‘You’re—a virgin!’ he croaked, and shook his head as if still not believing it.
With panicking hands she reached out and caught hold of his arms. He couldn’t go away from her, not now. I love you, I love you, she wanted to tell him. ‘Please, please don’t be angry with me,’ she pleaded. ‘I did try to tell you before, only...’
‘Only I wouldn’t listen,’ he answered and, seeming to make great strides to cope with his shock, went on, ‘Hell’s teeth, I’m not angry with you, my love—but myself. Oh, God,’ he groaned, ‘I must have terrified you!’
‘No, you haven’t,’ she denied, ready then to deny she had ever known so much as a moment’s panic.
‘I should have guessed, should have seen. Your shyness, your...’
It was then that Belvia began to see just how sensitive the man she was in love with was. And she leaned forward and kissed him, cutting off his words, hoping to make him see that he had nothing to hate himself for.
‘I’m sorry I said no,’ she whispered, putting her arms around him, holding him close. ‘I didn’t mean, no, I didn’t want to,’ she hurriedly went on to explain. ‘I think it was more—I hadn’t realised there would be pain. I mean, I suppose I must have known, but...’ Oh, heck, she was getting herself so tangled up in knots. She just left her explanation hanging there, and said instead, ‘Please make love to me.’ And again she kissed him, and while she kissed him her hands caressed his back. She pressed her breasts against him, heard a desperate kind of sound and took her mouth from his to kiss his chest, and moulded herself against him.
And at last, ‘Dear love,’ he breathed. ‘You’re sure this is right for you?’
‘Oh, Latham, my darling,’ she cried. ‘I’ve never been more sure about anything. I need you, I want you so badly.’ She kissed him again, and against his mouth she begged, ‘Please, Latham.’ And she felt him respond, his arms coming around her as he took over.
This time, though, in his awareness of her virginity, Latham put a rein on his passion. She was aware of it in the slow, delicate way he brought her to new heights, teasing her breasts to wanting peaks, caressing those swollen globes with his mouth, his tongue, gently, tenderly stroking her belly, her thighs.
‘Oh, Latham,’ she sighed, having no idea that she could feel like this, hoping with all she had that it was the same for him. She stroked his body too.
And at last, tenderly, gently, Latham returned to her, and this time she did not cry out. For, with a wealth of consideration for the pain he must cause her, Latham moved with her in restrained passion. Moved and checked and moved, and stayed with her until he had made her totally his.
Later Latham cradled her in his arms to sleep and Belvia just could not get over it. He was wonderful—kind, gentle and overwhelmingly sensitive. She lay for some while with her eyes closed, sleep starting to tiptoe in. She felt Latham place a light kiss on her hair, and knew contentment and nothing more, until she opened her eyes again and discovered that it was daylight.
Contentment had caused her to have her best night’s sleep—or what had been left of the night—since she had first met Latham. Her mental anguish seemed to have flown, for surely no man could be so gentle, so considerate, so tenderly loving if he did not feel some kind of regard for her?
She stirred in her bed and knew that, at some time while she slept, Latham must have gone to sleep in the other bed. She smiled a loving smile. Poor darling, he had waited until she had gone to sleep but must have been cramped beyond enduring while he waited for sleep to claim her.
Simply because she had to look at him she eased herself over to face the other bed and, feeling dreadfully shy suddenly—he could be awake too—she had to take another second or two before she could look across the yard or so of carpet that separated the two beds. She raised her eyes—but the other bed was empty.
For about a minute more she lay there, realising that he must be an early riser and, seeing that she was still sound asleep, must have moved especially quietly so as not to wake her. A smile touched her mouth again at his thoughtfulness. But all at once she was realising that when she went downstairs she was going to have to greet him in front of his sister and her husband.
That thought prompted her into speedy action to get bathed and dressed. While she did not doubt that Latham was sophisticated enough for him to greet her without any outward show of the closeness they had shared, she recalled her latent inclination to blush when he was around—and that was before they had lain naked with each other. By that scale of reckoning, the least she could expect was that she would go a brilliant crimson the next time she saw him.
Her hope, as she hurried down the stairs to greet Latham in private, was doomed the moment she reached the kitchen. ‘I’m just making coffee—fancy one?’ Caroline Astill asked her with the cheeriest of smiles.
‘Love one,’ Belvia responded, unable to see any sign of Latham as she busied herself getting a couple of cups and saucers out of a cupboard. And, not asking the question she wanted to ask—did Caroline know where Latham was?—she instead queried casually, ‘Graeme not down yet?’
‘He’s gone,’ Caroline informed her, something in her voice alerting Belvia to the fact that he was not merely out walking.
‘Gone—where?’ she enquired carefully.
‘I don’t know,’ Caroline replied, but added, almost to herself, and as though it was a matter of some great relief, ‘And I’ve only just realised I don’t really care.’
‘You—don’t care?’
‘I did, very much. To start with I was so much in love with him that I put up with his inconstant love.’
‘Oh,’ Belvia murmured. Poor Caroline. It sounded as if she knew of her husband’s affairs with other women.
‘Oh, indeed,’ Caroline commented and, bringing two cups of coffee over to the kitchen table, she sat down and, as Belvia followed suit continued, ‘Up until this morning, when I came down and saw him fall unconscious to the floor, I’d thought I was still in love with him, but—’ She broke off when she observed Belvia’s amazed expression.
‘Graeme was unconscious? He’d been drinking...?’
Caroline shook her head. ‘Latham flattened him!’
‘Latham did?’ Belvia was astounded. ‘He hit him?’
‘Knocked him clean out,’ Caroline answered, and confided, ‘He’d been asking for it for years, and it was beautiful to see—which is how I suddenly knew that the love I’d had for him all these years was dead. That he was a habit, and that I no longer needed him.’
There did not seem any appropriate remark to make to that, and as all that Caroline had said started to settle in her mind, so Belvia more urgently than ever wanted to know where Latham was. Had he been very upset? Must have been, she supposed. You could not knock someone out stone-cold without being furious about something. Oh, poor darling Latham. He had probably hit him from anger at the way he treated his sister. She recalled then that, while observing such courtesies as having him for a house-guest demanded, Latham had not been over-affable with him yesterday.
‘Is Latham out walking?’ she asked, realising that he could well have gone for a walk to cool down after flooring his brother-in-law. She was left gaping at Caroline’s reply.
‘He’s gone back to London,’ she informed her, and, catching Belvia’s open-mouthed look, ‘I’m sorry, didn’t he say?’
‘I—um—overslept.’ Belvia’s pride came to her aid. Her hopes, her dreams, might be fracturing about her, but she was the only one who was going to know it. ‘I expect he would have said had I not been such a sleepy-head.’
‘He said something about having some business to attend to. It must have been important business too—’ Caroline smiled ‘—or he’d never have gone.’ Belvia smiled back to show that it did not hurt and, seeing her smile, Caroline tacked on, ‘He barely waited to blow on his knuckles after decking Graeme, then he was off.’
‘That’s the way it is in business,’ Belvia replied and, borrowing some o
f Caroline’s cheerfulness, she got up from the table, consulting her watch without seeing the dial. ‘I suppose I’d better do something about getting back to London myself.’
‘I’m returning to London myself shortly—I’ll give you a lift, if you like,’ Caroline offered in a friendly way.
‘Didn’t Graeme take the car?’ Belvia paused to ask.
‘It’s my car, and I have the keys. With luck we might see him hitching it if we hurry. We’ll give him a toot,’ she added with happy maliciousness.
Belvia had to smile—but up in the room she had shared with Latham, she felt more like breaking her heart. Oh, how could she have been so unutterably foolish? The realisation that there had been nothing special for him in their lovemaking last night, nothing special at all—and that she was no more to him than some cheap, one-night fling—was crucifying.
It did not take her long to gather her belongings and to pack them, but she was so churned up inside that her hands were shaking as she fastened the catches on her case, and she just had to take a few minutes more in trying to calm herself.
Latham had been so wonderful, so sensitive with her last night, she could not help recalling, and then found that tears were streaming down her face. Oh, damn him, damn him to hell. No one had the right to make anyone feel the way she was feeling now.
Belvia dried her eyes and checked that there was no sign of her tears, then took her case downstairs. She left Caroline to lock up and did not know if she was glad or sorry that Caroline, after her initial confidence, was fairly silent on the journey back to London. She, too, plainly had a lot on her mind.
With too much time to think, Belvia tried to concentrate her thoughts during the journey on anything but Latham. But again and again he was there in her head. She recalled, painfully, how it had not been her he was interested in at all anyway, but Josy. He had done the gentlemanly thing and backed off when she had explained about her sister’s recent bereavement—though it was she who’d had to pay the price.
Belvia quickly cancelled that last thought. She had no idea why he had taken her in exchange for her sister, so to speak—and she certainly was not going to ring him up and ask him. But she had no reason to complain. He had wanted a cook, and she had cooked. But it was she who had wanted him to make love to her, and he had. They had made beautiful love, but not before—at his first knowledge that she was a virgin—he had broken from her. She had urged him to stay—she had been a more than willing partner.
Caroline dropped her off at her home, apologising for not being very good company. ‘It’s just dawning on me that I’ve no one to please but myself—I think I’m going to enjoy it,’ she grinned, and Belvia saw so much of Latham in his sister’s grin that she could barely speak.
‘Have fun!’ she smiled, added her thanks for the lift and an invitation to come in for coffee and, when Caroline suggested another time, went indoors, to find Josy looking more alive than she had for a long time.
‘How’s Kate?’ Josy asked, before Belvia could ask if anything had happened to put that light of interest in her sister’s eyes.
‘K—?’ Belvia bucked her ideas up to remember that she had used Kate as an excuse for being away for the weekend. She evaded another outright lie. ‘Anything happening here I should know about?’ she enquired.
‘Several things, actually,’ Josy replied. ‘Er—shall I make some coffee while you take your case upstairs?’
Belvia went upstairs, washed her hands and ran a comb through her hair, and caught a defeated look in the wide brown eyes that looked back at her. Since she and Josy were often so attuned to each other’s smallest upset, she knew that she was going to have to guard with all she had against Josy seeing how emotionally shattered she felt.
She put her own haunted feelings to the back of her mind and returned downstairs to find that Josy had brought a tray of coffee into the sitting-room. ‘So,’ she encouraged, recollecting that Josy had said several things had happened, ‘what happened first?’
Josy carefully poured her a cup of coffee and passed it over. ‘Well, to begin with, I’ve been having quite a lot of private battles with myself just lately, in connection with Hetty.’
‘Hetty?’
‘Mm,’ Josy confirmed. ‘It seemed to me that I just wasn’t being fair expecting you to exercise her for me the whole time.’
‘Oh, love, I don’t mind,’ Belvia exclaimed at once.
‘I know you don’t—you’ve been marvellous. Anyhow, that hasn’t stopped me from being unhappy about not exercising her myself. Anyway, I was feeling doubly guilty on Friday when I read your note and knew you’d had to consider me and Hetty before you could go to stay with Kate for the weekend.’
‘Go on,’ Belvia urged quickly, not needing to add guilt for telling lies to the rest of her unhappiness.
‘Well,’ Josy continued, ‘it bothered me the whole of Friday, but I did nothing about it. I don’t know now if I actually would have done anything about it if...’ Her voice tailed off, and Belvia looked at her with renewed interest, sensing that something pretty gigantic had taken place in her absence.
‘If?’ she prompted.
‘If Marc’s cousin had not called in.’
‘Marc’s cousin—from France?’
‘You’ve never met him. I only met him the one time myself—the day Marc and I arrived in France. He wasn’t at Marc’s funeral, but he’s in England on some business or other,’ Josy explained. ‘Anyhow, I gave him coffee, and somehow, probably because Marc and I met at a stables, we seemed to naturally get round to talking about horses. Somehow, too, he began to tell me how he had a couple of mounts but how, with him being away so much, he needed someone reliable to look after them.’ She took a hard swallow, and then said, ‘Suddenly, as we were speaking, he all at once stopped, and then said, “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in the job?” going on to tell me that he thought it might be a shade too quiet for me because he lived in an isolated spot with not too many people around.’
‘You didn’t say yes?’ Belvia stared at her in disbelief.
‘No. I said no straight away. But, since he had offered me the job, I felt that a straight no was a bit blunt, so I qualified it by telling him that I hadn’t had anything to do with horses since Marc died—and he just looked at me and said, “Don’t you think that you should,” and talked quietly to me for quite some while—with the end result being that he wanted to see where Marc worked, and...’
‘You’ve been up to the stables!’
‘And ridden Hetty,’ Josy replied to her amazement. ‘And...’ She got up out of her chair and seemed the same nervous Josy she had been before Belvia went away as she went over to the window and straightened two folds in the curtains before she went on. ‘And before he left he asked me to consider most carefully taking on the job, to consider going to France, be it only for six months.’
‘And—you have?’ Belvia queried, trying to keep her astonishment hidden. This had to be Josy’s decision. She must not attempt to influence her in any way. While it seemed to her, bearing in mind Josy’s shy temperament, to be too tremendous a step for her to take, Belvia recalled how Josy seemed to have a penchant for occasionally surprising her and doing something entirely out of character. Look at how, when Belvia would have said the odds were more for her remaining forever a spinster, she had taken that other tremendous step and had got married.
‘I’m—still thinking about it,’ Josy confessed. ‘But—what about Father?’
‘What about him?’
‘He’ll hit the roof if I suggest I won’t be here to housekeep for him.’
‘Let him pay for a housekeeper. If he can afford to part-sponsor a golf tournament, he can afford that expense.’
‘Oh, Bel, I’m so glad you’re back,’ Josy cried, as if Belvia had killed off some of her dragons, and then, her attention arrested by something the other side of the window, her tone quickened. ‘If I did go to France for a while, though, I’d have no need to worry about La
tham Tavenner, would I?’ she exclaimed.
Belvia’s breath caught at just the sound of his name—oh, how she wished that she could hate him. ‘You don’t have to worry about him any more,’ she assured her quietly, and, not wanting Josy to be upset ever again, she told her that which she knew to be fact. ‘I promise you, Jo, you’ll never see him again.’
It was she who was the more upset of the two this time, however, because, to show just how very much she had got that wrong, Josy replied, ‘I will. He’s just pulled up on the drive!’
For all of ten seconds Belvia went through the gamut of emotions, so that she was incapable of coherent thinking. Then, even while her brain-patterns were all over the place, she started to grow angry. How dared he come here and badger Josy? How dared he, after...
Suddenly she caught her sister’s worried look on her. ‘I’ll deal with him,’ she stated, wanting to run a mile and crown him, all at the same time. ‘How about you go into the kitchen and see about making Father’s favourite pudding? It might sweeten him up if you decide you have anything you want to tell him.’
Josy did not hang about but, expertly scooping up cups and saucers on to the tray as she went, carried the tray out from the sitting-room and, as the doorbell sounded, went kitchenwards.
Belvia waited until her sister was clear of the hallway, then went to the front door. But, with her legs suddenly feeling like so much jelly, she had to lean against the stout oak door for quite some seconds. Then, impatiently, the doorbell sounded again—and Belvia, striving all the time for control, put her hand to the handle. For her own sake, for the sake of her pride—and he had left her with little enough of that—she had to be strong. He might have taken her to bed, but it was Josy he was after.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BELVIA kept her eyes lowered as she pulled back the front door but, as her gaze travelled up the long length of him, she at last had to look at him. And, as she had known she would, she blushed a furious crimson.
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