For His Little Girl

'Encaster? Don't think I've heard of it.'

'Nobody's heard of it except the people who live there, and most of them wish they hadn't. It's about thirty miles north of London, very small and very dreary.'

'Didn't your dad want you home?'

'I called him at his work once to let him know I was all right. He told me to 'stop being an idiot' and come back, because Clarice was giving him a hard time about it. That was all he cared about. If he'd been just a little bit concerned about me I'd have told him where I was. But he wasn't. So I didn't. That was the last time I talked to him. I'm still in touch with Frank, but he and Dad aren't speaking. He won't give me away.'

'So you came to seek your fortune in London? At sixteen? Good for you, kid! Did you find the streets paved with gold?'

'They will be, one day. I do cookery courses in the evenings, and when I've got some diplomas I'll get a job as a cook. Then I'll do more courses, get a better job, and so on, until the gourmets of the world are beating a path to my door.'

'S'cuse me, ma'am, but it's my door they're going to beat a path to.'

'Well, I expect there'll be room for both of us,' she conceded generously.

'You mean the three of us, don't you?' he asked with a grin. 'You, me and that colossal ego of yours. They'll have to build somewhere just to house it.'

'And the rest! Everyone knows Americans can't cook.'

'Can't-May you be forgiven! And since you come from the nation that eats French fries-'

'Chips!'

'-with everything, doesn't think food is properly cooked unless it's swimming in grease, and can't make decent coffee-'

'All right, all right, I give in.' She threw up her hands in mock surrender, then pointed to her plate. 'This is really delicious, I'll admit that.'

'All my own invention. When I've got it perfect I'll present it to the head chef.'

''Oh, great! Now I'm a guinea pig. If I don't drop dead after eating this you'll know it's safe to offer it to the Sultan of Thingy and the Duke of Whatsit?''

'Something like that,' he admitted with a grin.

She saw him regarding her outfit and said, 'Nice, huh?'

'Love it, and the purple thing you were wearing when I saw you the other day.'

Pippa chuckled. 'The head housekeeper nearly fainted. She couldn't get me out of it and into my uniform fast enough. But I don't like people to overlook me.'

''No danger of that. How do you afford fashion and pay for classes, as well?''

'I make my own fashion from other people's rejects. The jeans came from a rummage sale, the boots had been reduced five times because the color frightened people the hat came from an Oxfam shop, and I knit the sweater from remnants.'. He grinned, enchanted.

His own story delighted her. He was, as she'd guessed, American, from Los Angeles, and his life seemed to have revolved around sun, sea and sand. His passion was cookery and the only books he ever opened were recipes. Beyond that there wasn't, a thought in his head apart from swimming, bodysurfing, eating, drinking and generally having a good time. There had been so little fun in Pippa's life that this young man, who seemed to make almost a religion of merriment, seemed to usher her to a new and magical world, one in which the light was always golden, the sensations exquisite and youth would last forever.

He had ambition, of a kind.

'I don't just want to be a cook,'there are plenty of them,' he explained. 'I want to be the cook, so I had to find something that would make me stand out from the others. I scraped together all the money I could and came to Europe, to work in some of the great hotels. I did six months in the Danieli in Venice, six in the George V in Paris, and now I'm doing the London Ritz. When my work permit's up I'll go back to Los Angeles as Luke of the Ritz. Hey, have you swallowed something the wrong way?' For Pippa was doubled up and apparently choking.

'You can't do that,' she spluttered when she could speak. 'Luke of the Ritz? Nobody will be able to eat for laughing.'

'Oh!' he said, deflated. 'You don't think they'll be impressed?'

'I think they'll chuck tomatoes at you.'

The awful truth of this hit him suddenly and he began to laugh, too. The more he laughed, the more she laughed, and it became funnier and funnier.

If this were a romantic comedy, she thought, they would laugh until they fell into each other's arms. She found herself tingling with anticipation.

But Luke pulled himself together and said in a choking sort of voice, 'It's late. I ought to be getting you home.'

'It's not that late,' she protested.

'It is when I have a 6 a.m. start. Come on.'

He borrowed a battered old car from one of the other residents, and drove the couple of miles to the hostel where she lived. As he pulled up, Pippa waited for his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close, his lips on hers…

''Here we are,'' he said, pulling open the passenger door.

Reluctantly Pippa got out of the car. He came with her to the front door.

'See you tomorrow,' Luke said, giving her a brief peck on the cheek. In a moment his taillights were vanishing around the corner, and she was left standing there, muttering some very unladylike words.

Pippa was proud of being a modern young woman, unshackled by the prejudices and restraints of outmoded convention, free to enjoy worldly delights on equal terms with men. If she wanted to smoke, drink and pursue the pleasures of the flesh, she had every right to do so.

That was the theory. The practice was more difficult. The only cigarette she had ever tried had been in a pub with a party of friends. She'd promptly had a violent coughing fit, upset a bowl of peanuts all over the floor and been ordered out by an exasperated publican. She hadn't tried again. It had tasted disgusting, anyway. So much for smoking.

Alcohol was also a problem. She could twirl a glass bravely, but more than a little of the cheap plonk, which was all she could afford, upset her stomach. So much for drinking.

Which left sex. And that wasn't working out brilliantly, either.

She'd naively imagined that London would be filled with attractive, lusty males, all eager to meet a liberated young woman. But a depressingly large number of them were middle-aged and boring. Too many of the young ones were studious, married or gay. They talked too much. Or too little. Or about the wrong things. It was like being back in Encaster.

She wasn't short of offers. A tall, delicately built young woman with a daft sense of humor, laughing eyes and legs up to her ears was always going to turn heads. It should have been, as the song said, a matter of picking 'the height, the weight, the size.' But the height was too often awkward, and the weight was usually excessive. So she passed up the chance to check the size.

After two years in London Pippa was virginal, exasperated and uneasily aware that as an advertisement for riotous living she was a miserable failure. At this rate she might as well be a Victorian maiden. It was very disheartening.

She wondered if it was too late to become a nun.

But from the moment she met Luke everything changed. He won by default because he was none of the dreary things the others were. Also because his voice had a vibrant note she'd never heard before, and it produced a quickening of excitement in her. He won, too, because his eyes teased and tempted her, because his mouth was wide and mobile, and it could be tender, amused, or firm when his stubbornness was aroused.

But mostly he won because just being in the same room with him could induce a fever in her. Plus, the rotten so and so had never shown any sign of wanting to entice her into his bed. It was an insult that she couldn't let pass.

What made it more galling was that everyone at work simply assumed they were sleeping together. Luke had a reputation as a love-'em-and-leave-'ern heartbreaker.