A Treacherous Seduction

A failed romance and the public humiliation of other people knowing about it, painful though it had been, had at least only damaged her own life. What had happened now had the potential to humiliate not just her but Kelly as well.

They had built up a very good reputation in the town since opening their crystal and china shop. Because they were a small outlet they concentrated on matching their customers’ needs and, where they could, innovatively anticipating them.

Kelly had already told her enthusiastically that they had several very good customers, with celebrations of one sort or another coming up, to whom she had mentioned the fact that the purchase of some very special and individual stemware might be an excellent idea.

One customer in particular had been talking excitedly to Beth only the previous week about purchasing three dozen of the crimson Czech champagne flutes.

‘It’s our silver wedding this year—two days before Christmas—the whole family will be coming to us and it would be wonderful to have the glasses for then. I’m having a large family dinner party and we could use them for the champagne cocktails I’m planning to do, and for the toasts…’

‘Oh, yes, they would be perfect,’ Beth had enthused, already in her mind’s eye seeing them on her customer’s antique dining table, the delicacy of the fragile glass and the richness of the colour emphasised by the candlelight.

There was no way Candida Lewis-Benton would want to order what she, Beth, had just unpacked. No way at all.

Valiantly Beth fought the temptation to burst into tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and, as she had thought she had proved when she was in Prague, she could be determined and self-reliant and, yes, proud too. She could earn her own self-respect, and never mind what certain other people thought of her—certain other not-to-be-thought-of, or thought about, arrogant, overbearing men who thought they knew her better than she knew herself. Who wanted to take over her life and her, who thought they could lie to her and get her to acquiesce to whatever they wanted for her by claiming that they loved her. And she had known, of course, just what it was he had wanted. Well, she had at least shown him just how easily she had seen through his duplicitous behaviour.

‘Beth, I know it’s probably too soon to tell you this, but I…I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he had told her that afternoon in the pouring rain on the Charles Bridge.

‘No, that’s not possible,’ she had replied hardily.

‘If that wasn’t love, then just exactly what was it?’ he had demanded on another occasion, and he had touched his fingertips to her lips, still swollen and soft from the passion they had just exchanged.

She had answered boldly, ‘It was just lust—just sex, that’s all…’ And she had gone on to prove it to him.

‘Don’t be tempted into falling for the promises these street traders make to you,’ he had warned her more than once. ‘They’re simply pawns being used by organised crime to dupe tourists.’

She knew quite well what he’d been after. What he’d been after was exactly what Julian had been after—her money. Only Alex Andrews had wanted her body thrown in as well.

At least sexually Julian had done the decent thing, so to speak.

‘I don’t want us to be lovers…not yet…not until you’re wearing my ring,’ Julian had whispered passionately to her the night he had declared his love—a love he had not felt for her at all, as it later transpired.

It seemed almost laughable now that she had ever agonised so much over his perfidy. Perhaps the acute sense of self-loathing she had experienced over his betrayal and accusations had had more to do with the humiliation he had made her suffer rather than a genuinely broken heart.

Certainly, whenever she thought about him now, which was rarely, it was without any emotion whatsoever other than a distant sense of amazement that she could ever have considered him attractive. She had gone to Prague determined to prove to herself that she was not the emotional fool Julian had painted her as being, vowing that never again would she let herself be conned into believing that when a man told her he loved her he meant it.

She had come back from Prague feeling extremely proud of herself, and equally proud of the new, hardheaded, hard-hearted Beth she had turned herself into. If men wanted to lie to her and betray her, then she would learn to play them at their own game. She was an adult woman, with all that that encompassed. Mistrusting men as emotional partners didn’t mean that she had to deny herself the pleasure of finding them sexually desirable. The days were gone when a woman had to deny the sexual side of her nature. The days had gone, too, when a woman had to convince herself that she loved a man and that, even more important, he loved and respected her before she could give herself to him physically.

She had been living in the Dark Ages, Beth had told herself—living her life by an outdated set of rules and an even more outdated set of moral beliefs. An outdated and far too idealistic set of moral beliefs. Well, all that was over now. Now she had finally joined the real world, the world of harsh realities. Now she was a fully paid-up member of modern society, and if men, or rather a certain man, did not like the things she did or the things she said, then tough. The right to enjoy sex for sex’s sake was no longer a purely male province, and if Alex Andrews didn’t like that fact then it was just too bad.

Had he really thought she was going to fall for those lies he had told her? All those ridiculous claims he had made about falling in love with her the moment he first saw her?

Prague had been surprisingly full of people like him. British-and American-born in the main, students, most of them, or so they’d claimed, taking a year out to ‘do’ areas previously off limits to them. Some had family connections in the Czech Republic, some not, but all of them had possessed a common ingredient; all of them, to some extent, had been living off their wits, using their skills as linguists, charming a living out of gullible tourists. In Beth’s newly cynical opinion they’d been only one step removed from the high-pressure-sales types hawking time-share apartments, who had made certain holiday areas of the continent notorious until their governments had taken steps to control their activities.

True, Alex Andrews had alluded to the very different lifestyle he claimed to lead in Britain. According to his own description of himself he was a university lecturer in Modern History at a prestigious university college who was taking a sabbatical to spend some time with the Czech side of his family, but Beth hadn’t believed him. Why should she have? Julian Cox had claimed to have a highly profitable and respectable financial empire—he had turned out to be little more than a fraudster who had somehow managed to keep himself one step in front of actually breaking the law. It had been plain to Beth from the first moment she had met him that Alex Andrews was very much the same type.

Too good-looking, too self-confident…too sure that she’d been going to fall into his arms just because he claimed he was desperate to have her there. She wasn’t that much of a fool. She might have fallen for that kind of line once, but she certainly hadn’t been about to fall for it a second time.

Oh, yes, she had escaped making a fool of herself over Alex Andrews, but she hadn’t been able to prevent herself from…

Numbly Beth studied the stemware she had unpacked. There was a sick, shaky feeling in her stomach, a sensation of mingled panic and dread. It had to be a mistake…It had to be.

She simply couldn’t face telling Dee, Anna and Kelly that she had made a spectacularly bad error of judgement—again.

And she certainly couldn’t face telling her bank manager. She had really gone out on a limb with the loan she had persuaded him to give her—and she it.

Anxiously she got to her feet. The first thing she needed to do was to ring the factory.

She was just about to dial the number on her invoice when the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver, she heard her partner Kelly’s voice.

‘Beth, you’re going to hate me for this…’ Kelly paused. ‘Brough is having to go to Singapore on business and he wants me to go with him. It could mean us being away for over a month—he says that since we would be almost halfway there anyway we might as well also fly on to Australia and spend a couple of weeks with my cousin and her family.

‘I know what you must be thinking. We’re coming up for our busiest time and I’ve only been working a couple of days a week lately anyway. If you’d rather I didn’t go I’ll understand…After all, the business…’

Beth thought quickly. It was true that she would find it hard to manage for what sounded as though it was going to be close on five or six weeks without her partner, but if Kelly was away then at least it meant that Beth wouldn’t have to tell her about the stemware. Cravenly Beth admitted to herself that, given the opportunity to do so, she would much rather sort out everything discreetly and privately without involving anyone else—even if that meant getting someone in part-time to help with the shop whilst Kelly was away.

‘Beth? Are you still there?’ she heard Kelly asking her anxiously.

‘Yes. Yes, I’m here,’ Beth confirmed.

Taking a deep breath, she told her friend and partner as cheerfully as she could, ‘Of course you must go, Kelly. It would be silly to miss out on that kind of opportunity.’

‘Mmm…and I would miss Brough dreadfully. But I do feel guilty about leaving you, Beth, especially at this time of the year. I know how busy you’re going to be, what with the new stemware…Oh…did it arrive? Is it as wonderful as you remembered? Perhaps I could come down…?’

‘No. No…there’s no need for that,’ Beth assured her quickly.

‘Well, if you really don’t mind,’ Kelly said gratefully. ‘Brough did say that we could drive over to Farrow today. I’ve been given the address of someone who works there who makes the most wonderful traditional hand-crafted furniture. He’s got one of those purpose-built workshops in the Old Hall Stables there. It’s been turned into a small craft village. But if you need me at the shop…’

‘No. I’m fine,’ Beth assured her.

‘When are you putting the new stemware stuff out?’ Kelly asked enthusiastically. ‘I’m dying to see it…’

Beth tensed.

‘Er…I haven’t decided yet…’

‘Oh. I thought you said you were going to do it as soon as it arrived,’ Kelly protested, plainly confused.

‘Yes. I was. But…but I want to get a few more ideas yet; we’ve still got nearly a fortnight before the town’s Christmas lights and decorations are in place, and I thought it would be a good idea to time the window to fit in with that…’

‘Oh, yes, that’s a wonderful idea,’ Kelly enthused. ‘We could even have a small wine and nibbles do for our customers…perhaps have the food and the drinks the same colour as the glass…’

‘Er…yes. Yes…that would be wonderful,’ Beth agreed, hoping that her voice didn’t sound as lacking in enthusiasm to her friend as it did to herself.

‘Oh, but I’ve just realised; we’ll be leaving at the end of the week so I shall miss it,’ Kelly complained. ‘Still, we’ll definitely be back for Christmas; that’s something I have insisted on to Brough, and fortunately he agrees with me that our first Christmas should be spent here at home…together…Which reminds me. Please save me a set of those wonderful glasses, Beth.’

‘Er, yes, I shall,’ Beth confirmed.

With luck, she would be able to get the mistake in her order reversed and the correct stemware sent out to her whilst Kelly was away. Whilst Kelly was away, yes, but would she get it in time for the all-important Christmas market? When selecting the pieces for her order she had deliberately focused on the colours she deemed to be the most saleable for the Christmas season; deep red, rich blue, fir-tree green, all in the lavishly baroque style and decorated with gold leaf. Beautiful though the pieces were, she doubted that they would have the same sales appeal in the spring and summer months.