Tree of Paradise Read online

  Tree of Paradise by Jane Arbor

  Donna went out to a small Caribbean island to check up on her uncle's banana plantation, which wasn't doing as well as it should. Her uncle blamed the situation on his enemy and neighbor, Elyot Vance. Vance was certainly a forceful character but Donna knew she must be fair to both men. That was before she found herself becoming involved with Elyot....

  Printed in Canada

  OTHER Harlequin 'Romances by JANE ARBOR

  919—DEAR INTRUDER 950—KINGFISHER TIDE 1000—A GIRL NAMED SMITH 1048—HIGH MASTER OF CLERE 1108—SUMMER EVERY DAY 1157—YESTERDAY'S MAGIC 1182— GOLDEN APPLE ISLAND 1277—STRANGER'S TRESPASS 1336—THE CYPRESS GARDEN 1406—WALK INTO THE WIND 1443—THE FEATHERED SHAFT 1480—THE LINDEN LEAF

  1544—THE OTHER MISS DONNE 1582—WILDFIRE QUEST

  1665—THE FLOWER ON THE ROCK 1740—ROMAN SUMMER

  1789—THE VELVET SPUR 1832—MEET THE SUN HALFWAY 1896—THE WIDE FIELDS OF HOME 1963—SMOKE INTO FLAME

  Many of these titles are available at your local bookseller or through the Harlequin Reader Service.

  For a free catalogue listing all available Harlequin Romances, send your name and address to:

  HARLEQUIN READER SERVICE, M.P.O. Box 707, Niagara Falls, N.Y. 14302

  Canadian address: Stratford, Ontario, Canada N5A 6W4 or use coupon at back of books.

  Original hardcover edition published in 1976 by Mills & Boon Limited

  ISBN 0-373-02033-3

  Harlequin edition published January 1977

  Copyright © 1976 by Jane Arbor. All rights reserved.

  Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher.

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure inmention.

  The Harlequin trademark, consisting of the word HARLEQUIN and theportrayal of a Harlequin, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in the Canada Trade Marks Office.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE bustle attendant upon the arrival of an aircraft was over. The knot of people behind a rustic trellis barrier had done their waving and shouting of their greetings to the straggle of incoming passengers, who in their turn had gone through Customs and Immigration before being collected or dispersing of their own, and now the modest inter-island, one-runway airport was left to what was probably its customary afternoon stupor.

  Officials, quickly divested of linen uniform jackets, strolled and gossiped in their shirt-sleeves; the Bureau de Change closed down; the last of half-a-dozen taxis, disappointed of a fare, revved up and departed; the owners of the boutiques in the duty-free annexe came out to sit in front of their gift counters and fan themselves, and the air-conditioned restaurant-cum-bar had only three customers—Donna, sitting close under the counter with her back to it, and a yard or two away, two men also turned from it, elbows rested backwards against it as they talked over their long drinks.

  For the second time since she had taken refuge from the sizzling heat coming off the tarmac outside, Donna glanced at her watch.

  Four thousand miles of Atlantic flight behind her, and Bran hadn't had the common courtesy to be on time to meet her ! Her plane had been punctual and he --or Uncle Wilmot had—been airmailed as to when it was due. Yet neither of them was here, and she was going to give them just another ten minutes, or as long as it took her to finish her iced grapefruit juice, before

  she telephoned the Louvet Estate to demand why!

  Her order had itself taken twenty minutes to be served, at the hands of the single waiter who was now making a tom' of the tables, wiping them clean of nonexistent stains and furnishing them with cutlery or china by making individual slow journeys to the back quarters of the restaurant for each piece he required. He moved at the rate of a walker in a slow-motion film, and as she watched his leisurely, mobile-hipped progress, something clicked in Donna's memory, a phrase forgotten from childhood until now—`Larayan time.'

  Larayan time. At eight years old, she remembered asking what it meant, to be told it was the island's kindly tolerance of unpunctuality. Mere 'time' was unexpectedly prompt time; Larayan time could be anything up to an hour of tardiness, and would still be forgiven. For who, on age-old, seasonless, tideless, all-summer Laraye, need hurry unduly? Except, perhaps, from an earthquake, a hurricane or a volcanic eruption, none of which had been more than unfulfilled threats for many years. To achieve Larayan time for any lesser urgency was, by the island's judgment, good enough.

  Donna straightened her face to gravity as she saw that one of the two men had noticed the half-smile which the memory had brought to her lips. His brows had lifted, as if in question that the smile had been meant for him or his companion. So she looked away. Meanwhile she felt a little kindlier towards her cousin's or his father's delay of welcome to her. They had both lived in Laraye for so long that to all intents they were Larayans, with easy-going habits to match. Perhaps their car had had a puncture or they had been held up in traffic. She would give them a little longer than her threatened ten minutes.

  She sipped her juice and found she was listening to

  the talk of the two men, having no scruples at doing so, as listening in to strangers was not eavesdropping, but mere idle interest in one's kind. Nor were they troubling to keep their voices down as they discussed local conditions and people and seemed to understand each other in unfinished sentences and meaningful shrugs or nods.

  She studied them when they weren't looking her way; decided they were colleagues of a sort and that the more formally dressed of the two—wearing a jacket and collar and tie and owning a bulging briefcase—might be travelling by the next plane due, and that the other one was seeing him off.

  The latter—the one who had met her smile—was the taller. His hair was reddish-brown, making a curved eave above his broad brow and a thick club-cut at his nape. His shoulders were wide and athletic-looking; his hips narrow by contrast. His clothes were those which she was to come to recognise as almost the Larayan male uniform known as the `shirtjak'—the tailored shirt, worn open-necked and over the trousers, and of almost any hue or pattern under the sun. His eyes, Donna noticed, ranged through a whole gamut of expression as she watched the two talk—deep interest, amusement, emphatic agreement, casual acceptance, but no boredom.

  A pretty vibrant type, was Donna's mental verdict on him—and she realised with a sharp stab of dismay that she was no longer merely listening in. She was eavesdropping.

  For she had heard a name that was familiar to her Louvet, the title of her uncle's banana plantations. And then his name—Torrence—which was also her own. The two were discussing him and the estate in no complimentary terms and, affronted by their criticism, Donna kept straight on with her eavesdropping, feeling

  it was justified in view of her involvement.

  The taller man had said, 'I doubt if Louvet has turned in a decent consignment these last two years. Not that Torrence could seem to care less.'

  The other man said, 'Can't the Growers' Association do something about it? Discipline him, or at worst, expel him?'

  `No affair of theirs, as long as he pays his whack and goes on nominally growing a crop. While it is banana land and Torrences own it, he can let it down as he pleases.'

  `Well, if he has no success with bananas, why doesn't he switch? To aubergines or pineapples or avocadoes?
Or even sell out?'

  `If he cared, there's no reason why he shouldn't make a go of bananas. Louvet marches alongside Marquise, and there's nothing to choose between them as to land. Anyway, he's too hidebound to switch, and too dog-in the-manger to sell. I know, for I'd willingly add it to Marquise, and have put out feelers for it. But—' a shrug.

  'You're not popular, for your success with Marquise?'

  The tall man laughed. 'An understatement. I'm Ghenghis Khan, Attila the Hun and the original bloated plutocrat. Wilmot Torrence and I don't mix. Or not willingly.'

  `Well, there's a boy, isn't there? What about him?'

  'Estate-wise, he's a non-starter too. A land rock that wants to be in the water, and yearns for the shore once it gets there. Can't settle. Currently he's working for Margot le Conte as a kind of gentleman tourist guide.'

  `Ah, Margot.' The other man seemed to recognise the name. He returned to his questioning. 'Why doesn't the parent company—Torrence and Son, isn't it—send out a trouble-shooter to put a bomb under the two of them, I wonder? "And Son", for instance?'

  `Yes, well, they're only in Import now. With Wilmot T. they still have an interest in Louvet, but after sugar failed here years ago, they sold out and went back to England to import sugar and rum, though bananas must now be their biggest deal. A sizeable slice of the land they used to own is now part of Marquise—the best slice, one hears, to the green in the eye of friend Wilmot Torrence! And anyway, there isn't an "and Son" to that side of the family. Just—'

  Simultaneously they both looked up and listened to a far-off but gradually nearing hum from the sky. They both set down their glasses. 'That will be yours,' said the tall man. 'It's due.'

  `Yes. But don't wait for take-off, please.'

  'I won't either. Just see you to the departure gate.' They went out together as the airport personnel, newly dynamised by the imminent arrival of another aircraft, put on its jackets, busied itself at counters, and drove luggage-carriers out towards the runway—the whole operation being as tranquilly conducted as at a country railway station on a branch line.

  Donna stayed where she was. In a minute or two she would go and telephone. But first she needed to collect her poise, to make sense of a mental jigsaw and to nurse her righteous gall over that obliquely petty gossip. She had become aware of a counter-irritant too—a physical one. Under the thin mesh of her stocking her left ankle and calf were itching in several places; she could see and feel the telltale lumps which meant insect bites, and the impulse to scratch was almost irresistible. She Compromised by rubbing her ankle with the toe of her other sandal, which made her look knock-kneed but afforded a little comfort while she pieced the jigsaw.

  Marquise. Yes. The huge banana estate which neighboured small Louvet. From time to time it had figured —sourly—in her uncle's letters. As had also its owner's

  name—Vance, Elyot Vance—which made, didn't it, the taller one of her late companions Vance himself—the self-satisfied, opinionated cock of the walk, with his impertinent thumbnail sketches of Uncle Wilmot and her cousin Brandon, which she would bet he thought clever and dry and caustic! Well, if only he knew what she thought of them, uttered in public! And it didn't take much to guess that when he had broken off at the sound of the incoming plane, he had been about to say 'Just a girl'—dismissing her, Donna Susan Torrence, as a considerably lesser mortal than the nonexistent 'And Son' they had seemed to find so droll.

  She was almost sorry he had said that he and her uncle didn't mix. For she would have welcomed a chance to cut him down to size. How, she didn't know, but there should be ways ... Meanwhile, remembering that at the moment she wasn't too pleased herself with her maligned relatives, she stood up, gathered her hand-luggage and was poised on one leg, giving her ankle a last savage massage, when Elyot Vance reap-peared and came across to her, purpose in every stride.

  'You're still here.' He made a statement of it, then glanced down. 'And suffering too, I see.'

  'Yes, I've been bitten by mosquitoes.'

  He laughed. 'You haven't read the right travel brochures. We have no mosquitoes on Laraye.'

  'Well, I doubt if I'm being chewed by vampires,' Donna retorted tartly. 'Do you mind—?'

  She meant the question to indicate that he was in her way. But he did not move. 'I came back because, if you were still here, I was going to offer you my services,' he said. 'That is, if you aren't camping here for the night, may I give you a lift somewhere?'

  Donna said, 'Thank you. But I'm being met.'

  His brows went up. 'Met? You came off the Antigua plane, didn't you? Your friends' timing isn't very good,

  is it?'

  'I was just going to telephone to see if my uncle or my cousin have been held up.' She fixed Elyot Vance with a cold eye. 'My. uncle is Mr Wilmot Torrence of Louvet,' she said.

  'Louvet?' he echoed. 'Well, well, how one's indiscretions do come home to roost! You—er--heard?'

  'How could I help it? You and your friend weren't exactly whispering, were you?'

  He shrugged. 'Just chatting while waiting for his take-off for Grenada. He's in the spice business. And we weren't to know a recording angel was present. If I thought about you at all, I concluded you were a rather disorientated tourist. Whereas in fact you are—?'

  'Donna Torrence. The "And Son" of "the other side of the family",' she quoted.

  His glance measured her slight feminine figure from head to toe. 'Really? You surprise me. How come?' he asked.

  'My father is a fan of Charles Dickens.' She was gratified to puzzle him, and then wasn't so pleased when he understood what she meant. She had expected he would need to have the reference explained to him, and he didn't.

  'All—Dombey And Son who were really Dombey And Daughter? I see. Good thinking, if your father wanted a son, got a daughter instead, and made the best of the situation, as old Dombey pere did,' he commented. 'And so you are his "And Son" partner, are you?'

  'I work in the firm as his personal secretary. But I'm not a partner in it,' Donna said, wishing he hadn't summed up so acutely her father's disappointment at his lack of a son. Most people, even when they recognised it, had the delicacy to refrain from spelling it out...

  'Nor a militant trouble-shooter, one imagines?' she heard Elyot Vance asking.

  After his caustic criticism of her Uncle Wilmot, she wasn't going to admit that that, in a sense, was what she was. If he 'thought about' her at all, let him discover for himself the part-purpose of her coming out to Laraye! She said shortly, 'Of course not. I've come to visit my uncle and my cousin Brandon. And now, if you'll let me pass, I'm going to telephone to them.'

  'There's a booth just round the corner. I'll wait to hear the result,' he offered.

  'Please don't.'

  But he was still there when she emerged from the kiosk to report that their housekeeper, Juno, had said that both Mister and Young Mister were out—Mister, she believed, gone to the library, Young Mister 'out on de job'. She had seemed surprised that Donna should believe she was expected today.

  'Then that settles it. I'll have to drive you,' said Elyot Vance. 'By the way, I don't have to introduce myself? You'll have heard of me, no doubt?'

  'Yes. And from you,' Donna added, 'that you and my uncle don't get on. So do you think he would approve your offering me a lift to Louvet?'

  'The alternative being your waiting around until they do choose to remember your existence?'

  'I could get a taxi.'

  'Nonsense. There's no need, when our roads are the same and we're neighbours—or as near as makes for neighbourhood on Laraye. So don't quibble, and come along.' He glanced again at her purpling ankle. 'We'll stop off in the town and get you some repellent spray for any future attacks from our nonexistent mosquitoes. Or no—on second thoughts, we won't. It's closing day for the shops in Calvigne. Sorry, no deal.'

  'That's all right.' She went with him to his car, and

  he put her luggage in the boot.

  'We need only skirt the t
own; then we climb,' he said. 'I hope you're not nervous of heights, for you'll have to get used to them here. Also to mile upon mile of potholed roads at which old Macadam, the surfacing chap, would turn in his Victorian grave.' As the car took a new height he pointed. 'Look—the harbour. There's a cruise liner in—there, at the dock, do you see?'

  Donna sat forward and noticed that distance and height had made the busy harbour as much of a collection of toy sheds and toy shipping as it had appeared from her incoming aircraft. 'We're driving inland and away from the sea all the time?' she asked.

  'In a manner of speaking, yes. Though you'd be surprised how, owing to the turns of the coast and the long inlets and creeks, the sea is apt to turn up around the next corner, as it were. At Marquise I'm a fair distance from it, but at Louvet, being lower, you're not much more than a stone's throw from your private beach. You swim, I suppose?'

  `Oh yes.' Noticing the water-filled potholes in the track and the ridged slither of red mud ahead, 'It must have rained quite a lot very recently;' she remarked.

  A nod. 'And that'—the car bounced into and out of a pothole and was manoeuvred expertly through the mud—`that, like the complete extinction of our mosquitoes, is something else you shouldn't take as gospel straight from the brochures' mouth—namely that, year in, year out, it's eternal, sun-filled golden day in the East Caribbean—for it's not.'

  For a moment Donna was silent. Then she said, 'I know.'

  'A tourist—and you're neither surprised nor affronted by the news?' he mocked.

  `No. Because I remember how it used to rain. Sudden-

  ly, rather as a child cries, and stops as suddenly. And when it rains almost out of a clear sky or only from one or two clouds, there's a Larayan saying about it. I can't remember quite how it goes—'