Merlyn's Magic

He swung away from her to stand up and cross the room to once again stare broodingly into the fire. ‘It's the usual reaction when you find a man crying in front of you like a child!'

‘Rand—–'

‘Go back to your room—please,’ he encouraged with a harshness that brooked no argument.

She hadn't been able to help him at all. All she had been able to do was give him a few moments of forgetfulness in her arms and then more pain. He felt as if he had betrayed his wife; he didn't need to tell her that, she just knew.

Merlyn's bedroom looked just as she had left it, the bedside lamp still on, the bedclothes thrown back where she had hurried to see what was happening. But she had changed. Since her disillusionment with Mark she had avoided any real closeness to men. She went out with them, she had a good time, but at the end of the day she always went home alone. God knows she had had her chances for it not to be that way, Christopher Drake only the last in a long line of men who wanted her to share their bed. But she had never found any difficulty in resisting those physical entanglements that in the end brought nothing but heartache.

Until Rand Carmichael. But she had felt no hesitation as she went to him, had felt that it was meant to be, as if she had known that from the moment she first saw him. Could it be that she had been so deeply involved with her research of Suzie Forrester these past months that for a brief time she had thought she was her? But that was ridiculous. Wasn't it …?

* * *

Merlyn was already in the lounge when Rand came downstairs the next morning. She had found the broken glass gone from the hearth, the room looking innocent of the stormy lovemaking it had witnessed the evening before.

Merlyn wished she felt as innocent! Her body ached, the slight soreness she was experiencing not alleviated by the lengthy soak in the bath she had indulged in earlier. Her bottom lip was swollen and painful, and she felt altogether irritable. The only good thing about the day seemed to be that the rain had stopped falling some time in the night and with luck the water level on the ford would have gone down enough for her to get out of here. She was going to walk to the hotel if she still couldn't drive there; she certainly couldn't stay on here when she and Rand were so embarrassed about last night.

It was after nine when she heard him coming down the stairs, standing up to move nervously in front of one of the tall windows, the bright daylight behind her giving a golden halo to the red flame of her hair, her slender body warmed by fitting black denims and a royal-blue coloured jumper.

She looked warily at Rand as he hesitated just inside the doorway before fully entering the room, completing the task of tucking the black shirt he wore into the waistband of fitted grey trousers as he did so. Now that the confrontation had come, Merlyn didn't know what to say to him. What does a woman say to the complete stranger she made love with the night before! Although he hadn't seemed so much of a stranger then.

Rand was eyeing her just as warily. ‘Has Mrs Sutton arrived yet?’ he asked abruptly.

‘No one's arrived.’ She shook her head. She had been going to say they were still completely alone, but in the circumstances that didn't sound right at all.

He frowned. ‘I wonder—–'

Both of them were startled when the telephone began to ring, Rand striding across the room to answer it. Merlyn watched him beneath lowered lashes, still finding it incredible that she knew his body more intimately than she knew her own. Any magic that had taken place last night had to have been instigated by Rand!

‘Yes,’ he was speaking to the caller now. ‘Okay, we'll see you soon.’ He rang off, shrugging slightly as he met Merlyn's questioning gaze. ‘Anne,’ he provided abruptly. ‘She's driving over.'

Oh God, Merlyn thought shakily, how was she supposed to face Suzie's sister after what had happened in this very room the night before! Rand seemed to guess at her dismay.

‘About last night—–'

‘Do we have to talk about it?’ she cut in raggedly.

‘Not if you don't want to.’ He frowned in his effort to read her expression with the daylight reflected behind her. ‘But—–'

‘I don't,’ she snapped, her hands moving together nervously. If this was the way a woman felt the morning after going to bed with a man she was glad she had avoided such encounters; she had never felt so uncomfortably out of place in her life!

He ran a hand through his loosely curling black hair. ‘I'd been drinking—–'

She had known that, had tasted the brandy on his lips and tongue, colour flooding her cheeks as she vividly recalled their insistent probing. ‘If that's supposed to make me feel better, it doesn't!’ Her eyes flashed deeply green.

‘I'm not trying to make you feel better—–'

‘That's good—because you weren't succeeding!’ She was so tense her usual control had gone. ‘You see, I hadn't been drinking!'

Rand sighed. ‘I'm out of practice with the niceties of these bedroom games, and I'm sorry if all of this is coming out the wrong way.’ He didn't notice how pale Merlyn had become as he moved to pour himself a cup of coffee from the pot Merlyn had made earlier. ‘Believe it or not, I was faithful to my wife for the eight years of our marriage—–'

‘Why shouldn't I believe it?’ she snapped. ‘You loved her.'

‘Yes, I did,’ he grated bleakly. ‘But it isn't fashionable in her world to be faithful to a spouse.'

What was he saying, that Suzie had been unfaithful to him? Merlyn had seen too many show business marriages fall apart because of the long separations and the loneliness their work often necessitated. But she wouldn't believe that of Suzie Forrester.

‘We were both faithful.’ Rand seemed to mock her indignation. ‘And since her death—–’ He made an impatient movement, as if it still hurt him to admit she was dead. ‘I'm just trying to explain to you why the age-old platitudes of “how good it was” and “you were wonderful” don't trip lightly off my tongue—–'

‘It wasn't that good,’ Merlyn cut in hardly, knowing that as far as she was concerned she lied; it had been beautiful. ‘And I wasn't that wonderful,’ she scorned self-derisively.

Rand's eyes had narrowed. ‘You weren't that bad either. Look, I'm not trying to give you a rating from one to ten, I just wanted to make you understand that I don't usually extract that sort of payment from unexpected guests, that last night was just—the circumstances were—–'

‘Unreal,’ Merlyn supplied softly. ‘They were completely unreal, as if they happened to two other people and not us at all.'

He blinked at her. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed in a puzzled voice. ‘That's exactly the way it seems. I don't remember the last time I—–’ He turned towards the front door as the bell rang, his expression grim. ‘That will be Anne.'

Merlyn swallowed hard, dreading her meeting with the other woman now, feeling as if she had betrayed Anne's trust in her. ‘Please don't let her realise about last night—–'

Rand glared at her. ‘Do you think I want that any more than you do?’ he snapped. ‘God knows we've had our disagreements in the past, but making love to one of her friends would not be acceptable to Anne at all.'

Merlyn released her breath raggedly as she waited for him to admit the other woman. She wasn't a friend of Anne Benton's, but she had wanted to be, and she knew that if Anne realised what had happened in this room the night before that she, too, would wonder at Merlyn's motives. She doubted anyone would believe her only ‘motive’ have been to be with the man she had wanted so desperately from the first. Mistaking this house for the hotel had been bad enough, but making love with Rand had ruined any chance she might have had of convincing him to let her appear in the film, especially as that chance had been slim to start with.

The woman who entered the lounge at Rand's side wasn't at all what Merlyn had been expecting. Anne was a short blonde woman of about thirty who, if one were being generous, could be called cuddly, and if one weren't, would be called plump. Suzie had been tall, ethereally slim, and dark-haired, and her sister came as something of a surprise.

Anne couldn't exactly be called beautiful either, with her even features, but as she smiled Merlyn realised she had something much more than mere surface beauty, that her warm blue eyes glowed with her inner serenity and gave her a charm that couldn't be bought or applied and would never fade.

‘Merlyn!’ she greeted warmly, crossing the room to hug her, unzipping the anorak she wore over a powder-blue jumper and denims as the heat in the room hit her. ‘You're just as beautiful as I thought you would be,’ she complimented without envy. ‘You really—–’ The glow left her eyes as she frowned up at Merlyn. ‘My God, what happened to your mouth?’ she gasped, moving Merlyn out of the light of the window. ‘You didn't mention anything yesterday about an accident—–'

‘I wasn't in an accident,’ Merlyn refuted reluctantly, knowing Anne had seen what Rand hadn't; the black and purple bruising about the cut she had made on her bottom lip.

‘But you look as if someone punched you in the— My God,’ she breathed dazedly, turning slowly to look at Rand. ‘You didn't!’ She shook her head disbelievingly. ‘Brandon, you can't blame Merlyn for any of this, it was my idea that she come up here. You didn't have to do this.’ She looked again with horror at the bruising to Merlyn's lip.

‘I didn't,’ he dismissed abruptly. ‘What was your idea? And if Merlyn is a friend of yours how is it that you didn't know how beautiful she is?’ His eyes were narrowed with cold suspicion.

Merlyn gave a negative shake of her head as Anne looked at her enquiringly, knowing the other woman had expected her to have told Rand who she was by now. Maybe she should have done, but he was already unfriendly enough without that, and she had had no idea how long she was going to be stranded with him in this way. Cold indifference she could live with, armed warfare was something else! She would have told him the truth before she left, Merlyn knew she owed him that. Although she probably wouldn't have told him in quite this way.

‘Because—–'

‘Because Anne and I have never met before,’ Merlyn cut in firmly, giving the other woman a reassuring look before meeting Rand's challenging gaze at her admission. ‘I'm an actress, and I—–'

‘Want to appear in that damned film they intend making about my wife,’ he finished thunderously. ‘I should have known,’ he scorned. ‘Arriving here in the storm with some tale about thinking this was Anne's hotel, when all the time—–'

‘That wasn't a tale,’ Merlyn defended herself heatedly. ‘Do you really imagine I wanted our first meeting to be made that way?'

‘Yes, I think that's exactly what you wanted.’ He looked at her in contempt. ‘I think you planned yesterday down to the last detail!'

All the colour drained from her face at his silent implication that she had intended that they should make love last night all along, that if the opportunity hadn't presented itself the way that it had then she would have made it happen. It was completely unjustified, but she had known who he was and she had made love with him, and that was all Rand could see at the moment.