by Penny Jordan
‘Sorry,’ she apologised curtly, hating the mocking glance he gave her. Did he think she had deliberately fallen against him?
‘No need to apologise,’ he drawled. ‘This road is appalling. I must get something done about it—either that or get myself a Land Rover, but there’s not much point in doing anything now until the winter’s over. The combination of salt and ice is lethal on freshly laid tarmac, but the Ferrari certainly isn’t built for this sort of terrain.’
‘A city dweller, like its owner,’ Chelsea suggested sweetly.
Slade brought the car to a halt in front of the house and she froze suddenly in her seat.
‘Waiting for something?’
In the darkness her face flushed anger, making her tremble as she reached for the door handle. Was he trying to imply that she had expected him to make love to her?
With false sweetness she said softly, ‘Forgive me, for a moment—I forgot that you weren’t Tom.’ Triumph glittered in her eyes as she added, ‘He always opens the door for me.’
She almost had it open when Slade leaned across, imprisoning her against her seat with his body. Neither of them was deceiving the other, and she knew the taunt about Tom, which had had nothing to do with the car door, would not go unpunished. It didn’t.
Slade was looking at her in a way that was unmistakable even in the semi-darkness. His left hand reached for the door handle, his arm imprisoning her. The door swung open and his arm was slowly withdrawn, brushing with subtle menace against her breasts. She was shaking from head to foot when she emerged from the car. The impulse to run into the house was overpowering, but somehow she mastered it. Behind her she heard the Ferrari engine fire, and despite the cold perspiration broke out on her forehead. On unsteady feet she headed for the kitchen, longing suddenly for a cold drink to steady her.
She let the tap run and found a glass. She was just filling it when she heard the door open. She drank the ice cold water quickly.
‘Going somewhere?’
Slade’s voice was almost as icy as the water had been, and Chelsea felt herself shiver. She felt him move behind her, stiffening when he gripped her shoulders, the hard touch of his fingers burning through her dress.
‘Let go of me!’
His only response was the subtle alteration in his touch from imprisoning to sensual caressing as his thumbs moved rhythmically over the tense muscles of her shoulders. His left hand gathered up the fall of her hair, his thumb moving sensually over the exposed vulnerability of her nape. Rigid with anger, she breathed in sharply, clenching every muscle against him. For all the impression it made she might just as well have not bothered. Effectively imprisoned between his body and the kitchen units, she had no means of escape when his head lowered and his mouth moved slowly over her neck, brushing it lightly, bringing her out in goosebumps as she tried not to react. The light, almost teasing kisses continued. She felt his hand on her zip, his lips tracing the exposed line of her spine before returning to the smooth curve of the neck, and icy shivers alternated with a hot dryness that enveloped her skin. Outrage warred with a heated upsurge of physical response, as Slade’s lips continued to nibble provocatively at her skin. It took every ounce of willpower to resist the fierce tug of desire surging through her; to suppress the small startled sounds of pleasure threatening to betray her as his mouth continued its damaging assault on her defences. She closed her eyes to strengthen her resolve, but it was a fatal mistake. Without the mundaneness of their surroundings to concentrate upon she was lost in a black velvety darkness which intensified a thousand times the pleasurable sensation of Slade’s mouth moving gently over her skin, seeming to know instinctively just where to linger. A Small sound of pleasure escaped her compressed lips, and as though it were the sign he had been waiting for Slade turned her into his arms, sweeping aside the dark fall of her hair and exerting just enough pressure on her neck to fully expose the vulnerability of her throat to his mouth.
Pleasure washed over in surging waves, and her head fell back against his shoulder as his lips plundered the pale flesh of her throat and shoulders, moving seductively against them until she was groaning huskily with pleasure, her fingers entwined in the thick darkness of his hair, everything but the sensations he was arousing within her forgotten.
His free hand covered the place where her heart thudded shallowly against her skin, moving upwards to stroke sensuously over her breast.
A fierce heat engulfed her. When he reached for her zip she made no attempt to stop him. Suddenly Slade froze, and then calmly zipped up her dress and released her, switching on the kitchen light and reaching past her for the kettle.
Chelsea’s senses reeled, and her own movements were sluggish and apathetic. She felt as though she had been caught up in an alien force against which she had no defences. Her body felt weak and she was trembling.
Damn him she thought bitterly watching him fill the kettle. He had done it again! She opened her mouth to tell him how much she detested him, but he forestalled her, smiling mockingly as he murmured softly, ‘Save it… Mrs Rudge is on her way down, and you wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea, would you?’
Her eyes rounded with disbelief and then she heard the unmistakable sounds of the house-keeper’s imminent arrival. Humiliation writhed through her. When she had been lost to everything but the feelings he had aroused he had been sufficiently detached to hear the housekeeper moving about. Something seemed to have gone badly wrong. It was men who were supposed to be so vulnerable to passion that they forgot everything else, wasn’t it?
Passion! A bitter smile touched her lips as she used the housekeeper’s entrance to make good her escape. Much more of this and he would have her believing that she was suffering from a frustration so acute that his touch was enough to bring it surging to life.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN the morning there was no sign of Slade, and Mrs Rudge told Chelsea acidly that he had had to go into Newcastle on business.
She was just on the point of leaving the house when the housekeeper suddenly produced a set of car keys which she handed begrudgingly to Chelsea, watching her speculatively.
‘Told me to give these to you and said you were to make sure you used the car. Out driving it, he was this morning before he left.’
For a moment Chelsea was tempted to tell Mrs Rudge in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of using the car, but caution prevailed. She had no intention of arousing the woman’s curiosity even further, and it had occurred to her that with the car she might be able to find alternative accommodation.
With this in mind she drove up to the farm shortly after three o’clock, intending to ask Tom’s mother if she could recommend somewhere where she could stay.
She found Mrs Little in the large old-fashioned farmhouse kitchen. The appetising smell of newly baked bread filled the stone-flagged kitchen, and Chelsea sniffed appreciatively as she followed Mrs Little inside.
‘Fancy a slice, do you? It will give you indigestion, mind,’ she warned, chuckling at Chelsea’s obvious battle against temptation.
‘Tom isn’t here,’ she told Chelsea several minutes later when they were both sitting down at the scrubbed wooden table. ‘He had to go into Jedburgh.’
‘It’s not him I’ve come to see,’ and Chelsea quickly explained the purpose of her visit.
‘Hmm. Finding a room hereabouts won’t be easy. There’s none to be had in the village, that I know of. Not making you comfortable at the Dower House? Janet Rudge is a sour old besom right enough…’
‘It’s got nothing to do with Mrs Rudge,’ Chelsea told her hastily, avoiding her eyes as she added, ‘It’s just that now that Mr Ashford has returned, I thought he might want his home to himself.’
She purposefully avoided Mrs Little’s shrewd eyes as she added the last remark, but felt that she had not totally deceived her when the older woman mused thoughtfully,
‘Aye, well, there’s them as would be pretty quick to jump to the wrong conclusions if Janet
Rudge wasn’t living there, and young Slade’s a fine-looking man; takes after his mother’s family for his looks. I mind well his uncle when he was his age. A bonny lad he was, with all the lasses wild for him. I’m sorry, lass,’ she apologised when Chelsea remained silent, ‘but if it’s lodgings you’re wanting I doubt that you’ll find anything local.’
The kitchen door swung open as she spoke and Tom strode in, patently surprised and pleased to see Chelsea there.
‘Sorry about last night,’ he apologised, when she had explained the purpose of her visit, and he had agreed with his mother about the unlikelihood of her finding alternative accommodation, ‘but at least you had Slade to take you home.’
‘Yes.’ Chelsea forced a noncommittal smile and glanced at her watch. ‘Heavens—I’d better be going. I’d no idea it was that time.’
‘I see Slade’s fixed you up with your own transport,’ Tom commented. ‘If you’ve got a minute I’ll show you the new arrival who interrupted our dinner party.’
The calf was penned into a stall with her mother, and Chelsea marvelled at the tiny huge-eyed creature as she watched it suckle greedily.
‘Everything obviously went all right, then,’ she observed as he walked her back to the car.
‘It was touch and go for a while, but in the end it wasn’t as bad as we feared—which reminds me, I’ve still got to make my apologies to Val. Could you drop me off in the village? The Range Rover’s down there having new tyres fitted ready for the snow they’re forecasting. I can pick it up and make my apologies at the same time.’
Chelsea had to suppress a small grin as she watched Tom folding his large frame into the small front seat of the car.
She was a competent driver and was pleased to see that Tom had no obvious bias against female drivers. It took them a little over thirty minutes to reach the village. Tom directed her to park in a quiet side street off the main road and several yards from the garage.
‘Why down here?’ she asked him, puzzled, glancing through the back window towards the main road. ‘I could have dropped you off outside the garage.’
‘I know, but if you had I wouldn’t have been able to do this,’ Tom said softly.
His kiss took her by surprise. The pressure of his mouth was warm and firm with no hint of the steel male dominance she had experienced with Slade. Refusing to admit even to herself that pleasurable though the brief embrace had been it in no way stirred her blood as Slade’s had done, Chelsea murmured protestingly in Tom’s arms.
A dark car flashed past and he released her reluctantly. ‘I’m afraid the setting’s not as romantic as it would have been last night,’ he apologised ruefully. ‘I’ll give you a ring later in the week. Perhaps we can arrange to go out together?’
As she watched him stride down the street Chelsea sighed. She liked Tom very much, but she had the feeling that he was rushing her, and it made her wary. After Darren she had vowed that no man would ever get close enough to her emotionally to treat her as he had done—and yet here she was breaking that vow twice over. Shivering a little, she re-started the car and drove slowly back towards the Dower House.
She parked the car carefully in front of the house and then let herself in with the key Mrs Rudge had given her. The first thing she saw was a note on the hall table from the housekeeper saying that she had gone down to the village to do the flowers for the church.
Chelsea knew that Mrs Rudge was one of a small group of ladies responsible for decorating the small Norman church in the village, and normally on these occasions the housekeeper was absent for several hours, spending the evening with a friend who collected her in her car and then brought her back again.
She would just make herself a light omelette for her supper, she decided, making her way upstairs. She felt tired and was unwilling to admit that she was finding it hard to deal with the physical presence of Slade Ashford in the same house. Like water constantly dropping on a stone, his acerbic comments and mocking glances were wearing away her self-possession, making it harder and harder for her to assume a mask of indifference towards him.
Even without the added complication of what had happened at Melchester she would have found him difficult to ignore, she admitted wearily, but at least without it she would not have been forced to bear his gritty determination to exact what he considered to be his rightful dues. In fact she doubted that he would have spared her more than a passing glance. Men like Slade Ashford were used to having women fall over themselves to get to him, she thought bitterly; she doubted that he had ever in his whole life needed to do the chasing, and she was pretty sure that in normal circumstances the coldly indifferent attitude she wore like a protective armour against men of his type would have kept him at a distance—she had very little illusions and had always suspected that to men of his type the fruit which remained elusively out of reach at the top of the tree did not merit the effort involved in obtaining it when exactly the same fruit could be picked up off the ground quite freely.
She had no one but herself to blame for the fact that he was pursuing her; albeit for the most uncomplimentary of reasons, but the only thing she could do now was to make it abundantly clear to him that he aroused in her nothing but distaste and dislike.
Not given to self-delusion, she paused with one foot on the uppermost stair, a wry grimace pulling at the corners of her mouth as she asked herself inwardly how exactly she hoped to achieve that after last night’s performance!
And it was no use trying to pretend that she had not responded to him, or that he had not recognised her response; he had made it only too plain that he had.
What was the matter with her, she asked herself despairingly; was she destined always to fall into the same trap? Was she mentally programmed to respond only to the type of man common sense warned her to avoid, or was it simply that at heart she was still every bit as foolishly vulnerable as her own niece?
Pushing aside the thought, she opened her bedroom door, and then stood frozen to the spot as she saw the man leaning indolently against the casement window.
‘What are you doing in my room?’ she demanded in freezing accents, her coat following her bag on to a chair as she walked determinedly towards him. Two yards away she came to an abrupt halt as she suddenly saw the yellow gleam of warning in his eyes.
‘Slade…’
‘Cut the outraged virtue,’ he told her softly. ‘It won’t work.’
‘Slade, I don’t know what you’re doing in here…’ Anger had given way to fear, but she was determined not to give in to it. The suffocating silence seemed to smother her ability to think. All she was conscious of was Slade’s reined in anger, glittering wolfishly in the unblinking eyes which tracked her every betraying movement.
‘You know full well why I’m here,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t like being led on and dropped flat; I don’t like what you did to me in Melchester one little bit, and if you think I’m going to stand by and watch you do exactly the same thing to Tom Little, you can damned well think again! And before you say a word, I saw the two of you in the village.’
‘You… but…’
‘You didn’t see me?’ He laughed harshly. ‘I’m hardly surprised—you had other things on your mind. I wouldn’t have thought a country boy like Tom up to your weight, or is it amusing you to play the innocent butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth bit for him? Perhaps I ought to broaden his education a little, tell him what you’re really like.’
‘You couldn’t!’ Even to her own ears her voice sounded high and unnatural, but Chelsea refused to back down. ‘You don’t know what I’m really like,’ she told him.
‘Like hell!’ Slade responded brutally, thrusting his shoulders away from the window and advancing on her. ‘I know how you feel in a man’s arms, how you melt against him… How you cheat… Well, you’re not cheating on me, Chelsea!’
‘I’m not trying to,’ Chelsea told him bitterly. ‘Look, I realise this might come as an outsize blow to your hugely inflated male ego, but it just
so happens that you simply don’t turn me on, and that’s…’
‘Liar.’ He said it softly, his eyes glittering over her pale face, the word snarled past lips which suddenly looked hard and bitter. ‘And I’ll prove it to you if you like.’
She tried to move, but it was like being caught up in a dream, her whole body heavily weighted making escape impossible.
Overriding everything else was acute disbelief that merely seeing Tom kissing her had aroused this terrible anger in Slade. Some advice she had once read in a book about trying to keep calm in the face of aggression came back to her and she forced herself to keep resolutely still, flinching only when Slade’s fingers bit painfully into her frail shoulderbones.
‘Well?’
‘It’s perfectly possible for any experienced male to arouse a purely sexual response in a woman,’ Chelsea told him icily.
‘So you admit that I can arouse you?’
She hadn’t admitted anything of the kind, but his fingers were moving disturbingly against her skin, anger giving way to a desire heightened by the emotionally charged atmosphere of the small room. A strangely lethargic sensation spread downwards from his caressing fingers; totally alien desire that knotted her stomach muscles into aching hunger. Panicking at the speed with which all her dearly held principles seemed to slide effortlessly away from her every time she came into close physical contact with Slade, Chelsea reached for the only weapon at hand.
‘I admit it was amusing to let you think you could,’ she drawled, trembling inwardly. ‘Men seem to think that all they have to do is merely smile and mouth a few meaningless compliments and a girl is only too happy to go to bed with them.’
‘When in reality what they really desire is more tangible evidence of admiration than mere compliments, is that it?’ Slade’s voice grated, somewhere above her ear. Fear flared inside her, but it was too late to back down now. ‘So that’s it!’ She could sense the rage boiling up inside him. ‘Lure your victim on and then drop him cold, first making sure that he’ll get ample opportunity to see what he’s missed out on, is that how it works? Is that why you ran out on me? Because you knew you were coming up here and that we’d be bound to meet again? Okay.’ He shrugged before Chelsea could summon her appalled wits and deny his allegations. ‘That’s fine by me; I’m not averse to paying for my pleasure, it helps to tidy up a lot of messy ends and makes sure that you aren’t left with any unwanted emotional involvements. So, what will it cost me to enjoy your delectable sexy body, Chelsea? A diamond necklace? A fur? An expensive holiday? I wouldn’t be so crude as to suggest money. You see, I do appreciate the finer points of such negotiations…’