Passionate Scandal

‘Go for your walk,’ he suggested gruffly after a moment. ‘It will help clear your head.’

She was standing in the hall pulling on her sheepskin coat when the telephone in the study began to ring, she heard her father’s voice answer, and was just turning away when his head popped around the study door.

‘Oh,’ he said, sounding faintly disconcerted, almost disappointed that she was actually there. ‘I caught you, then. It’s—it’s for you,’ he informed her gruffly. ‘Dominic,’ he added, cleared his throat, hesitated a moment longer than walked off briskly down the hall toward Louise’s private sitting-room while Madeline stared blankly after him.

She found her feet dragging as she went into the study and closed the door. The plain buff receiver lay off its rest on her father’s desk, his gold-rimmed spectacles lying at right angles to it.

Dom was on the phone was all she could think, staring down at it. Dom was on the phone and wanted to speak to her.

Her hand was trembling as she picked up the receiver and carried it to her ear. ‘Hello?’ she murmured, then closed her eyes while she waited for the seductive beauty of his voice to wash over her.

There was a pause, as though he was no longer certain he wanted to speak to her, and her heart began to thump heavily in her breast. ‘Dominic?’ she whispered promptingly, having to bite down hard on her bottom lip to stop herself begging him not to ring off.

God, she thought wretchedly. This is awful! Much much worse than it had been the first time around. She was shaking all over, even her knees were trembling, like her breath as it left her agitated lungs.

‘I want to see you,’ he said, and the husky tone in his voice told her he was finding this just as difficult as she was. ‘I’ve been away,’ he added quickly. ‘I only got back an hour ago or I would have rung sooner. Will you meet me somewhere this afternoon?’

‘I…I was just on my way out, actually,’ she said, saying the first thing that came into her head because the relief at hearing his voice was so violent that she’d gone light-headed with it.

‘Linburgh’s gone back to Boston,’ he stated curtly, as though he believed Perry was the only reason she would ever step out of the house.

‘Did I say otherwise?’ she asked, blinking in bewilderment.

‘Will he be coming back?’

‘I… Well…’ She frowned, not seeing the relevance of the question. ‘Not until Nina’s wedding, no,’ she answered honestly. ‘But I don’t see what Perry’s movements have to do with—’

‘I would say they have a lot to do with everything,’ he cut in gruffly. ‘I have something for you, something I promised you once. Will you meet me, Madeline?’

Something he’d promised her? Her frown deepened as she tried to think what in heaven’s name it could be? ‘Where?’ she asked, and closed her eyes again in the hopes that doing so would shut out Perry’s voice telling her how easy she made it for Dom. ‘He just crooked his little finger’, he’d said. And he was right.

‘Were you about to go anywhere special?’ he countered curiously.

‘Just for a walk,’ she admitted. ‘I was on my way to take a look at the old Courtney place. My father has been telling me that someone is having the old place renovated, and I thought I would like to take a last look at it before it changes beyond all recognition.’

There was a short silence, then, ‘It’s a bit early in the year to go crab-appling, isn’t it, Madeline?’ Dominic murmured softly.

Despite the tension in her she had to smile at that. In her young day, she’d used to find nothing more exciting than making secret forays into the major’s orchard to steal from his overgrown and neglected fruit tree. It wasn’t the fruit that drew her there, but the sheer exhilaration in knowing that if the old man caught her he would think nothing of threatening her with his loaded shotgun. He had never actually fired it, of course, but in those days she had been impressionable enough to believe he might.

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; ‘You, of course, were never young,’ she mocked him drily.

‘Once,’ he confessed wistfully. ‘A long, long time ago before a black-haired witch with dangerously alluring eyes cast her wicked spells on me and turned me into a very old man.’

The growing smile began to ease some of the strain out of her face. ‘Have you any idea who bought the house?’

‘Haven’t heard anything on the grapevine,’ he answered. ‘Are you riding, or driving?’

‘Walking, actually,’ she informed him a little defensively, knowing she was revealing more of her present mood than she would like. April was being its usual seasonal self and blowing up crisp cold winds from the north which were likely to bring rain with them, the dark clouds rolling in from nowhere to drop their icy load before rolling onwards again. And Dom would be well aware that she had decided to walk simply because she couldn’t resist battling with the unpredictable elements.

‘I’ll meet you there in about an hour, then,’ he said, and put down the phone.

Madeline stared at it, wondering pensively just what she was doing agreeing to meet him when she knew it would bring her nothing but pain. Then she happened to glance sideways at the mirror hanging above the old marble fireplace, and she knew why she had agreed. It was all there in her face, shining like a damned beacon for anyone to read if they wished to. Her eyes were glowing, her mouth had taken on an upward curl, and she felt happy, alive for the first time in over a week. And that was why she was going to meet him, because he was the only person on this earth who could make her feel like this.

Dominic’s car wasn’t anywhere to be seen when she arrived in the driveway to Courtney Manor, and she paused, gazing along the tree-lined driveway to where the old house stood, still looking charmingly rickety despite the amount of work which had obviously been done to it already. As her father had said, the roof had been completely replaced, and the black and white facer beams no longer wore the yellow-grey tinge of age and neglect. The rustic bricks, too, had been neatly repointed, and the tall chimney stacks had been straightened out. Madeline tipped her head to one side in an effort to put them back as she remembered them.

‘There was a crooked man who bought a crooked house,’ she murmured softly to herself, recalling the time she had chanted the rhyme at Dominic.