Deceit Of A Pagan. Carole Mortimer

influence in your life.’

      ‘You will not be allowed to be,’ he said arrogantly. ‘You will lead a very quiet life at my country house.’

      ‘Oh, yes? And just what will you be doing while I keep out of trouble in the country?’

      ‘Working. At my London apartment. I rarely visit the house you would be living in, and as soon as you move there I will endeavour to make my visits even more infrequent. I have no wish to behave as the doting husband too often.’

      ‘The—the what?’

      He looked impatient. ‘We will have to show a certain amount of affection towards one another, no matter how much we hate it. It will be expected.’

      Templar shook her head. ‘Not by me it won’t! I couldn’t possibly pretend to feel affection for someone I—–’ she broke off.

      ‘Hate?’ Leondro Marcose suggested. ‘You can be assured, Templar Newman, that the feeling is mutual. But I think my brother must have had some feelings of love for you. I do not know if he was aware of the type of person you actually are. Not even to know the father of your own child!’ his top lip curled back in a sneer. ‘I will leave you now. But arrangements will be made for our marriage of which you will be notified.’

      ‘Couldn’t I just have a little time to think it all over?’ begged Templar. ‘It’s all so—so sudden.’

      ‘Why sudden?’ he asked tartly. ‘You must have expected something of the sort when you wrote that letter.’

      She shook her head numbly. ‘I didn’t. I just thought your brother—Alex,’ she amended quickly, ‘I thought he might be able to help me.’

      ‘And why is it that you suddenly need this help? Keri is ten months old, did you not consider asking for his assistance when she was born? Ah, but I forgot—you did not know Alex was her father. So why this sudden necessity for his aid?’

      Templar thought of refusing to answer him, but knew he would only force it out of her. ‘I’ve been told I have to leave here at the end of the week, and I simply have nowhere else to go. No one wants to take in an unmarried mother, and I thought Alex might just be able to help for a couple of months until I had something sorted out.’

      ‘And now you find yourself placed in the position where you either marry someone you hate, or lose the one thing you love. It is a pity, of course, but then you were instrumental in forging your own destiny. You must have known you could never have married Alex.’

      ‘And why should I have known that?’

      ‘Because of his fiancée. A betrothal is almost as binding as a marriage in my country, and Alex was very much betrothed. He was killed only four weeks before the wedding was to have taken place. And do not think you were the first girl he had been involved with. There was another model just before his involvement with you.’

      ‘Then he couldn’t have been very much in love with his fiancée, to have behaved that way.’

      ‘Love!’ he scoffed. ‘What does love have to do with marriage? His betrothed was a quiet girl of a good family and breeding, and she would have brought a large dowry to her husband.’

      ‘Everything I’m not, apparently,’ said Templar dryly.

      ‘As you say,’ he agreed coldly. ‘But obviously your other attributes meant more to him at the time than anything Katina could give him.’ He glanced impatiently at his wrist watch. ‘I have an important appointment to go to now; you have until Friday to make up your mind. But be assured that whatever you decide to do for yourself, Keri will come to me. You are perfectly free to live your own life.’

      ‘Keri is my life,’ she repeated vehemently.

      ‘So you have said. I will call again on Friday.’

      The room felt strangely empty once he had left, the smell of his cigar lingering in the air. Templar stared blankly at the closed door. Things had seemed desperate before, but they were even worse now. Leondro Marcose might be able to give Keri the sort of up-bringing Templar could only dream about for her, but it meant a lifelong marriage for Templar to a man she could only ever despise.

      She stood at the side of Keri’s cot, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Oh, darling,’ she breathed softly, ‘what shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?’

      Templar looked around the shabby room she had moved into the day before. When the kindly landlady had told her that she could have the room and that she would look after Keri while Templar worked she couldn’t believe her luck. She had told no one she was moving, except of course Mrs Marks. Not even Mary and Ken knew. She daren’t risk being traced by them. Men like Leondro Marcose could wield a lot of power, and it wouldn’t take him long to trace one very frightened girl and her baby.

      And she was frightened, terrified in fact. She couldn’t possibly spend the rest of her life married to that cold arrogant man. He had the look of a springing leopard about to leap on its prey. And Templar felt as if she was that prey.

      Keri seemed little bothered by her change of scene, not that it was all that different. All these rooms were the same, although this one was shabbier than most. But then the landlady was kind, and that made all the difference.

      Of Ken she had seen little; he had finally washed his hands of her. In fact, like Leondro Marcose, Ken had given her an ultimatum: marry him and give up Keri or else their relationship ended. He seemed to think he had waited long enough for her, and the argument that had followed had not been pleasant. Templar had told him so many times that she would never give up Keri that she had thought he would actually have realised by now that she meant what she said. But he hadn’t, accusing her of playing at mother, and Keri’s contented gurgles of ‘Mama’ had only incensed him more. Finally he had stormed out of the room with a vow to waste no more time on her.

      In a way his departure had been a relief. His complaints about Keri had become more pronounced of late and Templar often had to bite her tongue from preventing herself from saying something she would regret. Like most red-haired people, she had a hot temper, although she usually managed to control it. As a child she had often been punished for losing her temper with another child, or even more disastrous, with an adult.

      At every movement or knock on the door Templar physically jumped, dreading opening the door in case it should be Leondro Marcose, although Keri didn’t seem affected by the air of electricity that surrounded her.

      Templar took Keri downstairs and left her with Mrs Street. She had to leave earlier in the mornings now, the journey to work taking twice as long from here. Her employer, Howard Hathaway, ran a small insurance agency, and Templar, besides being his secretary, was his assistant, the tea-girl, general telephonist and also the cleaning lady. Not that she minded. A huge impersonal complex wasn’t her idea of enjoying work, although occasionally Howard became just a little too familiar. Templar never ceased to be amazed by this. Howard had a beautiful and loving wife and two young children, and yet still he had to try and prove his irresistible manhood—another reason for her disillusionment of men’s fidelity.

      ‘Good morning, Howard,’ she said breathlessly, placing her bag full of groceries in the corner of the room with her coat. ‘Sorry I’m late, but I just had to get some food in.’

      ‘That’s all right,’ accepted Howard, a man in his mid-thirties beginning to go slightly bald on top. ‘Although you look worn out before you even start. What have you been up to?’

      ‘Why, nothing,’ she blushed. ‘But Keri did have rather a wakeful night last night.’

      ‘Teething,’ sympathised Howard. Having had to put up with it twice himself he knew how wearing it could be.

      Templar shook her head, beginning to sort through the letters on her desk. ‘No, it wasn’t teething. She decided that two o’clock this morning was the time to play,’ she grimaced. ‘You try telling a determined ten-month-old that you’re too tired to play! It doesn’t work.’