Enemy Lover Read Free Page A

stretched herself out on the rug and rested her head in the lap of a chair... If only the house wasn’t so silent. Somewhere in it old Angus was lying, critically ill. Why didn’t they let her see him? She had come all this way to see him.
    Once she thought she heard a car drive up to the house, and then it drove away again. Once, between sleeping and waking, she thought that a man put his head in at the door and looked hard at her... He had fiercely red hair, and his eyes were a cold, hard blue. They were old Angus’s eyes, and yet they were not Angus’s eyes.
    She fell fast asleep about five, and it was broad daylight when she awakened. Several people were in the room, and one was actually shaking her awake. She thought instantly of the school day that might have begun, and sprang up in confusion.
    “You’ll have to take me back! I’ll never be back in time!”
    The dark Giffard who had brought her to the house looked almost as concerned as she did.
    “I’d no idea you were spending the night in here,” he apologised. “I understood that my aunt had put you into a room.” He looked with sharp rebuke at his aunt, and then back again at the girl who was still bewilderedly rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and endeavouring to settle the disorder of her clothes at the same time. “Really, Aunt Clare, this is too much!” he exclaimed. “Miss Andrews has had to spend the night most uncomfortably...”
    But his aunt was weeping into a handkerchief, and when she lifted her eyes for an instant it was to glance at Tina in such a vague fashion that she might not even have existed.
    “It’s no use blaming me,” she protested. “I didn’t want the girl brought here. And you could have saved yourself the bother of bringing her. Poor Angus was never in a fit enough condition to see her.”
    “But he asked to see her.”
    “I know, Alaine, I know! Don’t we all know that he asked to see her?... And don’t we all know why!” The slim young woman who had moved and looked like a wraith in the hall was also crying fitfully into a handkerchief. Alaine turned to her as if his nerves were on edge.
    “For goodness’ sake, Juliet, is that really necessary?” he demanded. “Uncle Angus is dead, and you had no time at all for him when he was alive... None of us had! So why are you so upset now?” The door opened, and someone else came into the room. He
    was taller than Alaine, and possibly several years younger, and even although he was unshaved and his dinner-jacket had a crumpled appearance, and it was quite obvious he was far from in a good humour, the quality of his looks affected Tina with a queer sensation of shock. She knew that she had seen him before—in the night—and it was the redness of his hair and the blueness of his eyes that impressed her then. Now she was impressed by the arrogant perfection of his features, the coldness of his jaw and the hardness of his mouth, that somehow left unmarred the sheer masculine beauty of it.
    He ignored the rest of them and looked at Tina.
    “So you’re still here,” he commented. “Why doesn’t someone send you home? Old Angus isn’t alive any more and you won’t have any more opportunities to turn his ageing head. You must have worked pretty hard during the short time that you knew him-”
    “Angus!” his aunt exclaimed, as if even she was slightly shocked by his outburst.
    But he ignored her.
    “And to look at you you’re nothing more than the little school-marm we know you to be. A conniving little school-marm from some isolated village school!” The cold contempt in his merciless blue eyes made Tina cringe. She had never encountered anything like it in her life. “But there’s no fool quite like an old fool, and old Angus was a bachelor all his life—”
    Alaine didn’t merely order him to be quiet, he ordered him from the room.
    “Until you know how to behave in a house that has just been deprived of its master, and can remember you’re supposed