Naive Awakening

Freddie had snatched up his two cases and was taking the stairs two by two, overtaking the maid. He disappeared from sight, and Leigh turned to Nicholas, who had been observing her from a distance.

‘I don’t think I’ve managed,’ she almost choked on the words, ‘to thank you and of course your grandfather for kindly asking us here. Freddie’s delighted at the prospect of going to college for his course.’

‘And I gather from your tone of voice that you still haven’t worked yourself up to sharing his enthusiasm?’

‘No,’ she replied stiffly, thinking that it was difficult to become excited over emotional blackmail.

‘You could always have stayed in Yorkshire, you know, and made do with your rambling cottage which would have progressively eaten up more and more of your money, and your job at the library which just paid enough to keep the food on the table.’

‘You might as well know, I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for Freddie.’

‘But you are, aren’t you?’ he countered smoothly. The grey eyes swept over her with cool calculation. ‘And you can stop acting as though you’re the only one who’s suffering a change of lifestyle. As I said, the only reason I bailed your brother out was because of my grandfather.’

‘Are you trying to say that you don’t want us around?’

‘I’m trying to say that you’ve been rescued from a difficult situation, and…’

‘I should be grateful,’ she finished for him. She felt all her good intentions to be polite with this man draining away from her. Yet again.

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said tightly. Grateful, she added silently, for being in a gilded cage, because she was caged—trapped by a situation over which all control had been removed from her.

‘I don’t expect gratitude, Leigh,’ he said in a hard voice, ‘but I do expect you to stop acting like a martyr all of the time. Now perhaps you’d like to go upstairs and freshen up?’

‘Perhaps I would,’ she agreed, stinging from his reprimand, but knowing that she had more less provoked him into it. ‘Where is my room?’

‘I’ll show you up.’ He started up the stairs, and Leigh followed him.

Everything about him, his movements, his speech, that watchful, cool air about him, spelt power and self-assurance, and just a hint of arrogance. He was so totally different from all those boys she had been out with in the past. So totally different from her, she conceded. She would do well to remember that.

He began talking to her about his grandfather, telling her how much he had changed after the death of his wife years ago. ‘He hardly ever leaves the house,’ Nicholas said. ‘He says that he’s simply counting down to the day when he’ll no longer be around. He comes down for meals, and he uses the library on the ground floor a lot, and that’s really about it.’

Leigh thought that it was a shame. Her own grand-father had been full of beans right up to the end. Even in those last few weeks, when his illness had made getting around difficult, he had still insisted on taking his walks, on keeping as active as he possibly could.

Her bedroom was on the top floor, along with Freddie’s. Nicholas pushed open the door, and she stepped inside. Her bags had been brought up and were on the floor next to the gigantic old wardrobe. All the furniture in the bedroom, in fact, was old, from the dressing-table and chairs, to the bureau sitting next to the tall, leaded window, and, of course, the four-poster bed.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she breathed, forgetting his presence temporarily and padding across the floor, her hands trailing along the furniture, her eyes taking in absolutely everything. A small en-suite bathroom had been added at some later stage, and had been fitted out in colours of apricot and green, with matching bath towels.

Nicholas had been lounging by the door, and now he walked into the room and looked around it briefly.

‘It’s home.’ He shrugged and walked across to the window. ‘I suppose I’ve become used to it.’

‘I suppose you would,’ Leigh said drily, ‘although you wouldn’t, if you had any inkling of the hardship that a lot of people have to endure. I know some people who have slaved all their lives, working the pits, or toiling in factories, and for all their hard work they will never be able to know what it is to have this sort of comfort. The problem with wealth is that it cushions you against all of life’s unpleasantness, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it? Don’t you think that that’s a little bit of a generalisation? Why don’t you stop dividing people into categories, and start realising that everyone has something to offer?’

‘That’s unfair! I don’t divide people into categories.’

Nicholas moved to where she was, and before she could escape to some other, safer part of the room he was standing next to her, far too close for comfort.

‘You,’ he said, coiling his fingers into her long, unruly hair and tilting her head to face him, ‘have got to be the most argumentative, stubborn woman I have ever met in my life. And I’ve met my fair share of women.’

Leigh stared at his dark, handsome face in silence. She wanted to fire back with a retort. In normal circumstances she could hold her own in any argument, was rarely at a loss for words, but somehow her mouth had managed to go dry and wouldn’t do what she wanted it to.

She had a swift feeling of giddiness, and then she blinked and reality returned.

‘Believe me, the last thing I’m interested in is the number of women in your life!’

Her heart was beating heavily, and she could feel her hands clammy and tightly clenched at her sides. She just wanted to get away from this man. He was overpowering her.

There was a knock on the door, and Freddie bounded in. Nicholas released her abruptly, and her moment of confusion and alarm was over.

She retreated to her suitcases, which she began dumping on the bed, and chatted to Freddie, her words spilling over each other as she tried to shove the effect that Nicholas had had on her to the back of her mind.

Freddie was in high spirits. He wanted to do everything, see everything, yesterday. He had already unpacked, which meant that he had thrown all his clothes into the nearest available drawers and cupboards, and was now raring to go. He somehow managed to persuade Nicholas to take him to Piccadilly Circus, which he had heard about, on the Underground of course, and Leigh couldn’t resist a grin as she tried to picture Nicholas squashed in the middle of a crowded train.

‘Nicholas probably has to return to work,’ she said, trying to wipe the smile off her face.

This thought had obviously not crossed Freddie’s mind. ‘Oh,’ he said, deflated, ‘can’t you take the day off?’

‘Freddie!’

‘It’s all right, Freddie. I already have, and it’s just as well that you become acquainted with London as soon as possible.’

Freddie bounded back out of the room, an excitable puppy whose energy left Leigh feeling exhausted, and Nicholas turned to her.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll share the joke with me?’

‘Joke? What joke?’

‘The one you were grinning at a few minutes ago.’

Leigh blew a strand of her hair from her face, and said obligingly, ‘I will, actually. I was trying to imagine you on the Underground, with elbows and newspapers sticking into you, like a sardine in a tin.’

‘I see,’ Nicholas said thoughtfully. ‘Well, I find it equally hilarious to picture you on the Underground, sticky and uncomfortable and moaning about how much you’d wished you’d stayed in Yorkshire.’

‘Just as well as I’m not coming with you, then, isn’t it,’ she replied tartly, ‘so you’ll have to forgo the opportunity to laugh at me?’

Once he was out of the room, she ran a hot bath and settled into the suds with delicious enjoyment.

Over the past fortnight, she had barely had time to think, and now, in the silence of the room, her mind played around all the quickfire sequence of events that had occurred recently. It was unbelievable. Plucked from her rural home town and catapulted into London, and not just London, but the London champagne set, because she knew without being told that that was where Nicholas belonged.

It was like Cinderella at the ball, she thought, but an unwilling Cinderella without the fancy dress. She was the plain-clothed, plain-speaking rustic in a world which no doubt operated on various levels of innuendo and subterfuge.

She had as yet met none of his friends, and it was an experience which she was not looking forward to.

She wondered whether they would all be like Nicholas. The men all tall, and debonair, and the women sophisticated and bursting with savoir faire.

It was hard to imagine anyone quite like him, but maybe that was simply because she had never moved in this sort of world.

A sudden thought struck her: had she brought the right sort of clothes? Flowered print dresses, sandals and jeans might be all right in her small home town, but would they look out of place here? She mentally shrugged and decided that people could take her as they found her; she certainly didn’t intend losing much sleep over it.

Later on, when she was dressing for dinner, she looked dubiously at her wardrobe once again, finding it slightly more difficult this time to dismiss the thought that the things she had brought with her really were a bit on the well-worn side.

She had somehow not managed to do any shopping for the past few months, none at all in fact since the death of her grandfather, and a lot of her stuff seemed that touch faded. Of course, it didn’t matter one jot, she told herself defiantly, choosing a green uncluttered dress to wear that evening. She was meeting Sir John and she wanted to look just right.

Nicholas was eating out, and wasn’t going to be in until later, probably when they were having coffee.

Just as well, she thought, staring at her face in the mirror, wondering whether to put on any make-up and deciding against it. She was too sensitive to his presence to really relax with him.

Sir John was waiting for her in the sitting-room when she went down a few minutes later. Leigh introduced Freddie, and as the old man chatted to him she took the opportunity to observe him.

She barely remembered him. He couldn’t have been much older than her grandfather, but he certainly looked it. There were lines of resignation and disappointment around his mouth and his eyes were faded and blue as though he had spent years looking at things that he found depressing.

He turned to her and began talking.

Even his voice, she thought ruefully, was thin and strained. He apologised for not meeting them sooner, ‘But my doctor doesn’t like me exerting myself. I tend to spend a lot of time reading, or resting.’

It didn’t sound like a very healthy lifestyle to her, but she nodded politely and moved the conversation on to other things. She chatted about her grandfather, with Freddie butting in every two minutes with anecdotes which were only just on the right side of risqué, and after a while the old man began to look slightly more animated.

‘He was a rogue in his youth, that old Jacob,’ Sir John said whimsically.

Leigh laughed, throwing her head back, ‘He was a rogue in his maturity as well, Sir John, believe me.’

‘He drove the women crazy,’ Freddie said with a grin.

‘He did?’

Leigh nodded. ‘There was always some lady or other being invited around for coffee. If he really liked her…’

‘He would present her with something he’d made,’ Freddie finished. Leigh looked at her brother, and they giggled.

‘There was this one lady,’ Freddie offered, laughing at the memory until tears came to his eyes, ‘Mrs Bolby, a widow.’

‘Freddie! Sir John won’t want to hear about Mrs Bolby!’

‘Pray continue, young man.’ He really was looking more animated.

‘Mrs Bolby,’ Leigh said primly, ‘was a very quiet lady…’

‘A prude!’ Freddie screeched.

‘And Grandad saw fit—I don’t know what got into him…’ She began to giggle uncontrollably.

‘To present her with this wooden carving of a bed…’ Freddie continued.

‘And a lute. He told her they could make sweet music under cover!’

Sir John laughed, wheezing at first, then louder.

Over the exquisite meal of salmon with prawns, Freddie and Leigh regaled him with humorous things their grandfather had done. The old man really seemed to enjoy it, and over coffee he shook his head and murmured how much he envied Jacob’s life.

‘Having you two must have been a source of delight to him. Of course, I have Nicholas, and I love him dearly, but he’s rarely around and, as for me, I don’t get out at all,’ he confessed. ‘Don’t see the point. The world’s changed around me, and I don’t care for what goes on out there at all.’

‘It’s not all bad, Sir John,’ Leigh said gently, placing her hand over his. She was about to tell him all about her beautiful countryside, the free, enticing nature that surrounded her in Yorkshire, when the door opened and she turned around, her eyes fixed on Nicholas, who was dressed formally, in a charcoal-grey suit, his black hair swept back from his face.

Then she saw that there was someone behind him. A woman. She stepped into the sitting-room and Leigh gasped because she was quite simply the most stunning creature she had ever seen.

She was tall and voluptuous, all the curves in exactly the right places, and she clearly was aware of that fact, because her black dress curved lovingly and tightly around her body, plunging at the front to reveal more of her cleavage than Leigh would have thought possible.

She was only wearing one thick gold chain, but even so there was something expensive about her. Nothing you could quite put your finger on, but the overall package was chic beyond belief. The severely cut short black hair, the large dark eyes, the perfectly pro-portioned face with more than a hint of coldness about it.

Leigh had a sharp, terrible thought: Nicholas obviously doesn’t find her cold. And she obviously was very warm indeed around him because when she glanced at him there was something positively simmering about her.

‘You’re up late, Sir John,’ she said, moving gracefully into the room on very, very high heels. She looked straight at Leigh and threw her a smile which somehow succeeded in being disdainful rather than friendly. Her eyes travelled quickly over her, and registered that there was no threat there.

‘Leigh and Freddie,’ Nicholas introduced, sitting on the sofa and stretching out his long legs in front of him, ‘this is Lady Jessica Thompson.’ He began tugging at his tie, pulling it down until he was able to undo the top button of his shirt.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Leigh said warmly, standing up and stretching out her hand, which Lady Jessica took briefly and then dropped as though finding the exercise thoroughly boring.

Freddie was a little wiser. He said, ‘Hi,’ from the sidelines, but made no effort to shake Lady Jessica’s hand and exited from the party as soon as he possibly could.

Leigh fervently wished that she could do the same, but when she attempted to do so Sir John gestured her back into her seat, and instead eased himself up, rejecting Nicholas’s offer of help.

‘Oh, do help him up, darling,’ Lady Jessica murmured, and was rewarded with something that sounded remarkably like a snort from Sir John. ‘You know how frail your poor grandfather is.’

Sir John winked at Leigh slyly and her lips twitched.

‘Are you ready for bed, Grandfather?’ Nicholas asked, ignoring Lady Jessica’s suggestion.

‘I am now,’ Sir John said.

Nicholas and Sir John both vanished from the room, and Leigh remained perched on the edge of her chair, rooting around in her mind for something to say, although from the look of the other woman there was very little that she was prepared to find interesting in Leigh’s conversation.

‘Nicholas told me all about you,’ Lady Jessica said, crossing her slim legs, and flicking an invisible fleck of dust from her stocking. ‘And I must say, you look so much younger than I expected. My dear, how do you do it? You hardly look a day over fourteen.’

It was all Leigh could do to remember that she was a guest in the house and that she should be polite to her host’s friends.

She gritted her teeth and smiled politely. ‘Really?’ she said evenly. ‘I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment, but I will anyway.’

‘Oh, my dear, of course it’s a compliment!’ Lady Jessica exclaimed, in a voice which left Leigh in no doubt whatsoever that it wasn’t. ‘Though, to be brutally honest, it doesn’t really—how shall I phrase this?—fit in here in London. You look, well, a bit too young and innocent. Anyone would think you worked here, for heaven’s sake, instead of being a guest in the house!’

Leigh’s face was beginning to ache from the effort of smiling politely when she would much rather have thrown her cup of cold coffee into Lady Jessica’s carefully made-up face.

‘My dear—’ Lady Jessica’s eyes opened wide when

there was no response from Leigh ‘—I do hope you don’t think I’m being rude. I only want to help you while you and your brother are here!’

‘We’ll manage just fine,’ Leigh said tightly.

‘Of course you will. Silly little me. I simply wanted to warn you that London isn’t anything like your little village. It’s full of sharks, and it’s always just as well to be prepared.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘How long do you plan on staying anyway?’ Lady Jessica wasn’t looking in her direction, but Leigh knew instinctively that it was a loaded question.

She shrugged and said perversely, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Really?’ This time she did look at Leigh and her black eyes were as hard as little chips of stone.

Leigh nodded.

‘And what do you intend to do about money?’ she asked patronisingly. Surely not live off charity, her voice implied.

‘Nicholas has offered me a job with him.’

She could see that this was unwelcome news to Lady Jessica, but the other woman recovered her composure quickly. ‘That would be Nicholas, of course. Always doing the right thing. I expect he feels so very sorry for you and your brother.’ She smoothed her hands along her legs, and continued, ‘He always did have a soft spot for the underdog, believe it or not.’ She gave a throaty laugh. ‘I suppose it has something to do with his profession.’

Leigh felt the blood rush to her hairline.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ she muttered, getting to her feet, barely able to control the anger raging inside her, ‘I want to say goodnight to Freddie, and I’m still quite tired after the long journey, so if you don’t mind…’ Leigh couldn’t care less whether Lady Jessica minded or not, because she knew that if she stayed there a second more she would explode, and that was the very last thing she wanted to do. That would be to reduce herself to the very show of childish ill temper which the other woman was no doubt hoping for.

Oh, no, she would make a very quiet exit, and then pummel her pillow to death in the privacy of her bedroom.

Underdogs indeed! Was that how Mr High and Mighty Nicholas Reynolds saw them? Had he said so to this awful woman? And what else had he told her? That they were destitute, perhaps?

Lady Jessica uncoiled her elegant body from the sofa and stood up, towering over Leigh in her flat shoes.

‘Of course,’ she murmured in agreement, ‘I suppose this must be quite a late night for you, especially with all the excitement of coming down here.’

Really, Leigh thought, did this silly woman imagine that everyone who lived outside London retired to bed promptly at seven o’clock with their cups of Horlicks?

‘Yes,’ Leigh said, unable to resist a few parting words of sarcasm, ‘I can hardly cope.’

She didn’t know why she bothered because Lady Jessica looked at her blankly, then she said in a slow, careful voice, ‘I shouldn’t be too impressed by everything you see here, my dear. And I particularly shouldn’t be too impressed by Nicholas. I know he’s an extremely attractive man, but you take it from me that the last thing he wants is to be bothered by some wide-eyed innocent becoming infatuated with him.’

Leigh looked at her, speechless. This was the limit.

‘And you can take it from me,’ she answered in a cool, cool voice which masked her icy anger, ‘that the last person in the world I could ever find interesting would be Nicholas Reynolds. I could no more be infatuated with him than I could be with a toad from the bottom of the garden. But thank you so very much for your advice…’ She paused and subjected Lady Jessica to one of her own looks of disdain. ‘I’m sure every word of it was uttered with my welfare at heart.’

She turned away and swept out of the room, her head held high, her fists clenched at her sides.

She almost collided with Nicholas, who was coming down the stairs.

‘Going to bed?’ he asked, staring at her flushed face, but not commenting on it.

‘We country people need our rest,’ Leigh said, her voice taut. ‘We’re not used to late nights!’

Then she continued walking quickly up the staircase, not slowing down until she was outside her bedroom door.

She didn’t think that she had ever been so enraged or so insulted in her whole life. She could feel the anger thudding inside her, with a life of its own.

She was still fuming by the time she was finally under the covers and the lights were switched off, even though she told herself that she was stupid to let anything Lady Jessica said get to her.

She and Nicholas Reynolds richly deserved each other. Both as hard as nails, and ruthless in their own individual ways.

The whole evening, she thought, which had been so enjoyable with Sir John, had been spoilt by Lady Jessica. And, Leigh thought dimly, by Nicholas, because she might as well bracket them together. They were a couple, and that, Lady Jessica had made patently clear, was how she intended it to stay.

Not that she needed to make a point about it. Leigh could have told her for free that Nicholas Reynolds was not her kind of man. If he got under her skin, it was because he was arrogant and so totally out of her league that it was laughable.

And that, she thought dimly as she drifted off to sleep, was precisely how she meant to keep it.

CHAPTER THREE

SIR JOHN, the following morning, was horrified to learn that Leigh intended starting work as soon as possible. He was sitting in front of a plate of toast and honey at the breakfast table and he turned to face his grandson.

‘You never told me that you had offered Leigh a job,’ he accused.

‘Didn’t I?’ Nicholas sipped from his cup of black coffee and glanced down at his watch.

He was dressed in a charcoal suit, his dark hair swept back from his face, and as Leigh tucked into her plateful of bacon and eggs she eyed him surreptitiously across the table.

He really was flawlessly handsome. Not in a rugged way, but with a certain cold hardness that was emphasised by the perfect chiselling of his features.

Freddie was busily eating, paying scant attention to the conversation around him, his mind dwelling, Leigh suspected, on far more trivial things.

‘No, you didn’t,’ Sir John said testily. ‘When did all this take place?’

‘When I went up to Yorkshire,’ Nicholas replied smoothly. His eyes skimmed across to Leigh and she hurriedly looked down at her plate of food. ‘We both felt that it was a good idea for her to work for me,’ he was adding, then he paused for a fraction, as if giving her the opportunity to object, which she didn’t. ‘I’ve been looking for a replacement for Karen for a few weeks, and Leigh didn’t want to feel as though she was accepting charity. Did you?’ The grey eyes fixed on her face.

‘Charity?’ Sir John spluttered. ‘My dear, it’s a delight having you here. Nothing charitable about it at all.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Leigh said awkwardly. ‘But Nicholas is

right—’ in a loose manner of speaking, she added to