His Untamed Innocent. Sara Craven

the cup of designer hot-chocolate she likes last thing at night.’

      ‘For a chance to work with Adela Mason, I’d even pick the cocoa beans,’ Marin assured her jubilantly. ‘It’s not a problem.’

      ‘But getting through the interview might be,’ Wendy warned.

      Adela Mason had been taking part in a TV panel game that evening, dark hair cut in a severe bob, and a crimson dress making the most of an enviable figure. She was bright and sparky, and had emerged as an easy winner, accepting the plaudits of her fellow-panellists with apparent modesty.

      Yet there had been something about her smile and the turn of her head that had plainly been intended to remind them all that she was also the biggest earner on the show.

      Why should that worry me? Marin had asked herself. I’m not going to be any kind of rival, just a toiler in her vineyard—if I get through the interview, that is.

      However, somewhat to her own surprise, she’d done so.

      ‘You seem to have rather more about you than the other candidates,’ Ms Mason had told her, playing with the large solitaire-diamond on her wedding finger. ‘One of them gave the impression she’d never read a book in her life, and the other was just—unsuitable.’ She looked Marin over, taking in the slender body, the light brown hair swept back from her face and fastened at her nape with a ribbon, the pale, creamy skin and quiet, unremarkable features, and nodded. ‘Yes, if your keyboard skills are up to scratch, I think you’ll do very well.’

      She’d paused. ‘I’m planning to go down to Evrier sur Tarn next week. I expect you to be available to travel with me. Betsy made all the stopover arrangements before she went off to play Florence Nightingale, but if there are any difficulties I expect you to sort them out.’

      Marin could have done without that fairly callous remark about her predecessor, but she’d smiled and agreed that sorting of most kinds was well within her remit.

      Not realising that, less than a month later, it would be her own immediate future that would need her attention.

      And there, she thought with faint annoyance, went that damned phone again.

      ‘People know I’m away,’ Lynne had told her as she’d left, adding drily, ‘And I’ve left Rad a written memo too, so you shouldn’t be disturbed.’

      Except it wasn’t working out like that. Someone or more had clearly slipped through the net.

      ‘Please leave your message after the tone,’ she advised the unknown caller in a sing-song voice, before adding more hot water and some extra drops of perfumed oil to the bath and sliding further down into its comforting depths.

      It must be lovely, she reflected wistfully, to be so much in demand, to have friends constantly ringing to suggest a cinema, a meal or even a drink.

      And to have someone like Mike…

      That probably most of all, she admitted. Because, at twenty, she still hadn’t had anything approaching a serious relationship with a man.

      On the other hand, she was by no means Marin No-Mates. She’d gone on dates since she’d been in London, of course she had, generally making up foursomes with the other girls at the agency. Occasionally, the guy she’d been partnered with for the evening had asked to see her again. Occasionally.

      But in all honesty it had never really mattered to her when there had been no further contact.

      She was the first to recognise that she was shy and found it difficult to sparkle in company, that she didn’t know how to flirt, or take part in the jokey conversations that said one thing but meant something completely different. That she couldn’t in a thousand years imagine herself being drawn into the kind of casual intimacy that seemed the norm these days.

      Not that she disapproved, exactly. What other people did on the briefest acquaintance was none of her business. She only knew that it wasn’t for her, that her own inhibitions weren’t so easily discarded. Probably the men she encountered knew it too, and decided to go after girls with fewer hang-ups.

      ‘Do you think I’m a freak?’ she’d once asked Lynne, troubled, but the other had only laughed.

      ‘No, honey pie, I think you’ve got principles and you’re going to need to fall very seriously in love before you’re tempted to abandon them. And there’s nothing remotely freakish about that, so stop beating yourself up.’

      The memory of that made Marin smile. Lynne was so good for her, she thought gratefully, so warm and outgoing like her father, Derek Fanshawe, who’d met and fallen in love with Marin’s mother six years earlier.

      And very different from her own father, who’d been a quiet man, Marin thought, but fond. Her childhood had been safe and comfortable in the shelter of her parents’ happy marriage.

      Clive Wade had been a successful solicitor, who specialised rather ruefully in divorce, declaring that every case that crossed his desk made him count his own blessings all over again.

      And he’d gone on counting them until the day he’d collapsed outside a courtroom and died with terrible suddenness from a heart weakness no one had ever suspected, leaving Marin’s smiling, bright-eyed mother as a grey-faced ghost unable to comprehend so devastating a loss.

      Looking blankly back at people who told her that at least she had no money worries. That Clive had been a high earner, and had invested shrewdly. And that she should sell their mortgage-free home with its memories and move on.

      But it had been three years before a friend, who worked with her in the charity shop where Barbara Wade spent most of her mornings, had persuaded her to join her on a luxury trip round the Norwegian fjords. Derek Fanshawe, a big man with a ready smile, had been assigned to their table on the first evening, and by the time the cruise had ended Barbara, to her own surprise, no longer felt guilty about warming to his charm and ebullient kindness. Realised in fact that she was going to miss him more than she’d believed possible.

      Only to discover he was not prepared to become a reminiscence to be smiled over and put aside. That, as a widower with an only daughter, he wanted to see Barbara again and eventually ask her to make a new life with him.

      There could, Marin realised, have been so many problems. Second families so often didn’t work, and at first she hadn’t wanted to like Derek, seeing this as disloyalty to her father’s memory.

      But he’d accepted her dilemma with such understanding and sensitivity that it had been impossible not to meet him at least halfway. And, watching her mother bloom in his affection, she’d soon grown to love him and know that she could welcome their marriage.

      While in Lynne she’d found not only a sister but a friend. So, in spite of recent events, she could count her blessings too.

      Although the telephone issuing yet another imperative summons was definitely not among them.

      Groaning, she leaned forward to let the water drain away, then lifted herself lithely out of the bath, reaching for one of the fluffy, white bath sheets waiting in a neat pile on the tiled surround and wrapping it round her like a sarong, tucking the ends in above her breasts.

      She shook her hair loose, combing the damp ends with her fingers, before wandering barefoot down the passage into the living room.

      She went to the telephone table and pressed the ‘play’ button. A man’s voice—not Mike’s—said abruptly, ‘Lynne, pick up. It’s urgent.’ The second message was simply a sigh, expressing impatience and exasperation in equal measure, and the third had been cut off as soon as the machine had kicked in.

      Perhaps the caller had decided it was time to take no for an answer after all, Marin thought as she turned away—then froze as she heard the rattle of a key in a lock, the sound of the front door opening then slamming shut, followed by a swift and undoubtedly masculine tread approaching down the hallway.

      Sick with fright, she looked round for something, anything that she could use