This Way Out Read Online Free PDF

him with stately, ill-concealed disdain. ‘I don’t think I recall it.’
    Packer kept smiling, though more widely and with visible effort. His teeth were large and white and almost perfectly even, with the exception of one canine which – when, as now, he drew back his lips – was seen to be narrow and sharp as a fang.
    â€˜May I introduce my fiancée, Belinda Brown,’ he persisted. ‘She came with me to the service, of course. I’m sure my godfather –’
    â€˜My brother Hugh,’ Mrs Cunningham interrupted, ‘is alas dead. Thank you both for coming to the service, as so many others did – but this , as you see, is purely a family occasion. Good afternoon, Miss Brown. Good- bye , Mr Packer.’
    His facial muscles tightened. He glowered, then drained his champagne glass and swaggered off to the bar. Belinda, hot with embarrassment and tormented by a relentless grinding in the region of her pelvis, stumbled away in search of refuge and relief.
    For the past two weeks Belinda Brown had been desperate with anxiety. Her period was very late, and she was convinced that she was pregnant.
    Her present pain should have been reassuring. It wasn’t, because it was different from her usual period pains both in kind and in intensity. And so far, there was nothing to show for it. Sitting hunched in one of the bleak cubicles in the ladies’ room of the Duke’s Head hotel, she longed for her own warm bathroom, for the privacy of her single bed, and for the comfort of a hot-water bottle clutched to her stomach.
    She really didn’t want a baby, not yet anyway. Plenty of time to think about it … And with things as they were at home – Dad incapacitated by a stroke, and needing full-time attendance from herself or the nurse she employed when she needed a few hours off – she didn’t want another helpless member of the family to look after.
    And Hugh would be furious. That was her real fear. She hadn’t been able to share her anxiety with him because he had been furious enough with her already, having only recently learned that she wasn’t financially independent of her father. In fact until ten minutes ago, when he’d smiled and introduced her to Godfrey Lumsden as his fiancée, she hadn’t been at all sure that Hugh wasn’t about to break off their engagement. Telling him that she was going to have a baby might be just the thing to make him leave her; and she loved him too much to provoke a parting.
    At least, she supposed it was love. It wasn’t at all what she had thought love would be, in the days when she was the largest and dreamiest pupil at an expensive girls’boarding school, where she was unmercifully teased for her size, her common accent, and for having spots on her face. But then, Hugh was not the type of man who had featured in those old romantic dreams.
    His comparative shortness was only a minor disadvantage. What made her unhappy was his attitude towards her.
    Belinda had hoped to be wooed by a man at once kind and ardent. For someone who, while giving her the security of affection, the hugs and cuddles she had been deprived of by her mother’s early death, would also provide the mysterious extra ingredient she had so often read about in romantic fiction: the special something that would make her heart beat so deliciously fast that she would know without doubt she was in love.
    The churning emotion Hugh Packer aroused in her was quite different, a mixture of fascination and fear. He was inconsiderate, frequently off-hand, often verbally cruel and sometimes physically so. But Belinda couldn’t bring herself to break their relationship because she had never recovered the self-confidence she lost at school. The fact that she had since got rid of her spots and practised to acquire a conventional accent, and that many men – older men in particular – now looked at her figure with admiration, had