Dishonourable Proposal

Finally she admitted to herself she had never succeeded in tearing Jake out of her heart. It had been a self-delusion. She had run to France and stayed there. Developing a different career had helped her pretence.

Abruptly she stood up and crossed the room to the wide bed. No more, she vowed silently; as of now her game-playing was over. Next week she hoped to start working as a designer. Jake and all that had been between them was over, and she had to face the fact and get on with her life.

She shrugged off her robe, and, pulling back the covers, she crawled into bed. As for Jake, she had nothing to fear from him any more. The glimpse of pure unadulterated hate she had seen in his eyes, minutes before he had left, told her more clearly than words that the last part she had played had been her best and most convincing.

CHAPTER THREE

Katy buried her head in the pillow, but the slight, lingering fragrance of Jake's cologne clung to the crisp cotton covers, forcibly reminding her of their earlier lovemaking, and more—all the other moments she had shared with Jake...

She stirred restlessly on the bed, finally turning to lie flat on her back, her green eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Her mind spun on oiled wheels, preventing her from finding the oblivion of sleep. Small cameos of her past stirred flickering images in her brain.

Six years old and running around the huge grounds of the family home in Cornwall. A massive granite foursquare structure built on the hills above the little harbour of Fowey, a few miles from the china clay works that had been the foundation of the family business almost two hundred years ago. She had been a happy child, Irving in the huge house with her mother and grandfather. Her father had returned from the factory in London most weekends, and sometimes her mother would take her to London to stay in the elegant town house.

Looking back down the years, Katy could pin-point the exact moment things had begun to change. She had been ten at the time. Her father had returned home unexpectedly late one Thursday evening. She had awoken to the sounds of angry voices—her parents' and also her mother's friend Auntie Fiona's. The following morning the young Katy had run to her parents' bedroom, needing reassurance, only to find her mother on her own; her father had been occupying a separate bedroom.

From then on her father's visits were fewer, and Katy's trips to London stopped. When her dad did visit the talk was all about sending Katy to boarding-school. Her beloved grandfather died six months later, and at the funeral her parents had another row. The landlady of the local pub, the Bird in the Hand, cried at the graveside, and her mother had been disgusted. Katy could hear her father's voice even now.

'Mother has been dead for twenty-five years, for God's sake. He was a normal, healthy man, something you wouldn't understand, given your views on sex.'

Thinking about it now, she wondered for the first time if maybe her mother had been frigid. It was no excuse for the behaviour of her father but it might go some way to explain it.

By the end of the year Katy was a boarder at St Oswald's School for Young Ladies in the heart of Yorkshire. It was there that one of the older girls pointed out to her a photograph of her father and a young woman leaving a London club in one of the tabloid newspapers beloved of the school caretaker. Suddenly everything that had happened in her home over the past year made sense: her father was a philanderer and her innocent trust in home and family was badly damaged.

On the day of her mother's death in a car accident the police called at the factory, looking for her father. He was missing—abroad with one of his lady-friends. By sheer coincidence, Jake Granton had chosen that day to visit the factory. At the instigation of Mary, her father's secretary, Jake agreed to travel to Katy's boarding-school and break the news to the fourteen-year-old child.

He took her home to Cornwall and stayed rather than leave her with only the housekeeper for company. Jake supported and comforted her, until her father finally arrived on the morning of the funeral. It was Jake who explained her father's absence and told her she was too young to understand the emotions between adults and not to judge her father too harshly. At twenty-six, he appeared a confident young man, but near enough her generation to be comfortable with, so she tried to believe him.

/> Jake talked about his own mother's death a few months previously; he understood her feelings. He had only recently returned from Venice, where he had been acting as his father's envoy and settling his mother's affairs.

Katy sighed inwardly. It had been a peculiar trick of late that had brought herself and Jake together—the death of two women within months of each other.

In Venice Jake had discovered a great-uncle had left aim the shares in Meldenton, and on investigating had unearthed the story behind the holdings.

In the Second World War Grandfather Meldenton had been posted to Italy and there he had saved the life of an Italian man, Gianni Luzzini. After the war, when Grandfather Meldenton had needed capital to refurbish die London factory that had been badly bombed, Gianni, whose family had manufactured glass in Venice for centuries, had insisted on helping him. In return Gianni had rfoctantly accepted a thirty per cent holding in liddenton. Grandfather Meldenton's pride would not allow him to take the money as a gift.

Over the next twelve months Katy had been delighted d receive postcards from various parts of the world from Jake, but it had been the following summer before she had seen him again.

Her father had taken her to his new villa in Marbella and introduced her to Monica, his new bride, an attractive redheaded woman at least twenty years younger than himself. He'd also told Katy the house in Cornwall was to be sold—Monica did not like the country. Their home from then on was to be in London. Katy had been horrified, but Jake had turned up and with a few carefully chosen words had persuaded her to accept her father's marriage. From then on, Jake had always visited when Katy was at home.

Katy groaned and turned over, burying her head in the pillow. She wondered how she had ever been so damned gullible, such a fool, but at fourteen she'd had an outsize crush on Jake. He was the tall, dark, handsome man of her dreams, and she would have done anything for him... and eventually did!

It had been the Easter holiday in her last year at school. She had gone to the villa in Spain, loaded down with books to study for her A level exam. On arriving she had found Jake already in residence. He was convalescing after a skiing accident the month previously. She was horrified to see him hobbling around on crutches with his leg in plaster from thigh to ankle. Her father and Monica stayed for a few days, then left—nursing an invalid was not Monica's style.

For Katy the next two weeks were pure bliss; with only the elderly couple who looked after the villa to chaperon, Katy delighted in looking after Jake. They talked for hours, played Monopoly and chess, and Jake taught her to play backgammon.

It was the backgammon that was her downfall. The last evening of her holiday she was desperate for Jake to treat her as a woman.

Oh, he touched her—an arm round her shoulders, a quick hug, a kiss on the cheek—but she wanted more; just looking at him made her heart beat faster, her stomach turn over. She ached to be held in his arms and feel his beautiful mouth on hers.

Katy had read about love in books and longed to experience the reality of it with Jake, and that night for the first time she beat Jake at backgammon. She could remember it as though it were yesterday.

Jake lounged back on one side of the long hide sofa, his injured leg stretched out before him, his arm spread along the back of the settee. She had never seen him look more sexy. His dark eyes sparkled as he laughed at her across the width of the low coffee-table.

'Well, Katy, you finally did it. You beat the master, and by my reckoning I owe you five thousand pounds.' They used matchsticks as money, and, chuckling, he threw a handful of matches at her. 'I must be a great teacher,' he opined smugly.

Katy, elated at winning, but sad at the thought of leaving the next day, daringly responded, 'I admit you're a good teacher Jake, but, I wonder, is backgammon all you can teach me?' And, standing up, she moved around the table and sat down beside him on the sofa.

She looked at him without speaking, her green eyes brilliant in the perfect oval of her face. She was wearing a brief self-supporting smocked-top cotton sundress, and as she leaned towards him the front slid lower, revealing the soft full curves of her high breasts. She watched his brown eyes darken as his glance dropped to her breasts, she noted the dull flush spread along his high cheekbones, and all trace of amusement vanished from his expression.