It was too direct a question to duck, and, anyway, wasn’t there a chance he’d discovered the truth?
‘I’m a doctor.’ There was an element of pride in her voice.
She expected him to be at least mildly impressed. After all, he’d pretty much written her off as a no-hoper.
But he merely responded, ‘Okay, so don’t tell me,’ assuming she was being sarcastic.
Damn him. Was it so unlikely?
‘I’ll make sure you’re back on time,’ he went on. ‘In fact, I can send a car to collect you in the morning.’
‘There’s no need,’ she told him coldly. ‘I’ve said I’ll come.’
‘I wasn’t doubting it,’ he replied heavily. ‘I was trying to be helpful, save you relying on the vagaries of public transport.’
It was possible, Cass supposed, but then she remembered the last time she’d let him help her. There was always a motive behind Dray Carlisle’s apparent kindness.
‘Thanks all the same,’ she muttered back, ‘but I think I can cope with the train. I do, most days. In fact, it may come as a surprise to you, but a large section of the population rely on public transport.’
‘Really!’ he feigned surprise, then exclaimed dryly, ‘Goodness, how the other half live!’
He wasn’t serious, of course. He was just trying to wrong-foot her, borrow her lines before she could use them.
‘Well, far be it from me to relieve you of your hair shirt,’ he added in his deep drawl. ‘Would collecting you from the train be permitted?’
Oddly Cass didn’t mind his sarcasm. At least it was honest.
‘Strain getting too much for you, Dray?’
‘The strain?’
‘Of being pleasant to me.’
A moment’s disconcerted silence followed, and then he actually laughed. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, it was. I see you still prefer plain talking, Cassie.’
Cassie. The name struck chords. Perhaps conjured up by her slip, calling him Dray. A reminder that for a brief moment in time they’d been close.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she threw back.
‘Nothing at all,’ he conceded, before dropping his voice to a lower, more insidious tone. ‘In fact, why don’t we go the whole distance, Cassie, and stop pretending we’re strangers?’
Just words but they had their effect. Twenty-six years old and blushing like a schoolgirl. God, she was pathetic!
She took a deep, steadying breath and reminded herself he couldn’t see her blushes. He could only hear her voice, cold as ice as she responded, ‘Who’s pretending? You don’t imagine my sleeping with you makes you any less a stranger.’
There, she’d said it. It was out in the open. He had no power over her now.
A silence followed, as if she’d shocked him, but he came right back at her with, ‘Don’t worry, you and your sister shattered any illusions I might have had in that direction.’
The illusions had been hers as Cass remembered. She’d been a fool and Pen had wised her up.
‘Still, I suppose I should be flattered you even recall our tryst—’ he used the word in a purely mocking vein ‘—considering the many that have undoubtedly followed.’
Many? Cass could have challenged with ample justification. There’d been only one. A student doctor and he’d been another unmitigated disaster. But did she want him knowing just how limited her private life was?
‘I keep a record,’ she claimed instead. ‘You’re under D…for Disappointing.’
It was a put-down, so why did he laugh?
‘Are you sure it wasn’t D for Devastating?’ he suggested with his usual drawling arrogance, then cut the ground from beneath her by murmuring, ‘That’s what I have you under.’
Cass’s face flamed once more, as a shutter flickered briefly open on a picture of two bodies intimately entwined, and she wondered why she’d ever started this game of truth.
She stopped it abruptly by saying, ‘Well, now we’ve completed that trip down memory lane, do you think we could get back to the matter in hand? Burying my sister, that is,’ she added for both their benefits.
‘Of course.’ He didn’t argue with the change of subjects. Perhaps he regretted the deviation, too. ‘Phone me later with the train times and I’ll send a car to the station… I’m ordering the wreaths tomorrow. I can arrange one from you, if you wish.’
‘No, I’ll do that.’ She didn’t want any favours from him.
‘All right… Is there any song you wish to suggest for the service?’ he added with surprising generosity.
Cass knew her sister’s favourites but none was appropriate for the solemnity of the occasion and she said, ‘Not really. None you could play at a funeral.’
‘Right, I’ll just pick a couple of traditional hymns,’ he concluded.
Dirges would have been Pen’s comment and Cass was prompted to say, ‘Why don’t you ask Tom if he can think of anything she’d have liked?’
There was some hesitation before he answered obliquely, ‘Tom’s attention is focused on the baby at the moment.’
The baby. Her niece. Cass could have asked how she was. It would have been the natural thing to do. But any details and the baby would begin to be real for her.
He was clearly waiting for her to ask. When she didn’t, he volunteered. ‘She’s out of the incubator and doing well.’
‘Good.’ Cass sounded detached, and was determined to remain so.
He asked outright, ‘Would you wish to visit her while you’re up?’
‘There won’t be time,’ she replied, avoiding point-blank refusal.
But he heard it in her tone, anyway, and remarked, ‘I’d forgotten. Pen said babies weren’t your thing.’
Cass frowned. Why had Pen said that? It wasn’t true at all.
‘I don’t imagine they’re yours, either,’ she countered rather than deny it, then, feeling the conversation was becoming too personal once more, switched to saying, ‘That’s my pager just gone. I have to use the telephone, so if there’s nothing else…’
‘Your pager?’ He was obviously wondering why she needed such a thing.
Cass, having found the article still clipped onto the waistband of her trousers, put it on to test, then held it against the receiver so he could have a quick blast in his eardrum.
‘My pager,’ she repeated heavily, before muttering a terse, ‘Bye.’
She put the telephone back on its hook, then took it off again just in case he redialled. If he did, he’d get the busy signal, supporting her story.
Not her story, her lie, she corrected herself. Just one more to add to the series she’d told the Carlisles, if only tacitly. How she wished now she’d pressed Pen to be honest with Tom, to admit that she’d had that first baby. If she had, perhaps her sister might yet be alive.
But Pen had convinced Cass that, if she let her secret slip, there would be no marriage and, though, at a month short of eighteen, her sister had been ridiculously young to wed, it had seemed a better option than her vamping around on the nightclub scene. When Pen had finally brought Thomson Carlisle home to meet her, Cass had played her part beautifully, being warm and welcoming to a young