Old Desires/A Stranger's Kiss (2-in-1 edition) (34 page)

‘I’m sure I gave you every reason.’

‘No. You’ve always been my true knight errant, Adam. Always there when I needed you.’

‘I always will be, my lady.’ He cradled her face, stole a kiss.

‘Darlings,’ Jane said, ‘you’re supposed to wait until after the wedding…’

‘Forever and day, Tara,’ he said, then took her hand and walked her in front of the registrar and repeated his promise for all the world to hear.

ELOPING WITH EMMY (A Taster)

by

LIZ FIELDING

CHAPTER ONE

TOM Brodie regarded the man sitting behind the ornate desk. It was the first time he had met Gerald Carlisle; clients of such importance were usually dealt with by partners who had pedigrees as long as his own.

Brodie was the first to admit that he didn’t have a pedigree of any kind. What he’d achieved in his thirty-one years had nothing to do with family background, or the school he’d been to, it had been in spite of them.

It was the source of infinite satisfaction for him to know that one of the City’s oldest law firms, the august legal partnership of Broadbent, Hollingworth and Maunsell, had been driven to accept him because of their desperate need for sharp new brains to drag them out of their Dickensian ways, bring their systems up to date and drag them into the twenty-first century.

They’d tried offering him a consultancy. They’d tried a lump sum fee. He’d watched them wriggle with a certain detached amusement as they’d tried to buy his brains without having to take him and his working class background into their hallowed establishment, well aware that they needed him far more than he needed them. Which was why he’d refused to consider anything less than a full partnership.

One day, quite soon, he would insist that they add his name to the discreet brass plaque beside the shiny black front door of their offices; Broadbent, Hollingworth, Maunsell and Brodie. They wouldn’t like that either, but they’d do it. The thought made listening to Gerald Carlisle’s worries about his tiresome daughter almost bearable.

Gerald Carlisle was not his client. Brodie was too egalitarian in his principles, too forthright in his views to be let loose around a client who had a family tree with a tap root that reached down to the robber barons of the middle ages, with land and money as old. It didn’t worry him. He had his own clients, companies run by men like himself who used their wits and their brains to create wealth instead of living off the past. Companies that brought in new money and big fees. It was the reason for his confidence about the brass plaque.

But today was the twelfth of August. When Carlisle’s call for help had come through to the BHM offices, Tom had been the only partner at his desk. Everyone else had already packed their Purdeys and headed north for the grouse moors of their titled clients. It was tradition apparently, and BHM, as Tom was constantly reminded, was a traditional firm with old-fashioned values which apparently included shooting game birds in vast numbers in the middle of August.

Tradition also required that when a client of Gerald Carlisle’s importance telephoned, he should speak to a partner; and so he had been put through to Tom Brodie.

Gerald Carlisle, however, did not wish to discuss business over the telephone and so Tom had regretfully cancelled his dinner date with the delectable silver-blonde barrister with whom he had been playing kiss-chase for some weeks and driven to Lower Honeybourne.

Now, with the dusk gathering softly beyond the tall windows, he was sitting in the panelled study of Honeybourne Park, an impressive stone manor house set in countless acres of Cotswold parkland, while Carlisle explained the urgency of his problem.

‘Emerald has always been something of a handful,’ he was saying. For “handful”, Brodie thought, read “spoilt”. ‘Losing her mother so young...’

Anyone would think, from Carlisle’s hushed tones, that his wife had expired from some tragic illness rather than running away with a muscular polo-player and leaving her young daughter to the tender ministrations of a series of nannies. She had been a bit of a “handful” too — still was if the gossip columns were to be believed. Like mother, like daughter apparently.

‘I can see your problem, Mr Carlisle,’ Tom said, his face blank of expression. He was well used to keeping his feelings to himself. ‘I just don’t understand what you want me to do about it.’

Upon hearing the man’s proposed solution and the part he was expected to play in this, Brodie sincerely wished that he, too, had had some pressing engagement at the other end of the country that had taken him out of the office today.

‘Doesn’t your daughter have a say in this?’ he asked.

‘You don’t have to concern yourself with my daughter, Brodie. I’ll deal with her. All I want you to do is talk to this...gigolo...and find out how much it will take to buy him off.’

Buy him off.

Beneath that smooth aristocratic exterior, Brodie decided, Gerald Carlisle was a bully. He didn’t like bullies and for just a moment felt a surge of sympathy for Carlisle’s daughter, and for the young man she had declared it was her intention to marry. But only for a moment because he didn’t doubt that she was a spoilt brat who had to be regularly bailed out of trouble. Maybe, for once, she should be left to get on with it, stew in a broth of her own making and learn a lesson the hard way.

For one giddy moment he was tempted to suggest such a strategy, just to see the look on Carlisle’s face. But it wouldn’t do. Emerald Carlisle was an old-fashioned heiress on a grand scale. He knew that because BHM managed her Trust. Or rather Hollingworth did. Personally. It was that big.

Even a man of his egalitarian principles understood that a gigolo could not be allowed to prosper at the expense of one of BHM’s most valued — and valuable — clients. At least not while he was responsible for her.

Carlisle pushed a file across the desk. ‘You’ll find everything you need to know about Fairfax in there.’

Tom opened the folder and glanced at the top sheet — a report on Kit Fairfax from an investigation company which, despite the thinness of the file, appeared to have been thorough. He wouldn’t have expected anything else. It was a perfectly reputable company that his own firm used when necessary and Hollingworth had undoubtedly recommended them to Carlisle.

He flicked through the papers, glanced at the photographs of a man in his early twenties, his hair long and curling over his shoulders. He had a slightly distant expression, as if unaware of the extraordinarily pretty girl at his side, her arm looped through his, although that seemed unlikely.

As unlikely as the idea of a man setting an investigation agency to watch his own daughter simply because he didn’t much care for her boyfriend.

The whole business left Tom Brodie with a bad taste in his mouth but he made a determined effort to bury his own personal prejudices. Gerald Carlisle was concerned about his daughter, probably with good cause. Doubtless she was the target of all kinds of fortune hunters. ‘And if Fairfax won’t be bought off?’ he asked.

‘Everyone has a price, Brodie. Try a hundred thousand. It’s a nice round sum.’ Round, Brodie thought, in the way that peanuts were round. The guy must surely know that Emerald Carlisle was worth millions? But maybe he wasn’t that ambitious, maybe a “nice round” payoff was all that Fairfax was after. But somehow that dreamy face didn’t quite fit such a cynical scenario. Carlisle must have seen the doubt in Brodie’s face. ‘It’s a pity Hollingworth is away. He knows what he’s doing.’

Tom’s glance flickered to the other man. ‘Is this a regular occurrence?’

Carlisle stiffened. ‘Emerald is rather gullible. She needs protecting from unscrupulous people who would take advantage of her.’

‘I see.’ Obviously it was.

‘I doubt it, Brodie. I very much doubt it.’ He made it sound as if having Emerald for a daughter was like bearing the world on his shoulders. Maybe it was time he let the girl make a few mistakes. The longer he protected her, the harder it would eventually be. But Carlisle did not want to hear that and Tom wasn’t there to offer “agony aunt” advice. ‘I’m relying on you to deal with this situation quickly and without any fuss. Do whatever you have to. Hollingworth—’

‘I’m sure James Hollingworth would be more than happy to come back from Scotland if you prefer that he handle such a delicate matter,’ Brodie interjected, quickly. His own speciality was corporate law. Buying off an unsuitable husband was new territory for him, territory he was not anxious to explore.

But there was no escape. ‘That would take too long. I want this settled and I want it settled quickly before Emerald does something she’ll regret. You’re Hollingworth’s partner and I’m relying on you to do whatever you have to in order to stop my daughter marrying this man.’

Emmy Carlisle was fuming. She was nearly twenty-three years old, for heaven’s sake. Quite capable of making a rational decision about the rest of her life.

But not quite quick enough to anticipate her father’s ruthlessness when it came to getting his own way.

She grasped the door knob in both hands and shook it furiously. It didn’t budge. It was locked, and a cursory examination of the keyhole had revealed that the key had been removed. He had obviously foreseen the possibility that she might try poking it out of the lock onto a piece of paper. Assuming she had a piece of paper. She gave the door a kick.

How dared her father lock her up in the nursery like some Victorian papa? Did he think she’d just sit quietly and take it?

Easily, was the answer to her first question. And, no. He knew she wouldn’t take such treatment quietly, which was why he had tricked her into the second-floor nursery, conveniently equipped with safety bars across the window.

She abandoned the door and rushed across to the open window as she heard a car crunching over the gravel carriage drive that swept in front of the house, pulling herself up on the bars to get a better view.

It was a dark BMW, not a car she recognised, and it was parked too close to the house to get a good look at the driver as he climbed out. No more than a glimpse of thick dark hair, a pair of wide shoulders as he shrugged into his jacket, a feeling that he was above average height, although with her foreshortened view from the second floor it was impossible to say for sure. From the expensive cut of his charcoal grey suit it was obvious that he was some business connection of her father’s, in which case he was definitely not the kind of person to whom she could appeal for help.

She gave a little sigh.

It would have been so perfect if it had been Kit come to rescue her; driving up in his battered white van like some latter-day Galahad and hammering on the front door. But Kit was no Galahad and besides, he had no idea what had happened. She hadn’t dared tell him her plan or he would have been thoroughly shocked.

He was such a hopeless dreamer. Despite all his problems he’d packed his paints and taken off for France for the summer so that even if her mobile phone hadn’t been downstairs in her handbag, out of reach, she couldn’t have sent out an appeal to him for help.

At the time she’d been furious, but at least her father didn’t know where to find him. Yet. But she had to get out of here before he did and warn Kit, or her neat little plan would simply fall apart.

She had underestimated her father. She’d realised that he was having her followed, of course — he was so protective — and she’d known exactly what his response would be to her announcement that she planned to marry Kit...

Well, obviously not exactly. She hadn’t anticipated that he would lock her up like the heroine of some nineteenth century melodrama or she would never have walked into his trap. He must have planned the whole thing after she telephoned to say she had to see him about something important. Her biggest mistake had been to put him on his guard, but it had been the only way of ensuring her father’s attention. She twisted the small diamond engagement ring around her finger.

‘Oooooh!’ she growled, venting her frustration on one of the bars fixed to the window frame to prevent small children from falling out by just the kind of careful Victorian papa she had been castigating, striking at it with a tight little fist. It shifted slightly beneath the blow and she immediately forgot the pain caused by her temper. Instead she stared at the bar for a moment then, slowly uncurling her fingers, she reached out, grasped it firmly and gave it a sharp tug. She had not been mistaken; there was a small but quite positive movement.

Her temper instantly evaporated and she looked about her for something to lever the horrid thing out of the frame.

The room was furnished with a bed, a dresser, a small hard-backed chair. The built-in cupboard was bare as she had already discovered to her disgust. There was nothing in the least bit useful to be found, but she refused to be put off by this set-back. Instead, she returned to the window and gave the bar a vigorous shake.

It was definitely loose and seized by the same enterprising spirit that had got her into this scrape in the first place, Emmy put her foot against the wall for leverage, took the bar in both hands and gave it a sharp tug. There was the promising sound of wood splintering. Cheered by this success she did it again, yanking on the bar with all her might until the window frame split with a satisfactory crack, disintegrating beneath the pressure and sending her sprawling back on the floor, the bar still grasped tightly in her hands.

She stared at it for a moment and then laughed out loud. The frame had rotted away beneath the paintwork and no one had noticed. It was hardly surprising. The dreary old nursery hadn’t been used since her grandfather was a baby when children and servants were expected to keep their proper place. Her mother had insisted on a bright modern suite of rooms on the first floor for her baby girl, not that she’d hung around to enjoy either of them.