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‘What the devil’s been happening to you?’
The softly spoken concern wriggled briefly beneath her defences. Then she remembered. He didn’t really care a jot. This was how he got women sewing on his buttons.
‘Nothing. A busy morning,’ she replied crossly, struck by the ruthless perfection of his grooming and the messiness of hers. Already he’d lowered her self-esteem.
Desperate not to let it sink further, she straightened the slipping towel around her tiny body, turned back to the mirror and grabbed a brush. As she forced it through her tangled mop, she longed for her hair to miraculously turn into a smooth, sophisticated style for once.
She could see Max watching critically, his arms folded over his lean, taut torso and the plumb-line-straight navy tie accurately bisecting the advertisement-white shirt.
‘I can understand,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that the guy downstairs mussed your hair up in that clinch...but who made you cry in the first place?’
Her lip quivered and she pulled it into a grimace. He’d laugh if she said a baby! So she said nothing, not even issuing a denial about the clinch. Her brushing became more frantic, but she only ended up with shiny, fly-away hair which flew away in a multitude of directions.
Her face looked small and defenceless, her short upper lip bowing to form an ‘oh’ of dismay. Two enormous, wet-fringed eyes stared back at her. She looked as if she’d been stabbed in the heart.
Max didn’t let up. ‘You and the beefy guy had a row...’ He paused in the middle of his surmising, a faint frown on his beautifully tanned forehead. ‘About me? Because I was coming here and you’d told him we’d been lovers?’ he guessed.
‘Don’t exaggerate your own importance!’ she said, shooting a scornful glance at his reflection.
But she quailed at his piercing, bone-melting assessment and longed to be in full war paint for protection. She picked up a tube of all-in-one foundation and powder and began to spread it with shaking, ice-cold fingers.
‘You were kissing and—’
‘No! That’s a lie!’
Disastrously forgetting her intention to stay composed, Laura whirled around indignantly, her eyes glowing fiercely in anger, hair flying about her briefly animated face in jet black tendrils. The wild gipsy look, he’d once said admiringly, before he’d crushed her soft, poppy-coloured mouth beneath his.
For a moment there was a flash of intense light in Max’s eyes. She felt it searing a path straight for her soul. But she was dead inside and it didn’t reach anywhere important. He didn’t even know he was projecting sexual desire, she thought peevishly. It was as natural to him as breathing.
‘Too vehement a response, Laura,’ he declared quietly. ‘I saw you quite clearly. And why shouldn’t you hug and kiss him? Unless...’ His mouth became a tight snarl. ‘Unless he’s married, of course?’
She couldn’t help widening her eyes at his deduction. ‘He owns the business,’ she said evasively, for something to say.
‘And he employs you,’ Max persisted, in a savage undertone, contempt rippling through his harsh features. ‘He gives you a flat—’
‘It’s a bedsit!’ she declared. ‘Of the non-swinging-cat variety! And I pay for it. And I get up at five to start the ovens—’
‘It’s very convenient,’ he agreed disparagingly.
She fell silent. He was going to think the worst of her, but she wasn’t going to keep protesting her innocence. What was the point? In half an hour or so Max would be out of her life again. She hoped.
His lashes dropped, and she realised he was watching the way the first curves of her pinkly shining breasts rose and fell above the failing towel. They went pinker still and her skin prickled as if he’d switched on an electric current in her body.
She turned her back on him and rummaged in a drawer for her shirt, drawing it on and securing the first two buttons before replying.
‘I don’t owe you any explanation of my behaviour,’ she said flatly.
‘No. You don’t So long as you don’t ask for any explanation of mine.’
They were getting closer to the confession. He felt ashamed of two-timing her. Good!
Triumphantly she finished doing up the last button—only to find it wasn’t the last button at all. She had one left over. Annoyed, she started again. Doggedly she worked her way down, her fingers fumbling because he’d moved to one side and was watching every move she made. Her breathing thickened—or the air did; she wasn’t sure.
‘Are you ready to listen now?’ Max asked.
‘Perfectly.’
She made sure she spoke in a clipped tone. From now on she’d be detached. He wasn’t used to women showing no interest in him and it pleased her that, despite looking and sounding devastatingly handsome and sexy, he’d roused no deep, lingering desires.
A little more confidently, she tucked the shirt in and arranged her small body primly in a threadbare wing chair. Legs neatly crossed at the ankles. Back erect. Distantly involved expression on her face.
‘Fire away,’ she said, with all the appearance of a woman about to hear something boring. But she felt she might snap at any moment.
Max began wandering about and fingering everything he came across. ‘I hope you realise I should be in Paris.’
Absently he stroked the gleaming top of the cluttered mahogany sewing table which had once belonged to her grandmother. He seemed absorbed by the feel of the highly polished wood, his whole face responding to the satiny sensuousness beneath his fingertips. It was a very hedonistic action and had Laura’s gaze glued to every lingering caress.
She heaved her mind back to his remark. ‘Of course I didn’t. Paris, you say?’ she asked, intending to sound rudely uninterested, but her remark came out with croaky edges. She cleared her throat as surreptitiously as possible.
Max gave her a look of lazy curiosity and she hardened her eyes in case he got the wrong idea. ‘I’ve had to cancel two meetings.’
He moved lithely on to the mantelpiece, nonchalant and loose-limbed. Casually he began to examine a china herring-gull her mother had sent her. Laura wriggled, uncomfortable with the way he delicately traced the smooth curves of the beautiful bird.
‘Must be important news, then,’ she encouraged him.
‘You can say that again. One of these days, your sister will go too far!’
‘I thought she already had,’ Laura retaliated, wishing he wouldn’t prowl so. It made her feel restless. And it set off his long, sinewy legs and lean thighs too well.
He was already on the other side of the room, his hands thrust in his pockets, shoulders hunched as he brooded at her. Such an electric force field surrounded him that, by moving around, he was filling her tiny bedsit with his energy. If he carried on much longer she’d begin to feel suffocated by it.
‘Daniel rang me,’ Max said sternly.
‘I thought you and your brother hadn’t spoken since the day he married my sister,’ she remarked, lacing her voice with asperity.
Family feuds were so stupid in her view, and Max was small-minded where Fay was concerned. He owed her sister more courtesy than a flat rejection of her existence.
But then, Fay had said he was carrying a torch for her. Max wouldn’t have liked being superseded by his less prepossessing brother.
Max grunted. ‘I’ve been funding Daniel for the last few years.’
‘Oh. That’s very brotherly of you.’ She waited while Max did his best to wear out her cheap carpet.
‘I did it for the kids.’
She stiffened. Was he going to say more? ‘So you should—’
‘But,’ he went on, snapping out the word and glaring at her for interrupting, ‘it seems I was funding something else.’ He came to a halt in front of her, his face unnervingly grim.
‘Wh-what do you mean?’ she asked, prompted by his air of utter disgust.
Her sister had done some stupid things in her time. She and Daniel acted like flower-children, wandering around the country with travellers in battered old vans and defying authority.
‘Daniel and Fay have been arrested,’ Max said starkly.
Her heart sank. ‘Trespass? Again?’ she ventured, remembering she’d had to bail Fay out last time for refusing to leave some farmer’s land.
‘You don’t understand.’ Max’s mouth tightened as if he didn’t want to continue. His shoulders lifted and stayed high while she stared at him anxiously, then he said, punching out the words with barely contained anger, ‘They’re in jail in Marrakesh.’
Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open in sheer astonishment as his rage became clear. She knew how much he hated Daniel’s way of life. He was furious with his brother for blotting the family name. It was all right to get village girls pregnant and dump them, that was what the squirearchy did for kicks, but jail was unthinkable.
‘For... what?’ she asked breathlessly, her whole attention on his narrowed, glittering eyes.
‘Possession of drugs.’
‘Oh, God!’
She slumped heavily into the chair, staring into space, appalled.
‘There’s no time for histrionics—’ he began testily.
‘What histrionics? Did you see histrionics?’ she seethed through tightly clenched teeth. ‘I was thinking about the children. What’s happened to them? And what can we do about getting Fay and Daniel out—?’
‘Nothing,’ he said brutally.
‘Nothing? But—’
He silenced her with a scowl and a wipe-out gesture of his expressive hands. ‘The kids are the first priority.’
‘Of course, but—’
‘Listen, will you?’ he snapped tetchily.
‘You’ve had time to get used to this!’ she protested.
‘I’m just trying to get my head around what’s happened. OK. So who’s looking after Perran and Kerenza now?’
‘A traveller friend who’s now got tired of playing mothers and fathers.’
Her mind reeled. ‘In Marrakesh?’
‘No. Port Gaverne.’
Laura’s mouth fell open again. ‘But that’s in Cornwall!’ He gave her a slow, mocking hand-clap, making her feel stupid. ‘I don’t understand...are you telling me...Fay’s in Marrakesh and she left her children in Cornwall? How could she go away when Kerenza’s only a few months old?’
‘She’s not noted for her devotion to domesticity,’ Max said in a grim and disapproving voice.
Laura secretly agreed. She loved Fay, but her sister’s behaviour was beyond her. They’d always been chalk and cheese. If she had a four-year-old and a baby she’d have to be torn away from them. But then, if something came easy you didn’t value it—and Fay had always bemoaned the ease with which she fell pregnant and how the kids hampered her freedom. Laura lowered her eyes to hide the pain. She’d love her freedom to be hampered.
‘Well, thanks for telling me,’ she said woodenly.
‘Someone had to.’
‘Presumably the children are at your parents’ house right now?’
Max gave her an odd look. ‘My mother and father don’t live in the manor any more. They’ve moved to Scotland. The kids are staying in the cottage my father gave Daniel.’ He began quartering the floor again, clearly impatient to impart all the details and then go. ‘Not that he’s ever used it much. It’s been rented out most of the time, so goodness knows what kind of state it’s in.’
She remembered it. A tiny white stone building set into the side of a cliff. A narrow road ran down from it to the narrow inlet which formed Port Gaverne Bay, the less populated community next to the more bustling Port Isaac, where she’d been brought up, the child of a fisherman.
Fay loathed the cottage. She said it wasn’t big enough for a rat—and couldn’t the old man have done better than that. The Pendennis family had lived in Pendennis Manor then, further up Port Gaverne Valley. Fay had been hoping for something similar.
‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ Laura said, not sure at all.
She studied a slender leg, thoughtfully. This was a different kind of news from the sort she’d been expecting. Her face grew dreamy. Images came to her: sunny blue skies, glittering waves, dark cliffs. The smell of the sea was so real that she could almost taste the salt on her lips. For a moment she felt the spring of sea pinks beneath her feet, and then there was nothing other than the thin, worn lino.
She smiled faintly, wistfully. ‘Perran is probably having a great time on the beach every day—’
‘He’ll be there on his own by tomorrow morning,’ Max informed her sourly. ‘The friend is off to some music festival.’ He seemed as edgy as she was about the situation.
‘Well, that’s out! She can’t leave the children!’ Laura protested, bristling with indignation.
He shrugged. ‘The woman wasn’t paid to babysit. Why should she stay?’
‘Because they’re in need!’ she spluttered, amazed at people’s lack of responsibility.
‘She’s adamant about going. I don’t blame her. Fay promised they’d only be gone two days on a trip to London, and it’s now two weeks. She deliberately lied. Your sister isn’t too familiar with the truth, is she?’
Laura wished she could defend Fay. Her sister was wonderful fun to be with, but not very grounded in the real world. ‘I’m sure there’s a good reason—’
‘There is. Fay’s not cut out to be a mother and the children hinder her activities,’ Max said drily.
She winced. ‘What’s to be done?’ she asked, concentrating on the practical.
Max paused and lifted a black eyebrow. He seemed to be fixated on her softly parted mouth. She closed it and swallowed, bringing his gaze to her throat. Warmth stole over her skin and she knew she was flushing like a stupid schoolgirl. Angry with herself, she set her teeth and fixed her gaze somewhere in the mid-distance.
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ he observed smoothly. ‘If someone doesn’t get down there to take over, the kids’ll be dumped on the beach and abandoned.’
Laura wasn’t slow. She could see where this was leading. It was written all over his face. So she pre-empted him. ‘And you’re going down to look after them,’ she said, giving him what she imagined to be an admiring look. ‘Very good of you—’
‘It’s not good at all. You’re going.’
She looked at him steadily. No way. It was a suggestion so far into the stratosphere that she didn’t even fear it would come true.
She’d vowed never to return. Nor would she get involved with her sister’s children. She’d never even seen them. Kerenza was a baby. The other...
Perran was Max’s child.
CHAPTER TWO
