Lying, hidden by the high back of the sofa, Lisa felt sick. She didn’t understand all that was being said, but she could recognise the cold contempt in ‘typist and her brat’. She wanted to jump up and run to Dane Riderwood, to punch him and kick him, and make him sorry, but even as the thought crossed her mind, caution followed. If she did so then other people would come, and they would ask her why she was behaving like that, and she would have to tell them, and her mother’s happy, shining day would be spoiled, some instinct told her. Aunt Enid had been bad enough, but this was a hundred times worse.
This was her new family of which Dane was to be an important part, and he didn’t like them. He didn’t want them. She buried her face in the cushion and put her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to hear any more.
She was quiet some time later when Chas and Jennifer came to fetch her, to take her up north to Stoniscliffe. They were having a delayed honeymoon, because Chas wanted to show Jennifer his home, and wanted Lisa to settle in there too.
They looked at her pale cheeks and the wariness in her eyes and decided privately that it was over-excitement and nervousness, and didn’t press her for any explanations. It had been a relief to know from chance remarks they had let fall that Dane wouldn’t be joining them at Stoniscliffe. He was going back to America.
Perhaps he’ll stay there, the child Lisa had thought passionately. Perhaps he’ll never come back.
The woman she had become could smile wryly at such naïveté, looking back across the years. Of course he had come back, and gradually the situation had begun to ease although Lisa told herself she could never like him or even wholly trust him, and she was slightly on her guard all the time when he was around.
Grudgingly, she had to give Dane his due. He had never, she was sure, given her mother any distress by even hinting at his true feelings about his father’s second marriage. But then he had no reason to do so, she reminded herself. Chas and Jennifer had been very happy—even someone as prejudiced as Dane would have been forced to admit that. He was always civil, if rather aloof, to Jennifer, and he took hardly any notice of Lisa at all. But then, she thought, he had never bothered with Julie either, who had always shown a strong tendency to hero-worship him.
Sisterly devotion had never been Dane’s style, Lisa thought with a curl of her lips. He had girl-friends, of course—a lot of them. Some of them even came to stay at Stoniscliffe to run the gauntlet of Chas’s indulgently critical appraisal. But it was clear they were for amusement only. Dane showed no signs of becoming serious about any of them, although they were all beautiful and glossy and self-assured—good wife material for a man who stood to inherit a thriving family firm and would need a smooth and practised hostess in his private life.
Julie and Lisa discussed the girls between themselves, tearing their appearances, their manners, their clothes apart mercilessly. Later, they wondered about their sexual potential as well, with avid adolescent curiosity. At least Julie had done most of the wondering. Lis wasn’t that interested in the partners Dane chose for his sexual athletics, although she had little doubt he was an expert in that as he was at everything else.
Locally, he was the golden boy, already managing director of Riderwoods which was expanding rapidly and surely. Chas was proud of him, calling him a chip off the old block, but Lisa thought there was more to it than that, unless the original block had been granite, because there was a ruthlessness about Dane that chilled her.
That was why, quite apart from the original dislike and distrust, she had never been able to accord him the admiration which Julie lavished on him. He wasn’t Lisa’s idea of a hero. She saw no warmth in him, no tenderness.
Even when she was sixteen, and Jennifer who hadn’t been well for some time had died very suddenly in her sleep, there had been no softening in him. He had been away on a business trip, but he came home for the funeral, but even while he had uttered his condolences to her, she had the feeling that his thoughts were elsewhere. She had wanted to scream at him, ‘You’re not sorry! You never wanted her here, or me either.’ All the old hostility and hurt had welled up inside her, and she had said something in a cold, quiet little voice and turned away.
She had thought then that she couldn’t possibly dislike him more than she did at that moment. But she knew better now.
She leaned back against the sofa cushions, trembling a little inside as she always did when she let herself think of the events of two years before. Not that she often thought of them—the mental censorship she exercised saw to that.
She wouldn’t have been thinking of him now—God knows she never wanted to think of him again—if it hadn’t been for Julie’s letter. ‘Dane, of course, is going to give me away.’
She would have to write to Julie, maybe not tomorrow, but some time soon, and make some excuse. Because there was no way she was ever going back to Stoniscliffe while Dane was there, and Dane was always there now. It was a grief to her. She missed Chas, and the big grey house on the edge of the Dales, but she had to keep away because she never wanted to see or speak to Dane Riderwood again.
The ring at the doorbell made her start, because she wasn’t expecting visitors, although there were any number of people who would know she was back from the West Indies by now and could be dropping in. She grimaced slightly at the thought of her appearance, no make-up and hair tied up in a turban, and was strongly tempted not to answer it, but the bell rang again imperatively, and there was little point in pretending she wasn’t at home when the caller could see the light shining under the door.
Pushing the litter of papers and envelopes off her lap, she called, ‘All right, I’m coming!’
She was smiling a little as she opened the door, because it was more than probably Simon who had shown signs of becoming besotted with her just before she had flown off on this last assignment, and she liked Simon even if she was a long way from falling in love herself.
She began, ‘You’ve caught me at a bad moment. I’m …’
And then she stopped, the words dying on her lips as she saw exactly who it was, standing on her doorstep, waiting for admittance.
‘Hello, Lisa,’ said Dane Riderwood.
FOR a moment she could neither speak nor move, and her breathing felt oddly constricted. It was like a nightmare—as if Dane was some demon that her thoughts had conjured up. All these months she had never allowed herself to think about him at all, she had closed him out, incised him from her brain.
Now Julie’s letter had reluctantly forced open the floodgates of her memory, and she had walked through the past like some forbidden city. ‘Talk of the devil,’ people used to say, ‘and he’s sure to appear.’ And it was true because the devil was here with her now.
She made a grab for the door intending to slam it in his face, but her momentary hesitation had been her undoing, because he had already forecast her intention and walked into the room.
He said, ‘Allow me.’ And he closed the door himself, shutting them in together.
Lisa said between her teeth, ‘Get out of here!’
‘When I’m ready.’ His voice was as cool as ever. He had hardly changed at all physically from the first time she had set eyes on him. The lines on his face had deepened with maturity, but his body still had the spare lithe grace of some predatory animal. He moved forward and she recoiled instinctively. He threw back his head and stared at her for a moment, his eyes hooded, their expression enigmatic.
‘Relax,’ he advised caustically. ‘The sooner you hear what I have to say, the sooner