The Sun Tower Read online

  Even as this thought crossed her mind, she could feel him studying her, taking in every expression that crossed her face.

  'Dina and the dragon,' he murmured, and that rasping quality in his voice was very apparent, a razored edge to the words.

  'A while ago you were a knave,' she reminded him.

  'I refer to someone else who looms large on your horizon, but we won't argue about it right now. Time is running out.'

  'What a cynic you are, Mr Ventura !'

  'Call me Raf.'

  'Even that, even your name is raffish, isn't it?'

  'But suitable for a black-moustached dago, wouldn't you say?'

  'Cagliostro should be your middle name.' She flushed as she spoke, for again, so disconcertingly, he had read her mind.

  'You called it a trick, Dina, and in a way it is. A trick in my Milanese blood, for having sprung from the scugnizzi I have it in me to take advantage of every vulnerable chink in the armour of the nobilta. You are like a rare orchid which has been kept under glass, and I can't resist taking you out for an airing.'

  'Something which has been cultivated into growth, with no naturalness to me?' She felt faintly offended. 'You have a razor under your tongue, Mr Ventura, and you know how to use it.'

  'There was ever in the Italian a liking for steel.'

  'And back alley tactics?' she couldn't resist asking.

  'Ah, would you prefer it if I bought myself into this exclusive club and swung a polo stick at Wild Plage with the rest of the boys?'

  'Some hopes I' she laughed. 'You have to be nominated as a member, and the secretary here is probably the biggest snob of the lot of us. You know that, and I don't see you against a background of smart, lazy people who regard hard work as the eleventh sin.'

  'You think I like hard work?'

  'I know it, Mr Ventura. It's written all over your face. I bet many a time you've burned the midnight oil while you've pored over your account books.'

  'If I'm so fond of work, then how come you take me for a dangerous scoundrel?' His tone of voice

  was amused, but his eyes were intent on her face. 'Are the two compatible?'

  In your case, yes,' she replied, and never had she felt so sure of anything. 'I don't think it would suit you to use up your energy being a dilettante sportsman. You have to compete in the market of raw commerce and cut-throat competition. It satisfies something in you—a drive, a kick, that other men might get from Bourbon, or a hole in one out on the fairway.'

  'How tough-hided you make me sound!'

  'You are tough, aren't you?'

  Ail the way, honey eyes, from the roots of my nair to my fetlocks. Do I scare you very much?'

  'Yes—you're ruthless.'

  'Even so, haven't you had a surfeit of boyish charm and looking pretty in shantung at Wild Plage? Weren't you wishing for a little chutzpah on your angel cake?'

  'Girls don't always want their wishes to be granted.'

  'Meaning that danger is something a female likes to enjoy in her mind, like the fantasy rape?'

  'Yes—you don't spare a girl, do you?' Her shapely teeth caught at her underlip and her eyes ran over his face, so dark and different from Bay's fair-skinned, unlined countenance. Bay was so nice, so courdy, so—predictable. Her teeth bit down hard on the lower curve of her mouth.

  'Don't do that, you'll draw blood.'

  'It wouldn't worry you—you're more than a little cruel!'

  'There are different shades of cruelty, Dina.' He smiled down at her with eyes filled with irony. 'I've never pinned a butterfly and watched the filmy

  wings shrink closer and closer to the slim silver body. I have smacked a man round the face and broken some of his teeth.'

  'Oh—why? What did he do to you?'

  'He sold me some tainted caviare, but I shall make sure that what I bring to Nun's Cove will be the very best from the Caspian Sea. It's amazing how very ill tainted caviare can make a person, much worse than shrimp, for a couple of pints of milk can cure that.'

  'So you're holding me to that promise, Mr Ventura?'

  'As firmly as I hold you right now.' His hands tightened, and then relaxed. 'Do you hear voices coming this way—so do I? I suggest you slip behind those window drapes and hide there while I make my getaway. Did you ever see any of those vintage Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake films?' He smiled, released her, and with a sardonic bow he held aside the window drapes so she could slip behind them and be concealed as Raf Ventura made his exit from the games room.

  'Ciao,' she heard him say, in his attractively rasping voice. 'Just checking the pool table for wear and tear.'

  Dina pressed a hand against her mouth, and then realised that she was checking the impulse to laugh. He was a devil and he had made a conspirator of her ... she just wouldn't dare to see him again, and he'd have to eat that caviare all by himself. If he dared to come to Satanita, then she would deny knowing him. No one could pass the automatic gates unless someone at the house gave permission, so she'd be quite safe from his Italian furioso.

  'Dina darling, are you there?' It was Bay's voice, and she stepped out from the window enclosure and smiled at him, every silvery fair hair in place, and seemingly as tranquil as a moonlit pool.

  'Hiding from me?' His smile was lopsided and admiring of her composed face framed by her court-page hair. He held out her long velvet cloak lined with scarlet silk, and when she stood there quietly so he could adjust it so the high stiff collar enclosed her slim neck, it didn't show at all that her heart was still beating faster than Bay had ever made it beat.

  'Shall we go home?' he said.

  'Yes, let's.' She walked with him, coolly and gracefully, from the games room of the country club.

  Downstairs the members of the band were packing up their instruments, and waiters were clearing the buffet tables. There was a haze of smoke, scent, and a lingering excitement in the air. Couples called goodnight and car doors slammed in the driveway. Reminders were expressed regarding the next tennis match, or golfing game, and Dina heard it all in a kind of dream.

  They went outside to Bay's car, and in keeping with the general mood of nostalgia and the Great Gatsby era, he was running at present a Studebaker Sky-hawk, and Dina thought how extra boyish he seemed tonight, with his fair hair combed sleek across his brow, and with the lights of the courtyard catching in his candid blue eyes.

  'In you get, darling.' He assisted her into the car, and she felt his eyes skim across her face. 'Didn't you have a good time tonight, Di?' he asked, just a little concerned.

  'Of course.' She smiled up at him, and thought to herself that she had had an extraordinary time and couldn't quite believe that she had been propositioned by a man who was the opposite to Bay in every possible way. He moved round the long body of the car and slid into the driving seat beside her; above them the overhead light burned with the soft lustre of a topaz, glimmering on Dina's hair above the collar of her cloak.

  1 thought you might have got a bit needled because Steve Brett and I were discussing the next match at the Plage. You do go for the game, don't you, Di? I know you only watch and don't participate,' he broke into a grin and his teeth were as well kept as the rest of him, 'but I do sometimes get the feeling that you'd like to play. It's awfully risky, honey.'

  Honey. A simple enough endearment, and yet Dina felt the twisting of a nerve somewhere in her midriff, and she heard again in her mind a deeper, more mature voice saying that word and giving it an intonation that was far from casual. A taste of honey, he had said. Rocks to break and fire to walk through ... such tough notions didn't touch Bay's life, for the great wealth of his parents ensured that he was in every way the end result of the great American ideal. Polished, good-looking, courteous, and sports-loving.

  'Perhaps even women should take risks, now and again,' she said, quietly. 'If only in order to feel alive.'

  'You're alive enough for me.' He laughed as he started the car, and he was too unsubtle to catch on to the deeper implication in her words. 'I
guess you're just a mite moody, but tonight you looked

  terrific, and it makes a guy feel proud to have his very own dream, all realised and wrapped up in the shape of the swellest girl that ever got born. I'm touching wood and whistling—we don't want the devil playing any tricks on us, do we?'

  He rapped his knuckles against the walnut panelling of the car's interior, and once again Dina felt that nerve twisting inside her, and his mention of the devil made her shiver.

  'You cold, darling?' Bay shot a sideglance at her. 'You women wear such flimsy things, that's half the trouble. I say, don't get laid up with a chill just as we've got that big match coming off and I'm all set to score high for the team. I want you at the Plage, looking great and cheering me on.'

  D ina drew her cloak around her. 'I'm perfectly all right, Bay. You know I'm not one of your hot-blooded people.'

  'No, you're my snow maiden and I like it that way. Did you notice Lenore Hollis tonight, wearing that conspicuous red dress and making a blatant play for Steve? I reckon he ought to get himself fixed up with young Gayna before that Hollis woman gets him into trouble.'

  'Oh, Bay,' Dina couldn't suppress a laugh, 'you do sound prim and proper at times! I thought men enjoyed scarlet women.'

  'Maybe, but not in front of their friends,' he said, a trifle stiffly. 'Everyone knows that Lenore plays about behind her husband's back, and I'd give her a darn good hiding if she belonged to me—not, I hope, that I'd ever get tied up with someone like her. She's like a guy who can't hold his liquor.'

  'You mean she's promiscuous.'

  'As a cat,' he said, turning the Studebaker smoothly on to the coast road, where far below the harbour lay still and silvery under the moon, a myriad lights twinkling on the rigging of the moored sea-craft. This was a stretch of road that curved like a mottled serpent, lifting ahead of them, and then falling beneath the wheels with a swish of silken, precision driving. Bay was expert at everything that demanded good co-ordination ... he possessed a kind of jewelled timing in which clumsiness played no part.

  'What if you were like Bob Hollis and loved someone like Lenore?' Dina kept her eyes on Bay's profile as she asked the question, the topaz lighting on his smoothly tanned skin. 'Love is supposed to make us tolerant, isn't it?'

  'It isn't supposed to make blind idiots of us, Di,' he rejoined. 'In the first place I'd never be attracted to an over-heated female like Lenore, and in the second place there's more to love than being so physically besotted by someone that you don't care a darn what your family or friends think of the woman as a person. There's no pride in that kind of relationship—it's cheap and rather nasty.'

  And you don't think I could ever be like— Lenore?'

  'You?' For probably the first time in his life Bay almost drove off the road and had to give the leather-bound wheel a wrench that brought them back on the undulating spine of the serpent. 'Honey, don't go giving me shocks. You're about the last girl in the world to imitate the antics of a cat on hot bricks. I just love your coolness and that calm grace you have when you walk into a room, so that people stare at you as if you're visiting royalty,

  and waiters can't be quick enough to wait on you. That's the kind of icing I like on my cake.'

  'Angel cake?' she murmured.

  'Sure, I couldn't have put it better myself.' He chuckled. 'You know, you are in a rather odd mood tonight, princess. Introspective, don't they call it? I suppose it's tied up with the fact that we shall be married before Christmas.'

  'And this is August,' she said. 'We're almost at the turn of the year, when the leaves start to fall and the sunsets somehow grow more beautiful. The pensive season, the leaves and the greengages ripe for falling.'

  He shot a look at her when she said that, and the topaz lighting seemed to make dark gold pools of her eyes, and to lose itself in the slight hollows under her cheekbones.

  'I've always liked the little bit of mystery about you,' he said. 'You're not like other girls—you're much deeper than the usual crowd. I'm lucky to have you, and I intend to hold on to you.'

  Dina's heart gave a tiny flutter at his words and his sudden possessive tone of voice. Silence fell between them and she knew from the shadowy depths beyond the road that they were nearing Satanita. The car accelerated as it began its climb into the higher hills, making for the tall gates that would be opened to the blare of the Studebaker's horn. A tunnel of tall aracaria trees led towards the house, making an avenue of shadow and leafy scent.

  The house had turrets like a white castle in the moonlight, and its rooftops sloped and shone like polished stones. The wall lamps in the forecourt cast their dull gold light upon the steps that led to the high front door, and Dina felt a sense of relief

  that she was home at last from the demands and problems created for her now she was grown up and could no longer think of Satanita as her fortress against the invading forces of adult life. 'I'm so very tired-'

  But her fiance caught at her hand as she went to mount the steps and he held her in abeyance in the bulk of one of the huge, spike-flow-ered cedars that flanked the steps like a pair of venerable sentinels.

  'Were you talking to him?'

  'Who-?' She looked at Bay with starded eyes.

  'Who are you talking about?'

  'That foreign-looking guy who came out of the games room just as I reached the door—I was with Steve who wanted the club secretary to cash a cheque for him. We both noticed the guy, who said something in Italian. You were in the games room, Di. Surely you saw him?'

  'I—I knew that someone came in for a few minutes.' Dina hated to tell lies, yet here she was denying all knowledge of Raf Ventura. 'I was in that window alcove and I came out when you called me.'

  'So you didn't exchange any kind of talk with him—tall, dark as the devil, and certainly not a club member, otherwise I'd have recognised him. He gave me a strange sort of glance as he passed by—malevolent, I'd call it.'

  'Oh, don't talk such nonsense I' For some odd reason she felt a stab of vexation and wanted to pull free of Bay's hand. 'I daresay he was at the club on business. Not everyone spends their life having a ball!'

  'Is that a dig at me?' A thread of lamplight revealed the frown that drew Bay's sun-bleached

  eyebrows into a line. 'If my father was in business instead of being a senator, then I'd no doubt work for him. But I'd be no good at politics, Di. Okay, so we're affluent, but we aren't idle. We keep occupied, and I did my spell out in Vietnam.'

  'Oh, Bay, I'm not criticising you, but you, me, our friends, we seem to regard anyone outside our circle as being a kind of—of menace to our way of life. I mean—malevolent.'

  'I've never seen brows so black, and eyes so glittering, like the sharp steel those dagos are fond of—'

  That word twisted the knife and she did wrench free of Bay's hand. 'I'm tired and I don't plan to stand here half the night discussing a stranger, who is probably quite respectable and no more dangerous than you or I.'

  'If you think that, Di, then you couldn't have seen him. He gave me the feeling of being marked out, similar to that out in Vietnam when you sensed that a sniper was around and your name might be on the next bullet. I mean it, Di. I know when someone is giving me the evil eye.'

  'I've never heard you talk such rot!' Dina gathered her cloak around her and ran up the steps to her front door. It was slightly alarming that her legs felt shaky. 'Go home, Bay, and mind how you drive. I'll see you at the match on Friday.'

  'Shall I pick you up, or will you drive down?' He sounded slightly offended, as if he thought she were treating him like a fanciful boy.

  'I'll drive down, which will give you more time to prepare yourself for the game. Goodnight, Bay.'

  She quickly turned her key in the lock and slipped inside the house before he had time to

  demand a less formal goodnight. She stood inside the door and didn't fully relax until she heard the Studebaker drive away into the night.

  It wasn't like Bay Bigelow to have such fancies ... ha
d he really seen threat in Raf Ventura's eyes, or was that his general reaction to someone who was obviously foreign and not a member of Pasadena's thoroughbred pack?

  Dina made her way upstairs to her room, moving quietly, her cloak over her arm so it wouldn't rustle in the stillness and be heard by Bella, who was a light sleeper. Dina felt that tonight she had indulged in enough disturbing talk, and her godmother had an uncanny knack of sensing when Dina was troubled and she'd want to know the reason. She'd probe and guess there had been a slight difference with Bay, and the very next time she saw him she would worm it out of him that there had been a stranger at the country club ... a dark, foreign stranger over whom they had almost quarrelled.

  The last thing Dina wanted was for her godmother to learn about Raf Ventura, and with bated breath she crept past Bella's bedroom, and she didn't breathe freely until she reached the safety of her own room. She stood there in the darkness, listening for the smallest sound. She almost betrayed the tense state of her nerves when the little clock chimed on her mantelpiece, each stroke blending with the nervous beat of her heart.

  Midnight, she thought, and the ball was over. Tomorrow she would be able to talk about the dance quite casually ... in the sober light of day the events of tonight would seem like a fantasy and she would be able to smile and dismiss from her

  mind that meeting with a man who had no part to play in her life.

  Tomorrow it would all seem like a half-remembered dream.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dina kept her word to herself and didn't keep that appointment at Nun's Cove—how could she, after what Bay had said, and in view of her own subtle doubts that it would not be altogether wise to encourage such a man.

  She attended the polo match on Friday and it was quite exciting, with Bay's team winning by a couple of chukkas. They and their circle of friends had tea afterwards in the clubhouse of the polo field, and it was a bright, unclouded party, and to her relief Bay appeared to have forgotten their slight tiff and the cause of it. The day ended on a happy note, and she had quite put out of her mind that threat by Raf Ventura that he would come to Satanita if she dared to defy him.