by Penny Jordan
'Only one? What about you?' She felt hot at the stupidity of her unwary tongue.
To her relief Dominic seemed unaware of the ambiguity of her question. She had half expected him to make some taunting remark asking her if she was inviting him to share a room with her, but instead all he said was, 'Oh, I won't need one. I don't often feel the cold. I seem to be equipped with my own very efficient central heating. Your bag's in the hall. Do you want me to bring it in?'
She nodded her head. While he was lighting the fire she could put on some clothes. Although she hadn't said anything to Dominic, even her bra was soaked through after her tumble in the snow, and she was anxious to remove its cold clamminess from her skin.
She waited until she heard his feet on the stairs before slipping out of the towel and stripping off her damp bra, shivering a little, her skin still chilled.
She had only brought one change of underwear, so after a moment's hesitation, she pulled on a thick sweater, hoping that its bulkiness would disguise the fact that she wasn't wearing a bra underneath it.
The damp one she rolled up with her other discarded clothes and stuffed in one half of the rollbag before putting on a pleated woollen skirt of soft olive and yellow checks. The skirt buttoned up the back, and the thick sweater she was wearing was in the same olive as the check. It was an outfit she had had for quite a long time and she was surprised to see Dominic stand just inside the doorway for what seemed like a long time, simply looking at her.
'It's snowing again,' he told her.
'Will Lorna and the baby be all right?' She shivered as she remembered the cold drive to the remote farm.
'Yes, they'll be fine. Lorna's an experienced mother, don't forget, and people who live as close to nature as they do know all about protecting themselves from the elements. It's the city dwellers who can't cope. If there's a power cut they're marooned without light and heat in their multi-storey flats. The Thomsons have open fires and paraffin lanterns.'
Almost as though by some freak coincidence, as he spoke the light bulbs flickered and from outside came the sound of the wind. It flickered again twice, and then abruptly it was dark.
'That's all we need!'
'Have you got any lanterns?' Christy asked him wryly.
'There are probably some in the cellar, but I'm damned if I'm going to go down there and risk breaking my neck. We'll have to make do with candles.'
Candlelight and log fire, it was far, far too intimate, Christy acknowledged. She could almost feel her mind disintegrating and her senses taking over.
'Tell me about America?'
Dominic was sitting opposite her, and for a moment as he looked at her she thought he had guessed how his closeness affected her.
'There isn't much to tell,' he began, but nevertheless some of the stories he told her about his patients were amusing, and as she listened and laughed she forgot that shared laughter could be as dangerous as shared silence—perhaps even more so.
They ate supper—a casserole that Dominic had heated and served, refusing to let Christy do anything—and now as she sat with her fingers curled round a mug of chocolate she could feel a sleepy lethargy washing over her. She put down her mug and leaned back in her chair. She would just close her eyes for a few minutes…
Half an hour later she was still asleep. Dominic bent down to look at her and then picked her up. She stirred briefly in his arms, burying her head against him with a contented sound of pleasure. His arms tightened and he frowned.
Upstairs in the room he had prepared for her, firelight danced on the walls, highlighting the floral trellis pattern of the old-fashioned wallpaper.
He put her on the bed, and then threw more logs on the fire and walked back to her. He could hardly let her sleep in her clothes.
Christy woke up as he started to tug off her jumper, clutching it against herself protestingly.
'Christy, you can't go to bed in it. Come on. Look, I've got your night things here.'
Muzzy with sleep, she tried to remember why it was so important that Dominic didn't take off her jumper, but it was too much of an effort, and so she let him pull it off, only remembering why he shouldn't when she felt the cool rush of air against her naked breasts.
She saw him looking at her and felt the responsive quiver deep down in her stomach.
It wasn't a surprise when he moved to take her in his arms; part of her had been waiting for him to touch her all evening… had been waiting for it and wanting it.
Her lips clung softly to his, her skin delighting in the sensation of his hands moving hungrily against it.
She could feel his heart thumping and knew that her own echoed its frantic beat. There was need and hunger in the way that he kissed her, and she couldn't deny her own response to him.
'Christy, let me stay with you tonight.' The words were muffled against her skin as he tasted the creamy vulnerability of her throat. 'I want you so much.'
Ironically, if he hadn't spoken she would have gone with him to hell and back, but the raw, almost agonised sound of his voice had broken the delicate spell, and she moved away from him, shivering with too much tension and emotion.
'I can't.'
'Why not?' His voice was thick and tortured. 'Is it because of him?' His face contorted and she shuddered as she recognised the sexual jealousy glittering starkly in his eyes. 'You might love him, Christy, but you can't have him. And besides, you want me.'
His hand touched her breast to underline his meaning, the brief sensation of the pad of his thumb against the taut thrust of her nipple almost agonising.
'Be with me tonight…'
'No…' The denial was torn from her throat, making it ache. It was all too much; she couldn't go on pretending any longer. 'You don't understand, Dominic,' she told him wretchedly. 'I don't love David, I never have… Oh, he wanted me for a while, just as he's wanted a dozen or more women, and sexually he's very attractive, but I've never loved him. '
He looked at her hard, but she held his eyes until she saw that he believed her. If anything he seemed even more tense, and then he said rawly. 'If you don't love him, then why…'
She didn't let him go on. She was far too wrought up as it was.
'Can't you guess? I don't want to have sex with you, Dominic…'
She saw him flinch back from her feverish words. A dark tide of colour burned up under his skin, and he looked almost as wretched as she felt.
'I can't go to bed with you, Dominic; I can't involve myself in a brief affair with you, because it would tear me apart. I love you too much.'
There, it was said. He would leave her alone now. She turned away from him, waiting to hear the sound of the door closing behind him. Dominic had his own code of honour; now that he knew the truth he would understand, and so she waited, tense and frighteningly close to the edge of her self-control.
When he touched her she flinched almost as much as he had done earlier, but his grip compelled her to turn round and look at him.
'Let me get this straight.' He was speaking slowly, breathing heavily as though fighting to control a huge inner rage. 'You won't make love with me because you love me?'
For the first time in her life she was frightened of him. He wasn't reacting the way she had expected. He looked angry, violently, dangerously angry, and he was looking at her in a way that made her skin crawl with fear.
'Is that what you're saying?'
He shook her and she tensed beneath his hand. It was too late to lie now. 'Yes.'
He released her so unexpectedly that she fell back against the bed, watching him with nervous eyes. He was staring up at the ceiling, swallowing hard.
'I don't believe this.' His voice was flat and hard.
'Why do you think I made love with you in the first place?' Her voice was nowhere near as self-controlled as his had been. 'It certainly wasn't because of anything to do with David.'
'All these years I've fought against coming back… told myself that what you felt for me was just an adolescent
's emotion. I kept in touch with your parents, hoarding every little nugget of information I got from them. I thought you were happy in London—the career woman who put her job first and her lovers second. I tried every way I knew to forget you, and to stop myself from going mad because I'd fallen in love with a child of seventeen. Have you any idea what that does to a man? It made me feel like some sort of pervert. It got so bad that I couldn't trust myself alone with you. What in God's name made you think that all I wanted was a cheap affair?'
She was almost too stunned to speak.
'I… You only said that you wanted me… I thought it was just sex… When I mentioned Amanda you said she was looking for a husband, and implied that you weren't interested.'
'Of course I damned well wasn't! There's only ever been one woman I've wanted to marry, and that's you.'
He reached for her, dragging her into his arms, his voice muffled against her. 'Christy… when I think how close we've just come to losing each other… Tonight when you said you didn't want me…' He broke of, gripping her tightly.
'I couldn't bear to make love with you. I was terrified of what I might reveal. Did you really love me all those years ago?' She couldn't believe it.
His smile was slightly crooked. 'Want me to show you how much?' He laughed softly at her expression. 'When you were seventeen I was twenty-five, plenty old enough to know what I wanted from life, and old enough to be terrified of the way I felt. One of the reasons I went to the States was that I felt I couldn't trust myself not to manipulate you into a relationship you weren't really ready for. It would have been all too easy to take advantage of your adolescent feelings for me and to persuade you into marriage, and I knew that wouldn't be right.'
His thumb stroked the softness of her lower lip and she caught it in her teeth, biting it gently, her eyes widening as she caught his harshly indrawn breath.
'The first thing I'm going to do when this snow lets us out of here is to get us a special licence,' he told her huskily.
It was her turn to laugh, a confident, happy sound, knowing that he loved her. 'And until then?' she teased.
'When I asked you this afternoon if you were pregnant, I was secretly hoping that you might be. Then you would have had to marry me, or so I told myself, and I'm afraid a rather base male instinct still makes me feel that it would be a very good way of making sure that you can't run away from me.'
Dominic's child. Emotion quivered through her, and she held out her arms to him.
'Stay with me tonight,' she whispered against his ear. 'We've already spent far too many nights apart.'
'Are you sure that this is really what you want?' She could see the tension in his eyes as he waited for her response.
'I'm sure.'
Christy moved her mouth to his, kissing him slowly, savouring the taste and texture of him.
Against the provocatively lazy movement of her lips he muttered, 'If you keep on doing that, you're going to get yourself in an awful lot of trouble.'
Suppressing the bubble of laughter welling up inside her, Christy responded softly, 'Mmm, do you know, that was exactly what I had in mind.'
^