Love's Prisoner. Elizabeth Oldfield

      CHAPTER ONE

      SUZY set her knife and fork back down on her plate with an unsteady clatter. ‘You want me to include Piers Armstrong in my book?’ she enquired.

      The portly middle-aged man who sat on the other side of the lunch table nodded. ‘If you do, sales will skyrocket.’

      ‘But you’ve already accepted the manuscript,’ she protested, her voice gathering up an edge of panic, ‘and the publication date has been arranged!’

      ‘That’s no problem. We can shove it forward by a couple of months,’ Randolph Gardener, editorial director of the Kingdom Publishing Company, told her, in jovial reassurance. ‘Armstrong’s unexpected release is a fantastic stroke of luck for you,’ he went on. ‘Of all the poor devils who’ve been held hostage of late, he’s the one who seems to have most gripped the public’s imagination, so he’s the chappie everyone will hand over their hard-earned cash to read about.’

      Suzy frowned down at her prawn and mango salad which, with the seafood arced in a succulent pink fan and the fruit sliced into juicy golden leaves, was presented nouvelle cuisine style. Ever since the invitation had been issued a few days ago she had been looking forward to lunching here, at one of London’s most exclusive and élite French restaurants, but all of a sudden her appetite had disappeared. Vanished. She had envisaged receiving praise for a job well done, not being hit with a demand which was provoking an uncharacteristic yet none the less loud-hailing anxiety attack. Piers Armstrong’s release last month came as a personal name-tagged gift from heaven? Not in her opinion. While she had naturally been relieved when, after a year of being held captive by Central American guerrillas, he and his fellow hostage, a US photographer, had been freed, Suzy now wished she had worked faster on her book so that its processing could have safely, incontrovertibly passed the point of no return. She wished Randolph had not been able to identify what he apparently regarded as a wondrous window of opportunity.

      ‘My contract specified a hundred and fifty thousand words, so if Piers Armstrong is featured it means one of the other profiles will need to be dropped,’ she said, clamping down on her alarm and striving to sound unemotional and matter-of-fact. ‘That isn’t fair. Each of the men I interviewed very generously gave up several days of their time, and—’

      ‘No one will be dropped, because we shall be increasing the length of the book,’ Randolph informed her. He tasted his wine, rhapsodised knowingly on its excellence, then leant across to pat her hand with pudgy fingers. ‘I realise what a nuisance it is to have to yank yourself up by your bootstraps, get the adrenalin flowing again and produce another slug just when it seemed you could relax, but once the royalty cheques start to appear you’ll be the first to agree that the effort was well worth while,’ he said, speaking in the kind of soothing tones which air hostesses adopted to pacify passengers during turbulence.

      Suzy took a sip of spa water. The royalties would be her major source of income over the next year or two and thus the amount she received was important, yet even so...

      ‘You were happy with my book as it stood,’ she said, her chin taking on a stubborn slant.

      ‘We were delighted,’ her host acknowledged, ‘and we would have been delighted to have gone ahead and published it as it stood—if Armstrong hadn’t suddenly resurfaced. However, my board and I feel the chance to include him is one which can’t be missed.’ He slid her a baited smile. ‘And now we’re also thinking of following the hardback edition with a paperback.’

      Joy burst inside her like fireworks. A paperback would mean a far wider readership and could help lodge her name in the public consciousness. It would also vastly increase her royalties. Suzy battened down her joy. She refused to be lured.

      ‘I don’t see that Piers Armstrong’s insertion would make that much of a difference,’ she insisted.

      Randolph heaved a sigh. After spending well over a year on research and writing, her reluctance to tackle an additional case history was only natural, yet he had felt certain that any hesitation would be brief and easily overridden. In all their previous dealings Suzy Collier had shown herself to be open to ideas and co-operative, so why must she be contrary now?

      ‘It’ll make a vast difference,’ he insisted. ‘You see, while the other men you’ve profiled are each of interest in their own way, none is a formidably tough war correspondent. Neither are any of them tall, dark and handsome.’

      ‘That matters?’ she protested.

      ‘It’ll be a tremendous plus point in marketing. Selling books is just like selling any other commodity, in that if you can identify an aspect which’ll spice up the consumer’s interest you go all out to promote it.’

      Suzy speared a prawn. ‘I don’t consider Piers Armstrong handsome,’ she said. ‘He may have beautiful eyes—pale grey and fringed with thick black lashes—but his face is too angular, his nose too hawklike, his jaw too blunt.’

      ‘Sounds as though you’ve studied the chappie in some detail,’ her companion observed, plastering a finger of toast with his favourite goose liver pâté.

      The heat seeped into her cheeks. ‘I—I used to know him,’ she muttered.

      ‘Of course, you once worked on The View too— I’d forgotten. Well, even if Armstrong isn’t perfect feature by feature, the public—with an emphasis on the female variety—regard him as something akin to a film star, and if what you write could be illustrated by a few photographs of the fellow looking hunky, as my adolescent daughter calls it—’ Randolph guffawed ‘—you’d be guaranteed the number one slot on the non-fiction bestsellers list.’

      Suzy bit into the prawn with sharp white teeth. The editorial director was fantasising. She knew enough about popular taste to know she had not the least hope of toppling the ubiquitous epistles on diets or keep fit or cookery; though that was not her aim. All she really aspired to for this, her first book, was decent crits and respectably encouraging sales. At twenty-six, she was only starting to climb the literary ladder of success. In any case, whatever their appeal, returned hostages were nine-day wonders, and by the time her work reached the shelves next spring the hullabaloo which Piers Armstrong’s release had created would be long over. As their liaison was long over, she thought, and her face clouded. Whether the war correspondent’s inclusion in her book could be construed as an asset or not, there was another reason—a significant and personal reason—why she rebelled against writing about him, but she felt disinclined to say this to someone who was no more than an acquaintance, and who could proceed to ask probing