`Nothing. There's—there's nothing to tell. I—I just said I'd come with you,' she stammered, angry and frightened at the same time, and thinking what a fool she'd been to come here with a man of whom she knew nothing. No wonder Jan had broken her engagement if he'd treated her like this ! Yet she knew he wouldn't have treated Jan like his. He'd have made love to her, and she would have let him—just as she was letting Paul make love to her. But her morals weren't Ellis's morals. The fact was, Steve was a fantastically handsome man, if you could get past the cynicism, the bitterness in his face. He had money too, that was obvious. But none of that meant anything to Ellis, whatever it had meant to Jan.
`I hope that is all you said,' he commented, letting her go. 'You didn't, by some slip of the tongue, tell her you were my new housekeeper?'
`No, but I wish I had,' she retorted defiantly. 'And I did tell her I'd look after the shearers—if I'm still here. It's not very fair of you to leave everything to Leanne, especially when you promised you'd bring someone back, anyhow.'
`I don't make promises of any kind to Leanne,' he said abruptly. 'She's one of those women who likes to carry the stockwhip, but I assure you she's not cracking it around my head. I'll get a new housekeeper in my own good time.'
`You've got me,' Ellis pointed out.
`I'm not interested in you in that way. You can do your little, bit around the homestead, but I've told you what I feel about you.'
`What you feel about me?' she jeered. 'You—you don't feel anything.'
`I want a wife,' he said.
`I can't help that. Why should it be me?'
`Why not?' He looked at her through half-closed eyes, and she was aware of a sort of tensed-up menace from him. She backed away till she was near the chest of drawers. He didn't move, but he didn't take his eyes off her.
`You're available,' he said cynically after a moment. `You've been—disappointed in love. I think that's the phrase. You offered yourself in that letter you wrote to me. Remember? And now you're here. That's why you.'
Ellis listened feeling her heart would leap out of her breast, its beating had become so agitated. She was here —and that was what was so inexplicable. She couldn't even explain it to herself. She couldn't understand how she'd been so gullible as to let him persuade her it would be all right, though when she thought of it, he hadn't actually done any persuading. He had flipped his fingers and she had come like the proverbial lamb —to the slaughter. She stared at Steve, her blue eyes wide and fearful, and she saw his long mouth curl upwards at the corners.
He said, 'I want you because your looks please me,
Ellis. Your voice pleases me too, when you're not spitting at me like a little cat. Quite apart from that, you have me persuaded that you're not purely ornamental. What more could a man want from a woman?'
`Am I expected to feel flattered?' she demanded. `I'm really beginning to understand why Jan sent back your ring. You're—you're hardly any girl's idea of the ideal husband, Mr Gascoyne.'
`Call me that just once more and I'll make you sorry for it,' he said very softly. 'Who's your ideal, anyhow, Ellis? The man who's doubtless now making love to my ex-fiancée?' He paused and she said nothing. 'I don't believe he set any fires alight in you—you're still a very frightened little virgin, aren't you?—hugging your robe around you as if I were about to ravish you ... Or is your ideal more along the lines of the old family friend who was consoling you so lavishly in Hobart? If you knew just a little more about the human male, you might be glad I've delivered you from his clutches. He'd barely begun to—play with you so far, is my guess, and believe me, you'll be a lot better off with me. A man his age is usually motivated more by lust than by passion when he gets a pretty little innocent like you down on his couch.'
Ellis felt herself go white, but her eyes were blazing. She longed to smack this man in the face, but she hung on to her temper somehow as she stammered out, `Don't you dare to speak about Jake like that ! We—we don't have that sort of relationship. He—he's a good man. You're a warped character, Mr Gascoyne. You're the last man I'd ever want to—oh !'
The rest of her sentence was lost as with a sudden movement he reached out and crushed her against the hardness of his body.
`I warned you not to call me that,' he said into her
hair, and then he forced her head up and his mouth found hers.
She fought him this time, agonisingly conscious of the fact that she had not a stitch on under her robe and that it was no longer covering her nakedness anything like adequately. His mouth was bruising hers cruelly and she felt the strength of his hands as they pressed against her naked rib-cage so that she was rendered utterly helpless. She wanted to scream, but she hadn't a hope.
Then Leanne's voice shocked her by calling, 'Ellis, are you coming down to get the dinner? Oh ! ' Her exclamation of surprise was clearly audible because she had pushed open the door and was staring open
mouthed at the two figures still twined together.
`Go to hell, Leanne,' Steve gritted, without releasing Ellis. 'See to the dinner yourself—'
Leanne disappeared like magic, closing the door swiftly and silently behind her.
Ellis wrenched herself free of Steve and turned her back on him, wrapping her robe around her with fingers that shook.
`You're—you're detestable,' she muttered, swallowing on a sob. Her whole body was burning with shame. `You—you shouldn't have come into my room—'
`You're damned right, I shouldn't,' he agreed harshly. His breathing, she noticed, was as uneven as her own. 'You'd better get dressed. I'm going to take a shower—a cold one.' From the door he told her wearily, 'Wear what you like,' and then she was alone.
`Wear what you like.' The words rang mockingly in Ellis's ears, as she stared at the clothes lying on her bed. What was the point in the black skirt, the office-girl blouse—the housekeeper's guise—now? Leanne would have no illusions as to why she was here : Steve
was on the warpath—he was looking for a wife and he'd marked Ellis down.
She moved away from the bed and without knowing what she was doing took up her brush and began to draw it through her hair, her eyes fixed on her reflection. She felt so terrible she wished she could vanish—that the girl with the golden-brown hair was simply not there—that there was no image at all in the mirror. Or she wished she could wake and find herself—oh God, where? Somewhere back in her childhood, long before she'd met Paul and been dropped by him, before Jake had—gilded her—before she'd ever set eyes on a barbarous man with black and silver hair who seemed intent on—
As she tossed her brush down, she saw that he had left the jeweller's box on the dressing table. She opened it like one in a dream and slipped the ring on to her engagement finger. It fitted almost perfectly and its emerald fires glittered hard and enigmatic as the green eyes of the man who had left it there.
Ellis closed her eyes and bit hard on her lower lip. Why should she feel so frightful about Leanne's having seen her in Steve Gascoyne's arms? But she knew why—it hadn't been an ordinary embrace. Leanne must have seen the state of her—undress, and she, Ellis, was not the kind of girl who could simply shrug it off. It hurt her self-esteem terribly to have Leanne think she would let a man who was almost a stranger to her take liberties like that. The old-fashioned phrase coming into her mind made her wince, and she hated the thought of having to face any of them again.
She took the ring off and put it back in its box, but she knew she was madly tempted to leave it there on her finger—to pretend to be engaged to Steve. Wouldn't it be easiest that way? Then she wouldn't
have to fight him off—he would have a right to make love to her within reason, to—
Ellis shivered, catching sight of her white and naked body where the edges of her gown had parted. She turned quickly away and looked around her as if she'd just come out of a dream—a dream it shamed her to remember. The room was growing dark despite the light from the wall lamp, and she found the switch and lit the little gold-shaded light that stood on the dressing table.
She couldn't stay hiding here all night, even if Leanne was getting the dinner, and she tried to make her mind a blank while she dressed, slipping on over panties and bra the dress that he had chosen.
When she was ready, with her face carefully made up, she had become a complete stranger. Paul would never have known her, and neither would Jan or her Uncle Bill. But Steve Gascoyne would recognise her. She was the girl he had encountered in the Cabaret Room at that sophisticated hotel in Hobart—the girl with the elderly admirer, the girl another man had tried to pick up. The girl who had sent out invitations with her eyes, with her body.
That was the girl who was going downstairs to dine in the gracious room with its red cloth and gleaming silver and crystalware.
It's not me, Ellis thought exhaustedly.
She switched off her light and left the room. She was the girl Steve Gascoyne wanted for his wife because she was available, because she was there—because she had written him a come-on letter.
And if she stayed much longer—oh yes, she would marry him, because—because he would have compromised her. It was an unpalatable thought.
Joining the others downstairs was not, after all, the
nightmare she had imagined it might be. The sherry Steve poured for her without consulting her tastedryish, light—certainly helped, as did the fact that the lights were soft, and though she had coloured painfully when she first came face to face with Leanne, the other girl gave no sign that she even remembered what she had seen. Ellis had expected a knowing smile at the least, but none was forthcoming.
Later, it was Steve who went out to the kitchen to give Leanne a hand with the steaks, and Ellis was left alone with Charl
ie.
They talked, but of what she afterwards had no recollection, though she was somehow quite certain Leanne had said nothing to him about the scene she had broken in on earlier.
As soon as she could after dinner, she excused herself, saying she was tired, and went upstairs to bed. She was thankful Steve didn't offer to accompany her up the stairs, but as she prepared for bed she wondered if they were talking about her in the sitting room—asking Steve questions about her. Yet—she thought not. Steve wasn't the sort of person who'd submit to being questioned, and if he was, she had a pretty strong idea he wouldn't answer.
She got into bed and lay in the dark, her eyes wide open—sleepless, listening. But there was nothing to hear, nothing at all. Nobody came upstairs, there were no voices. She thought about the day that had just passed and it seemed an eternity since she had first met Steve. She knew him and yet she didn't know him, and it disturbed her deeply to remember how he had kissed her, and the emotions he had aroused in her. Sex, for her, was something you reserved for the man you loved, and yet her physical being had responded to him with such ardour that even now she ached all through.
She closed her eyes and turned on her side and tried
to think of Paul, but for once she could barely call up his image, and the painful longing that always rose in her when she relived the tender moments she had known with him simply didn't come. Those tender moments seemed so pale and ghostlike and far away, whereas the memory of Steve Gascoyne's passionate approaches, that totally lacked any kind of tenderness, raged in her mind like some demon.
Sleep refused to come, and she wondered restlessly what tomorrow would bring. Whether she'd be able to start on some kind of routine of work in the house. Knowing that now Leanne had seen what she had, she couldn't possibly hope to be looked on as a housekeeper.
It seemed hours later that she heard movements in the hall outside her room, and she knew the others must at last have come up to bed. Yet still she couldn't sleep, and at last, in the silence, she slid out of bed, put' on her slippers and her robe, and went softly along the hall and down the stairs feeling her way in the darkness. She'd heat herself some milk—anything to persuade herself she'd sleep, otherwise she'd be fit for nothing in the morning.
When she reached the foot of the stairs she saw a line of light under the dining room door and she heard voices. For an instant she stood petrified, and then she realised it was Charlie and Leanne talking, and that they sounded as if they were having some sort of an argument. Ellis hesitated, then went on towards the kitchen, and had a slight shock when she discovered the light was on. But no one was there and she proceeded to do what she had `come to do, getting the jug of milk from the fridge and pouring some carefully into a small saucepan. She set it to heat on the gas stove while she found herself a heavy glass. It was curious, but in here,
perhaps because the second door was open, she could hear the voices much more
clearly, and she caught a few
words without even giving her attention to it.
`Now you're being difficult.' That was Charlie, and Leanne's voice was raised as she snapped back,
`I am not! You're beginning to sound just like your marvellous big brother.'
`And is there anything wrong with that?'
`Plenty,' Leanne said shrilly. 'Seeing he thinks women are such second-rate citizens, only useful for breeding. You might try pleasing me sometimes just for a change instead of falling all over yourself to do what he says. I am your wife, after all.'