A Little Revenge Omnibus Page 7

  ‘To have one of their own artists copy such an intricate floral design would, they say, prove far too costly—the work would have to be done by one of the top workers, which would mean taking him or her off work they already have in hand. They recommended that I got in touch with you. Apparently there is no one else they would allow, never mind recommend, to do such work.’

  ‘I...I worked for them whilst I was at university,’ Kelly explained huskily. ‘That was when I discovered that I had some talent for...for china-painting. I would have to see the design... It wouldn’t be easy...or cheap...’ she warned him.

  Against her will she had been touched by the story he had told her, but she knew, even if he didn’t, just how intricate and time-consuming the kind of work he was describing could be.

  ‘I’ve managed to cadge one of the tea plates from Nan, and Hartwell have very kindly said that I can use their archive records.’

  ‘Do you have the plate with you?’ Kelly asked him.

  He shook his head, unexpectedly looking oddly boyish as he admitted, ‘I’m terrified of breaking it. I’ve got it at home. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to call there to see it.’

  Kelly wanted to refuse, but her professional pride and curiosity proved too strong for her.

  ‘I could,’ she agreed cautiously, ‘but it would have to be when the shop is closed. My partner, Beth, is away at the moment.’

  ‘Could you manage this evening?’

  ‘I...’

  ‘I don’t have very much time left. Nan’s birthday isn’t very far away,’ he told her.

  Kelly sighed. There was no reason why she shouldn’t look at the plate this evening.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she agreed reluctantly. ‘Where do you live? I—’ She broke off as the phone began to ring, automatically going to answer it, saying, ‘Excuse me a moment...’ as she picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hi, Kelly, it’s Julian. How are you, you delicious, hot, sexy thing...?’

  Kelly almost dropped the receiver as Julian’s loud voice seemed to fill the shop. Her face burning with embarrassment, she turned her back on Brough even though she knew that he could well have heard what Julian had said.

  ‘Julian. I...I’m busy...’ she protested. ‘I...’

  ‘I understand, babe. What you and I have to say to one another needs to be said in private, right?’ Julian responded. ‘God, but you turned me on last night, doll... I can’t wait for us to get together...’

  ‘Julian.’ Kelly closed her eyes, as revolted by Julian’s conversation as she was by his person. ‘Julian, please—’ she began. But he wouldn’t let her finish, interrupting her to say thickly, ‘I’ll ring you later at the flat. I’ve still got the number...’

  He had hung up before Kelly could object or protest, leaving her pink cheeked both with anger and chagrin—anger because of Julian’s assumption that she, or any other woman for that matter, would be willing to see him when he was supposedly already involved with someone else, and chagrin because Brough could have overheard some of the conversation.

  It was to be expected, of course, that he wouldn’t let the matter go without comment, especially when the girl whom Julian was supposed to be on the point of becoming engaged to was his own sister.

  ‘I appreciate that custom has it that there’s supposedly safety in numbers, but don’t you think you could be interpreting its validity just a little too generously?’ he asked her smoothly.

  ‘Julian is an old friend,’ Kelly reminded him.

  The look he gave her could have stopped Linford Christie in his tracks, Kelly felt sure.

  ‘Really? Then I feel extremely sorry for you, not only in your unfortunate choice of friends but your misplaced and, no doubt, regularly abused loyalty.’

  ‘Julian is dating your sister,’ Kelly felt compelled to remind him defensively.

  He had turned to walk towards the door, but now, abruptly, he stopped and turned back to Kelly, and said quietly but with grim force, ‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’ And then, almost without pausing, he added coolly, ‘Shall we say eight tonight? This is the address...’

  Kelly was still looking bemusedly at the business card he had placed down on the counter as he closed the shop door behind him.

  Why on earth hadn’t she said something, objected to his high-handed assumption that she would not merely be free this evening but that, additionally, she would fall in with his plans, agree to his request, especially in view of the way he had spoken to her?

  Reluctantly she picked up the card. Kelly had a vague idea where the house was since it was on the same road as a customer who had ordered a special commission from her.

  Ten minutes before she was due to re-open the shop, the phone rang again. This time the caller was Beth, ringing from Prague.

  ‘Hi... How are things going?’ Kelly asked her eagerly.

  ‘Not too bad, in fact really quite promisingly. I’ve been given several contact numbers, and I’m due to drive out of the city tomorrow to visit a crystal factory.’

  ‘And you’re managing okay, despite the language barrier?’ Kelly asked her. This had been one of Beth’s main concerns about her trip and Kelly was anxious to know how her friend was coping.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got an interpreter,’ Beth told her.

  Kelly frowned. The offhand tone of Beth’s voice was both unfamiliar and slightly worrying.

  ‘And she’s helping you, visiting factories with you...?’

  ‘She is a he,’ Beth told her shortly. ‘And as for helping me...’ There was a small pause. ‘Honestly, Kelly, men. I’m totally off all of them. Just because a person has a fancy degree and a whole string of letters after his name, that does not give him the right to try to tell me what to do. And as for trying to force me to visit factories that he’s chosen, with tales of theft and gypsies—’

  ‘Beth.’ Kelly interrupted her in bewilderment. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, I’m just letting off steam. It’s Alex, the interpreter. He’s half-English, as it turns out, and his grandparents left Prague for political asylum in the west when his mother was a child. Alex returned after the revolution to search for his family and he’s stayed on here.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s been confiding rather a lot of personal history to you for someone you don’t get on with,’ Kelly told her wryly.

  ‘Oh, he tells me what he wants me to know. He’s insisting that I visit a glass factory run by his cousins, but I’m not inclined to go. He obviously has a vested interest in anything I might buy. I’ve managed to track down somewhere that produces this most wonderful design I’ve seen, and he’s acting all high and mighty and trying to tell me that it’s all a con and that the stall-holder saw me coming a mile off. He says there isn’t any factory where they’ve told me to go and the glass I wanted to buy couldn’t have been genuine. He says it’s a well-known ploy to get hold of foreign currency that is often worked against naive people like me...

  ‘Oh, but Kelly, you should have seen this glass. It was wonderful, pure Venetian baroque, you know the kind of thing, and it would lend itself beautifully to being gilded for the Christmas market. I even thought that if the price was reasonable enough we could commission some special sets, hand-painted and gilded for special celebrations—weddings, anniversaries...you know the kind of thing...’

  Kelly laughed as she listened to her friend’s excited enthusiasm. It was wonderful to hear that note back in Beth’s voice again, and even more wonderful that she hadn’t even asked once about Julian Cox.

  ‘Anyway,’ Beth was continuing determinedly, ‘somehow I’m going out to this factory by myself. I’m planning to give my guide, and for that you can read jailer, the slip. It’s obvious what he’s up to,’ she told Kelly scornfully. ‘He just wants to secure our business for his c
ousins. He claims that their factory could probably reproduce the glass if they had a copy of it...’

  ‘Mmm... Well, if that’s the case, it might be worthwhile sketching the glass and seeing if they can reproduce it.’

  ‘Never,’ Beth asserted fiercely. ‘There’s no way I’m going to have Alex dictating to me... No. I’ve seen the glass I want and I know where to get it, and I’m determined to get an exclusive supply of it and at the right price. After all, if we did commission Alex’s cousins, what’s to stop them selling our design elsewhere, putting up the price to us because they know we want it? Look, I must go; Alex is picking me up in half an hour. He’s insisting on making me walk over the Charles Bridge, and since it’s raining today he says it should be relatively free of other tourists.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ Kelly teased her, smiling as she said goodbye and hung up. The others would be so pleased to hear that Beth seemed to be getting over Julian Cox.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AS HE LET himself into the hallway of their rented house and blinked at the teeth-jarring, hard yellow paint of the room, Brough reflected that he would be glad when they could finally move into the large Georgian farmhouse he had bought several miles outside the town and which was presently undergoing some much needed renovation work. It had been empty for three years before Brough had managed to persuade the trustees of the estate of the late owner that there was no way anyone was ever going to pay the exorbitant price they were asking for it.

  ‘If they don’t sell it soon, they’ll be lucky to have anything there worth selling,’ he had told the agent crisply. ‘It’s already been empty and unheated for three winters, and if the government gives the go-ahead for the new bypass the area will be swarming with protestors just looking for an empty house to take over and make themselves comfortable in.’

  Buying the house, though, had simply been the beginning of a whole spate of difficult negotiations. The property was listed, and every detail of his planning applications had to be scanned by what had felt like a never-ending chain of committees, but now at last the approved builder had started work on the property, and, with any luck, he should be able to move into it within the year, the builder had assured him cheerfully on his last site inspection.

  For now, he would have to live with the last owner of his present house’s headache-inducing choice of colours.

  ‘Brough, is that you?’

  He grimaced wryly as Eve came rushing into the hallway, her face pink with excitement as she told him breathlessly, ‘Guess what? Julian rang; he’s going to be free this evening after all, so he’s taking me out to dinner. Oh, Brough, I was so afraid he was going to be angry with me when you insisted that you couldn’t help him with his new venture.’

  As he listened to her Brough could feel himself starting to grind his teeth. There was no point in wishing that his sister had a more worldly and less naive outlook, nor in blaming his grandmother and the old-fashioned girls’ school she had insisted he send her to for the part they had played in her upbringing. He might just as well blame their parents for dying—and himself for not being able to take on the full responsibility for bringing her up without his grandmother’s help.

  He knew how upset his grandmother would be if she knew how ill-prepared the select, protective girls’ school she had chosen so carefully for her had left Eve for the modern world, and some day in the not too distant future Brough was afraid that his sister was going to have her eyes opened to reality in a way that was going to hurt her very badly.

  As he’d thought a number of times before, there was no point in him trying to warn Eve about Julian Cox. She had a surprisingly strong, stubborn streak to her make-up, and was very sensitive about both her own independence and her judgement. To imply that Julian was deceiving her, that she was totally and completely wrong about him in every single way, was almost guaranteed to send her running into his arms, and not away from them, which would have been bad enough if what she stood to lose from such an event was her emotional and physical innocence—more than bad enough. But Eve stood to inherit a very sizeable sum of money from their parents’ estate when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday, and Brough was convinced that Julian Cox would have no compunction whatsoever about marrying her simply for that reason alone.

  Brough had had Julian’s financial affairs thoroughly investigated. To describe them as in total disarray and bordering on the legally fraudulent was no exaggeration, nor was his emotional history any less murky. But, of course, Eve wouldn’t hear a word against him. She considered herself to be in love.

  ‘Oh, I’m so pleased. He was awfully upset this morning after you told him you really couldn’t help him... That was mean of you,’ she reproached Brough.

  ‘On the contrary, it was simply good business sense,’ Brough told her dryly. ‘I know how you feel about him, Eve but...’

  ‘Oh, Brough, please don’t start lecturing me,’ she begged him. ‘Just because you don’t want to fall in love...because you don’t have someone to share your life with...someone special...that doesn’t mean... I love him, Brough,’ she said simply.

  Brough sighed as she went upstairs. He wished he could find some way to protect her from the ultimate inevitability of having her heart broken, but he suspected that even if he were to confront her with incontrovertible evidence of Cox’s real nature she would simply close her eyes to it.

  Women! There was no way of understanding how their minds and, even more, their emotions worked. Look at Kelly. A bright, intelligent, beautiful young woman who was apparently as oblivious to Cox’s faults as his own sister. Not that he thought that Kelly’s other choice of male was any better—but for very different reasons. Harry was quite obviously an extremely estimable young man, the kind of man whom he would have been only too pleased to see dating his sister, but, as a partner for a woman of Kelly’s obviously feisty and quicksilver personality, surely a totally wrong choice. She needed a man who could match the quickness of her brain...who could appreciate the intelligence and artistry of her work...who could share the passion that he could sense ran so strongly through her at the very deepest level of her personality... A man who...

  Abruptly he caught himself up.

  Nothing he had experienced in his admittedly brief contact with Kelly had indicated that she had the kind of insecure, needy personality that would make her a natural victim for a man like Cox.

  Eve, on the other hand, if he was honest, desperately needed to feel loved and secure, to have a partner who would incorporate into their adult relationship the kind of protective, emotional padding she had missed from the loss of their father and experienced in a different way at school. Eve needed a man who would treat her gently, a man with whom she could have the kind of relationship which he privately would find too unequal. The woman he loved would have to be his equal, his true partner in every aspect of their lives. There would have to be complete and total honesty and commitment between them, a deep, inner knowledge that they would be there for one another through their whole lives—he too had suffered from their parents’ death, he acknowledged wryly.

  And Eve was wrong about him not wanting to fall in love...to marry. At the end of his present decade lay the watershed birthday of forty, comfortably in the distance as yet, but still there on the horizon. When he thought of himself as forty, it was not particularly pleasant to visualise himself still alone, uncommitted...childless... But the woman he married, the woman he loved...

  Unbidden, the memory of how Kelly’s lips had felt beneath his flooded his body, sharply reminding him that if a male’s sexual responses were at their fastest and peak in his teens, then they could still react with a pretty forceful and demanding potent speed in his thirties—disconcertingly so.

  The dichotomy he had sensed within Kelly at the ball which had so intrigued him had turned to a more personal sense of irritation this afternoon. Did she really think
he was so lacking in intelligence...in awareness...that he couldn’t see how alien to her personality her relationship with Julian was? What the hell was it about the man that led a woman like her to...? It was almost as though he held some kind of compulsive attraction for her or had some kind of hold over her.

  In another age it might almost have been said that he had cast some kind of spell over her—as she was beginning to do over him?

  * * *

  KELLY PAUSED IN the act of picking up her keys. In the close confines of the flat’s small entrance hall she could smell the scent of her own perfume. Defensively she told herself that wearing it was simply second nature to her and meant nothing, had no dark, deep, psychological significance, that the fact that she was wearing it to, and for, a meeting with Brough Frobisher meant absolutely nothing at all.

  She wasn’t a woman who was overly fond of striking make-up, nor strictly styled hair, but she did like the femininity of wearing her own special signature scent, even if normally she wore it in conjunction with jeans and a casual top.

  Tonight, though, those jeans had been exchanged for a well-cut trouser suit—not for any other reason than the fact that wearing it automatically made her feel more businesslike. And that was, after all, exactly what this evening’s meeting was all about—business. And as for that small spurt of sweet, sharp excitement she could feel dancing over her vulnerable nerve-endings, well, that was nothing more than the arousal of her professional curiosity.

  Hartwell china always evoked special memories for her. It had been the Hartwell china she had seen on a visit to a stately home as a girl which had first awoken her interest in the design and manufacture of porcelain, and it had been the Hartwell factory where she had first had her actual hands-on experience of working on the physical aspect of copying the designer’s artistry onto the china itself. And so it was only natural that she should feel this surge of excitement at the thought of seeing a piece which sounded as though it was extremely rare.