Читать книгу A Treacherous Seduction - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 8

BETH gave an involuntary gasp of horrified disbelief as she stared white-faced at the contents of the crate she had just opened.

‘Oh, no! No!’ she protested in despair as she picked up the wine glass she had just removed from its packaging, one of a suite of matching stemware she had ordered on her buying trip to Prague.

Beth closed her eyes; her face had gone deathly pale and she felt rather sick.

She had invested so much in this Czech order, and not just in terms of money.

Her fingers trembling, she opened another box, biting her bottom lip hard as the decorative water jug she had in her hand confirmed all her growing anxiety.

Three hours later, with the storeroom at the back of the small shop she ran in partnership with her best friend Kelly Frobisher strewn with packages and stemware, all Beth’s worst fears were realised.

These…these abominations against good taste and style were most certainly not the deliciously pretty reproduction antique items she had ordered with such excitement and pleasure all those months ago in the Czech Republic. No way. This order, the order she had received but most certainly never placed, might equate in terms of numbers and suites to what she had bought, but in every other way it was horrendous, horrible, a parody of the beautiful, elegant, covetable top-quality stemware she had seen and paid for.

No, there was no way she would ever have ordered anything like this, and no way could she ever sell it either. Her customers were very discriminating, and Beth’s stomach churned as she recalled how enthusiastically and confidently she had titillated their interest by describing her order to them and promising them that it would turn their Christmas dinner tables into wonderful facsimiles of a bygone age, an age of Venetian baroque, Byzantine beauty.

Sickly she stared at the glass she was holding, a glass she remembered as being a richly gorgeous Christmassy cranberry-red with a depth of colour one could almost eat.

Was it really for this that she had put the small shop, her reputation and her personal finances into jeopardy? Was it for this that she had telephoned her bank manager from Prague to persuade him to extend her credit facilities? No, of course it wasn’t. The glassware she had been shown had been nothing like this. Nothing at all!

Feverishly she examined another piece, and then another, hoping against hope that what she had already seen had simply been a slight mistake. But there was no mistake. Everything she unpacked possessed the same hallmarks of poor workmanship, inferior glass and crude colouring. The blue she remembered as being the same deep, wonderful colour as a Renaissance painter’s Madonna’s robes, as having the same depth when held up to the light as the most beautiful of antique stained-glass windows, the green she recalled as possessing the depth and fire of a high-quality emerald, and the gold which had had gilding as subtle as anything to come out of an expert gilder’s workshop were, in reality, like comparing the colours in a child’s paintbox to those used by a true artist.

There had to have been a mistake. Beth stood up. She would have to ring the suppliers and advise them of their error.

Her brain went into frantic overdrive as she tried to grapple with the enormity of the problem now confronting her. After being delayed well beyond its original delivery date, the order had just barely arrived in time for their Christmas market.

In fact, she had planned this very afternoon to clear the shelves of their current stock and restock them with the Czech stemware.

What on earth was she going to do?

Normally this would have been a problem she would immediately have shared with her partner, Kelly, but these were not normal circumstances. For one thing, she had been in Prague on her own when she had taken the initiative to order the stemware. For a second, Kelly was quite rightly far more preoccupied with her new husband and the life they were establishing together than she was with the shop at the moment, and they had mutually agreed that for the time being Kelly would take a back seat in the business they had started up together in the small town of Rye-on-Averton, where the girls had originally been encouraged to come by Beth’s godmother, Anna Trewayne.

And for a third…

Beth closed her eyes. She knew that if she were to tell her godmother, Anna, or Kelly, her best friend, or even Dee Lawson, her landlady, of the financial and professional mess she was now in all three of them would immediately rush to her aid, full of understanding and sympathy for her plight. But Beth was sharply conscious of the fact that, out of the four of them, she was the only one who always seemed to get things wrong, who always seemed to make bad judgements, who always seemed to end up being duped…cheated…hurt. Who always seemed to be a loser…a victim…

Beth shuddered with a mixture of anger and anguish. What was the matter with her? Why was she constantly involving herself with people who ultimately let her down? She might, as other people were constantly reminding her, be placid, and perhaps a little too on the accommodating side, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have any pride, that she didn’t need to be treated with respect.

None of the other three would have got themselves in this situation, she was sure. Dee, for instance, would most certainly not have done. No, she couldn’t imagine anyone ever managing to dupe or cheat Dee, with her confident, businesslike manner, nor Kelly, with her vibrant, positive personality, nor even Anna, with her quiet gentleness.

No, she was the vulnerable one, the fool, the idiot, who had ‘cheat me’ written all over her.

It had to be her own fault. Look at the way she had fallen for Julian Cox’s lies; look how gullible she had been, believing that he loved her when all the time what he had really been interested in had been the money he had believed she would inherit.

She had been stricken with shame when Julian had left her, claiming that he had never told her that he wanted to marry her, accusing her of running after him, pursuing him, of imagining that he had ever felt something for her.

Beth’s face started to burn. Not because she still loved him—she most certainly didn’t, and she doubted deep in her heart that she ever had; she had simply allowed him to persuade her that she had, because she had been flattered by the assiduous attentions he had paid her, and by his constant declarations of love, his insistence that they were soul mates. Well, she had certainly learned her lesson there. Never, ever again would she trust a man who treated her like that, who claimed to have fallen crazily and instantly in love with her as Julian had done, and she had stuck to that private vow even when…

Beth could feel her heart starting to thud heavily as she fought to suppress certain dangerous memories.

At least she hadn’t made the same mistake twice. No, she agreed mentally with herself, she’d just gone on to make fresh ones.

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.

One hour and five unanswered telephone calls after she had finished speaking with Kelly, Beth sat back on her heels and stared helplessly around her chaotic storeroom.

The horror and the anger she had initially felt at having received the wrong order were giving way even more to frantic unease and suspicion.

The factory she had visited had been a large one, and the sales director she had spoken with suave and business-suited. The cabinets which had lined the walls of his plush office had been filled with the almost mouth-wateringly beautiful stemware from which he had invited Beth to take her choice for her order.

His secretary’s office, which she had glimpsed through an open door as he had escorted her from the reception foyer and into his own office, had been crammed with the most up-to-the-minute modern technology, and it was just not feasible that such an organisation would not, during office hours, have its telephone system fully manned and its faxes working.

But every time Beth had punched the numbers into her own telephone she had been met with a blank silence, an emptiness humming along the wire. Even if the factory had been closed for the Czech Republic version of a Bank Holiday, the telephone would still have rung.

The most horrible suspicion, the most awful possibility, was beginning to edge its way into Beth’s thoughts.

‘Don’t be taken in by what you’ve been shown,’ Alex Andrews had warned her. ‘Some gypsies are thought to be used as pawns in organised crime. Their aim is to sell non-existent goods to gullible foreign tourists in order to bring into the organisation foreign currency.’

‘I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to frighten me,’ Beth had told him furiously. ‘To frighten me and to make sure that I give my order to your cousins,’ she had added sharply. ‘That’s what all this is really about, isn’t it? Telling me you’ve fallen in love with me…claiming to care about me…I would be gullible if I had fallen for your lies, Alex…’

Beth didn’t want to remember Alex’s reaction to her accusations. She didn’t want to remember anything about Alex Andrews at all. She wasn’t going to allow herself to remember anything about him.

No? Then how come she had dreamed about him virtually every night since her return from the Czech Republic? a small inner voice taunted her.

She had dreamed about him simply out of the relief of knowing she had stood by her own promises to herself and not fallen for his lies, his claims to love her, Beth told her unwanted internal critic crossly.

She looked at her watch. It was almost four o’clock. No point in trying the Czech suppliers again today. Instead she would repack her incorrect order.

Dee, their landlady for the shop and the comfortable accommodation that went with it, who had now become a good friend, had invited her over for supper this evening.

Dispiritedly she started to repack the stemware, shuddering a little as she did so. The crystal was more suitable for jam jars than stemware, Beth decided with a grimace of distaste.

‘Haven’t I heard,’ Dee had queried gently a few weeks ago, ‘that some of the processes through which their china and glassware are made are a little crude when compared to ours…?’

‘At the lower end of the market perhaps they are,’ Beth had defended. ‘But this factory I found originally actually made things for the Royal House of Russia. The sales director showed me the most exquisite pieces of a dinner service they’d had made for one of the Romanian Princes. It reminded me very much of a Sèvres service, and the translucency of the china was quite breathtaking. The Czech people are very proud of their tradition of making high-quality crystal,’ Beth had added.

She had Alex Andrews to thank for that little piece of information. It had been something he had thrown furiously at her when she had accused him of trying to persuade her to buy his cousins’ goods, and the cause of yet another quarrel between them.

Beth had never met anyone who infuriated her as much as he had done. He had brought out in her a streak of anger and passion she had never previously known she possessed.

Anger and passion. Two very dangerous emotions.

Quickly Beth got back to repacking the open crates. Remember, she told herself sternly, you aren’t going to think about him. Or about what…what happened…

To her chagrin, Beth could feel her face starting to heat and then burn.

‘God, but you’re wonderful. So sweet and gentle on the outside and so hot and wild in private, so very hot and wild…’

Furious with herself, Beth jumped up.

‘You weren’t going to think about him,’ she told herself fiercely. ‘You aren’t going to think about him.’