Beaumont Brides Collection (63 page)

His lips brushed over hers and he felt her tremble slightly, unexpectedly against him. After the confidence of her embrace in front of the cameras he had expected her to respond with a rather more immediate fire. Passion or fury. Instead she seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to take the lead.

Her hesitancy took him by surprise, emboldening him and he took her lower lip between his to taste its warm sweetness, dipping his tongue against her teeth in the gentlest exploration. She gave a little sigh, moved slightly to fit more closely against him then raising her lashes over a pair of startled eyes, as she became aware of his all too obvious arousal.

‘Is this the way you take care of all your clients?’ she asked, her voice more breath than substance.

Clients? Did she really think of herself as his client? If that were the case, he’d be giving serious thought about how he collected his account.

‘It’s the most effective technique I know,’ he assured her, softly. ‘If anyone wants to get to you, they have to get passed me first.’

She thought about it for a moment, shrugged. ‘That makes sense.’ And apparently quite happy with that closed her eyes again. He looked down at her. Her lids were heavy, lightly dusted with the same silver grey as the colour of her eyes; her lashes were unbelievably long and thick, like the glossy furs worn by his grandmother when he was a boy.

He touched them very lightly with his lips and was rewarded with a tiny sound that came from somewhere deep inside her, tightening his skin, making him very aware of his own desire. But he refused to be rushed by a racketing libido. It had been a long time since he had made love to a woman and he was determined they should both enjoy the experience.

With that firmly in mind, he began, very slowly, very thoroughly to trace the finely moulded bones of her face until he reached the small crease just above corner of her mouth. Her lips, he had noticed, tilted up slightly, so that she looked as if she was smiling even when her eyes were saying something else, but the crease only appeared when she was genuinely happy and it seemed that she was happy now. Rather happy himself, he touched the tiny indentation with the tip of his tongue.

Claudia turned slightly as if seeking his mouth with her own, but then she hesitated and looked up at him, her eyes full of question.

‘This is just for us, Mac?’ she asked, with touching uncertainty.

‘Just for us.’

He took his time, aware that for both of them this was something new. Not the kissing, he had kissed her before, first without quite knowing why, and then he had kissed her because, well, there were all kinds of reasons, none of them to do with the way he was feeling right now.

Now he tasted her lips, the smooth minty freshness of her teeth, met and slowly acquainted himself with the heady pleasure of her tongue, drifting away on a tide of this new sensual pleasure. New. The word mocked him. He was thirty-five years old. There was not much left for him to discover, pleasure or pain, that was entirely new and as the kiss deepened a warning bell reminded him that he’d been here before.

Yet not quite here. Not feeling quite like this.

This was like being fifteen, knowing nothing and kissing a girl for the first time all mixed up with those years of experience. The combination was so heady that he didn’t even hear the door opening behind him. It took a low cough to warn him that they were no longer alone, to drag him back from the dangerous territory into which he had strayed.

It took a moment longer before he focussed on the figure standing in the doorway. Mac had seen him before and he didn’t much like him. His brain began, slowly, to click into gear. Redmond. Phillip Redmond, the theatre manager.

‘You sent for me, Claudia?’ Redmond said, with the barest touch of something insolent in his manner. ‘I did knock.’ But he hadn’t waited for her to answer and he had interrupted them when anyone with an ounce of good taste would have simply closed the door and gone away, Mac thought. No, he didn’t like him. And he fully expected Claudia to tell the man to get lost in her own inimitable style.

Instead she took a little shuddery breath, Mac felt it beneath his hands before she gathered herself and not quite managing to meet his eyes, turned away from him, putting a yard of distance between them. It felt like a mile, a great yawning empty space.

‘Yes, Phillip, I did.’ Mac took comfort from the fact that her voice shook just a little and that she sat rather suddenly on her dressing stool. ‘I want to know the progress you’ve made so far in your enquiries about what happened on Saturday.’ She avoided looking in the mirror, Mac noticed, avoided looking at him, while Redmond fussed around picking up the cuttings that had slipped from her hands. ‘Leave those,’ she said, impatiently. ‘I’ll pick them up later.’

She wasn’t quite in control, Mac thought, but she was getting there. Phillip Redmond, however, was too intent on the photograph in the newspaper to notice Claudia’s lack of poise.

‘Your mother would never have done that,’ he said, holding it out to her.

She didn’t take it. ‘It was just a kiss, Phillip,’ she said, blushing a little. Mac was surprised that she felt the need to explain herself to the theatre manager. He was even more surprised by the blush. ‘It was just a bit a fun to raise money for Fizz’s charity.’

‘Your mother raised a great deal of money for charity without the need to make an exhibition of herself,’ Redmond replied. ‘But then, she was a lady.’

Claudia finally took the paper, looked at it for a moment and then at Redmond. The sudden flush of colour had been leached from her skin and she was perfectly still. ‘Just what does that mean, Phillip?’ she enquired, softly. ‘That my mother was more competent at raising money for charity than me?’ Her pause was epic. ‘Or that I am not a lady?’

CHAPTER NINE

THERE was a horribly long moment when the tension was so thick that it could have been cut into wedges and served with whipped cream. Mac finally broke the silence.

‘Miss Beaumont asked you a question, Redmond.’ His voice was scarcely above a whisper, but it was the kind of whisper that would have hit the back wall of a hushed theatre, Claudia thought, and no one would have been left in any doubt about his feelings. ‘It would be ill-mannered to keep a lady waiting for an answer.’

A lady? Used by Mac to describe her, the word caught her by surprise. She fought back the urge to look at him and read his face, see if he really meant it. It was too important. She cared too much. So she kept her eyes fastened on Phillip Redmond.

But Phillip was defensive, rather than apologetic. ‘I didn’t say that, Claudia. You know I didn’t mean to imply-’

‘Didn’t you?’ With his mean-spirited attempt to justify himself something snapped. Claudia knew the way Phillip felt about her mother. He’d placed the image of Elaine French on a pedestal a mile high and worshipped at her feet.

It had been obvious from the first that he bitterly resented Melanie’s presence. She had told Mel that Phillip would get used to her, but it was quite obvious that he had been getting more, rather than less difficult during the run and, Claudia realised with a sinking heart, she was partly to blame.

With the benefit of hindsight she believed her father had been unwise to bring Phillip in to work on Private Lives, a play so much associated with the Elaine French legend, although heaven knew that he would have been terribly hurt if he’d been left out of the team and her father had preferred to overlook his behaviour, excusing it as a slightly irritating eccentricity instead of confronting it.

It had been a mistake, a mistake she had to address right now.

Phillip wanted her to behave like her mother, or at least the woman he thought she had been. No problem.

Lifting her head, she tilted it slightly to one side in the pose that was the very essence of Elaine French and then very still, very poised, she became her mother.

It wasn’t difficult. She had been brought up to it, had performed the trick as a child, for her mother’s friends, for eager photographers when they came to take “family” shots, even at school.

‘I think,’ she said, in that cool dismissive voice her mother had used when she was particularly displeased, ‘I think that you came very close to it, Phillip.’

Redmond blinked, his shoulders dropped and he took a step back, almost for a moment as if he’d seen a ghost. Then he raised his hand to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry, madam. I’m sorry. You know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.’ He made a helpless little gesture.

Madam. He had always called her mother that and Claudia froze, momentarily horrified by what she had done, how convincing she had been.

‘Perhaps you’d better try harder,’ Mac suggested, stepping forward, a supportive hand beneath her elbow. ‘Miss Beaumont was put in an impossible situation on Saturday. Do you think she enjoyed performing like that?’

‘Miss Beaumont? Claudia.’ Phillip stared at her for a moment and then with a long shudder turned to Mac. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that Claudia looks so much like her mother. I can’t...’ He made a helpless little gesture, as if incapable of putting his feelings into words.

Claudia made a small sound, deep in her throat. It might have been the beginnings of a laugh. But then again, it might not, she couldn’t be sure. If Phillip had ever seen the ladylike Elaine French screaming abuse at her hapless husband because she was no longer beautiful, because she couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror and he was the only available target for her venom...

But no one knew about that. Not all of it.

Fizz had told Luke, and Melanie had been told just a little about why Edward Beaumont hadn’t left his deeply damaged wife to be with the girl he loved. But no one who hadn’t been there could possibly know. Who could you tell? Who would ever believe it? They had never discussed what they should do. They had each simply chosen to lock away the terrible memories and so the legend had remained intact.

She realised that Mac was looking at her, his eyes suggesting that Phillip was expecting something from her, the gentle pressure of his hand on her arm assuring her that she was not alone. Slowly, with conscious effort she came back to the dressing room, reality.

‘The standards of behaviour that my mother set were so...’ - she struggled for the right word - ‘...so taxing, that few of us can ever hope to achieve their like, Phillip,’ she said. It was as near to an acceptance of his apology as she could manage.

He didn’t appear to notice the reservation. ‘She was unique,’ he agreed, solemnly, as if that answered everything.

‘I believe she was.’ She sincerely hoped so. And she made a silent promise to herself that, no matter what the provocation, she would never, ever, impersonate her mother again. And once this run of Private Lives was over, she would never recreate one of her roles, or even allow herself to be made up to look like her.

A shiver ran through her, as if someone had walked over her grave.

Mac felt it and moved closer. ‘Claudia?’

She put her hand over his for just a moment while she gathered herself and he saw the brief internal struggle as she reclaimed herself, put on the public smile.

‘Darling,’ she said, with forced brightness, ‘why don’t you sit down over there. This won’t take long and then I’ll show you around.’

For the moment Mac accepted that he had temporarily lost the woman he had discovered a few minutes ago. Warm, a little uncertain, a very different woman from the one who wore her couldn’t-care-less front so convincingly. But he was concerned about her, too. Something had just happened inside Claudia’s head that he didn’t understand. She had done something to herself, something that had sent a shiver down his spine.

As he hesitated, she gave him a playful push and taking his cue from her, he reluctantly resumed his self-inflicted role as infatuated lover and retreated to the velvet covered chaise. The temptation to flatten Phillip Redmond was still making his knuckles tingle but it would serve no purpose, Mac decided, other than to make himself feel better and that wasn’t why he was there.

Instead he picked up a programme to flick through idly as though the business of the theatre bored him rigid.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Phillip Redmond interested him a very great deal. He was clearly obsessed with Elaine French and obsessive characters were dangerous. Especially when the object of that obsession, apparently reincarnated in the shape of her daughter, refused to conform to the proper standards of behaviour.

Mac wasn’t a psychologist but to his layman’s mind it had all the hallmarks of a disaster waiting to happen. Or maybe it had already happened. The destruction of the dress would have presented no difficulty for Redmond and he undoubtedly knew where both Claudia and Fizz lived.

He could have followed them easily in the heavy traffic of London and once he had seen they were headed for Broomhill he wouldn’t have needed to stay on their tail.

The photograph in the parachute was more difficult.

‘That’s it?’ Claudia looked up as Phillip finally came to the end of a long list of names. ‘Wasn’t there anyone who was unaccounted for?’

‘Well, there might have been someone. We’re not quite sure. Jim says he caught sight of someone hurrying out through the door at about half past six.’