The Impatient Virgin

Stooping, Van sniffed. “Mmm... that scent suits you.” Letter to Reader Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Author’s Note Copyright

Stooping, Van sniffed. “Mmm... that scent suits you.”

As they moved on, Anny noticed that French women of all ages, from teenage girls to women with matronly figures, looked with interest at the man strolling beside her.

She basked in the pleasure of knowing that this evening she looked like other girls of seventeen and was out for the evening with a man who might be considered a bit too old for her now, but wouldn’t always be. Each year the age gap between them would become less important. She just had to pray that he wouldn’t fall in love with anyone else before she was ready for love. Seventeen was too young. She knew that. But eighteen was officially grown-up, and nineteen was old enough for anything...even marriage.

Dear Reader,

If the name of one of the people in this story rings a bell, it’s because you have met her before...as a child in one of my longer books, Summer’s Awakening, published by Worldwide in 1984.

The hero of that story was a computer tycoon, as is the hero of this one. Remembering my introduction to the excting world of computers during a winter in America in the early eighties, I also remembered the people in Summer’s Awakening and the letters from readers suggesting a sequel.

This book is not a sequel, but it answers some of the questions about what happened to Emily.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

THEY were walking briskly across the park, a tall, fair-haired couple who might have been brother and sister, when Jon reached for her hand and laced his fingers through hers.

Until that moment, Anny had been relaxed and carefree, one of the many Londoners enjoying the sunshine in Hyde Park on a spring afternoon after a long cold winter. As his fingers tightened, intuition told her the gesture was more than a friendly impulse.

She had thought that if, some time in the future, he proposed to her, it would be at a secluded table in a quiet restaurant after a candle-lit dinner. Jon was that kind of man: romantic, conventional, predictable but also totally reliable. Everyone who knew him liked him. But even though they had known each other for some time, she was still uncertain how she would answer him, if and when the time came.

Now, in quite different circumstances from the way she had imagined, she sensed that any second now he was going to pop the question.

They had left the path and were cutting across the grass in the direction of the lake. There was nobody near them. He drew her to a halt, released her fingers and took her face between his hands. Big hands, but always gentle.

Her hair tossed about by the breeze which had rosied her winter-pale cheeks, Anny looked into his eyes and longed to say, ‘No, Jon...not yet. I’m not ready.’ At the same time she shrank from hurting him.

As he opened his mouth to speak, her cellphone started to ring in the pocket of her red fleece squall jacket.

Jon growled something which, translated, would probably be a taboo word in English. He had learnt to speak Turkish for his work as a plant conservationist, and had smatterings of other languages. She had never heard him swear in his own. He had a placid temperament. It took a lot to rile him.

‘I’ll say I’m busy.’ She took the telephone out of her pocket and extended the aerial. ‘Hello?’

‘Greg here...got a job for you.’ The caller was the editor of the colour magazine of a Sunday newspaper. ‘All the morning flights from Gatwick and Heathrow are booked solid, so you’ll have to fly from Stansted. The flight number...’

Anny had been a journalist in London for five years. She never went anywhere without a pencil and small pad in her pocket. Holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, she wrote down the details. Air UK Flight 910 Business Class 15 April 1120 hours Destination Nice.

Nice, on the Bay of Angels, on the French Riviera. She could see it in her mind’s eye. Fountains sparkling in the sun. Palm trees and beds of green grass dividing the three lanes of traffic along the Promenade des Anglais, named after the English who had invented the concept of wintering in the sun. A blue sea lapping the beach and, nearby, in the old quarter, the stalls of the flower market bright with fluffy golden mimosa, symbol of the mild climate. A city she had known well, but would never willingly go back to, or to any part of that coast.

‘Why Nice?’ she asked.

‘Because I’ve set up an interview with Giovanni Carlisle. His place is not far from Nice, just the other side of the Italian border. You can pick up a car at the airport and be there in less than an hour.’

Anny felt as if she were having a heart attack. There was a pain in her chest. She felt sick and giddy.

‘It’ll be the scoop of your career... the first time the King of Cyberspace has talked to a journalist. I hope you realise how lucky you are,’ said Greg.

‘Why send me? Why not someone who understands all that stuff?’

‘Because it’s the private man we’re interested in, not the computer whiz. There’ll be a file of clippings from the computer press waiting for you at the check-in. You can bone up on the technical background during the flight. This is your big break, Anny. You’ll never get a better one. Go for it.’ Greg rang off.

‘What was all that about?’ asked Jon, as she put the cellphone back in one pocket and the notepad in the other.

‘An assignment to fly to Nice tomorrow...to interview Giovanni Carlisle.’

He looked relieved. ‘That won’t take long. You’ll be back by tomorrow night. Until you said “Why Nice?” I thought it might be one of your editors sending you off to the back of beyond for a month. That would have been tough...just when I’m back for a spell.’ As they began to walk on, he said, ‘I thought Carlisle was famous for his hatred of the popular press and only ever talked to computer journalists on strictly technical matters.’

‘Up to now, yes. But that makes him all the more desirable in the eyes of people like Greg. Most of the world’s celebrities fall over themselves to get coverage. Those that don’t—the ones who employ PR people to keep them out of the limelight—are the biggest quarries of all, from an editor’s point of view.’

‘I wonder why Carlisle has changed his mind?’

‘I can’t imagine,’ said Anny. She thought, but didn’t say, And he may change it back double-quick when I turn up on his doorstep.

‘I can give you a little bit of gen about him,’ said Jon.

‘You can?’ Her eyebrows rose in surprise.

Jon had a degree in horticulture and now worked for Fauna and Flora International, an organisation dedicated to preserving natural species in their native habitats. He used a notebook computer and was sufficiently alert to what was going on in the world to have heard of Giovanni Carlisle, the genius behind Cyberscout. But she wouldn’t have expected Carlisle to be more than a famous name to him.

‘He lives at the Palazzo Orengo near Ventimiglia,’ said Jon. ‘From there to Cannes that whole coast is dotted with famous gardens planted when the Côte d’Azur was the smart place to go in the winter. Nobody went in summer. It was considered too hot. Orengo was one of the legendary gardens of the Edwardian era. Then its owner died and it began to decline... until Carlisle bought it. With the cost of labour sky-high now, only a billionaire could restore a place that size. But even the top brass at the Royal Society of Horticulture aren’t allowed in to see what he’s done to it. A guy I know who writes for their journal, The Garden, wanted to do a piece. He wrote to Carlisle, giving a string of influential references. He was turned down flat.’

‘So why has he suddenly succumbed to Greg’s blandishments?’ Anny said, half to herself.

Jon could see she was totally preoccupied with the assignment. If she had had an inkling of what he was about to say before the telephone call, it had been driven from her mind. She was a dedicated journalist whose career, up to now, had come before everything. He accepted that. In some ways it was a bonus. It made her more understanding when his work took him away and kept her from being bored in his absence. Previous girlfriends had been less tolerant.

‘I should think there’s a lot of material about Orengo in its heyday in the RHS archives. I’ve got nothing to do tomorrow. If you like I’ll go and dredge it out for you.’

‘Sweet of you, Jon, but it could be a waste of time. Leave it till I get back. This whole thing could fizzle out if the so-called King of Cyberspace doesn’t like my face.’

‘Of course he’ll like your face. It’s a beautiful face,’ he said fondly.

He was seeing her with the eyes of a man in love, but even people with clearer vision thought Anny Howard good-looking. In fact her eyes were her only truly beautiful feature; large grey eyes with dark-rimmed irises and long lashes. Men admired her slim figure and long legs. Women envied her style. Somewhere she had learnt the knack of wearing very simple clothes in a way that made them look better than expensive designer outfits on other women. But it was the warmth of her expression, the humorous curve of her lips, her attractive voice which drew people to her and made them confide in her.

Jon had wanted to marry her for months. Sensing that she was less sure of her feelings, he had been biding his time. In the event he had chosen his moment badly. That damned telephone call had come at the worst possible moment.

Now, with Giovanni Carlisle on her mind, it might be better to wait until she came back from France before broaching the subject again.

Late that night while, in London, Anny was checking that everything was in readiness for her early start tomorrow, in the balmier air of Monaco on the Riviera, a tall, dark-haired man in a dinner jacket was looking at the sculptured body of a naked girl with her forearms resting lightly on the shoulders of a naked man and her hands crossed behind his neck.

Giovanni Carlisle—known to his father’s side of his family and to most of his intimates as Van—had seen the bronze before, but not by moonlight. It was by a sculptor called Kerkade who had called it Invitation. It reminded Carlisle of an incident in his own life.

The Principality of Monaco was not a place Carlisle liked. He never normally came here. But it would have been churlish to refuse the invitation to tonight’s dinner party given by a woman who, like himself, was half-American. They had something else in common. They had both made serious mistakes in their personal lives, although his had happened in private, not in the glare of public attention which had surrounded her high-profile divorce.

Carlisle could never enjoy complete anonymity, but his life was as private as he could make it. Although rich and famous himself, he disliked the society of other people in that category. Most of the time he stayed inside the boundaries of his own smaller kingdom along the coast.

While Monaco’s economy depended on the tourists who arrived by the coach-load to gawp at the soldiers from the Principality’s minuscule army changing the guard outside the palace, Carlisle had no intention of allowing anyone to penetrate his seclusion except by invitation.

Thinking about the woman bidden to Orengo tomorrow, a cynical smile curled his well-cut mouth.

Was there a possibility that Anny Howard might put her pride before her career? Knowing her, he thought not. Much as she might dislike having to confront him, nothing would make her pass up an important scoop.

Teeth-gritted, she would come. But she wouldn’t get what she wanted. He had made sure of that

There was little traffic in the West End at ten minutes to seven next morning when Anny took a taxi from her flat to Liverpool Street Station where the seven-thirty Stansted Express would take her to the small airport thirty miles north of London.

The airport shuttle train took her to the final departure lounge where there were complimentary newspapers and a small quiet café serving Stansted’s habitués. She needed a cup of coffee to pull her together after a disturbed night. Then she would look through the file on Giovanni Carlisle, the man whose brainchild, Cyberscout, had simplified public access to the vast resources of cyberspace and, in so doing, made him a fortune.

It was he, even more than Jon, who had kept her awake in the small hours and given her troubled dreams. She did not want to be here, on her way to Orengo. She had tried to forget the past and had thought she’d succeeded. Last night had proved that she hadn’t.

Time, it was said, healed all wounds. What ailed her was like malaria in days gone by, a persistent infection which might recur for a lifetime. To know that in a few hours she would see Van again made her head ache, her body shiver.

She should have refused the assignment, made some excuse to get out of it. Why hadn’t she?

Charlene Moore had been PA to Giovanni Carlisle for three years, since her predecessor, also American, had married a Frenchman from nearby Menton.

Charlene left the palazzo by the side door and walked down sloping paths and flights of steps to the swimming pool.

The extra-long pool had been sited where it could not be seen from the house. It was filled with sea water pumped up from the secluded bay at the bottom of the huge garden. Every morning Mr Carlisle swam fifty lengths before breakfast, although sometimes he didn’t have breakfast until ten or eleven, having worked most of the night.

As Charlene had discovered in her first week at Orengo, Mr Carlisle was a man who, as a poet had put it, ‘marched to a different drummer’. Other people’s ways of living and codes of behaviour meant little to him. He could afford to do as he pleased, and did.

Although she lived on the premises, there were areas of his life which even she didn’t know about. It was rumoured he had a beautiful mistress in Nice but, if so, it was a discreet relationship. They were never seen together in public.

In some ways she felt sorry for him. He had a brilliant mind, was phenomenally rich and also very good-looking. But he would never know if a woman loved him for himself or was only going through the motions for what she could get out of him.

When she reached the clay-flagged terrace surrounding the pool, he was sitting at the far end, drinking coffee and reading some papers.

Even at this early hour the sun was quite hot. The breakfast table was shaded by a large square green sunbrella. Her employer, wearing a white towelling robe and navy cotton espadrilles, was sitting outside its shadow, long suntanned legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. In addition to the thick black hair and olive skin handed down from his mother’s forebears, it seemed he had also inherited a Latin liking for hot weather. Even in the grilling heat of summer he never looked hot or fatigued.

He saw her coming and stood up. He was always punctiliously polite, especially to his subordinates.

‘Good morning, Charlene.’ At the outset he had asked her permission to use her first name, but had never suggested she should be informal with him, even in private.

‘Good morning, Mr Carlisle.’

He gestured for her to sit down in a canvas director’s chair under the sunbrella. ‘Did you enjoy your day off?’

‘Yes, thank you. I went to Èze.’ She was an amateur artist and spent her free time sketching the picturesque hill villages on both sides of the border.

As she took out her notebook in readiness for his instructions, he said, ‘Later today we shall have a house guest...Anny Howard.’

He did not need to explain who Anny Howard was. One of Charlene’s duties was to file all the British journalist’s articles, sent in monthly batches by a London press clippings agency.

There had been several files full of clippings when Charlene started working here, and she had filled a couple more. Why Mr Carlisle was interested in Miss Howard was a mystery she had yet to fathom.

‘Put her in the tower room, will you? Tonight have them use the round table, not the long one. I want Miss Howard opposite me.’

‘That will make thirteen people. I know you are not superstitious, but it might worry some of your guests...and it would mean putting two women next to each other.’

‘That would never do,’ he said sardonically. ‘In that case invite General Foster. He won’t mind being asked at short notice.’

Charlene made a note to call the octogenarian Englishman who lived in a flat in Menton, a town once thronged by English winter sun-seekers. Even Queen Victoria had wintered there, renting one of the hotels.

‘What time is Miss Howard arriving? You’ll want Carlo to meet her, I presume?’

Her employer removed his sunglasses. Someone meeting him for the first time would expect his eyes to be brown to match the rest of his colouring. In fact they were blue, the vivid dark blue of a bed of echiums she had passed on her way to the pool.

‘Her flight lands at four. There’s no need to send the car for her. She’s an experienced traveller and I’m sure the papers she writes for don’t quibble about her expenses. We’ll let her find her own way here.’

He spoke in his usual quiet voice, but it seemed to Charlene that his eyes had the steely gleam she had seen once or twice before when he was annoyed about something.

She had never incurred his displeasure and didn’t expect to because she was very efficient. But she’d heard his wrath could be devastating. Other members of the household had told her, with graphic gestures, that when he was angry—Dio mio!—it was like a volcano.

Probably they were exaggerating. The Italian housekeeper and cleaners and the French chef were all inclined to make dramas out of minor incidents. They had more emotional temperaments than Americans and the British. But as Mr Carlisle was only half-American, perhaps he could be provoked into fiery eruptions.

Something was vexing him now. He was looking down towards the sea where the translucent blue-green water lapped against ochre rocks at either end of a scimitar-shaped pebble beach. The sight didn’t seem to please him. His black brows were drawn together, his mouth set in a harsh line.

If Miss Howard’s arrival was causing that grim expression, Charlene wondered why he was allowing her to come. Many well-known journalists had approached him for interviews, but all had been refused.

Why was he making an exception of Anny Howard?

Aboard Flight 910 to Nice, the cabin staff had taken their places for take-off.

Only five other people besides Anny were flying in the forward section. She put her tote on the aisle seat and the file on the seat next to hers. On her way to see anyone else, she would have been eager to start researching her subject. In this instance she wanted to postpone the study of Van’s achievements since the last time she had seen him.

Instead she opened the in-flight magazine, but found herself reading paragraphs without taking in what they meant. She leaned back and closed her eyes, memories crowding her mind, the old pain lancing her heart.

That she was now five years older and far more sure of herself didn’t make her confident that she would be able to handle him. She knew her defences would still be flimsy, her weapons feeble when matched with his formidable powers.

Van wasn’t like Jon, kind and sensitive. In his field, Van was a genius, and like all such men he had a ruthless streak. What he wanted he got. But he hadn’t got her, or not on the terms he required.

That would have rankled for a long time. He might have forgotten her since then, but what if seeing her again rekindled his ire? Wasn’t it better to avoid that possibility? When they landed at Nice, she could fly straight back to London. But if she did that what would it do to her prospects as a freelance journalist? Greg couldn’t blame her for being thrown out by Van, but he would if she chickened out. She could say goodbye to any more assignments from him, and he might spread the word to other editors. Journalism was a competitive profession in which, so far, she had done well. That could change if she blotted her copybook with Greg.

Lunch was served. Anny had a good appetite and maintained her svelte shape with an energetic life rather than by counting calories. Today she did less than justice to an excellent meal.

With forty minutes to landing time, she broached the file, reading with practised swiftness clippings from the American and British computer press. Some of them carried the only photograph of Van ever released by his PR department. It showed him sitting in a swivel desk chair, a monitor screen behind him. His face was as she remembered it, not the way he would look now.

Replacing the clippings in the file, she took from her bag an envelope sealed five years ago and never opened until now. Her fingers weren’t perfectly steady as she shook out the contents; several snapshots and various sentimental mementoes. It pained her to see them again. Greg, if he knew she had them, would badger her to let him publish them. Despite being taken by an amateur, they were valuable for the light they threw on the time before Van became famous.

Like Stansted, the airport at Nice was ultra-modern, built as close to the sea as it was possible to be. In the final minutes of the flight, Anny looked down at the familiar coastline, feeling a mixture of terror and joy.

Once these shimmering waters reflecting the blue of the sky had been her natural habitat. ‘The nearest thing to a mermaid you’ll ever see,’ someone had said of her.

But that was long ago, when her skin had been almost always sticky from constant dunkings in the sea and her sun-streaked hair, when not hanging in dripping rats’ tails, had been tucked up inside the straw hat she was made to wear out of the water.

Once through the airport formalities, which didn’t take long these days, she looked around for a quiet corner from which to call Greg on her cellphone.

He was at his desk and took her call straight away. ‘Hello, Anny. What’s the problem?’

‘No problems yet, but your briefing yesterday wasn’t very informative. I’d like to know how you persuaded Carlisle to relax his embargo on journos?’

There was a pause before he answered. ‘OK, I’ll level with you. I didn’t persuade him. He suggested it to me, but only on certain conditions.’

‘Which were?’

‘First, that I sent Anny Howard. It seems he’s read some of your interviews and thought they were good.’

‘What else?’

‘He wanted a written assurance that he would be shown your copy before publication, with the right to make cuts...in fact to veto the whole thing if he didn’t like it.’

‘You didn’t go along with that!’ she expostulated.

‘I didn’t have any option. Anyway I’m sure he will like whatever you write. People always do. You’re good at telling the truth in a way that doesn’t upset them.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on that in this case.’ Hot-tempered when she was younger, at twenty-five Anny had learnt not to fly off the handle even when raging inwardly.

‘The fact that he specifically asked for you gives you a big edge,’ said Greg.

That’s all you know, she thought. Aloud, she said, ‘Maybe...maybe not. I’ll call you later.’

The girl at the car rental desk took her for a compatriot till Anny explained she was a foreigner. Her fluent French and Italian had been a help to her career, but she hadn’t had to work at them like Jon with his Turkish. She had picked them up as a child, with some Spanish and Catalan learned in harbours and boatyards up and down the coast of Spain.