A Suitable Husband

‘You’ve told Edwina I was coming?’ Jermaine asked as he escorted her along the hall.

She was looking at him as he glanced to her and shook his head. ‘I thought we’d give her a nice surprise,’ he answered blandly, so blandly that for a fleeting moment Jermaine had an uncanny kind of feeling that this clever man staring down at her so mildly had seen through Edwina. Had seen through her and was on to all her wiles.

Oh, heavens! Though before she could blush from the embarrassment of thinking that Edwina was making a fool of herself, Jermaine countered any such idea. Men fell for Edwina like ninepins. Lukas Tavinor might be clever in business, but he was a man, wasn’t he? Besides which there was nothing in his expression now to so much as hint that he knew Edwina was playing to the gallery.

Then he was opening the drawing room door. How cosy! There was Edwina, feet up on the sofa. There was Ash…Though, come to think of it, Jermaine had seen him looking happier.

‘Jermaine!’

It was not her sister who exclaimed her name but Ash, as he beamed a smile at her and hurried over. ‘You came!’ he cried, and appeared so pleased to see her he bent as if to kiss her.

Jermaine gave him a frosty look for his trouble, but as she pulled back of out his reach she caught his elder brother speculatively observing them. She met Lukas’s gaze full-on, and let him have a helping of frost too.

She wanted out of there! None of these people were doing her blood pressure the slightest good. One way and another she seemed to have been in a permanent state of anger ever since Ash’s phone call three days ago. Since his brother had joined in the act, two days ago, she had gone from mere vexation to a constant state of uproar!

Jermaine decided to ignore both men and approached the sofa where her sister was so prettily draped. Edwina was too good an actress to show her displeasure while the others were in the room, but Jermaine knew her well enough not to miss the hostility in her ‘What are you doing here?’

‘How are you feeling?’ Jermaine asked, hating the role she was forced to play—but it was that or show her sister up as the fraud she was.

‘Oh, I’m much, much better.’ Edwina smiled fragilely.

‘Edwina’s been so brave.’ Ash joined them to look down at his new love.

There didn’t seem much of an answer to that, Jermaine fumed. But she’d already had enough of perjuring her soul by asking Edwina how she was. Jermaine turned and saw that Lukas Tavinor was still silently observing the tableau. Though, since his expression was inscrutable, what he was thinking was anybody’s guess.

‘May I use your phone?’ she asked, tilting her chin a proud fraction. It was humiliating having to come here and start play-acting—but it was all his fault. If he hadn’t deliberately gone to see her parents…

‘There’s a phone in the hall,’ he replied evenly, and went with her from the drawing room and out into the hall. Though his tone had toughened, she noticed, when, as she looked about the wide and splendid hall for a phone, he abruptly challenged, ‘Won’t the boyfriend wait?’

Get him! ‘For ever, if need be,’ she answered snootily—like she was going to tell him she’d been dumped by her boyfriend, his brother, in favour of her sister.

‘You’ve only just got here—did you promise to ring him as soon as you’d landed?’

Jermaine stared at him, her lovely violet eyes going wide. What was this? ‘Thanks to you, and your colossal cheek in alarming my parents, I need to ring them to tell them that Edwina isn’t as badly hurt as you must have made out to them,’ she hissed.

He smiled. She hated him. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make your call in the privacy of my study?’ he offered, and was leading the way before she could hit him.

She hadn’t seen him smile before, though. And, while she was still angry with him, she had to admit there was something fairly shattering about him when he smiled. His smile seemed infectious, somehow. Not that she was going to smile back—perish the thought.

Nor was she smiling a minute later when—so much for privacy—he closed his study door—but with him on the inside. ‘Thank you,’ Jermaine said nicely. He didn’t budge. She looked pointedly at the door—he seemed to find his turned-off computer of interest. Jermaine turned her back on him, picked up the phone and dialled. Her father answered straight away. ‘Edwina’s fine,’ she told him, knowing that that was what he wanted to hear in preference to anything else.

‘You’ve seen her?’

‘I’m with her now.’

‘Can’t she come to the phone herself?’

‘Well, I’m not actually in the same room,’ Jermaine explained. ‘I’m at Highfield, Ash’s place.’ She was aware of the elder Tavinor breathing down her neck and, though when she never, ever got flustered, she started feeling all edgy inside. ‘Well, it’s his brother Lukas’s place, actually,’ she corrected.

‘That would be the man who came to see us this morning?’

‘He shouldn’t have,’ she rallied. If he was staying to hear her private conversation, he could hear this as well. ‘He had no right at all to call and to worry you so. He…’

‘He had every right, Jermaine,’ her father retorted sharply. ‘I’ve since spoken to Ash, and he tells me you knew on Monday that your sister was injured. You should have told me straight away!’

‘But…’

‘It was you who had no right not to tell us. Your mother said you’d spoken to Edwina, but I thought it was only today you’d spoken to her. Ash Tavinor told me you’ve known she was injured since Monday.’

Jermaine was not very happy at being taken to task by her father, and, had not Lukas Tavinor been listening to her every word, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have told her father that his dear Edwina was only pretending to have hurt her back for her own ends. He’d be furious with his younger daughter, of course, but, while he had never been able to see any wrong in Edwina, surely he couldn’t be so completely blinkered to some of his eldest daughter’s less loveable traits?

But Lukas Tavinor was listening and all Jermaine could think of to say to her father was, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So you should be. Ash wants you to stay with Edwina—just mind that you do.’

Jermaine sighed. She was used to coming second where her father and Edwina were concerned. ‘I’ll get Edwina to ring you tomorrow,’ she promised.

‘Not if it’s going to cause her pain to come to the phone. You can ring me to tell me what sort of a night she’s had.’

‘Give my love to Mum,’ Jermaine said quietly and put the phone down ready to strangle her sister—and not feeling too well disposed to the man who strolled into her line of vision either. ‘I hate you,’ she snapped, tossing him a belligerent look.

‘That makes a change,’ he replied urbanely. ‘Women are usually falling at my feet.’ Jermaine added seething dislike to her look. He grinned. ‘Did your father give you hell?’

‘Thanks to you.’

‘You should have come when you were called,’ Lukas replied, totally unabashed.

‘I came, I saw,’ she answered shortly, ‘and I’m going home.’

‘Oh, your father wouldn’t like that,’ Lukas mocked.

‘You’d tell him?’ she questioned, staring at him in dis-belief.

‘You bet I would.’

What a swine the man was. ‘Why?’ she asked angrily.

‘Why?’ He shrugged. ‘Because Mrs Dobson, my treasure of a housekeeper, is getting on in years, that’s why. Because she gets upset at the thought of retiring and wants to keep on working, I wouldn’t dream of letting her go. That doesn’t mean I want her running upstairs ten times a day to attend to your sister when that job is so obviously yours—that’s why!’

Jermaine came close then to telling him that there was nothing wrong with her sister. But he wouldn’t believe her anyhow, would again think her hard and unfeeling and prepared to blacken her injured sister’s name rather than stay and do her sisterly duty. Jermaine felt then that she had taken enough. But, having come near to denouncing her sister and letting them all go to the devil, she discovered that family loyalty was still stronger than her own fed-up feelings. Because she couldn’t do it. Instead, her tone firm and unequivocal, she told him bluntly, ‘I’ll stay tonight. But I’m going to work—at my office—in the morning.’

Grey eyes stared hard into her wide violet eyes. Then he smiled, a gentle smile, and her insides acted most peculiarly. ‘Allow me to show you to your room,’ he suggested quietly.

That gentle smile, his quiet manner, seemed to have the strangest effect on her. Because, instead of mutinying some more that her plans appeared to be getting away from her, Jermaine found she was standing meekly by while he went out into the foulness of that stormy night and collected her overnight bag from her car.

Unprotesting, she went up the wide wooden staircase with him, turning right and going along the landing with him to a room at the far end. He opened the door to a beautifully furnished room with not a speck of dust to be seen, the double bed already made up. Jermaine did protest then.

‘I shouldn’t have come.’