Dangerous Entanglement

‘Oh…’ She shrugged her slim shoulders in a gesture intended to convey a measure of indifference. ‘The usual, I suppose. We were probably too young. It was fun for a while, but we were heading in different directions. Unfortunately the person he chose to head off with was my best friend at the time.’

‘I see.’

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of laughter from the kitchen. ‘What about you?’ she asked after a moment.

He swirled the wine around in his glass. ‘Remarkably similar, as a matter of fact. Only in my case, it was my brother.’

‘Oh…’ She shifted under the weight of a heavy discomfort. Was that the brother he had displaced from the family firm? Had that been his revenge? But those were hardly the sort of questions she could ask him.

But he went on without a prompt. ‘Like you, we were rather too young—I was twenty-three, she was twenty-one. And I had to be away a good deal of the time—I suppose in a way it was only natural for her to turn to my brother; he was a couple of years older than me, being groomed by my father to take his place as chair of the company. And they had similar tastes,’ he added drily. ‘Expensive cars, expensive clothes…’

She sipped her wine, her eyes studying that darkly handsome face. The only light on the balcony was the glow spilling out from the sitting-room—Annette had put a couple of candles ready in glasses, but they hadn’t been lit yet. But the shadows did nothing to soften the arrogant lines of his features—if anything they lent him an almost…sinister air.

‘But then…you became chairman instead, didn’t you?’ she enquired diffidently.

He nodded, a hint of hardness around his mouth. ‘That’s right,’ he confirmed. ‘Unfortunately, between them, my father and my brother were making quite a mess of things, so I had the board elect me instead. Then I bought them out.’

That brief, ruthless explanation sent a chill scudding down Joanna’s spine. From the newspaper accounts, it had been shortly after his wife had left him for his brother that he had ousted both him and their father from the company. Whatever his rationalisations, the implication was clear—it had been an act of pure revenge.

She had been a fool to let the wine and the moonlight lull her into a dangerously unguarded mood, she chided herself warningly—she ought to have known better. This was a man who got what he wanted, and damn the consequences for anyone else. It would be wise not to let herself forget that, not for a second.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b7a620b7-c09a-5482-ae50-f3bc2cca335f)

JOANNA took another sip of her wine. It was difficult to maintain her cool façade, with Alex Marshall sitting there on the other side of the table, still watching her with those enigmatic dark eyes. Was it a spark of genuine interest in her that she could see there? Or was he playing some kind of game with her, to try to prevent her holding up the mining operation?

She shifted edgily in her seat, glancing back over her shoulder. ‘Those two are taking their time in the kitchen,’ she remarked with a nervous laugh. ‘We’ll probably be lucky if we get fed at all tonight.’

But at that moment the other couple appeared, Annette blushing delightfully, her hair dishevelled, while Greg was managing to look both pleased with himself and a little sheepish at the same time. They were each carrying a large serving-dish, which they set down on the table.

‘I’m sorry,’ Annette apologised breathlessly. ‘The rice got a little bit…overcooked.’

Alex’s hard mouth quirked into a smile of ironic humour. ‘So I see,’ he commented, surveying the doughy sludge in front of him. ‘Er…do I eat it with a fork or a spoon?’

Annette giggled. ‘You might have to use a spoon, I’m afraid.’ She sat down, her eyes sparkling up at Greg as he held her chair out for her. ‘Oh…We left the wine in the kitchen…’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Alex put in. ‘We might as well finish this one off first.’

He filled their glasses with the burgundy, leaning across to top up Joanna’s glass before she realised he was going to. She accepted it without protest, but silently warned herself to be careful how much she drank; she needed to keep a cool head—just in case the love blossoming unmistakably between the couple on her left should prove to be contagious.

The rice really wasn’t quite as bad as it looked—just a little soft—and Annette’s lamb kofta was always delicious. She dimpled with pleasure at the fulsome compliments of the two men, but it was obvious whose praise meant more to her.

That was something of a relief to Joanna—she had wondered whether, once she had had a chance to see more of Alex, Annette’s preference might begin to waver. But her manner towards him was characterised by the kind of politeness and respect that suggested that his thirty-five years appeared, from her mere twenty, to be a generation gap as wide as the Nile Valley.

This fact seemed to afford him some amusement. Watching him covertly from beneath her lashes, Joanna was a little surprised to realise that he had a real sense of humour; with Annette, and with his young cousin, there seemed to be no trace of that mocking cynicism. He had a very attractive laugh, too—deep and husky, lighting his eyes.

The table was lit by two candles, stuck in drinking glasses so that they wouldn’t blow out, and their flickering light seemed to sculpt the strong bone-structure of his face, emphasising the intelligence written in his high forehead, the arrogant hook of his nose. He was wearing a casual linen shirt, and in the shadow of the open collar she could glimpse a few rough, dark hairs that curled at the base of his throat.

Her mouth seemed to have gone strangely dry. It was a long time since she had been so acutely aware of a man; after the break-up of her marriage, it was something she had taught herself to avoid. But there was something about Alex Marshall, an aura of power and raw masculinity, that couldn’t be ignored.

Suddenly he caught her eye across the table, and, though they were five feet apart, she could feel the hypnotic power of that gaze holding her prisoner. She didn’t seem able to look away, although she knew that he would see far too much—all the vulnerabilities that she would have preferred to keep hidden behind the brittle mask she customarily wore.

‘…one in the Guimet museum that was wrapped in an old sail. But Joanna’s the one you should really be asking—she’s the expert on mummies. She’s written papers about it.’

The sound of her own name brought Joanna back to earth, and she turned to her friend, as disorientated as if she had switched on the television in the middle of a programme. ‘I…I’m sorry?’ she stammered.

‘The Lyons Sailor,’ Annette prompted innocently— she had been so absorbed in her conversation with Greg that she wouldn’t have noticed if the sky had fallen in around her, let alone picked up the subtle undercurrents passing between the two other occupants of the table. ‘Didn’t they find out it was an old sail he was wrapped in?’

‘Oh…Yes. They pieced all the strips together,’ she explained to Greg, glad to feel herself on safe ground, dealing with the dusty facts of ancient history. ‘It turned out to have been ripped from one large square piece of material, still with part of the rigging in it.’

‘Didn’t a lot of them have bad teeth?’ Alex enquired, joining in the conversation.

Joanna nodded. ‘Yes. Partly because the cereals in their diet were very coarsely ground, which would have caused a lot of wear. But many of the Pharaohs, in particular, had a lot of decay, which suggests that they ate a lot of sugar. It does tend to make it rather difficult to work out how old they were.’

‘Don’t they use carbon dating?’ asked Greg.

‘That’s to find out when they lived, silly,’ Annette corrected him with a teasing laugh. ‘If they want to find out how long they lived, they have to examine the skeleton with X-rays—though even then it’s hard to be sure…’

Joanna slipped back out of the conversation, sipping her wine, watching the young couple with affectionate humour. Greg was prompting Annette with questions, listening raptly to her answers, as if he had waited all his life to hear about the history of ancient Egypt.

It made her feel a little old, and maybe a little sadshe had learned too soon that love wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She just hoped that this promising romance wouldn’t end in the same sort of disappointment she had found—she wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

From beneath her lashes, she slid a covert glance towards Alex. He too was watching the younger couple, a glint of tolerant amusement in his eyes. Were his thoughts similar to her own? If they had met when they were younger, as naively open to taking a chance as Annette and Greg, could that spark of physical awareness between them have ignited into a stronger flame?