Blackmail

He walked across the room, removing a small key from several on a key ring which he returned to his pocket, then unlocked a beautifully carved eighteenth-century desk.

‘Remember this, Lee?’ His voice was light, almost devoid of all emotion, but Lee’s sensitive ears caught the faint note of triumph, her eyes fastening despairingly on the giveaway rose pink notepaper. It had been a present from her godmother on her sixteenth birthday. She had been thrilled with it at the time, but less than six weeks later the entire box had been consigned to the fire.—All but for two single sheets of the paper and one envelope.

‘I wonder what that jealous fiancé of yours would have to say about this?’ Gilles taunted. ‘Even in today’s more lax atmosphere, it still has a certain … something, would you not agree? Or perhaps you would care to refresh your memory?’

Lee shuddered deeply, averting her face, unable to even contemplate looking at the letter, never mind touching it.

‘Alas, your modesty comes too late. Indeed, after reading this I doubt anyone would believe you ever possessed any. I read it again myself this morning, and while the vocabulary and style might leave a certain something to be desired, no one could fault the clarity of the sentiments. I believe I would be right in thinking that not even your beloved fiancé has a letter such as this to treasure from you …’

‘Do you think I’d ever …’ Lee burst out, goaded into answering. But Gilles stopped her.

‘Perhaps not. Indeed I find it hard to equate the cool front you present to the world with the undeniable passion of this letter. Perhaps you would care for me to read you a passage or two, to refresh your mind …’

‘No!’ The word was a low moan, Lee’s hands going up to cover her ears. She was shaking as though held deep in the grip of some fever, her eyes as dark as jade, and empty of everything but the agony she was experiencing.

‘So,’ Gilles murmured, apparently not in the slightest affected by her bowed shoulders and white face. ‘It is agreed. Either you will marry me—temporarily—or I shall send a copy of this delightful love-letter to your fiancé. You have the night to think it over,’ he added coolly. ‘And, Lee, do not try to leave here, for that will surely guarantee your fiancé’s sight of this charming epistle.’

Somehow she managed to get to her feet, to walk past Gilles on legs that trembled convulsively with every step. He stopped her at the door, his eyes raking her pale face without mercy.

‘Strangely enough, you do have a certain air of breeding; a beauty that speaks of cloistered walls and untouched innocence. Be thankful that I know you for what you are and do not seek to take more from you than merely your time. Were you as cool and innocent as you appear, it would be … intriguing, awakening you to love.’

‘To lust, don’t you mean?’ Lee said sharply in disgust. ‘A man like you doesn’t begin to know the meaning of the word love, Gilles.’

‘Then we should make an excellent pair, shouldn’t we?’ he murmured insultingly as he held wide the door.

In her room Lee did not undress. She sat before the window, staring out into the moon-swept gardens, her eyes blinded by the tears cascading down her face as the present ceased to exist and she was once again that sixteen-year-old, trembling on the brink of life, and love.

It had all started as a joke. Aunt Caroline had a neighbour who had a daughter several months older than Lee, and when Lee stayed with her godmother, the two girls normally spent some time together.

With the benefit of hindsight, Lee wondered if Sally too had not had a crush on Gilles, just as she had done herself, but it was far too late now to query the whys and wherefores. The truth was that she had fallen deeply and intensely in love with Gilles, seeing him as a god to be worshipped adoringly from a distance, and Sally had discovered her secret and teased her with it.

That fatal day had been particularly hot. They had been lying in the uncut grass at the end of Aunt Caroline’s long garden. Earlier Gilles had been cutting the lawn, muscles rippling under the smooth brown skin of his back, tanned in far sunnier climes than England’s. Lee had watched him with her heart in her eyes. Soon he would be going back to France, his brief stay over, and she felt as though her heart would break.

As though she had read her mind, Sally had tempted as cunningly as Eve with her apple, ‘I dare you to tell him how you feel.’

Lee had been horrified. She could think of nothing worse than that Gilles, so supercilious and unattainable, should know of her foolhardy impertinence.

‘If you won’t tell him, then I shall,’ Sally had threatened with relish.

Lee had, of course, pleaded with her not to do—a foolish action, she now realised, and at length Sally had reluctantly agreed.

As she had claimed later, with a pert toss of her head, writing a letter was not telling, because she had not actually spoken to Gilles.

She had used her artistic talent to copy Lee’s handwriting, and had signed the letter in Lee’s name, using the very notepaper which Aunt Caroline had given Lee for her birthday. With so much evidence against her, it was small wonder that she had not been able to convince Gilles of her innocence, Lee reflected soberly, but his cruelty and callous disregard of how she had felt was something she would never forget.

Lee had been in her bedroom when Gilles found her. She had blushed the colour of a summer rose when he walked in. He looked so tall and handsome in his white shirt and tapering black trousers. The dark shadow of his tanned, muscular chest beneath the thin silk had triggered off an awareness of him she had not experienced previously, tiny tendrils of fear-cum-excitement curling along her spine; the first innocent awareness of sexual magnetism, but before Gilles left her room the veil of innocence had been torn aside for ever.

His presence in her room momentarily robbed her of speech, but her heart had been in her eyes as she looked up at him.

‘Very appropriate,’ he had sneered, his eyes on her cross-legged pose on her bed, where she had been doing some studying. ‘But I regret, mademoiselle, I have not come here to satisfy your nymphomaniac desires, but to warn you of the outcome were you to express the same sentiments to a man who is not honour bound to protect you from yourself.’

‘I …’

‘Save your breath,’ he had warned her. ‘These prurient outpourings say it all.’

The letter had fluttered down from contemptuous fingers to blur in front of the green eyes that read it with growing disbelief. Some of the words, some of the desires expressed were unfamiliar to her, but those which she did understand were of such a nature as to bring a flush of shame to her cheeks.

‘Oh, but you can’t think … I didn’t write this!’ she had pleaded with him, but his face had remained coldly blank.

‘It is your handwriting, is it not?’ he had demanded imperiously. ‘I have seen it on your schoolbooks—schoolbooks! What would they say, those good nuns who educate you, if they were to read this … this lewd filth?’

‘I didn’t write it!’ Lee protested yet again, but it was no use, he wouldn’t even listen to her, and a schoolgirlish sense of honour prevented her from naming the real culprit. She felt as though she had suddenly slipped into some miry, foul pool, from whose taint she would never be clean again. The way Gilles was looking at her made her shudder with revulsion. She forgot that she had adored him, and felt only fear as she looked up into his condemning face.

‘I have heard my friends talk of girls like you,’ he had said at length, ‘girls who use their lack of years to cloak their lack of innocence!’ He spat out a word in French which she did not catch but was sure was grossly insulting, and then before she could move, reached for her across the brief intervening space and crushed her against his body, so that she was aware all at once of the vast difference between male and female, his hand going to her breast as his lips ground hers back against her teeth until she was crying with the pain, both her body and mind outraged by the assault.

‘I hope you have learned your lesson,’ he said in disgust when he let her go. ‘Although somehow I doubt it. For girls like you the pain and degradation is a vital part of the pleasure, is this not so? Be thankful I do not tell Tante Caroline of this!’

Lee had practically collapsed when he had gone. Her mouth was cut and bleeding, her flesh scorched by the intimate contact with him, and although she had not understood a half of what she had read in the letter she was supposed to have sent, nor the insults he had heaped upon her head, she had set herself the task of learning—a long and arduous process when one’s only source of knowledge was parents, the nuns, and gossip picked up from school friends whose practical knowledge was less than her own.

The incidents had had one salutary effect, though. It had killed for ever any desire for sexual experimentation; no other man was ever going to degrade her with insults such as those Gilles had hurled at her.

She came back to the present with a jerk as someone tapped faintly on her door. She frowned. If it was Gilles there was no way she could face a further attack upon her tonight.

‘Lee, it’s me.’

She sighed with relief as she heard Michael’s brisk familiar tones. Her boss quirked an eyebrow in query as she opened the door.

‘Well, have you been holding out on me, or was the announcement of the engagement as much a shock to you as it was to me?’

‘You know I’m engaged to Drew.’ She longed to be able to pour out her troubles to Michael, but his responsibility was to their employers, and his first charge was to secure the Chauvigny wine for their customers. At twenty-two she was old enough to sort out her own emotional problems, although quite how her present dilemma was to be resolved she had no idea.

‘I take it it was all a plot to get rid of the clinging vine—Louise,’ he elucidated when Lee looked blank. ‘Neat piece of thinking.’

‘Neater than you imagine,’ she told him dryly. ‘Gilles wants us to get married—strictly on a temporary basis, so that he can acquire some land from Louise’s papa, without having to acquire Louise as part of the bargain.’

‘And you being an old friend, he guessed that you would fall in with the idea,’ Michael supplied, totally misunderstanding. ‘Umm, well, I suppose it might work. Drew is likely to be tied up in Canada for twelve months, or so you told me when you applied for your job, and you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the marriage annulled.’

Now, when it was too late, Lee wished she had told Michael the complete truth. But how did you tell a man that you were being blackmailed by a letter you had never written? In not challenging Gilles to do his worst, she had already tacitly admitted that Drew would believe she had written that letter, and why should Michael not do the same?

‘In fact it could work out very nicely for us, altogether,’ Michael commented, not entirely joking. ‘As your husband Gilles would be sure to sell us his lesser quality wine. We’ve won the award for the best supermarket suppliers of wine for the last two years, and I’d like to make it three in a row, which would be almost definite if we get this wine.’

Her vague hope of appealing to Michael for some solution faded; he was, after all, first and foremost, a wine buyer, Lee reminded herself fairly, and as far as he knew what Gilles was proposing was merely an arrangement between friends.

‘Well, Comtesse,’ Michael commented with a grin, ‘I’d better let you get some sleep. When’s the wedding to be, by the way?’

‘I haven’t given Gilles my decision yet,’ Lee protested lightly.

‘Umm—well, I can’t see him accepting it if it isn’t in his favour,’ Michael warned her. ‘Your husband-to-be didn’t strike me as a particularly persuadable man, my dear, so I should tread warily if I were you.’

Lee was already awake when dawn streaked the sky. She washed and dressed, then hurried downstairs. The house might have been deserted. In the courtyard where they had arrived she could hear the soft coo of doves. The clatter of horse’s hooves over the drawbridge warned her that she no longer had the morning to herself, and she shrank back into the shadows as Gilles rode into the yard, astride a huge black stallion. Man and animal made an impressive picture, and Lee held her breath as they walked past her, unwilling to be found watching like a voyeur of two intensely male creatures.

The housekeeper stopped her in the hall, and Lee wondered how such a large woman managed to move so quietly, materialising almost as though by magic. ‘Le petit déjeuner will be served in the small salon,’ she told Lee in repressive tones, her eyes sliding over the slim-fitting rose linen trousers Lee was wearing with a soft cream blouse and a matching rose linen sleeveless tunic.

It was on the tip of Lee’s tongue to deny that she wanted anything to eat, but to do so would be an admission of defeat, and something in the housekeeper’s eyes told her that the woman would dearly love to see her humiliated.

She paused by the stairs, her eyes drawn against her will to the portrait she had noticed before.

‘René de Chauvigny,’ Gilles commented quickly behind her, his hand on the banister over hers, preventing her flight. ‘He was with Napoléon at the sack of Moscow and saved the Emperor’s life. For that he was given these estates, which had belonged to his family before the Revolution, but which had passed into the hands of a second cousin who hated his aristocratic relatives enough to send them to the guillotine without compunction. The man you see portrayed there was little better. He stole a young Russian girl away from her family, ravished her and then married her. The family legend has it that the Chauvigny betrothal ring was part of her dowry. So much did she hate her husband that she locked herself in one of the towers and refused to come out.’

Lee was appalled, contemplating the poor girl’s fate. ‘What happened to her?’

Gilles laughed mirthlessly. ‘If you’re comparing her fate with yours then don’t. My foolish relative made the cardinal error of falling deeply in love with his captive bride, and the story goes that upon learning that he loved her enough to send her back to her parents, the girl relented and came to love him in turn. What is more like it is that she discovered that languishing alone in a tower can be dull and lonely, and decided to make the best of matters. Whatever the truth, she bore my ancestor three sons and two daughters.’

‘She must have been very lonely and frightened.’

As she was frightened, Lee admitted, although not for the same reasons. How could she keep this temporary marriage a secret from Drew? She would have to tell him. If only she had told him about the letter, this would never have happened. But she had seen no reason—or perhaps suspected that he would not understand; that he too would condemn her for something for which she was not to blame. For the first time Lee wondered exactly how much value she put upon Drew’s trust, if she was already doubting that it existed, and wasn’t mutual trust, after all, a very important cornerstone for any marriage?

‘Do not try to pretend that you are frightened,’ Gilles taunted. ‘Or is that why you hid from me in the shadows of the courtyard?’

So he had seen her! Lee turned, her eyes already darkening angrily, and found herself trapped against the banister, the warm, male smell of him invading her nostrils; his chest darkly shadowed beneath the thin silk shirt. She ought to have been repelled by such maleness. She preferred fair-haired men, men whose bodies were not so openly masculine, and yet some deeply buried nerve responded to the sight of his bared chest and long tanned throat in a way that made her lips part in soft dismay, her eyes clouding in disgust at her own reaction. Had Gilles been right after all? Was she the sort of woman who responded only to the savage maleness of men?

‘Come, I have not yet had your answer; not yet heard from those sweet untouched lips that you will be my bride,’ Gilles jeered. ‘But then we both know that you will, don’t we, Lee?’

‘I don’t have any choice in the matter. If I don’t …’

‘I will acquaint your fiancé with exactly what sort of female he is introducing to his correct Puritan family. Does he not care about all the men who have passed through your life, Lee, or is he so besotted that he has convinced himself that none of them matter?’

‘Why should they?’ Lee lashed back furiously. ‘Not all men think it essential to find themselves an untouched virgin for a wife. Would you respect the academic whose chooses only to debate with those of inferior intellect? Or perhaps that’s why men like virgins; it prevents women from discovering their shortcomings!’

‘You wouldn’t by any chance be issuing me a challenge, would you, Lee?’ Gilles probed softly. ‘Your body is very desirable—more desirable than I remember.’ He studied her with insulting thoroughness; her soft breasts, outlined by the creamy fabric of her blouse; her narrow hips and long, slim legs. ‘But no, I have no wish to be landed with you permanently, although any allegations you might make would hardly stand up in a court of law. Still, it might be as well were you to sign a document stipulating that this marriage will last only so long as I decree.’

His arrogance took Lee’s breath away.

‘You can’t believe I would want to prolong it?’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘I can see no means of escaping from it, and much as it goes against the grain I shall have to agree, but make no mistake about it, Gilles. I’m not sixteen years old any longer. I’m not impressed by your chauvinistic machismo …’

‘Marriage is a very intimate undertaking, and who is to say what you will and will not feel?’

‘I love Drew, and I hate you. This farce of a marriage can’t be over soon enough for me. And I should like my engagement ring back.’

‘You shall have it—when our marriage is dissolved. For now, you will wear this.’

Lee gaped at the emerald ring he was sliding on to her finger. It was huge, glittering green fire through the darkness of the hallway, and as he slid it on to her finger Lee heard Gilles exclaim triumphantly, ‘As I thought! It matches your eyes exactly. So, now we are betrothed.’ And before Lee could stop him, his hands had left the banister to grasp the soft flesh of her upper arms, his dark head blotting out what little light there was as his lips grazed hers in a kiss which was more a stamp of possession than any tender gesture.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY were married three days later in Paris. Michael went with them and attended the brief ceremony. Lee knew it was irrational to feel so bereft of family and friends. After all, it was not a ‘real’ marriage. She could scarcely have asked her parents to be present, but it would have been nice to have Barbara and Pat there for moral support. The other two girls, in addition to being her flatmates, also worked for Westbury’s, but in different departments, and the three of them got on exceptionally well. The Personnel Officer had suggested that Lee might like to share with them, when she explained that she had no accommodation in London. The previous member of the trio whom Lee was replacing had gone to work abroad, and the arrangement had worked out very well. She would have to write to them and let them know that it would be some time before she returned, and also to warn them about sending on her mail. They were good friends, but Lee couldn’t help wondering what they would make of the situation. She could hardly not tell them about the marriage when Michael had witnessed it, but she could ask them to be discreet.

After the ceremony Gilles dismissed Michael with promises to think carefully about supplying Westbury’s with wine, and as Lee saw Michael’s taxi disappearing towards the airport, she felt as though she were saying goodbye to her last friend.

Why Gilles had chosen Paris for their marriage Lee did not know, unless it was merely that he wished to avoid the speculation of a local wedding, although there was bound to be that, surely, when he returned to the château with his bride?

They had been married in the morning, and now it was afternoon and she was a wife of three hours, although Lee reflected that she doubted that she would ever be able to think of Gilles as her husband. Her enemy and tormentor perhaps; but her husband—never!

They had a palatial suite of rooms in an exclusive hotel, and when they returned there after the ceremony, Lee took the precaution of checking that the communicating door between the bedrooms was locked, before stepping out of the suit she had been married in, and having a brief shower.

The blue linen suit was attractive enough, but it was a far cry from the virginal white she had every right—and desire—to wear, although of course she would wear that for Drew. But somehow it wouldn’t feel the same; the ceremony would be besmirched by the memory of today; of the curt words in French; the touch of Gilles’ hand as he guided hers in the register before tears had blinded her when she tried to write her name.

‘Lee, open this door!’

The cold voice demanded admittance. She dressed hurriedly, staring at the locked door.

‘Open it, Lee, or I shall ask the maid to come up with the pass-key.’

The threat decided her. She crossed the dove-grey carpet and unlocked the door. Gilles stood there, wearing the suit he had worn for the marriage ceremony, a soft, pale grey wool, impeccably tailored, and as he strode into her bedroom and removed the jacket, dropping it carelessly on her bed, she saw the name ‘Pierre Cardin’ stitched neatly inside.

‘Couldn’t you have worn anything better than that?’ His eyes swept contemptuously over her suit.

Lee refused to feel threatened by the way he was prowling round her room, like a hungry panther waiting for his next meal.

‘I didn’t come prepared for a wedding.’

‘You need new clothes.’

Lee stared at him resentfully.

‘This afternoon we shall visit some of the couture houses and see if something can be organised.’ Lee opened her mouth to protest, but was forestalled. ‘As my wife you will have a position to maintain. After the vintage I entertain the buyers. As my wife and hostess you will be expected to mingle with women whose clothes and jewels come only from the finest houses.’

‘The vintage?’ Lee went white with dismay. ‘But that’s six months away!’

‘So?’ Gilles was very cool. ‘Is six months of your life too high a price to pay for your fiancé’s peace of mind, and my silence? By then Louise will have turned her attentions in other directions.’

‘And you will be able to search for a dutiful, virginal bride in peace.’

Gilles inclined his head.

‘You appear to take an inordinate amount of interest in the chastity of my eventual bride, but as she will be the mother of my children, it is only natural that I should wish her to be pure and untainted.’

‘Unlike her husband.’

‘Silence! You go too far! Do you goad me because I refuse to join you in the gutter? Be careful that I do not teach you the real meaning of degradation!’

NEVER HAD she seen so many breathtakingly elegant clothes, Lee thought in a daze. She and Gilles had been sitting on the dainty gilt chairs in this pale pink and dove grey salon for half an hour while model after model paraded in front of them, and so far Gilles had not said one word, apart from introducing Lee to the black-gowned vendeuse as his bride.

‘My wife is young and has had a convent education,’ he said at last, ‘and I should like to see her dressed accordingly.’

The vendeuse’s brow cleared instantly.

‘We have an entire trousseau designed for a young South American girl, which is no longer required. An elopement, you understand, about which the family do not wish to talk. They are very proud and the girl had been reared from birth for the grand mariage

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