stopped dead. ‘Oh dear,’ she went on after a well-judged pause. ‘I appear to be interrupting something. Lisle darling, you really should learn to lock your door.’
‘You’re interrupting nothing,’ Lisle said wearily, noticing Janie’s eyes bright with malicious interest. She was used to Janie. Jake Allard wasn’t, and she knew that crack about the locked door would have been noted and filed away for future reference. ‘I’m sorry about the ice. As it happens, I’ve got to break up the party. I’m going away for a few days.’
‘Now that is fast work!’ Janie’s incredibly long mascaraed lashes were fluttering as if they’d been caught in a gale. ‘Not that I blame you, darling, not for one moment.’ She sent Jake Allard one of her deliberately provocative sexy looks, and he laughed suddenly, the harsh lines of his face softening into genuine amusement.
When he wasn’t being a bastard, he could be diabolically attractive, Lisle realised wonderingly.
She said quietly, ‘Janie, Grandfather’s dying.’
For a second her flatmate’s face wore an expression of almost ludicrous astonishment. ‘But he can’t be, darling! He’s Murray Bannerman. He’s immortal—everyone knows that.’ In one of her mercurial changes of mood, she was sober suddenly, taking control. ‘You look ghastly. I’ll finish your case.’ She looked at Jake Allard. ‘Perhaps you’d get Lisle a drink. She looks as if she could do with a brandy. And yourself, of course.’
‘Not now, thanks. I’ve a long drive ahead.’ He went out, closing the door behind him.
Janie swept up a handful of underwear and tucked it into the corner of the case. ‘Who was that?’
‘Jake Allard.’ Lisle was feeling limp again. She sat down on the dressing stool.
‘My God! No wonder his face seemed familiar.’
‘You know him?’
‘Graham does.’ That was her boss. ‘And I’ve seen the odd blurred pic in the financial pages. According to all reports, he’s dynamite, and not only in the boardroom.’
Lisle grimaced slightly. ‘That doesn’t altogether surprise me.’
Janie folded Lisle’s nightdress with exaggerated care. ‘Does the fact that he’s here mean that the deal is on again with Harlow Bannerman?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lisle shook her head slowly. ‘I dare not think. Everything’s happening too fast—and Gerard’s vanished.’
‘You don’t know where he is?’ Janie’s eyes were on her face.
Lisle shrugged. ‘I could make an educated guess.’ Barbados, she thought. That was where Gerard would be, with Carla Foxton. Mrs Carla Foxton. A wave of irrational anger at Jake Allard swept over her. God damn him, he had a reputation of his own, so what right had he to sit in judgment on anyone else?
‘Then I’d get him back if I were you. This is not a good time for him to be missing, believe me.’ Janie was unwontedly sober, and Lisle bit her lip.
‘Is it that bad?’ She tried for lightness of tone, and didn’t quite make it.
‘It could be.’ Janie gave a little shake of her head. ‘I’m sure Gerard would rather be here, fighting, than coming back to salvage what he can from the wreckage. For that’s all there’d be, and you can ask Graham if you don’t believe me.’
‘Oh, I believe you,’ Lisle said bitterly. ‘I believe you only too well. The Allard man looks capable of anything.’
‘And in this case appearances aren’t deceptive,’ Janie said grimly. ‘According to all reports, he’s fought his way single-handed up a very steep ladder, and you don’t do that these days without stepping on a number of faces.’
‘By the look of him, he’s also been trodden on in his time,’ Lisle said caustically. ‘I’d like to shake the hand of the man who did it.’
‘I don’t recommend it.’ Janie shot her a minatory glance. ‘My advice is to forget that you don’t find him the flavour of the month—particularly if he’s going to be a force to be reckoned with in Harlow Bannerman. Graham says that Jake Allard can be a good friend—but a very bad enemy.’
‘Indeed?’ Lisle had discarded the black dress by now, and was pulling a cashmere sweater over her head to match the olive green corded jeans. She tugged the sweater into place, and raked her fingers carelessly through the heavy waves of copper hair, pushing it back into shape. ‘Well, perhaps he’ll discover the same can be said of me.’ She cast a swift glance over the contents of the case and remembered her toilet bag from the bathroom. ‘He doesn’t frighten me,’ she flung over her shoulder as she went to the door.
Jake Allard was coming down the passage, glass in hand. There was no way he couldn’t have heard her last remark, and his teeth glinted momentarily in a faint, hard smile as he held the glass out to her.
‘Your brandy, Miss Bannerman, or perhaps the need for it has passed.’
She said curtly, ‘Yes, it has,’ and went on down the passage to the bathroom.
It was unoccupied, and obeying an impulse she hardly understood, she closed the door behind her, and shot the small bolt, shutting herself in away from the rest of the world. There was a mixture of exotic scents in the warm air, and several of the towels lay damp and crumpled on the floor. Automatically she retrieved them, straightening them and returning them to the heated handrail. There were mirrors everywhere and she seemed to catch sight of herself in them all, a myriad reflections of Lisle, two bright spots of colour in her pale face, her green eyes glittering like a cat’s.
She’d spoken brave words, but they had been a lie. Of course she was frightened, with a deep gut-wrenching panic which was totally outside her experience. She felt as if every prop and stay to her security were being knocked away one by one, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it.
She sank down on the high-backed wicker chair and tried to think, to reason out everything which had happened in the past hour.
Grandfather, she had been told, could be dying, but then his doctors had written him off before, and been wrong. As Janie had said, Murray Bannerman was immortal. He didn’t believe in illness, or particularly in safeguarding his health against the march of time either.
‘If you lived as these damned medicos want you to, you might as well be dead,’ he had growled testily more than once.
The doctors grumbled too about his refusal to follow their advice, his frankly avowed aversion to hospitals, They complained it was impossible to give him the treatment he needed, but Lisle knew that secretly they admired his stubbornness and his fighting spirit.
She tried to imagine life without him—Harlow Bannerman without him, and the exhilarating boardroom battles he had always enjoyed. She had often felt he secretly relished the covert sniping between Gerard and Oliver Grayson, but she had never until then doubted for a moment whose side he would be on if ever the chips were down.
Now she was not so sure.
Jake Allard at the Priory—on a private visit. And just what discussions had gone on under the shelter of that privacy? she wondered desperately. It was surely beyond coincidence that
