Antigua Kiss

Anne Weale

He had promised never to touch her

Christie's marriage to Caribbean island playboy Ash Lombard was to be for convenience only. Her orphaned nephew would have a real home and she and Ash would be friends, nothing more.

That was fine by Christie, a young widow whose unhappy first marriage had thoroughly destroyed the passionate side of her nature.

But it wasn't long before she discovered that Ash had no intention of keeping his word ....

IN the middle of the night—or so it seemed—she was woken by a sound which at first she didn't recognise as her door-bell. When she realised what it was, Christie raised her head from the pillow and peered at the faintly illuminated dial of her electric alarm clock.

She had been asleep for two hours, having come to bed early at ten. It was now only just after midnight, but still an extraordinary hour for someone to be ringing her bell in that persistent series of three rings, a pause, then three more rings.

Thinking it must be one of her neighbours in some sort of urgent trouble, she fumbled for the switch of her bedside lamp, threw back the bedclothes and swung her feet to the floor.

Her pyjamas, her snug sheepskin slippers, and her plain, warm cream woollen dressing-gown were those of a woman who rated comfort above glamour. A woman who slept alone.

Yet the sleep-flushed face reflected in the dressing- mirror as she flung on the cosy robe was neither elderly, nor what Americans call

"homely".

A few years ago, before the events which had quenched her sparkle, the youthful Christie had been considered a beauty. Now, at twenty-four, she still had the fine, clear skin, the silver-grey eyes and full lips. But time and experience had tempered her personality and made her almost unrecognisable as the glowing, effervescent young creature she had been on her nineteenth birthday.

As she went through the flat switching on lights, it occurred to her that the reason for the insistent ringing might not be an emergency, but the act of hooligans or a drunk. For this reason she left the safety chain in place when she opened the door, and was glad she had. The man outside was a stranger.

'What do you want?' she asked cautiously.

The narrow aperture and the dim lighting in the corridor made it difficult to see him in detail, but he was very tall and broad-shouldered, with a skin as dark as those of the fathers and brothers of her Indian pupils. But as far as she knew the only Indians of his stature were Sikhs, and he was not wearing a turban.

'Mrs Chapman?'

'Yes.'

'I'm Ash Lambard. Your sister's husband was my half-brother.

Perhaps you'd like to check my identity.'

He passed something through the gap. It was a passport, open at the first page, with
Mr Ashcroft Lambard
written in the space for the name of the bearer.

This was the moment which Christie had dreaded ever since the discovery, after the motorway accident in which her sister, her sister's husband, and four other people had lost their lives, that her normally feckless brother-in-law had actually made a will.

As Paul's house had been heavily mortgaged, he had driven a company car and had stopped the payments on his life insurance, his estate had consisted of liabilities rather than assets. Christie had not cared about that, except in so far as it affected the welfare of her orphaned nephew.

It was the clause in the will about the child which had upset her. In the event of Jenny's death, Paul had consigned his son not to his sister-in-law but to his half-brother, a man about whom she knew little except that he had been expelled from a famous public school, and sent abroad in disgrace.

Neither she nor Jenny had ever met Ashcroft Lambard. Although invited to her sister's wedding, he had not attended it.

The generous cheque he had sent as a wedding present could have meant that the erstwhile black sheep had done well for himself overseas. Or it could have meant that, like Paul, he loved to play the big spender, and had happened to be in funds at the time the younger man wrote to announce his forthcoming marriage.

She undid the chain and stepped back to let him come in. In the better light of her lobby, she could see that the swarthiness of his skin was a deep tan superimposed on the colouring which went with dark hair and very dark eyes. She seemed to recall hearing that his mother had been a foreigner from one of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean.

Having walked through into the living-room, and dumped a small grip on the carpet, he turned and offered his hand to her.

'I'm sorry to have dragged you out of bed, Mrs Chapman, but I haven't any time to waste. I landed at Heathrow an hour ago, and I have to fly out the day after tomorrow. As you'll be at work most of tomorrow, it seemed a good idea to come here at once rather than waiting until the morning.'

Although, in the last week of term before school" broke up for the Christmas holidays, the weather was chilly, his ungloved brown hand was not cold. His fingers closed firmly on hers in a powerful but not crushing clasp.

'How do you do, Mr Lambard,' she said, a little nonplussed by the unexpectedness of his arrival. 'If you'd cabled you were coming, I would have stayed up and had a meal waiting for you.'

'I didn't know until the last moment that I was going to be able to come today. This is a busy time of year for me. I ate on the plane, so I'm not hungry. But I wouldn't mind a drink.'

As he spoke, he took off his light-coloured rainproof blouson.

Christie, who liked good clothes even if she could not afford them, noticed the label—
Aquascutum.

Once, when her sister had been in London on a shopping spree, Christie had tried on a beige silk Aquascutum shower coat. Jenny had thought it boring; "her taste ran to the latest fashions. She hadn't cared if they were of poor quality and inferior finish. She would wear them only until the next fashion came in.

But Christie had loved the feel of the fabric, the understated elegance of the style with its stand-up collar, fly front, flared line and classic strapped cuffs. It was the kind of coat which would go anywhere, winter or summer, and always look right. The price ticket had made her blench. Two hundred and fifty pounds! And that had been some time ago. What would it cost now?

Underneath the blouson Mr Lambard had on a navy blue seaman's sweater which she recognised as a guernsey. She had had one herself at one time, but had given it away because of its associations.

Guernsey, although a lovely island, was not a place she wished to remember.

'I'm afraid I haven't any spirits. Only sherry or wine,' she told him.

'In that case—' He unzipped his grip and produced^ bottle. 'I took the precaution of bringing my own supply of rum. Will you join me in a tot?'

'Oh, no, thank you—not at this hour. I'll get you a glass.'

While she went to the sideboard in the dining end of the room, he moved to the sitting area. As she brought the glass to him, he asked,

'Is this your only form of heating?'—indicating the gas fire set into a rather ugly artificial fireplace.

'Yes, but it gives a good heat. I'll light it.' She bent to do so, then, straightening, said, 'Would you excuse me while I put on the kettle?

Do sit down. I shan't be more than a few moments.'

As well as filling the kettle, she went quickly back to her bedroom to brush her fair, shoulder-length hair and smooth it back from her face with a tortoiseshell clasp at the back to keep it neatly in place. She never wore it loose by day.

'Why are you here, Mr Lambard, if this is your busiest time?' she asked, returning to the living-room to find him looking at her bookshelves with what seemed a very generous tot of rum in his hand.

He took in her tidied hair, the concealing dressing- gown and her slippers. She had the feeling he thought her a dowdy, mousy-looking female.

'As we are, in a fashion, related, why not call me Ash?' he suggested.

'Your name is Christiana, I believe.'

'Yes, but I'm always called Christie.' She moved closer to the fire and perched on the edge of a chair.

'I've come to take charge of the child,' he said, in answer to her question.

'To take charge?' she said warily.

'You've had to hold the fort so far because you were near and I wasn't.

But you can't be expected to cope indefinitely. I'm here to take him off your hands.'

She said in a quiet, pleasant tone, 'But I don't want him taken off my hands. I'm very happy to take care of my sister's son. I'm the natural person to do so.'

'Had he been a girl—yes, perhaps you would have had a stronger claim. But it isn't good for a boy to grow up under a woman's aegis with no masculine influence as a counterbalance. You're young, and perhaps may remarry'—she felt he thought it unlikely—'but that's all the more reason for me to take him. I know from bitter experience what can happen to a child whose mother dies, and whose stepmother or foster-mother comes to regard him as a cuckoo in the nest.'

His strongly marked brows had drawn into a forbidding frown, and she saw his jaw muscles clench.

But his tone remained even as he continued, 'I'm not married, and never likely to be, so that circumstance won't arise if he grows up with me.'

'Why are you never likely to marry?'

A faint gleam of cynical amusement lit his sombre dark eyes as he answered her.

'Because, unlike most men who depend on your sex for all their creature comforts, I do not. I find my life runs more smoothly without the continual presence of a woman in it. I don't dislike them. At times I find their company very necessary. But I don't need it all day and every day.'

In the solitary evenings of her widowhood Christie had turned to books for solace. History was what she liked best, but before discovering this preference she had sampled almost every genre, including the works of all the leading champions of Women's Lib from Simone de Beauvoir to Germaine Greer. Their cause had never excited her, and only rarely had she felt a twinge of their indignation at certain entrenched male attitudes.

But now, when Ash Lambard made it clear that his only use for women was as what the liberationists called sex objects, she understood their resentment.

She said stiffly, 'You may not but, while he's little, John does need a woman's daily care. I'm afraid you can't just march in here and remove him from mine.

You see, Jenny left John in
my
custody, Mr Lambard. Paul was killed outright, but my sister lived for three days after the accident. She made me promise to keep John, which I did—very willingly.'

Her voice was not perfectly steady as she spoke of her sister's last hours. The tragedy was too recent to be referred to dispassionately. It had seemed such a cruel irony of fate that Jenny, with so much to live for, had been the one to be taken while she, Christie, a childless widow with no possibility of remarrying, lived on.

'But Paul left the boy in my charge. Not verbally merely, but legally, in his will. It seems unlikely that his wife had no say in the matter.

She must have agreed to it.'

'She may have—or she may not. She was very happy-go-lucky and easily influenced. She may have agreed because she felt it was impossible for anything bad to happen to her or Paul. If she'd been a person who worried, she could never have stood driving with him.'

'You thought he drove badly?'

'He'd had several minor accidents, and he often drove above the limit,'

she answered, forbearing to add that it was not only the speed limit which her brother-in-law had disregarded.

Aftef a moment, she went on, 'Jenny made no mention of any will in the time I spent at her bedside. But she had to be heavily sedated, and it made her very confused. The only thing which did seem clear in her mind was that I should swear to look after John. I had to promise not once but repeatedly.

Several of the medical staff would be able to vouch for that if you didn't believe me.'

'Certainly I believe you, but a promise made in those circumstances may often be seen to have been injudicious in the light of mature reflection.'