Enemy Lover Read Free Page B

to be a gentleman, not an oaf!”
    Alaine’s tone was arctic, his dark eyes glinted as if steel lay in their depths.
    “Go to bed, if you’re tired, but whatever you do, go! Miss Andrews has spent the night in here, and no one even thought to keep the fire in for her.”
    “Miss Andrews was warmed by the thought of the future,” Angus enunciated with obvious difficulty, and then turned and strode from the room.
    White-faced, Tina turned to Alaine.
    “What does he mean?” The clouds of sleep were still whirling in her brain. She didn’t merely feel at a disadvantage; she felt as if she was up against something that was quite beyond her, and that the others held the key to a mystery that was utterly baffling. “Why did
    he look at me like that—?”
    “Don’t worry, my dear,” Alaine said gently, patting her shoulder. “We’ve all been up all night, and we’re none of us particularly fresh. Sir Angus died about four o’clock, and it didn’t seem worth going to bed after that. Aunt Clare, you’d better go to bed.”
    His aunt groped her way to the door.
    “I think I will. Everything’s been such a shock over the last few days... Juliet, you’d better go to bed, too.”
    But Juliet had stopped crying, and her expression was sullen. She had the same aubum-tinged hair as her brother, the same nearly perfect features, but her complexion had the strange whiteness and delicacy of a hot-house camellia. She looked like a hothouse plant that had been carefully nurtured all its days, and now in her twenty-second year she was beginning to suspect that there was another side to life. It carried its shocks and disappointments as well as pandered to her pleasures.
    “I don’t think I want to,” she answered sullenly. “I’ll go and find
    Angus and we’ll have some breakfast together. I suppose we’re still entitled to breakfast in this house—?”
    Alaine looked at her long and peculiarly.
    “If you want to be helpful,” he suggested, “you can rouse up one of the maids and get her to provide breakfast for us all. Miss Andrews will need some before she leaves.”
    But Tina said swiftly: “No, thank you, I’d rather leave now, if you don’t mind. I can’t possibly be back in time to begin a normal school day, but I’d like to get away from here. And perhaps I could telephone before I leave? Someone will have to be informed of the reason why I disappeared so suddenly last night.”
    “Of course,” he answered. “And we’ll stop and have breakfast on the way back. I’m afraid you’ve received very little hospitality in this house, but the circumstances were unusual. My aunt isn’t normally inhospitable... And unfortunately Sir Angus was in no condition to see you once we got here last night.” She glanced round the handsome room, that was beginning to oppress her unbearably.
    “I was an intruder at the wrong time,” she said quietly. “I should never have been brought here at all. I can’t think why I was brought here... Sir Angus and I hardly knew one another.”
    Alaine Giffard was silent.
    She gazed at him with sudden earnestness, too weary to drive home the point, yet feeling it had to be made.
    “You believe me, don’t you?” she asked. “Your relatives obviously don’t—” ignoring the fact that Juliet was still in the room with them—“but it’s true. The friendship between Sir Angus and myself was a brief affair that might never have happened at all, but for the fact that he needed help one night. And now he’s dead, and I’m sorry because I liked him . . . the little I knew of him. He was the loneliest man I’ve ever met, and yet apparently he need not have been lonely at all, for he was not alone in the world as I imagined. He wasn’t even poor.”
    She glanced up at the portrait above the fireplace.
    “That was him when he was younger, I suppose?” The fierce blue eyes seemed to be watching her with a curious, fixed eagerness. “I’m sorry it’s over,” she