Unguarded Moment

Unguarded Moment
Sara Craven

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

ENDPAGE

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

AS the taxi stopped, so did the rain, and Alix Coulter flung the sky an appreciative glance as she paid off the driver. Her three weeks in the sun had been a leisurely delight, but at the same time had spoilt her for the vagaries of the English climate in August. It had been a distinct let-down to descend on London through thick cloud and find a sullen, humid day waiting for her.

Driving through the glistening streets, she’d wondered half humorously, half apprehensively, whether the threatening weather was an indication of what was waiting for her. Bianca had been all smiles when she’d said ‘Au revoir’, but that was no guarantee that Alix would be equally warmly welcomed. Bianca’s moods were—mercurial, to find the kindest way of putting it, Alix supposed. Even the slightest obstacle in her primrose path could bring on a tantrum which might last for days. ‘Artistic temperament’, the directors and producers who worked with her on her films tactfully called it. ‘Sheer bloodymindedness’ was the more down-to-earth description from Lester Marchant, Bianca’s most recent husband, now licking his wounds and ruefully contemplating the divorce settlement in the United States.

Alix sighed a little, She had liked Lester, and was sorry when he finally declared enough was enough and moved out. But as she was the first to admit, it wasn’t easy being a member of Bianca’s entourage. She had worked for Bianca for three years now, and while it was undoubtedly exciting, it wasn’t always enjoyable.

Alix had often wondered, especially when Bianca was being more than usually imperious, why she stood it. She was a good secretary. She was calm, efficient and well organised. She wouldn’t have the slightest difficulty in finding another job—and an employer not nearly as trying and demanding as Bianca apparently took a delight in being. And yet she still stayed, restoring order to Bianca’s hectic social life, smoothing out her travel arrangements, taking her frequent changes of mind in her stride as equably as she did Bianca’s constant changes of clothes.

It must be family feeling, she told herself wryly.

She had been quite shattered to learn that Bianca Layton was her aunt, her own mother’s sister. She could never remember hearing it referred to even once during her childhood, although Bianca was already a name in films on both sides of the Atlantic, celebrated for her outrageous beauty and her love affairs which sometimes, but not always, ended in marriage.

It was incredible even to think of Bianca coming from the same staid background as her mother. All her life Margaret Coulter had stood up for all the virtues that Bianca seemed deliberately to flout. Alix often wondered whether her mother had been ashamed or envious of her amazingly glamorous sibling.

When Alix had at last discovered the truth, learned that Bianca Layton was her aunt and was coming to visit them, she had appealed to her mother, ‘But why did you never tell me? Why have you never said anything all these years?’

Margaret Coulter was a quiet woman, but now she was so silent that Alix was afraid she had offended her in some way.

At last she said, ‘There seemed no reason for you to know. Her world isn’t ours, and I never thought we would ever see her again.’

There was a note in her voice which told Alix quite unequivocally that it was Margaret herself who had desired the separation. She looked at her mother uncertainly, at the greying dark hair cut and waved neatly into the same style for the past ten years, at the figure, no longer youthfully slender but blurring into comfortable lines, and realised that Margaret was probably dreading the inevitable comparisons which would be made.

Margaret met her gaze and her smile was wintry. ‘No, we’re not alike,’ she said. ‘We never were. No one took us for sisters, even when we were at school. Sometimes I could hardly believe it myself.’

It had seemed even more unbelievable when Bianca finally arrived. She seemed to fill the house with her presence. Her perfume hung exotically in the air. She was charm, she glittered, and she never once by either word or deed gave any indication that she found her sister’s home and her sister’s family drearily suburban and middle class.

She was gracious in a remote way to Alix and to Debbie, her younger sister. She obviously wasn’t used to very young girls; all three of her marriages had been childless.

And when Bianca had departed as dramatically as she had come, and they were left with that inevitable feeling of anticlimax, Debbie had said, ‘But why did she come? What did she want?’

But no one had an answer to that—at least not then. Sometimes Alix found herself staring at the place at the neatly set table with its embroidered cloth and matching china where Bianca had sat and wondering dazedly whether it had all really happened, or whether they hadn’t been victims of some sort of mass hallucination, or one of those dreams where the Queen comes to tea as if she was an old friend.

It had been a fleeting visit, and yet it seemed to have had a profound effect. Margaret Coulter had never been the ebullient, extrovert type, but now she seemed to become more withdrawn than ever, and her family watched her with concern.

One night Alix, who couldn’t sleep, came downstairs for a drink of water and heard her father’s voice, almost coaxing.

‘Don’t worry, Meg. It’s over. It’s past.’

And her mother’s response, her tone throbbing with something like hatred, ‘Or it could be just beginning.’

Alix, unseen and unheard, went back to bed without her drink, instinct telling her that any sort of intrusion would be unwelcome.

What had her mother meant? she wondered as she tossed and turned restlessly. Aunt Bianca had said nothing about another visit. Was this what her mother was afraid of? Constant descents on them, like some goddess coming down from Olympus, with all the fuss and attendant publicity which would probably be inevitable? She could understand why quiet, conventional Margaret should find such an idea abhorrent. It was that unmistakable note of venom which disturbed her. Her mother was a good woman—everyone said so. She belonged to the Mothers’ Union and raised money for Oxfam and a string of other charities. She didn’t have an enemy in the world—or at least that was what Alix had always believed.

She could only surmise that at some time in the dim and distant past something had happened between the sisters which had driven them irrevocably apart. There had been a breach which Bianca’s unexpected visit had done nothing to heal. On the contrary, old wounds seemed to be open and bleeding.

Gradually, as the weeks lengthened into months, and nothing was heard from Bianca, although plenty was heard about her—more films, another marriage—things began to return to normal.

And two years had passed before Bianca came back into their lives again.

‘Cheer up, ducks. It may never happen.’ The taxi-driver’s cheerful voice cut across her reverie, and Alix started. He had unloaded her luggage, two cases in cream hide, on to the pavement beside her. ‘Very nice too.’ His gaze slid from the cases over Alix, and on tothe house they were standing outside, so she wasn’t altogether sure what he was referring to, and certainly not inclined to ask.

The tan she had acquired over the past few weeks suited her, she knew, and she was wearing her thick dark hair loose on her shoulders instead of in a neat chignon as she usually did. Although that, of course, was not entirely her own choice. It was just that Bianca preferred her to look neat and businesslike when she was working.

Well, perhaps not just that, Alix admitted to herself wryly. She remembered the first day she had come here, summoned by a telephone call not from Bianca herself but from Lester Marchant.

Would she come and see them, he had said, because he had a proposition to put to her. Alix had hesitated at first, her instinct telling her that her mother wouldn’t want her to go. But her curiosity proved too strong in the end.

She could remember the uncertainty she had felt, standing at the foot of the steps for the first time, looking up at the tall Georgian house and wondering if she had the courage to ring the doorbell.

At least she didn’t have to do that any more, she thought, as she fitted her key into the lock, and she was certainly a more confident and self-reliant person than she would have been if she’d gone on with her humdrum little job in a solicitor’s office.

The driver carried her cases in and she thanked him with a tip and a smile he would remember far longer. Then she closed the door and stood looking around her with the usual pang of delight which assailed her every time she entered the house. It was a beautiful hall, broad and spacious, with a broad imposing staircase, and the walls panelled in honey-coloured wood. Bianca had other houses, but this was where she spent most of her time.

‘In spite of everything, England is still the most civilised place to be,’ she was fond of saying in interviews. The only thing she didn’t find civilised was the weather, and as autumn dwindled into winter with rain and fog and frost, she was generally ready to be off to her home in California, or to accept any of the numerous invitations to friends’ villas in Marbella or the South of France.

Alix had seen a lot of the world in the past few years. She had expected to be taken on location when Bianca was filming, but she hadn’t been sure about the trips which were really frivolity. But Bianca had dismissed her misgivings with an impatient wave of her hand. When she travelled, she liked her entourage with her, and that included Alix as well as Edith Montgomery who had been with her all her life, it seemed, fulfilling a variety of roles—a kind of companion-maid-masseuse-dresser-housekeeper rolled into one.

Monty was coming downstairs now, neat in the dark skirt and white tailored shirt she usually wore, and she looked at Alix with her brows raised.

‘So you’re back,’ she observed grudgingly and unnecessarily.

Alix kept her face straight. When she had first come to work here, she had been unnerved by Monty’s inexplicable but thinly veiled hostility. Later, when she became more settled, she had been able to reason it out. Monty wasn’t a young woman. Her face was thin and lined, and she made no attempt to disguise the liberal streaks of grey in her hair. But she had a close relationship with Bianca, and perhaps she thought having her niece working as a secretary and actually living in the house might be a threat to that relationship. Alix had had to walk on eggshells for several months in an attempt to convince Monty that she had nothing to worry about, that although she had accepted the job she wasn’t trying to muscle in on anything else. She supposed she had succeeded up to a point. They had achieved a kind of armed truce, but she had stopped hoping that Monty would regard her with any real warmth or approval.

Now she smiled more widely than she felt inclined to do, and said, ‘Yes, I am. How are things? Any crises during my absence?’

‘We’ve had our ups and downs,’ Monty said drily. ‘But you’re just in time for the row of the year.’

‘Oh, hell!’ Alix was apprehensive. ‘It isn’t the film, surely? It hasn’t fallen through?’

‘No, that’s still very much on the cards. Veronese is coming over here shortly to talk to her about it.’ Monty paused heavily. ‘No, it’s this biography.’

‘Oh?’ Alix’s voice sharpened. This was something she hadn’t foreseen. Before she’d gone away, Bianca had been all for the suggestion that her life story should be written. She had even had boxes of ancient photographs brought down from the attic to look for suitable prints of herself as baby and small child for the inevitable illustrations. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘They don’t want her to write it.’ Monty gave a resigned shrug. ‘She thought it would simply be a matter of hiring someone to listen to her talk through her reminiscences, and then ghost them, but now it seems the publishers have commissioned someone—a Liam Brant. Have you heard of him?’

Alix thought she had, but couldn’t remember in what connection.

She said, ‘What has she got against him?’

‘He isn’t her idea. She wanted that girl—the one who did the article about her in Woman of Today. She thought she was simpatico.’

‘It was certainly a very flattering article,’ Alix said drily. ‘I doubt if the same note of unquestioning admiration could be sustained for a whole book. Has she met this Mr Brant? Perhaps he’s simpatico too.’

‘He’s coming here this morning.’ Monty sounded dour. ‘And she says she won’t see him. A nice start that is!’

A nice start indeed, Alix thought resignedly, bidding her holiday goodbye for ever. She was back in the thick of it, and no mistake.

She lifted the dark fall of hair wearily from her neck. ‘If he’s the publishers’ choice, then we may be stuck with him, unless she can come up with a better reason for turning him down than she’d rather it was someone else. And it won’t do to antagonise him. I’ll talk to her.’

‘I wish you would,’ said Monty, and that was an admission coming from her. She sounded tired, Alix thought. Perhaps the last three weeks had been more trying than usual, although after all these years Monty should be used to Bianca’s vagaries. ‘Leave your cases. I’ll get Harris to see to them.’

Harris and his wife occupied a small flat in the basement. They took care of the house when Bianca was away, and when she was in residence, Harris was a total manservant, doing most of the fetching and carrying around the household, but acting as butler when the occasion demanded, while Mrs Harris was a divine cook.

They had worked for Bianca for a long time too, and they seemed impervious to the storms which periodically rocked the household, or perhaps they stayed because the wages were good, and the perfect employer didn’t exist anyway, Alix sometimes thought, amused.

She ran upstairs and paused outside the door of Bianca’s first floor suite, wondering whether to knock. Bianca usually catnapped during the morning, and she hated being caught doing it. But even as Alix hesitated, she heard the unmistakable crash of shattering glass coming from behind the door. She smiled grimly, turned the handle and went into the room.

‘I do hope that wasn’t a mirror,’ she said lightly. ‘I don’t think we can do with seven years’ bad luck.’

It was a vase of flowers. Broken glass, water and sad-looking blooms were strewn across the carpet at Bianca’s feet. Alix thought detachedly that she looked magnificent, even if the flush in her cheeks was caused by temper rather than excitement or good health.

The huge emerald eyes, which had been staring straight ahead, focussed on Alix and sharpened.

Bianca said, ‘So it’s you. Where the hell have you been?’

Alix suppressed a sigh. ‘So nice to be needed,’ she said drily. ‘I’ve been on holiday, in case you’ve forgotten—to Rhodes. Didn’t you get my card?’

‘I may have done,’ Bianca gave an irritable shrug. ‘The girl they sent from the agency has been dealing with the mail. My God, what a mistake that was!’

‘Wasn’t she any good?’ Alix fetched a discarded newspaper from the table beside the chaise-longue and began to gather the broken glass and wilted flowers on to it.

‘Useless. It’s all her fault that this frightful man is coming here this morning. She made the appointment without consulting me. Well, you’ll just have to get rid of him, Alix. Telephone him. Tell him I’m ill—tell him anything. I won’t see him. I won’t!’ There was an hysterical note in Bianca’s voice and Alix glanced up at her, her brows drawing together in a faint frown.

She said equably, ‘Very well. But what shall I say when he asks for another appointment? And he surely will. This is a commission, and he won’t want to lose out.’

Bianca’s perfectly painted mouth twisted sullenly. ‘Oh God, you sound just like Seb! He won’t help at all. He says I’ve agreed that my life story should be written, and the best thing I can do is co-operate.’ She swore viciously. ‘Some public relations man he turned out to be!’

‘He’s one of the best,’ Alix said, faintly amused. ‘And his advice is probably good.’

Bianca gestured wildly. ‘But I don’t want his advice. I just want him to get rid of this terrible man—this Brant.’

Alix retrieved a sliver of glass from the carpet with a certain amount of care.

‘How do you know he’s so terrible? He might be charming. If you met him you might like him.’

‘I would not.’ Bianca made it sound like a solemn vow. ‘He writes the most awful things. He did the Kristen Wallace book last year, and he made her sound like a neurotic bitch.’

‘Well, isn’t she?’ In spite of her care, Alix had cut her finger on a splinter, and she sucked the blood reflectively.

‘Of course,’ Bianca said impatiently. ‘But he had no right to say so.’

Alix hadn’t read the book, but she could remember Bianca doing so with gurgles of enjoyment, and she knew now why the name seemed familiar. The Wallace biography had caused a sensation because it had exploded a myth once and for all. Kristen Wallace had acquired a reputation for playing serious roles in films which relied heavily on prolonged silences and heavy symbolism for their impact. In the book, Kristen had been encouraged to talk about her work, which she had done at length, revealing in the process that she hadn’t, in all probability, understood one word of the deeply significant lines she was called on to say. The real genius, it had been suggested, was Miss Wallace’s dialogue coach. Alix remembered one critic had called the book, ‘A devastating insight into a deeply trivial mind.’ One thing was certain: Kristen Wallace had been a laughing stock afterwards, and she hadn’t made a film since.

‘He’s a hatchet man—a real swine,’ Bianca railed. ‘I don’t want that kind of thing written about me.’

Alix began to smile. She said, ‘That’s hardly likely. You’re not a pretentious idiot like La Wallace.’

‘I don’t want anyone like that poking about in my private life,’ Bianca said with finality.

One answer to that was that there was no aspect of Bianca’s life which could be considered private, but Alix wasn’t brave enough to suggest it. Her affairs, her marriages, and her divorces had all been conducted in the full glare of the publicity spotlight. There could be few details about them that the great reading public didn’t already know, ad nauseam.

‘So you’ll telephone him now,’ Bianca persisted. ‘And when you’ve done that, you can phone Seb and tell him he’s fired.’

‘Just as you say,’ Alix agreed cheerfully. There was no problem about the last instruction. Seb had a fireproof contract, and he was used to Bianca’s tempers. He said they added further colour to life’s rich tapestry.

She disposed of the broken glass and flowers, and told Monty regretfully about the soaked carpet, then went off to the room she used as an office.

The agency girl might have roused Bianca’s ire, but she seemed to be a neat worker. The desk was immaculate, and the carbons of the correspondence she had dealt with were all clipped together by the typewriter so Alix could familiarise herself with everything that had happened while she was away.

The filing had all been done too, and she found Liam Brant’s letter without difficulty. It was a polite enough request for an interview, she thought, as she dialled his number, but the signature was a give-away—a slash of black ink, harsh and arrogant, across the creamy paper.

His line was engaged, so she re-dialled and spoke to Seb.

‘You’re fired.’

‘That’s the fourth time this year,’ Seb said mournfully. ‘One day I’ll take her at her word, and then where will she be? And how are you, my honey flower? Did you enjoy your happy hols?’

‘I wish I could remember,’ Alix sighed. ‘I’ve now got to gently but firmly get rid of Mr Brant.’

There was a startled sound, then Seb said, ‘I can tell you now that you won’t. I tried to indicate that to Bianca, but there was no reasoning with her. She put the phone down on me in a hell of a rage.’

‘And broke a vase,’ Alix said ruefully. ‘I’ve just been picking the pieces up.’

‘Well, my advice is still to co-operate with Mr Brant, or you may have more than the pieces of a vase to pick up,’ Seb assured her. ‘Have you come across any of his books?’

‘Only by hearsay. I gather Bianca’s been reading some of them—the Kristen Wallace biography in particular.’

‘Well, I suggest you read them too, so that you know what you’re up against.’

When she had replaced the receiver, Alix sat for a moment or two staring at the phone as if it might bite her. Then slowly and carefully she re-dialled Liam Brant’s number. She did not know whether to be sorry or relieved when it was still engaged.

She looked at the internal telephone on her desk, wondering if she should ring Bianca’s suite to warn her she had been unable to get through to Liam Brant as yet, or whether she should go up and tell her in person, passing on at the same time Seb’s rather terse advice.

She needed to go upstairs anyway. She had her unpacking to do, and she needed to change. Bianca had been too overwrought to notice her brief cream denim skirt and sleeveless black top, and her bare tanned legs culminating in flimsy leather sandals bought from a street market, but she would notice eventually, and not be pleased.

When Alix had first come to work there, she had been so dazzled to find herself the possessor of a salary which exceeded anything she could reasonably have hoped for that she had plunged into an orgy of buying. She didn’t want the way-out things displayed in so many of the boutiques, but it was fun to choose things which enhanced her young slenderness, clothes which whispered to her entranced image in fitting room mirrors that she could be more than merely attractive—that she might even have the promise of beauty.

She had entirely forgotten what had happened after her first visit to the house, when she had been brought into this very room to meet her predecessor, whose abrupt departure had provided the reason for her being offered the job.

The girl had been tight-lipped and hostile, and Alix had been unsure how to defuse the situation, wishing very much that Lester Marchant who had brought her here and introduced them had remained to ease the way for her. But of course he hadn’t, she thought, her mouth lifting in a smile of wry reminiscence. Lester had problems of his own, even then.

‘So you’re the new secretary.’ The other girl had surveyed her from head to toe. ‘I don’t think you’ll last long. You’re not bad looking and Bianca doesn’t brook any possible rivals, you know. That’s why I’m going. I could handle the job, but someone bothered to give me a word and a smile at one of her cocktail parties when he should have been devoting all his attention to her, and that’s fatal.’

Hot with embarrassment, Alix said, ‘Perhaps you ought to know that Miss Layton is my aunt.’

‘She is?’ The other girl sounded astonished, rather than abashed. ‘Well, that’s probably the last time you’ll ever be allowed to tell anyone that. And it won’t save you from the limitations Bianca likes to put on her staff. Niece or not, you’ll submit to the image she wants, or you’ll be out. Now, I suppose I’d better show you how the filing system works.’

Alix had been too dazed by the harshness of the words to pay much attention to the demonstration that followed. She was torn with doubts anyway, knowing how her mother would react to the news that she had accepted a post as Bianca’s secretary, however high-powered and well paid, and beyond the wildest dreams of anyone as relatively young and inexperienced as she was. Whatever the trouble was between Bianca and her mother, she had an uneasy feeling that her decision to work for Bianca, to live in her house, to devote her waking hours to her interests, would improve nothing between the sisters.

Now, it seemed, she would have problems at work as well as at home. She had known a momentary impulse to cut and run, but now an older, wiser Alix knew that she would have regretted it bitterly if she had done so.

Even a few weeks afterwards when Bianca, her smiling lips belying her narrowed eyes, had suggested charmingly that perhaps some of her new clothes were more suitable to her leisure hours rather than an office environment, she had learned to swallow her humiliation. Because by that time she knew that nothing—not Bianca’s moods, or Monty’s hostility, or the silences at home which disturbed her most of all—could persuade her to abandon the sheer stimulation of her new job. And if Bianca wanted her hair tied demurely back instead of flowing freely over her shoulders, and preferred her to dress in quiet drab styles, which were both businesslike and unobtrusive, then she would not argue. It might be weak-willed, but Bianca was paying the piper, and handsomely too, and Alix had no real objection to her calling the tune.

So she dressed and behaved with the utmost discretion, and she made no men friends where she might conceivably be accused of poaching on Bianca’s preserves.

She told herself that she didn’t really mind either that Bianca had fulfilled her predecessor’s prophecy by describing Alix airily as a young cousin, explaining later, ‘A niece sounds incredibly ageing, darling. Don’t you agree?’

Alix was realistic enough to know that even if she had objected violently, it would really have made no difference. Bianca spent a lot of her time pampering her face and body, keeping the march of time at bay. It would have been hard at any time to guess her age, and Bianca clearly intended to keep people guessing for many years yet.

She tried Liam Brant’s number once more for luck, and grimaced as the engaged signal came steadily to her ears.

‘Talkative devil, aren’t you?’ she addressed him as she put the phone down.

As she crossed the hall, the doorbell rang, and she hesitated, wondering if she should answer it, but she could already hear Harris’s footsteps as he came up the basement stairs, and besides, Bianca wouldn’t thank her for receiving guests in her holiday gear. So she went on towards the stairs, returning a smiling greeting to Harris’ hearty, ‘Good morning, miss. A pleasure to see you, if I may say so.’

Of course he could say so, she thought, as she put her hand on the curve of the banister rail. He was the only one who had said anything of the sort, and it was nice to be welcomed.

She was still smiling when she turned slightly to see who was at the door. He was tall, and his shadow fell across the watery sunlight which was making a brave attempt to straggle across the hall floor.

His voice was low-pitched, resonant and cool. ‘My name’s Brant. Miss Layton is expecting me.’

As he spoke, he glanced across the hall and his eyes fell on Alix, standing transfixed on the stairs.

She looked back at him blankly, registering his lean height, the darkness of his hair, the arrogant strength of nose, mouth and chin, and the cynically amused appreciation in his eyes as he surveyed her.

Her first thought was, ‘My God, it can’t be him! He’s on the phone. He can’t be here.’ Her second was, ‘Bianca will kill me!’

And she went on up the stairs, not looking back, but aware just the same that he was still watching her, and having hell’s own job not to break into a run and take Bianca’s elegant stairs two at a time.

She flew into her bedroom, nearly falling over her holiday cases which Harris had put there. Holiday gear was the last thing she wanted now, she thought, kicking off her sandals and shrugging the too-revealing black top over her head. She grabbed the nearest dress, a neat shirtwaister in beige cotton, and pulled it on, forcing the buttons through the holes, and knotting the tie belt hastily, before sliding her feet into matching low-heeled pumps. There was not time to fix her hair properly, she decided, gathering it firmly into a swirl at the back of her head, and anchoring it with a few well-placed hairpins.

And it was no use bothering Bianca at this stage. She would go downstairs and face the wretched man and see if she could persuade him to go away until she and Seb and Leon, Bianca’s agent, had had a chance to talk to her, to reason with her.

Harris was waiting at the foot of the stairs. ‘I’ve shown the gentleman into the drawing room, Miss Alix. Shall I bring coffee? And shall I tell Miss Layton he’s here.’

‘Not for the time being.’ Alix’s heart was thumping in a most uncharacteristic way, and the headlong rush to change into an approximation of what Bianca expected of her had made her breathless. ‘I—I’ll ring if I want anything.’