Marjorie Lewty - A Girl Bewitched (1982) Page 7

  Sanity left her completely and she was engulfed in an almost feverish hunger for his kiss. When his mouth closed over hers she let out a small moan and her arms went up to clasp themselves behind his dark head and draw him even nearer, while her lips and mouth responded to his with a wildness that seemed to have nothing to do with the girl she had thought she was until now.

  She felt the pounding of his own heart and knew he was aroused too. For a moment his arms tightened round her, then with a little shake of his head he let her go, pushing her away gently.

  'Thank you, Emma, that was nice,' he said. 'Who was it remarked that weddings are for kissing? Your friend the best man, wasn't it? Now you must get along to bed and get some sleep. I've got some things to talk over with your uncle. I see he's still working.' He jerked his head towards where lights showed in the workroom at the end of the garden. 'I'll tell him we're hitting it off very well, shall I?'

  Emma had heard about blinding flashes of insight, when everything becomes clear in a second. She had one now. Of course—Trent Marston had been practising his charms on her for one reason only. He was so sure of himself that he knew she would fall for him and wouldn't be likely to say anything to Uncle Edward about the affair between Lisa and himself.

  Uncle Edward, tucked away in his workroom, wouldn't have seen what was going on under his own eyes. But if he found out that Trent had hurt his beloved daughter that would alter everything. Edward Fairley was a mild man, but he would undoubtedly show Trent the door, and the firm would then proceed downhill even more rapidly.

  Emma got out of the car. She was ice-cold now. As Trent slammed the door on his side and walked round to her she said calmly, 'You're keen on taking this work on for the firm, aren't you?'

  She saw his eyebrows go up. 'Yes, I am. Why ask now?'

  'I merely wanted to assure you that I've no intention of doing anything to stand in your way. Or of doing anything to help you either. Thank you for the lift home, Mr Marston,' she added, and turning abruptly she walked into the house and left him standing there staring after her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The house was silent. In the hall every trace of the reception had been tidied away and the wedding might never have been. Jessie and Malcolm must have been working at it all evening and they must have already gone to bed, tired out.

  Emma went out to the kitchen, switched on the light and filled the kettle. A cup of tea might restore a semblance of normality to the evening. She sat down to drink it at the big old-fashioned wooden table that Jessie refused to part with and scrubbed lovingly every day.

  After the first cup of tea, sanity began to return, but she still felt more churned up inside than she had ever felt before. What had possessed her to behave as she had just done, out there in the car? Tiredness? Jet-lag? Too many glasses of punch?

  No, face it, Emma, the man was devastating. He had gone through her defences like a laser beam went through—whatever laser beams did go through. From the first moment she set eyes on him he had given her one look and all her inside workings had begun to quiver like a jelly, she thought with bitter self-contempt. And what had just happened had been the final humiliating result.

  She pulled her thoughts up short. But what actually had happened? She had danced with a man. He had driven her home. He had kissed her in the car. Nothing world-shattering about that—it had happened before.

  Ah, but never like that! Never that wild, heady ecstasy that had made her cling to him, snuggle into his arms like the kitten he had called her. For a few moments she had been overwhelmed by a kind of madness, but not again. No, she had to admit the sheer animal magnetism of the man, and then proceed to take herself out of its field of attraction.

  She knew the danger. She knew the way he treated women. She winced, hearing again the cruel bite of his voice saying, 'I don't love you, never did. I don't give a damn for you, Lisa.'

  That was the kind of man he was, a man who would amuse himself with a girl and then throw her aside with callous brutality. She didn't intend to be his next victim. She would see Uncle Edward tomorrow and tell him she would prefer to spend another year on her languages—in Greece, or Germany, perhaps—before she took her place in a senior position in the firm. It shouldn't be too difficult to convince him without telling him the true reason—that Trent Marston had come close to breaking his young daughter's heart. Trent Marston seemed to be the firm's last hope. Therefore he must stay and she must go.

  Not merely because she hated him and feared him, she admitted, as she dragged herself upstairs to bed. But because she was afraid of herself.

  It was quite a time before she went to sleep. She kept on waking up and thinking about what had happened and what a fool she was to let herself get carried away by a man who specialised in trading on his sex-appeal. And when she did go to sleep she dreamed that she was standing naked on the bank of a fast-flowing river. Trent Marston was swimming towards her with powerful strokes, brown arms flailing the turbulent water, and calling, 'Come on, Emma darling, jump in, I'll catch you.'

  She didn't need Freud to tell her what that meant. She took it as another warning.

  When she finally sank into sleep she slept heavily and wakened to see Jessie standing beside the bed with a tray in her hands.

  Emma shot up, pushing the hair away from her flushed face. 'Heavens, what time is it? Jessie, you shouldn't have brought my breakfast up—I'm just a lazy so-and-so.'

  Jessie plonked the tray down and drew the curtains back. 'Och, no, Miss Emma, you earned a good lie-in. Flying all those thousands of miles across the sea and then all the excitement of the wedding and you having to look after Miss Lisa, and very prettily you did it too. You needed a guid long night.'

  'And so did you, Jessie. You must have worked like a beaver, clearing everything up after I went out to Mrs Southall's party.'

  Jessie's face creased into the nearest thing to a smile she ever allowed herself. 'You enjoyed it? I saw you go off with Mr Marston.'

  Emma bent her head over the coffee pot. 'Jessie, why all the dark hints about me and Mr Marston? I assure you I don't like the man at all.'

  Jessie picked up the top of a jar of cleansing cream that Emma had left lying on the dressing-table last night, and screwed it on again firmly. Her smile became even more enigmatic. 'Oh, aye?' she said on her way to the door. 'I didna think much of Malcolm when I met him, either.'

  She went out on to the landing, then her head appeared round the door again. 'Mr Edward's down in the workroom. He said to ask you to go and see him, but there was no hurry. Mr Marston went off early to the factory, so you tak' your time and enjoy your breakfast.'

  Emma found she was hungry. She had drunk several glasses of punch last night and eaten nothing except a couple of biscuits with her cup of tea when she got home. Now she cracked the top off a brown egg and spread creamy Dorset butter on her toast and proceeded to enjoy herself. She was getting over last night, it couldn't have made all that much impression on her after all. What's in a kiss? she asked herself, crunching toast pleasurably.

  She browsed over the subject as she ate her breakfast. She was nearly twenty-one, and she would have had to have been very stupid not to know that men found her attractive. There had been plenty of kisses in her life, and the funny thing was that every kiss was different from every other. It must be like fingerprints, she thought with a grin. No man kissed you in exactly the same way as any other man.

  She drank up her coffee and went along to the bathroom for her shower. What was she thinking of— maundering on to herself about kisses at this time in the morning? A cool shower would put all that nonsense out of her head.

  The odd thing was that it didn't. As she soaped her smooth body under the tepid water and dried the pinkly glowing limbs with a fleecy towel, she was still thinking about kisses—and one particular kiss at that.

  As soon as she got downstairs the phone rang and it was Jim Bolton. 'Emma? What happened to you last night? You disappeared. Are you okay? Mrs Southall said you'd gone home early, you had a headache. Why didn't you say? I'd have driven you home.' He sounded half-way between huffiness and guilt.

  'I was going to ask you, but you were drunk,' Emma said bluntly.

  'I was not drunk!' he spluttered loudly. There was a sudden pause and she could see him looking round the estate agent's office where he worked to see if anyone was listening. In a lowered tone he said, 'Okay, Emma, perhaps I was a mite over the limit and I'm sorry if I let you down. We'd all had rather too much—old Richard was in a flat spin before the wedding and I had to bolster him up a bit, and then afterwards—oh well, I'm sorry if I was a clot, love. It won't happen again. Forgive me?'

  She laughed. 'Of course,' she said. 'Weddings are for celebrating, aren't they?' And for kissing, she thought, with a jolt of her stomach as she heard again a deep, amused voice, felt the touch of strong fingers at the nape of her neck, smelled the clean fragrance of a man's freshly-washed hair against her cheek.

  She dragged her mind back to what Jim was saying. '—lunch, can you manage it? Just to show I'm forgiven.'

  'Lunch?' she echoed vaguely. 'Today?'

  'Yes, today. I can get away at twelve, with any luck. I've got to take a potential customer to look over a bungalow in Worth Matravers, but after that I'm free. We'll meet at the Golden Butterfly as usual, shall we?'

  Emma didn't really want to lunch with Jim, there were too many other things on her mind, but at least she would be away from the house, and any risk of encountering Trent Marston. Jim worked in Poole, and the factory and office of Fairley Brothers were in that town too. But Trent wasn't likely to lunch at the Golden Butterfly. The three-star Dolphin in the High Street would be more his style. So she agreed to meet Jim and he sounded delighted, and she had a feeling th
at he was going to ask her again to marry him.

  She sighed as she made her way down the garden to Uncle Edward's workroom. She had told Jim 'No' so many times, but he wouldn't take it, and if there was anything she hated, it was having pressure put on, and made to feel she was letting someone down.

  Uncle Edward looked up as she knocked and went into the workroom. He smiled at her and she smiled back and thought, with a sudden surge of affection, that he really was the nicest of men. His gold-rimmed glasses were perched on the end of his nose, giving him a decided look of the 'mad professor' that she and Jessie had jokingly named him. He was not yet fifty, she knew, but he looked older. Tragedy and worry and his somewhat one-pointed existence had put grey in his hair and wrinkles on his face.

  'Busy?' Emma enquired, which wasn't necessary, for he was always busy.

  He held up two crossed fingers, and his blue eyes shone keenly behind his glasses. 'I think I may be on to something that will make all our fortunes.'

  'Great!'

  'Marston thinks so too.' He nodded thoughtfully. 'You know, Emma, for a man who doesn't profess to be a boffin, that chap has a superb grasp of technology. A very bright brain indeed.'

  'Yes,' said Emma, 'I'd rather gathered that.' He'd thought out his plan last night very cleverly.

  Edward put down his pencil and swivelled round in his chair. 'I'm glad you're getting on with him. He seems very impressed with you. I think you'll make a very good team. When this new thing really gets cracking we're going to need all the expertise we can get.'

  She drew a finger along the edge of the work-bench. 'I wanted to talk to you about that, Uncle Edward. Meeting a man like Trent has shown me that I don't have what it takes to work with him yet. As you say, he's a live wire; he'll expect more than I can give.' (And you can say that again, Emma!) 'I thought,' she went on carefully, 'that if I could have another year, perhaps, to work on my languages? I could go back to Germany and stay with Hallbachs, they'll take me any time, they said so. Then, perhaps, six months in Greece? My Spanish and French are fairly good and I can get by in Italian. But I'd like to be really confident before I take up the job. Dear old Joe isn't critical, but Mr Marston would be, I'm sure. What do you say?'

  He looked disappointed. 'Are you sure, Emma? We were planning on Trent making up his marketing team straight away, and he seems keen to include you.'

  Yes, she thought, and I know why—because he wants to keep things sweet between us in case I decide to tell Uncle Edward what a bastard he is in his private life. Probably the very qualities of hardness and ruth- lessness that she knew he possessed would make him a success in business. Emma didn't know and she didn't propose to find out. She knew enough of her uncle to guess that he would feel the same way.

  Perhaps she ought to tell him—perhaps it wasn't fair to keep him in the dark about the character of the man he seemed to be putting all his trust in. But that would mean the break-up of the firm, for sure. She couldn't take the responsibility for that.

  She said, 'He's only keen to include me because I happen to be your niece. He can't have any idea of my capabilities yet, I only met him yesterday and we haven't talked business at all.'

  A little sheepishly Edward Fairley said, 'I showed him a letter I had from Joe, saying quite a lot about your capabilities. Joe was most impressed with the report you compiled for him.'

  'Yes,' she said, quickly changing the subject, 'and that's another thing. What about Joe? How is this new appointment going to affect him? He's so devoted to the firm and he's worked like a brick all the time we've been in the U.S. It seems——- ' she paused. She needed to be tactful about this— 'don't you think it seems a bit hard to bring in an outsider above him? I suppose that's what it would amount to.'

  It was a moment before he replied, then he said with unusual seriousness, 'I know you think the world of Joe, Emma. So do I, and I wouldn't do anything that would hurt or distress him. But we had a long talk before you and he left on this trip and he confessed to me that he hoped it would be the last overseas commitment he was asked to undertake. He was very reluctant to upset the pattern, but he said he'd felt for some time now that he wasn't doing justice to the job. It was all getting a bit too much for him and he wished we could find someone to take on most of the promotional work and allow him to spend his time more on the routine, based in the office. I've no doubt at all that he'll be delighted when he hears about the change, and when he gets back from Mexico next week we can all put our heads together and work something out.'

  He sighed and passed a hand rather wearily across his brow. 'If you only knew, Emma, how much it will mean to me to have a younger, more dynamic man in charge of that part of die business I can't handle.' He looked out through the window. 'Your father was the man—you know that—and together we could have tackled anything. I've waited a long time to find someone else.'

  Emma said, holding all emotion out of her voice, 'You don't feel bad about putting another man in Father's place?'

  ‘Not if it's Trent Marston,' he said simply. 'I just feel he's the right one.'

  She bit her lip. 'Then you think I shouldn't go to Germany?'

  'Oh, don't let's be hasty about it. We'll all meet and discuss it this evening. Meanwhile—— ' he picked up a folder— 'I wonder if you'd go along to the office with this, Emma? I promised Trent you'd take it to him there as soon as I'd finished it. He went out early this morning. Malcolm's working in the garden, so you can take the Rover. Will you do that for me?'

  Her first impulse was to find some excuse, so that she wouldn't have to confront Trent Marston this morning, but she overcame the impulse rapidly. It would be childish to behave like that, and why should he have the power to affect her actions? She raised her head. 'Of course I'll go,' she said briskly. 'I'll go straight away. I was going into Poole this morning in any case—I promised to have lunch with Jim.'

  Edward nodded absently. 'Oh yes? Well, enjoy yourself.' Already his attention was back on his work.

  Emma went out and left him to it. The interview had certainly not been an unqualified success. But Uncle Edward hadn't definitely said 'No,' to her idea. She would work on it again this evening. Somehow she had to get herself out of Trent Marston's field of activity.

  Half an hour later Emma was parking the Rover outside the Fairley Brothers premises in Poole. The factory, of which the office was a part, was in the old district of Poole, near the quay. It had originally been a boatbuilding yard, which also made and supplied other items of sailing equipment. After the war, when her grandfather died, it had gradually narrowed down to specialising in navigational instruments, which were Uncle Edward's particular field of interest. Half of the building had been sold off and was now used as a cafe, which was open only during the summer season.

  Emma was always aware, these days, of a faint depression when she visited the factory. Now she parked the car and sat for a moment or two, looking at the outside, at the big doors that had once opened on to a thriving boatyard; at the seedy cafe next door, its windows boarded up against vandalism, the door covered with peeling posters.

  How splendid if the whole place could be smartened up and put on its feet again! Much as she hated the idea of Trent Marston coming here and taking over, it seemed that he was their last hope.

  She took the folder from the front seat and locked up the car, glancing at her watch. It was a quarter to twelve. Just time to hand over the folder and walk to the Golden Butterfly to meet Jim. That would save having to hunt for somewhere to park the car in the centre of town.

  As she slid open the heavy door her inside stirred uneasily at the prospect of seeing Trent Marston again, after last night. She would be very brief, very businesslike, just hand him the folder and leave.

  Inside the big room, the six trained girls, whose job it was to assemble the intricate parts of the navigation instruments, bent over their work-tables. Emma paused for a moment or two for a word with a couple of the ones she knew best. They were a good, loyal work-force; Uncle Edward paid them well and they adored him—and Joe too. It was like a big happy family.