you have the plate with you?’ Kelly asked him.
He shook his head, unexpectedly looking oddly boyish as he admitted, ‘I’m terrified of breaking it. I’ve got it at home. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to call there to see it.’
Kelly wanted to refuse, but her professional pride and curiosity proved too strong for her.
‘I could,’ she agreed cautiously, ‘but it would have to be when the shop is closed. My partner, Beth, is away at the moment.’
‘Could you manage this evening?’
‘I …’
‘I don’t have very much time left. Nan’s birthday isn’t very far away,’ he told her.
Kelly sighed. There was no reason why she shouldn’t look at the plate this evening.
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed reluctantly. ‘Where do you live? I—’ She broke off as the phone began to ring, automatically going to answer it, saying, ‘Excuse me a moment …’ as she picked up the receiver.
‘Hi, Kelly, it’s Julian. How are you, you delicious, hot, sexy thing …?’
Kelly almost dropped the receiver as Julian’s loud voice seemed to fill the shop. Her face burning with embarrassment, she turned her back on Brough even though she knew that he could well have heard what Julian had said.
‘Julian. I … I’m busy …’ she protested. ‘I …’
‘I understand, babe. What you and I have to say to one another needs to be said in private, right?’ Julian responded. ‘God, but you turned me on last night, doll … I can’t wait for us to get together …’
‘Julian.’ Kelly closed her eyes, as revolted by Julian’s conversation as she was by his person. ‘Julian, please—’ she began. But he wouldn’t let her finish, interrupting her to say thickly, ‘I’ll ring you later at the flat. I’ve still got the number …’
He had hung up before Kelly could object or protest, leaving her pink cheeked both with anger and chagrin—anger because of Julian’s assumption that she, or any other woman for that matter, would be willing to see him when he was supposedly already involved with someone else, and chagrin because Brough could have overheard some of the conversation.
It was to be expected, of course, that he wouldn’t let the matter go without comment, especially when the girl whom Julian was supposed to be on the point of becoming engaged to was his own sister.
‘I appreciate that custom has it that there’s supposedly safety in numbers, but don’t you think you could be interpreting its validity just a little too generously?’ he asked her smoothly.
‘Julian is an old friend,’ Kelly reminded him.
The look he gave her could have stopped Linford Christie in his tracks, Kelly felt sure.
‘Really? Then I feel extremely sorry for you, not only in your unfortunate choice of friends but your misplaced and, no doubt, regularly abused loyalty.’
‘Julian is dating your sister,’ Kelly felt compelled to remind him defensively.
He had turned to walk towards the door, but now, abruptly, he stopped and turned back to Kelly, and said quietly but with grim force, ‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’ And then, almost without pausing, he added coolly, ‘Shall we say eight tonight? This is the address …’
Kelly was still looking bemusedly at the business card he had placed down on the counter as he closed the shop door behind him.
Why on earth hadn’t she said something, objected to his high-handed assumption that she would not merely be free this evening but that, additionally, she would fall in with his plans, agree to his request, especially in view of the way he had spoken to her?
Reluctantly she picked up the card. Kelly had a vague idea where the house was since it was on the same road as a customer who had ordered a special commission from her.
Ten minutes before she was due to re-open the shop, the phone rang again. This time the caller was Beth, ringing from Prague.
‘Hi … How are things going?’ Kelly asked her eagerly.
‘Not too bad, in fact really quite promisingly. I’ve been given several contact numbers, and I’m due to drive out of the city tomorrow to visit a crystal factory.’
‘And you’re managing okay, despite the language barrier?’ Kelly asked her. This had been one of Beth’s main concerns about her trip and Kelly was anxious to know how her friend was coping.
‘Oh, I’ve got an interpreter,’ Beth told her.
Kelly frowned. The offhand tone of Beth’s voice was both unfamiliar and slightly worrying.
‘And she’s helping you, visiting factories with you …?’
‘She is a he,’ Beth told her shortly. ‘And as for helping me …’ There was a small pause. ‘Honestly, Kelly, men. I’m totally off all of them. Just because a person has a fancy degree and a whole string of letters after his name, that does not give him the right to try to tell me what to do. And as for trying to force me to visit factories that he’s chosen, with tales of theft and gypsies—’
‘Beth.’ Kelly interrupted her in bewilderment. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, I’m just letting off steam. It’s Alex, the interpreter. He’s half-English, as it turns out, and his grandparents left Prague for political asylum in the west when his mother was a child. Alex returned after the revolution to search for his family and he’s stayed on here.’
‘Sounds like he’s been confiding rather a lot of personal history to you for someone you don’t get on with,’ Kelly told her wryly.
‘Oh, he tells me what he wants me to know. He’s insisting that I visit a glass factory run by his cousins, but I’m not inclined to go. He obviously has a vested interest in anything I might buy. I’ve managed to track down somewhere that produces this most wonderful design I’ve seen, and he’s acting all high and mighty and trying to tell me that it’s all a con and that the stallholder saw me coming a mile off. He says there isn’t any factory where they’ve told me to go and the glass I wanted to buy couldn’t have been genuine. He says it’s a well-known ploy to get hold of foreign currency that is often worked against naive people like me …
‘Oh, but Kelly, you should have seen this glass. It was wonderful, pure Venetian baroque, you know the kind of thing, and it would lend itself beautifully to being gilded for the Christmas market. I even thought that if the price was reasonable enough we could commission some special sets, hand-painted and gilded for special celebrations—weddings, anniversarie’s … you know the kind of thing …’
Kelly laughed as she listened to her friend’s excited enthusiasm. It was wonderful to hear that note back in Beth’s voice again, and even more wonderful that she hadn’t even asked once about Julian Cox.
‘Anyway,’ Beth was continuing determinedly, ‘somehow I’m going out to this factory by
