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CHAPTER TWO
MALLON felt angry enough to bite nails in half. ‘You should have said!’ she erupted furiously. ‘You let me tell you everything I did, while all the time…’
‘It wasn’t the truth?’ he cut in sharply, entirely unmoved by her anger. ‘You’re saying now that you were lying?’
‘I wasn’t lying. You know full well I wasn’t lying!’ she retorted—did he think she went out walking in a cloudburst wearing only a cotton dress just for the fun of it?
‘Then what the blazes are you getting so stewed up about?’ Quillian demanded.
‘Because, because…’ She faltered. Then she rallied. ‘I wouldn’t have told you anything of what I had if I’d known you were related to him!’
‘Only by marriage!’ he gritted, the idea of being related by blood to that worm plainly offensive to him.
‘You won’t say anything to your sister?’
‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.’
Mallon stared at him angrily. ‘If you can’t see that to tell her might do irreparable harm to her marriage…’
‘Harm has already been done. My sister and that apology for a man separated three months ago.’
Mallon’s anger went as swiftly as it had arrived. ‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘H-he never said. He let me think she, his wife, had only recently left on an overseas trip to do with her work.’
‘Did you see any evidence of Faye being around?’
‘We’re back to hindsight again,’ Mallon muttered wearily. ‘Now, now that I know, I can see that there hadn’t been a female hand about the Lodge for some while.’
‘It was in need of a clean and tidy-up when you arrived?’
Understatement. ‘Let’s say it was fairly obvious he hadn’t advertised for a housekeeper a minute too soon. Are he and your sister legally separated?’
Harris Quillian shook his head. ‘It’s a trial separation as far as Faye is concerned. She’s hoping that, once they’re through what she terms a cooling-off period, they’ll get back together again.’
‘Oh, grief!’ It amazed Mallon that anyone with a grain of intelligence should fall for, let alone want to marry and stay married to, a man like Roland Phillips. ‘It won’t help if you tell her about me,’ Mallon said.
‘You’re suggesting that I don’t tell her? You think it would be better for her to go back to him without being aware of what he’s capable of?’ Harris questioned grimly.
‘She may well know, but love him enough to forgive…’
‘What he tried to do to you is unforgivable!’ Harris chopped her off harshly.
Mallon let go a shaky breath. ‘I—w-wouldn’t argue that,’ she had to agree.
The subject seemed closed. ‘Ready?’ he said. ‘We’ll go and get your clothes.’
Mallon suddenly had an aversion to putting on the dress that Roland Phillips had tried to tear from her. She knew then that she would never wear it again. She wouldn’t have minded borrowing a comb, but Harris wasn’t offering, and she wouldn’t ask. ‘I look a sight,’ she mumbled.
‘Do you care?’
It annoyed her that he too thought she looked a sight! He needn’t have agreed with her. ‘Not a scrap!’ she answered shortly, and, delaying only to put on her sodden sandals, she joined him at the door.
The nearer they got to Almora Lodge, though, and nerves started to get the better of her. So that by the time Harris had pulled up outside the house, she had started to shake.
‘You’ll come in with me?’ she questioned jerkily when all those terrible happenings began to replay in her head, refusing to leave. Suddenly she felt too afraid to get out of the car.
‘I’ll be with you most every step of the way,’ he replied, his expression grim.
The front door was unlocked. Harris didn’t bother to knock but, tall and angry beside her, he went straight in. There was no sign of Roland Phillips.
‘I’ll be one minute,’ Harris said. ‘If you see Phillips before I do, yell.’
Mallon waited nervously at the bottom of the stairs while Harris headed in the direction of the drawing room. She waited anxiously when he went from her sight. Then she thought she heard a small short sound that might have been a bit of a groan, then a thud—but she had no intention of venturing anywhere to find out what it was all about.
And, true to his word, barely a minute later Harris appeared. He was with her every step of the way too as they went up the stairs. He stayed close by while she packed her cases and retrieved her handbag.
She had been all knotted up inside, certain that at some stage Roland Phillips would appear, if only to find out who was invading his property. But she was back in the car sitting beside Harris Quillian—and had seen nothing of her ex-employer. She started to feel better.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply as they left Almora Lodge behind.
‘My pleasure,’ he replied, and at some odd inflection in his tone, almost as if it had been a pleasure, Mallon found her eyes straying to his hands on the steering wheel. The knuckles on his right hand were very slightly reddened, she observed.
‘You saw Roland Phillips, didn’t you?’ she exclaimed as the explanation for that groan and thud suddenly jumped into her head. ‘It wasn’t very nice of him to mark your hand with his chin like that!’ The words broke from her before she could stop them.
‘Worth every crunch,’ Harris confirmed.
Mallon turned sideways in her seat to look at him. Firm jaw, firm mouth, steady eyes; she was starting to quite like him. ‘You didn’t need much of an excuse to hit him,’ she commented, guessing that because, at heart, his sister wanted to get back with her husband, Harris had previously held back on the urge to set about Roland for the grief he had caused Faye. However, Roland’s behaviour today had given him the excuse he had been looking for.
‘True,’ Harris answered. ‘Unfortunately he was still half sozzled with drink, so I only had to hit him once.’ She had to smile; it felt good to smile. By the sound of it, Roland Phillips had gone down like a sack of coals.
Harris carried her cases up the stairs when they arrived at Harcourt House. The two habitable bedrooms were side by side. He placed her cases in the room as yet without a bed, and showed her the other room.
‘Faye has seen to it that there’s plenty of bed linen, towels, that sort of thing, so I’ll leave that side of it to you.’ And, when Mallon stood hesitantly in the doorway, he went on casually, ‘I’ll arrange for locks to be put on both these bedroom doors tomorrow.’ Then, taking up what was obviously his overnight bag, he announced, ‘Now I should think about leaving.’
Mallon
