The First Long Kiss

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

A captivating tale from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1953 and now available for the first time in eBook. Gemma Grantham and Bette Dickens decide to have a really luxurious holiday. Longing for romance they move into a suite at the fabulous Hotel Splendide. Then to add excitement to their joy, Gemma pretends to be an heiress and falls into the clutches of Rudy Shore, a handsome fortune seeker. Adventure follows adventure, and although heartbreak threatens, love is destined to find a way...

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

THERE could have been no sharper contrast than that between the girl who was the Reception Clerk at the Splendide Hotel and the one who had just walked up to the desk and said in a breathless voice:

‘My name is Grantham. My friend, Miss Dickens, and I booked a suite—two communicating single bedrooms with private bath for a fortnight from today.’

The Reception Clerk patted her lips to smother a yawn. She was very blasé and bored. She flipped the pages of a ledger and eyed the visitor resentfully and said:

‘Oh, yes. Suite No. 24. On the second floor.’

‘Facing the sea?’ asked Miss Grantham eagerly.

‘Yes, with balcony, and I think we mentioned the price when we wrote to you.’

She added ‘Madam’ as an afterthought.

For the girl who was claiming Suite No. 24 looked to the Reception Clerk as though she would never be able to pay the bill. And she seemed childishly eager and excited. She had none of that poise or calm or sophistication to which the Splendide Hotel was accustomed from their wealthy clients. Suite No. 24 had just been vacated by Major Lord Forborough, D.S.O., recently decorated hero of the Korean war, and his beautiful society bride. What a come-down to have to let it to a couple of girls from—from—the Reception Clerk knitted her brows and looked at the ledger to refresh her memory—Moxdale, Lancs. Sloe Lane was the address. Sloe Lane. The Reception Clerk shuddered delicately, with visions of cart ruts and mud and puddles. Of course this might be a Lancashire heiress—who was to know? Suite No. 24 cost a pretty penny so she must have money. Pretty, the Clerk grudgingly admitted. The linen suit a bit creased and face hot and sticky, but no doubt Miss Grantham had just had a long tiring journey all the way from the North of England to the West. She had a good figure, of course, and a glorious complexion. The long lashes were naturally dark. The crisp waving hair a natural pale gold. The eyes were brown with golden flecks in them. Unusual—such dark eyes with such fair hair.

She beckoned her friend.

‘Come along, Bette, we’ve got the suite we asked for.’

The girl addressed as ‘Bette’ dropped a small suit-case she was holding and puffed, fanning a crimson face not nearly as pretty as her friend’s. Much more typical of the North thought the critical Clerk. Short and stocky, and she had a mass of unruly red curls, and a snub nose. But she had the jolliest face imaginable. She was smiling now at the page who was attempting to take her suit-case.

‘No you don’t, my lad. Those are the Crown Jewels, and I take them myself.’

The page grinned and retired. He whispered to the porter who also grinned, then stood waiting by the lift beside the two large suit-cases which the newcomers had brought, while they signed the register.

Miss Dickens added her name to Miss Grantham’s. They then linked arms and walked towards the lift.

‘Oh, Bette!’ exclaimed Gemma Grantham, ‘we’re here and it’s even more marvellous than the pictures in the brochure. Just think of Moxdale and look at this.’

Bette looked. She was as thrilled as her friend but rather more prosaic. Gemma had always been romantic and even artistic. Beauty in any shape or form appealed vastly to her. But Bette had a wholesome respect for her appetite and she was hungry. She wanted to wash and dress and get down to a square meal. They had been travelling all night.

It had been Gemma’s idea to come here. For a year they had planned and saved for it. They worked together in Barrow in the head offices of one of the owners of a big slate quarry. It had meant rigid economy for a good eleven months.

Gemma, entering the lift—that gilded cage with its beautiful mirrors and padded seats—took another last final ravished look at the vestibule of the Splendide. The aroma of cigar smoke and of women’s perfume lingered here. One could see that at night they danced for there was a highly-polished floor at the far end.

All her life Gemma had longed to see the Cornish coast.

Her heart beat fast as they reached the door of the suite and the page boy unlocked it. They passed through a tiny hall. The whole suite was charmingly appointed and luxurious.

Gemma and Bette came from much the same sort of homes. Good, solid, little grey stone Lancashire houses. The kitchen probably the best room because it was always the warmest in winter. And since the war they all ate their meals in there. Gemma thought of her shabby bedroom. Dear to the heart because of fond memories, old photographs and books and personal treasures, and the feeling that it was home. But wouldn’t any girl alive give a lot to occupy Suite No. 24 in the Splendide Hotel for a little while?

‘I really feel like Betty Grable or Jean Kent,’ sighed Gemma, flinging her coat on the bed (although she felt it a desecration to put anything on that gleaming satin-spread).

She walked to one of the windows, opened it and stepped on to the balcony into a blaze of sunshine. Down in the garden people sat drinking aperitifs under striped umbrellas. Smart-looking sun-browned girls in chic cotton frocks or linen slacks. Men wearing grey flannels and sports-shirts. Just like pictures Gemma had seen of ‘Society’ in the South of France. Just what she had hoped for. A new exciting world—the world of the wealthy far removed from that of a shorthand-typist in Moxdale. A world which was to be hers for two whole weeks. She could do more than dream now. She could live and breathe glamour to her heart’s content.

Her friend’s gay voice interrupted her thoughts:

‘Now there remains only one thing—to hope we meet two gorgeous boy-friends who’ll propose to us and tell us that life in the Splendide shall be ours for ever.’

‘Idiot,’ murmured Gemma.

And she laughed. ‘Gorgeous boy-friends’ had not been a paramount thought in her mind. She had felt that it would be enough to be able to dwell in these surroundings alone for a little while. She drew in a breath of the salt air, looked longingly at the sparkling sea, and felt the sun warm on her face. Grey old Lancashire seemed far away. Ten to one it was raining in Moxdale at this very moment. They rarely got it as fine and hot as this even in August.

Her gaze was caught and held now by a couple at a table below the balcony. She could see them plainly—both wore shorts and had been playing tennis. Their racquets were propped up against the table. Both were wearing dark glasses and sipping iced drinks. The man was fair. Gemma did not really like fair men. But this one was handsome in a ‘big brute’ fashion, with a square chin and powerful shoulders. His hair was rather too bleached and long and smooth. Gemma could hear his voice—it had a slight drawl.

‘My dear Corinne—I don’t agree⎯’

Gemma thought:

‘He looks as though he couldn’t agree with anyone. He’s got a sulky mouth. But he’s not unattractive.’

The girl called ‘Corinne’ was very attractive. She had a long incredibly thin body, deeply bronzed, and wore spotless white shorts and top, with a scarlet bandana handkerchief knotted around her throat. She was the acme of sophistication; just the type to fascinate the unsophisticated Gemma. Dark satin hair parted in the centre and drawn into a knot at the nape of the neck. A scarlet mouth, and long scarlet finger-nails. Gemma’s interested gaze took in all the feminine details even to the gold chunky ear-rings, and the gold seals on her bracelet which jangled as she lifted her glass.

‘Rather like a model-girl in Vogue,’ Gemma mused. ‘How poised she is and cool! I wish I could be like that.’

And It was a very cool poised voice which floated up to Gemma answering the man who had just spoken.

‘My dear Rudy—I assure you⎯’

The rest of the speech was lost to Gemma.

She decided to let Bette take the first bath. While she listened to her friend splashing and singing Gemma unpacked.

It was even a thrill to her to bring out these clothes so carefully lain between folds of tissue paper; for they were all new.

Later, she rolled back the satin spread and lay on her bed, slender fingers laced behind her head. Dreaming again; not of the present but of the past.

Just think—if Dad hadn’t had such incredibly bad luck—this sort of thing might have been an everyday occurrence in her life. She might have had everything and been one of the richest girls in Lancashire. If it hadn’t been for all the bad luck and that horrid old Joseph Blacker who was Dad’s business partner when Gemma was an infant. She did not often dwell on the past. It was her parents’ story, not her own, but of course it had had a direct effect upon her.

No doubt Dad was a bit to blame, too. But whenever Gemma did review it, she held the other man to blame rather than Dad.

It had all begun with her grandfather. He and Joseph Blacker’s father had founded a prosperous engineering works in Moxdale and worked together peaceably all their lives. They had left the business to their two eldest sons hoping that they, too, would continue along the same lines.

But young Tom Grantham and Joe Blacker disagreed. Quarrelled violently over the policy of the works, the switch-over to munition-making during the war; everything, as far as Gemma could see that they could disagree about. Men of two different natures: both hide-bound, bigoted, unwilling to give ground.

Blacker had wanted to try a new process and Gemma’s father had refused, whereupon Blacker threatened to sell out his shares. Tom Grantham scoffed at the threat but (how often Gemma had heard her father tell the story) Blacker said that not only would he sell out but set up in opposition and ruin his former friend. Tom had defied him and he had done it. Helped by a legacy left to his wife, and by a combination of luck, hard work and daring, Joe Blacker built up the great engineering firm of Blacker & Son. He had meant it to become the major industry of Moxdale; that the future streets of council houses and shops should be built around his great new factory and for it. And he brought off the gamble.

Poor old Dad, Gemma thought, always a little late and hesitant—he hadn’t been able to fight the cleverer, more ambitious man of the two. There was room for only one firm of engineers in Moxdale. Finally Mr. Grantham’s business dwindled, and the crowning bitterness and humiliation came when he was forced to sell his factory, and found himself on the brink of financial ruin.

The Blackers had one son, Kelvin. The Granthams a daughter—christened Gemma after her great-grandmother who had been a noted Yorkshire beauty. A portrait of her by Lely hung to this day in the National Gallery of Portraits.

Gemma had never seen anything of the money or position which her parents had known in their youth. When she was a year old Mr. Grantham had been reduced to buying a small-holding and eking out his income by keeping chickens. A sad come-down for the one-time well-to-do engineer.

Gemma was the idol of his life; all that he had left, for her mother had died while she was still a baby. His sister Lizzie—a spinster older than himself—helped to bring Gemma up. Now Lizzie was crippled with arthritis and Tom Grantham, himself, in failing health. So Gemma had to look after them both. A bright intelligent girl, she had won a scholarship and thereby obtained a good education in one of the biggest colleges in the North Country. Afterwards she had trained as a shorthand-typist. She had been earning her living for the last two years. Already she had had a rise and her salary made a difference to the over-strained finances of the Grantham household.

Dreamy and idealistic though she was, Gemma was independent of spirit and had never been of an envious disposition and she usually smiled when her father spoke in anger and bitterness of the position she should have had if that dastardly old Blacker had not ruined him. The one thing that bit like acid into Tom Grantham’s soul was the knowledge that his former partner’s son had had all that his poor Gemma lacked. Kelvin Blacker—seven years older than Gemma—had been given a public school and Varsity education. Every advantage that his wealthy parents could lavish on their only son.

Of course Gemma had heard the many stories that circulated round Moxdale about Kelvin Blacker. But they had never met. Their paths did not cross. He lived in that wealthy, glamorous world which Gemma only dreamed about, or saw in the cinema. Sometimes she had a glimpse of him in one of his expensive sports-cars tearing through Moxdale. That was all. She knew, as most people did, that he had taken an honours degree in languages at Oxford, and volunteered for service in the Navy, and then after a distinguished career in coastal forces had returned home to work in his father’s firm.

Every time Kelvin was mentioned in the local papers (Kelvin winning the Monte Carlo Rally in his Jaguar—Kelvin playing Rugger for England—Kelvin ski-ing in Norway or Switzerland) Mr. Grantham exploded.

‘Young rascal—wasting his money and his time, and in a position that ought to belong to my girl!’

Why was it, Gemma asked herself in this hour, that she had never felt any personal antipathy towards the Blacker heir? ‘Let the best man win’ every time, was her motto, and because Joseph Blacker had won—why disparage his son? No—she had nothing against the young man even though she ought by rights to have shared his social position. And as far as she knew he was hardly aware of her existence.

Funny that she should remember him today. Except perhaps that she was thinking in terms of wealth and magnificence. And ‘Kelvin the Magnificent’ was what she had christened him when, as a teenager, she had seen a large framed photograph of him in Naval uniform in the window of a Moxdale photographer’s shop. Extraordinarily good-looking and alive. With cap set a little jauntily on a curly head. It had been a photograph in colour, showing the gold braid, the ribbons on his breast, and the blueness of his eyes.

HALF AN HOUR later, in their fresh cotton frocks, the two girls went down to the lounge, looking as radiant as the flowers themselves.

As they were getting out of the lift, they ran into the couple whom Gemma had noticed on the terrace an hour ago. The big fair man and the dark lovely girl. Both had removed their sun glasses. A quick glance showed Gemma that the man’s eyes were light hazel, set rather too close together for real good looks.

With them was an elderly woman, smartly dressed, with snow-white immaculately-waved hair. The man addressed her:

‘Don’t wait lunch if you’re dressed first, Mother. You know what a time I take.’

‘I know what a time Corinne takes,’ said the woman smiling.

‘Then please don’t wait for me either, my dear Aunt,’ said the girl named Corinne, with what Gemma thought was rather a disagreeable little laugh.

The blond man was looking at Gemma now very hard. She could not fail to see that he was interested in her. As always happened when she was nervous, she blushed bright pink.

The trio went up in the lift. The man said:

‘New arrivals. Darned pretty girl. Actually blushed when I looked at her. Rare specimen!’

Corinne answered:

‘Not the red-haired dumpling with the plump legs, surely? You must be slipping, Rudy.’

‘No, of course I didn’t mean the red-head.’

Corinne shrugged her shoulders.

‘The tall one wasn’t bad but her hair was frightful—so unsmart.’

‘I thought it was a particularly beautiful colour.’

‘Blonde like your own—how you do adore yourself, dear Rudy. All the same it needed cutting—also like yours.’

He shot her a malevolent look.

‘I must say you are very bad-tempered today, Corrie. We all know that the papers say that Miss Corinne Shore’s beauty is practically flawless, but it cannot be said that she has an equally beautiful nature.’

‘Now, you two!’ interrupted the white-haired woman benevolently.

The lift stopped on the fourth floor. They all got out. Mother and son turned to go one way and the girl the other. Rudy touched the latter on the shoulder with his racquet.

‘Say what you will, my pet, that was a darned pretty girl. Fresh as a rose and I adored the blush.’

‘My dear Rudy, go and gather your rose for all I care. You make me sick. You are always looking for something new to play with.’

He called after her.

‘You sound jealous, sweetie-pie. You, yourself, don’t want to play by any chance, do you?’

She looked over her shoulder with contempt.

‘With you? No, thank you. I’m waiting for Kelvin to come and thank goodness he will be here tomorrow. I’ve had about enough of you. You bore me to tears.’

He called after her yet again as she turned the corner of the long corridor.

‘Gracious little soul! One can always expect a soothing word from you. Let’s hope that your Kelvin will play when he comes, but I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. He’s a confirmed bachelor.’

Rudy was too far away now from Corinne to hear her retort but he was certain it would be a vicious one. Anything like that about Kelvin Blacker touched her on the raw. Rudy knew it. She had been madly in love with Kelvin ever since their ski-ing holiday at St. Moritz last February.

Rudolph and Corinne were first cousins. They moved in the same crowd. They had been in the Palace Hotel at St. Moritz with Rudy’s mother when they had first met Kelvin, and watched him in the ski-jumping contest. He had joined their party and danced a good deal with Corinne; seemed attracted by her dark lithe beauty and the way that she had with a man (which was quite volcanic, Rudy admitted, although she had never attracted him). He—being sophisticated himself, preferred his girl-friends to be less so. He liked them a little more innocent and clinging. Perhaps that sweet young thing in the lift with her doe-like gold-brown eyes and thick fair hair, would cling a bit? Rudy mused pleasurably upon this as he went off to his room to change. He couldn’t care less what Cousin Corinne thought.

Kelvin was turning up tomorrow to join the party because he knew that Corrie was here. Obviously he liked her, even though one night he had confided in Rudy that it would have to be a very special girl before he tied himself up permanently. But he was coming down to La. . .