LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER TWO

      BY MORNING Alethea had decided that she would ring Trent de Havilland and tell him that she was not going to go to dinner with him. She would tell him that she had been so surprised by his call, she hadn’t had a chance to recall a prior engagement. Into her mind loomed the thought of another evening of Polly deciding she did not want to go to sleep and, what was more, she was never going to steep—and if she wasn’t ever going to go to sleep, the whole world was going to hear about it.

      Hating herself for thinking that it would be quite nice to have a tantrum-free evening, Alethea took her mother a cup of tea and went to her office, where she found time during the day only to discover that Trenton de Havilland’s home phone number wasn’t listed. With Mr Chapman dashing to various meetings, she had no chance to ask him if he had Trent’s number. Or, failing that, if Mr Chapman knew where Trenton de Havilland worked.

      ‘Bye, Alethea,’ Carol said when they parted in the car park twenty minutes after five.

      ‘Bye,’ Alethea smiled, and drove home with her tummy all of a flutter. She had been out on dates before, but only with men she had known for some while—and never with any man like Trent!

      ‘Dinner will be late,’ her mother greeted her. ‘We’ve had such a day of it.’

      ‘Polly playing up?’ Alethea guessed.

      ‘She’s been as good as gold.’ Her mother purred as if the high voltage tot had never ever known a temper tantrum. ‘We went to the house—it hasn’t been sold yet—and he was there.’

      ‘Keith?’

      ‘Who else? He’s been suspended.’

      ‘SEC have found out about the missing money?’ Her mother nodded. ‘They’re investigating. I couldn’t resist telling him a few home truths. He called me an interfering old bat! Can you imagine?’

      There was more in the same vein. Eleanor Pemberton only broke off momentarily when Maxine came into the room, looking as if she’d been crying. Alethea guessed that her sister had heard more than enough of what her mother had to say on the subject of her husband, and broke in quickly, ‘Actually, I’m going out to dinner this evening, so I won’t be needing—’

      ‘With Carol?’ her mother asked sharply, her thoughts swiftly taken away from the man her other daughter had married.

      ‘No—er—a—an acquaintance.’

      ‘A male acquaintance?’ her mother fired at her before she could add more. ‘You never did get round to saying who phoned last night—is it him?’

      ‘Yes, actually.’

      ‘Hrmph,’ her mother grunted. ‘Do I know him?’ was the next question. Alethea had been through the third degree on several occasions before.

      ‘I’ll introduce you; he’s calling for me at seven,’ she replied, and quickly made her escape to go and shower and change, and to wonder why if, as she told herself, she did not want to go out with Mr Trenton de Havilland, she should feel so churned up; somehow she was very wary, yet at the same time she was experiencing a prickle of excitement at the prospect.

      Alethea found it a rush to be ready on time. Sadie and Georgia came in to help—which added another five minutes.

      A high-pitched squabble broke out between the two little girls when they both wanted to use her face powder at the same time. However, having separated them and placated them with a spray of perfume behind their ears, Alethea and her two ‘helpers’ finally left her room with one minute to go before seven.

      She knew that, good manners aside, there was no way in which she was going to be able to avoid introducing her escort to her family, but she was hopeful of making that introduction as brief as possible.

      It was not that she was ashamed of her family in any way. It was just that Trenton de Havilland was a very sophisticated man. She wanted him out of there before her mother attempted to give him the grilling which had been the fate of her other escorts.

      ‘Aunt Alethea gave us a squirt with her perfume...’ The girls rushed ahead of her into the sitting room—and stopped dead.

      A prickle of apprehension had already started along Alethea’s spine as she followed them. She, too, stopped dead. Trent de Havilland had already arrived! The strained atmosphere spoke volumes.

      How long he had been closeted with her mother and her sister and, for once, an angelic-looking Polly, Alethea had no idea. She hadn’t heard his car, though perhaps with Sadie and Georgia squawking in her bedroom that wasn’t so surprising.

      ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here to introduce you.’ She smiled as she went into the room, trying to ignore the fact that her mother looked as if she’d been on a diet of vinegar for a week. Maxine was looking much the same—what on earth had been going on?

      ‘I was several minutes early.’ Trent had risen to his feet as, in a mustard-shade dress, she’d entered the room. He paused to say hello to Sadie and Georgia, and started to come over to her. ‘I introduced myself,’ he commented easily. But, for all his relaxed manner, he seemed not inclined to delay their departure. ‘Shall we go?’

      They said their goodbyes, and Alethea led the way out into the hall, followed by her mother’s sharp warning, ‘Don’t forget you have to be up early for work in the morning, Alethea!’

      Oh, grief! She skirted the chest of drawers and heard a thudding sound as Trent didn’t, and just knew that the evening was going to be a disaster before it began.

      ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologised tensely, already guessing that her mother had asked him some pretty pertinent questions and he was probably ready to call the evening off right then and there.

      ‘Sorry?’ he queried, opening the passenger door of a black, extremely expensive car that suggested that whatever job he did, he was well paid for it.

      Loyalty to her family, plus a sudden realisation that, whatever had passed between him, her mother and sister—Maxine had been looking on the sour side too—she did not want to know about it, made her say, ‘At a guess, I’d say you cracked your shin on that chest in the hall.’

      ‘Is it there as some sort of test you give to all your men friends—to see how brave they are?’

      ‘You didn’t cry,’ she replied—and suddenly the tension was eased, and they were both laughing.

      Miraculously, though she rather knew Trent had a lot to do with it, the evening which she thought had started off badly progressed to a fine start.

      He took her to a restaurant which served excellent food. But she had little recollection of what she ate, for he was an excellent dinner companion: witty, serious, knowledgable.

      ‘Yes, but, Trent—er—Trenton...’ She went on to put forward her point of view, but the subject went straight from her mind. It was the confusion he seemed to have a knack of arousing in her. She started to grow hot at the thought that this astute man who had introduced himself to her as Trent de Havilland might think she had been checking up on him, and had found out his name was Trenton. ‘It’s on file—your name.’ She dug a bigger hole for herself. Oh, Heavens, this was dreadful. ‘I wasn’t checking up on you!’ she blurted out.

      ‘That’s not very flattering of you,’ he teased.

      She started to feel a bit better.

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