A Scandalous Engagement

The newspaper article was short and scandalously to the point.

Jade took a few deep breaths. “Do you have any idea how this ludicrous rumor started?”

Curtis shrugged eloquently. “Getting into a state about it isn’t going to change anything.”

“I had no idea you were notorious enough to feature in the gossip columns,” Jade informed him tartly.

Another expressive shrug. “I’m rich, eligible…”

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.

A Scandalous Engagement

Cathy Williams

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

‘SO, YOU’ RE up at last. I didn’t want to disturb you before I left, but have you remembered that the plumber’s coming?’

Jade crooked the telephone receiver between her cheek and her shoulder and carried on making herself a cup of coffee. Even after six weeks it still felt decadent to be wandering around this kitchen at nine-thirty in the morning, wearing only her usual garb of jeans and tee shirt. She should be at work. That was always the first thought that sprang into her head when she blearily opened her eyes to peer at the clock at the side of the bed. The clock which no longer summoned her peremptorily out of sleep at six-thirty in the morning with an insistent, aggravating beeping that could raise the dead.

She should be at work. She should be feeling the pressure, because pressure was the only thing that could rescue her from her thoughts. She should be scrambling into her suit and hurrying out of the flat with her bag slung over one shoulder and her briefcase in her hand. She should be preparing for her daily battle with the London Underground, easing her frantic pace only to stop at the news vendor just outside her office block so that she could buy a tabloid to read at lunchtime.

‘Of course I’ve remembered that the plumber’s coming.’

The voice down the other end of the telephone laughed warmly. ‘I can tell from your tone of voice that you’d forgotten. Two o’clock this afternoon.’

‘Oh, very optimistic, your precision.’ She poured some milk into her mug and sat down at the kitchen table which, after their initial attempts to keep it free from clutter, now sported enough artist’s materials to start a small cottage industry. ’Didn’t your mother ever tell you that plumbers have a different sense of time keeping to all other mortals?’

She sipped her coffee, smiling contentedly at the sound of Andy’s voice. How did he do that? How did he manage to make her feel so loved and wanted and secure? She had known him for less than a year, but it almost felt as though she had known him for ever. As though he was somehow meant to be a part of her life. One of the first things her counsellor had told her was that she needed to begin to trust, needed to stop feeling guilty. Had Andy just happened to come along at the right time, when she’d been beginning the difficult, painful process of chipping her barriers away? Was that why she felt so close to him? As though he was the soulmate she had been blindly searching for over the past two years?

‘No,’ Andy said thoughtfully down the line. ‘Amongst her erratically scattered pearls of wisdom, advice concerning plumbers was noticeably absent. Do you think that’s been part of my problem?’

He chuckled softly, and Jade felt a rush of pleasure at his words. Over the past few months he had opened up in ways neither of them would have thought possible. Both of them had. They had tentatively shared the common ground of counselling, learning to expose their fears and voice their nightmares, and it had paid off. They had learned to reach out to each other, and if she still didn’t automatically react with trust to most people, she was getting better.

‘Now, there’s a possibility,’ Jade joked back, her eyes skimming over some work she had started the day before and liking what she saw. ‘Okay, I’ll make sure I’m washed and brushed by two, even though I’d bet you ten quid that the man doesn’t show up on time. He’ll stroll in just as we’re about to sit down and eat dinner and rake up a few limp excuses about “burst water pipes, guv.’”

‘That’s more than possible, but got to keep the old place ticking over.’

‘Don’t I know it.’ There had been an unspoken acceptance between them from the start that sharing this house involved a complicated series of unwritten rules and regulations. No clutter. No mess. Definitely no broken appliances left to go rusty. And top of the list was ‘No Leaks’. Leaking water could destroy wallpaper and ruin all the tasteful silk that seemed to thread through each of the impressive rooms, not to mention wreak havoc with the paintings.

The paintings, Andy had told her before she had moved in, were worth a small fortune, but she had still been unprepared for the quantity of them. Picassos were dotted about the house with the casual ease that typified people for whom money was no object. She had spent her first day just wandering through the graceful house, nestled in a secluded spot just outside central London, amazed at the profuse splendour while Andy had trailed behind her, smiling indulgently at her gasps of awe.

The place, which he contemptuously referred to as the Mausoleum, was a testament to well-bred opulence. Nothing was overdone but everything had clearly been chosen with no thought of cost. And, however bitterly he spoke of the background that had failed him, he still fitted in: blond, elegant and as beautiful as any Adonis that had been tenderly crafted by its sculptor.

Even now, having grown accustomed to all of it, she still found herself wondering what it must have been like to have been brought up amidst such splendour. A house in the country, another in the wilds of Scotland, yet another in the South of France. The holidays in far-flung places. She imagined his parents, now dead for many years, as a glorious, golden couple. She had spotted pictures of them in the house and her imagination had taken flight at the images of his mother, the typical blonde, English rose, and his father, the typical debonair, dark Greek tycoon. It seemed somehow tragic that all their son could resurrect from his childhood memories was a legacy of nannies, a loathing of boarding schools and a glimpse of his beautiful parents in between their endless and impressive social engagements.

From what she had gathered over time, his had been a life of loneliness and absentee parents, who had compensated for their shortcomings with lavish gifts and money. She pictured him, and his two siblings, rattling around in all those huge houses with a wake of well-paid nannies in attendance, waiting for the hour when their glamorous parents would pay them a brief night-time visit for the statutory peck on the cheek and a quick inspection to make sure that nothing was visibly amiss and the nannies were doing what they were paid for.

Andy Greene had been an emotional mess waiting to happen. She was only glad that their separate chaotic personal troubles had led them to one another.

Two hours after the phone call, Jade had completely forgotten the plumber.

She was still at the table in the kitchen, the only room in the house where disorder was allowed because there were no priceless furnishings that could be accidentally damaged, her slim fingers skimming over the paper in front of her as she experimented with various layouts for a children’s book. She was becoming more confident by the day. It had made no difference that she had studied art at college for two years after leaving school. All that had been years ago, and the first time she had re-entered the art school in London she had been as nervous as if she had never glimpsed the inside of one in her life before. She had stared at pastels and paintbrushes and cartridge paper with the fear of someone suddenly crippled by stage fright. But time was beginning to do its thing. Time and the talent which she had thought had been abandoned for ever by the wayside when all her dreams had turned sour.

She sat back, frowning, and gazed at what she had accomplished over the past few days. The illustrations were lively, but they lacked detail. No matter. She would go back over them and painstakingly begin to put the detail in. It was the bit she loved most. The loving strokes that turned the sketches into the finely etched drawings which she would then paint over in watercolour. She bent her head so that her shoulder-length buttermilk-blonde hair dipped across her face and was raising her hand to begin her work when the doorbell went.

For half a minute she chose to ignore it, but when the ringing turned into banging she distantly remembered the wretched plumber and reluctantly dropped her pencil and walked to the front door.

Of course the damned man would choose this very minute to pay his visit. Well ahead of the time he had given them. Wasn’t that just typical? Jade thought irritably, gritting her teeth together. Hadn’t she said that they operated in another hemisphere when it came to time?

‘All right!’ she yelled, when one bang threatened to bring the door down. Whoever was hammering on the door was certainly no small, retiring type. ‘I’m coming!’

She worked her way through the three locks and yanked open the door, scowling in anticipation of the brute on the other side. Her chocolate-brown eyes were confronted by a chest and, as they quickly travelled upwards, by the most powerfully impressive man she had ever set eyes on before in her life.

He was swarthy, and something about the set of his features and the angular planes of his face lifted him from the merely handsome into the realm of dangerously sensual. His thick hair was very dark, almost black, and in contrast his blue eyes were the ice-blue colour of the sky in winter. She felt an instant and fleeting jolt of unaccustomed awareness surge through her like a sudden electric shock, and she almost took a step backwards, surprised and unsettled by her reaction.

She was still scowling furiously as she met his eyes, though, and was incensed to see that he was scowling back at her. The nerve! So plumbers were in short supply, but who did this one think he was?

She also noted, in passing, that he was not dressed in plumber’s overalls. Not unless plumber’s garb in London ran along the lines of a trench coat with cream-coloured wool jumper and khaki trousers. Good grief. She only hoped that he hadn’t come out to inspect the site and was considering sending in one of his chaps at a later date. Last seen, the leak in Andy’s bedroom had been dripping slowly but persistently into a saucepan which they had strategically placed underneath and had shown no signs of letting up.

‘Good of you to answer the door,’ the man said coldly. ‘Didn’t you hear the doorbell first time around?’

Jade was almost too angry to speak coherently. She stuck her hand on one slim hip and gave him a withering look which failed to do the trick.

‘You’re early,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘And I was busy in the kitchen.’

‘I’m early?’ For a second the scowl disappeared, replaced by a look of astonishment which only managed to make him look more aggressively good-looking, then he was scowling again, this time with somewhat more insolence, allowing his eyes to rake over her and making no attempt to conceal the fact.

Jade abruptly turned away. This was the last thing she was in line for. A lecherous plumber with the manners of a warthog and enough of an over-sized ego to consider himself above overalls and tool kit.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said, not that he was standing on ceremony by waiting outside. Oh, no, he was stepping right through the front door, wet shoes and all. ‘And wipe your feet,’ she ordered. ‘You’re not dripping mud into this house. In fact, you might as well take your shoes off and leave them by the door.’ She gave his shoes a scathing look and was frustrated but not surprised to see that they were as out of character as the rest of his outfit. She was no connoisseur of men’s shoes, but these didn’t look as though they had spent their lifetime being dragged through mud.

‘Just exactly who are you?’ he asked, looking at her narrowly and not, she noticed, removing his shoes.

‘Jade Summers,’ Jade replied, bristling. ‘And in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, I’m the person you’ve come to see about this plumbing job.’ She looked him squarely in the face, which necessitated her straining her neck upwards because frankly, to her five foot six, the man was a hulking giant.

‘Plumbing job.’ He continued to stare at her, then he stroked his chin thoughtfully with one finger.

‘Ah! So you remember, do you?’ she said sarcastically. ‘Andy, Mr Greene, got in touch with you last night to come and mend a leak?’

‘A leak…’

‘Would you mind not repeating everything I say?’ She flashed him another of her specialty cold, quenching smiles which, again, had no effect. ‘And I’m beginning to doubt whether you’re competent to handle the job, Mr…’ He inclined his head to one side while she tried to rack her brains for the name Andy had tossed at her at eleven-thirty the night before. ‘Mr Wilkins. You’re hardly dressed appropriately, and you don’t seem to know anything about leaks. Shouldn’t you be asking a few pertinent questions by now? Like Where exactly is your leak, madam? Or Perhaps you’d care to wait while I just fetch my tools?’ She folded her arms and looked at him with narrow-eyed suspicion. ‘I take it you are a qualified plumber…?’

‘I have lots of qualifications,’ the man replied coolly, outstaring her so that she was forced to look away.

‘Good.’ She knew he had. Andy had randomly picked one from the Yellow Pages with the biggest advertising space and she vaguely recalled seeing a few letters here and there after his name. ‘In that case…’ She eyed the trench coat. ‘Maybe you’d like to divest yourself of your coat and follow me upstairs.’

‘Divest? That’s a complicated word for… I beg your pardon. I got the name, but not what your position is here…’

He didn’t sound like a plumber either. Not that she had any idea what plumbers sounded like, since she had never, fortunately, had to cross paths with one. This specimen was obviously a university-educated one, hence the arrogance.

‘That’s because I didn’t mention it, and it’s none of your business anyway. You just need to know that I’m in charge.’ She couldn’t believe she had just said that. Firm she could be, and had had to be for years, working as personal assistant, first of all, then upward bound until she had virtually been all but running the small company she had worked for ever since she’d moved to London two and a half years previously. But tyrannical? Never in a million years.

But what other way to go was there in this situation? Whether this Wilkins man was the boss of his own company or merely an employee with an over-inflated sense of himself, he needed a bit of discipline.

‘Follow me,’ she ordered, looking at his stylish and, more ominously, clean clothes in a jaundiced way. She would give him the benefit of the doubt, but if he had come prepared to fix a leaking ceiling, then she would eat her hat. If she’d possessed one. And there was no point asking her to lead him to the nearest spanner, or whatever tools he needed, because she had no idea where she would find any in the house, and she was pretty certain that Andy would be as clueless as herself.

‘The leak’s in one of the bedrooms,’ she explained, ahead of him, uneasily aware of his presence behind her. She hoped to high heaven that she wouldn’t be subjected to another of his all-over inspections or worse. She shivered, and mentally called up his face, all brooding, dark sensuality. The sort of face that women swooned over. Was straightforward plumbing all he did when he went to houses to mend leaks, or was he accustomed to women giving him the come-on?

She decided to let him go ahead of her. It paid to be careful.

‘The bedroom’s just down there,’ she told him, standing back and pointing along the corridor.

‘Just down where?’

‘Last door on the left. You can’t miss it. We had to pull the bed out and stick a container under the leak to catch the water.’ She watched him warily as he sauntered along the corridor, looking through the open doors, in no visible hurry to get to his destination.

‘And would you mind hurrying up?’ she called after him impatiently. ‘I have a lot of chores to be going on with.’

‘So you work here, do you?’ he called back casually, taking his time, as though she hadn’t spoken. He paused outside the bedroom door to look at her, hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. ‘Don’t you want to come and hear what I’ve got to report about your leak?’ he asked loudly. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, madam. I’m a perfectly well-behaved member of the human race.’

She didn’t like the way he had called her madam. It reeked of disrespect. She pursed her lips together and walked towards him.

The man was wasted in his business, she thought absent-mindedly. He was just too predatorial-looking to spend his life peering down broken drains and inspecting faulty washing machines. He should be out in a jungle somewhere, exploring the depths of the Amazon and slaying man-eating snakes with his bare hands. Or something like that.

‘It’s over the bed. There.’ She pointed to the ceiling and the patch of wallpaper underneath which had been unravelled by the dripping water.

‘I see.’ He walked into the room, side-stepping various articles of clothing which were lying on the ground.

‘Andy’s room,’ she found herself saying, just in case he thought that this mess belonged to her. At the age of twenty-two, and four years her junior, Andy still hadn’t developed any noticeable talent for clearing up behind him. Twice a week a cleaner came and purged the house, but in the intervening days he allowed his bedroom to develop the sort of teenage chaos that would have driven most mothers round the twist. She supposed that his untidiness was simply a reflection of the fact that he had never had the need to be tidy. There had always been someone else clearing up behind him, making sure that everything was neatly folded and put away. Even when he cooked, which he did with flourish, the kitchen afterwards resembled a badly bombed site.

She edged over the wrought-iron bedframe and snatched a pair of boxer shorts off it, dropping them to the ground and then kicking them under the bed. When she raised her eyes, it was to find the plumber looking at her with an unreadable expression.

‘You were saying about the leak?’ she reminded him weakly, staring in concentration at the damp patch on the ceiling.

‘Could be serious.’

Jade’s face blanched. ‘Serious? How serious?’ She didn’t like the sound of that. It didn’t look like much from where she was standing, but then again she wasn’t a plumber, and who knew what build-up of water could be lurking above the ceiling? She imagined Niagara Falls pouring down the wall, destroying everything in its wake, including the vastly expensive carpeting.

‘Can’t be sure.’ He stroked his chin again and continued to stare at her, which she failed to notice with the onset of the horrific, water-filled scenario that was now running through her head. ‘You say you…what?…spotted the water…?’

‘We were watching television and I felt a drip on my head,’ Jade explained, dragging her eyes away from the ceiling and meeting his, which were now glacial. ‘Andy got on the phone immediately,’ she said defensively, primed to contradict any accusations of irresponsibility, not that it should be any concern of the man in front of her. ‘I was here when he made the call, and I know that he stressed the importance of getting it seen to as soon as possible.’

‘And what time would that have been?’

‘A little after eleven in the night,’ Jade said impatiently. ‘Don’t you people keep a log book or something for incoming calls? Look, can you fix it or not?’

‘Not at the moment.’

Jade groaned in despair. ‘But we—Andy explained to you the importance of getting this sorted out. Yet you come here without so much as a screwdriver in sight and tell me that you can’t fix it at the moment.’ She sat on the edge of the bed. ’Well, when can you fix it?’

‘Why don’t we go downstairs to discuss this?’

‘What’s there to discuss?’ It seemed perfectly clear-cut to her.

‘What needs to be done.’ He shrugged and continued to look at her with relentless concentration. She could almost hear his brain ticking away in his head. Probably working out the vast charges he would make at the end of this little job.

‘Oh, all right.’ She stood up wearily, threw one last disgusted look at the leak, which appeared so inoffensive, or had done until the Wilkins man had said otherwise, and headed out of the room.

‘Perhaps we could discuss the situation over a cup of coffee,’ he suggested to her, halfway down the stairs, and she paused to look at him over her shoulder.

‘Haven’t you got other jobs you need to get to?’

‘Not at the moment.’ He had stopped when she had turned to address him. Now he took another step down, and for some reason the thought of being cooped up on the staircase with this man towering over her was enough to get her legs moving again. She swung around, trailing her hand along the banister, and skipped lightly down the remainder of the stairs.

‘Well, I happen to be quite busy,’ she said pointedly, leading the way to the kitchen.

‘Of course. Doing what?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ She couldn’t believe her ears. The man’s rudeness defied description.

‘I only ask because I’ve been here before. A few times, actually, and the house has been empty.’

‘Why would a plumber come to an empty house?’

‘Contract.’ He shrugged eloquently, as though that single word explained a host of things.

Jade groped her way to further enlightenment. ‘Oh, I get it. You come every so often to check up on the place and make sure that everything’s running smoothly?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’m surprised Andy didn’t recognise your name in the book, in that case,’ she mused aloud, filling the kettle with water and plugging it in.

‘We plumbers. A forgetful lot.’ He raised his eyebrows expressively, and somewhere in the depths of her head she realised that he was laughing at her.

‘Yes. Quite. How do you take your coffee?’

‘Black, one sugar. So…’ He strolled around the kitchen and finally, as she had known he would, ambled over to the kitchen table, where he looked with interest at the drawings spread across the wooden surface. From the other end of the room, Jade watched him with a growing feeling of antagonism.

‘Have a seat, Mr Wilkins,’ she said tightly, ‘and then perhaps we could discuss the matter at hand?’

‘Draw, do you?’

‘That’s right, and I really haven’t got the time for chit-chat.’ How much more blatant did she have to be? She filled their mugs with boiling water, wondered whether it was too late to call in another firm to have a look at the leak, and then stood stock still as he held up one of her sketches to the light and began inspecting it.