Bride's Dilemma Read online

  Violet Winspear BRIDE'S DILEMMA

  BRIDE'S DILEMMA

  First published in 1965 by Mills & Boon Limited,

  50 Grafton Way, Fitzroy Square, London, England.

  Harlequin Canadian edition published April, 1966

  Harlequin U.S. edition published May, 1971

  All the characters in this book have no existence oufside fhe imaginafion of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  The Harlequin trade mark, consisting of the word HARLEQUIN® and the portrayal of a Harlequin, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in the Canada Trade Marks Office.

  Standard Book Number: 373-51008-X.

  Copyright, ©, 1965, by Violet Winspear. All rights reserved.

  Printed in Canada

  Chapter One

  CHORLEY-ON-SEA in March, with the wind lashing the sea into white caps, and gulls mewing in a rather lonely way above the headland where in the holiday season families brought picnic hampers and lazed in the sun-warmed heather.

  Now the place was desolate, cut off from gaiety, restored to the stark beauty Tina Manson liked.

  She stood on the headland, a slender young thing in a blue suede jacket over a sweater and tapering trews, braced against the wind which tangled her fine ashen hair and whipped color into cheeks that were pale from the long hours she spent typing in the rather stuffy office of a local firm of solicitors. Today was Sunday, however, and for a while Tina was free to enjoy all this, thoughts of work, Aunt Maud, that dreary old house on Dulcey Avenue pushed to the back of her mind.

  She had a bar of chocolate in her pocket and she was reaching for it when someone said: “Please, don’t move just yet. Stand just as you are, gazing out towards the sea as though the realization of a dream awaits you on the other side of the horizon.”

  Tina instinctively obeyed the request, while her pulses gave a jolt of surprise that mingled with quick interest. Never before had she heard such a compelling male voice, but she knew that voices could disappoint you. Over the phone at the office they often sounded far more interesting than their owners turned out to be. The wind wrapped a pale coil of hair about her slim neck, but She refrained from moving it, though it tickled a bit, for she had guessed that she was being sketched.

  Artists did drift into Chorley now and again, bringing their easels with them. The coastline had its attractions, a rugged arm embracing a town that petered out into a dullness that sent many of its young people to London for a livelihood.

  “That’s got it,” the man said. “Now you can relax.”

  Tina, on the contrary, went rather tense. It wasn’t in her nature to start casual conversations with strangers, and she knew he had come suddenly closer to her, taking a long stride through the heather. She turned with swift, unaware grace and took him in with her woodsmoke eyes. He was tall, lean, tanned by a sun that had never shone over England. Thick hair flecked with grey moved in the wind above the face of a man who had seen much, travelled far, and picked up along the way an experience that had left him with a sad and cynical mouth. These impressions ran swiftly through Tina’s mind, like a stream in spate picking up scattered leaves, then he smiled and grew strangely younger as lines fanned out beside eyes as blue as the sea—not the sea here at Chorley, but the sea as Tina imagined it could be far over the horizon.

  “Caricatures are a hobby of mine. Here, take a look at yourself as seen through the eyes of someone else, for mirrors can lie and words have for each of us only the meaning we wish to read into them.”

  Tina took the sketching block he held out to her, and she saw that in light, sure strokes he had captured her air of loneliness on this headland under drifting clouds. Her legs in her slender trews seemed to want to dart far away, her loosened hair played about a profile that was fineboned and stamped with wistfulness.

  With a diffident little laugh she met the stranger’s eyes. “I’m grateful you’ve been kinder than caricaturists usually are to their victims,” she said.

  “I’m rarely cruel to young things and animals,” he drawled, pushing the block into a capacious pocket of his tweed jacket and taking out a briar pipe from the other one. “I’m sorry I can't offer you a cigarette,” he added, the stem of the briar jutting from a comer of his mouth as he patted his pockets for matches.

  “I don’t smoke.” Tina, who was twenty-one, was glad he hadn't taken her for a complete kid despite her lack of make-up and the knockabout clothes she was wearing. She watched him feed the flame of a match to the tobacco in his pipe, a long-fin-gered hand shielding it, a tousle of grey-flecked hair meeting his right eyebrow. Strong smoke sailed to her nostrils and she wondered what this lean, sophisticated stranger was doing in Chorley of all places.

  He seemed to read the question in her mind, for he said. “I’ve been visiting friends further along the coast. My car broke down here last night and I’m putting up at the Tudor Arms while it’s undergoing repairs.”

  “Chorley must seem pretty dull to you?” Tina took a bite at her milk-flake and knew he was regarding her with twin glints of amusement in those sea-blue eyes.

  “You find it dull yourself, don’t you, child?” he parried.

  Her tongue edged a crumb of chocolate out of the comer of her mouth; the upper lip of that mouth was shy and fine, the lip beneath it was full, dented in the centre like a small heart. “I suppose you’ve got me tabulated as a backwoods girl dreaming of going to the big city in search of fame as a model or a TV star,” she said, crossing swords with him, albeit with more defiance than skill

  “When a girl stands gazing out to sea with wistfulness etched in every line of her, then I'd say she was scanning the horizon for something new. A dream, maybe ... an adventure.” He narrowed his eyes against the updrifting smoke of his pipe. “When I was a boy, down in Cornwall, I used to watch the sea and dream of sailing to its farthest shores.”

  She looked at him and knew he had made his dreams come true, but one dream of his had floundered on rocks and he still carried the wounds— they etched his lean face in lines that made, it difficult to assess his age. The grey in his hair was nothing to go by, for Tina could never remember a time when Aunt Maud had been other than grey, and Tina had lived with her aunt for almost twenty years. Maybe he was forty. Anyway, he was rather nice to talk to. He wasn’t just picking her up, leading her on, amusing himself for half an hour with a shy country girl.

  “I would like to travel,” she admitted, “but there isn't much hope of my doing more than dream about it.”

  “Nonsense.” He threw her words to the wind with a gesture that blew sparks out of the bowl of his pipe. “We live in an age when the doors of most of the world are open to everyone with a dash of initiative in them. You could travel abroad with a group of girl friends and do it quite cheaply—if that’s the drawback. Is it? Or have you a pair of stuffy parents who keep you on leading strings?”

  The moment he said this, there spiralled through Tina an urge to confide in him, but confidences established a link and she hesitated to weld one between herself and this disturbing stranger. When they parted, she knew he would return to a life that was totally different from her own, the memory of their conversation drifting away from him like his pipe smoke. But she would not forget so easily. It might hurt—a lot—to have to remember that here on this lonely headland she had opened her heart to a man with sea-blue eyes, and a dent in his chin that made her fingertips tingle to explore it.

  She was faintly shocked, deep down inside herself, by such thoughts about a man. She had always found those in Chorley quite uninteresting— which was just as well, f
or Aunt Maud had never encouraged her to take an interest in them.

  “My parents are dead,” she said, hands in the pockets of her trews, her gaze following the graceful swoop of a gull on to something finned in the sea. “I lost them when I was about two, and my father’s unmarried sister took me in. I—I suppose you could call Aunt Maud a bit of a Victorian. What I mean is ...”

  “I can guess,” put in that vibrant voice, with something about it that was not quite English, though he had said he came originally from Cornwall.

  Tina looked at him. Her stance was boyish, independent. She wasn’t asking for pity.

  There was no pity in his eyes, only the understanding of a man of wide experience. “Your aunt has never been wanted by a man, and it's a cruelty she has never forgiven—anyone,” he said quietly.

  He had cut straight to the heart of the matter and she liked him, very much, for not being amused by the classic situation of an orphaned girl tied by a sense of duty to a cold-hearted guardian. She knew, none better, that her loyalty to Aunt Maud was unappreciated and taken for granted, but she couldn't bring herself to walk out on someone elderly and friendless.

  “It would be wrong to deny yourself a wider horizon if this aunt of yours cared for you,” said this dangerously perceptive stranger who had walked into her life, and who would in a while walk out of it. “It isn’t enough to come up here and dream for an hour. At least try and manage a holiday abroad, or are foreigners in Auntie’s opinion not to be trusted?”

  When Tina smiled and shrugged her slim shoulders, his quizzical eyes probed the sensitive angles of her face. “Exactly how old are you?” he asked, evidently of the opinion that she was young enough not to mind telling him.

  She told him.

  “What happens when you want to get married? I presume it’s on your agenda?”

  “Only as a footnote.” She grinned and her small, pale face took on a triangular charm. “Look, isn’t this a rather peculiar conversation for a couple of strangers to be having? I’m sure you can’t really be interested in my problems.”

  “It’s a little like a scene out of a book, isn’t it?” His jutting briar sent up spirals of smoke, his navy-blue silk-knit tie fluttered out of his jacket, his air of easy assurance spoke of money and a knowledge of women. “We’re talking like this because we’re passing ships in the afternoon, because I picked up your distress signal and I’m an older tug who might be able to help you navigate a sticky patch. You’re bogged down in it, aren’t you, child? You’re going to have to pull out before you grow into a joyless facsimile of this aunt of yours. It could happen—it will, if you let it.”

  Tina shivered, chilled by the inevitable as clouds scurried low overhead and turned the sea as sombre as her future on Dulcey Avenue, hemmed in by darkpapered walls and her aunt’s inhibitions. Yes, she wanted to pull out while she was still young and hopeful, but her aunt wasn’t a robust woman. Right now she was in hospital, awaiting the results of tests which might indicate an operation.

  Aunt Maud hadn’t liked the idea of going into hospital, but her doctor had been insistent. Tina still felt hurt by the scene there had been, for her aunt had got it into her head that her niece didn’t wish to nurse her. “You’re selfish, like that mother of yours!” she had stormed. “Pleasure outings, that’s all she thought about—”

  Tina’s parents had been killed in a coach crash and it was an old cry of Aunt Maud’s that Tina took after her mother. She had been very much younger than George Manson when they had married and much too pretty for his sister’s liking . ..

  “I must be getting home.” Tina swung away from the grumbling grey sea. “It looks as though it’s going to rain.”

  They walked side by side through the wind-tossed heather, she and this long-legged stranger, and he talked about the West Indies, where he lived, describing in vivid detail an island called Ste. Monique. But all too soon they had reached the market square, and a flurry of raindrops dewed the determined brightness of Tina’s smile when they paused outside the black and white timbered inn where he was putting up. It had been fleeting but memorable, this meeting!

  “I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” she smiled. “If I never see Ste. Monique I shall always know a little what it looks like.”

  “I’ve enjoyed our conversation as well... little girl lost.” He took her slender hand into his strong-fingered one and gazed straight down into her eyes. “Remember what I said to you up on the headland, you have a life of your own to lead. Don’t waste it. Youth, is such a short and precious time.”

  He gave the words a deep, personal meaning, while the lines beside his mouth seemed deeper engraved.

  Impulsively she said: “May I know your name?” He broke into a smile. “Will you forget me if you have no proper label to hang on me?”

  She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and shook her head. “It’s just that I seem to know your face—”

  “I’m John Trecarrel,” he told her quietly.

  The name slipped into her mind and in a flash connected itself to a selection of remarkable bronzes recently shown in a magazine. One of those stiff, studio photographs of the sculptor had accompanied the bronzes. “You’re John Trecarrel the sculptor!” she exclaimed, not in awe but in a kind of warm satisfaction.

  His lips quirked into a grin and she saw a hint of raffishness in him, glimpsed the man he had been at her age. “Are you going to tell me your name?” he asked. “Or must I just remember you as the girl on the cliff?”

  She told him her name, pleased he had asked for it.

  “Goodbye, Tina!” His fingers pressed hers, then she walked across the market square without looking back. She didn’t have to. His lean, dark face and long-limbed frame were etched on her mind.

  While Tina’s aunt was in hospital she was staying with the people next door, a nice, easy-going family. Kitty, the daughter, was a lively young person with several boy-friends, and very naturally she was of the opinion that Tina should get out and about a bit more. “You tie yourself hand and foot to that nagging old aunt of yours,” she said with youthful candor. “An occasional movie is about your limit. Look, come to our club dance on Friday and I’ll get you fixed up with a nice boy.”

  “Thanks for the offer, Kitty,” Tina smiled, “but I can’t leave Aunt Maud without a visitor on Friday.”

  “You can come along to the club after you’ve been in to see her,” Kitty pointed out.

  “I—I’ll see,” Tina said, but she knew she wouldn’t go to the club. She lacked the sparkle that appealed to young men and was never at her best with them. The slick repartee they expected from a girl was not her kind of language.

  Each evening Tina visited her aunt, taking in the fresh fruit which Kitty’s father purchased for her at the market garden where he worked. A good deal of it remained untouched on her aunt’s locker, but when Tina suggested that the woman in the next bed might enjoy some of it, Aunt Maud sourly rejoined that the woman had relatives of her own so let them supply her with fruit.

  It was on the Friday evening that the doctor in charge of Maud Manson’s case had a talk with Tina. An operation must be performed, but Miss Manson’s heart was strong and he had every confidence in a successful result. He patted Tina’s shoulder and told her not to worry, but Aunt Maud was no longer a young woman and it was natural that Tina should be concerned.

  She didn’t have to work on Saturdays, and the following morning she busied herself in her own house, her hair swathed in a scarf as she wielded her aunt’s heavy vacuum cleaner. The rooms were stuffed with dark furniture which had belonged to Aunt Maud’s parents, and as Tina worked away she thought of Kitty next door and the way she had come in from the dance last night, lipstick on her chin and a turbulent pink in her cheeks. It must make life much easier if you were able to face it in such a carefree manner, Tina reflected, recalling the way Kitty had danced her flounced petticoat round the bedroom and announced that she was thinking of falling in love with her latest boy-friend.
<
br />   “I didn’t know a girl had to think about falling in love,” Tina had laughed.

  “You are an innocent, Tina,” Kitty had scoffed. “Of course a girl must think about it. Only a goof would let herself go crumbly at the knees over anything.” Then, perched on the foot of her bed and rolling off her nylons, she had asked: “Ever liked someone special?”

  Tina had shaken her head, remembering all the time a pair of sea-blue eyes and a deep voice saying: “Goodbye, Tina!”

  Her housework finished, she finally settled down in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. The radio was on and a record was playing when a loud rat-tat sounded on the front door, jerking Tina’s heart into her throat. She was thinking worriedly of Aunt Maud as she skimmed up the passage to open the door—a stout, red-faced man and a fur-coated woman stood on the step. They were total strangers to Tina—and yet there was something vaguely familiar about the woman’s face.

  “We’re your Aunt Sarah and Uncle Sidney.”

  Sarah Hutton! Aunt Maud’s sister, who had married a publican years ago and gone to Birmingham to live!

  “Here, you look bowled over to see us,” the woman said. “Didn’t Maudie tell you she’d written to me?”

  Tina shook a bewildered head. Aunt Maud and her sister had quarrelled a long time ago, when Sarah had learned at their father’s funeral that he had left this house and its furniture to Maud. This was Sarah’s first visit in Tina’s experience—and gazing wide-eyed at the brash, big-boned woman, she decided that she didn’t much like the look of her.

  “Well, aren’t you going to invite us in?” Sarah demanded.

  “O—of course.” Tina stood aside for them. Sidney Hutton brushed against her, and when she drew back he leered at her, evidently the type who considered himself irresistible!