A Sudden Engagement and The Sicilian’s Surprise Wife(17)

‘No.’ She flushed as his eyes lingered intently on her face, suddenly feeling like a guilty schoolgirl, for no reason at all.

The bell pealed again and she moved towards it and opened the door.

‘At last—I’d begun to think you’d gone to bed!’ Clive stepped in through the open door, bending to nuzzle her neck and murmur appreciatively, ‘Umm, you smell nice. What is it?’

‘Forbidden.’

Drew’s icy voice stopped him in his tracks, and his head lifted as he drawled appreciatively and without the slightest trace of embarrassment, ‘Oh dear! Sorry about that, lovey, but I thought…’

‘I think you should leave,’ Drew interrupted suavely.

For a moment Kirsty thought Clive would debate the issue, and then he shrugged lightly, smiling as he turned back towards the door, murmuring sotto voce to Kirsty, ‘Another time, perchance, oh fair one,’ and then he was gone, leaving Kirsty alone to face the icy coldness of Drew’s eyes, feeling as guilty as though they had in truth been engaged.

‘I didn’t ask him to call—’ she began defensively.

‘I don’t expect you did,’ Drew agreed. ‘His type never need asking, although God knows you were giving all the encouragement he could have wanted this afternoon. I ignored it because I thought it was all pique, but perhaps I was wrong? Is he what you want from life, Kirsty?’

‘He was being friendly, that’s all. He felt sorry for me because I was on my own…’

‘Is that so? Now I got a completely different impression,’ Drew told her with iron inflexibility. ‘I thought he knew quite well that you were engaged to me and that he wanted to do a little poaching in safe water—safe for him, that is.’

Kirsty fired up indignantly. ‘You’re wrong! He was just being friendly…’

‘Very friendly,’ Drew drawled in agreement. ‘Friendly enough to call around at…’ he shook back the sleeve of his sweater to glance at his watch, ‘nearly eleven at night. You would have offered him a cup of coffee, of course, by which time it would have been twelve-ish—he has lodgings in York, unless I’m mistaken, with some of the other bit players, and the last bus leaves at eleven-fifteen. What would you have done, Kirsty—suggested that he walk home, or offered him a bed here? Your bed, perhaps?’

‘That’s a vile thing to suggest!’ Kirsty protested indignantly. ‘Must everyone have an ulterior motive? Couldn’t he simply have been wanting to be friendly?’

‘Not where you’re concerned,’ he told her brutally, ‘and if all he had in mind was a platonic friendship, I’m no judge of character. But then of course men in love are notorious for their lack of judgment,’ he added with fine irony. ‘One thing’s for sure—he wasn’t expecting to see me here.’

‘He heard Rachel Bellamy asking you to dine with them,’ Kirsty told him brittlely.

‘And felt sorry for my poor deserted little fiancée, all uncared for and unloved. Perhaps I’d better correct that impression—don’t worry,’ Drew told her, when her eyes widened, ‘I have no intention of spending the night on your settee—there are other ways,’ he told her enigmatically. ‘Starting with getting my ring on your finger.’

When he had gone, Kirsty found it curiously difficult to get to sleep, despite her tiredness. What was the matter with her? she asked herself restlessly. The sooner she was free of this bogus engagement the better. And everything was working out so well. Clive appearing unexpectedly as he had done had plainly aroused Drew’s suspicions. All she had to do was to fan them to the point when it provoked a confrontation—and yet she had a curious revulsion for what she had to do. It brought her down to the level of Beverley Travers and Drew, she thought fastidiously.





CHAPTER SIX


THE fine weather continued as Drew drove them towards York. He had picked Kirsty up just before eleven. She had been ready and waiting for him, choosing, on some impulse she couldn’t quite define herself, to wear an expensive, fine tweed suit Chelsea had given her when she left college. The plums and greys were a perfect foil for her own dark colouring, and with it she wore a plain grey silk blouse she had bought in Harrods sale.

If she had expected Drew to be impressed by the care she had taken with her appearance she was disappointed. He murmured only a brief greeting and then escorted her to the waiting car, opening the door for her and seeing her safely inside before driving off.

As she glanced surreptitiously at him it came to Kirsty how little she knew about him, and yet here they were practically on the verge of getting engaged, albeit temporarily. Did he have a family, close friends who might be expected to want to know about their supposed ‘engagement’? It was hard for her to imagine him in a family setting, for some reason he struck her quite forcibly as a loner, but somewhere he must have parents; perhaps other relatives…

‘You’re looking worried—what’s the matter this time?’

Kirsty hadn’t realised he had switched his glance from the road to her, and caught unawares by the steely perception of his eyes she blurted out unthinkingly, ‘I was just wondering about your family—what they might think about…’

‘I have no family.’ His voice was clipped, his face shuttered and repressive.

‘No… but…’

‘Oh, I had parents once—if you could call them that. A mother who cheated on her marriage and then when she found herself pregnant by her lover deserted the child she bore, while her lover disappeared, somewhere in the Australian outback. They’re both dead now,’ he told Kirsty coldly, ‘and if it wasn’t for the compassion of my mother’s husband, I doubt if I’d know even today who my parents actually were.’

The brooding quality of the words struck Kirsty to the heart. Surrounded all her life by her parents’ almost doting affection, she found it hard to accept that any parents could simply abandon their child as Drew was suggesting.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded sardonically. ‘Don’t you believe me? Or is it simply that you want to hear all the unpleasant details?’

When she made a brief sound of denial in her throat, he grimaced. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well this engagement isn’t real, otherwise you might legitimately question who you were marrying. It’s a terrible thing to deprive a child of all knowledge of its parents; it creates a vacuum that no one who hasn’t experienced it can understand; a sense of being set apart from the rest of society and oneself; a loss of identity that lurks in the shadows like a childhood nightmare.’

Listening to him, Kirsty remembered what Helen had told her on the night of her party. Now her words started to make sense. Was this what she had meant about Drew being reluctant to commit himself to marriage? Was it because he himself…

‘You have a very expressive face,’ he told her roughly. ‘I can almost see the word “bastard” written on it in six-inch-high letters!’

‘No… no… I was just thinking how terrible it must have been for you as a child,’ Kirsty told him honestly.

‘Not at first. I was brought up in a children’s home with “others of my kind”.’ His mouth was wry. ‘It was only when I reached my teens that I realised fully what that meant. Those were agonising years—knowing nothing about myself except the fact that I had been abandoned as a baby. I was fifteen before I learned the truth, and then only by chance. My mother’s husband had found her letters to her lover on her death and on going through them had realised she had had a child and that they had decided between them to abandon it. He started to look for me—not out of any sense of maudlin sentiment but because he truly believed she had done wrong in leaving me with no means of discovering anything of my roots. I liked him. He died two years ago, unfortunately…’

‘And your father?’ Kirsty prompted softly, a huge lump in her throat. It was silly to feel so much pain for a man she positively hated, and yet she did—oh, not pain for the man he was, but pain for the child he had been—bitter, deserted…

‘Like I said, he went to Australia when my mother discovered she was pregnant and he died there six years afterwards. Both of them were only children, so if you’re expecting to gain a family as well as a fiancé I’m afraid you’re doomed to disappointment.’

‘Was it very dreadful?’ Kirsty asked quietly. ‘I.…’

‘Save your sympathy for those more deserving of it,’ Drew told her dryly. ‘I’ve come to terms with my birth a long time ago. I just wish to God these kids who glibly get themselves pregnant and then find out the hard way that being a single parent in Surbiton doesn’t measure up to the Hollywood image of having a “love-child” would think a little more about the child they’re creating and a little less about themselves.’

He was a man of strange contrasts, Kirsty reflected to herself as he turned away from her to concentrate on his driving, and plainly there were scars, however much he tried to hide them. No doubt this was why he had been wary of marriage, but now he had found Beverley and he wanted total commitment from her; the sort of commitment his mother had denied him when she deserted him for the sake of propriety, Kirsty realised with sudden insight.