Читать книгу Never Forget Me - Marguerite Kaye - Страница 11

Chapter Three

Three days later, Geraint was in the morning room with Flora, where a phonograph sat incongruously on an antique marble-topped table. Like the rest of the house, the room was a mixture of styles, reflecting the changing tastes of the Carmichaels through the generations. Glen Massan House was too eclectic to be aesthetically pleasing. It was not a showpiece, but a home. Flora Carmichael’s home. Which it was now his duty to pillage.

He must not allow himself to think about it in that manner. She and her ilk neither deserved nor required his sympathy, yet he found it increasingly difficult to think of Flora as belonging to any clique. She seemed slightly out of place, a misfit. A bit like himself, if truth be told. ‘I can’t quite work you out,’ Geraint said, surrendering to the unusual desire to share his thoughts.

Flora looked up from her notebook, her smile quirky. ‘I thought you had me neatly labelled from the minute we met.’

‘That’s what I mean. You should be empty-headed, or your head should be stuffed full of fripperies—dresses and dances and tennis parties. I’m not even an officer. You should be looking down that aristocratic little nose at the likes of me.’

‘The likes of you?’

She eyed him deliberately up and down. If anyone else had appraised him so brazenly, it would have provoked a caustic riposte. Instead, Flora, with her sensuous mouth and her saucy look, made him want to kiss her.

‘I am not in the habit of categorising people, as you are,’ she said. ‘In any event, I very much doubt there is anyone quite like you. Which is why, despite myself, I find your company stimulating.’

Stimulating! She certainly was. ‘Then that makes two of us,’ Geraint said, trying not to smile, ‘though let me tell you, it is entirely against my principles.’

Flora gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘You are the master of the backhanded compliment. I am sorry that you find you cannot dislike me when you have tried so hard to do so.’

‘You sound as if you wish me to try harder,’ he retorted.

‘Perhaps I do. Your barbs, Corporal Cassell, have been a welcome distraction while we dismantle my home.’

Which was the nearest she had come to saying what she felt about the requisition. Her father wasn’t the only one with a stiff upper lip. Guessing that sympathy would be most unwelcome, Geraint gave a mocking bow. ‘I am delighted to have been of service.’

Flora’s smile wobbled. ‘It is silly of me, but I feel as if we are doing something very final. I doubt things will return to what they were, even when this war is over.’

‘I sincerely hope they do not.’

She sighed. ‘No, of course you don’t, and you’re probably right.’

The perfume she wore had a floral scent. Not cloyingly sweet, but something lighter, more delicate and springlike. ‘I don’t understand you,’ Geraint said. ‘You’re not some empty-headed social butterfly. Don’t you feel suffocated, stuck here in this draughty castle with nothing to do but—what, arrange flowers and sew samplers?’

‘Do not forget my playing Lady Bountiful for the poor of the parish,’ Flora snapped. ‘Then there is the endless round of parties and dances, the occasional ceilidh in the village that I must grace with my presence. Added to that, there is tennis in the summer and...’

‘It was not my intention to patronise you,’ Geraint interrupted. ‘You just baffle me.’

‘So you said.’

Her eyes were over-bright. Annoyed, as much for having allowed himself to notice the soft swell of her bosom as she folded her hands defensively across her chest as for having been the cause of the action, Geraint spoke in a gentler tone. ‘It just seems to me that you’re wasting your life, shut away here. Aren’t you bored? Why don’t you leave?’

She stared at him blankly. ‘I cannot just leave. Where would I go? What would I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said impatiently. ‘What do you want to do? You must have thought about it.’

‘I have never had to,’ Flora said, looking troubled, ‘which is a shocking thing to admit, but the truth, for it is not as if I spend my days idly, is that there is always something to do here. I suppose it has always been assumed that I would marry well.’

‘You mean replace your father’s patronage with that of another wealthy man so that you can carry on arranging flowers ad nauseam.’

‘That is a very cynical way of looking at matrimony,’ Flora said coldly, ‘and quite beside the point, since I have no intention of making such a match. The problem is, I am not actually qualified to do anything else. Thank you very much for bringing that fact to my attention, incidentally.’

‘You are making a pretty good fist of managing this requisition, despite your claim that you had no idea how to tackle it,’ Geraint pointed out.

‘That is because I have had your expert lead to follow.’

He shook his head firmly. ‘Do not underestimate yourself.’

‘I doubt that is possible.’

‘Flora, I meant it. You are bright, quick-witted, practical and articulate. You’ve a talent for organising, for creating order.’

‘Do you really think so?’ She spoke eagerly.

‘I wouldn’t have said it otherwise,’ Geraint replied, touched by the vulnerability her question revealed. ‘You should know me well enough by now to know I don’t say anything I don’t mean.’

‘My parents are both fairly certain that I will make a hash of things.’

‘Then you shall surprise them by proving them wrong.’

He was rewarded with a smile. ‘Perhaps I shall surprise you, too, at the end of it,’ she said. ‘Despite the melancholy nature of our task, I have to admit that I am enjoying the challenge. Perhaps I should reconsider joining the VADs, like Sheila.’

‘Sheila? You mean the maid? Blonde, pretty girl?’

‘Do you think she’s pretty?’

Geraint laughed. ‘I think that’s the first predictable thing you’ve ever said to me. Yes, she’s very pretty and I’d have to be blind not to have noticed.’

‘We went to school in the village together until I was removed to an academy for young ladies,’ Flora said, making a face. ‘Sheila is counting the days, waiting to be assigned to a hospital. I shall miss her terribly when she goes. I did consider volunteering, but my mother was appalled. She thinks it would be most improper work for me, and my father thinks that I would find it far too taxing, and the demoralising fact is that he is probably right.’ She held up her hands for his inspection. ‘Lily-white and quite unsullied by hard work, as I am sure you have noted.’

Which so exactly mirrored his own, original opinion of her that Geraint felt a stab of guilt. ‘There are plenty of other things you could do, I’m sure,’ he said gruffly.

‘Would that I had your confidence in me. Which sounds really rather pathetic. You are right, I am stuck in a rut and have no purpose whatsoever in my life save to look decorative while waiting for a suitable husband to appear,’ Flora replied brightly. ‘Thank you, as I said earlier, for pointing that out, but if you don’t mind, I have had quite enough picking over my empty life and my character flaws for one day.’ She picked up her notebook and pencil. ‘I think we should get back to work.’

Her smile was fixed, her cheeks flushed, though she countered his scrutiny with a determined tilt of her chin. Geraint was not fooled, but he was not such an idiot as to ignore the signs. No trespassing. He ought to be pleased with himself for making her face up to some unpalatable truths, but he wasn’t. She had taken his criticisms on the chin, too. She would have been within her rights to tell him to mind his own business, which was what he would have said had the roles been reversed. Flora Carmichael might look as if a puff of wind would blow her away, but she had backbone. He had to admire her for that. In fact, the more he got to know her, the more he liked her....

The realisation set him quite off-kilter. Geraint got to his feet and made a point of consulting his wristwatch. A gift from his parents on his twenty-first birthday, it was a plain, functional timepiece, but it was one of his most precious possessions. ‘You carry on without me. I need to check on the lads.’

* * *

The door closed behind him, but Flora remained where she was. Geraint did not, as Robbie would say, pull his punches. It was a dispiriting thought, but she suspected she had been merely marking time with her life without even realising it. Forcing herself to think about it now, the very idea of turning into her mother, which she would, if she continued to allow herself to drift with the tide, made her shudder. Her parents expected so little from her that it was ridiculously easy to please them. And it would, sadly, be ridiculously easy to disappoint them, were she to pursue some sort of independent course.

‘Whatever that may be,’ Flora muttered to herself. Pacing over to the window, she stared morosely out at the loch. The problem was that now Geraint had pointed it out, she could not deny the creeping dissatisfaction she had been feeling, and nor could she ignore it, though to do something about it would be to fly in the face of her parents’ expectations. ‘So I am damned if I do, and damned if I don’t,’ she said wryly. ‘Which brings me no nearer at all to knowing what it is I am going to do.’

You are bright, quick-witted, practical and articulate, Geraint had said. None of those epithets had ever been applied to her before, yet Geraint never said what he didn’t believe. He was blunt to a fault, but he also saw things in her that others did not, and expected much more of her than anyone else did, which both pleased and scared her a little. What if she failed?

Think positively, Flora castigated herself. She would not fail, because that would reflect badly on Geraint, and she wanted Geraint to succeed. Almost more than she wanted to succeed herself. Which was a novel, not to say startling, thought. ‘Sink or swim,’ Flora repeated, remembering the pact they had made.

An image of a naked Geraint swimming beside her in the loch, rivulets of water coursing down his muscled back and buttocks, sprang shockingly vivid into her mind’s eye. ‘Swim it shall most definitely be,’ Flora muttered, pressing the backs of her hands against her flaming cheeks.