A Stranger's Kiss

yanking on the bar with all her might until the window frame split with a satisfactory crack, disintegrating beneath the pressure and sending her sprawling back on the floor, the bar still grasped tightly in her hands.
    She stared at it for a moment and then laughed out loud. The frame had rotted away beneath the paintwork and no one had noticed. It was hardly surprising. The dreary old nursery hadn’t been used since her grandfather was a baby when children and servants were expected to keep their proper place. Her mother had insisted on a bright modern suite of rooms on the first floor for her baby girl, not that she’d hung around to enjoy either of them.
    But she didn’t waste time congratulating herself on her luck, which was just as well. While the rest of the bars were dispensed with easily enough, her problems were far from over. The nursery was on the second floor and there was the better part of fifty feet between her and freedom.
    It was a pity, she thought, that she had taken so much trouble dressing to create the right impression. Jeans and a pair of Doc Martens would have been far more practical for climbing down the ornate drainpipe than the elegant linen dress and high-heeled shoes she had decided would convince her father that she was serious. Her father, she knew, would never have taken her seriously in jeans, and it was desperately important that he be convinced that she was in earnest. Unfortunately she had achieved her objective rather too well.
    She considered the problem for a moment, then took off her shoes and dropped them out of the window onto the rose border below. She peeled off her stockings and, lacking a pocket in which to stow them, she stuffed them into her bra, because her high-heeled shoes would rub against her feet in five minutes without them and the last thing she needed right now were blisters.
    She didn’t have a handbag; she’d left it in the study when her father, brushing aside her declaration that she intended to marry a penniless artist with or without his blessing, had asked her to give her opinion on some old toys that had been found in the attics during recent roof repairs.
    After completing her fine arts degree, she had taken a job in an auction house where she had become fascinated with old toys. Her father had been furious that she had chosen to take any kind of job, even one that any well brought up young heiress might covet. After her last escapade, he had wanted her to stay at home where he could keep an eye on her until he found her a suitable husband.
    Although she recognised the device as being in the “if we don’t talk about it, it will go away” category, she had been sufficiently touched that he should have brought himself to acknowledge her expertise to fall for it.
    She wasn’t usually so gullible where her father was concerned but, with the lure of a lost hoard of Victorian toys, she had walked into the nursery without a suspicious thought in her head. That was when he had slammed the door and locked it behind her.
    Pride, Emmy thought ruefully, always came before a fall. And of course there weren’t any toys. If there had been, he would have summoned a real expert; he would certainly never have consulted his tiresome daughter.
    She gave the door a look that should have incinerated it then, in an attempt to slow down discovery of her flight she jammed the solitary chair beneath the doorknob. That done, she hitched up her skirt and swung one leg over the window-sill.
    * * *
    ‘I’ll expect to hear from you within twenty-four hours that this matter has been settled, Brodie,’ Carlisle said, as he walked with him down the steps. ‘I want no delay.’
    Brodie considered whether to mention the possibility that the lovebirds might already have flown, probably to one of those romantic destinations where weddings could be arranged in a matter of days, in which case it was already too late. But as they reached the bottom of the steps he decided against it. What clinched it was the sight of Emerald Carlisle, her dress hitched up about her waist, clinging just above head height to an ornate lead drainpipe about twenty feet behind Gerald Carlisle’s back.
    Brodie knew that he should draw his client’s attention to what was happening behind him. Something stopped him. It might have been a pair of large pleading eyes. Or the deliciously long legs wrapped about the drainpipe. Or even, heaven forbid, the glimpse of something white and lacy peeping from