A Different Kind of Love Read online

  “Please call me Kate,” she said quickly.

  “Pleased to meet you, Kate,” the darker of the girls said with a pronounced Irish accent that reminded her immediately of her father. “I’m Doris and this is Faye. Sorry the old fellow’s not here to make your acquaintance right now, but you’ll meet him later.”

  They fell about giggling again, and Mrs Wood tut-tutted at the pair of them. They obviously shared some private joke, but Kate didn’t care. Doris was no more a Londoner than she was, and when Faye spoke to her it was with a strong north-country accent which reminded her uncomfortably of Walter for a moment, but then reassured her.

  They were all strangers here. London was a hotch-potch of people, just as her father had always said. Only when he’d said it, it wasn’t with any sense of magnanimity, but with dark, scathing undertones that said you never knew who you were mixing with next.

  “What are you doing here then, Kate?” Faye said.

  “Getting a job, I hope.”

  “She’s going to sit for my Luke first of all,” Mrs Wood said proudly. “And if the two of them make their fortunes, she won’t need to do no other work at all.”

  The girls convulsed, and Doris’s eyes sparkled.

  “You just be careful posing for pictures, Katie. You never know where it might end up.”

  “That’s enough of that kind of talk,” Mrs Wood said sharply. “Kate’s a respectable married lady, like I told you, and my Luke knows how to treat ladies.”

  “So where’s your husband then?” Faye asked. “If I had a man looking after me, I’d never have come down to the smoke looking for work. But there’s not much pleasure in slogging your guts out in the mills all day long.”

  As Mrs Wood slapped a great big meal on the table in front of Kate, she managed to answer coolly, “I’m a working girl, same as you, and as for my husband, the less said about him the better, if you know what I mean.”

  They didn’t, but her apparently worldly attitude stopped any more questions. It was amazing, Kate thought, just as she’d done in Bournemouth. You acted a part and, providing you did it convincingly, everybody believed it.

  It was easy to see the admiring, knowing glances between the two girls now, clearly assuming that Kate’s husband had been a rotter, and she’d run out on him. And good for her. It was a strange way to win people over, but it had obviously worked with these two.

  Luke called for her promptly at eleven o’clock. Doris and Faye made no attempt to get out of the house until they’d caught sight of him, flashing their heavily made-up eyes at him and flirting outrageously.

  “Mrs Wood calls them harmless butterflies still finding their city wings,” he told Kate, when they’d left the house to go to his studio. “You don’t have to worry about their antics. They just like to shock, that’s all.”

  “I wasn’t worried!” she said, wondering if he thought she was actually jealous because they seemed to find it so easy to flirt, while she found it so difficult.

  “Good. Because, as I’ve told you before, nobody could hold a candle to you, Kate.”

  “I wasn’t fishing for compliments, either.”

  “You don’t need to. But you’re always going to get them, wherever you go. You must know that.”

  She didn’t know it. She didn’t count Walter’s compliments, since she knew now that they were as false as Walter himself. Until she had met Walter, she hadn’t paid much attention to her hair and her looks and her clothes, but making her trousseau and dreaming about being married had changed all that. She’d had someone she wanted to look pretty for, and now she had Luke, who told her she was beautiful.

  “You’ve gone into your silent world again. Come out of it, Kate. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems.”

  “Isn’t it?” And what would he know, she thought resentfully, with his inheritance and his Bentley, and his studio, and his up-and-coming business.

  He put his hand over hers as he steered the car carefully along the empty Sunday streets. Presumably everyone had either gone to church or were still in bed, she thought.

  “Whatever happened in the past, it’s over, Kate. You’ve taken a great step forward in coming here, so don’t make the mistake of stepping backwards. You’re far more likely to fall over if you do.”

  He spoke lightly and in riddles, but somehow the riddles made sense, and she let her hand remain in his until he had to put it back on the steering wheel again.

  They stopped outside the windows of a large showroom, in which there were framed portraits of wedding groups and families. The name Luke Halliday was emblazoned in gilt letters over the doorway and again at the top of each double-fronted window.

  Kate’s heart lurched, and her mouth dropped open in dumb surprise. Whatever she had expected, it had been nothing like this. All she knew of photographers was a little tin-pot place in the nearby town that wasn’t for the likes of her, anyway. But this … the façade alone was so splendid, and it made her embarrassed that she had dared to telephone this important man to come and fetch her from Paddington Station, and expected him to take care of her.

  “Impressed?” came Luke’s smiling voice.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said angrily. “I had no idea it would be this grand!”

  But of course she should have done. The Bentley and the boat in Poole harbour, and the Charlton Hotel in Bournemouth where he was such a regular client, should have told her without the need for words.

  “Does it matter? We’re all the same underneath the trappings, Kate.”

  He recognised her feeling of inverted snobbery, and the instinct to sneer at something beyond her experience. But he didn’t know everything about her. She lifted her head and remembered the actress inside her.

  “I doubt that. I’m hardly the same as Doris and Faye.”

  “Thank God. Well, are we going to sit here all day, or are you going to come inside?”

  “Said the spider to the fly,” Kate murmured, voicing the thought that had sprung to her mind that first evening when she’d accepted his invitation to dine with her at the Charlton. She made herself laugh.

  “Of course I’m coming inside. It’s what I came here for, isn’t it?”

  Luke grinned and squeezed her hand. Sometimes she seemed as sweetly open as a summer rose, and at others she was as deep and secretive as the ocean, and he still couldn’t make her out at all. But he was working on it, and he had no intention of letting her out of his life now that she’d come so delightfully into it.

  He almost surprised himself at the depth of his feeling for her. She was so fragile in appearance and yet inwardly so strong, he was sure of it. Something had hurt her very badly in the past, but she had survived, and he admired that.

  He unlocked the door of his showroom with his usual surge of pleasure. Although it has been bought courtesy of his great-aunt’s money, the fact that it had flourished beyond his wildest dreams was due to himself, to hard work and an eye to the future. In business, it didn’t pay to sit back and rest on your laurels. You had to sense what the future trends were likely to be, and it had worked out marvellously for him so far. If there was an even better future to come, he wanted Kate Radcliffe to be a part of it.

  Kate was even more impressed by the plush interior of the showroom. The floors were carpeted in soft green and there were matching velvet-covered chairs and sofas where the clients could sit and wait and take tea, or browse among the sample books of photographs demonstrating single or group poses. The whole ambience was of restful elegance, and designed to make nervous clients feel at ease.

  “I had an assistant for a short time,” Luke said casually, “but she was more interested in trying to get me to take photographs of her for her boyfriend than dealing with clients, and she was a bit short on finesse as well, so I had to let her go. If you want to attract a better class of customer, then you have to give them class. Don’t you agree?”

  Kate said she did, while being none too sure what finesse was. Nor was she quite su
re whether or not he was hinting at the offer of a job for her in the studio. Probably not.

  What did she know about photography, anyway? On the other hand, from what he said, would she need to do anything other than to take down a client’s name and offer them tea? Any fool could do that. She felt a flicker of interest at the thought. It hadn’t been what she intended when she came here, and her pride wouldn’t let her push him to do any more for her than he was doing already. A job that she knew, stitching and machining in a sweatshop, just like the one at home, was all that she’d had in mind.

  But it occurred to her that she wanted more. She wanted to move on, just as she’d moved on in coming here in the first place.

  “Come through to the back and I’ll show you my working area, and then the darkroom. Have you ever been in a photographic studio before, Kate?”

  “Never,” she said, “and what’s a darkroom?”

  “It’s where I take innocent young ladies to see what develops,” he said without expression.

  At her startled look, he laughed out loud.

  “I’m sorry, Kate, but I couldn’t resist it. It’s the standard joke about darkrooms, and not a very good one. It’s simply the special room where the developing and printing is done, and if you’ve never seen a photograph come to life, you’ll think it’s truly magical to see how the images gradually appear on the white paper.”

  She couldn’t work up the same kind of enthusiasm for something of which she had no knowledge, but she couldn’t doubt the enthusiasm in Luke’s voice. He spoke of the process as lovingly as if he spoke of a sweetheart, and she knew well enough that it took that kind of commitment to make a business a success. Luke had all that, and more. She was filled with a new and burgeoning admiration for him.

  Chapter Seven

  The studio itself was full of equipment. Several large cameras stood on tripods, and there were various angled lamps to light or shade the sitter. There was a floor-to-ceiling backcloth of palest green baize behind several chairs and couches where the clients presumably posed. There was also an entire range of props and accessories, including a small box of children’s toys. The sight of it touched Kate. Here was a man who obviously paid great attention to detail and wanted to get the best out of his clients, for himself, and for them.

  In one corner of the studio she was surprised to see a large phonograph machine with a stack of records in their paper sleeves on a shelf alongside. At Kate’s enquiring look, Luke said it often helped to relax his clients if soft music was playing in the background. The more she heard him talk, the more she could tell he knew exactly how to put people at their ease; he had a great knack for it, as she had already discovered.

  “The lucky chaps who came back unscathed from the war were keen to be photographed in their uniforms for their wives and sweethearts, Kate. Then, when their children came along they came back for family photos, and quite often the smaller ones were understandably nervous, especially when the flash bulbs went off. But I’ve already told you that, haven’t I? I don’t want to bore you with it again.”

  “You never bore me,” Kate said quickly. “Anyway, I love to hear it, it’s a lovely story, and it’s good to hear about that kind of continuity. There were so many who didn’t come back at all, and others who probably made the most of their time in France in other ways.”

  “That didn’t apply to all of us,” Luke said shortly.

  She knew he had been in an Infantry unit in France during the war, and had thankfully come home unscathed. It was where he had been shown so many photographs of loved ones, tucked inside soldiers’ wallets and pocket-books.

  He must have seen horrors as well, and Kate was ashamed of her unthinking words. She wondered what on earth had made her say such a thing. By the bitterness in her voice, she had almost betrayed the strong suspicion that Walter had been one of those main-chance philanderers.

  “What I mean is,” she went on carefully, “not everyone had a bad war, did they?”

  “Most of them did, and there’s nothing about a war that’s good, Kate. All the medals and all the honour and glory in the world count for nothing when a man’s life is cut short and a family is left behind to grieve for him.”

  She felt chastened at once, and she was aware of a small tension between them. It wasn’t helped by the knowledge that she had been unwittingly reminded of Walter, when she was trying so hard to put that part of her life behind her for ever. But perhaps it was burying her head in the sand to think she could forget so easily. Walter had been everything to her, as she believed she had been to him, and the hurt of his betrayal flared up when she least expected it.

  “Come on, cheer up,” she heard Luke say. “You can’t take the sorrows of the world on your shoulders, Kate. And I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You haven’t. It’s just that I once knew someone…”

  “And he didn’t come back?”

  “Something like that,” she mumbled. Walter hadn’t come back to her, though not quite in the way Luke was thinking.

  “You must have been very young at the time, though in my opinion people often underestimate how deeply the feelings of children can be hurt,” he said. “But we all have a past, Kate. The trick is in knowing how to keep it in its proper place.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said solemnly, glad of his misunderstanding, and his chuckle broke into the tense atmosphere.

  “I’m sorry. That sounded pompous and schoolmasterish, didn’t it? Come on, let me show you my darkroom, and then we’ll go for a drive around the city. All the tourists want to see Buckingham Palace, and I can’t imagine that you’ll be very different.”

  Kate’s eyes sparkled, even though such a thing had never even occurred to her. The thought of actually seeing the palace where the king and queen lived was enough to take her breath away. Even more so to think she was now living in the same city as these remote and important folk.

  Luke drew in his breath at the sudden sparkle in those fabulous blue eyes, and he couldn’t resist trailing a finger down her cheek in a light caress. Kate felt a ripple of pleasure at his touch. It was uncomplicated and non-sexual, and nothing like as predatory as Walter’s, nor as calculating as the odious Jenkins.

  “When I photograph you, Kate, I want you to think of whatever it is that’s exciting you right now,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked, dismissing Walter from her mind again. She was fishing for compliments, and she didn’t care, because it seemed that they were hearing the same music once more.

  “Because I want to capture that mixture of innocence and sensuality and expectation in your face,” he said.

  Kate felt her skin tingle. It was the professional speaking now, she reminded herself, but she would have been a fool to think it was only that. She could see something more in his eyes, she could hear it in the timbre of his voice, and she could sense it in everything about him. The ripples of pleasure in her body turned to mild alarm, knowing she was alone with him, and very much on his territory.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of here, Kate,” he said gently, as if reading her mind. “And nor should you flinch from being told how you appear to other people. Most women would pay a king’s ransom to have what you’ve got.”

  “Stop it, please!” she protested. “You’d better hurry up and show me this darkroom and get me out of here, because I’m starting to feel very hot and embarrassed.”

  Luke laughed. He tucked her hand in his arm as he led her through a bamboo curtain to another part of the building. She saw a door prominently labelled DARKROOM – DO NOT ENTER WHILE RED LIGHT IS ON. There was a large lamp fixed to the wall, and as Luke opened the door and turned on the light switch, Kate saw the outer lamp light up before he closed the door behind them.

  She was immediately enveloped in a dull red glow that barely lit the room and the strong smell of chemicals filled her nostrils. But any apprehension she felt was dispelled by curiosity about the contents of this room, which was unlike any other she had eve
r been in. A long workbench and a double sink unit took up all one wall, and bottles of chemicals and packs of photographic paper of all sizes were ranged along the shelves above. There were hanging racks of negatives and plates, and a large magnifying glass at the end of the workbench.

  “Are you impressed?” Luke said, smiling.

  “Amazed, more like!” Kate said. “I had no idea what it involved. What’s the magnifying glass for?”

  “I take a number of photos of my subjects, and the best way to see any flaws before printing them is through the magnifier. Everybody wants to look their best in a photo. And quite frankly, I can’t wait to work with you and see your lovely face in an elegant frame. It will be my centrepiece in the showroom window.”

  “Now just hold on a minute, Luke,” she protested with an uneasy laugh at the prospect. “How do you know I’m going to be at ease in front of a camera? I might turn out to be completely useless and you’ll have wasted your time on me.”

  She was thankful that the subdued rosy glow in the dark room hid her face as she turned away from him, knowing the words sounded all too provocative. But they had been said, and once said, words were there for all eternity.

  Luke’s arms went round her, and he turned her very gently towards him.

  “The time I spend with you has already become the most important in my life. Don’t you know it by now?”

  He bent his head towards her, and before she could protest, she felt the touch of his lips on hers. It was no more than an innocent kiss, but here in this confined space, in the intimate glow of the darkroom light, it took on a very different meaning for Kate, and she struggled to get away from him.

  “Don’t – please,” she gasped. “It’s not what I came here for, and if I’ve given you the wrong impression—”

  The agonising thought had surged into her head that it had been so short a time since they had left Bournemouth, and here she was, running after him. Or at least, that was how it might appear – that she had seen him as a well-heeled young man, and decided she could do very well out of their acquaintance. Why hadn’t she stopped to think?