A Bad Enemy Read Free

mixture of exotic scents in the warm air, and several of the towels lay damp and crumpled on the floor. Automatically she retrieved them, straightening them and returning them to the heated handrail. There were mirrors everywhere and she seemed to catch sight of herself in them all, a myriad reflections of Lisle, two bright spots of colour in her pale face, her green eyes glittering like a cat's.
    She'd spoken brave words, but they had been a lie. Of course she was frightened, with a deep gut-wrenching panic which was totally outside her experience. She felt as if every prop and stay to her security were being knocked away one by one, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it.
    She sank down on the high-backed wicker chair and tried to think, to reason out everything which had happened in the past how.
    Grandfather, she had been told, could be dying, but then his doctors had written him off before, and been wrong. As Janie had said, Murray Bannerman was immortal. He didn't believe in illness, or particularly in safeguarding his health against the march of time either.
    'If you lived as these damned medicos want you to, you might as well be dead,' he had growled testily more than once.
    The doctors grumbled too about his refusal to follow their advice, his frankly avowed aversion to hospitals, They complained it was impossible to give him the treatment he needed, but Lisle knew that secretly they admired his stubbornness and his fighting spirit.
    She tried to imagine life without him—Harlow Bannerman without him, and the exhilarating boardroom battles he had always enjoyed. She had often felt he secretly relished the covert sniping between Gerard and Oliver Grayson, but she had never until then doubted for a moment whose side he would be on if ever the chips were down.
    Now she was not so sure.
    Jake Allard at the Priory—on a private visit. And just what discussions had gone on under the shelter of that privacy? she wondered desperately. It was surely beyond coincidence that all this should have taken place when Gerard was safely out of the way, so what could her grandfather have been thinking of?
    She would have to telephone Gerard somehow, get him back into the country before it was too late.
    He'd covered his tracks well if Jake Allard had failed to find him, she thought, but it was hardly surprising. Harry Foxton wasn't over-jealous, or particularly suspicious, but he was no fool either, and any hint that Gerard and Carla were enjoying a break from a damp English autumn on the same Caribbean island would set all kinds of alarm bells ringing. Few men with very attractive wives trusted Gerard, she was forced to admit.
    But it wasn't altogether his fault, she thought loyally. Since childhood, he had always been too good-looking and possessed of far too much charm for his own good. His hair was darker than hers—a kind of rich chestnut, and his eyes were bluer, and he had the look of a young Renaissance prince. Women had begun drooling over him in his pram, and almost before he had left adolescence the admiring looks had become frankly speculative. It was like letting a child loose in a sweetshop, Lisle thought ruefully. And so far he had shown no sign of surfeit…
    She sighed. She knew the fact that Gerard had laughed to scorn any idea that he should settle down and give some thought to the next generation of Bannermans had distressed her grandfather. Murray Bannerman believed in the family, and the stability of marriage. He had said openly that a wife and child might give Gerard the sense of responsibility he so often seemed to lack, and yet at the same time he usually greeted the rumour of some new romantic adventure by his grandson with a muttered, 'The young dog!' and a hoarse chuckle.
    Lisle's attitude to Gerard's constant affairs fell a long way short of approval, but he was her older brother, and although there was now no trace of the hero-worship with which she had regarded him when they were much