by Penny Jordan
‘Dominic, let’s get inside, it’s freezing out here.’ Slipping her hand through his arm, Amanda swept past Christy’s motionless figure with a triumphant smile.
Once they were inside the house, Christy put Dominic out of her mind and tried to concentrate on her role as note-taker. She had brought her notebook with her, and listened attentively as Dominic explained his plans for the two buildings.
‘It would be impossible for us to do everything we wanted to do all at once, but the scope is here. There is over half an acre of land with these houses, enough for a car park and extensions.’
They toured both houses from top to bottom while Christy made notes. Dominic knew exactly what he wanted and had the knack of putting it across in a way that the layman could easily understand, and almost against her will Christy found herself being fired with some of his enthusiasm for his project. There was no doubt that it was a worthwhile one, and the others evidently thought so too.
Busy with her notes, Christy didn’t realise that she and Dominic were alone in one of the rooms until she glanced up and saw him watching her with a curiously pensive, almost brooding expression.
‘He must know you very well to have chosen this for you.’ His fingers reached out and touched the soft fur of her jacket. ‘I’d never thought you’d grow up to be the sort of woman who would be content playing second fiddle, Christy. I thought you’d have too much pride.’
Her teeth ached from the strain of stopping herself from telling him that he was wrong and that she and David weren’t lovers. But he was right about one thing: she did have too much pride—far too much to make any explanations to any man—and especially to him.
‘Ah, there you are, Nicky darling. My god-mother is ready to leave. You must stay and dine with us. I’m simply fascinated by what you’re planning to do here, although really you’re wasted in a small place like this. You should be practising in Harley Street.’
Chattering animatedly, Amanda led him away. Despite her fur jacket she was feeling intensely cold—too cold, Christy thought, shivering with a mixture of shock and outrage. Her fur embraced her body like a shroud—like a prison!—condemning her, and suddenly she felt as though she loathed it.
In point of fact Dominic had been wrong about one thing. Meryl had chosen the colour, not David. He had told her later that he had wanted to buy her a lynx dyed jacket, all white with spots of gold, but Meryl had protested that with her vivid colouring Christy should have the red.
Tiredly she followed the others outside. The temperature seemed to have dropped even further, and already it was dark. She unlocked the car door and slid inside starting the engine. Dominic’s car had already gone.
She drove home slowly, wound up with a nervous tension that affected her ability to give all her attention to what she was doing. She turned into the lane and sighed with relief, only to feel the breath lock in her throat as the car wheel spun savagely out of control and, as though it had been wrenched from her hands by an unseen grip, the steering wheel seemed to develop a mind of its own and the car careered off the road and plunged down into a ditch.
It took her several minutes to realise what had happened, and then what seemed like another lifetime to struggle with the seat belt in a vain attempt to free herself. Horrible images of cars bursting into flames tormented her mind, and then, shockingly, the door was wrenched open and hard hands were reaching for her, unlocking the tangled seat belt and dragging her out of the car.
She looked up at her rescuer hazily, unable to differentiate between hallucinations and reality, his name leaving her lips on a husky whisper.
‘Dominic, what…?’
‘Don’t try to talk, not just now.’ His hands moved expertly over her body, clinically exact in their movements, and only when he had assured himself that nothing was damaged did some of his tension seem to relax.
‘The car skidded…I…’
‘I know what happened.’ His voice sounded terse. ‘I was right behind you. My God… You haven’t broken anything, at least. Did you hit your head at all?’
‘No…No, I don’t think so.’
‘I’ll take you back to my place, and check you over properly…’
‘No, I want to go home,’
‘Looking like that?’ His voice was scathing. ‘What do you think it’s going to do to your mother if you walk in looking the way you do right now?’
She glanced down at herself in bewilderment and then lifted her eyes to meet his.
‘Don’t argue with me, Christy.’
‘But the car…’
‘I’ll arrange for the garage to come and collect it. Now come on, let’s get out of this damned wind.’
She made to walk, her breathing suspended as he swore under his breath and lunged forward, picking her up as easily as though she weighed next to nothing.
‘Dominic…’
‘Save it,’ he advised her tersely.
His car was parked only yards away from her own, slewed across the road as though he had stopped abruptly. He opened the rear door and bundled her on to the back seat. She looked over his shoulder and saw that it had begun to snow.
‘It’s snowing.’ Her mind seemed to be clogged with cotton wool, making it impossible for her to do more than utter the merest banalities.
‘So it is.’
She could understand why he sounded so sarcastic, but that didn’t stop the tears burning against the back of her throat. She was suffering from shock, she told herself, but the information didn’t seem to penetrate past the barrier of pain lodged round her heart, and she shrank back from him as he leaned over her, much as she might have shrunk from a would-be attacker.
She heard him swear again and then the car door slammed.
She closed her eyes, willing herself not to burst into tears. The driver’s door opened, the car rocking slightly as he got in. The engine purred into life, and she felt herself tensing as Dominic slipped it into gear. He was a far more able driver than she was herself, she acknowledged as the big car moved steadily over the icy lane.
She saw her father’s car parked outside the house as they drove past, but Dominic made no attempt to stop and she felt too weak to protest. She could hear the gravel drive to the Vicarage crunching beneath the car wheels as they drove up it, and then the car stopped. She sat up and reached for the door handle.
‘Leave it,’ Dominic snapped, turning in his seat to frown bleakly at her. ‘I don’t want you putting any weight on your legs until I’ve checked you over properly. I’ll carry you inside.’
Eight years ago Christy would have been delirious with delight at the thought of being in his arms. Now all she felt was apprehension, and a fine spear of pain that seemed to have no logical reason for springing into being. ‘I thought you were supposed to be having supper at the Manor.’
As he bent to lift her out of the car she was overwhelmed by her own awareness of his proximity. A feeling of acute panic raced through her body and she had to force herself to breathe normally.
‘Then you thought wrong, didn’t you.’ His abrupt tone warned her not to pursue the subject.
She could feel icy cold flakes of snow stinging her exposed skin as he carried her to the house. He paused to unlock the door, shifting her in his arms so that briefly her face rested against his neck. She could smell the warm male scent of his skin. Her body tensed instantly against her awareness of him, her face drawn into lines of rejection which he obviously mistook for pain, as he pushed open the door and switched the light on.
His ‘What’s wrong?’ fanned a warm breath of air against her skin, making her shiver wildly.
It wasn’t possible for her to speak, only to shake her head, denying that anything was the matter. Dominic strode through into the library, and set her down on the leather settee.
‘Don’t move from there, I’m going to go and ring your father and explain what’s happened. Then I’ll come back and check you over.’
Before he left, he knelt down and applie
d a lighted match to the fire set in the grate. Christy watched the flames spread and leap through the sticks and coal like someone drugged as she waited for him to come back. She was still suffering from shock, she told herself, unwilling to admit that most of her shock was caused not by the accident, but the proximity of Dominic, and the realisation of what that proximity was doing to her.
He came back within minutes, his face still grim.
‘I’ve told your father that I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but for your mother’s sake we both think it best that you stay here this evening. He’s going to tell your mother that I invited you back here for supper and that you accepted. If you go back looking the way you do now, you’re likely to cause her to have a relapse.’ He crouched down in front of her, expertly sliding the zips down on her boots and tugging them off before she could even think of a protest. The heat of his palm as he held the arch of her foot, his long fingers curling round her ankle, made her heart thud at twice its normal rate.
‘You’ll have to take these off, I’m afraid,’ he told her, standing up and gesturing to her tight jeans.
Her face froze, and she knew suddenly and intensely that there was no way she could do what he asked. It was all very well to tell herself that he was a doctor, but he was also Dominic. She knew that she was being silly; after all, he had seen her growing up, a skinny, flat-chested, adoring child, but she wasn’t that child any more, and for some reason she didn’t want him looking at her body with that same clinical detachment with which he had studied it before.
‘I’m perfectly all right.’ To prove it she swung her legs to the floor and stood up, taking a few tentative steps, before she started to shiver and had to subside back on to the settee.
Far from being relieved, Dominic’s mouth had compressed into a savagely inimical line.
‘What is it, Christy?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Surely you aren’t frightened of my taking advantage of the situation?’
The explicit way he let his glance linger on her body left her in no doubt as to what he meant. Even though she tried to suppress it, there was nothing she could do to control the hot surge of colour sweeping up under her skin.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’ Her voice sounded unfamiliar and thick, almost as though it was choked with tears. She turned her head away from him and added huskily, ‘I know quite well that you’re the last person who’d ever want me, Dominic.’
She couldn’t look at him, but even without doing so she was intensely conscious of the stunned quality of his stillness. In the end she had to look at him, her eyes meeting the brilliant, disbelieving glitter of his in shocked astonishment.
‘Is that what you honestly think?’ He dropped down on to his heels and slid his hand into her hair so that she couldn’t turn away from him. His voice sounded oddly rusty. ‘Is it, Christy?’
She wanted to turn away from him, but there was no way she could. Instinctively she moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, and then froze when she saw the way his eyes darkened and followed the movement.
‘You’ve been pushing me away ever since you came home. I thought it was because…’ he broke off and shook his head. The firelight danced on the exposed nape of his neck, and she had an aching desire to reach out and stroke it.
‘Christy, what’s gone wrong between us? What…?’
She couldn’t let herself listen to the husky seduction of his voice. He had hurt her once, and so badly that she had never really recovered. She had to remember that. She twisted beneath his hand and instantly he released her, his frown deepening.
‘I don’t know what game you think you’re playing with me, Dominic,’ she told him. ‘You humiliated me once,’ she burst out bitterly. ‘I’m not going to let that happen again. It’s all very well for you to act as though it never happened…as though you never virtually called me a little tramp…’ Her colour was high now, her eyes glittering with unshed tears, her mind sliding back to the past, and her body shivering with pain.
Her voice broke, and because she knew she wasn’t far from tears, she curled her hands into tight fists, willing herself not to give way, her face turned into the darkness of the settee and away from Dominic’s probing scrutiny.
She heard him get up, and felt him standing in front of the fire, blocking off its warmth. He moved, almost restlessly, and then she heard him say, ‘I’d no idea you felt like this. God in heaven, you can’t be holding that against me, Christy! What was I supposed to do?’ She felt him coming towards her and cringed back, but he didn’t touch her, his voice roughening and coming from somewhere above. ‘You were a child!’ His voice was almost tortured now.
She struggled to sit up and face him, as he stood looking down at her.
‘I was seventeen,’ she told him bitterly.
‘Like I said, just a child.’
She couldn’t avoid the tight-lipped look he gave her or her shock as he suddenly swore savagely and volubly—something she had never before heard him do. ‘A very provocative child, maybe,’ he added tersely, ‘but a child none the less.’
She was the one who should have been bitterly angry, not him. She couldn’t understand that anger, and something of her lack of understanding must have shown in her face, for suddenly he grasped her shoulders and pulled her round into the firelight.
‘You may be eight years older, Christy, but that doesn’t seem to have made you any more mature. You’ve held on to your bitterness and resentment like a child instead of trying to see my point of view. What the devil was I supposed to do? What would you think of me right now, if I’d taken you up on your offer?’
It was something she had never thought of, and her eyes widened as he forced her to face up to the reality of what had happened between them. Now, as a woman of twenty-five herself, what would she think of a man of her own age who made love to an ignorant, adoring adolescent?
She shuddered as the realisation of what he had saved her from shot through her, falling back against the back of the settee like a jointless doll as he abruptly released her.
‘You never even tried to see it from my point of view, did you?’ He was pacing the floor now, his face in the shadows. ‘My God, to think you’ve carried this resentment against me around with you all these years! I know I hurt and upset you, Christy, but I had to…can’t you see that? I was so damned scared for you. You were such an innocent. Hell, you hadn’t the faintest idea.’ He broke off and swore again. ‘I’m not in the right frame of mind to go into this right now. I’d no idea you felt like this.’ He shook his head heavily like a man coming out of deep water for much-needed air.
Why did he keep on stressing that? It couldn’t possibly matter to him what she thought.
Christy didn’t realise she had spoken out loud until he caught hold of her again hauling her to her feet in front of him.
‘Of course it damn well matters!’ He was practically shouting at her. ‘Do you believe for one moment that if you walked in here now and offered yourself to me like that I’d even think of turning you down?’
Shock crystallised inside her. She searched his eyes and face for signs of mockery and saw only anguish and…and desire…
It was like being hit in the chest with an iron first. Dominic wanted her.
She opened her mouth and closed it again, and then heard him say in a thick, unfamiliar tone, through a haze of cotton-woolly disbelief, ‘Do that again,’ and her mouth opened instinctively to absorb the heat of his as he pulled her against him and kissed her with a famished kind of hunger that was so erotic that she had no defences against it.
Against her mouth she heard him mutter, ‘You can’t know how much I’ve wanted to do this. Even then, God help me. I want you, Christy. I want to take you upstairs to bed with me and make love to you until…’
It was his voice that brought her back to reality, making her pull away from him in panicky shock.
‘What is it?’
She pushed him away, shaking her head, and as s
he did so, she saw him frown and look at her coat.
‘I see. You’re thinking of him. Is that it?’ His mouth hardened and she saw the bitterness in his eyes. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I forgot that you were committed…elsewhere.’
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to tell him how wrong he was, but some last shred of sanity luckily prevented her. He wanted her, he had said, and God alone knew she had wanted him. The moment his mouth touched hers she had known how much she ached and yearned for him; eight years of telling herself she had changed meant nothing. She had known the moment she felt his mouth against her own that she still loved him, but this time it was a woman’s love, not a child’s.
Half of her couldn’t believe it—didn’t want to believe it, but it was true none the less. She had to fight to keep back the hysterical laughter building up inside her.
‘I’d better take you home.’
She didn’t protest, simply allowing him to lead her to the front door, her mouth still tingling from the pressure of his kiss. Her body ached in a way that was far more intense than any mild desire that David had ever aroused in her.
How ironic fate could be. Almost she could laugh at the ridiculous folly of Dominic thinking that David was her lover, but just as long as he continued to think that, she was safe. If he ever discovered that no man had ever touched her, that no man had ever aroused the need in her that he could arouse, then she was lost. Lost because he would take her simply out of his own need and desire for her, and that was something she didn’t think she could bear. Once, she had thought no further than the dazzling pleasure of having him make love to her, but then she had been a child convinced that somehow once he had made love to her, he must love her. Now she was adult and knew better. Dominic had said nothing about loving her, and she didn’t think she could endure giving herself to him knowing that while he was her whole life, she was nothing more to him than a woman whom he wanted.