her love for him she had been tempted to give way to him. She had loved him—or had thought she had, she thought bitterly. God, she had been a fool, and naïve! And now here was history almost repeating itself with poor little Kirsty!
Her phone was ringing as she entered the flat, and when she picked it up she heard the familiar voice of her boss, Jerome Francis. He wanted to tell her about a new commission they had obtained from the National Trust. Jerome’s company specialised in repairing prize tapestries and other antique fabrics, and Chelsea was his most skilled employee. She had left drama school after her débâcle with Darren, too humiliated to return, guessing that the others on the course with her must have known how Darren had been deluding her, and admitting to herself that she did not have the aptitude for the stage she had once thought. She lacked the hard, unyielding core that made a first-rate actress, one of her teachers had told her, but she had gained a certain panache; a way of moving and holding her head that drew the eye, even while she herself was unaware of it.
Instead of the stage she had turned instead to her second love, embroidery, being lucky enough to enrol at the Royal College of Embroiderers, where she had come to know Jerome and eventually to work for him.
The new commission sounded just her cup of tea. The Trust had just taken over a mansion in Northumberland. The house had been in the same family—a cadet branch of the Percys—for many centuries and had been inherited by a cousin who had decided to offer it to the Trust.
The pattern was a familiar one, but what excited Chelsea was Jerome’s information that among the contents being left in the house was an extremely old tapestry, said to have been stitched by the ladies of the family during the Third Crusade.
‘If everything goes well you could start work up there when you’ve finished the chair covers,’ Jerome suggested. ‘I’ll be away most of next week, so we can finalise arrangements when I get back.’
One of the joys of her job was that her work was never monotonous or boring and could and did take her all over the country, and sometimes to the chateaux and palaces of Europe, but Northumberland was somewhere she had never before visited, and Chelsea felt the familiar excitement growing in her as she replaced the receiver, her happy smile being replaced by a sudden frown as she remembered her conversation with her sister.
Ann was not a fusser, nor prone to exaggeration, and Kirsty was an enchantingly feminine girl; pretty and clever with an excellent future ahead of her, providing she did not fall into the same trap that had so cruelly mauled her, Chelsea thought grimly.
She was granted an unexpected opportunity to judge for herself exactly what danger her niece was in when she had to drive into town for some embroidery silks she had run out of.
For most of the articles she worked on, Chelsea dyed her own silks, using natural dyes of the same type as would originally have been used, and these were then cleverly faded to match the existing colours, but in this instance all she wanted was an oyster-coloured silk she knew she could obtain from a local craft shop.
Parking her car in the cobbled square which doubled as a market place on market days, Chelsea got out and walked down the narrow street which housed the craft shop, stunned as she did so to see her niece emerging from a newly opened restaurant, accompanied by a darkly tall man.
For a moment the elegance of the expensively cut charcoal grey suit, the way the lean brown fingers cupped Kirsty’s elbow as they stepped off the pavement, took her back in time and she herself was seventeen again.
Fighting against anger, Chelsea stepped back automatically into the shadows, the progress of the other couple across the road affording her an uninterrupted view of her niece’s escort for the first time.
One look at him and Chelsea felt her heart sink. Ann had been quite right; this man had sensuality written all over him—it was imprinted into his skin, drawn tautly over high cheekbones, olive-tinted as though he spent a considerable amount of his time in climates far warmer than Melchester’s.
As he bent his head to Kirsty’s Chelsea was forced to acknowledge the fascination he would undoubtedly have for a girl her niece’s age—and for many considerably older.
The way he moved, his smile, the lean fitness of his body, all bespoke a maleness that would attract the majority of women.
But not her, Chelsea thought contemptuously, wishing she could forget the adoration in her niece’s eyes as she looked up at him. They had now safely crossed the street and were walking past Melchester’s one and only fashionable boutique when an elegant blonde emerged, the smile she gave Kirsty’s escort a very clear invitation.
Chelsea didn’t miss the way Slade Ashford’s eyes admired the blonde’s slender curves, and her fears that she wouldn’t be able to free Kirsty vanished on another wave of contempt. Even when he was with her niece the creature couldn’t keep his eyes off other women! What could he possibly want with Kirsty, a man of his undoubted experience? Was her very innocence the challenge which his jaded appetite demanded? Would he simply seduce her and then leave her? Not if she had anything to do with it, Chelsea vowed grimly.
She telephoned her sister when she returned home, and ascertained that Kirsty was indeed spending the afternoon with Slade Ashford.
‘I didn’t want to let her go,’ Ann admitted, ‘but what could I do? If I’d refused she’d only have arranged another meeting behind my back. I don’t want to force her into lying to us.’
‘Don’t worry too much,’ Chelsea comforted her. ‘Kirsty might be blinded by adoration, but he’s far from being similarly afflicted.’ She told her sister briefly about the blonde. ‘You know the type—skin-tight jeans, brief tee-shirt and a very come hither smile.’
‘Poor Kirsty!’
‘I expect he finds her refreshingly different,’ Chelsea said bitterly, remembering Darren using those words about her in what now seemed another life. ‘But at least it means that he shouldn’t be too difficult to detach from her, and perhaps the humiliation of it being done so publicly at your party will be enough for her to refuse to see him again.’
‘It ought to be,’ Ann agreed. ‘She shares your pride.’
‘I don’t think it would be a good idea to introduce me to him as your sister,’ Chelsea warned Ann. ‘He just might smell a rat. In fact, it might be as well if I engineered my own introduction. I suspect Kirsty will try to stick to his side like glue, so we’ll have to find some means of detaching her for long enough for me to introduce myself. I only hope I haven’t forgotten all my old drama training, although playing femmes fatales wasn’t high on the list of our studies.’
‘Perhaps not, but you’re an excellent mimic,’ Ann reminded her sister, ‘and travelling as you do, you must have had ample opportunity to study the breed in its natural habitat.’
Chelsea grinned. If it wasn’t for her concern for poor Kirsty, she might almost enjoy cutting Slade Ashford down to size. He and men like him had preyed on her sex for too long. Picturing Slade Ashford’s expression when she had seen him with Kirsty, Chelsea doubted that a woman had ever said ‘no’ to him in his life. All the bitterness she had experienced over Darren welled up inside her. Now, she realised, she had a chance to even the score.
Like any good actress she laid her plans carefully, including a visit to London to find a suitable outfit. Something definitely provocative and sexy, she decided, as she sat in the train; something to appeal to the experienced male predator; not too blatant though …
She found it after several hours’ search in a small boutique tucked away off Bond Street. It was part of their new Christmas stock, the salesgirl told Chelsea as she admired it. It was also criminally expensive, but nevertheless she agreed to try it on.
Normally the rich blue taffeta dress with its tight moulded bodice wouldn’t have appealed to her at all, but as she emerged from the changing cubicle to study herself full-length in the pier glass she had to admit that it suited her. The tight bodice clung seductively to her breasts, her shoulders and throat glowing softly pale against the rich fabric. The rustling skirts billowed