To her horror she found her throat was clogged with tears. Why, when she knew what a fortunate escape she had had? Why cry now when she hadn't allowed herself to cry before? What was there after all to cry for apart from her own folly?
'He left you?'
'Not exactly.' Briefly she explained what had happened, stopping breathlessly halfway through her explanation to take another quick gulp of her wine and to marvel a little hazily at what she was doing.
Not even to her closest friends had she confided as much as she was now confiding to Daniel. What was it about him that made her feel she could trust him? That made her want to confide in him, that made her feel so secure, so safe, so protected almost?
She watched now as he refilled her wine glass, protesting uncertainly, 'I shouldn't really. It's going straight to my head.'
But nevertheless, more out of nervousness than anything else, she picked up the glass and started toying with it, before taking a small sip and then another.
'Do you still love him?' Daniel asked her quietly.
'No. But I still feel-I don't know-sort of raw inside for being such a fool. A woman of my age ... I ought to have realised.'
'What? That he was lying to you? That he was using you? Age isn't any protection against that kind of vulnerability.'
'No, perhaps not, but I ought to have realised when he didn't want
She bit her lip, angry with herself for her own stupidity. Another few seconds and she would have been telling Daniel that Giles had never made love to her. That final humiliation was something she hadn't been able to bring herself to tell anyone. It had left a deep wound that still hadn't healed, that realisation that, not only had Giles not loved her, but that he hadn't desired her either, that he had found her so lacking as a woman that sexually he had been totally uninterested in her. It didn't matter that she herself had been lacking in any deep sexual curiosity about him. She had put that down to the fact that her sheltered upbringing and general ignorance about men had made her sexually naive and immature. Giles had been neither of those things though, as she had brutally discovered when she had found him with someone else, and now, although she might not regret the loss of the man, she still ached inside with the knowledge that she had been rejected as a woman.
'When he didn't want to what?' Daniel pounced. His wine glass was just over half full; the bottle was nearly empty, which meant that he must have drunk exactly as much as she, and yet it didn't seem to be having anything like the same effect on him as it was having on her.
'When he didn't what, Angelica?' he pressed.
Her throat had gone very dry. She wanted badly to lie to him and casually pass off her slip-up by saying something like, 'Oh, when he didn't want to introduce me to his friends, that's all,' but she knew she simply could not do it with anything like conviction.
She touched her tongue-tip to her lips in a nervously betraying gesture, licking their dryness while she hunted frantically for something to say, wondering how on earth she had ever got herself into this mess.
What was wrong with her? she asked herself bitterly. Was she so desperate for male appreciation and attention that the moment a man flirted casually with her and commented that he found her attractive, she instantly had to regale him with her entire life-story?
'What didn't he do? she heard Daniel insist, and suddenly her pride gave way beneath much stronger needs. Recklessly ignoring the panic-stricken voice of warning inside her brain, she told him with husky defiance,
'When he didn't want to-to make love to me. I should have realised then, but, like a fool, I thought .. .' She shook her head helplessly. 'Go on, laugh if you want to. I expect I would in your shoes.'
'Believe me, the last thing I feel like doing is laughing,' Daniel assured her grimly. So grimly that she forgot her self-conscious anguish and stared at him, trying to read what lay behind the hard darkness of his eyes, wondering what it was that she had said to provoke the bitter anger flaring in them.
'Unfortunately there are human beings like that, who enjoy wounding and maiming, who take pleasure in inflicting the kind of pain that does not kill, but which instead festers, leaving a poison that spreads over the whole of their victim's life. You must be very strong emotionally to have survived that kind of treachery.'
Was that really how he saw her-as someone strong? She thought of all the nights she had lain awake tormented by self-doubt and anguish, of all the pain and self-analysis she had gone through, of the aloneness she now endured, of the stress which had finally resulted in her coming here.
'Strength isn't a virtue men look for in a woman,' she told him bitterly.
'Oh, yes, it is,' he contradicted. 'It's just that most of us don't choose to admit it. A weak, clinging woman might appeal to an immature, insecure man, who needs that kind of dependence on him, but he soon grows tired of it and of the woman, poor creature. A woman with her own special strengths and inner resources is something else again.'
He said it so softly that it was several seconds before she realised how intensely he meant what he was saying. His eyes were shadowed as though he were looking not at her, but back into the past, and she wondered what on earth lay there to make him look like that, to make him feel like that, and then just as she was about to ask him, to question him as he had questioned her, he stunned her by asking directly, 'Have you ever had lover, Angelica?'
She was too stunned to lie, her eyes widening as she absorbed the question, recognised its intimacy, felt her body as well as her emotions react to it, and responded automatically without thinking.
'No. No, I haven't. Does it show so much?'
'No. No, it doesn't show at all. If you hadn't told me tonight about Giles, if I'd gone on my first impression of you when you arrived here, I'd have put you down as a sophisticated and experienced woman; not a woman who cares to indulge in casual sex-you obviously value yourself far too highly for that-but a woman none the less who knows what it is to share passion and desire.'
'I'm afraid the truth must be rather disappointing,' she responded huskily, bending her head over her wine glass so that her hair swung forward and hid her expression from him. She felt such a fool. Why on earth had she told him so much?
The unexpected touch of his fingers against her skin as he brushed her hair away forced her to look up directly into his eyes. They were glittering with an unexpected heat that made her stomach muscles clench and her body tense.
'Who said I was disappointed?' he asked her softly.
She had made the remark instinctively, defensively, not expecting him to take her up on it, to challenge her so directly and thus imbue their conversation with a far more personal intimacy than she had intended it to have.
From somewhere she found the courage to add recklessly, 'And please don't tell me that you're the kind of man who finds the idea of a woman of twent-yeight still being a virgin-a-challenge or in some way exciting, because I won't believe you.'
'Good, because I'm not,' he replied promptly. 'But I find you exciting, Angelica.'
It stopped the breath in her throat, froze all her responses, made her focus on his face and stare into his eyes, the expression in her own unguarded and naked for the whole of half a dozen heavy heartbeats, while she assimilated his quiet words and in a panic tried to deny them.
He couldn't find her exciting. She wasn't exciting. She was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin, whom no man had ever found exciting.
Out of her panic, she recognised later that she said the very worst possible thing she could have said, challenging him almost, although that was not what she intended when she delivered her flat, emotionless denial of what he had just said.
'I don't believe you.'
'Why not?'
She tried to think of a reason and found that her mind had gone dismayingly blank, and in the end all she could manage was a feeble, 'Well, men just don't find me exciting.'
'Because they don't tell you so.' He sounded amused now, and suddenly she felt angry both with him
and with herself. She stood up, pushing herself away from the table and then finding that she had to cling to it as dizziness hit her.
'I'm not a complete idiot,' she told him bitterly. 'I am aware of how the male sex behaves when it experiences desire. Oh, not personally, maybe, but I'm a great observer of life; people like me always are we don't have much alternative. I have seen how a man reacts when he meets a woman he finds attractive.'
'Really.'
Daniel too was standing up and for one breathless moment she actually thought he was going to come round to her side of the table, and take hold of her and ...
The disappointment that welled through her when he didn't, but walked past her instead, made her bite her lip and burn with a fierce inner resentment both of him and of herself. What was it about her that made her so vulnerable, so stupid? Had she really thought that he meant it, that he wanted her? Hadn't she already learned her lesson? He was just playing a game with her, just whiling away their final hours together, just amusing himself at her expense.
He was doing something by the sink. She heard him turn on the tap but refused to look round. She didn't want to look at him, she recognised, because she was frightened that if she did so that uncomfortable aching, yearning sensation in the pit of her stomach would fill her again, rendering her helpless to fight against the slow pulse of need he seemed to arouse so effortlessly inside her.
'You've got to taste Mrs Davies's strawberries,' she heard him saying. 'I almost forgot about them. You aren't allergic to them, I hope.'
She wanted to fib and say that she was, to react childishly and petulantly and storm off up to her room in a fit of sulks, but thankfully she managed to subdue the impulse and assure him as casually as though they had been discussing nothing more intimate than the weather that she was longing to taste the farmer's wife's soft fruit.
She still couldn't look at him though, rigidly keeping her back to him, but all the time intensely conscious of every small movement of his body. And yet for all that her ears were straining to catch every movement he made, he still managed to leave the sink and walk up behind her without her being in the least bit aware of it until she heard him saying, 'Here are your strawberries.'
The shock of knowing that he was standing directly behind her made her turn her head far too quickly so that she immediately became dizzy and disorientated. She tried to stand up, without knowing why other than that she had to escape from him, and yet in standing up she had effectively moved even closer to him.
Mercifully he seemed to have mistaken the cause of her reaction, because as he took hold of her upper arms she heard him saying urgently, 'Angelica, are you all right? Are you feeling ill?' And then, when she didn't make an immediate reply, he swept her up off her feet and carried her over to the chair beside the Aga, muttering under his breath, 'I knew you shouldn't have had that damn steak.'
'It wasn't the steak,' she protested automatically, the words muffled against his chest as he paused in the act of releasing her to stare frowningly into her eyes. 'Really, I'm fine.'
'So fine that you looked as though you were about to pass out,' he told her grittily, demanding, 'If it wasn't the steak, then what the hell was it?'
She could have fibbed, ought to have done and in fact fully intended to do so, manufacturing some excuse about the wine and her own lack of tolerance for it, and it was certainly true that the alcohol did seem to have loosened all her normal inhibitions, did seem to have removed from her behaviour the constraints she normally imposed on it, did seem to have made her feel extraordinarily and dangerously incautious. But it wasn't the wine that made her take that fateful and betraying step of letting her glance slide from his eyes to his mouth and linger there while her tongue-tip unconsciously stroked her own mouth, relieving its sudden dryness.
'Angelica.'
Panic suddenly seized her with the realisation of what she was inviting. As his head bent towards her, his hands suddenly tightening on her arms, she trembled openly and moaned a frantically protesting 'no', which both of them knew was not the denial it seemed.
Certainly there was nothing rejecting or reluctant about the way her lips clung to the slow caress of his, her panic subsiding, forgotten in the slow, sweet wash of pleasure that seized her.
It was such a gentle kiss, such an exploratory, tender pressure of mouth against mouth, as though he was deliberately giving her the opportunity to draw back, as though he had sensed her panic and understood how much she needed this restrained tenderness to ease it from her and reassure her. As though he was deliberately giving her the time to become accustomed to this intimacy with him, and her own reaction to his unfamiliar maleness.
His body imprisoned hers within the soft depths of the chair, but it wasn't a threatening imprisonment, just as the pressure of his kiss wasn't being brutally enforced on her, just as the grip of his hands on her arms was such that she knew instinctively she only had to move, to protest, and she would immediately be set free; the smallest signal that this wasn't what she wanted and it would be over. She knew that as well as she knew her own name, just as well as she knew that in allowing this kiss to continue she was inviting the kind of intimacy, the kind of vulnerability that could only lead to further pain. So why didn't she stop him?
Her senses knew the answer; Dizzily, greedily almost they drank in the pleasure he was giving them, intoxicated by his scent, his taste, his weight against her body, his touch against her skin, the heat he was generating between them.
Why, when she had thought she loved Giles so deeply, had she never once with him been aware of him as a man in the way that she was now so overwhelmingly and sharply aware of Daniel's maleness? Why had she never hungered for everything that was male in Giles with the same fierce, elemental hunger she could now feel for Daniel?
She was hungry for him in a way that both excited and alarmed her. The tender, exploratory pressure of his mouth was no longer enough. She wanted to bite at it, to tease it with her tongue, to feel its hungry pressure. She wanted ... She gave a deep shudder and made a small anguished sound deep in her throat as she recognised how disturbingly quickly she had gone from apprehension to arousal. And it was no use pretending she wasn't aroused. At least not to herself.
What did amaze her was how easily and quickly she, who had never really experienced this kind of sexual intensity before, could recognise so immediately what it was that was happening to her.
She didn't need any experience to tell her that the tight ache in her breasts was caused by her need to feel Daniel's hands against her skin, or that the fierce pulse beating urgently lower down in her body was caused by its feminine need to feel the maleness of him stroking deep within her wanton flesh.
Shocked as she was to discover that she could be aroused so quickly and so intensely, she was honest enough to admit to herself that it wasn't simply the fact that Daniel was kissing her that was responsible for her immediate reaction to him. Her own thoughts, her own awareness of him as a man, her own awareness of the effect he had on her had already primed her body to be receptive to his touch. And not merely receptive, she acknowledged weakly as she tried to fight for some self-control.
She wanted him with a need which she had always felt belonged to women of a far different calibre from herself. She wanted him as hungrily and immediately as though she were a woman with a succession of lovers behind her and a very experienced awareness of her own needs and appetites.
When she had contemplated making love with Giles, it had been with a certain amount of hesitancy and apprehension, a relief almost that their physical union was something she didn't have to confront until they were married, but now, with Daniel, there was no hesitancy, no apprehension and certainly no reluctance.
He was still kissing her, feathering small delicate kisses along her jaw, exploring the delicate whorls of her ear, making her moan and sending her into an agony of need as she clung helplessly to his arms, biting her bottom lip as she fought to suppress the betraying moans clogging
her throat. And yet when his mouth did return to hers, as though the hand that caressed the taut flesh of her throat had registered her ruthlessly silenced 'please', instead of behaving with dignified restraint, instead of passively allowing him to kiss her, she gave in to her earlier need and bit frantically at his bottom lip, digging her nails into the hard muscles of his back as she lost her battle to control the effect he was having on her.
That her behaviour was so totally out of character, that even to contemplate it in the privacy of her own thoughts would normally have been enough to shock her with self-disgust and disbelief that she could ever, ever act in such a way, was something that never even managed to surface past the fierce ache of need that engulfed her, and Daniel, far from appearing to find it shocking, responded to her fevered urgency with such satisfying immediacy and recognition, pressing her deep into the depth of the chair, his hands tangling in her hair, hard and warm against her scalp as he held her a willing prisoner beneath the fierce ravishment of his mouth, that she quite unconsciously made delirious sounds of pleasure that he told her huskily reminded him of a cat starting to purr. For some reason his words made her shiver erotically and arch her body as though she wanted to rub it against him as enticingly as that same animal wanting to be stroked.
Never when she had contemplated the act of making love had she envisaged that it could be accompanied by words, promises, pleas, indistinct sometimes and yet so intensely arousing that to hear them, to recognise the arousal and desire they cloaked, was almost as erotic as the touch of his hands and mouth. And if she had never contemplated a man saying these things to her, even less had she imagined herself saying similar things, to make-making desperate pleas ... giving soft whispers of lavish praise, allowing herself to be carried away on a tide so deep and full that when Daniel stopped kissing her briefly and then watched her gravely, while his hands unfastened the first button of her blouse, she had no thought of stopping him, no awareness of self-consciousness or shyness, only a dizzying eagerness to be rid of the constriction of her clothes, which made her move restlessly and plaintively beneath his hands, so that they trembled slightly and she caught the betraying rasp of his indrawn breath as her urgency seemed to communicate itself to him, and he wrenched almost awkwardly at one of the buttons, causing her heart to pound, not with fear, but with fierce excitement and pleasure at the thought that he wanted her as much as she did him.
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