Without Trust

There was only one way she could escape. She would have to take Mrs Mayers’ job. Even if he traced her there, she wouldn’t be so alone, so vulnerable. He would never kiss her like that while she was living with Mrs Mayers. He would never dare to arrive on Mrs Mayers’ doorstep and demand entrance.

Had his kiss been his personal way of extracting payment because the case had been cancelled? She shivered, hugging her arms tightly around herself.

He was certainly arrogant enough to do something so unorthodox, but there hadn’t been anger in his touch, nor resentment. So why, then? She shivered again, knowing the answer but not wanting to admit it. There had been that brief moment of time in the court room, that exchanging and mingling of glances that had contained more than mere acknowledgement of one another as adversaries.

Too inexperienced to judge its value properly, she had nevertheless been aware of that brief arcing of some indefinable emotion between them, some sensation of almost physical communion, generated by their mutual awareness. But she had dismissed it, not wanting to recognise its potential.

She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself for instinctive comfort. She would have to take the job now. She wasn’t going to allow herself to dwell on exactly why she felt this need to protect herself, and if Mrs Mayers’ son disapproved, well, that was his problem, she told herself defiantly.

CHAPTER THREE

WHY on earth was she spending so much time agonising about taking the job which, in her heart of hearts, she was forced to admit might have been tailor-made to get her out of her present dilemma?

The reason was quite simple. She liked Mrs Mayers. The older woman had stressed right from the start that she knew all about the court case and that she didn’t want to discuss it.

Lark had taken her words at face value, only too glad to meet someone at last who was prepared to judge her on herself and not on what she had read in the papers about her. But would the same hold true for Mrs Mayers’ son? Somehow, she doubted it very much, and there was the crux of her dilemma.

With every word she had said to Lark about her son, Mrs Mayers had betrayed her love of him, and mixed with that love had been just the tiniest tinge of awe, Lark was sure of it.

She wouldn’t go as far as saying that Mrs Mayers was in fear of her son. Lark would hate to be the cause of any trouble between them, and yet, if she didn’t accept Mrs Mayers’ offer, what on earth was she going to do? And that was before she had even begun to try and analyse exactly why James Wolfe had come round to see her.

She told herself that she had hated the way he had brazenly demanded entrance to her flat, the way he had so calmly and arrogantly assumed that she would welcome his attentions. Attentions! She laughed bitterly and wryly to herself.

What a very old-fashioned word for what was in effect a very modern sin. She had no doubt at all about what James Wolfe had wanted from her. She remembered with sick distaste several newspaper men who had haunted her doorstep until they realised that there was simply no way she was going to respond to their advances.

They had been at first amused and then annoyed to discover that she was not in the least flattered by their propositions. She had been astounded to discover that they seemed to take it for granted that she would be only too happy to go to bed with them. Common sense had warned her that they would laugh in her face if she had told them she was simply not that kind of girl, which happened to be the truth.

She was twelve years old when her aunt took her on one side and gave her a lecture about the ways that good girls did and did not behave. Her aunt had left her in no doubts whatsoever as to what her fate would be if she ever dared to stray from the straight and narrow path she had just outlined to her.

As a teenager, Lark had struggled with her own inner rebellion when she’d discovered her cousin was not expected to adhere to the same rigid moral code. Now she considered it was too late for her to indulge in the kind of teenage experimentation she had then been denied.

At university, she had been too busy to have much time to spend with friends of the opposite sex. In her first month at work, she found that she had discovered a certain fastidiousness that put her out of step with many of her peers. Perhaps that was why the thought of working for Mrs Mayers was so tempting. It would be a totally non-threatening environment—something that she needed badly after the traumas of the past few months. Something that she needed badly because it would provide an escape from James Wolfe.

She shivered a little, cross with herself for allowing him to creep into her thoughts. She could still feel the imprint of his mouth on her own, still see his lazy amusement at her shock. What had been his purpose in coming to see her? One thing she was sure of, she wasn’t going to wait around for him to appear a second time so that she could ask him.

For all she knew, he could be like the newspaper men she had met, making a habit of taking his victims to bed. Well, in her case he was going to be disappointed.

She tried to imagine him making the virulent comments she had been subjected to by the reporters, but somehow couldn’t quite do so. He was too controlled, too much in charge of his emotions to do that.

She tried to visualise him losing his temper and was dismayed with herself for doing so.

Morning brought her no closer to a solution to her dilemma, until her landlord arrived and announced that he was intending to put up her rent. Lark hated the way his eyes roved unceasingly over her body while he talked to her. She had never liked him, right from the start, and last night’s episode with James Wolfe had left her feeling acutely vulnerable.

Her flat was nowhere near as safe as she would have liked. The rent the landlord mentioned was exorbitantly out of line with the accommodation. She told him as much, and flinched as he sneered, ‘A woman like you—you’ll soon find the money from somewhere or someone.’

Dear God, was this what she was going to have to put up with until the world forgot about who she was and what had happened? It wasn’t until she heard herself telling the landlord exactly what he could do with his rent increase and his accommodation that she realised that she had committed herself to Mrs Mayers’ job.

Shaking with reaction, as soon as the landlord had gone she pulled on her coat and hurried out into the street to the nearest telephone box.

Mrs Mayers answered the telephone herself. Shakily, Lark told her her decision, unable to keep the hint of apology from her voice as she did so. She only hoped that the older woman would not live to regret her generosity. She would have felt better if she had actually met Mrs Mayers’ son before accepting the job, but he was a very busy man, Mrs Mayers had informed her, and a touch of defiance in her voice as she said the words had made Lark condemn him as both overbearing and selfish.