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The Youngest Sister
ANNE WEALE


Her Prince Charming?Cressy Vale was the youngest in a family of thin, glamorous, beautiful women. Only, she wasn't thin or glamorous, and only the kindest of souls would ever call her beautiful.Which was why Nicolas Talbot's interest in her was so surprising. Yet since meeting Cressy he had become a regular knight in shining armor…offering her a place to stay and his undivided attention. Cressy was half in love with him already. But did Nicolas regard Cressy as merely a damsel in distress or his modern-day Cinderella?Another classic romance from this popular author







“Already I feel very beholden to you.” (#ue08c8113-85b7-58ef-9f64-746f99d15f4e)Letter to Reader (#u724a8d84-9a2f-5b88-ac24-3f7a038127be)Title Page (#ud06d6ef9-9ef9-5563-8b96-9f29198ba876)CHAPTER ONE (#u612a3bd5-04b0-5ff4-93c3-f13ae1a78fa7)CHAPTER TWO (#ud2b44b7e-48a8-5604-8762-e77cfe5c29a1)CHAPTER THREE (#ud39b8dc1-ec7d-5d36-b9be-c89e88167566)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


“Already I feel very beholden to you.”

“There’s no need. You’re actually doing me a favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s been a long time since I had any female companionship. I hadn’t expected to find myself sitting here with a beautiful woman beside me so soon after my arrival.”

The way he talked, Cressy could almost believe she was beautiful. But she knew it had to be a line. She would only ever be a beauty to a man who loved her, and she couldn’t delude herself that someone like Nicolas had fallen in love at first sight. Neither had she—had she?


Dear Reader,

Many readers like to know how a story came to be written. This one was inspired by Ca’n Xenet, an old farmhouse in rural Majorca, which was given new life when it was bought by Shiela Peczenik, an artist, who made it her home and that of her painting school.

Although writers avoid using real people in their stories, for A Touch of the Devil (published 1980), which some of you may have read, I drew on my son’s experiences in the Spanish Foreign Legion to create a hero who had also been a legionnaire. Similarly, much of what I know about men like the hero of this story derives from my husband’s passion for mountains. While I was painting in Majorca, he was walking the Pennine Way and planning a trip with our son to the summit of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere.

In creating exciting heroes, it helps to be the wife and mother of men who do adventurous things. Had our first home not been in the wilds of “upcountry” Malaysia, I might never have written any romances, and certainly not Winter is Past, the one that launched me on a long and satisfying career as a storyteller.

Best wishes,

Anne Weale




The Youngest Sister

Anne Weale







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


CHAPTER ONE

USUALLY when Cressy Vale travelled by air it was on the cheapest charter flight available.

Today she was flying business class on Centennial’s scheduled service because the journey was urgent and all the ordinary seats on airlines serving the island of Majorca were fully booked.

It was late June, a popular month with people who wanted to avoid the crowds of the high season as well as the more intense heat of the Mediterranean in July and August. This was the perfect time to go to the beautiful island off the east coast of Spain where the Spanish royal family spent their summer holidays.

Cressy was not going for pleasure, but to answer an SOS message that an elderly member of her father’s family, who had retired to Majorca, was in trouble.

Her flight to Palma, the island’s capital, took off at nine-thirty. By twelve-forty, Spanish time, she would be in golden sunshine instead of the cold, wet weather which had persisted since Easter in England.

Cressy lived and worked in London. On the train from Victoria station to Gatwick airport, she was one of a number of young people travelling in casual clothes with their belongings in rucksacks and roll-bags. But she wondered if, at the airline’s business class check-in desk, she would be conspicuously out of place in her jeans and faded indigo cotton sweater.

Her jeans were freshly laundered and the sweater had been expensive when her sister Anna had bought it. But now it was three years old and had undergone several repairs. Even her dark blue deck shoes had once been in Anna’s wardrobe. Both her sisters spent a lot of money on clothes, but they earned more than she did and needed to dress well for their jobs and their non-stop social lives. Cressy was saving for an expensive group trip to the Galápagos Islands, a sanctuary for rare wildlife in the Pacific. She felt lucky to have a family who supplied her with top-quality hand-me-downs.

However, when she reached the check-in any fears that she might be made to feel like a bag lady at a gala ball were driven out of her mind by the sight of the person being checked in ahead of her. When her questing glance dropped from the sign above and behind the desk to the tall figure standing in front of it, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Never in her life had she seen such a gorgeous male back-view.

For a moment her heart stood still, the way it had the first time she saw the soaring white summit of the Jungfrau on a family holiday in Switzerland.

The Jungfrau was there for ever. In a hundred years’ time it would still be stopping the hearts of impressionable schoolgirls. But any minute now the man she was looking at would finish his business at the desk and she would see his face. The probability was that his front wouldn’t match his scrumptious rear.

Bracing herself for the inevitable let-down, she savoured the brief illusion that here was the kind of man she had always dreamed of meeting—and not merely a fellow traveller in the same teeming airport, but actually going where she was going.

He was tall, the top of his head at least six inches above her own, with shoulders to match, and long, powerful but shapely brown legs exposed by very short shorts. But they weren’t the beach shorts of someone going on a sand, sun and sangria holiday. These were the serviceable shorts worn by trekkers, and this particular pair had seen a lot of service. As had his leather boots.

Above the waist he was wearing a dark blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up high over deeply tanned elbows and the kind of biceps and forearms that could hoist their owner up a rock face more easily than most people climbed stairs.

His black curly hair was long and would have flowed over those impressively wide shoulders if it hadn’t been neatly bound by a length of black tape. Midway down the rim of one ear there was a glint of silver.

Cressy knew what it was because she had one herself, at home, in the miniature chest of drawers where she kept her few bits of jewellery. It was a little silver climbing figure. Hers had come from a market stall selling strings of turquoise beads and earrings of lapis lazuli. She wore it as an open-backed ring, but if the man in front of her was a rock climber he would regard rings as a hazard. Curled round the rim of his ear, the silver climber was less likely to catch on something.

For some moments she feasted her eyes on every visible detail of him, from the upright muscular shoulders, lean hips and hard male backside to the strong but elegant legs which, for a man with black hair, were not as furry as dark men’s legs usually were.

She was jolted out of her trance by being jabbed on the backs of her own legs. Before she turned round she knew what had caused the painful thrust—the front bar of the baggage trolley of someone behind her.

The woman in charge of the trolley was an ash-blonde, forty-something, in a pastel suit with a lot of gold jewellery and a matched set of expensive suitcases. Without a word of apology, she said, ‘This is the business class queue.’

‘I know. I’m in it,’ said Cressy

‘Then why are you hanging back here? The desk’s free,’ the woman said abruptly.

Had Cressy’s mother or either of her sisters been addressed in that tone, they would have made a cutting retort about bad manners. But Cressy had a high threshold of tolerance. If people were rude, she assumed they were under stress. It might be that the woman was secretly terrified of flying. Surprisingly many people were.

As Cressy turned back towards the desk, no longer blocked by the tall man, she glanced in the direction she would be going in after check-in. She was just in time to catch a glimpse of him loping gracefully out of sight, leaving her with an impression of a long, elastic stride and a body in peak physical condition.

But she still didn’t know what his face was like.

Nicolas settled his tall frame in one of the comfortable chairs in the business class departure lounge and downed half a glass of chilled orange juice from the courtesy bar in one long, refreshing swallow.

He had taken a copy of The New York Herald Tribune from a selection of newspapers on a table near the door, but he didn’t start reading it. After months in the back of beyond he had long since broken the habit of following world events and was in no hurry to resume it.

Instead he glanced round the lounge at his fellow passengers, but none held his eye for more than a second. They were the usual mixed bag of pallid-faced businessmen travelling on expense accounts and well-to-do middle-aged to elderly couples returning to their retirement villas in the expatriate colonies that were dotted round most of Majorca’s coastline.

Not that everyone in the lounge was bound for the same destination. Centennial didn’t have its own lounge, but shared it with various other small airlines.

He was about to turn his attention to the front-page headlines when someone unexpected made an uncertain entrance.

At first he thought she must have come in by mistake and would be redirected by the stewardess on duty at the desk. But after a brief conversation the newcomer nodded and smiled, and came towards the non-smoking end of the lounge where he was sitting. Having chosen a seat, she divested herself of her backpack, which was small enough to be stowed in an overhead locker on whichever plane she was catching. Then she went to the self-service bar, where coffee was waiting on a hotplate alongside a comprehensive range of alcoholic drinks, the appropriate mixers being stored in two glass-fronted fridges under the counter.

Although she carried herself well, Nicolas had the impression that the girl was inwardly self-conscious, feeling herself out of place in this quiet and softly lit enclave of cosseted comfort so different from the hurly-burly endured by tight budget travellers.

She looked to be about nineteen and, in an era when teenagers’ role models were either as thin as starved cats or built like greyhounds with implanted breasts, her figure was unfashionably Amazonian.

He watched her dropping ice cubes into a glass before filling it from the jug of orange juice. Barefoot, she would be about five feet nine or ten. A big girl in every sense. But her curves were firm and well-proportioned, and would be a cuddly armful. He had never been attracted by delicate, doll-like women.

She returned to her place, stepping carefully around the outstretched legs of a sleeping transit passenger who was relying on the stewardesses to wake him in time for his next flight. Her hair was light mouse with blonde streaks. But they were like children’s blonde streaks, not the result of expensive sessions at the hairdresser. Her face appeared bare of make-up. She looked an open-air girl, which was also how he liked them. Except she was too young, and probably not going where he was anyway.

At a different time of year Nicolas would have put her down as a chalet girl, bound for a winter of cooking and cleaning for skiing parties. Assuming her interests to be sporting, he wondered what she would look like stripped off except for a minuscule swimsuit, speeding across the water on a windsurfer.

His train of thought was broken when, after looking round the lounge as he had a few minutes earlier, the girl met his eyes and realised he had been watching her.

For a second or two she was visibly disconcerted, and then a delicious blush suffused that clear outdoor skin and she turned her face towards the door. Her shyness amused and intrigued him. Even at nineteen not many girls were flustered by a stranger’s stare. In his experience, the signal he had been sending—albeit not deliberately—was usually returned with tacit permission for him to make the next move.

Cressy set her glass down on the table alongside her chair and, bending forward, pretended to be looking for something in one of the pockets of her backpack.

She hadn’t expected to find the dark man staring at her, but that wasn’t why she felt agitated. She was in a dither because his face had not been the let-down she had anticipated. It was extremely attractive. More than that, it was a face she had often tried to visualise but never quite succeeded in putting together in her mind—the face of her dream man.

Like a police detective composing an Identikit picture, she had often mentally assembled the various facial characteristics she expected him to have. A firm mouth and chin. A nice smile. Eyes both intelligent and kind. But somehow, like an Identikit, the face she had seen in her mind’s eye had never been more than an approximation of her ideal.

To be suddenly confronted by the real thing, the genuine article, took a bit of getting used to. Had it been a trick of the soft light from the silk-shaded table lamps? If she looked again would the illusion vanish?

Certainly, in that brief moment of eye contact, the impression she had registered hadn’t been one of kindness and niceness. She had felt the same sort of frisson she would have expected to feel on finding herself within yards of a magnificent but dangerous wild animal.

Even his impressive back-view hadn’t prepared her for that extraordinary face—the tanned skin stretched tautly over a bone structure that seemed to belong to the chieftain of a remote mountain kingdom somewhere in wildest Asia rather than here in Europe where, in her observation, real men had almost died out.

She wanted to look at him again, but she didn’t dare in case he was still watching her. She calmed herself with the thought that it was most unlikely they would be sitting together.

Half an hour later, when she found that they weren’t, she was perversely disappointed. They were seated in the same row but she had been allocated the window seat on the port side and he had the other window seat, with an elderly couple next to him. On Cressy’s side of the aisle there was only one seat next to hers and its occupant hadn’t shown up yet.

Some passengers were still boarding when those in the business class section were offered a choice of orange juice or champagne. Cressy decided to stay with orange juice. When the aircraft took off the seat next to hers was still empty.

No sooner was the plane airborne and the No SMOKING sign switched off than the dark man rose from his seat with a polite, ‘Excuse me, please,’ to his neighbours.

Cressy assumed he must want to go to the loo. But, after waiting for the others to resume their seats, he looked down at her and said, ‘Would you mind if I joined you? This airline doesn’t have a no smoking policy, and I don’t want to spend the flight behind a chain smoker.’

Following the direction of his nod, Cressy saw the top of Forty-something’s candy floss hairdo and a spiral of smoke.

‘Not at all,’ she said politely, but without the friendly smile she would have given to anyone else making the request.

As he sat down next to her she was aware of the same inner turmoil she had felt in the lounge. From the pouch on the back seat she took out the in-flight magazine and put on a show of becoming deeply immersed in it.

Even in business class Nicolas found the leg room inadequate, but he was used to enduring far worse discomforts. The girl’s aloof manner amused him. He guessed it was caused by shyness. Shy girls were rare nowadays. He sensed that the one beside him, pretending to be absorbed in the magazine, was a throwback to his mother’s generation. As his mother had, she smelt delicious. The scent was one he didn’t recognise, a delicate, flowery fragrance which didn’t invade the nostrils like the heavy stuff worn by the blonde in front of his previous seat.

A Spanish stewardess distributed menus and another took orders for pre-lunch drinks. Expecting the girl to ask for another orange juice, he was mildly surprised when she ordered Campari and soda, her manner unexpectedly decisive. He liked the sound of her voice and the size and shape of her hands. He didn’t like women whose bones felt as fragile as those of small birds when he shook hands with them. Nor, when making love, did he like having long nails drawing blood on his back. The girl’s nails were short and clear-varnished. She was wearing a gold signet ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. She could have bought it in an antique shop because the crest appealed to her. It could mean she had something serious going with a boyfriend. Or it could be a family heirloom.

As the man beside her ordered a gin and tonic Cressy was aware that the pretty Spanish stewardess, her slender figure set off by a navy skirt and white blouse with red and blue stripes on the revers of the collar, was making it clear that she fancied him.

Well, who wouldn’t? thought Cressy, sneaking a glance at the long length of rock-hard brown thigh parallel with her own leg.

She studied the four-course menu, written in Spanish and English, wondering what Nebraska-style meant in relation to salmon pâté with palm heart sticks and baby corn cobs.

She wasn’t a strict vegetarian but, like a lot of her friends, she no longer ate meat when she had any choice in the matter. She wouldn’t be choosing the veal tournedos. The alternative was a mixed-meat kebab with pilaf rice, peas and Parisienne carrots, whatever they were. She would eat the rice and vegetables, leave most of the kebab and fill up with cheese and fruit, which were shown as two separate courses.

After their drinks had been brought to them, with the usual sachet of peanuts, the man beside her said pleasantly, ‘May I open the packet for you?’

Although the bags were famously difficult to open, Cressy was taken aback by the gallantry of his offer. Big girls like herself were widely regarded as being able to fend for themselves in every respect. Even ultrafeminine babes like the doe-eyed stewardess weren’t being overwhelmed with chivalry these days. In the words of a guy Cressy knew, most men had taken so many putdowns from women who read sexism into every wellmeant gesture that they had given up doing all that stuff their mothers had taught them. If women wanted to be equal, he’d said, that was fine by him. He would go on being nice to old ladies, but anyone else could open doors for themselves, change their own wheels and pay for their own meals.

‘Oh...would you...? Thank you,’ she said, handing over the peanuts.

The brief contact with his fingers as the packet changed hands sent a strange tingle up her arm. She had had several boyfriends, none of them serious, but couldn’t remember ever being as strongly aware of their physical presence as she was now with this stranger.

Having opened the packet and put it back on her tray-table, he said, ‘Are you on holiday?’

‘No, I’m not. Are you?’

‘I live on the island.’

‘Really? What do you do there?’

‘I relax and recharge my batteries. My job involves a lot of travelling. When I’m at home I sit in the sun and vegetate.’

She was about to enquire what his job was when he beat her to it by asking, ‘If not a holiday, what takes you to the island?’

‘I’m going to see my great-aunt.’

‘Have you stayed with her before?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve never been to Spain at all.’

‘Where on the island does your relative live?’

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Cressy admitted.

Had this been a holiday, she would have read a guidebook before coming away. There hadn’t been time to do that. She had only the common knowledge that Majorca was the largest island in a group called the Balearics—one of which, Ibiza, had once been a mecca for hippies, and possibly still was.

‘The house is called “Es Vell”. It’s somewhere near a town called Pollensa,’ she told him.

‘That’s up north, nowhere near Palma airport. Will there be someone meeting you?’

Again Cressy shook her head. ‘Aunt Kate doesn’t know I’m coming. She’s a bit of a recluse. It was her Spanish neighbour who let us know she was ill. She rang up yesterday afternoon. Luckily the person who took the call speaks some Spanish, so she could make out roughly what was being said. Aunt Kate has broken her leg. At seventy-eight that’s serious.’

He lifted an eyebrow. ‘Wasn’t there anyone older who could have come out to take charge?’

‘How old d’you think I am?’

‘Eighteen? Nineteen? Rather young to cope with the situation you’ve outlined...especially if you don’t speak Spanish.’

‘I’m twenty-three,’ Cressy said briskly. ‘And, apart from not speaking Spanish, I can probably cope a lot better than some people twice my age. I work for Distress Signal, an organisation which specialises in dealing with domestic emergencies.’

‘I’ve heard of it, but I would have thought they’d be staffed by sensible middle-aged ladies, not girls who could pass for teenagers.’

‘They’re staffed by a wide range of people...of both sexes,’ Cressy informed him. ‘Normally a situation like this one would be dealt with by someone Spanish-speaking. But in this case, when there’s a close relation who can come to the rescue, that’s obviously preferable to employing an outsider.’

‘If you’ve never been to Spain before, and your aunt is a recluse, it doesn’t sound as if the relationship between you is a close one.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she conceded. ‘But I do know a lot more about her than a stranger would. At one time she and my parents had a good relationship. But then she went off to the Mediterranean and they gradually drifted apart. My parents lead very full lives—and they’d rather go to France for their holidays. My mother wilts if it’s too hot.’

As she spoke she wondered why she was confiding in him. Chatting to strangers had always been one of her foibles. When she was younger, her lack of caution in making friends had been a worry to her elders—especially to Maggie, who’d run the house while Mrs Vale was busy helping to run the country from the House of Commons. Cressy had lost count of Maggie’s warnings that talking to strangers could be hazardous. But that had been when she was younger and less competent to judge whether people were trustworthy or not.

‘How long have you worked for Distress Signal?’ he asked.

‘Two years. What do you do?’

‘I’m a freelance journalist and travel writer. If you ever read travel articles you may have seen my by-line... Nicolas Alaró.’

Her eyes widened in astonishment. She had read a lot of his pieces. He had been to all the places she would have liked to visit. Sometimes she cut out his articles and filed them away against the day when she might meet a suitable travelling companion and take off on a round-the-world trip. She didn’t fancy going alone, which was why she was going with a group to the Galágapagos Islands.

The last clipping she had filed had been about an expedition on a yacht called Endless Summer, sailing the channels of Patagonia.

“‘Alaró” sounds Spanish, but you don’t write as if English was your second language. Are you completely bilingual?’

With his black hair and tanned olive skin, he could pass for a Spaniard in some ways. But his eyes weren’t brown, they were dark indigo-blue—the colour her sweater had been before many washings had faded it.

‘I had a Mallorquin grandfather who left me his house on the island. I also use his name for working purposes. My real surname is Talbot...and you are?’

‘Cressida... usually called Cressy.’

Deliberately, she didn’t mention her surname. He might connect her with her mother. She was proud of her mother’s achievements but she had learnt a long time ago that Virginia Vale was either admired or loathed, and he might be one of the loathers. Many men were.

She said, ‘Travel writing must be a marvellous way to earn a living. I enjoyed your piece about the voyage on Endless Summer.’

‘I enjoyed researching it. South America’s a fascinating continent. I’m going back there early next year. I want to get to the summit of Aconcagua. It’s the highest point in the western hemisphere... the highest mountain outside Asia.’

She saw by the light in his eyes that the project excited him, and she felt her own heartbeat quicken at the thought of such an adventure.

She still hadn’t fully adjusted to the astonishment of finding that, in a sense, he was someone she knew. She rarely bought books in hardback but hadn’t been able to resist buying all his as soon as they came out, the most recent being a collection of his travel essays.

She had bought it at Stanfords, the London bookshop known to travellers from all over the world for its fine range of maps and guides. If she had known beforehand that he was doing a signing session at the shop she would have gone along to have her copy autographed. It had been a big disappointment to discover she had missed the chance of meeting him, if only for the few seconds it would have taken him to write his name on the fly-leaf.

To meet him by chance seemed almost...as if it were fated.

The practical side of her nature made short shrift of this proposition, reminding her sharply that what mattered was his intimate knowledge of Majorca. He could supply her with much-needed information.

Cressy’s practicality was really her only asset. Even her family acknowledged that, although disastrously lacking in academic ability, she was very strong on common sense.

‘What’s the best way to get to Pollensa?’ she asked, when the salmon pâté had been set before them. ‘Is there a bus service to it? Or would a taxi be better?’

‘A taxi will get you there faster but will also cost a lot more. Does your great-aunt have a car?’

‘I don’t know for certain. I’d think so. She certainly had one the last time she came to stay with us in England. But that was ages ago. I must have been about eight then. I remember the car she was driving because a boy I used to play with made such a fuss about it. He was a car fanatic, and Aunt Kate’s was something unusual.’ She searched her memory for the name. ‘He called it a roadster... a Cord roadster. I forget the year it was made, but some time in the 1930s. My father was rather taken with it too.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nicolas. ‘It’s one of the legendary cars from an era of luxury motoring before the roads became choked with assembly-line vehicles. What’s more,’ he went on, ‘that Cord is still running...or was, up to a couple of years ago. I saw it going through Alcudia with an elderly lady at the wheel. She aroused my journalist’s curiosity. I asked around and was told she was Katherine Dexter, once a leading combatant in the battle of the sexes.’

Cressy’s mother and sisters would have corrected that description. She let it pass. ‘How did she look when you saw her?’

‘It was only a glimpse. At that time she looked pretty good. So did the car. I was told it was very rare. The makers went out of business with only about two thousand Cords on the market. According to my informant, your great-aunt’s model was being kept in repair by a garage mechanic who was hoping she would leave it to him. Whether it’s still on the road—quién sabe?’ Remembering she had no Spanish, he translated. ‘Who knows?’

‘Old cars can be temperamental. If it is still running, I don’t think I’d want to drive it,’ Cressy said, thinking aloud. ‘Maybe I can rent a motor scooter.’

‘If you need one, there’ll be no problem. In July and August, yes. But not at this stage of the year. As for reaching Es Vell today, I’ll run you there.’

Again she was taken aback.

Before she could say anything, he went on, ‘My house is in the same part of the island. I don’t know your great-aunt’s place but I doubt if it’s more than a few kilometres off my route.’

‘It’s extremely kind, but I really couldn’t impose—’

‘If you’re worried about the risk of accepting a lift from a stranger,’ he said, looking faintly amused, ‘we can get over that quite easily. By virtue of my distinguished maternal grandfather, I’m quite well-known in Mallorca...as the Spanish call it. There’ll be people at the airport who’ll convince you that you won’t be risking your safety if you accept my suggestion.’

Cressy found it hard to fathom the generosity of his offer. She was attracted to him but didn’t flatter herself that he was attracted to her.

Research had proved men were attracted to women who more or less matched them in terms of physical assets. For that reason the men she attracted were guys whose faces and physiques could be classed as averagely pleasant rather than to-die-for. She had never appealed to anyone with Nicolas’s outstanding looks and she didn’t expect to. He was in her sisters’ league. Therefore, his offer had to be prompted by disinterested helpfulness rather than being the first move in a holiday romance.

Casting about for some reason why Nicolas would want to help out a girl like herself—presentable but nothing special—Cressy suddenly realised the solution was under her nose.

He was a journalist. Aunt Kate, in her day, had been a celebrity. The motive behind his offer of a lift must be the hope of an interview with her. As well as writing travel articles, he did occasionally do profiles of interesting people encountered on his journeys.

In his book there was a profile of Edward James, a millionaire patron of the arts with an extraordinary house in Mexico. The introduction to the profile said that Nicolas had been a backpacking teenager when Edward James had consented to be interviewed by him. It had been his first journalistic coup, the foundation of his career. It could be that he saw Cressy as the means to an end—the end being a profile of Aunt Kate.

The possibility that, far from being genuinely helpful, he was using her, or attempting to do so, was curiously upsetting. But two could play at that game. If he meant to use her, he couldn’t complain at being made use of himself.

‘I don’t think we need to go to those lengths. I can check your bona fides for myself. What is your latest book called, and what is the last place in it?’

Looking amused, he said, ‘It’s called Faraway Places and the last piece was about Nantucket. I called it “Yesterday’s Island”. But, beyond confirming that I am who I claim to be, I don’t see that it proves anything.’

‘It proves you’re a well-known name, unlikely to be a serial killer or “The Mystery Rapist of Majorca”.’ As she said this, she wiggled her fingers to indicate she was quoting the kind of headline seen in the popular Press. ‘I’d be very grateful for a lift to Aunt Kate’s place. Thanks for the offer. How far is it from Palma to Pollensa?’

‘Now the motorway’s finished, it takes less than an hour.’

While they were eating the main course, he said, ‘Tell me about your job. Why did you choose it, and what sort of things do you do?’

Actually, Cressy hadn’t chosen it. The job had been set up for her by her mother, who had met the director of Distress Signal.

‘We do a huge range of things, from emergency child-minding to visiting people in hospital when their next of kin can’t. Last week I drove a rather wobbly old man to spend a holiday with his house-bound sister on the other side of England. This week I was going to look after a Down’s Syndrome child while her mother is in hospital, but now someone else will be doing that.’

‘You must be a good deal wiser and more capable than most twenty-three-year-olds,’ he said dryly.

Cressy shrugged. ‘It’s a question of horse sense. Sometimes clever people don’t have much. I’m a total dud academically, but I’m good at practical things like—’ She broke off, aware that she was letting her tongue run away with her.

‘Like what?’ he prompted.

‘Oh...unblocking drains...that sort of thing.’

‘You sound an ideal travelling companion. Equal to every contingency. Never fazed when plans go awry. Does adventurous travel appeal to you?’

She knew from his book that he had been to many remote and potentially hazardous places.

‘If you mean like your journey through the Atlas Mountains with a mule, I think that would be too adventurous for me.’

‘That was a long time ago. Do I gather you’ve read my books?’

Her mouth being full, Cressy replied with a nod.

‘As far as I know, I don’t have many women readers.’

It was on the tip of her tongue to remark that he would have thousands if his publishers put his picture on the back of the jacket, or included shots of the author in the pages of illustrations. But the only glimpse his readers had ever been given was an anonymous figure with wind-tousled dark hair—not as long as he wore it now—sitting with his back to the camera in wilderness terrain.

She said, ‘You seem very camera-shy. There’s never a photo of you with any of your travel pieces.’

He shrugged. ‘As I’m not an actor or a male model, what I look like is irrelevant.’

His answer surprised and puzzled her. He must know he was, if not strictly handsome, compellingly attractive. Her mother and sisters were all fully aware that their looks were a major asset. Her mother had been one of the first politicians to seek the advice of an image consultant, and to take advantage of a photogenic face and a flair for speaking in sound bites to advance her career.

Having grown up with people who knew and exploited the value of their faces and figures, Cressy found it hard to believe that Nicolas was without vanity. He must have realised how easily he could have dated the most attractive women. Yet he spoke as if his looks were a matter of indifference to him.

It suddenly occurred to her that he might be married. Not that the way he had stared at her in the airport suggested he was a man whose love for one woman had made him blind or indifferent to the rest of her sex.

‘How does your wife occupy herself during your absences? Do you have lots of children?’ she asked.

He said dryly, ‘Even in the quieter parts of Mallorca it’s virtually impossible to find a woman content to sit at home having babies for an absentee husband. I wouldn’t want that sort of wife anyway. But, conversely, there still aren’t many women prepared to spend months on end living in primitive conditions. Those who don’t mind roughing it are usually dedicated to good works, or not feminine enough for my taste. How’s your private life?’

Was that very slight emphasis on ‘private’ a subtle riposte for her cheek in asking him intimate questions? Or was she imagining a nuance where there wasn’t one?

‘I don’t have one,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m still living with my parents. My job doesn’t pay enough for me to set up independently. Well, it might in the country, but not in London, where the cost of living is higher.’

She had put her watch forward by an hour immediately after fastening her seat belt. When a sensation in her ears told her it wouldn’t be long before they landed, she couldn’t believe how quickly the time had passed since they took off.

Her first aerial view of the island made it look very brown and barren. Almost rising out of the sea was a range of steep, jagged mountains and then the land flattened out and became a patchwork of farmsteads and groves of grey-foliaged trees.

When Nicolas leaned closer to her in order to look out of the window, Cressy was sharply aware of the natural aroma of his skin. Judging by his shorts and boots, he had flown into London that morning from somewhere remote. Obviously he had changed his shirt and had a shave at Gatwick; the shirt was too crisp to have been slept in and his jaw had no trace of dark stubble. But she doubted if Gatwick had facilities for taking a shower, as she knew there were at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Yet he smelt good. Better than men who sloshed on expensive lotions. He smelt as good as old books and summer grass and clean towels warm from the airing cupboard. She wanted to close her eyes and inhale the scent of him.

Instead she kept her eyes open, studying his face in profile and the way his springy black hair grew from his forehead and temples.

A shiver ran through her. She had a crazy impulse to reach out and stroke his cheek to see what effect it had on him.

In her mind she saw his eyes blaze before, pinning her shoulders to the back rest, he brought his mouth down hard on hers in a kiss unlike any she had ever experienced before.

The fantasy felt so real that, when he did turn his head, she gasped and gave a nervous start.

Slowly Nicolas sat back. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Nothing ... only ... you startled me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ His blue eyes narrowed as he scrutinised her face. ‘You’re nervous. Are you worried about landing? Don’t be. It’s a good airport.’

‘I’m not,’ she assured him truthfully.

But either he didn’t believe her or he pretended not to. Reaching for her nearest hand, he held it firmly like an adult taking charge of a child.

‘We’ll be down in a minute and then you can shed your sweater. You won’t need it again till you go back.’

Cressy said nothing, feeling, for a different reason, as tense and panicky as if she really were afraid of what might happen as the plane came in to land. Short of an embarrassing struggle, there was no possibility of extricating her hand from his until he chose to release it.

The infuriating thing was that having her hand held was nice. It reminded her of being small and walking with Maggie in the park. She had always felt safe with calm, capable Maggie, and a little afraid of her brisk, energetic, sometimes quick-tempered mother.

Now, with Nicolas holding her hand, she felt both secure and nervous. Secure because in the unlikely event that anything did go wrong she would have him beside her, a man accustomed to danger. Nervous because intuition told her that meeting him and accepting his offer of a lift might put her far more at risk than she was at this moment.

Soon afterwards they touched down and the pilot applied reverse thrust.

Still holding her hand, Nicolas said, ‘Welcome to Mallorca...illa dels vuit vents..’

‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

‘It’s Mallorquín for “island of the eight winds”. We’ve been using wind-power since the fourteenth century, and our eight winds are also the reason so many yachtsmen come here.’


CHAPTER TWO

WHEN the aircraft had come to a standstill, Nicolas rose to his feet and opened the overhead locker where Cressy’s backpack was stowed. But when she would have taken it from him he shook his head, saying, with a glint of amusement, ‘You’re in macho territory now.’

She wondered if he was teasing her, or if, in the less touristy parts of the island, Majorcan manners and attitudes were still very different from those in London.

His own pack, when it appeared on the carousel in the baggage-reclaim hall, was a massive rucksack packed solid with equipment and, she guessed, too heavy for her to lift off the ground, let alone carry for long distances. But he swung it off the conveyor belt with the practised ease of a man who had done it many times before and whose body, compared with those of most of the tourists struggling awkwardly with their suitcases, was as different as that of a leopard from a crowd of overfed lap dogs.

With both packs on a trolley, they went through to the main concourse where a thickset man with grizzled hair was waiting for Nicolas. To Cressy’s surprise their greeting was very demonstrative. They embraced, they exchanged cheek kisses, they smiled at each other with the warmest affection she had ever seen shown by two men. Had they not been so dissimilar, she would have taken them for grandfather and grandson.

Eventually Nicolas turned to her. ‘This is Felió. He and his wife Catalina look after things when I’m away. He’s known me since I was born, and my mother as well.’

Thus he introduced her to Felió, who took the hand Cressy offered but whose smile was more reserved than the beam which had lit up his face at the sight of Nicolas.

It was like shaking hands with the exposed root of an old tree. Felió’s palm and fingers had been callused by years of manual labour. His face had the texture of a dried fig. He was a perfect match for the sun-baked landscape she had seen from the plane.

On the way to the car park, the two men talked to each other in a language which didn’t sound like Spanish. She supposed it must be Mallorquín. Then, out of this flow of words which made no sense to her, came two which did. Kate Dexter. Evidently Nicolas was asking if Felió had heard of her great-aunt.

The older man answered at some length, his reply accompanied by gestures which left Cressy uncertain as to whether he had or hadn’t.

When he finished, Nicolas said, ‘Felió knows where Miss Dexter lives. It’s only about fifteen minutes from my place. So that’s no problem.’

The vehicle in which Felió had come to fetch his employer was a military-green Range Rover.

‘Would you mind sitting in the back?’ said Nicolas as Felió unlocked the doors.

‘Of course not,’ said Cressy. ‘If you’ve been out of touch for a long time, you must have a lot to catch up on.’ She made a mental note to ask him later where he was returning from.

In contrast to her first impression of Majorca from the air, what struck her as they left the airport was the luxuriant blossom on the tall bushes lining the road. They looked rather like pale pink azaleas but she knew they were oleanders. The blue sky, the golden sunlight and these wonderful hedges, thick with flowers, combined to lift her spirits as if she were starting a holiday rather than being on a mission which might be fraught with problems.

She had thought that Nicolas would take the wheel, but he was in the front passenger seat, and from time to time he interrupted his conversation with Felió to turn and smile at her.

Usually when he did this Cressy would be gazing out of the window at the passing scene. But she always knew when he was looking at her and found it impossible not to return his smile. Each time he faced forward again she would have liked to continue looking at him, but she knew that if she did he would know it. She didn’t want him to guess she was far more interested in him than in the island’s hinterland.

She recognised that, although she had only just met him, she was in the grip of the most powerful physical attraction she had ever experienced. Everything about him was perfection and, to make matters worse—because she wasn’t comfortable with the feelings he aroused in her—his mind, as revealed in his books, was as pleasing as his person. Somehow she had the feeling that this was too good to be true, that there had to be a catch in it somewhere.

Neither of her sisters, who had everything going for them—brains, beauty, personality, wit—had been lucky in love. Why should she be? Except that she believed in love in a way that they no longer did and perhaps never had.

When they turned off the motorway where it was crossed by a minor road, she had a brief glimpse of a signpost indicating that Pollensa was seven kilometres further along the main road.

Not far along the side road the vehicle slowed down again to pass between massive stone pillars, one carved with the name Ca’n Llorenc.

Turning to her, Nicolas said, ‘In my Mallorquín grandfather’s time this was one of the largest estates in this part of the island. The main crops were almonds, oil and figs, but everything his family ate was grown or bred here. It was a self-sufficient community like the great estates in England. It could be still, if I wished it. But I prefer to travel, leaving the land in other hands.’

The drive was more like a farm track than the way to a great house. A long way ahead she could see the roofs of a number of buildings surrounded by what, at a distance, looked like giant feather dusters. Beyond them, in the distance, lay mountains, the farthest ones pale dovegrey in the afternoon light.

The track was flanked by ploughed land on one side and hay stubble on the other, with drifts of sky-blue wild flowers growing along the edges of the track.

Closer up, the feather dusters revealed themselves as date palms, with bunches of ripening orange-coloured fruit dangling among the branches. Then they passed through another stone gateway giving onto a large courtyard formed by the protruding wings of an old house built of rough stone with cut-stone lintels and sills above and below its many green-shuttered windows.

‘We’ll drop off Felió and my pack, and I’ll just say a quick hello to Catalina, and then we’ll go on to Miss Dexter’s place,’ said Nicolas. ‘While I’m gone, come and sit in the front.’

Cressy climbed out. After sitting still for several hours, she was glad of a chance to stretch and do a few limbering exercises. When the two men had disappeared, she put one hand over her shoulder and the other behind her back. With her fingers locked, she exerted the light pull needed to recover her normal flexibility.

The double doors leading into the shadowy interior of the house were shaded by the branches of an ancient vine trained over wires stretched between the wings of the building. In the centre of the courtyard stood a huge stone um, overflowing with brilliant red and pink geraniums. A well-fed black cat was drowsing in the shade of their leaves.

When Nicolas came back, Cressy was standing, storklike, on one leg, her other foot being held behind her to loosen her thigh muscles. Quickly she put it down and stood normally.

Behind him, lurking inside the doorway, wanting to see without being seen, was a woman in a print pinafore. Cressy smiled in her direction before turning and climbing back into the Range Rover.

‘You’re very supple,’ said Nicolas, sliding behind the wheel. ‘Are you a dancer as well as a rescuer of people in distress?’

‘Oh, no... I was just doing what your cat will probably do when he wakes up.’

‘He’s supposed to be a mouser,’ said Nicolas. ‘But Catalina feeds him. Sometimes he brings in a young bird, but he’s no threat to the mice.’

As they started back down the drive, Cressy said, ‘It’s incredibly good of you to go to these lengths for me. I’m sure you must be longing to have a cold shower and relax. How long have you been in transit?’

‘Around forty-eight hours, but I’m used to it. Jet lag doesn’t affect me any more. I can sleep anywhere.’

‘Where have you come from?’

‘I never talk about my trips until they’re in print.’ He took his eyes off the track to smile at her. The smile made his answer less of a snub than it might have sounded otherwise. ‘I find if I talk about places it saps some of my enthusiasm. I’ve heard novelists say the same about their stories.’

The remark made her wonder about his friends, and if they included many fellow writers and other creative people, artists and craftsmen, as well as men like himself who spent their lives doing adventurous things. She had a feeling his circle would be very different from that of her parents and sisters, for whom the twin peaks of achievement were power and money.

Sometimes Cressy felt so much like a changeling that she wondered if there could possibly have been a mixup at the expensive private clinic where she had been born. Not only was she physically unlike her sisters but she lacked their diamond-bright minds and their driving ambition. Nor, except in her size, was she like her father, a leading architect whose buildings she secretly disliked.

‘You look worried,’ said Nicolas. ‘Don’t be. I have nothing to do for the next few days. I’m happy to be your driver and interpreter.’

Cressy hadn’t realised that her face was reflecting her thoughts. Quickly brightening her expression, she said, ‘Is everyone in Majorca as helpful as you are? Is it a Majorcan characteristic?’

‘It’s a human characteristic, unless people have been corrupted by wretched living conditions in overcrowded cities. The islanders who work in the tourist resorts can sometimes be less than friendly, but most of the country people will try to be helpful.’ He had been watching the road as he spoke, but now, with a clear stretch ahead, he gave her a quizzical glance. ‘In any part of the world a girl with your looks doesn’t usually have any trouble drumming up help when she needs it.’

She didn’t know how to handle this. Compliments had come her way, but not often, and never from a man like Nicolas whose own looks were so compelling.

To her relief, he went on. ‘When you’re my size you sometimes feel like Gulliver in Lilliput...a giant in a world of mini people. My father was tall and my mother is tall for a Spanish woman. By the time I was fifteen, I was taller than everyone at Ca’n Llorenc. Teenagers are always self-conscious. For a few years I felt like a freak.’

‘Oh... so did I,’ she agreed, with deep feeling. ‘It’s all right for a boy to be tall, but for a girl it’s a pain. I used to hunch my shoulders, trying to look a bit shorter. But then I would be told off for bad deportment.’

‘Where did you go to school?’

She told him the name of her boarding school, wondering if he knew it was famous for academic excellence and the alma mater of many of Britain’s most brilliant female minds. She had been one of its failures.

‘Were you educated here?’ she asked.

‘No, I went to my father’s school in England.’ He brought the vehicle to a halt, giving way to a large flock of sheep coming in the opposite direction.

As they streamed by on both sides of the Range Rover Nicolas leaned out of the window and called a greeting to the shepherd. When only the back of his head and a quarter of his face could be seen, he looked very foreign. No Englishman ever had hair as black and springy as the thick, lustrous mass tied back at his nape, like the locks of an off-duty rock musician. All she could see of his face was the slanting line of his cheekbone, the forceful thrust of his jaw and his long neck.

It was impossible, now, to imagine him as a lanky adolescent, as unsure of himself as she had been at that age—and to some extent still was. Not with the people she worked with, but with her family and all their high-powered friends.

When the flock had gone past, bleating, Nicolas drove on until they reached a sandy by-way flanked by trees she recognised, from a family holiday in southern France, as olives.

They had travelled at least a mile along this meandering track when a small house came into view. It looked a ramshackle place, as did the various outbuildings. There was no garden around it, only olive trees and bare earth where some hens were scratching.

‘It looks closed up,’ said Cressy as they approached it on foot.

‘The shutters being closed doesn’t mean no one’s at home. The Spanish believe in keeping the sunshine out. The rooms stay cooler that way. But I would expect the door to be ajar, and it isn’t,’ said Nicolas.

A bell, which looked like a goat’s bell, was suspended beside the door. He pulled the string. When no one answered and no sound came from inside, he tried the handle. The door was locked.

‘It seems you were right. It is closed up. But someone’s keeping an eye on the place.’

‘How do you know?’

‘That goat has been milked today.’ He pointed towards a nanny goat standing tethered under a tree, chewing and staring at them with indifferent yellow eyes.

A moment later they heard a distant voice calling something Cressy couldn’t make out.

‘Someone’s coming,’ said Nicolas. ‘They must have seen us arriving from somewhere higher up the hill. This terrain might seem deserted but there’s always someone about. No one comes or goes without being noticed.’

They did not have long to wait before a small portly woman came hurrying round the side of the house. At the sight of Nicolas she broke into a torrent of Mallorquín, at the same time producing a large old-fashioned iron key from the pocket of the pinafore she was wearing over her dress.

When she finally paused for breath, Nicolas said, ‘This is Senora Guillot, who telephoned the bad news. I’ll explain to her who you are.’

When he had done this, the Spanish woman smiled and offered Cressy her hand. But, having observed the niceties, she turned back to him, clearly expressing concern.

‘She thinks, as I did at first, that you’re far too young to deal with the situation. She says Miss Dexter is an obstinate woman who needs someone more authoritative to take control,’ said Nicolas.

‘Please tell her I have a lot of experience in dealing with old and sick people,’ Cressy said firmly. ‘When exactly did the accident happen? Could she tell us as much as she knows? Perhaps while you’re talking I could take a look inside.’ She indicated the key and then touched her chest and pointed at the house.

Instead of handing it over, the Spanish woman mimed that the lock wasn’t easy to open. It took several attempts, accompanied by muttered imprecations, before she got it to work and stepped inside.

Cressy had already noticed that the electricity poles along the side of the minor road didn’t branch off up this lane. If there was no electricity there wouldn’t be mains, drainage or any other modern amenities.

As she followed the Señora inside she noticed that the place had the musty odour of neglect. Even before one pair of shutters was thrown open, the sun coming in through the door showed it was a long time since the floor had been swept. More light revealed more disorder: a wind-blown film of powdered earth lying thickly on all horizontal surfaces and clutter everywhere. Dusty cobwebs, made by long-dead spiders, draped the rafters supporting the upper floor, which was reached by an unrailed staircase in a corner of the living room.

While the others talked Cressy took in the signs of a solitary life which perhaps had never been orderly and now had descended into squalor. She had had to deal with it before—visiting old men and women who had either given up on the effort or become too infirm to cope.

Presently Nicolas said, ‘The accident happened early on Sunday morning. The old lady fell down the stairs, breaking her wrist and her thigh. She might have lain here till she died, but luckily the noise made by the goat, which is milked morning and evening, made Senora Guillot realise something was wrong. Equally luckily, she had a nephew visiting her who did his military service in the Cruz Roja—the Red Cross. So he knew what to do until the ambulance arrived. He was also bright enough to search for some clue to the whereabouts of Miss Dexter’s next of kin. He didn’t have far to look—there was an envelope nailed to the wall above her bed with “Instructions in the event of my death” written on it in Spanish. Inside was your family’s London telephone number.’

The señora was mounting the stairs, beckoning them to follow her.

‘What about water and sewage?’ Cressy asked over her shoulder as Nicolas followed her up. ‘Will there be a well?’

‘If not there’ll be a cisterna—an underground water store. Sewage will be dealt with by a pozo negro, a cesspool. Depending on its construction, it will either be pumped out into a tanker or will drain itself.’ After a pause, he added, ‘You can’t stay here, that’s for sure. The place is a dump.’

‘It only needs a good spring clean,’ Cressy said cheerfully. ‘I’ve dealt with a lot worse in London.’

The bedroom, when light had been admitted, revealed itself as even more chaotic than the room below. Here there were signs that when the island had rain the roof leaked. An array of old family photographs, some in tarnished silver frames, stood on top of a chest of drawers: sepia prints of people in the clothes of the Twenties and earlier stood behind black and white snaps of more recent vintage. There was one of Cressy and her family, taken about nine years ago.

But she didn’t point it out to Nicolas, partly because she had looked a mess at that age and partly in case he might recognise her mother.

Fortunately most of his attention was given to Senora Guillot, who was still chattering nineteen to the dozen.

It wasn’t until they were driving away that he gave Cressy a condensed version of the little woman’s outpourings.

‘She’s been worried about the old lady living there alone for a couple of years. She would have been glad to do some cleaning and cooking for her, but Miss Dexter wouldn’t hear of it. She kept herself to herself. The only time she was seen was on market day in Pollensa, but she only went to buy provisions, not to socialise with other expatriates. She speaks fluent Spanish and has nothing to do with the foreign community.’

As they came to the road Cressy said, ‘Pollensa’s quite near, I gather. Will there be a car-hire firm there?’

‘Yes, but if you’re going to suggest that I run you over there and leave you to tackle this mess on your own, forget it. We’ll go back to my place to freshen up before going to the hospital together. This is a situation where you need local advice. You can’t handle it on your own any more than a Spanish girl with no English could cope with a similar situation in England.’

Cressy could tell from his tone that he would ignore her protests. He had made up his mind to be helpful and that was that.

Her sisters, accustomed to giving instructions rather than taking them, would undoubtedly have resented having their wishes overridden in that authoritative voice. It didn’t worry Cressy. She knew he was absolutely right. She did need his help and was deeply grateful he was prepared to give it.

‘Thank you,’ she said warmly. ‘Let’s hope if a Spanish girl ever finds herself in this sort of situation she’ll meet an Englishman who’ll be as obliging as you are.’

The glance he shot at her held a gleam of amusement. ‘You speak as if I were Spanish.’

‘As you live here, I assumed you felt more Spanish than English.’

‘I live here because I have a house here...and I prefer the climate. I don’t feel Spanish or English. My roots here were broken when I was sent away to school. Now I feel comfortable in most places. If I hadn’t been left Ca’n Llorenc, my base would have been a very small flat in London I share with a guy who’s hardly ever in it. We were at school together, and he now earns his living as an expedition guide.’

She didn’t ask where it was because then he might ask her where she lived. If he knew London well her answer might give the game away. Her parents lived close to the Houses of Parliament, in a neighbourhood occupied almost exclusively by MPs.

To divert the conversation into a safer channel, she said, ‘Does the island have a good medical service?’

‘I can’t answer that. I’ve never needed to use it and fortunately no one at Ca’n Llorenc has had any illnesses or accidents that I can remember. When they have minor aches and pains they consult a pharmacist in Pollensa. It’s cheaper and quicker than going to a doctor. But I can make some enquiries.’

‘I was thinking it might be better to have Aunt Kate flown back to England.’

‘It would be very expensive. She’s unlikely to have any medical insurance to cover repatriation by air.’

‘Most unlikely!’ Cressy agreed, remembering the state of the cottage. ‘But I’m sure my father will pay for whatever is necessary. On the other hand, she may be receiving first-class treatment where she is.’

By this time they were re-entering the gateway of Ca’n Llorenc. As they entered the courtyard for the second time Cressy’s anxiety about her aged relative was temporarily supplanted by intense curiosity to see how Nicolas lived.

The door was open and he ushered her through it, not into a hall but into an enormous room with another large double door on the far side of it. Like the living room at Miss Dexter’s cottage, this much grander room also had a bare stone staircase in one corner. But here the stairs were protected by a rail on one side and a thick black rope attached to the wall on the other.

The next thing to catch her eye was the painting on the chimney-breast of the huge fireplace, at present occupied by a large wicker basket crammed with a mass of dried flowers. With their small mustard-coloured heads, they looked like some kind of herb.

‘What a wonderful picture,’ said Cressy, moving towards it.

As she gazed at the deep blue mountain peaks in the background, and the pink and white blossom on the trees in the foreground, Nicolas, standing behind her, said, ‘It’s called Noria entre Almendros, which means “noria among almond trees”. A noria is a water wheel, worked by a donkey plodding round in a circle, with buckets attached to the rim for raising water from a well into irrigation canals. You saw them all over Spain when I was a child. They must have been introduced by the Moors because the name comes from the Arabic “na’ ara” which means to creak.’

‘Who is the painting by?’ asked Cressy.

‘An artist born in Pollensa called Dionís Bennássar. Here’s his signature.’ Nicolas pointed to the left-hand corner where the painting was signed in red.

She said, ‘The way the blossom is painted reminds me of Samuel Palmer. He painted my favourite picture, The Magic Apple Tree.’

‘I like that picture too,’ said Nicolas. ‘I first saw it in the Fitzwilliam Museum when I was at Cambridge.’

‘At the university?’

‘Yes. I didn’t really want to spend three years there—it’s viciously cold in winter—but it seemed a good idea to have a geography degree to fall back on if I couldn’t earn a living as a travel writer.’ He moved away and, raising his voice, called, ‘Catalina.’

Almost at once the woman Cressy had glimpsed earlier came from a room leading off the main room.

Nicolas introduced her and, like Señora Guillot, she smiled and shook hands. But behind the show of friendliness Cressy sensed she was being subjected to a critical appraisal.

‘Catalina will show you a bathroom where you can have a shower before we go to the hospital. I need to get into clean clothes, and I also have some telephone calls to make. I’ll be down in forty minutes,’ said Nicolas. ‘If you’re ready sooner Catalina will bring you tea or a cold drink out on the terrace.’ He gestured towards the door at the rear of the house, then translated all this into Mallorquín for the housekeeper’s benefit.

A few minutes later, mounting the stairs behind her, Cressy smiled to herself at the memory of her dismay when the travel agent had said there were no economy seats left on the flight to Palma. For, although all her expenses were being paid by her father, she had learnt thrift from Maggie and never liked wasting money.

However, as things had turned out, being obliged to travel more expensively had actually been a stroke of luck. If she hadn’t met Nicolas it would have been a major problem to locate her great-aunt’s cottage, let alone find out what had happened and discover Miss Dexter’s present whereabouts.

The window of the bathroom where Catalina left her overlooked the roof of a single-storey part of the building. Patches of golden lichen spattered the weathered clay tiles, and a creeper with orange flowers had climbed the wall at the end of it and was spreading up the gable of another wing of the building.

When Cressy started running a bath she found that almost boiling water gushed from the hot tap with a vigour suggesting that, in matters of mod cons, Ca’n Llorenc was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Miss Dexter’s primitive living quarters.

Having adjusted the flow to lukewarm, Cressy added some bath oil from a selection of toiletries Catalina had indicated were for visitors’ use.

While the bath filled she sat on the window ledge and thought how lovely it must be to live here, surrounded by beauty and peace, instead of in noisy, fume-ridden central London.

In his bathroom, Nicolas had stripped off and was enjoying a shower. After a long time away, it was always good to come back to the creature comforts missing from most of his trips. When he had cleaned up and changed, he intended to make some enquiries about where an elderly lady would get the best medical care which wouldn’t involve her great-niece helping to nurse her.

In some Spanish hospitals, patients were fed, washed and watched over by their mothers, daughters or other close female relations. The hospital staff provided medical care only. But he had other plans for Cressy, as she’d said she was called.

Usually, Catalina being an excellent cook, he would dine at home on his first night back. Then, having already made some duty calls to his Mallorquín relations on the island, he would ring one of several numbers in the address book on his desk.

They were the telephone numbers of women who had come to the island as wives but had since been discarded in favour of younger models. It was something which happened quite frequently in the various groups of high-living foreigners who frequented the small resorts. As a result, the island was littered with ‘thirty-somethings’ and ’forty-somethings’ on the lookout for a man—either a replacement meal-ticket or a lover. It meant that anyone who had had to batten down his sex drive for weeks or months had no problem in finding someone to let off steam with if that was what was required.

This time, by a stroke of luck, it looked as if he wouldn’t even have to make a phone call. Someone far more alluring than any of his usual bed partners had turned up. Cressy was the most delectable creature he had seen in a long time. Far more attractive than any of the women in his address book.

Luckily she wasn’t as young as he had first thought. As far as he was concerned, girls with no previous experience were like wild flowers. Not for picking. But at twenty-three Cressy had to be a lot more savvy than she looked. The thought of her lying in the bath on the other side of the house was a turn-on. He wished he had her here with him now, that gorgeous Amazonian body sleek and slippery against his.

Taking Cressy to bed would be the perfect reward for four months’ celibacy, he thought with a growl of anticipation.

Cressy was drying herself on a fluffy white bath-sheet. Then, as there was plenty of time, she massaged her legs with an after-bath lotion scented with the same subtle fragrance as the bath oil.

She was humming to herself, her spirits unaccountably buoyant in spite of her concern about her great-aunt’s injuries, when she remembered something that instantly changed her mood.

Nicolas’s behaviour wasn’t prompted by disinterested kindness; she mustn’t forget that he had an ulterior motive. Aunt Kate, in her day, had been as famous as Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. He was hoping the end product of being helpful to Cressy would be an exclusive interview with her, like the profile of Edward James which had been his first journalistic coup and the foundation of his career.

Still in her jeans, but wearing a clean white T-shirt, she went downstairs and outside onto the terrace, and found Catalina there before her. The housekeeper was transferring an earthenware jug and two tall glasses from a tray to a large low table surrounded by comfortable chairs.

‘Limonada, señorita.’

‘Muchas gracias, Señora.’

This, plus hello and goodbye, was the limit of Cressy’s Spanish.

The housekeeper filled a glass with the juice and then, using a ladle which hooked on the side of the jug, fished for a couple of ice cubes to drop in the glass. Then she left Cressy on her own.

The terrace was paved with clay tiles in the same mellow terracotta colours as the Roman tiles on the roof. Here and there a few had been removed to make a space for a lemon tree to grow. It must have been from one of these trees that Catalina had picked the fruit whose chilled juice now left its tangy freshness on Cressy’s tongue.

Above her, forming a canopy, grew an enormous vine dripping bunches of half-ripened green grapes from a tangle of leafy branches. In the blazing light of a Majorcan afternoon it was heaven to sit in the shade, sipping freshly made lemonade and gazing at the hazeveiled mountains.

Footsteps on the stone stairs announced the arrival of her host. But when he came into view he was not the long-haired, heavy-booted traveller whose back-view she had admired at Gatwick airport.

‘You’ve cut off your hair!’ she exclaimed.

He laughed, showing excellent teeth. ‘I don’t wear it long at home, only in places where there aren’t any barbers. Tomorrow I’ll have it cut properly, but this will do for tonight.’

Because it was naturally curly—with a looser curl than a perm gave—no one would have guessed he had cropped it himself. It was the kind of hair which, like animals’ fur and birds’ plumage, would always spring back into place after a vigorous shake. The silver climber on his ear had also disappeared, she saw. He was wearing a shirt of dark blue and white striped cotton and a pair of dark jeans. When he sat down and crossed his long legs, she noticed that his ankles were bare and that his trekking boots had given way to a pair of dark brown deck shoes.

He took a long swig from his glass. ‘Mmm ... Catalina makes great lemonade. Felió has some bee-hives in the hills, where the wild thyme grows. Lemonade sweetened with honey tastes better than stuff made with sugar.’

He looked her over, his eyes taking in, but not lingering on the curves defined by the T-shirt. ‘You look very cool and fresh. I’ve told Catalina to make up a bed for you.’

‘But I can’t stay here,’ she protested.

‘Yes, you can. You have no alternative. It’s not easy finding a room in the big hotels. They’re all full of package tourists. There are hostals in most of the towns but, though clean, they’re really intended for travelling salesmen. They can be very noisy in summertime, when street life goes on till the small hours. You’ll sleep far more soundly out here in the country.’

He made it difficult to refuse, and part of her didn’t want to. Yet, mindful of the awful warnings drummed into her during her teens, she also felt faintly uneasy.

He was a well-known writer and, judging by this house and the estate surrounding it, his forebears had been people of standing on the island. But that didn’t alter the fact that he was a stranger, and bad things had happened to girls who placed too much trust in strange men.

She didn’t really suspect him of being a psychopath who during the night might rape her and throw her down a well, his faithful retainers keeping their mouths shut about her unexplained disappearance out of misguided loyalty to his family. That was the kind of scenario only dear old Maggie would envisage!

But what if he just made a pass? Some men felt entitled to sex after taking a girl out to dinner, going to a lot less trouble than Nicolas had for her. If he made a pass, how would she handle it?


CHAPTER THREE

‘PERHAPS I can stay at the hospital,’ Cressy suggested. ‘Most hospitals have rooms where close relations can sleep when people are critically ill. A broken thigh isn’t critical, but it’s pretty serious when it happens to someone of Aunt Kate’s age. And she must have been in shock when they found her if she’d been lying there some time.’

Nicolas glanced at his watch. After draining his glass, he said, ‘Let’s go and find out exactly what the situation is, shall we?’

Cressy had repacked her rucksack, with the discarded shirt in a plastic bag to be washed at the first opportunity. She had left the rucksack at the bottom of the stairs. As she picked it up and slung it over one shoulder she noticed that near the terrace door was a large antique table piled with stacks of old and new books. A title which caught her eye was The Mayan Prophecies: Unlocking the Secrets of a Lost Civilisation. Another was The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture.




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