Anne Mather - Pale Orchid

Laura sank down weakly on to the banquette behind her. ‘For how long?’ she asked helplessly. ‘When will they be coming back?’

‘One month, maybe two. Who knows?’ Jason lifted his shoulders in a dismissing gesture. ‘I’m not my sister’s keeper.’

Laura shook her head, resting her elbows on her knees and cupping her cheeks in her hot palms. ‘Oh, God!’ she said again, feeling the emptiness of despair gripping her insides. ‘What am I going to do?’

It was only partly a rhetorical question, but the sudden breeze through the open door alerted her to the fact that Jason had left her. She was alone in the green and gold beauty of the saloon, alone with her unwilling memories, and with the terrifying realisation that there was nothing she could do.

She supposed she should leave. After all, Jason had done what he could. He had told her where Kazantis was, and he had not disbelieved her story. The anger he might have displayed at the news that Pamela had evidently been having an affair with his sister’s husband had not materialised, and she was simply wasting her time, and his, by pursuing the matter further. Somehow, she was going to have to find a way to tell Pamela that Mike Kazantis was married; that there was no point in her threatening to kill herself again, because he could not marry her. Not unless he got a divorce from Irene, of course, and if Jason was right and he was with his wife, in Italy, that did not seem at all likely. Besides which, Laura had met Irene, and she knew her to be a very beautiful young woman. It had been an outside chance at best that her marriage to Kazantis had floundered. Remembering what she knew of him, Laura doubted anything would prise him away from the wealth and influence that came from being Marco Montefiore’s son-in-law, and contacting Jason had been her last resort.

Which brought her back to that other puzzling development: why had Jason assumed he knew why she was in Hawaii? Was there something she had overlooked? Did he know something she didn’t know? And why had he kissed her? She had been prepared to face his anger, not his passion.

With trembling fingers, she traced the bare contours of her lips. She wore little in the way of cosmetics, just eyeliner and mascara, and occasionally a shiny lip-gloss to frame her mouth. But what little make-up she had been wearing had been erased by his caress, and she couldn’t deny the unwilling awareness that his touch still had the power to melt her bones. If only …

His reappearance with an enamelled beaker which he held out to her arrested her guilty thoughts. ‘Here,’ he said, pushing it into her hand. ‘You look as though you could use it.’

‘What is it?’ she asked foolishly, while the aromatic odour of ground beans floated to her nostrils, and Jason’s mouth pulled down.

‘Just coffee,’ he replied drily, taking off his jacket and pulling off his tie. ‘Laced with heroin, of course!’ He grimaced. ‘Drink it, for God’s sake! I’m not reduced to drugging my women yet!’

Laura obediently sipped the fragrant beverage, recovering a little of her composure in the time it took her to drink it. Jason, she noticed, tossed his jacket and tie aside and flung himself on to the wide velvet cushions at the broad forward end of the cabin, crossing his legs as he had done before and staring broodingly out on to the sunlit dock.

‘So, tell me what happened,’ he said at length, when he had given her time to compose herself. ‘How did your sister meet Kazantis?’

‘I don’t know.’ Laura caught her lower lip between her teeth before continuing: ‘She works— worked —in Sausalito, but she has an apartment in San Francisco.’

‘Since when?’

‘Oh eighteen months, I suppose. She qualified as a physiotherapist in London, but she wanted to travel. I tried to dissuade her from coming to the United States, but …’

‘… she wouldn’t listen?’

‘Right.’ Laura looked down into her cup. ‘She always seemed so much younger than me. It’s only two years, I know, but—well, I’ve always felt much older.’

‘And you didn’t want her to venture out into the bold bad world!’ remarked Jason wryly, running his hand inside the opened neckline of his shirt and in so doing loosening several more buttons. ‘So—she met Kazantis. Why didn’t you warn her?’

‘Warn her?’ Laura looked across the cabin at him, uncomfortably aware of the sensuality of his exploring hand. The skin of his chest exposed by his careless movements was as brown and smooth as she remembered, his nipples taut, an arrowing of fine hair only lightly roughening his flesh. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘She didn’t write to you?’

‘Well, yes. Yes, of course, she wrote.’ Laura dragged her eyes away, and tried to keep her mind on what she was saying. ‘She just didn’t mention her relationship with Mike Kazantis, that’s all. And … and after all, she wouldn’t know who he was.’

‘Who he was?’

‘Yes.’ Laura shifted a little restlessly. ‘Your brother-in-law; Irene’s husband! I … she … we never discussed your relations.’

Jason regarded her intently. ‘But she knew of me? She knew we were living together, didn’t she?’

Laura moistened her lips. ‘She knew we were … close, yes.’

‘But did she know we were living together?’ persisted Jason insistently, and Laura wondered if he already knew the answer.

‘It’s not important,’ she said, shaking her head, but he did not agree.

‘Perhaps, if you’d been more honest with her, she would have felt more able to confide in you,’ he commented brusquely, and Laura met his relentless gaze with hastily-summoned indignation.

‘Are you saying it’s my fault?’ she exclaimed, using anger as a means to avoid his questioning, and he shrugged.

‘I’m saying you were afraid to tell your sister the truth. Why should you be surprised if she feels likewise?’

Laura sniffed, and buried her nose in the beaker. ‘That’s a simplistic way of looking at things,’ she said, in a muffled voice.

‘I’m a simplistic person,’ he responded carelessly, and she thought how ironic it was that he should say a thing like that.

‘You’re the least simplistic person I know,’ she retorted childishly. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, does it matter what I did or didn’t tell her? Pamela’s pregnant, right? And if I hadn’t arrived when I did, she would have been dead!’

Jason considered her for a few nerve-racking moments, then he said quietly: ‘Exactly why did you arrive in California?’

‘Pamela ‘phoned me.’ Laura cradled the beaker between her palms and gazed into space. ‘I’d just got back from Aix …’

‘The South of France, I know.’

‘… and when she rang …’ Laura paused briefly, as the import of what he had said reminded her of something he had said earlier— ‘when she rang, I sensed something was wrong.’

‘Just sensed?’

‘No. No.’ Laura spread a helpless hand. ‘Pamela sounded strange—desperate! I don’t know why, but I knew she had to have rung for a purpose.’

‘A cry for help?’ suggested Jason drily, and Laura looked at him sharply.

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He tilted his head back against the dark green velvet and studied her through narrowed eyes. ‘But, objectively, I’d say that perhaps your sister wasn’t as desperate to kill herself as you might think. I mean, she did rig herself a lifeline before jumping over the side, metaphorically speaking, of course.’

Laura sat up straighter. ‘That’s a rotten thing to suggest!’

‘It’s something for you to think about,’ retorted Jason flatly. ‘Laura, I hear of people over-dosing every day. Most of them do a better job of it than your sister appears to have done.’