Читать книгу White Jade - V. J. Banis - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

It was five full years since I had last seen Jeffrey Linton—five years since he had held me in his arms and kissed me while my heart pounded and my head went spinning.

I had not gone to his wedding. My broken heart was my own business. I was nineteen at the time and I thought I would die, that my heart could never mend and love would never come to me again.

Now I was twenty-four and if I had never fallen in love again, I could at least say with certainty that I was healed of that first love.

Still, it was a shock to find myself facing him once again, so without warning. Time, which is a sense experience after all and not a matter of so many measured intervals, disappeared in that first moment. All those years vanished. Christmas Channing was a nineteen year old again, her face flushing with delight.

“Chris,” he said, in the soft sweet voice of old.

“Jeff.” I moved instinctively toward him. He had changed very little. He would be twenty seven now, still slim and youthful, his dark hair spilling across his forehead as it always had, his lopsided grin giving my heart a tug.

“Jeff?” Another voice from deep inside the house. A woman’s voice. Suddenly it brought those five years back to me, the intervening years. I glanced past him and stopped in my tracks.

“Forgive me,” he said in a quick, low voice. “I played a trick on you to get you here because I need help badly, and you were the one person in the world I knew I could trust.”

“I don’t understand,” I stammered. This was too sudden, too unexpected, for me to grasp.

He didn’t let me finish. “I’ll explain everything as soon as we’re alone, I promise. But please, go along with whatever I say until then. It’s urgent.”

I pulled my hand from his with a jerk. A growing anger was taking the place of my initial surprise. I had traveled nearly two hundred miles from New York City for what appeared to be some shabby practical joke.

“I don’t know why you brought me here under false pretenses,” I said coldly, “but I don’t think I want to stay.”

“Chris.” There was such an unmistakable note of urgency in his voice, such a look of pleading on his face, that it stopped me. “It means life and death to me. My life and death.”

There was no time to argue the point or for further explanation. He had held me there too long for me to make an easy escape. Now there was a flurry of motion in the hall behind him and a woman appeared at his side.

I recognized her, although we had never met. At the time of her marriage to Jeffrey, she had appeared fairly often in the society columns. In that first painful year, especially in the weeks after their engagement was announced, I sought her name and picture almost daily, a self-inflicted torture. I had gotten over that, however, and in time ceased to read that section of the paper at all.

Mary Linton, née Morgan, was beautiful in an austere, chilling way. She held her head imperiously high and looked down upon us lesser mortals with haughty disdain. I could imagine the smile that would grace her elegant lips if she were told I was a druggist’s daughter who had once been in love with her husband.

That was it, of course—that awful snobbishness and my childish reaction to it. I had suffered from that kind of snobbery all through the early years of school, the private school to which my father sent me, not because he could afford it but because my mother had died giving birth to me and he didn’t have the time to look after me and run the store as well.

I had suffered that same disdain from a changing army of young women who sneered because I was a druggist’s daughter who, they thought, aspired to their exalted station. It had made me distant in return. I had decided I wanted their friendship even less than they wanted mine. I remained independent and aloof ever after and, if I am to be completely honest, with a great big chip on my shoulder when it came to snobbish people.

That was what made me suddenly angry at her instead of him and put me, if only for a moment, on Jeffrey’s side, without the faintest idea what Jeffrey’s side was. I had loved him once with all the intensity of young love, and I resented her immediately not only because she had taken him from me (never a thought of his going) but because she was what she was, and that I had always resented. And without time to think about it, I was prepared to defend Jeffrey against her. It was silly but it was automatic, and it was settled before I could even think of its silliness.

“Hello,” she said, looking me up and down as if I were a fish she was contemplating buying for dinner. “Who’s this?”

“It’s a Miss Channing.” Jeff fixed his eyes on mine. “She’s come about the job.”

The cold look turned positively frigid. “She won’t do,” Mary Linton said.

“Good Lord, Mary, you haven’t even spoken to her,” Jeff said, fixing his eyes on mine. “How do you know she won’t be just perfect?”

“No,” I said sharply. I did not mean to be thrown back and forth between them, like a ping-pong ball in a tournament. “That’s quite all right. I’ve decided the job isn’t right for me.” I turned to go.

“Wait,” he said, and to my further humiliation, I did wait. “My wife is being very rude.”

“Jeffrey...,” she said.

“It’s true. You are being rude. This young lady has come a long distance for an interview—”

“At whose suggestion?”

“Mine, blast it. I told you her letter sounded excellent and I wanted her to come up. And now here she is.”

“Yes, here she is.” His wife edged away from the anger in his voice and she yielded reluctantly. I did not delude myself however that this had in any manner increased her liking for me. “I must have forgotten you were coming. Come in, Miss...Banner, was it?”

“Channing,” I said in my crispest voice. “Christmas Channing. My father called me that because I was born on Christmas day.”

“How sweet.” Her eyelashes flicked.

I hesitated as they stepped aside for me to come in. I did not want to enter this house. I did not want to be involved in whatever Jeffrey’s problem was, or with Jeffrey Linton in any way.

My automatic resentment of his wife, however, had caused me foolishly to keep silent this long about my former relationship with Jeffrey. To admit to it now seemed to lend it an air of guilt. And to refuse to go in would seem childish after Jeffrey’s defense of me.

Without seeming furtive or silly, there was nothing I could do but go past them into the house, holding my chin defiantly high in the way that Jeffrey used to tease me about. As the door swung shut, I promised myself I would make the interview brief, decline the job, and leave as quickly as I could.

“I’m afraid we’ve just lost a maid,” Jeff said, “so we’re sort of roughing it. Let me help you with your coat.”

“It isn’t necessary,” I told him, “this won’t take long, I’m sure.”

“Don’t be silly.” He gave me one of those mocking grins that had once meant so much to me. “It’s rather warm in here. I’ve been quite ill, you know.”

I did not know but the words seemed weighted. And I did realize, looking into his face as he took my coat and gloves and scarf, that he had indeed been ill. I had been so shocked seeing him that I hadn’t noticed how gaunt and deeply lined his face was, more than it should have been as a result of the five years. He was pale, strikingly so, his eyes had the dull, lightless look of the ill, and his mouth was drawn down.

I had a sudden feeling of malaise. I shivered even though it was warm in the hall.

“Of course she knows you’ve been ill,” his wife said sharply, leading the way into a room off the hall. “Why else would you be interviewing a nurse to stay with us?”

Again my eyes met Jeffrey’s. It was fortunate that his wife’s back was turned to me. She could hardly have helped noticing my look of surprise. I knew nothing about nursing. I had come regarding a supposed secretarial job, to see a man who had given his name as Adams. I had come under no false pretenses, yet I suddenly found myself embroiled in a deception the purpose and extent of which I could not even guess. I was being placed in a position between a man I had once loved and his wife, who plainly did not like me.

“Come in, please,” Jeffrey said.

He took my arm firmly, his grip so fierce that it was actually painful. The look he flashed me was so pathetic, so desperate, that I let him pilot me into the richly paneled sitting room into which his wife had preceded us.

It was a very handsome room, furnished in what I thought was the Queen Anne style, a room in which one should have felt immediately comfortable.

I felt as if I were stepping into a tomb.