A Bad Enemy (5 page)

Only now she knew differently. Mud had been thrown, and some of it had stuck as it had a habit of doing. The kind of things which had been said about her, the kind of implications which had been drawn from her behaviour made her feel unclean, and the thought that some of these vile rumours had found their way back to her grandfather and distressed him was intolerable. Yet he had never uttered one word of warning or reproach, she thought numbly.

Mrs Peterson's soup was everything she had remembered and more, and the cold roast chicken which followed was accompanied by a salad made infinitely more exciting by a selection of exotic ingredients. Jake asked for cheese to follow, but Lisle succumbed to the blatant temptation of a slice of homemade treacle tart, accompanied by thickly whipped cream.

Afterwards, Mrs Peterson deposited a tray of coffee in the drawing room and wished them goodnight.

Lisle poured the coffee, conscious of a feeling of awkwardness. Supper had been easier than she anticipated, with Mrs Peterson bustling in and out, making sure they were enjoying their food, and that they had everything they needed.

But now they had been left almost pointedly alone, and it made Lisle uneasy.

Jake on the other hand looked perfectly at ease. He had removed his jacket and slung it over the back of the big leather chesterfield and loosened his tie, and now he was leaning back, waiting for his coffee.

She handed him his cup, almost slopping it into the saucer in her haste, then got up to add another log to the already adequate fire, and fussily adjust one of the ornaments on the mantelpiece. 

Jake gave her a bored look. 'Relax, for Pete's sake,' he told her. 'Rape is not imminent.'

'I never imagined it was,' she snapped, re-seating herself behind the coffee tray, and adding cream to her own cup.

Jake grinned suddenly. It made him look younger, and even more attractive, and Lisle decided she preferred him scowling. 'Then you should have,' he said. 'After all, we have the perfect set-up— flickering fire, a beautiful girl, and damn all on television.'

In spite of loathing him, she felt her lips quiver. 'Aren't you the flatterer!'

'Not usually,' he said. He drank his coffee, and set the cup down on a table near his seat with a deliberation that she found slightly unnerving. He looked at her, and she thought confusedly that the lamplight had softened the colour of his eyes to silver. He held out his hand, and his voice was very gentle suddenly. 'Come here.'

And the shattering thing was that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have got out of that chair and gone to him. It was unbelievable that she could feel that way, but she did. He was her enemy, and she hated him. He had insulted her and outraged all her feelings ever since he had walked into her life, and yet she remembered the way his mouth had scorched her hand, and knew that, in his arms, her whole body could turn to living flame.

And remembered too, just in time, that he thought she was the worst kind of tramp.

She said huskily, 'I'll see you in hell first.'

'Heaven might be more enjoyable,' he suggested, but she could hear the cynical note. He thought she was just playing hard to get, and that sooner rather than later she would let him make love to her.

She rose to her feet with a faint smile. 'Heaven?' she queried. 'Now you're flattering yourself, Mr Allard. I'll leave you to your fantasies, and go to bed. Alone.'

'What a waste,' he said softly. 'You wouldn't be disappointed, I'm sure my performance would reach the standard you've come to expect.'

'A personal guarantee,' she marvelled. 'Now there's a novelty! But I'm still not tempted. Goodnight.'

'One thing I would guarantee.' His voice was silky. 'That—come the dawn—at least you'd remember my bloody name. There's another novelty.'

Lisle walked to the door, nerves jumping at every step, in case he came after her. Because in spite of everything that had happened, she wasn't sure how she would react if he touched her, seriously wanted her. She hoped she would kick and bite and scratch to be free, behave like the vixen he'd called her, but she wasn't issuing any guarantees at all, and she knew she wouldn't feel safe until she was safely up in her room behind a door which, for the first time in her life, she would lock.

Lisle woke with a start in the pitch dark, remembering she had forgotten to telephone Gerard. Well, not forgotten, simply had no opportunity to do so without Jake guessing what she was up to. And she didn't want him to know. She wanted to be able to speak to Gerard in perfect privacy without Jake being able to overhear so much as a word.

Not for the first time, she sighed over Murray's intransigence on the subject of phone extensions in bedrooms. He thought they were immoral, a blatant temptation to people to be idle and run up enormous bills at the same time.

'A telephone's place is in the library,' he said. 'Let people make their calls at a civilised hour or not at all.'

The middle of the night was hardly a civilised time, Lisle thought ruefully, but it was all that was available.

She had fallen asleep at once, behind that safely locked door, so she hadn't heard Jake pass her room on his way to bed, but he would be sound asleep by now.

She sighed as she pushed back the covers and reached reluctantly for her robe: The first thing she would have to do was go to Gerard's own room, find his address book, and hope that Carla Foxton's Barbados villa was in it. If that address book ever fell into the wrong hands, it would probably be grounds for a dozen divorces, she thought as she padded softly across the carpet to the door. She stood for a moment on the landing, listening intently, but the house was at peace, not a light showing anywhere.

She found the address book in Gerard's bureau, and slid it into the pocket of her robe, before beginning the journey downstairs.

The drawing room door was open when she reached the hall, and she could see the remaining embers of the logs still glowing red in the wide hearth. She wondered if Jake had remembered to set the spark guard in front of the fire, and decided she would see to it on the way back.

She closed the library door behind her noiselessly, and switched on the light, blinking for a few seconds at the sudden glare. Murray's big desk was set in the window recess, and the telephone was perched on one corner of it, trim scarlet lines looking strangely out of place among the antiques and rubbed leather which surrounded it.

After some initial difficulty in dialling, she managed to get through to the villa. The phone rang for a long time, and she was just about to give it up as a bad job, when the receiver was lifted and a woman's voice said, 'Yes?' 

Lisle spoke politely, 'Good evening, Mrs Foxton. I wonder if I could speak to Gerard Bannerman.'

Silence crackled at her. Then, 'Who
is
this?'

'I'm his sister, Lisle. We met once, actually, at the Hargreaves' dinner party.'

'Oh, yes.' Carla Foxton's voice conveyed complete indifference. 'Well, what makes you think Gerard's here, Miss Bannerman?'

Lisle prayed for patience. 'As a matter of fact, I'm not sure where he is, Mrs Foxton. I hoped you might be able to help me. You see, there's rather a crisis here. My grandfather has had a severe heart attack, and I feel Gerard should come back immediately, for a number of reasons.' She paused, but there was no response from the other woman. 'So, if you do happen to know where he is, perhaps you could pass on a message for me.'

Another lengthy pause, then Carla Foxton said curtly, 'I'll see what I can do.' And rang off.

Lisle sighed as she replaced her, own receiver more slowly. It occurred to her that really she liked very few of Gerard's women, and Carla Foxton probably least of all. She was petite, black-haired and beautiful in a voluptuous way which spoke of the Latin-American blood in her recent ancestry, and Gerard had been frankly besotted with her for several months. Carla was some fifteen years younger than her wealthy indulgent husband, and although Gerard was undoubtedly more to her taste as a lover, their affair had been carried on fairly discreetly. Carla much preferred to have the best of both worlds, and was shrewd enough to ensure that she did so. Lisle could understand her caution on the phone, but not the lack of humanity she had displayed.

Dispiritedly, she walked to the door, and stepped out into the hall, pausing as her hand readied for the switch to plunge the library back into its former peaceful darkness.

'Walking in your sleep?' Jake asked.

She nearly screamed, her hand flying to her mouth just in time to stifle the sound, so that it emerged instead as a kind of strangled squeak.

He was lounging in the doorway to the drawing room, his hand clasped round a tumbler of whisky. His head was thrown back slightly, and the grey eyes were narrowed as he looked at her.

Lisle said faintly, 'You—you startled me.'

'You startled me,' he returned pleasantly. 'When I saw you go past the door, I thought for a moment you were the resident ghost.' A faint appreciative smile twisted the corners of his mouth. 'But if you were, of course, I'd be able to see right through you, instead of merely through that pretty nonsense you're wearing.'

Lisle realised with embarrassed dismay that, standing in the strong light streaming from the room behind her, she was providing him with a frank revelation, of the outline of her body through the thin nightdress and robe. Hastily her hand moved to the switch again, snapping it to the 'off' position.

'What are you doing down here?' she asked. Apart from a couple of extra buttons unfastened on his shirt, he was, dressed exactly as when she had left him. It didn't seem as if he'd been to bed at all.

'Thinking,' he said. 'And drinking.' He held up the tumbler of whisky in a kind of mocking salute.

'You find alcohol aids your thought processes?'

'I find that sometimes it blocks them out altogether, which can be equally useful. May I ask, in return, what you're doing down here?'

'I—I couldn't sleep,' she said hurriedly. 'Worrying about Grandfather, I suppose.' She gestured towards the doorway behind her. 'I came down to get a book.'

He looked past her into the shadowed room with its tier upon tier of booklined shelves, then back to her empty hands. He began to laugh.

'But you couldn't find one. Or have you read them all before?'

She glared at him. 'Only I decided I'd rather have some hot milk instead. I was just going to get it.'

'Hot milk,' he said softly. 'How very girlish. May I recommend my own personal anodyne instead?'

'Whisky, I suppose.' Lisle pulled a small, jeering face.

'No,' he said. 'Not whisky.' And his eyes slid down her body from head to foot, assessing her in a slow deliberate sensual scrutiny, which left her oddly breathless and as vulnerable as if it had been his hands which had stripped her and left her naked beneath his hungry gaze.

She said on a little gasp, 'You're disgusting!'

'And you're a hypocrite,' he said derisively. 'You know what to expect when you flaunt yourself in front of a man with hardly a stitch on. And I'm not interested in your fables about books and hot milk either. There's a very good reason why we should both be roaming the house at two in the morning suffering from insomnia, and I'm sure I don't have to spell it out to you.'