‘I don’t know, Dad. I know very little about him. He’s looking for a designer and someone gave him my name.’
This was close to the truth but, she hoped, would avoid a cross-examination by her stepmother. Fortunately it was almost time for Rosemary’s favourite soap opera and her eagerness to learn the outcome of the dramatic climax at the end of the last instalment was stronger than her need to know about Nicole’s telephone caller. As Rosemary picked up the remote control, Nicole, who wasn’t a soap fan, said she had things to do upstairs.
‘I’ll say goodnight, Dad.’ She went over to kiss him.
‘Goodnight,. my dear. Sleep well.’
She suspected he knew she found Rosemary a trial, although Nicole had never confided her problems to him. When Rosemary had entered their lives, Nicole had welcomed her, knowing that a man still in his early fifties needed more than a daughter’s companionship.
It was only later, as Rosemary relaxed and allowed her true nature to show, that misgivings had set in. Her stepmother was not a bad woman, quite the reverse. It was her excessive goodness that was the problem She wanted the best for everyone and put herself out to achieve it for them. But what she thought best wasn’t always what they wanted.
Rosemary Dawson was a kind-hearted, wellintentioned control freak who refused to consider that her decisions and arrangements on behalf of her family, friends and acquaintances might sometimes be flawed or even completely disastrous.
‘Goodnight, Rosemary.’ Nicole managed to smile at her stepmother and forced herself to kiss the older woman’s upturned cheek.
Inwardly, she was close to the end of her tether. Somehow she had to escape from the stifling atmosphere in this household. Her father, she knew, was resigned to it He had married Rosemary during the long and desolate aftermath of his first wife’s death. He would abide by that commitment, no matter how severely it taxed his patience.
Sometimes it seemed to Nicole that he was no longer the same person she remembered from her childhood. Something in him had died with her mother. Even with Dan, his grandson, he was not the same carefree, lively personality he had once been.
Dan had tackled his homework as soon as he came back from school. Now, in the small bedroom next to hers, he was sitting in front of his computer. ‘Hi, Mum. Come and look at this.’
‘It’s almost logging-off time,’ Nicole said, as she picked up a stool and placed it next to his chair.
‘I know, but you must see this website. It’s brilliant!’
She rested an arm on his shoulders and looked at the screen. What she really wanted to do was to hug him tightly to her. But although she still kissed him goodnight, and Dan planted a kiss on her cheek before he got out of the car when she dropped him off at school, she took care not to be too demonstrative.
He was twelve now, on the verge of puberty when life started getting complicated...especially for a boy without a father. In looks, he took after her, with the same fair hair and hazel eyes. But the size of his hands and feet, and the way he was shooting up, indicated he was going to be a big man. It was her most fervent wish that, despite a bad start in life, he would also grow up to be a good man.
After taking her on a tour of the website, Dan closed down his PC and began getting ready for bed. At school, he was conscientious rather than clever. Team sports bored him. His overriding enthusiasm was for computers, an interest that Rosemary deplored but Nicole encouraged.
While he was in the bathroom, probably skimping his wash but giving his teeth a good brush because she had given him an electric toothbrush which kept going for two minutes, Nicole sat on the end of his bed. She wished she had had the luck, when her son was little, to meet a nice man who would have been a father to Dan and set him a good example. A grandfather wasn’t the same. Her father did his best, but he couldn’t do the things a man in his thirties would have done.
And it wasn’t only for Dan’s sake that she longed for a man in her life. She would have liked more children, a home of her own and someone to share her bed. From a personal perspective, her twenties had been as arid and empty as the Great Thar Desert. Now she was in her thirties and the few men she met were either married or had been through a painful divorce and weren’t going to make another commitment in a hurry. She had long since given up hoping that a knight in shining armour was going to materialise and whisk her off to the life of her dreams.
That just wasn’t going to happen. The only person who could make things better was herself, which was why she had answered the advertisement.
Walking from the Underground station nearest to her rendezvous with him, Nicole wondered what Dr Strathallen had written in his report on her. She now knew a bit more about him than she had at their first meeting.
Her father, who clipped newspaper articles on subjects that interested him, had unearthed a report of a lecture given by Dr Alexander Strathallen to the Royal Geographical Society a couple of years earlier. His subject had been the Rabari nomads whose traditional way of life was under threat. Probably the only reason the talk had been reported was because he had made some controversial statements about the decline in moral values in the west.
Nicole had also found out from a girlfriend who knew about such things that the restaurant where he was giving her lunch was exceedingly fashionable and tables had to be booked long in advance. Not wanting to arrive first, when she came to the street where it was and saw that it was located close to the corner, she continued along the main road, window-shopping until her watch showed twenty-nine minutes past twelve.
The restaurant had a large plate glass window allowing passers-by to see the interior. As Nicole approached the entrance, she recognised Alexander Strathallen’s hawk-like profile. He was seated on a sofa immediately inside the window and at right angles to it. But he wasn’t alone.
There were two people with him, a man and a woman. The woman was leaning towards him from the opposite sofa, talking vivaciously and then breaking off to sip from a flute of champagne.
Dismayed at the thought of being interrogated by three people, Nicole raised her hand to open the door, but had it opened for her by a friendly young man who welcomed her to the restaurant. Then a smiling girl appeared to take her coat and umbrella. Although it hadn’t rained so far, heavy showers were forecast for later. When, having handed over her things, Nicole turned towards Strathallen and his companions, she found he had already risen and was standing behind her.
‘Good afternoon.’ For the first time he smiled and offered his hand.
The smile transformed him from a somewhat forbidding personality into one of such charm that Nicole felt her insides do an involuntary flip. The feel of his long strong fingers closing over hers accentuated the reaction.
‘Good afternoon.’ She always shook hands firmly but now put all her strength into returning his clasp to avoid having her knuckles ground together. But his handshake wasn’t the crushing grip she expected. Obviously he modified it when greeting women.
Then, instead of introducing her to the others, he said to the hovering young man, ‘We’ll go straight in and have our drinks at the table.’
Apart from one young couple so casually dressed that Nicole thought they had to be from the pop music world, or showbiz, the restaurant was empty.
‘What would you like to drink?’ her host asked, when they were seated.
Nicole’s mind went totally blank. Perhaps it was the result of tension, followed by relief that the other people weren’t with him, plus the jolt of attraction, but all the right answers deserted her.
‘As we’ll be drinking wine, let’s stay with the grape, shall we?’ Strathallen. suggested. ‘Two glasses of champagne, please.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
When the young man had gone, Strathallen said, ‘I arrived early and got into conversation