by Penny Jordan
She tensed as he took hold of her arm, steadying her as someone jostled past her. She fought the fierce surge of pleasure that dizzied her, trying to breathe deeply and calmly, looking straight ahead as she thanked him and quickly stepped away from him.
‘Do you have any family?’ Leigh asked him, unashamedly curious, as they all reached the stile into the field.
‘Some. But unfortunately I don’t get to see much of them these days.
‘My sister is married to an Australian. They have three children. My parents retired out there several years ago. I think my mother had given up on me as a provider of grandchildren.’
‘You don’t want children?’ Leigh asked him.
Debra smothered her instinctive protest. Leigh was like that, inclined to ask the most personal of questions of relative strangers. It meant nothing. It was just a part of her personality.
She held her breath, hoping that Marsh wouldn’t snub her, even though she knew that she could never have asked him anything so personal.
‘Yes.’
But when she looked at Marsh there was no trace of anger in his face. Instead he was smiling, amusement glinting in his eyes as he told her easily, ‘Yes. Yes, I do, but, since as yet the marvels of science have not made it possible for a man to bear his own child, I shall have to curb that desire until I find a woman who shares it with me.’
‘I can see that would be an almost impossible task,’ Leigh told him, irrepressively grinning at him.
Fortunately he seemed to take her teasing in good part.
‘Almost,’ he agreed, tongue in cheek. ‘It’s the glass slippers, you see—they will keep on breaking.’
Later, when they had reached the river, and Marsh was crouching down, pointing out to the two entranced little girls some small trout basking peacefully in the sun, Leigh whispered to Debra, ‘You’re mad. You know that, don’t you?’
Debra gave her a confused look.
‘You want him, Debs,’ Leigh continued softly. ‘And I’m damn sure that he wants you. For goodness’ sake...life doesn’t hand out too many chances like that to turn your back on one. All right, so ultimately there may be pain, but it won’t be deliberately inflicted. Not by a man like that, and even if it was...’ She stopped speaking and looked at Marsh’s crouched figure.
‘I’d say that he was a man who knows instinctively how to give a woman pleasure and how to appreciate the pleasure she would want to give him.
‘That was one of my biggest irritations with Paul. He was a terrific lover, just so long as he was the one doing the loving, but he had to be the one in control, and in the end I got tired of being controlled, even though it took me a long time to admit it.
‘Don’t turn your back on what he’s offering you, Debs.’
‘He isn’t offering me anything,’ Debra told her fiercely.
Leigh’s eyebrows rose.
‘No...I’d say his presence here is making a pretty clear statement of intent.’
‘That was just a coincidence,’ Debra hissed at her, anxiously checking to make sure that Marsh couldn’t overhear what they were saying.
Leigh laughed. ‘It’s no coincidence,’ she told her in amusement.
Debra told herself that Leigh was wrong, but when her mother invited Marsh back to have tea with them and he accepted she began to wonder.
As they walked back she could hear the two men, her stepfather and Marsh, chatting amicably together. Her elder niece slipped her hand into Debra’s and whispered that she thought that Marsh was ‘really nice’, and, from the way her mother fussed over him, urging him to have another scone and flushing as he praised the jam she had made the previous autumn, Debra suspected that she shared her small granddaughter’s view.
In fact, he was so at home with her family that he might have known them all years and not merely a few brief hours.
She herself hardly took part in the conversation. She sat silently watching the others, tense and on edge, and yet at the same time in some vague way almost resentful of them for the way they monopolised Marsh’s attention, and then he turned his head and smiled at her, and right there, in the comfortable shabbiness of the familiar sitting-room, her heart did a double somersault inside her chest and the dismaying truth hit her.
She was actually falling in love with him!
CHAPTER FIVE
‘I believe we’ve got a group meeting tonight.’ Debra tensed as Marsh walked into her office. Ever since the weekend of her stepfather’s birthday she had deliberately maintained a distance between them, but Marsh seemed oblivious of it, ignoring it, just as he ignored the way she always carefully physically distanced herself from him whenever he came close to her.
She had seen from his eyes that he was not oblivious to it, though, and a small bout of nervousness shook her now as he added, ‘I’ve got to drive past your place on the way there. Why don’t I pick you up? Save us using two cars.’ She would have liked to refuse. The mere thought of sitting beside Marsh in the close confines of his car was a burden she did not want to place on her frail self-control.
She might be able to banish him from her thoughts during the day, but at night, when she had no conscious control, it was a different matter.
She was exhausted by trying to fight off going to sleep and then waking too early, her body trembling, aching. Her mind in turmoil as she tried to deny the desire that tormented her sleep.
She couldn’t refuse, however. Her car was in the garage, being serviced, and when Brian had rung her this morning to announce that he had brought forward the date of the meeting because he was due to go on holiday she had called the garage and they had informed her that it was impossible for them to get her car back to her until later in the week.
Numbly she nodded her head, thankful that the strident ring of the telephone meant that she didn’t have to do anything other than agree when Marsh suggested picking her up at seven-thirty. As he closed the door behind him she drew in a shaky breath of air. Surely he must be able to see that she didn’t want to get involved with him, so why didn’t he just leave her alone?
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Leigh had derided her when she’d complained miserably to her. ‘Men like to chase. They can’t help themselves. It’s in their natures, poor things. They’re designed to respond to the challenge... if you really want someone to blame, don’t blame Marsh, blame nature, and besides,’ she’d asked Debra with a sideways look, ‘are you so sure that you don’t really want to be caught?’
‘Of course not,’ Debra had denied furiously. ‘I don’t believe in playing those kinds of games.’
‘Who said anything about playing?’ Leigh had murmured sotto voce, and then amended, ‘All right... all right. I know you don’t want to get involved with him. But isn’t it really a bit too late for that, Debs?’
Debra hadn’t been able to answer.
It was certainly far too late to pretend to herself that she was ever going to be able to ignore the way Marsh made her feel. And not just physically, but emotionally as well.
But that still didn’t mean that she had changed her mind about his not being the right kind of man for her; about the desire she felt for him not being the kind of feeling she wanted to have for any man.
And yet the thought of never seeing him again, of never hearing him laugh, or seeing him smile, watching the way his mouth curled at the comers, deepening the grooves of humour at either side of it, the way his eyes darkened so disturbingly whenever he focused on her, filled her with anguish and panic.
Hypocrite, she challenged herself after he had gone. You’re a hypocrite and a fool. She knew he wasn’t right for her; the emotions, the desires he aroused in her made her feel afraid. That kind of intensity was too dangerous, too consuming.
She was glad that the case she was working on was so complicated that it demanded her whole concentration and left no room for daydreaming about him.
Her client was divorced from her husband, who had left her for someone else. Husband and wife had
run their own small business jointly, and until the divorce she had left the financial affairs of their small company totally in the hands of her ex-husband. Now she had discovered how misplaced her trust had been.
During the course of his affair, while they were still married, he had siphoned funds out of the company, leaving it virtually bankrupt, so that when the divorce came, instead of finding herself the owner of half of a thriving business, the wife had discovered that all she did in fact own was half of the company’s outstanding debts.
Her shock, her pain when she had first come to Debra for advice, had made Debra wince. It was plain to her that the woman still loved her husband, that she could not believe what he had done, and, over the months, watching the gradual realisation dawn on her that he had systematically and deliberately ensured his own financial security while destroying hers had been so painful for Debra to watch that she often dreaded seeing her.
That was what could happen to women who loved too much; too intensely.
What could happen, she reminded herself, not what must, and women could be just as cruel to men.
What was she doing? Why was she having these thoughts? So she could sense that Marsh was sexually interested in her. So what? That did not mean that she had to respond to that interest or to return it.
What was it that was making her feel so panicked, so on edge? Marsh’s subtle show of interest in her, or her awareness of the strength of her own feelings towards him?
She worked a little later than she had intended, anxious to complete what she was doing, and it was a shock when her office door opened and Marsh came in, reminding her easily, ‘Don’t forget—seven-thirty.’
It startled her to realise that it was gone six o’clock, and irritation, as much at her own lack of awareness of the time as at Marsh’s comment, made her push her fingers into her hair in a brief gesture of tiredness as she told him shortly, ‘I’m not a child, Marsh. I can tell the time, and I haven’t forgotten.’
She saw the smile die out of his eyes and wished that she hadn’t been quite so curt. It was as though the sun had suddenly slipped behind a cloud, and she discovered that she actually wanted to shiver a little.
Suppressing such a Freudian physical reaction, she bent her head back over her work, hoping that Marsh would take the hint and go.
When he did she breathed a tiny sigh of relief and then trembled a little as she glanced towards her closed office door, mentally recalling how he had looked, standing there.
There were some men who, when wearing formal business clothes, looked either very ill at ease or so unapproachable that their clothes immediately diminished their sex appeal, and then there were others—a very few others, like Marsh—who seemed so immediately at ease with themselves and their clothes that whatever they wore, whether formal or casual, seemed in some subtle and totally uncontrived way to accentuate their maleness and to bring it sharply into focus so that as a woman one was immediately aware of that maleness.
Sighing, Debra acknowledged that she wasn’t going to get any more work done. It was already later than she had realised. She had to clear her desk, to get home, have something to eat, to shower and change and to be ready when Marsh came to pick her up at half-past seven.
Tiredly she stood up, clearing away her papers, locking them in her desk drawer, checking her diary for the next day, just to make sure she didn’t have any appointments she might have overlooked, and making a few brief notes to remind herself that she still had to complete the work she was doing on Elisabeth Groves’s file.
Normally she enjoyed her short walk home from the office; often she took the longer route, around the outskirts of the old part of the city, stopping to watch the river, and to wonder how it might have looked when seen through Roman eyes.
Leigh had always chaffed her for her romantic daydreaming streak, but in a gentle rather than an abrasive way, and Debra openly admitted that it was perhaps not a characteristic one might normally expect to find in someone who had chosen accountancy as their career. But then she reflected that it underlined the fact that no person was ever one-dimensional, and that no person was necessarily inwardly exactly as they seemed outwardly; that human beings were very adroit at concealing those parts of their natures they considered to be the most vulnerable and at projecting those which seemed the strongest and most powerful.
Tiredly she reflected that she couldn’t imagine Marsh having any weaknesses, any vulnerabilities, or at least none which he was not totally in control of.
Unlike her. Why couldn’t she control the dangerous reaction she had to him?
She had never felt like this about anyone before. Never experienced this frightening surge of awareness of how very vulnerable she was emotionally.
Perhaps that was why it terrified her so much.
This evening her walk home failed to soothe her or to distance her from her worries.
She fished her keys out of her bag, unlocking her front door and going inside.
She had fallen in love with her small house the moment she had seen it, feeling as though its smallness somehow wrapped itself protectively around her. She had lovingly decorated and furnished it, spending hours at antiques fairs and house sales, looking for exactly the right pieces of furniture.
Some of her most treasured pieces had been lovingly restored, dozens of coats of paint stripped from them to reveal the richness of their wood, but this evening as she walked through her small hall, the pretty little oak table with the mirror above it and the pair of wall sconces either side of it, which were some of her favourite finds, failed to lift her spirits.
Tiredly she inspected the contents of her fridge, before acknowledging that she was far too nervous to want to eat.
Some fruit and a cup of coffee—that was about all she could manage.
Upstairs she stripped off her office clothes and showered quickly, desperately trying to ignore the treacherous sensuality of her own skin. Had her body always possessed this hidden awareness of its power to respond to the subtle messages of another human body? And, if so, why had she never recognised it before? Why was it only now that she was aware of the silky sheen of her damp skin, of the softness of the curves and hollows of her body, of its shape, its sexuality, of its physical design that was both so tactile and so sensitively responsive to physical touch that its reactions were clearly visible to the naked eye?
Experimentally, angry with herself for doing so and yet somehow driven to test herself, to punish herself, she thought about Marsh, pictured him as she had seen him last, standing in the doorway to her office.
Immediately her stomach muscles knotted and her nipples hardened, a tiny frisson of sensation bringing her body out in a rush of goose-flesh and making her stomach churn tensely.
If he were here with her now... how would it... how would she... ?
Stop it, she warned herself fiercely, quickly reaching for her towel, as though somehow by wrapping it tightly around herself she could suppress what she was feeling, binding it so tightly that she deprived it of the ability to survive.
In her bedroom, she opened her drawers, removing clean underwear, dressing quickly in her jeans and a cotton top with a round neckline and four small buttons unfastening the front.
It had been an impulse buy, but now, glancing at her reflection in the mirror, she frowned a little. She hadn’t realised that the round neckline revealed quite so much of her bare shoulders, nor that those four tiny buttons would look quite so... so... provocative somehow.
She frowned a little, deriding herself that it was only her imagination, her physical awareness that made her think so. Her imagination that furnished her with that dangerous mental image of Marsh leaning towards her, his fingers touching those buttons, his mouth exploring the warm curve of her throat and shoulder.
Her face bright red with temper and embarrassment, she reached for her hair-drier, telling herself that for someone who wanted to keep Marsh completely out of her life she was behaving in a very odd way.
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When he arrived at seven-thirty she was ready, her heart beating frantically fast, all her senses leaping into sharp awareness as she opened the door to him.
It was like living life on a different plane, changing into a different and far more dangerous gear. It was an awareness that sharpened and accentuated every single one of her senses and which made it impossible to walk with him to his car without having to distance herself from him.
Once she was actually in the car with him it intensified even further. She felt quite sick with tension, exhausted by the frantic race of her heartbeats and yet at the same time so on edge that she felt as though it would never be possible for her to relax properly again.
‘Are you all right?’ Marsh asked her, glancing briefly at her as he waited for a set of traffic-lights to change.
Immediately her tension increased. She glanced away from him, hoping that the hot colour she could feel burning her face had not extended to her throat, where he might see it.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she lied, carefully keeping her voice cool and distant.
She could see that he had registered that distancing vocal warning. His face hardened a little, but he made no further comment other than to say how very relaxing and enjoyable he found living in Chester after the faster pace of London and New York.
‘But surely eventually you’ll have to return to one or other of them?’ Debra commented. Her comment was intended to remind her that his time in Chester was limited; that he would not be there for very long, rather than to ask personal questions, but he, of course, could not know that, she admitted as she felt the quick look he gave her almost as though her question, her interest, had surprised him.
‘Not necessarily,’ he told her. ‘I could, if I wished, choose to stay in Chester.’
‘But surely the best jobs, the best career moves for you, must be in London or New York?’ Debra insisted, suddenly anxious and edgy.