Mary Lyons - It Started With A Kiss

‘Rather you than me, any day. That old hag is a right battleaxe!’ the older woman called out, her scornful peal of laughter echoing in Angelica’s ears as she hurried down the street.

There was clearly no love lost between her old nanny and Lady Marshall. Unfortunately, Betty had known the imperious old lady when she’d been plain Doreen Summers, kicking up her legs in the back row of the chorus. ‘A very flighty piece she was, too,’ Betty had said. ‘If Doreen hadn’t caught old Sir Edward Marshall’s eye, and frogmarched him to the altar, goodness knows where she might have ended up!’

However, as Angelica got off the bus at Sloane Square, she was far less interested in Lady Marshal’s past than in her present position as chairman of the board of trustees responsible for the maintenance and upkep of Lonsdale House… Of course, Betty was quite right. There was no doubt that the elderly lady was an extremely tiresome and difficult womam. Unfortunately, with her very strong, forcful personality, she had become the dominant voice among the other trusts, who all weakly bowed to her will.

Having greeted the group of people gathered together for her tour, with some latecomers still arriving, Angelica was still preocaupied with wondering exactly how to dealt with Lady Marshall. It was vitally important that the elderly woman should fully understand the immediate, desperate problems she was now facing with Lonsdale House.

Collecting the small fee for the tour, and automatically handing back the small yellow receipts, plus any necessary change, Angelica was just wondering if she could put forward the idea of obtaining advice from the Victoria and Albert Museum, when a deeply voiced ‘thank you’ caught her attention.

Looking more closely at the long, tanned fingers of the hand into which she was just placing a receipt, whose wrist was clasped by a distinctly familiar, wafer-thin gold watch, she suddenly felt faint. All the breath seemed to have been driven from her body, as though she’d been hit by a swift, violent blow to the solair plus. Feeling quite sick, her eyes ’slowly travelled up the dark sleeve of the immaculately cut suit towards the broad shoulders and…

This couldn’t be happening to her! Angelica clamped her eyelids tightly shut for a moment, fervently praying that she was mistaken. Could she be suffering from a very brief, temporary hallucination? But when she opened her dazed blue eyes again she realised that she was way out of luck. Because standing there and regarding her with a mocking, sardonic smile was the man who’d caused her such distress and emotional trauma only a few days ago.

‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped breathlessly.

‘I thought it might be interesting to learn something about the history of Chelsea,’ he drawled coolly, his lips twitching with amusement at her expression of consternation and horror. ‘I’m also looking forward to seeing if you are any better informed about this area of London than you were about the City.’

Ignoring the hateful man’s slur on her competence, Angelica quickly tried to pull herself together. ‘Go away!’ she spat through clenched teeth. ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with you!’

‘Well, I’m afraid that you don’t have any choice in the matter,’ he murmured sardonically, holding up the yellow receipt. ‘You have taken my money— which means that we now have a contract between us.’

What was it about this terrible man which could send her into a blind fury in just five seconds flat? Angelica asked herself wrathfully. And did paying his money really give him a lawful right to join

the tour?

‘So, OK—go ahead and sue me!’ she ground out defiantly. ‘Because you are definitely, absolutely not accompanying me on this tour today.’

The man raised a dark eyebrow, staring down at her blandly for a moment, before reaching Inside his expensive dark suit. Producing an equally expensive-looking leather wallet, he extracted a small white business card.

‘My dear girl, I have no intention of suing you,’ he informed her coolly. ‘However, if you continue to refuse to allow me to join this tour, I suggest that you give my card to your employer. You can tell him that he’ll be hearing from my lawyers— about a possible action for damages.’

‘A what…?’ Angelica stared up at him in dawning horror. ‘You’ve got to be kidding?’

The man shook his dark head. ‘By using totally incompetent guides such as yourself, your employer is clearly responsible for taking money under false pretences,’ he drawled silkily. Placing his business card in her nervously shaking hand, he added, ‘I can assure you that it will give me great pleasure—plus the considerable satisfaction of performing a public duty, of course—to put both him and his ramshackle firm out of business.’

‘You…you can’t possibly do that!’ she protested angrily.

‘Would you like to place a bet on it?’ he drawled, the hard, confident note in his voice sending shivers of fright scudding up and down her spine.

He gazed past her, to where the other members of the group were clearly becoming restless.

“It would seem that you have only a few seconds to come to a decision, Angelica. If you delay any longer, it looks as though I’m not going to be the only client to complain about the way your employer runs his business!’

THIS was definitely not one of her better tours, Angelica told herself glumly, staring blindly at an oil painting on the wall, while the other members of her group inspected the ancient hammer-beam roof and oriel windows of Crosby Hall.

She’d had no choice but to give in, of course. Despite practically dancing with rage in the middle of Sloane Square, Angelica had quickly realised that the awful man’s dire threats to sue her employer, David Webster, had virtually settled the argument. She wouldn’t have minded standing up in the High Court and telling the whole world just how objectionable the man really was. In fact, she’d have relished the chance to do so! But she really couldn’t expose poor David to the possibility of legal proceedings. Especially when the conflict had absolutely nothing to do with the conduct of his business, and far more—if she was to be entirely honest— with an overwhelming personality clash between herself and the man, whose name appeared to be Luke Cunningham.

‘This doesn’t mean a thing!’ she’d snorted, grimacing at the small white business card which he’d placed in her hand. ‘It wouldn’t take you more than five minutes to have one of these printed—with any name you chose to put on it. For all I know, you could be Jack the Ripper!’ she’d added belligerently, squinting down in the sunshine at the small print, which merely stated in capital letters ‘LUKE CUNNINGHAM’, and in the bottom left-hand corner the words ‘Cornhill Bank, Bishopsgate’.

‘Don’t be so stupid—of course that’s my real name!’ he snapped, clearly annoyed and put out by her temerity in suggesting otherwise.

‘Oh, yes?’ she queried sarcastically, before giving a bark of jeering, scornful laughter which she hoped he would find profoundly irritating. Although Angelica was well aware, from the sounds of general unrest in the group behind her, that she couldn’t afford to stand here arguing with this man for much longer, she was quite determined to fight Mr Luke Cunningham every inch of the way.

‘If you think that I’m likely to be impressed by the fact that you work in a bank, you couldn’t be more wrong!’ she added scathingly. ‘Bank managers, are definitely not my favourite people at the moment.’