Dangerous Entanglement. SUSANNE MCCARTHY
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strolled across the room, and out on to the balcony, standing balanced with his feet a little apart, his hands deep in the pockets of his khaki trousers, his wide shoulders square against the sky. ‘Nice view,’ he accorded casually.
‘Yes.’
Joanna spared a glance for the brooding ruins of the temple, and the tranquil river beyond, glittering darkly beneath the desert moon. If she had been a romantic, she would have said there was something almost magical about the scene…But fortunately she had learned to control such flights of fancy a long time ago.
Well, if this was going to be the height of their conversation, it didn’t bode particularly well for the evening ahead, she mused to herself as she moved across to the table, sitting down and folding her hands together on the cloth to stop them fidgeting.
Alex slanted her a smile of wry amusement. ‘Have you managed to maintain any other topic of conversation this afternoon?’ he enquired, nodding his head in the general direction of the kitchen.
Joanna glanced at him warily, not sure if an admission would be betraying Annette’s confidence. But since he was being so frank, maybe she could afford to be too. ‘Not for very long,’ she admitted. ‘Love’s young dream, eh?’
He lifted one dark eyebrow in quizzical amusement. ‘You sound a little cynical,’ he remarked.
She shrugged evasively, glancing away. ‘Oh, maybe,’ she conceded. ‘I suppose I’ve been around once too often.’
‘Only once?’ he enquired with a trace of ironic laughter.
‘Once was enough.’ She hoped her effort to sound light-hearted about it had come off, though she suspected’he was far too perceptive to be deceived.
With a casual movement he hooked out a chair, and sat down at the far end of the table. ‘You’ve been married?’ he asked with a gentleness that surprised her a little.
‘Once,’ she managed.
‘And divorced?’
‘Three years ago.’
An awkward silence fell again. Joanna was already regretting that she had told him even that much about herself—she had intended to keep an impersonal distance between them. But there was something about this man that was very disruptive to her hard-won peace of mind; and there was no way she could pietend that the way her heartbeat was racing at this moment was due to claustrophobia.
But to her relief, he chose to change the subject. ‘Shall we make a start on the wine?’ he suggested, reaching for the bottle.
‘Oh…Don’t you think we ought to wait for the others?’ she suggested, her voice a little unsteady.
From the kitchen came the sound of merry laughter. ‘If we wait for them, we could be waiting all night,’ he remarked with perspicacity. He pulled a heavy-duty penknife from his pocket, and opened a corkscrew from among the various useful attachments folded into it. ‘Be prepared,’ he mocked himself mildly.
Joanna’s lips quirked into a smile. ‘You were a boy scout?’ she enquired, daring to tease him a little.
He grinned, that hard face suddenly almost boyish. ‘A long time ago.’
She propped her elbow on the table, resting her chin on her cupped hand, her blue eyes dancing. ‘I can’t imagine it,’ she mused. ‘Did you wear shorts and a woggle?’
Dark eyes twinkled with amusement at her across the table. ‘Of course.’ He took her glass and filled it. ‘What shall we drink to?’ he enquired, a lilt of light humour in his voice. ‘Young love? Or wisdom and maturity?’
‘Oh, the latter, I think,’ she asserted wryly. ‘It lasts much longer.’
He laughed in ironic agreement. ‘Unfortunately, you’re probably right.’
Joanna sat back in her seat, enjoying the rich, distinctive flavour of the wine. A few years in the wood had given it a mature subtlety that she found very pleasing, a smooth sweetness that lingered on the tongue, deeply satisfying.
It was a romantic evening, she acknowledged to herself. A slight breeze was rustling the leaves of the palm-trees along the riverbank, cooling the lingering warmth in the air. The sky was a velvet black, spangled with stars, and the water was smooth and dark, disturbed only by a few clumps of water-hyacinth that floated slowly downstream on the current. In the distance, music was playing—there must be a dance on board one of the cruise-boats moored at the ferry-stage.
‘So, what happened with your marriage?’ Alex enquired with the kind of sympathy that could only come from someone who had trodden the same rocky path.
‘Oh…’ She shrugged her slim shoulders in a gesture intended to convey a measure of indifference. ‘The usual, I suppose. We were probably too young. It was fun for a while, but we were heading in different directions. Unfortunately the person he chose to head off with was my best friend at the time.’
‘I see.’
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of laughter from the kitchen. ‘What about you?’ she asked after a moment.
He swirled the wine around in his glass. ‘Remarkably similar, as a matter of fact. Only in my case, it was my brother.’
‘Oh…’ She shifted under the weight of a heavy discomfort. Was that the brother he had displaced from the family firm? Had that been his revenge? But those were hardly the sort of questions she could ask him.
But he went on without a prompt. ‘Like you, we were rather too young—I was twenty-three, she was twenty-one. And I had to be away a good deal of the time—I suppose in a way it was only natural for her to turn to my brother; he was a couple of years older than me, being groomed by my father to take his place as chair of the company. And they had similar tastes,’ he added drily. ‘Expensive cars, expensive clothes…’
She sipped her wine, her eyes studying that darkly handsome face. The only light on the balcony was the glow spilling out from the sitting-room—Annette had put a couple of candles ready in glasses, but they hadn’t been lit yet. But the shadows did nothing to soften the arrogant lines of his features—if anything they lent him an almost…sinister air.
‘But then…you became chairman instead, didn’t you?’ she enquired diffidently.
He nodded, a hint of hardness around his mouth. ‘That’s right,’ he confirmed. ‘Unfortunately, between them, my father and my brother were making quite a mess of things, so I had the board elect me instead. Then I bought them out.’
That brief, ruthless explanation sent a chill scudding down Joanna’s spine. From the newspaper accounts, it had been shortly after his wife had left him for his brother that he had ousted both him and their father from the company. Whatever his rationalisations, the implication was clear—it had been an act of pure revenge.
She had been a fool to let the wine and the moonlight lull her into a dangerously unguarded mood, she chided herself warningly—she ought to have known better. This was a man who got what he wanted, and damn the consequences for anyone else. It would be wise not to let herself forget that, not for a second.
JOANNA took another sip of her wine. It was difficult to maintain her cool façade, with Alex Marshall sitting there on the other side of the table, still watching her with those enigmatic dark eyes. Was it a spark of genuine interest in her that she could see there? Or was he playing some kind of game with her, to try to prevent her holding up the mining operation?
She shifted edgily in her seat, glancing back over her shoulder. ‘Those two are taking their time in the kitchen,’ she remarked with a nervous laugh. ‘We’ll probably be lucky if we get fed at all tonight.’
But