business for his cousins. He claims that their factory could probably reproduce the glass if they had a copy of it …’
‘Mmm … Well, if that’s the case, it might be worthwhile sketching the glass and seeing if they can reproduce it.’
‘Never,’ Beth asserted fiercely. ‘There’s no way I’m going to have Alex dictating to me … No. I’ve seen the glass I want and I know where to get it, and I’m determined to get an exclusive supply of it and at the right price. After all, if we did commission Alex’s cousins, what’s to stop them selling our design elsewhere, putting up the price to us because they know we want it? Look, I must go; Alex is picking me up in half an hour. He’s insisting on making me walk over the Charles Bridge, and since it’s raining today he says it should be relatively free of other tourists.’
‘Sounds fun,’ Kelly teased her, smiling as she said goodbye and hung up. The others would be so pleased to hear that Beth seemed to be getting over Julian Cox.
CHAPTER FIVE
AS HE let himself into the hallway of their rented house and blinked at the teeth-jarring hard yellow paint of the room, Brough reflected that he would be glad when they could finally move into the large Georgian farmhouse he had bought several miles outside the town and which was presently undergoing some much needed renovation work. It had been empty for three years before Brough had managed to persuade the trustees of the estate of the late owner that there was no way anyone was ever going to pay the exorbitant price they were asking for it.
‘If they don’t sell it soon, they’ll be lucky to have anything there worth selling,’ he had told the agent crisply. ‘It’s already been empty and unheated for three winters, and if the government gives the go-ahead for the new bypass the area will be swarming with protestors just looking for an empty house to take over and make themselves comfortable in.’
Buying the house, though, had simply been the beginning of a whole spate of difficult negotiations. The property was listed, and every detail of his planning applications had to be scanned by what had felt like a never-ending chain of committees, but now at last the approved builder had started work on the property, and, with any luck, he should be able to move into it within the year, the builder had assured him cheerfully on his last site inspection.
For now, he would have to live with the last owner of his present house’s headache-inducing choice of colours.
‘Brough, is that you?’
He grimaced wryly as Eve came rushing into the hallway, her face pink with excitement as she told him breathlessly, ‘Guess what? Julian rang; he’s going to be free this evening after all, so he’s taking me out to dinner. Oh, Brough, I was so afraid he was going to be angry with me when you insisted that you couldn’t help him with his new venture.’
As he listened to her Brough could feel himself starting to grind his teeth. There was no point in wishing that his sister had a more worldly and less naive outlook, nor in blaming his grandmother and the old-fashioned girls’ school she had insisted he send her to for the part they had played in her upbringing. He might just as well blame their parents for dying—and himself for not being able to take on the full responsibility for bringing her up without his grandmother’s help.
He knew how upset his grandmother would be if she knew how ill-prepared the select, protective girls’ school she had chosen so carefully for her had left Eve for the modern world, and some day in the not too distant future Brough was afraid that his sister was going to have her eyes opened to reality in a way that was going to hurt her very badly.
As he’d thought a number of times before, there was no point in him trying to warn Eve about Julian Cox. She had a surprisingly strong, stubborn streak to her make-up, and was very sensitive about both her own independence and her judgement. To imply that Julian was deceiving her, that she was totally and completely wrong about him in every single way, was almost guaranteed to send her running into his arms, and not away from them, which would have been bad enough if what she stood to lose from such an event was her emotional and physical innocence—more than bad enough. But Eve stood to inherit a very sizeable sum of money from their parents’ estate when she reached her twenty-fifth birthday, and Brough was convinced that Julian Cox would have no compunction whatsoever about marrying her simply for that reason alone.
Brough had had Julian’s financial affairs thoroughly investigated. To describe them as in total disarray and bordering on the legally fraudulent was no exaggeration, nor was his emotional history any less murky. But, of course, Eve wouldn’t hear a word against him. She considered herself to be in love.
‘Oh, I’m so pleased. He was awfully upset this morning after you told him you really couldn’t help him … That was mean of you,’ she reproached Brough.
‘On the contrary, it was simply good business sense,’ Brough told her dryly. ‘I know how you feel about him, Eve but …’
‘Oh, Brough, please don’t start lecturing me,’ she begged him. ‘Just because you don’t want to fall in love … because you don’t have someone to share your life with … someone special … that doesn’t mean … I love him, Brough,’ she said simply.
Brough sighed as she went upstairs. He wished he could find some way to protect her from the ultimate inevitability of having her heart broken, but he suspected that even if he were to confront her with incontrovertible evidence of Cox’s real nature she would simply close her eyes to it.
Women! There was no way of understanding how their minds and, even more, their emotions worked. Look at Kelly. A bright, intelligent, beautiful young woman who was apparently as oblivious to Cox’s faults as his own sister. Not that he thought that Kelly’s other choice of male was any better—but for very different reasons. Harry was quite obviously an extremely estimable young man, the kind of man whom he would have been only too pleased to see dating his sister, but, as a partner for a woman of Kelly’s obviously feisty and quicksilver personality, surely a totally wrong choice. She needed a man who could match the quickness of her brain … who could appreciate the intelligence and artistry of her work … who could share the passion that he could sense ran so strongly through her at the very deepest level of her personality … A man who …
Abruptly he caught himself up.
Nothing he had experienced in his admittedly brief contact with Kelly had indicated that she had the kind of insecure, needy personality that would make her a natural victim for a man like Cox.
Eve, on the other hand, if he was honest, desperately needed to feel loved and secure, to have a partner who would incorporate into their adult relationship the kind of protective, emotional padding she had missed from the loss of their father and experienced in a different way at school. Eve needed a man who would treat her gently, a man with whom she could have the kind of relationship which he privately would find too unequal. The woman he loved would have to be his equal, his true partner in every aspect of their lives. There would have to be complete and total honesty and commitment between them, a deep, inner knowledge that they would be there for one another through their whole lives—he too had suffered from their parents’ death, he acknowledged wryly.
And Eve was wrong about him not wanting to fall in love … to marry. At the end of his present decade lay the watershed birthday of forty, comfortably in the distance as yet, but still there on the horizon. When he thought of himself as forty, it was not particularly pleasant to visualise himself still alone, uncommitted … childless … But the woman he married, the woman he loved …
Unbidden, the memory of how Kelly’s lips had felt beneath his flooded
