Guyon grunted and pocketed his pencil. “All right.”
She dropped beside him and snatched the pad from his hand. In the same moment her smile died and colour stained her cheeks. Inescapably caught in a few brief strokes of the pencil for all eternity, she stood gazing out to sea, and by some strange genius all that was good in her, all the inno-cence and longing of youth, were there also.
She looked up at him in wonderment. “It’s beautiful.”
“But you are,” he said calmly. “Has no one ever told you this before?”
“I learned rather early in life that it’s dangerous to let them.” She smiled ruefully. “Until my mother died four years ago we lived in a villa near St. Tropez. You know it?”
“Extremely well.”
“In St. Tropez, in season, anything female is in demand and fourteen-year-old girls seem to have a strong appeal for some men.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said gravely.
“Yes, life had its difficulties, but then the General bought this little island and I went to school for a couple of years. I didn’t like that at all.”
“What did you do, run away?”
She pushed her long hair back from her face and laughed. “Persuaded the General to send me to a finishing school in Paris. Nowthat was really something.”
Guyon grinned and lit a cigarette. “Tell me, why do you always call him General?”
She shrugged. “Everyone does – except for Anne, of course. She’s special. When she married my brother Angus she was only my age. He was killed in Korea.”
She paused, a few wild flowers held to her face as she stared pensively into the past, and Guyon lay back, gazing up at the sky, sadness sweeping through him as he remembered another time, another girl.
Algiers, 1958. After five months chasingfellaghas in the cork forests of die Grande Kabylie he had found himself in that city of fear, leading his men through the narrow streets of the Kasbah and Bab el Oued, locked in the life-or-death struggle that was the Battle of Algiers.
And then Nerida had come into his life, a young Moorish girl fleeing from a mob after a bomb outrage on the Boule-vard du Telemly. He closed his eyes and saw again her dark hair tumbling across a pillow, moonlight streaming through a latticed window. The long nights when they had tried to forget tomorrow.
But the morning had come, the cold grey morning when she had been found on the beach, stripped and defiled, head shaven, body mutilated. The proper ending for a woman who had betrayed her people for aFrangaoui. The sniper’s bullet of the following day which had sent him back to France on a stretcher had almost carried a welcome ob-livion.
Nerida.The scent of her was strong in his nostrils and he reached out and pulled her down, crushing his lips against hers. Her body was soft and yielding and when she swung on to her back her mouth answered sweet as honey. He opened his eyes and Fiona Grant smiled lazily up at him.
“Now what brought that on?”
He leaned on one elbow for a moment and rubbed a hand across his eyes. Tut it down to the sea air. I’m sorry.”
Tin not.”
“Then you should be.” He pulled her to her feet. “Didn’t you tell me you were expected for lunch?”
She held on to his hand. “Come back with me. I’d like you to meet the General.”
“Some other time. I’ve arranged to eat at the hotel.”
She turned from him like a hurt child. He restrained a strong impulse to take her in his arms, reminded himself strongly that he had work to do – important work – and walked away. When he reached the top of the rise he hesi-tated and turned reluctantly.
She was standing where he had left her, head drooping, something touchingly despondent about her. The strong sunlight, streaming through the thin cotton of her dress, outlined her firm young thighs perfectly.
“Damn her!” he said softly to himself. “She might as well have nothing on.”
He sighed heavily and went back down the slope.
Mallory lay on his bunk inFoxhunter watching the blue smoke from his cigarette twist and swirl in the current from the air-conditioner. He’d had an excellent meal at the hotel in company with Owen Morgan, but there had been no sign of the Frenchman.