The Tempestuous Flame Read online

  ‘You won’t have much opportunity to call me anything. You’re leaving, remember?’

  ‘Oh—oh, yes.’

  ‘You hadn’t forgotten?’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘Only momentarily. It isn’t every day you find out that the famous Greg Fortnum has been making passes at you—it came as quite a shock. I wouldn’t have expected someone like you to take a holiday here, I would have thought somewhere like the Bahamas was more to your taste than a tiny cottage in Cumbria.’

  ‘No privacy. When Matt suggested this cottage it seemed ideal. But every Eden has its serpent.’

  ‘You’re so rude!’

  ‘I know,’ he replied uncaringly.

  Caroline stood up. ‘I’m just going to pack my things.’

  ‘No one’s attempting to stop you.’

  After a momentary hesitation between slapping his face and storming out of the room she decided on the latter. It seemed the safest; he was probably the sort of man who would hit her back.

  Ten minutes later she was back downstairs, her packed suitcase in her hand. André—Greg was reading a book beside the fire. ‘I’m off, then.’

  He glanced up, turning over a page of his book. ‘Have a safe journey,’ he remarked before returning his attention to the book.

  ‘Do you really care?’ she snapped.

  ‘Of course, I have the usual respect for human life.’

  ‘But nothing else?’ she probed.

  André sighed, discarding the book completely. ‘What else could there be? You want to leave, so I wish you a safe journey. What else can I say?’

  ‘Nothing, apparently.’ Caroline turned to the door, her hand already outstretched to turn the handle when she felt him close behind her.

  ‘Caro?’ He took hold of her shoulders and turned her round. ‘Do you want to go?’

  She shrugged. ‘I have to.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If you want to stay, stay, if you want to go, go. But don’t expect me to beg you to stay, because I won’t.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to.’

  He removed his hands and stepped back. ‘So, make up your mind, either go or stay, but for goodness’ sake make a decision one way or the other. You haven’t been this unsure in your other decisions, you decided you didn’t like me from the start, and I don’t think I’ve done anything to change that.’

  ‘No.’ He hadn’t done anything, but she had; she had fallen in love with him!

  ‘Then you’d better go.’

  Caroline went, revving up the car angrily before accelerating out of the driveway. How she managed to drive home she didn’t know, only coming to an awareness of her surroundings as she stopped in the fore-court of their apartment block. She hadn’t caused any accidents, so she couldn’t have driven that badly.

  It was pitch black now, although it was only six o’clock, still much too early for her father to be home. Perhaps that was just as well; she hadn’t completely calmed down from his deception yet, and she didn’t want to explode at him as soon as she entered the apartment.

  She let herself in with her key, turning with a smile as Maggie came out to see who had entered. ‘Only me, Maggie. The prodigal returns.’

  ‘Caroline!’ the elderly housekeepr greeted her with enthusiasm. ‘Thank goodness you’re back!’

  ‘Daddy proving more unbearable than usual?’ Caroline took a guess at Maggie’s relief at seeing her. She usually managed to cushion things between the two of them, knowing that although her father had threatened hundreds of times to give Maggie her notice, he would never do it. They both loved her too much to do without her.

  Maggie grinned, her face older now, but still as beautiful as Caroline remembered her as a child. To Caroline, Maggie had become the mother figure lacking in her life, and it was to her she had run when her first love affair had gone wrong at the great age of twelve, to her she had shown with pride her first evening gown, and to her she had proudly presented her first ‘grown up’ boy-friend. Yes, Maggie was an important part of the household, and although some people would say she was only an employee, to Caroline and her father she was much more.

  ‘No more than usual,’ Maggie retorted dryly. ‘He’s been a bit brash about your absence. He said you’d been to the cottage.’

  Caroline walked into her bedroom, flinging her case on the bed to begin removing her neatly packed clothing. ‘I have.’

  Maggie shivered. ‘A bit cold for that. What did you do for entertainment?’

  She almost spluttered with laughter. Entertainment was something she hadn’t gone short of. ‘I met a couple from a neighbouring farm. The man took me out a couple of times.’

  Maggie’s eyebrows rose, and she took over Caroline’s task with a frown. ‘Didn’t his wife object?’

  ‘Oh, she wasn’t his wife.’ Caroline did laugh this time, Maggie’s scandalised face was very amusing. And she needed amusement at the moment. ‘Maggie, really! She was his sister.’

  Her brow cleared. ‘Oh—oh, I see. Only your father was muttering horrible threats about some man the other day, something to do with you, and I—’

  ‘That would be Mr Fortnum, Maggie. You know Daddy’s plans concerning him.’

  ‘Hmp.’ Maggie crossed her arms across her chest. ‘Why doesn’t he let you make your own mind up about the man you want to marry? I told him exactly what I thought of his latest idea.’

  ‘You tell him altogether too much, Maggie,’ Caroline grinned. ‘That’s why you argue.’

  ‘We argue because he’s a very stubborn man.’

  ‘And you’re a stubborn woman.’ It felt good to be back among the normality of her family life, good to be away from Greg Fortnum.

  ‘That’s as maybe, but I’m sure he’ll be glad to have you home again. And so am I. It’s no fun cooking for one, especially someone as finicky as your father.’

  Yes, it was definitely good to be back. Caroline grinned at Maggie. ‘Don’t count on me to cheer him up by appearing like this. He isn’t going to like it at all.’

  ‘He isn’t?’

  She gave a shake of her head. ‘I’m sure of it.’ She had thwarted his plans coming back like this, and he wouldn’t forgive her easily.

  Maggie shrugged. ‘Well, you know best. But I would have thought he would be pleased to see you at any time.’ She looked at her watch. ‘He’ll be home soon, I’ll just go and put dinner on.’

  ‘Nothing too much for me, Maggie. I’m not feeling too hungry.’ And she wasn’t, her appetite had deserted her since she had found out who André actually was. And she didn’t think her father would be all that hungry when she had finished with him.

  ‘You’ll eat what I give you,’ Maggie returned sternly. ‘We don’t have snack meals in any establishment I cook for.’

  ‘Yes, Maggie.’

  ‘And none of your cheek either. I may be pleased to see you home, but I won’t have any of your nonsense.’

  ‘No, Maggie.’

  Maggie laughed at her mock-subdued look. ‘You always could twist me round your little finger.’

  ‘Yes, Maggie,’ Caroline laughed too.

  She was seated in the lounge when she heard her father enter the apartment, a glass of sherry in her hand, a soothing record playing on the stero unit.

  ‘What the—?’ Her father stopped in his tracks at the obvious habitation of the room, his eyes opening wide as she slowly stood up. ‘Caroline!’

  ‘The one and only,’ she smiled tightly.

  ‘But I—’ he looked around. ‘Are you here alone?’

  ‘Who else would be with me?’ she queried mildly, much more mildly than she felt.

  ‘No one, I suppose. I just thought—’ he shook his head.

  ‘What did you think?’

  He grimaced. ‘You said you weren’t coming home just yet. I’m naturally surprised to see you.’

  ‘And pleased too?’

  ‘What a damned stupid question to ask your own father!’ He glared a
t her fiercely.

  ‘But a pertinent one, wouldn’t you say, considering you haven’t even given me a hug hello, let alone a kiss,’ she scoffed.

  He came forward sheepishly to hug and kiss her. ‘I am pleased to see you, love. But why didn’t you let me know you were coming home today? I could have taken the afternoon off.’

  Caroline moved away, a slight figure in a slim-fitting brown woollen dress. ‘There was no need,’ she told him distantly. ‘And it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, not planned at all.

  ‘I see.’ He bit his bottom Up thoughtfully.

  ‘Do you?’ she said sharply.

  Matt looked at her, shrewdly noting the high colour to her cheeks and the challenging sparkle to her eyes. ‘Out with it, Caroline,’ he sighed. ‘I’m too old for these guessing games.’

  She gave a mocking smile. ‘Don’t bring your age into this, you’re fifty-two years of age, not a hundred. And you know damn well why I’m so angry.’

  ‘Don’t swear, Caroline. You know I don’t like it.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject, Daddy,’ she snapped at him. ‘You’re a deceitful, scheming, interfering old man, and I ought to hate you.’

  ‘But you don’t,’ he stated with a smile. ‘Now just tell me what I’m supposed to have done, and calmly, so that I can understand you.’

  ‘You know very well what you’ve done. Greg Fortnum!’

  ‘Greg?’ He raised his eyebrows innocently. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Ooh, Daddy, I ought to hit you! You deliberately omitted to tell me I was staying at the cottage with him. André Gregory indeed! You knew how I felt about that man, you knew!’

  ‘I know you didn’t want me matchmaking, and I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t within a hundred-mile radius, so how could I interfere?’

  ‘Don’t act the innocent with me! You could have told me who he was, stopped me making a fool of myself.’

  ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘You must know I did. I only found out this afternoon who he was.’ And she could still remember her shock, too vividly for comfort.

  ‘And that made you leave so suddenly,’ he probed, watching her closely.

  Caroline turned away. ‘No, I’d already decided to leave before that. Finding out he was Greg Fortnum only made me all the more eager to go.’

  ‘So you didn’t like him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ she denied vehemently, perhaps too vehemently. ‘He was everything I thought he would be, bossy, overbearing, sure of his own attraction—too damned sure of that.’ She saw him frown. ‘Damn isn’t exactly swearing, Daddy.’

  ‘It is to me,’ he rebuked sternly.

  ‘All right, all right!’ she said impatiently. ‘But you could have told me, you didn’t have to let me find out like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She avoided his eyes. ‘Like I did.’

  ‘Mm, I see. Well, I didn’t tell you because Greg asked me not to.’

  ‘That was because he considered me to be your mistress,’ she sighed her frustration. ‘But you could have told me, your own daughter!’

  ‘I could have,’ he admitted. ‘But I didn’t see why I should. You left here in a fit of temper, leaving me to cope with our weekend guest on my own. I didn’t see why I should make your stay at the cottage a pleasant one.’

  ‘It wasn’t!’

  He chuckled. ‘I can see that. But it wouldn’t have made any difference to you if you’d know André was Greg Fortnum, he’s still the same man, no matter what his name is.’

  ‘It would have made a great deal of difference,’ she told him crossly. ‘I would have left at the first opportunity.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why I kept quiet. You had a lesson in manners coming to you, Caroline, and Greg was just the man to give you it. By your attitude towards him I would say he succeeded.’

  ‘He did not! He couldn’t teach anyone manners, because he doesn’t have any himself. He was rude to me from the first moment we met. I told you I was going to try and teach him a lesson—did that sound as if he had made a good impression?’

  ‘He never tries to make a good impression. You take him as you find him, if you don’t like what you find then that’s too bad.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘If you protest much more, Caroline, I’ll begin to think you really liked him.’

  ‘Then you would be wrong.’ She didn’t like the man, she loved him. ‘Now don’t try and wheedle out of the blame, Daddy. You kept quiet about his identity for reasons of your own, not because he asked you to. You wanted me to fall in love with him, wanted me to marry him. Well, I didn’t, and I’m not going to. And did it ever occur to you to ask him if he wanted to get married?’ She paced the room restlessly. ‘He has no more desire to get married than I have.’

  ‘I thought you would change all that.’

  ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t even attempt to try.’

  ‘That’s that then. Over. Finished. Now can we get on with the rest of our lives?’

  Caroline wished she could dismiss it as easily as he appeared to be able to. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t dismiss André at all. She found that she could never think of him as Greg for a start, to her he would always be André.

  But she tried to forget him, she tried very hard over the next few days, going to a couple of parties and losing herself in shopping sprees during the daytime. By the fourth day of her return she had had enough, wanting only to go back to the cottage to see André. The carefully applied rosy hue couldn’t hide the paleness of her cheeks, or disguise the dullness of her eyes.

  ‘You look as if you could do with a holiday,’ remarked Esther, as the two of them sat in Esther’s compact but easy to run flat.

  Caroline sipped her black coffee. ‘I’ve only just had one.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if it’s done you much good. You look thoroughly fed up. Why don’t you ask your father to let you go to your villa in the Bahamas? You need the sunshine.’

  ‘I need André!’ Caroline cried, her coffee cup landing with a clatter in the saucer.

  ‘André?’ Esther prompted. Caroline had been very reluctant to talk about her stay at the cottage, but she knew something was troubling her friend badly.

  ‘André Gregory Fortnum!’ Caroline said resentfully, her anger still not diminished by the passing of time.

  ‘André Fortnum?’ Esther queried softly.

  ‘That’s right. That’s his full name.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’ve been staying at the cottage with him,’ she burst out fiercely.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And it was all Daddy’s fault,’ she carried on angrily. ‘He ordered me back home knowing full well I would do the opposite, all the time knowing I was staying there with that hateful Greg Fortnum. I’ll never forgive him. Never!’

  ‘Explain from the beginning, Caroline,’ Esther interrupted gently. ‘You aren’t making a lot of sense at the moment.’

  She listened patiently to Caroline’s often not very articulate explanation, her eyebrows raised in surprise at the end of the tirade. ‘So all the time you were staying with Greg Fortnum?’

  ‘Don’t call him that!’ she literally winced with the pain it caused her. ‘His name is André.’

  ‘So how do you feel about him now?’ Esther tried not to look too interested in the answer.

  ‘How can I feel about him?’ Caroline cried. ‘You know my opinion of Greg Fortnum, why I didn’t even want to meet him. He’s a rake, Esther, an out-and-out rake!’

  ‘And André?’

  ‘André—?’ Caroline looked startled, then shrugged resignedly. ‘They’re the same person.’

  ‘Not to you they aren’t,’ Esther smiled. ‘Look at this thing reasonably, Caroline. I realise that it’s difficult at the moment, but just try. If you hadn’t heard of his reputation via other people, what would you have thought of him? What do you know of him that you haven’t heard through the media or other similar sources?’
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br />   ‘Why, nothing—’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Esther with satisfaction.

  ‘But Daddy says he’s very ruthless.’

  ‘Of course he is, most good businessmen are. Your father’s the same, but that doesn’t stop you loving him.’

  ‘I don’t love Andr—Greg Fortnum!’

  ‘I agree with you about the latter, but André…’ Esther shook her head. ‘You feel quite differently about him.’

  Caroline’s shoulders slumped as she admitted defeat. ‘You’re right, I love—like him a lot. He’s so different from anyone else I’ve ever met. But we argued nearly all the time I was there, and not very pleasant arguments at that.’

  ‘That’s to be expected, you’re both strong personalities.’

  Caroline gave a rueful grin. ‘André’s that all right. But he’s very attractive,’ she added.

  ‘Mm, I’ve seen photographs of him.’

  Caroline grimaced. ‘I wish I had, I could have saved myself all this heartache and left at the first sight of him. And to think I stayed on to teach the arrogant devil a lesson! I don’t know where he got his information about me from, but he has the most terrible opinion of my morals. And he was very rude about Daddy’s matchingmaking plans.’

  ‘Well, so were you, so you have something in common. And at a guess I would say he got his information the same place you got yours. That just proves how wrong they can be. His opinion of you was the reason for your change of surname?’

  ‘Yes,’ Caroline nibbled disinterestedly at a biscuit. ‘I never did tell him who I really am, it didn’t seem important under the circumstances.’

  Esther shook her head. ‘I would have said it was very important. Oh, Caroline,’ she scolded, ‘can’t you see that the affair he thought you were having with Matt was the main reason he half despised you?’

  ‘Half despised!’

  Esther chuckled. ‘It didn’t sound to me like that was all he felt towards you.’

  Caroline remembered her candid disclosures of a few minutes earlier and blushed profusely. ‘No—no, I suppose not. But it wouldn’t have worked, Esther. You know my feeling regarding love and marriage. I won’t compromise by having an affair with anyone, no matter how they attract me. I want a normal happy marriage, like yours. You know that’s why I’ve never entered into any of the casual relationships most of the crowd find amusing. They just don’t interest me.’