other. I wish there were some way of convincing you.”

  “There is,” he said tersely.

  “Is there?”

  “You could tell me there was someone else.”

  A silence throbbed between them. Sally’s glass was taken from her fingers and she looked up quickly into the lean clever face gone dark with some emotion, into eyes in which the banked-down fires had suddenly flamed. She felt the flexible strength of his fingers upon her upper arms. The dark cloud of torment in her own eyes cleared magically and her breath caught in her throat.

  “For Pete’s sake,” he said thickly. “Don’t look at me so meltingly unless you mean it. I’ve stood enough agony from you, young Sally.”

  She whispered, “What did you mean—someone else?”

  “Do I have to translate it into words of one syllable? Can’t you ... feel it?”

  She did, then. Felt it tingling through his fingertips, surging up from her own heart. Trembling, she pressed her face against him and clung, and for a long time there were just his hands, moving and gripping over her back, and the leaping responses of her own nerves. Then he lifted her chin and looked into her eyes, and she was filled with a painful rapture as his mouth came down to meet hers.

  * * *

  Some time later Dane said, “You earned that bonus, little one. We’ll make it a trousseau after all—let ourselves go in Paris.”

  “Paris!”

  “On the way to England. I suppose you’ll insist on getting married in Cumberland?”

  “Oh dear,” she said, going scarlet. “Do we have to think about marriage? It’s a bit soon, when we’ve only just kissed for the first time.”

  “But how we kissed!” He laughed at her expression. “Haven’t been in the habit of doing that kind of thing with other chaps, have you?”

  “No, but...”

  “Like to know that we’ll kiss like that every day for the rest of our lives, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, but...”

  “There’s only one way to make sure of it. Hook the guy.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair. “I love you, Sally. I was never more certain of anything in my life. That day you nearly crashed down from Tony’s balcony I knew I had to marry you—look after you for ever. That’s why I was so furious with you. In a matter of seconds I knew I loved you and nearly lost you. God, it was appalling.”

  “But it was after that that you kissed Lucette!”

  “She kissed me,” he reminded her, “but I didn’t object, as you were watching. We’d just had a row on the terrace, if you remember.”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Good. Perhaps you now realize why I was so keen to get Mike on the go in England. He’s all right, but I wanted him out of our way.”

  “Tony, too?”

  “Tony most of all,” he said, sounding grim. “I knew what you felt for Mike was professional compassion, but Tony’s pleasant and quite a good-looker, and he does mean to succeed with the plantation. He’s wasted a lot of time, but he was steadying up a little before you came, and I was horribly afraid his situation would appeal to that touchingly soft heart of yours. Why was it never soft for me?”

  “I had to protect myself.”

  “Against what?”

  “The machine,” she said tremulously. “It’s only very recently that I’ve believed you could love anyone, and then I was so afraid it was Lucette. I didn’t want to fall in love with you.”

  He laughed, exasperatedly. “I knew that the moment we met. You were a young woman out of England for the first time, yet you refused to be impressed by Morocco or anything else. You took one long blue-eyed stare at me and decided that Morocco had nothing on Cumberland and that you would do your job and get out, quick! Like it or not, my darling, you fell the whole way that first day, just as I did—I haven’t felt right since. But you were a sight more stubborn about acknowledging it.”

  “Not to myself,” she said softly.

  “That’s something.” He hardened and let her go. “It’ll take me ages to recover from the shock of knowing you were arranging to leave. How did you expect me to react to that?”

  She looked up at him, beseechingly. “Dane, I didn’t know how you felt, but now that I do know ... I’d never do anything to hurt you; I’d hurt myself so much more. You’re such a strange man...”

  “Don�
��t say that!”

  “Nice strange,” she qualified. “You do such a lot for everybody in such an odd and cold way. I’m sure there’s no other man in the world who’d have gone off to the kasbah at Nezam in the middle of the night to scare the Caid into bringing his son to Shiran! And do you know what I believe? You first took over the Mirador because you liked Pierre ... and you backed the date plantation for the same reason.”

  “I did that for you. It was the first piece of Morocco that you admitted you liked!”

  She turned to the drink she had neglected, and asked slowly and a little offhandedly, “What was the reason you took an interest in the phosphate mine? It belonged entirely to Cécile, didn’t it?” would use the money to further her career. I engaged experts to investigate the mine, and it was discovered that with the expenditure of several thousand we could get it going again, on a profitable basis. I couldn’t let Cécile sell out—it wouldn’t have been fair.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’d have lost money by it. It was only right to buy the mine as it stood and then form a company, of which she could own a proportion of the shares—and get' her cut of the profits.”

  “Did she use the lump sum to further her career?” He smiled faintly. “In a way I suppose she did. She bought expensive clothes galore, and assumed a veneer of success that brought in offers of contracts all over North Africa. Professionally, she was made.”

  “You two ... stuck together, didn’t you?”

  He put down the glass and held her shoulders. “My dearest girl, you’ve spoiled me for every other woman in the world. I used to enjoy Cécile—she was sophisticated and a good companion for the few weeks she used to stay in Shiran—but there was nothing more. I’m not blind, of course. She practically ignored other men, so I knew that some day she’d expect me to marry her. I hadn’t much feeling about it, either way. I used to believe I wasn’t the marrying kind—till you came.”

  “How are things now—with Cécile?”

  “She’s gone. Didn’t you know?”

  Sally lifted a wide blue glance. “No. I thought she had a few more days.”

  He plunged his hands back into his pockets. ‘Td better explain. You know how I felt about that scene they arranged—Lucette’s husband and the rest. I had the girl weeping over me, and after she was gone I was in a mood to do damage to someone. Well, first I saw Mike and told him he was leaving for England. Next day I had half an hour with Cécile; that was when I discovered that she’d been as deeply in it as Mike.”

  “You quarrelled with her?”

  “Lord, no. We were painfully polite and nothing was openly discussed. I didn’t leave her in doubt, though. I told her I thought she could give Le Perroquet a miss for a year or two, and reminded her that Shiran had no other night club big enough to pay her fee. I also suggested that she looked too tired to complete her contract ... you know, the old routine.”

  “Yes,” he said, and left it there for a minute while he dropped more ice into his almost empty glass. Then, with a shrug that meant he might as well get it over, he stated, “I did take up the phosphate mine chiefly for Cécile’s sake. She wasn’t making much by her singing, and she told me that if she could sell the mine she could stop singing.”

  “What they call the charming brush-off?”

  “That’s right. It was she who suggested leaving Shiran today.”

  “She is beautiful,” said Sally with a sigh.

  “If you like honey-blondes. I don’t. I go for a cross between chestnut and bronze and English coloring.”

  Sally smiled, but said soberly, “You did work insidiously and well on Cécile, didn’t you? I believe I’m a bit afraid of you.”

  “Not you—you’ve got me in your pocket.”

  “You wouldn’t say that so airily if it were true.”

  He grinned. “Don’t get defensive again. It’s just you and me now.”

  “But the mine still connects you with Cécile?”

  “Oh, didn’t I finish? I’ve offered to buy her out and I think she’ll accept. It will be a sort of insurance for Mike, too. If he doesn’t recover sufficiently to do his old job well, he’ll get desperate. Any man needs independence, and if Mike owns a share in the mine and a directorship of sorts, he’ll be able to please himself where he lives and do a spot of work when he feels like it.”

  “He hates your generosity, you know.”

  Dane lifted his shoulders and nodded. “It doesn’t matter—he needs it. If he gets back into circulation I’ll let up, and start demanding a few things from him. By the way, will you mind living at the villa till we find somewhere else?”

  She pinked again. “Do we have to discuss that kind of thing so soon?”

  “We could wait an hour, if you insist.”

  She smiled shakily. “I won’t mind the villa ... or anywhere.”

  “Even the Mirador?”

  “Well, I’d rather keep house, but ... but I do like this hotel. It’s where we met, and it’s something you created.”

  “Tell you what—we’ll occasionally spend a week here in this suite, and in the mornings you can sing right there, on the balcony, and I’ll join in. I sing off-key, but you’ll be too much in love to notice.”

  “Oh, Dane,” she said huskily. “I’m so happy and relieved that you love me.”

  Which was the cue, of course, for him to repeat his assurances, very thoroughly. In his arms, Sally could only feel, she couldn’t think. But when he released her, she thought of travelling to England with him, showing him off to the family, of the ceremony in the village church ... and of Morocco again.

  “Shall we always live here?” she asked, searching his face.

  “Who knows, honey?” he said teasingly. “Is it important?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t like to lose touch with Shiran. I’m quite fond of Pierre.”

  “Don’t mention Tony again or I’ll get vicious!”

  She chanced it “I do think it was terribly hard to insist that he wait two years before he marries.”

  “What difference does it make? He hasn’t even met the girl yet.”

  “But supposing he does find someone quite soon?”

  “Even after that, it takes time.”

  “It didn’t take you very long!”

  Dane shoved an arm round her and hugged her. “We’ll rescind the offending clause when we announce our engagement—tonight. Like royalty granting an amnesty to prisoners. Satisfied?”

  “Very.”

  His tones lost distinctness. “I want you so much, Sally. I’ve waited all my life for this.”

  “We want each other,” she murmured against his chin. “I love you more every minute.”

  His answer was lost in her hair, but it didn’t matter. At last they were close, physically and spiritually. It wasn’t important that she didn’t yet fully understand this big masterful man who was to be her husband. They loved, and the understanding would come.

  THE END