Heart On Fire Part 14

Claudia tried to draw back~ her head, and his hand slid round, stroking her hair, to clamp the back of her head and make sure she could not pull far away from him.

"You're beautiful, you know that, don't you?" he said softly, and thenhe kissed her with a pa.s.sion which swallo. v~ed her like a great wave,so that she drowned in it, unable to see or hear anything else,clinging to him to save herself, her arms going round his neck, holdingon to him tightly, her body swaying towards him like tendrils of weedflowing with a tide they, could not resist.

When he stopped kissing her it was like being broken out of a trance; she was disorientated, confused, her colour high, her breathingffapid.

Ellis was breathing fast, too, his eyes like burnished steel, brilliant and dangerous. He r~m his fingers over her red-gold hair, smiling crookedly.

"A pity I have to be off to Germany tonight. When I get back, can wehave dinner in town? I'll ring and make a firm date when I know whatI'm doing."

"I only go into town at weekends," she said huskily, and Ellis gave her an amused smile.

"Oh, I think we can persuade my father to let you have an evening off to meet me." He glanced at his watch and sighed, releasing her and sitting up.

"We had better get back, I suppose! He must be off the phone by now.

Let's hope he managed to work something out. " He got to his feet and Claudia stood up, too, a little weak at the knees but trying to hide it.

"I thought you liked to be in the centre of London so that you could get to auditions if one came up suddenly?" Ellis asked as they walked back to the house. "Isn't it a problem for you, living out here?"

"I had a morning off one week for an audition," she said, shrugging.

"But nothing interesting has come up since I started work here. I've managed to get weekend appointments with my voice coach-on Sat.u.r.day mornings. And I go to the gym at weekends, too, and keep up my exercises on my own here before I go down to breakfast."

He gave her a thoughtful look.

"You went to drama school, I remember--did you ever have any success?"

Slightly defensive, she gave him the highlights of her career, then in a fit of honesty said, "I know I'm not ever going to be a star, but I love acting."

"You should aim for. television or film," Ellis said, considering her face and figure with amused eyes. "You must be very photogenic. Have you got an agent? He isn't doing much of a job, is he?"

"He has a lot of much more successful clients," she wryly said.

They went back into the house, but, before they rejoined Quentin, Ellis said, "When we meet in London, would you like me to get tickets for a play, instead of just having dinner? We could have supper after the theatre."

"Yes, please," she said eagerly.

"I used to go to the theatre several times a week, at least, until I started working out here. I do miss it."

1 . ~A.

"OK," Ellis said, turning towards the door of his father's study, but before he opened it they both heard the front doorbell ringing, and Celeste grumblingly going to open it.

Stephen? thought Claudia ruefully, wis.h.i.+ng now that she had not rung him in such a panic and asked him to come down here. Her wild visions of what Ellis might plan to do to her had not come true, thank.

heavens.

Ellis gave her a sideways glance, lifting one black brow.

"Can this be my dear brother. Come hotfoot from London to rescue you from me?"

The mockery in his voice made her go pink, laughing.

Then they heard the new arrival's voice, and realised that it was not Stephen. Claudia stopped laughing. She knew that voice. It was Estelle's.

Shooting a hurried look at Ellis, she saw that his face had gone blank, his lids half down over his grey eyes. Had he asked Estelle to join him here?

He must have done. Why else would she be here? She hadn't visited Quentin before, she couldn't have come to see him.

She was here to see Ellis, which meant that he had wanted to see her.

~ Celeste appeared, mouth rigid. ~"Ellis, you have a visitor," she began, but Estelle was right behind her, and did not wait for Celeste to finish.

She flew past the housekeeper and stood on tiptoe to kiss Ellis on his mouth.

"Oh, darling, I've missed you... It seems years since I saw you..."

Claudia was sick with jealousy. She tried to look away but couldn't; she 'had to know the truth. She watched them with strained attention, trying to work out how Ellis really felt about Estelle, but it was impossible to tell because he knew she was there, watching him.

It was easy to guess how Estelle felt about him. She made no secret of it, kissing him lingeringly, her arms clasping his neck, her body leaning towards him in yearning. She couldn't have been more obvious if she had tried, Claudia thought sourly.

Ellis deftly managed to free himself without difficulty-Claudia wasn't even sure how he had done it.

One minute he was wreathed with Estelle--the next he wasn't. Cleverly done, she thought. How often has he used that trick? She mustn't forget that there had been plenty of other women before her. Did she want to be one in a long line? How many would there be after her?

That was the real question, and she felt a black depression coming down on her as she faced that one. She couldn't trust him to be faithful, could she?

n.o.body could. It would be pure crazy folly if you did.

Estelle didn't seem worried by the way he had wriggled out of her grasp, though. She went on smiling at him, smoothing down her brunette hair with one slim, pale hand. She was as elegant and expensively dressed as she had been when Claudia met her in London.

Today, she wore a flame-red wool dress, under a black mink jacket, and looked a million dollars. Easy for her, Claudia thought, when her father was worth millions. Try looking that way on an ordinary working girl's salary!

"I know you said you'd see me at the airport tonight, but I couldn't wait,"

Estelle said throatily.

"I had to see you sooner than that.

You don't mind, do you, darling? I haven't seen your father forages, I thought it would be nice to visit him, while you're here, and then we could drive back to London together 134 to catch our plane. I suppose I shouldn't say this, but I'm hoping it is going to take you days to fix this German problem, and we can have lots of time together before you have to dash off to Tokyo again. " She was going to Germany with him, Claudia thought, the pain of the realisation almost more than she could bear. He had come down here and made love to her, made a date with her to meet in London when he got back, and all the time he had had another woman waiting for him in London, and was planning to take her with him on his business trip.

Ellis shot her a look, frowning, and she held herself stiffly, trying to hide the cold whiteness of her skin, the shadowed look in the green eyes. He had made a fool of her, lied to her, but somehow she would retrieve some sort of dignity--she would not let him see just how badly he had hurt her.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

ESTELLE had noticed that she didn't have Ellis's attention; she looked round to see what he was staring at, and saw Claudia with an audible intake of breath, turning a rather nasty shade of red, which, Claudia smugly felt, did not suit her, especially in that dress!

"What's she doing here?" she demanded, looking Claudia up and down very rudely.

"She works for my father," Ellis said in a clipped way, deliberately offhand.

"You got her a job with your father?" Estelle apparently could not believe her ears. Had she ordered him not to see Claudia again?

"No, I didn't!" Ellis said irritably.

"It was my brother Stephen's idea; he knew my father needed a secretary, and he introduced her to Papa. I only found out about it today."

"Do you expect me to believe that?" Estelle shrilled, and Ellis flinched, looking grim, and yet hunted at the same time. Estelle probably had that effect on a lot of people, but Claudia felt no sympathy for his plight. He wouldn't stand up to Estelle, she was certain of that, and she decided that she was not waiting around to hear him apologise for her presence in his father's house.

She was both angry and miserable, and afraid that at any minute she was going to burst into tears, so she walked away, very fast, and went into his father's study where the old man was just putting down the telephone. He turned his head, smiling, knowing her 135 136 step by now. His hearing was amazingly acute, and growing more so every day, she felt.

"Ah! Claudia! Where is my son? I have much news for him." His accent was decidedly German today, she noted, after that long discussion on the phone.

She was able to find a faint, weary amus.e.m.e.nt in that. He was vocally a chameleon, taking on the accent of any language he had just been speaking.

At times she was convinced he had been born English, at others that he was a French native, and his Italian was amazing, too, but then she knew he had worked all over Europe.

Stephen said that Ellis had inherited his father's linguistic talent, and Stephen himself certainly spoke the main European languages fluently. They had had the advantage of being taught by special tutors from an early age, of course, but still she admired their ability, and envied it. When she was living in central London again, she was determined to start taking lessons at a language school, and broaden her linguistic horizon.

"Your son is talking to a friend outside, he should be here soon,"

she said husk fly She tried hard to sound perfectly normal, but Quentin must have picked up something in her voice, because he frowned.

"Is anything wrong, Claudia?"

"No, nothing, I'm fine," she said hurriedly.

"I finished work on your tape, you know. Have you got anything else for me to do, or don't you need me while your son is here this morning?"

She was hoping that he would tell her to take the morning offmshe wanted to get away and stay away until Ellis had left--but she spoke very quietly, because she didn't want Ellis to hear her ask his father to let her go, especially as she could hear them, now, 137 right outside the door, could hear Estelle talking fast and furiously in that light, high voice, scolding Ellis, who listened in silence.

"Who is that angry woman?" Quentin asked uncertainly. "I don't recoguise the voice," He listened in frowning disbelief for a while, trying to place it, then said, "It isn't Estelle Harding, is it? I think it is! Why is she lecturing Ellis like that?"

No doubt, thought Claudia grimly, she is ordering him to talk to his father about me, tell him that I'm not a suitable secretary, I'm insolent and I don't just melt into the wallpaper, as a good secretary should! Ellis wasn't arguing over that; he wasn't saying anything, he was just listening, letting Estelle do all the talking.

That might indicate discretion, or cow-ardicemor perhaps he would rather she didn't work for his father, for his own reasons?

Maybe I'm going to get fired again, thought Claudia defiantly, but determined not to let it break her heart,. Ellis hadn't done anything about getting her back her job at the hotel, had he? If he let his girlfriend engineer her dismissal from this job, he was beneath contempt.

She was fond of Quentin, and she liked living in the flat over the boathouse; it was wonderful to have so much room to herself, to be so independent, and she liked being by the river and watching it in all its changing moods, but at this precise moment she longed to be back in central London, with her own family around her, supporting her.

She wanted to escape from this emotional minefield, where at any moment something might blow up in her face and wreck her life. All she wanted was to find some sort of peace, achieve stability, stop see-sawing up and down between such extremes of mood. The last time 138 she could remember feeling like this was as a teenager, and she had no wish to go back to that disturbed and disturbing period of her life. She had thought that all that was far behind her, but here it was again, like a recurring nightmare.

"I suppose it is a lovers' tiff," Quentin thought aloud, pulling a droll face.

"She scolds him as if they had been married twenty years!

Ellis is not going to marry her, is he? " Claudia pretended not to have heard that question. She sat down at her own desk and switched on her screen, pretended to be studying the text she had keyed in earlier.

"Shall I read this new pa.s.sage to you?" she asked Quentin, who looked confused.

"What?" He was still eavesdropping on his son's quarrel with Estelle.

"The tape you left me... I've put it on disk--you may want to change a few things," shall I read it out? " "Ah, yes. Good, yes, do that." Quentin put his fingertips together, forehead wrinkling as he listened to her reading.

"Yes, that sounds good, don't you agree?"

"Definitely," she said, half distracted by the sounds outside the door.

"Then I won't revise it. Add it to the rest of the material." Quentin chuckled.

"The ma.n.u.script must be growing quite thick by now."

"It is," she agreed, picking up the pages and weighing them in her hands, then she stiffened as the door opened and Ellis came into the room alone.

Quentin picked up his arrival at once, of course, turning to gaze blindly in that direction.

"Ellis?"

Ellis didn't answer for a second, staring instead at her, across the study, grey eyes insistently trying to 139 make her look back at him,

but Claudia kept on staring at the screen in front of her, pretending to be absorbed.

"Who is it? Ellis, is that you?" Quentin queried and his son had to

answer him, his voice slow and abstracted."Yes, Papa.""Who have you been talking to out there? It wasn't Estelle Harding?""Yes, it was, Papa." Ellis still hadn't. taken his eyes from Claudia, and she was still ignoring him.