Bride's Dilemma Read online

  Tina knew he was just being polite, for as she stepped on to the balcony and was dappled by the sunlight the gleam that stole into her husband’s sea-blue eyes was an indulgent one. Her delight was mixed, but intense, and she had to look away from him—flinching almost from her own inward storm of emotion. “Good morning, Liza!” She gave her smile and her attention to the child.

  “Good morning, Tina.” A shy smile touched Liza’s face to a charm that held a latent beauty. “Is it all right for me to call you—just that? One of my friends at school has a stepmother and she has to call her Auntie”

  Tina slipped into her seat at the table, murmuring thank you to John, her fair head bent as she removed her napkin from its ivory ring. “I don’t feel in the least like your auntie, Liza.” She exchanged a quick smile with the child. “More like a big sister—mmm, I think I’ll try some bacon and a ring or two of pineapple.”

  As she helped herself from the covered dish she was conscious of Liza’s interested scrunity, then a thin, tanned arm came edging near hers and Liza gave a chuckle. “How pale you look compared to Pops and me,” she exclaimed.

  “I intend to get just as brown as you two, you just wait. Your bangle looks pretty, Liza,” Tina added. “Have you unpacked your other presents yet?”

  “I’ve peeked at my saddle. It’s a beauty, isn't it? Sorrel will fancy himself when I put it on his back.” Liza hugged her knees and treated her father to a mischievous grin. “You did do a lot of shopping in England, Pops. I must say I like the present you brought back for yourself.”

  “The youngsters these days!” he muttered behind a laugh, catching Tina’s eye. “There, my dear, you have the approval you were so worried about. Yes, Liza, Tina was naturally worried in case you chose not to like her.”

  “That’s funny,” Liza touched a finger to Tina’s ruby ring, “I thought she might be snooty and not care for someone else’s child. Isn’t it a relief, Tina, that you’re so super?”

  “Am I ?” Tina’s smile was warm but startled. “You bet!” Liza rocked herself in her young eagerness. “You aren’t all painted up a—and pretentious. I’d have had it in for Pops if he’d married someone like that.”

  There was such a fierce, meaning note in the child’s voice that Tina had to look at John to see if he realized what lay behind her outburst. His gaze was fixed upon Liza, so intent and searching that a quick chill feathered through Tina. Yes, he knew his daughter disliked Paula Carrish. That could be part of the reason why he fought his own desires in that direction—why he had given her a young, uncomplicated stepmother!

  Then, thrusting a hand into a back pocket of his trousers, he drew out his college-crested tobacco pouch. “D’you mind if I enjoy a pipe while you’re eating, Tina?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Her appetite had slackened off, anyway, and she had to force down the last crisp portion of bacon. Like a dark shadow, Paula Carrish seemed to hover above every sunbeam that came out for her! She topped up her coffee cup and asked Liza how long a holiday she had.

  “Two weeks. Super, isn't it? The three of us will be able to have crowds of fun.”

  “We’ll have to teach Tina how to ride,” John said, biting on the nicked stem of his briar and carrying a match to the bowl. “That little filly, Dusky, should be okay for her to start on, wouldn’t you say, pet?”

  Liza bobbed her head. “Didn’t you learn how to ride back in England, Tina?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Tina smiled and dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “The nearest I came to a horse was the placid old nag who used to pull the coalman’s cart. There are a lot of things I—I haven’t yet coped with, so you’ll both have to be patient with me.” She shot a look at John, but he rose in that moment and went to the balcony parapet . . . as though moved to irritation by her shy appeal. Heat ran over her body. You could hate love, she fiercely reflected. It ruthlessly destroyed your self-dependence and left you as exposed to every small thrust as a crab without its shell!

  Then John swung round and puffed out smoke, the brilliant sunshine behind him, his eyes in the dense shadow of his brows. “What do you fancy doing this morning, Tina?” he asked.

  “I’d rather like to do a tour of the house and get the feel of things,” she replied.

  “Good idea.” He spoke rather carelessly. “Liza can be your guide. I have some mail to catch up with, but this afternoon we’ll go for a drive round the island—”

  “And have tea at Smuggler’s Cove?” Liza entreated. “They serve super cream ices.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of stuffing yourself?” He quirked an eyebrow at his sprig, who was peeling a banana with the tip of her tongue showing between her red lips. He tweaked her hair on his way into the house, then paused to add: “If the pair of you go down for a swim, be sure to keep within the barrier reef. Joe’s seen a couple of small sharks lurking about just lately. They probably won’t come inside the reef, the fishing isn’t good enough, but they might still be on the prowl beyond it. Also Tina will need to be well daubed with sun oil. Take some with you and be sure she smarms plenty on the vulnerable spots, like the backs of her knees and that bit of a nose.”

  Tina felt her heart quickening at the deepening pitch to his voice, but when she braved a meeting with his eyes there was a merciless amusement in them. She jerked back when he flicked a light finger at her nose, “Don’t treat me like the baby around here, John,” she protested.

  “I’m only waring you that your nose will peel if you don’t oil it.” He looked mock innocent. “See you later, my infants.”

  He strolled into the house, leaving behind him a trail of tobacco smoke and a giggling daughter. “Isn’t Pops funny?” she said through a mouthful of banana.

  “Madly comic!” Tina, pink cheeked, rolled her napkin and inserted it in its ring, nerves of annoyance and frustration rippling through her. Back in England he had said he wanted a wife, not a little girl to dandle on his knee, yet now she was here with him he was treating her as though he was no longer certain what he wanted of her. A most unsatisfactory state of affairs.

  A houseboy in crisp white came to clear the breakfast table, and Tina went with Liza on a tour of her now home. Last night she had absorbed only a surface impression of its grace and charm, now in daylight she discoverd that it was mellow-stoned, embraced by a spacious suntrap of a veranda, with an impressive pillared portico. Liza made eager dashes from room to room, catching at Tina’s hand and pointing out things—the chairs in the hall with little medieval paintings set in the backs of them, the steep bookcase windows in the library, and the side table supported on a carved eagle. The jewelled chandeliers and Queen Anne loveseats in the drawing room. The lovely rose windows at the curves of the double staircase, framing at one side a sweeping view of Blue Water’s grounds; at the other side a spectacular gold, white and blue mosaic that was the sugar-icing beach and ruffled silk ocean below the house, shot with rich sunlight.

  “This is my den,” Liza announced, throwing open the door of a charming mimosa room with a pair of scarlet basket-chairs, curly white rugs beside the divan bed, a sprig-skirted dressing table with a stool to match, and a balding teddy bear beside a blonde doll on the padded window seat. The built-in clothing closets were painted white, and there was a white and scarlet record player to match a little radio on the bedside cabinet. The room of a much loved child, Tina thought, noticing the carved toys and musical boxes John had brought back for Liza from Continental trips.

  “Make yourself at home and I’ll play you a record,” Liza said, patting one of her basket-chairs, then sliding open a well-stocked record cabinet. “Do you like Cliff and the Beatles?”

  Tina smilingly listened while Liza enthused about her various pop idols, already loving this child who was part of John. So much a part of him, with the same promise of long, easy limbs, a wide sensitive beauty about the mouth, blue eyes contrasting with dense lashes.

  “Do you know what an iconoclast is?” Liza suddenly asked, squattin
g on a plump floor cushion like a gnome and gazing up at Tina.

  “Isn’t it a breaker of images?” Tina smiled. “Have you been learning about them at school?”

  “I saw it in a book,” Liza gestured towards her bookcase. “Paula’s like that, isn’t she?”

  The statement shook Tina. “Why do you say that, Liza?” she asked, shot through with a quick fear in case the woman had said something to the child about her father.

  Liza shrugged her thin shoulders. “When people are happy she sort of pulls them down. She does it with Uncle Ralph, and he’s a darling. I wish he’d get married, then she’d have to move out of his bungalow.” Liza caught at Tina’s left hand and pressed her cheek to it. “I used to be scared Pops would marry her. Ooh, I bet she’s all steamed up because he hasn’t.”

  Tina cupped the young, warm cheek and reflected that children, like animals, had infallible instincts when it came to judging people. It was almost as though they could smell insincerity and cruelty, and there wasn’t much doubt in Tina's mind that there was a streak of cruelty in Paula Carrish. She thought of the woman in her leopard cape last night, elegant and extraordinary, standing before John on her long silken legs and looking him straight in the eye. What had she been daring him to remember? Tina dragged her mind away from the scene.

  “Shall we go down on the beach?” she suggested. “I want to start getting a tan.”

  “Yes, let’s.” Liza jumped to her feet. “And we mustn’t forget the sun oil, otherwise, being so fair, you’ll be bound to burn.”

  Tina went along to her room to change into her swimwear, a rucked pink one-piece, over which she threw a towelling poncho. She also took along her smoked glasses, but didn’t bother about a cap, for she liked to feel the sea in her hair when she swam. Having lived near the sea all her life she had learned to swim as a child and was very able in the water.

  They made their way through the garden to the cliff steps, and Tina saw her first flame trees, burning with bold beauty against the hot blue sky. There were silver wattles, and gloriously scented magnolias. And a really striking looking tree called shower of gold, with cascades of sunny buds and glossy green leaves. Big butterflies clung to the peachy frangipani and cool blue plumbago, while the incessant tuck-tuck of a hidden Blue-Hood followed them. Liza showed her a tortoise with bright orange spots on its head, and pointed out peacock-blue hummingbirds whirling like toys in the golden air.

  “Everything is so vivid,” Tina exclaimed in wonder. “Flowers never grow to this size in England. And the scents! They make me feel drunk.”

  “Did you mind leaving England?” Liza asked, pausing like a faun on the steps to gaze back at Tina, who kept dawdling to look at blue-headed lizards and the marvellous view of the cove and the reef that was roughly the shape of a three leaved shamrock.

  “I wanted to come to Ste. Monique from the first moment your father described the island to me,” Tina replied. “It was a chilly day in March, and I never dreamed at that time that he would marry me and actually bring me here.”

  “It’s like a fairy tale,” Liza cried, running across the warm feathery sand with Tina behind her. They chased into the blue and buoyant water and swam to the lacing of foam about the barrier reef, where the coral was as jewelled as the tails of the peacocks Tina had watched with John in Holland Park Gardens. They had been happy together that day, his fingers catching at hers as though, like a lover, he needed the reassurance of touching her.

  Back on the beach, after feasting their eyes on the colorful fish that haunted the reef, Tina and the child dried off, oiled each other and stretched out in the sun. The sand was soft as lambswool under Tina’s body, and for now she was lazy with contentment as she lay listening to the breakers rolling silver over the coral reef.

  After lunch up at the house, John had the car driven round to the front steps. The car he had used in England had been a hired one, and Tina’s eyes widened at the dashing open-top vehicle waiting below the double tier of steps leading down from the portico. It was glossily cream, upholstered in saxe-blue, with a silver Mercury on the hood.

  There was room for the three of them on the wide front seat, and as John slid in behind the wheel and slammed the door he cast a side glance over his passengers. Tina wore cream glazed cotton, Liza peppermint green, and wide Alice bands held their hair in place. Both of them sat waiting like small demure girls for their treat to begin.

  “Do we look nice, Pops?” Liza enquired.

  “Like a pair of vanilla and peppermint lollies,” he grinned. “Mighty eatable!”

  He started the car and they swept round a small plantation of tropical plants in the centre of the drive and out on to a highway of crushed coral. The countryside through which they drove was fertile with plantations of sweet potatoes, sugar cane, maize and bananas. The sails of the maize mills turned lazily in the warm air, and narrow village streets set with gingerbread houses were wrapped in the somnolence of siesta. Dogs stirred in the heat, grubbing their muzzles into fleabitten coats, while a colored farm boy quizzed the touring car from beneath the ragged brim of a straw hat, then lolled back against a lime-washed wall and resumed his doze.

  “D’you see the way he looked at us?” John smiled. “He knows it’s true about mad dogs and Englishmen, but I’ve never succumbed to the island habit of resting while the sun’s at its zenith. Feeling the heat yet, Tina?”

  “I love it!” she replied warmly. “England starves one of sunshine.”

  She saw small farm holdings clinging to the hillsides, tumble-down but picturesque; peaceful yet with a hint of the pagan about them. They drove along a headland that plunged to the turbulent surf of a coast where wrecking had gone on in the bad old days, and John said: “This part of the island reminds me of Cornwall. Even its history of wrecking and pirates is much the same.”

  He stopped the car because Liza wanted to pick wild flowers—as though they didn’t have enough in their own garden—and strolled long-legged with Tina towards a grassy patch that gave a spectacular view of the ocean and was green enough to promise a breeze while they rested there. John sprawled, indolent and easy-limbed, white shirt open at his throat. Tina sat with her legs neatly curled in front of her, fingers plucking at the grass, her gaze on the sea rippling round the glossy points of rock—to which ships had been lured in the old days by the lanterns of wreckers. The mewing calls of the swooping birds and the sobbing sea were like echoes down the years of the people who clung, drowning, to bits and pieces of floating timber.

  John suddenly touched her hand and said softly: “Look at Liza.”

  Tina did so. The child had plucked a flower that evidently pleased her very much, and quite unconscious of being observed she was stroking its soft petals against her cheek with the youthful wonderment that is all too soon lost in the stresses of adult living.

  “How I’d love to sculpt the child just as she is now,” John murmured. “But that kind of pose could never be recaptured. See, already she’s moving on to her next discovery.”

  “Couldn’t you work from memory?” Tina gently asked.

  “Memory is too—too fallible.” He shrugged his shoulders, drew up his knees and encircled them with his arms. “You capture some facets, but others are lost in an inevitable obscurity and you have a piece of art which is flawed instead of perfect. Art only truly succeeds when it satisfies the heart, the mind, and the soul. It’s a kind of loving, and a creator of art, like a maker of love, must be without doubts, otherwise there can’t be true satisfaction for creator or lover.”

  Tina’s heart jolted. She had caught the deepening note of meaning in John’s voice and was sure he was telling her that until doubts were cleared away between them, they could not be close . . . That was the decision he had come to, and she, in her shyness, her inexperience, her pain, had to abide by it. She had her pride as well.

  Assuming self-possession like a garment, she launched into a question that had cropped up in her mind that morning. “Will it be all righ
t if I do my own marketing?” she asked. “It would be rather nice for you and Liza to have English cooking now and again, and I’d enjoy doing it. Topaz could go with me to the shops.”

  “Sure you can do your own marketing.” He ran lazily amused eyes over her slightly tense face. “You don’t have to get my permission to make changes in your own home—I’m not a Victorian tyrant like that aunt of yours.”

  “I know that.” She gave one of his elkthong sandals a light kick. “But I’m a comparative stranger on the scene, and men get into routines they don’t always like having disturbed.”

  “It shouldn’t disrupt me too much having steak and kidney pie now and again. The cook hasn’t a light hand with pastry, and I’m partial. I like jam-puff as well, now we’re on the subject.” He stretched out and gave her chin a tweak. “Reassured, my timid one?”

  She nodded, but was prompted to add: “All the same, you know, you men can be unnerving creatures at times.”

  His eyebrows shot up, then on a half-laugh he said: “If I unnerve you a little, it’s only because I'm older and experienced, but I haven’t forgotten your telling me you hadn't had much to do with men owing to your aunt’s dislike of the sex.” His mouth grew mocking. “If you can’t cotton to the various hints I’ve thrown out about keeping my distance for a while, then you can always shoot the bolt on your bedroom door, I doubt whether I could batter down solid teak.”

  “There’s no need to say things like that.” Color ran hotly to her temples. “I assure you I’ve taken your hints.”

  “Then we can drop the subject.” A hint of steel edged the words, and Tina sighed with relief when Liza appeared on the scene, her collection of flowers and weeds raining into Tina’s lap.

  “Whew, I’m hot!” she announced.