Valentine Vendetta. Sharon Kendrick
knotted her scarf tightly around her neck and looked around. Sam Lockhart had told her where she could get a cab and she walked out of the station into the dreary afternoon, where a fine mist of grey rain clogged the air and slicked onto the roofs of the cars like grease.
There was no one else in the queue and the driver looked at her with interest as she told him the name of the house.
‘Sam Lockhart’s place,’ he commented, as he switched on his meter and pulled out of the station forecourt.
‘You know it?’
‘Should do. He brings us plenty of work. Thought that’s where you’d be headed,’ he said, smiling.
Fran, who was hunting around in her handbag for a mirror, paused, mid-search. ‘Oh?’ She smiled back. ‘Can you guess where all your passengers are headed, then?’
‘No. Just his.’ The driver stopped at some red lights and grinned at her in his rear mirror. ‘If it’s someone glamorous getting off the London train, then the odds are that she wants to go out to Sam Lockhart’s place!’
Fran bristled as the driver’s giveaway remark reminded her why she was here in the first place. Poor Rosie! ‘Oh?’ She thought how indignant she sounded! ‘He has a whole stream of women arriving here, does he?’
The driver shook his head hastily. ‘Oh, no! Never more than one at a time!’ he joked. ‘And we only notice because nothing much happens around here. It’s a pretty isolated place.’
‘So I see.’ Fran looked out of the window as the buildings and lights of the town began to get more sparse and the landscape began to acquire the vast, untouched emptiness of perfectly flat countryside. It could have been boring, but she thought that it had a stark, distinctive beauty all of its own. Even so, its very bleakness did not fit in with her idea of where a sex god would live. Why had he chosen to settle out here, she wondered, when he could be raving it up in London? ‘Is it very far?’
‘Another couple of miles,’ he answered, slowing the car right down as the lane narrowed. ‘Writer, are you?’
‘Not me, I’m afraid!’ she told him cheerfully, and picked up her hand mirror to see what sort of face Sam Lockhart would be greeted by.
Unexciting was the word which immediately sprang to mind.
Her skin looked too pale, but then it always did—and the green-gold eyes could have done with a little more mascara to make the best of them. But apart from the fact that she had left in a hurry, Fran had deliberately played safe, unwilling to look as though she’d spent hours in front of the mirror in an effort to impress Sam Lockhart. Apart from the fact that it just wasn’t her style—sex gods were used to women slapping on the entire contents of their make-up bags. She knew that from living with her husband. So she would be different. Because there was one other thing she knew about that particular breed of man…they were easily bored and something different always intrigued them.
So she had contented herself with a slick of nude lipstick which simply looked like she had been licking her lips. Just enough make-up to look as though she wasn’t wearing any at all—but only a woman would be able to tell that!
‘Here we are!’ said the driver. The car slowed down and began indicating right as a high, dark hedge began to loom up beside them. Before her stretched a long drive which curved off unexpectedly to the left, and impulse made her lean over to tap the driver on the shoulder.
‘Would you mind stopping here?’ she asked.
‘It’s a long drive.’
‘I can see that. I don’t mind walking. In fact I’d rather walk. I just want to get the…feel…of the place first.’ That first gut reaction to someone’s home was invaluable. Houses and owners taken unawares told you volumes about what they were really like—and the better you knew a client, the better you would be able to judge the perfect party for their particular needs. A car drawing up outside would alert Sam Lockhart to her arrival and that would not do. She wanted to see the face of the seducer taken off guard.
Ignoring the driver’s curious expression, she paid her fare and gave him a healthy tip.
‘Thanks very much, Miss. Will you be wanting to go back to the station…tonight?’ He put the question so delicately that Fran might have laughed if she weren’t feeling so indignant on Rosie’s behalf. What was Lockhart running here, for goodness’ sake? A harem?
‘Yes, I will,’ she answered crisply. ‘But I don’t know what time that will be—so if you’d give me one of your cards I’ll ring.’
She waited until the red tail-lights of the car had retreated before setting off up the wide path, her sensible brown leather boots sending little shoals of gravel spraying in her wake.
The grounds—they were much too extensive to be called a garden—wore the muddy, leafless brown of a winter coat, but the sparse flower-beds were curved and beautifully shaped, and the trees had been imaginatively planted to stand dramatically against the huge, bare sky.
The house was old. A beautifully proportioned whitewashed villa which was perfect in its simplicity.
And it looked deserted.
Moving quietly, Fran crept forward to peer into one of the leaded windows at the front of the house, and nearly died with shock when she saw a man sitting in there, before the golden flicker of a log fire. A dark, denim-clad figure sprawled in a comfortable-looking armchair, his long legs stretched in front of him as he read from what looked like a manuscript.
She came to within nose-pressing distance of the window and her movement must have caught his attention, for he looked up from his reading and his dark-featured face registered no emotion whatsoever at seeing her standing there. Not surprise or fright or irritation. Not even a mild curiosity.
Then he pointed a rather dismissive finger in the direction of the front of the house and mimed, ‘the door’s open.’
And started reading again!
How very rude, she thought! Especially when she’d travelled all this way to see him! Fran crunched her way over to the front door, pushed it open and stepped inside, narrowing her eyes with surprise as she looked around.
It wasn’t what she had expected.
On the wooden floor lay mud-covered wellington boots, a gardening catalogue, a pair of secateurs and a battered old panama hat. Waterproof coats and jackets were heaped on the coat stand and a variety of different coloured umbrellas stood in an untidy stack behind the front door. The walls were deep and scarlet and womblike and welcoming.
So where were the wall-to-wall mirrors and the shaggy fur rugs where he made lots of love to lots of different women?
It felt like coming home, she thought, with an unwelcome jolt. And it shouldn’t, she told herself fiercely. This was the house of the man who was responsible for Rosie’s heartache—not the house of her dreams!
She turned and walked along a narrow corridor which led to the study and stood framed in the doorway with the light behind her.
He looked up, all unshaven and ruffled, as if he’d just got out of bed. Or hadn’t been to bed. ‘Hi,’ he said, and yawned. ‘You must be Fran Fisher.’
His eyes were the most incredible shade of deep blue, she noticed—night-dark and piercing and remarkable enough to eclipse even the rugged symmetry of his face. With the jeans went untidy, slightly too-long hair, making him more rock-star than literary agent.
Yes, Fran thought, her heart pounding like a mad thing. No wonder Rosie had fallen so badly. He looked exactly like a sex god! ‘And you must be Sam Lockhart,’ she gulped.
He shot a brief glance at his wristwatch and she found herself thinking that she had never seen a man so at ease in his own skin as this one.
‘Yeah,’ he drawled. ‘That’s me!’
‘Nice of you to come to the door