Читать книгу Scandals - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 11

‘Happy?’

Olivia nodded, turning her face towards Robert, the wind tangling the normal sleekness of her hair, her hand held warmly within Robert’s clasp as they walked together through Denham’s frost-rimed formal gardens, their Wellington boot-clad feet crunching on the gravel pathways. They startled a couple of male pheasants that had been foraging for food and that now walked slowly away in that manner peculiar to pheasants, meant to convey the impression that they actually weren’t there at all.

‘Yes, I am happy,’ Olivia reaffirmed. ‘And you?’

‘Not as happy as I would be if I was kissing you, but I think we’re already the subject of enough family curiosity, without stoking up any more for the time being, don’t you?’

His answer couldn’t have shown better how similar their thinking was. Olivia loved that there was no gameplaying between them, no having to contrive artificial tests and tricks so that each could lure the other into being the first to admit to their feelings. It had charmed and delighted her that instead of holding back from her, in the style favoured by New York men – who promised to ring and then didn’t, only to do so just when you’d given up, requiring a girl to pretend then that she wasn’t interested, or risk losing face – Robert had been prompt and plain about seeking her out this morning, after picking her up at the airport yesterday, discreetly creating an opportunity for them to be alone together via the simple expedient of announcing after breakfast, ‘Come on, Olivia. It’s Christmas Eve, and you and I are on holly-finding duties. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas at Denham without holly’

‘Mom’s already been quizzing me, saying that we seemed to be “getting on very well”,’ she informed Robert ruefully, loving the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed.

‘That’s probably because my mother will have been warning her not to let you seduce me,’ he teased her, mock solemnly.

Olivia aimed a playful punch at his shoulder with her free hand, retaliating, ‘My mother has been warning me to remember that you’ve got a decision to make about Lauranto.’

‘Is that an issue?’

Oh, she did like his directness. It made everything feel so easy and natural.

‘Not for me,’ she answered him truthfully. ‘It must be a difficult decision for you to make, though?’

‘I do feel I have a duty to the people of Lauranto. My grandmother is set in her ways; the whole country is in need of modernisation.’ He turned to her. ‘And I, Olivia, have a very great need of you in my life.’

So this was happiness, this giddy, dizzy, disbelief, this delight that made everything – every sensation, every sense, every thought – feel as though it was imbued with a special wonder.

Hand in hand they continued through the garden. The crisp winter air smelled of frost and wood smoke from Denham’s chimneys, the sky swept clean of clouds by the sharp easterly wind blowing down from the Derbyshire hills, the Cheshire plain cradled snugly between those hills and the Welsh mountains to the west. The Romans had marched and fought and settled here, mining the area’s rich deposits of salt, building the fortress city of Chester, but it was a county that belied the bloodiness of its history, blanketing it with its rich farmland, which spoke more easily of orderly contentment and peace.

They’d reached the end of the walled garden now, the land beyond it parkland scattered with the handsome specimens of trees originally planted by Denham’s first owner.

With unspoken mutual consent, Robert opened the age-silvered oak door in the wall to let Olivia pass through ahead of him. To the west of the formal garden lay the vegetable garden and the Victorian succession houses, whilst in front of them, beyond a pretty wooded area in which winter crocuses were still showing their lavender petals, lay the ha-ha that separated the formal gardens from the park, with its muntjac deer.

‘I do love Denham,’ Olivia sighed happily, before adding consideringly, ‘I like Osterby as well, of course, especially its peacocks.’

‘Noisy brutes,’ Robert complained before relenting and telling her, ‘There are some in the palace garden in Lauranto.’

As he spoke he pulled the wooden door shut behind him, and reached for her.

Olivia went willingly into his arms, raising her face for his kiss. She could feel the silky warmth of the scarf he was wearing against her hand. She could smell the clean soap scent of his skin, mingling with the tweedy wool smells of his jacket and scarf. His lips were cold at first and then deliciously warm, the sensation reminding her of the childhood pleasure of hot chocolate sauce poured over ice cream.

As he had done before, Robert simply kissed her, taking his time, making the sensation of his mouth moving against her own a subtly sublime pleasure that had her toes curling in her Wellingtons.

When he finally released her it was to take her hand again, telling her as they headed for a holly tree on the edge of the thicket, ‘I’ve got to revisit Lauranto in February. When I do, I’d like you to come with me.’

Olivia stood still. She could feel the unsteady beat of her heart, and the colour coming up under her skin.

‘You…you would?’

‘Yes. Very much. As I was saying earlier, there’s a lot that needs to be done, for the people, for Lauranto’s heritage, and I’d like you to see everything as it is, before—’

‘I’d love to go with you.’

This time when Robert kissed her, Olivia knew that, without the words being said, a commitment had been made between them, an awareness shared of what could be, along with an acknowledgement that they would travel to that destination at their own pace.

Robert observed the glow of happiness illuminating Olivia’s. Everything was going to work out. In fact, it was all going to be perfect. Olivia was perfect and he could love her for that alone, he told himself.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and get that holly, otherwise it won’t just be our mothers who are asking questions.’

Emma, Katie, Harry and David had taken possession of the billiard room from which the younger members of the family were currently barred. Despite the cold outside, the windows were open, the better to dispel the telltale scent of the roll-ups they had been passing round, the smoking of which had produced a shared mood of beneficent relaxation, spoiled only by David, who had started giggling and been unable to stop until Harry had dragged his younger brother to the window and held his head out of it, to bring him down.

It was the day after Boxing Day, and after two days of charades, sardines, and similar hearty party games shared with the littlies, the four of them were all agreed that they deserved some chill-out time that was a bit more relaxing.

‘The thing is,’ David remarked earnestly, ‘it’s not as though smoking a joint does anyone any harm. I mean, it’s not like doing heroin or coke, is it, so the parents making a fuss about it is just a joke really.’

‘You’re the joke, fathead, if you think that Dad wouldn’t make a fuss if he caught us,’ Harry responded.

‘Oh, Dad. He’d probably think a chap should be cashiered from his regiment, he’s so old-fashioned.’

‘In the twenties heroin and coke were all the rage, and accepted. It wasn’t even against the law,’ Katie offered. She was still feeling very down about not being able to go to Klosters. She’d had a miserable telephone conversation this morning with Zoë, who had sounded even more wildly off the wall than normal, whispering into the phone that she couldn’t talk properly now but that she’d met ‘my fate and my soulmate in the shape of my own personal Earl of Rochester’.

The sudden warning rattle of the door handle had the four of them leaping to their feet, Harry calling out in an impressively firm baritone, ‘If that’s any of you kids, you’re barred, remember.’

The door opened and Olivia stepped in, smiling as she told them, ‘I’m not really sure if I come into the barred category or not, but I can warn you that Polly’s boys have asked her why they can’t play billiards, so if I were you…’ She could smell the telltale sweet scent of the dope and she turned to exchange a knowing smile with Robert, who was standing behind her. She’d finally crossed the bridge now that had previously divided them, leaving her on the side of the ‘young ones’, whilst Robert had been firmly on the side of the adults, and it felt good, Olivia acknowledged, it felt very good indeed. She watched in amusement as Emma and Katie started frantically flapping their arms in an attempt to move the sweet-scented air out of the window.

‘Here…’ she delved into her handbag and removed a small atomiser of scent to spray into the air around the door, ‘…this might help to provide a distraction.’

‘Softie,’ Robert teased her later as they walked out into the garden together, the only place they could really be sure of any proper privacy. ‘I dare say that the parents will do the same for them as they did for us, and pretend not to notice, knowing that in a very short space of time they’ll have grown out of it.’

‘Our parents maybe, but I am not so sure about Uncle John.’

‘Mmm…I see what you mean. He’s a good sort but more suited to the Victorian age in some ways, stiff upper lip, doing the right thing and behaving in the right way, and very conscious of being Lord Fitton Legh.’

‘That’s a bit unkind,’ Olivia objected.

‘But true?’

A little reluctantly, Olivia nodded.

Although as yet they’d done no more than exchange kisses, Olivia knew that Robert was serious about her, and about them.

‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to wait until February to see you again,’ he told her now.

‘I think you’ve been reading my mind,’ she admitted.

‘Delaying your return to New York and coming back to London with me would probably be a bit more obvious than either of us wants right now, but if I were to be able to snatch a couple of days in New York in, say, a couple of weeks’ time…?’

‘You’d be very welcome.’

‘I normally stay at the Pierre.’

‘My apartment has a spare room.’

They looked at one another, Olivia both smiling and blushing a little at what she could see in Robert’s eyes.

‘You’re quiet.’

Rose smiled at Josh. ‘I was thinking about Nick,’ she admitted. They were in the car on their way home from Denham. ‘I do wish there was something we could do to help him with Sarah.’

‘He’s a grown man and not a boy. He knows enough about the world to have sussed out why her parents wouldn’t exactly welcome him as their son-in-law.’

When Rose looked at him, he reached out and covered her folded hands with one of his own. She was so neat and compact and precise somehow, his Rose. And so vulnerable still, even after these years, still so sensitive to her own mixed-race heritage and the revulsion her great-grandmother had felt at the fact that Rose had a Chinese mother.

‘Rose, he’s working class, and Sarah’s father’s a titled, upper-class snob.’

‘Sarah chose to marry him.’ ‘Did she? Or did Nick choose for her? Look, I’m not knocking him – he’s my son – but he had a hard upbringing before he came to us. It’s bound to have affected him. He isn’t like me, we both know that. Nick’s got an edge to him, a need to win, simply for the sake of winning. To someone like Nick, brought up the way he was, marrying an upper-class girl like Sarah would seem like winning, and would be a goal he would set himself simply for the sake of that win.’

Rose shot Josh an unhappy look. ‘That’s not fair,’ she protested. ‘Look how hard Nick worked to buy Sarah that house. She and the boys have the best of everything.’

‘Of course they do. That’s part of the buzz for him, being able to give her more than the upper-class husbands of her friends can give them. It’s all about proving himself, Rose, about proving that he’s the best, but now he can’t, can he, because Sarah’s father is standing in his way, determined to prove that he’s the best.’

Rose gave him a troubled look.

‘Nick’s my son and I love him, Rose, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to his flaws and faults any more than I am to my own. The trouble is that Sarah’s father is obviously intent on using those faults against him.’

‘Sometimes I think I shall never understand our children. Katie’s going round with a face like a wet weekend, insisting that she should still go skiing, with that broken arm.’

Folding clothes and putting them in the open case in their bedroom at Lenchester House, Emerald continued, ‘And then of course there’s Robert. Not a single word has he said to me about Olivia, and yet it’s obvious that something is going on between them. It’s only because Ella told me that Robert’s invited Olivia to go to Lauranto with him in February that I even knew he was going back, never mind taking Olivia with him. I really don’t like the idea of him getting involved over there, Drogo. I don’t trust Alessandro’s mother one little bit.’

Emerald paused and looked at her husband. ‘Do you think Alessandro’s mother will tell Robert about you know what?’

Drogo walked over to take her in his arms. He knew the real Emerald, the vulnerable Emerald she hid from the rest of the world. ‘About your father, you mean?’

Emerald nodded. ‘The Princess hates me and she always has done.’

Drogo knew how much it would hurt his wife’s fierce pride if the truth were ever to come out, although typically, rather than admit this, Emerald told him, ‘It would be dreadful for the children if they were suddenly to learn that their grandfather was a painter and not a duke, as they have always thought.’

‘I doubt very much that Alessandro’s mother will say anything. It’s in her own interests not to, apart from anything else. She wants Robert to take Alessandro’s place. Alienating him by revealing the truth to him isn’t something she would want to risk.’

‘You’re right.’

Drogo squeezed her arm gently. He knew how much, even now, she still hated the thought that her father had not been his predecessor, the late duke, but instead Jean-Philippe du Breveonet, painter of the picture of Amber, The Silk Merchant’s Daughter, now hanging in the National Gallery.