Tempted by Trouble (12 page)

‘We were at a party and she was all over him. I couldn't bear it. I told Basil he had to tell her or I would. Bernard overheard us. He thought I was playing fast and loose with the two of them and he'd followed us to find out what was going on. I sometimes think he only married me to keep the secret in the family.'

‘Secret?'

‘Basil went home and faced his father. The old man told him that he had to leave. Disappear. Never come back, never contact the family ever again.'

‘Just like that?' Elle asked.

‘He gave him money, a lot of money, but it wasn't right. If his mother had still been alive, I'm sure things would have been
different. I don't think Bernard ever forgave himself for what happened. Or me.'

‘Oh, Gran,' Elle said sadly.

She looked up. ‘I was just trying to help.'

‘Of course you were.'

It explained so much, Elle thought, as she hugged her. And made it even more imperative that she find Basil. Bring him home.

‘The beans!' Geli yelled.

 

Later, when they'd got rid of the smell of burning beans and the ruined saucepan, Elle retired to the privacy of her own room to call Sean.

‘Elle? Is there a problem?'

‘No,' she said. Nothing could be wrong when she was lying on her bed with his voice rippling through her, soft and warm as melted chocolate. ‘Not wrong, exactly. Just different.'

‘How different?'

‘Are you sitting comfortably? It's a long story.'

He listened while she filled him in on the family secrets.

‘How do you feel about that?' he asked when she'd finished.

‘Sad for them all. But it explains a lot about why Grandpa was the way he was.'

‘Life is endlessly complicated.'

‘I suppose.' She settled lower against the pillows. ‘But the odd thing is that since she's told us Gran seems…I don't know…more…here.'

‘She's been living with that guilt for a long time. Telling you must have felt like a weight being lifted from her. You did say that the doctor told you she was blocking out what she couldn't deal with.'

He'd remembered?

‘Mmm… We're all feeling a bit giddy at the moment, I think, but it's more urgent than ever that we find Basil and bring him home.'

‘Of course. Do you want me to search the cottage? I only glanced through the place before, just to make sure he hadn't taken an overdose and was lying… Well, you know.'

‘I know,' she said.

‘You could come over tomorrow and we could do it together, if you like? We could reprise the cheese sandwiches. Feed the ducks again. Maybe take the boat out.'

‘That is so tempting.'

‘Haven't you heard? You should always give in to temptation,' he teased.

‘I really wish I could.' Then, realising that she might have been a little too eager, added quickly, ‘You've done so much already.'

‘And you've already missed an entire day's work.' He sounded a touch off. ‘Freddy will be missing you.'

‘Rosie isn't going to replace my job, Sean. Not yet, anyway. I have bills to pay.'

‘I know. Leave it to me. I'll see what I can find.' Changing the subject, he said, ‘So, tell me about today. How does it feel to be a television star?'

‘Rosie made the evening news, I'll have you know,' she said. ‘And she's going to be featured in the
Country Chronicle
.'

‘Hot stuff.'

‘You'd think so, but it isn't like that.' And at his prompting she told him all about the filming. The endless waiting around. Had him laughing at her description of the good-looking but thick actor who couldn't make a ice cream cone to save his life. Doing things over and over again.

‘It doesn't sound as much fun as you'd think.'

‘Mostly it was just mind-numbingly boring,' she admitted, ‘although it did get a lot more exciting when I discovered how much they were paying me.'

‘That will do it every time. So are you beginning to take me seriously?' he asked.

‘Absolutely,' she said without hesitation. He was so easy to
talk to, share things with that, before she knew it, she'd told him about her plans for Rosie. The name she'd thought up.

‘Scoop?'

‘With an exclamation mark. What do you think?'

‘I like it. Short, snappy, memorable. Make sure you have some flyers with you on Saturday and we'll spread the word.'

‘The girls are working on them now.' Then, reluctantly, ‘I suppose I'd better go and see how far they've got.'

‘Let me know if you need anything printed,' he offered.

‘That's really kind of you, Sean, but if we're going to be a serious business we need to get ourselves properly organised.' Then, when the silence went on a moment too long, ‘This is not me being unable to accept help. I am making an effort to let go a little. Trust my sisters. Other people.'

‘Me?' he asked. ‘Do you trust me?'

The question was so unexpected that for a moment she floundered.

‘You're wise to hesitate.'

‘Am I?' she asked. ‘What exactly are we talking about here?'

‘We've already covered the question of money,' he reminded her.

Elle opened her mouth, closed it and, heart beating just a little faster as she ran her tongue over dry lips, said, ‘What else is there?'

He didn't answer. Her call?

She swallowed. Her heart was pounding in her ears now. ‘I'm sure that a man so determined to avoid commitment must practise safe sex.'

‘Sex is never safe. Not if the emotions are engaged.'

Was he warning her that while men could be uncommitted, emotionally disengaged—that
he
would be uncommitted—women were always going to be hurt?

‘Life is not safe, Sean. My mother died young, but she filled every moment of her life with…life. By the time she was my
age, she'd had lovers, children.' Heartbreak, maybe, risk, but joy, too.

‘You're not like her, Elle.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘You need a forever man who'll make you the centre of his life.'

‘Her father, my grandfather, was a forever man,' she told him. ‘And I wouldn't want the life my grandmother lived with him either. Meantime,' she said, moving on quickly because he'd made it more than clear that he couldn't handle ‘forever' and assumed she couldn't handle anything else, ‘if I'm going to run
‘Scoop!'
as a serious business I have to do this properly. Not rely on favours from friends.'

‘I thought you were learning to take help? Yours wouldn't be the first local business who'd used our copier in an emergency,' he argued.

‘If there's an emergency, I promise I'll call you. And I would still like you to look after Rosie since you know her so well. But not in return for ice cream.'

‘And if I insist on being paid that way?' he asked, his voice teasing, evoking the memory of his tongue curling around creamy ice. ‘Rosie and all the works as a birthday treat.'

‘For your many nieces and nephews?'

‘I was thinking of something a little more…personal.'

‘Oh…' As she lay there, her skin was so sensitive that every inch of clothing was a torment, her lips burned for the cooling touch of his ice-chilled mouth. Her breasts felt heavy and the ache between her thighs, the hot poke of desire, made her reckless. He might not be interested in commitment, but then she wasn't free to give it and, without stopping to think, she said, ‘Well, if those are your terms, I'd have to do my best to fulfil them,' she said, so softly that she might have been talking to herself.

‘You see how easy it is?' Sean said, and even though she couldn't see him she knew he was smiling.

‘But I get to choose how it's served,' she went on, as if he hadn't spoken. ‘Exactly where to pipe the ice cream…'

‘Elle…'
He wasn't laughing now.

‘Where to drizzle the chocolate fudge sauce.' He uttered one word that assured her that she had his full attention. ‘A special one made with coffee liqueur. I love coffee liqueur…'

‘Excuse me, Miss Amery, but are we having phone sex?' he asked, his own voice pure Irish cream.

‘Elle!' Geli yelled from the bottom of the stairs. ‘I need you to look at what I've done.'

She sighed. ‘With my family, it's the only kind we're ever likely to have.'

‘You're forgetting my birthday.'

Geli was thundering up the stairs. ‘Elle! Where are you?'

‘No.' She wasn't about to forget this telephone conversation. Ever. ‘When is that? I need to make a note to keep the evening free.'

‘I'll leave that up to you,' he said. ‘Whenever you have a spare afternoon or evening just…call me.'

‘Elle!' Geli burst in, then stopped. ‘Oh. Were you asleep?'

‘Maybe,' she said, rolling over, pushing the phone out of sight beneath her pillow as she swung her legs to the floor. ‘Just give me a minute. I'll be right down.'

She splashed her face with cold water. It wasn't enough. Her body felt aroused, as if Sean had been there in the room with her, lying beside her, touching her, undressing her. It was going to take a cold shower to bring her back to earth.

S
EAN
tore off his T-shirt, shucked off his jeans and plunged naked into the river.

The cold hit him like a blow, but the fire Elle had stoked up in him refused to die down and he swam upstream until it felt as if he were warming the water, rather than the other way around.

His brother was right. Lovage Amery had a smile to come home to. A voice that warmed him through, touching something buried so deep inside him that he hadn't known it was there. Even now was afraid to examine too closely for fear that it was an illusion.

She was a woman who had taken everything that life could throw at her and still took on emotional complications without reservations. No caveats or conditions. No ifs or buts… No fear.

She had that from her mother, he suspected. It was the whole-hearted grasp on life that had somehow eluded him.

They were complete opposites in that. He'd taken a step back, determined not to break her heart, but he'd completely misunderstood her.

Elle might cling obsessively to physical security, but she
gave love as if it came from a bottomless well. Would risk her heart without a second thought. While he was prepared to risk anything but. Hoarding his feelings like a miser, protecting them from danger, keeping them locked away until they were stunted, miserable things without value.

She was ready to come to his bed if he wanted her, and there was no doubt that he wanted her.

But forever?

How could you know, be sure? Or was that what she was telling him? That you couldn't ever be certain, but it was worth the risk anyway.

He stopped fighting the river and let it carry him home, but as he reached the dock he discovered he was not alone.

‘Wild night-time swimming isn't going to do your cold any good,' Charlotte said, stepping in front of him so that he could enjoy a close-up of her stunning ankles. ‘Just as well I came bearing honey and lemon.'

‘I never saw you in the Florence Nightingale role,' he said, pulling himself out of the water, forcing her to step back or be showered. Using his T-shirt to dry himself.

‘You have me,' she admitted. ‘I was lying about the honey. But then we both know that your sudden cold on Saturday night was of the diplomatic variety.'

‘The chill was real enough,' he assured her and she sighed.

‘I know. I came to apologise for being such a catty witch, Sean.'

‘In that case you're in the wrong place. It was Elle who could have lost her job.'

‘Elle…' For a moment she hesitated as if there had been something in the way he said the name that betrayed him. Then, as if dismissing the thought, she arched her brow and said, ‘Oh, please. Her boss had his hands all over her.' She'd noticed it, too? ‘Very possessive. If she's in trouble it's your fault for flirting with her.'

‘Pots and kettles, sweetheart,' he said, reaching for his jeans,
pulling them on. ‘You always make a point of flirting with good-looking waiters.'

‘Maybe I do, but I never look at them the way you were looking at her.'

He didn't argue. Charlotte flirted in the same way she breathed. Without thinking about it. He only flirted when his interest was engaged. And Lovage Amery had grabbed his total interest from the moment she'd opened her front door to him.

When he didn't respond to her needling she let it go. ‘Oliver Franklin was at the party on Saturday. I let him take me home.'

‘Did he give satisfaction?' he asked idly.

‘I didn't…'

‘No, of course not. He's on the list of men you might eventually marry. You need to keep him eager.'

‘He asked me to have dinner with him one day this week,' she said, offering him one last chance to change his mind. ‘I said I'd call him.'

‘Do that. You've kept the poor sap at arm's length for long enough.' Her face betrayed her. ‘You'd never settle for me, Charlotte. I don't have an estate of my own, a title, money. I'm just someone you're filling in time with while you scope out the market.'

‘And the waitress will, I suppose.' She sounded forlorn, but she didn't deny it. ‘It's time to grow up. Take the next step.'

She sighed. ‘Is that what's happened to you?'

He didn't know what had happened to him, only that the type of relationship he'd enjoyed with Charlotte wasn't enough for him any more. As he leaned close enough to kiss her cheek, he said, ‘Be sure to send me an invitation to the wedding.'

She gave a little shiver. ‘I don't think so.' Then, ‘It's hard, isn't it?'

‘Growing up?'

‘Falling in love. But you're right. You're fabulous in bed, but you're not husband material.'

She didn't wait for an answer but turned and walked away, her heels beating out a sharp staccato on the dock.

She was wrong, he thought, as he stretched out on the dock, staring up at the stars, the sound of her little roadster racing through the estate roads growing fainter and fainter until the night was reclaimed by small insects, a nightjar, the occasional splash of a small river mammal. So wrong.

Falling in love wasn't hard. Compared to not falling in love it was a piece of cake. That required concentration. Lose it for a moment and love slipped unnoticed under your defences as sweetly, as effortlessly as an ice cream sliding down a parched throat on a summer's day. No drama or noise. Just a smile, a touch, a kiss was all it took to bring down even the most powerful fortifications, so that without warning you were falling, with nothing to grasp hold of.

He'd still been hot and horny when he'd emerged from the river and a repentant Charlotte, eager to make up, should have been a gift. A week ago he wouldn't have thought twice. A week ago his life had been simple.

Today there was only one woman he wanted in his bed. Not just for an hour or two, but to wake up with. He wanted to open his eyes and see Elle's hair spread over the pillow. Her lashes lying against her cheeks. See her open her eyes and smile. But forever?

It was clear that, like his brother, he'd reached some kind of turning point. He just wasn't sure where this new turn was taking him.

 

A tap on the dining room door on Saturday sent Elle's heart swooping up into her mouth, her hand flying, scattering the leaflets she was piling up across the table.

‘Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. Your grandmother said I'd find you in here,' Sean said.

‘You didn't startle me. I saw you pull in.' Saw him jump down from the Land Rover he was driving today.

She was in the old dining room, empty since the bailiffs
had carried away the Regency dining room suite, the china, the silverware that had once graced it. Now it was the
Scoop!
Office-cum-store room with cartons of cones, pallets of ice cream mix piled up at one end.

Leaflets, boxes of stationery that had been quickly run off on the printer at the Small Business Unit set up in the college were on an old bookshelf they'd moved down from one of the bedrooms.

A large planner was pinned to the wall so that they could see all their bookings at a glance but the pièce de résistance was the rail of clothes that they'd brought down from the attic. Glamorous Madmen dresses from the early sixties.

For the Pink Ribbon Club, she'd picked out a dark pink dress with a sweetheart neckline, nipped in waist and a full skirt that was exactly Rosie's era. She'd pinned up her hair in a classic chignon. Painted her lips and nails bright pink to match her dress.

Sean had played his part. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the word ‘
Scoop!
' written in pink sparkle across his chest. The fact that it exactly matched the fonts Geli had chosen for the flyers and their letterheads could not be coincidence.

‘You've been cross-referencing our designs,' she said, weirdly shy after the intimacy of their phone call. The kiss they'd shared. She was never tongue-tied, but it was as if she didn't know what to say. As if he didn't know what to say.

They hadn't spoken since then. He'd only sent a text telling her that he hadn't found anything useful in Basil's cottage. She'd sent one back saying thanks for looking. It was as if they'd almost stepped over some precipice and were wobbling on a dangerous edge and it could still go either way. One wrong word and it would all be over.

‘You look absolutely amazing, Elle.'

‘A bit different to the usual get-up,' she agreed, self-conscious in such unaccustomed finery, so much make-up. Maybe that was it. All starched up, she didn't feel like herself.

‘You've been busy.'

‘Yes. Panicking mostly.'

That raised a smile from him. Better. She began to relax.

‘I saw the website. And the blog.
Rosie's Diary
? I thought Rosie sounded very like you,' Sean said.

‘Did she?'

She wanted to ask him what she sounded like. Whether he liked it. Wanted him to put his hand on her cinched-in waist, pull her closer, kiss her neck. Maybe if they lost themselves in desire everything would be all right, but the mind-reading thing didn't seem to be working today.

‘I'm not sure that's a compliment,' she said finally.

‘Aren't you?' The smile lines deepened imperceptibly. ‘Jess enjoyed it. And my sister, Olivia, loved the stuff about the filming.'

‘Your sister? The one whose marriage broke up?'

‘She's got an idea for craft workshops in the old stable block and needs something to keep her occupied.'

‘And you're letting her play with your estate?' she asked incredulously.

‘She'll soon get bored, but I thought, what would Elle do in this situation?'

‘Now that is a compliment.'

He shrugged. ‘What harm can she do?'

She let her hand linger briefly on his shoulder. ‘None at all, Sean.'

He took her hand, kissed her fingers, kept hold of them. ‘You did a great job of selling the PRC Garden Party. On the blog. It was both funny and touching…'

She swallowed. It had been hard writing that.

‘I've ordered some Rosie badges,' she said, eager to change the subject before a tear that had been threatening all day ruined the sixties eyeliner that Sorrel had applied so carefully. ‘To give away at children's parties.'

‘Turning them into walking advertisements for your business? Nice one,' he approved.

‘And of course we have the retro clothes.'

‘They're fabulous,' he said, flicking one-handedly through the rail, stopping at a glamorous full-skirted halter neck black lace dress. ‘Where did they come from?'

‘The attic. We used to dress up in them when we were kids. Mum used to do our hair, make us up. I thought I'd wear that one for the evening events,' she added. ‘With very high heels and bright red lipstick. What do you think?'

‘I think that the businessmen will believe they've died and gone to heaven,' he said. ‘And the old guy at the retirement party will probably have a heart attack.' He turned to look at her. ‘I'm in danger of having one just thinking about it.' Then, as if he'd said more than he meant to, ‘Hadn't we better go?'

She gave a little yelp as she checked her watch. ‘Can you bring those leaflets?'

She didn't wait for a reply, but practically fled the room.

Sean gave himself a moment, gave her a moment, but as he gathered up a pile of leaflets advertising
Scoop!
, he saw the smear of pink on his thumb where it had rested close to her mouth and, unable to help himself, he rubbed it against his lower lip, tasting it. Tasting her.

Forget about some old guy having a heart attack when he saw her in the black lace. He'd come close when he'd seen her in the pink dress and there was a lot less of her on show in that one.

There had been a moment, no more than a heartbeat, when Elle had turned and her entire body had appeared to lift in welcome. Or maybe it had been his own instinctive response to the sight of her. An urge to reach out and touch her. Just a hand to her arm. The kind of small, intimate gesture exchanged by lovers.

They weren't even close. They'd shared just one kiss. So why did he feel more like her lover than he ever had with any woman he'd known?

What was this intimacy that had nothing to do with sex, lust? This belief that he knew her? That somehow her thoughts, her
feelings mattered more than his own? The powerful draw that brought him back to her even when she'd told him to go.

All week, wasting precious time hoping to find some small clue, he'd cursed Basil up hill and down dale. But Basil was the one excuse he had to keep coming back to her. Even when the risk of it scared him witless. Even when he needed no excuse.

It was Elle who'd led the way on the phone, boldly teasing him, making promises.

She was such a curious mixture. Capable in ways that the Charlotte Pickerings of this world could never imagine. A woman who'd learned very early in life to deal with loss, officialdom at its worst, hardship, she would hold the world at bay to protect her family. ‘Sean!'

He smiled at the imperious summons in her voice.

Not a curious mixture, a glorious one. She deserved to be wooed, courted, made to feel valued. He might not be able to give her the kind of commitment she deserved, but he could at least give her that. ‘Sean!'

‘Right with you,' he said, following her into the kitchen where she was standing holding up the retro pink kettle he'd bought her.

‘What,' she demanded, ‘is this?'

‘A kettle?' he offered.

For a moment their eyes met and he dared her to turn it down.

‘Thank you.' She turned quickly away. ‘Sorrel is coming along with us to learn the ropes.'

Her sister glanced at her. Clearly it was the first she'd heard of it but she was quick on the uptake. ‘Can't wait.'

‘Just Sorrel?' Sean asked, not entirely sorry to have a little chaperone to keep things from boiling over. They needed time. They needed space. ‘What about you, Angelica? Aren't you desperate to learn the trick of producing the perfect ice cream?'