by Penny Jordan
‘Yes?’ she urged Finn curiously. They had already told one another of their love, so it couldn’t be that
‘I want you to move in here with me, Maggie.’
Finn could see the shock that Maggie wasn’t quite quick enough to banish from her eyes and his heart felt like granite inside his chest, a heavy leaden weight of black, bleak disillusionment.
‘Maggie?’ he pleaded rawly, when she continued to look at him in silence. ‘I know you’ve got your city life, your city commitments…’ He turned away from her a little, not wanting her to guess what he was thinking. She had told him about her business, her headhunting agency, and somehow he had managed not to betray to her his own feelings of distaste for the way of life she was reminding him of.
For a moment Maggie thought that he was just teasing her, that his suggestion was some kind of unfathomable male joke, but then she realised that he was actually serious. A fierce rush of emotion seized her—panic, fear, anger—forcing a deep chasm between her and her earlier feeling of love. In its place was a sense of betrayal, of disillusionment, a shocking and unwanted return from the idealistic world she had been creating in her own thoughts to one of reality.
‘Me move in here? No, that’s impossible,’ she told Finn immediately, shaking her head as she pulled back from him. ‘How could you possibly think—?’ She stopped and looked round the kitchen and then back at him, unable to vocalise the full extent of her disbelief.
‘Impossible?’ Finn challenged her flatly. ‘Why?’ But of course he already knew the answer to his own question, just as he also knew that she was unlikely to give it to him, to be honest with him. His knowledge of her duplicity lay heavily against his heart. She had said that she loved him, but he himself had heard her call another man ‘darling’, with a note of soft tenderness in her voice that had said how much he meant to her.
He had hoped, prayed, that she might tell him about her lover, that she might say something, anything that would explain, excuse her lack of honesty, but she had said nothing, had given herself to him with a sweet hot passion that he had been totally unable to resist even whilst he had been despising himself for not being able to do so. For the first time in his life he had had to admit that he was unable to control his own feelings, unable to stop himself from loving her even whilst all the time knowing that she was committed to someone else.
When she had claimed to love him she’d been lying to him. When he had asked her to come and live with him she had refused—because of that someone else and the commitment she already shared with him. But she was obviously not prepared to tell him any of this. And if that made her a liar then what did it make him? What had he wanted her to tell him? That there was another man in her life but that because of what they had shared he now meant nothing to her whilst he, Finn, meant everything? Where the hell did he think he was living? Certainly not on planet earth. Cloud cuckoo-land was more like it.
A quick fling, a few days of sexual excitement with a stranger—that was all he was to her. He had known so many women like her in the old days, known them and felt sorry for them, for all that was missing from their lives, never imagining that one day he would fall in love with one of them.
Silently his stubborn heart begged her to confide in him, to justify its belief in her against the cynical contempt of his brain.
Maggie felt as though she was in shock. How could Finn possibly have imagined that she could live here? Angrily she blamed him for the destruction of her happy plans. And yet instead of exhibiting guilt, as he ought to be doing, something in Finn’s manner was suggesting that he felt she was the one who was at fault. If he really loved her, as he had claimed to do, he would know instinctively how impossible it was for her to live somewhere like this.
The cold weight of his own disillusionment and pain lay like lead against Finn’s heart, entombing it. Bitterness filled him, darkening his eyes and hardening his mouth in a curt line of contempt.
‘You’re right,’ he agreed savagely. ‘It is impossible. What were you planning to do, Maggie? Just disappear without a word, without a Thank you for having me? I should have remembered, shouldn’t I, that city women like you get a thrill out of indulging in a little bit of rough now and again—especially when it can be kept hidden away…walked away from? Well, perhaps before you do go I should really give you something to remember me by.’
Before Maggie could escape Finn moved, trapping her between the kitchen wall and his body and placing his hands on the wall either side of her as he deliberately lowered his mouth towards her own and began to kiss her with a savage passion that stripped away any veneer of polite social convention, revealing the raw, naked intensity of his anger—and his desire.
And hers she admitted bitterly as the sheer physical strength of her own need burned through her. Beneath his mouth she opened her own, taking angry biting kisses from his lips, her hands curling into small fists that clawed at the front of his shirt as she both clung to him and tried to force him away. The weight of his body as he lowered it against hers to imprison her made her want to fight against what he was doing and at the same time not merely to succumb to it but to feed it, until they were both consumed in the flames of their mutual hatred. She hated him and she wanted him. She wanted to destroy him and she wanted to wrap her body around him, draw him deep into it and keep him there, her prisoner, to do with as she willed, to make him helpless and dependent on her, to make him ache for her, need her, want her, to make—
The shock of Finn abruptly releasing her almost made her stumble, and that he should be the one to reject her made bitter passion burn in her eyes as they faced one another in silence.
It was Finn who broke that silence, speaking in a voice so empty of emotion that it caught at a vulnerable nerve ending she hadn’t known she possessed, thickening her throat with tears of loss she would have died rather than let him see.
‘I don’t know which of us I despise the more.’
‘I thought it was my sex that was supposed to be changeable,’ Maggie responded, keeping her voice as light and indifferent as she could. ‘This morning you swore you loved me, and now—’
‘It wasn’t love,’ Finn interrupted her harshly. ‘God knows just what it was, but it bore as much resemblance to love as the devil does to an angel.’ Only he knew, thank God, just what it cost him to deny his feelings, to put pride and reality before the intensity and vulnerability of his love, the love he had now sworn to himself he must destroy.
Afraid of what she might, say, what she might betray if she allowed herself to speak, Maggie turned on her heel and left.
CHAPTER FOUR
MAGGIE hadn’t realised that Shrewsbury was such a busy town. No, not a town, a city, she reminded herself, remembering her earlier phone call with her assistant Gayle. She had driven here in the hire car Gayle had organised for her and, having parked it, had set out to find the small designer shop Gayle had informed her the city possessed in order to buy herself some clothes. The city itself, though, had proved more distracting than she had expected. More than three-quarters enclosed by the loop in the river within which it was built, it possessed a strong sense of itself and its history.
It was here that the Welsh marauders had been held at bay, here too that the rich sheep farmers had brought their flocks. Maggie stopped, the bleakness of her own thoughts momentarily suspended as she caught sight of an entrancingly pretty courtyard down one of the city’s medieval wynds. And then, as she turned the corner, she saw the shop she had been looking for, its windows as artfully temptingly dressed as any one of its London peers.
Pushing open the door, Maggie went inside, and a warmly smiling assistant came towards her. Giving her a quick shrewd look, Maggie recognised in the black suit she was wearing the cut of one of the fashion scene’s most cherished designers. Quickly she explained what had happened and what she was looking for.
‘I think we’ve got the very thing,’ the assistant told her. ‘It’s a bit late in the season, but one
of our regular clients, who is your size, cancelled part of her reserve order.’ She gave Maggie a small smile. ‘She met someone whilst she was working in New York and she’s gone over there to be with him.’
Whilst she chatted she was moving through the clothes rails, deftly removing several items which she displayed for Maggie to examine. There was a mouthwatering honey-coloured full-length cashmere coat, butter-soft and blissfully warm, that Maggie fell immediately in love with even before she tried it on. When she did so, the gleam of approval in the assistant’s eyes made Maggie wonder what Finn would think if he could see her in it—a weakness which she instantly tried to wall up behind a defensive barrier of sternly abrasive thoughts as she warned herself of the folly of allowing herself to think about him.
Why should she want to or need to anyway? Need to? The appalled expression that crossed her face as she slipped off the coat and handed it back to the assistant had the latter misguidedly assuming that it was caused by the cost of the coat, which she quickly explained was an exclusive designer model.
‘It’s fine. I love it,’ Maggie assured her, and then winced at her own casual use of a word which had caused her so much anguish when it was applied to Finn.
Finn. Finn. Why on earth couldn’t she stop thinking about him? Why was she driven by this self-destructive urge to link everything she was doing with him? Maggie berated herself an hour later as she left the shop, wearing not just the cashmere coat but the suit she had bought as well.
For once a self-indulgent bout of retail therapy had failed to have its normal recuperative effect on her senses, and despite the warmth of the shop, and the restorative powers of the delicious cappuccino the assistant had produced for her, there was a cold emptiness inside Maggie, a feeling of misery and deprivation that reminded her unwantedly of the child she had once been, an outsider envying her peers who had all seemed to belong to happy loving families.
But that had been before she had gone to live permanently with her grandparents and become secure in their love, before she had taught herself that solitude and independence, both financial and emotional, were of far more value to her than an emotion which, like those who claimed to give it, could never be totally relied on. Now, back in the security of her own personal space, she couldn’t understand why on earth she had behaved in the way she had And as for believing that she had fallen in love. She just didn’t know how she could have thought such a thing. Love was far too unstable, untrustworthy and volatile to ever form part of her life-plan.
Firmly she congratulated herself on having come to her senses. What had happened was regrettable, and had revealed a previously unsuspected weakness within herself, but at least no lasting harm had been done. No doubt to Finn, undeniably good-looking and possessed of such sexual dynamism and power, she was simply another foolish woman who had made a fool of herself over him. Her face burned as she forced herself to remember just how much of a fool and how explicitly. Thank goodness she was never likely to see him again, she told herself as she checked her watch and hurried down the windswept street towards the car park where she had left her car.
It would only take her half an hour or so to drive back to the hotel in Lampton. She had arrived there the previous afternoon, dropped off by the taxi which had collected her from Finn’s farmhouse. It had taken a considerable amount of patience and all of her many business skills before she had been able to persuade the manager of the hotel to lend her the money to pay her taxi fare—that and a telephone call to Gayle, who had not only vouched for her but also given the hotel manager her own credit card number to cover both the fare and a small cash loan to Maggie, to tide her over until the new cards Gayle had ordered for her arrived. Much to Maggie’s relief, these had been delivered by hand to the hotel this morning.
Momentarily her footsteps faltered. She could still see and feel Finn’s angry hostility towards her as he had watched her leave. Finn. What had happened between them had been an aberration, a totally inexplicable act completely contrary to her nature, and she was just thankful that reality had brought things to an end when it had.
Despite the warmth of her newly acquired cashmere coat Maggie gave a little shiver, so totally engrossed in her own thoughts that it was a handful of heart-stopping seconds before her brain registered what her body had already recognised: namely that the man standing in the middle of the street, as immobile as any statue, less than five metres away from her, was none other than Finn himself.
‘Finn.’ As she whispered his name Maggie could feel the physical reaction overwhelming her body, a cold drenching icy sense of shock as potentially dangerous as any floodwater could ever be, and an equally devastating blast of hot searing yearning as uncontrollable as a forest fire
‘Maggie!’ Caught off guard, Finn felt the shock of seeing her crash through his defences. The urge to wrap her in his arms and carry her away somewhere private, where he could show her in all the ways that his rebellious body wanted to show her just what they could have together, was so strong that he had taken a step towards her before he realised what he was doing.
The sight of Finn striding purposefully towards her sent a wave of panic over Maggie. Immediately she looked for some means of escape. She just wasn’t up to any kind of conversation with him right now, not with her emotions in such chaotic disarray. There was a narrow street to the side of her. Quickly she dived into it, her heart hammering against her ribs as she heard Finn calling out to her to wait.
After Maggie’s departure from the farm Finn had told himself that he was glad she had gone, reminding himself of all the reasons why a relationship between them could never work. But last night he had dreamed of her, ached for her, woken at six o’clock in the morning not just physically hungry for her but emotionally bereft without her—and furiously, bitterly contemptuous of himself for being so.
Finn could not possibly have known that she was in Shrewsbury; Maggie knew that. But nevertheless there was a sense of fatefulness in the fact that she had seen him, a sense of intensity that made her feel both frightened and angry, as though somehow she herself was to blame for his appearance, having conjured him up by her own thoughts. And even as she hurried away from him a certain part of her was feeling hectically excited at the thought that he might pursue her, catch up with her, and…
And what? Take her in his arms and swear that he was never going to let her go? Somehow magically turn back time so that…? Was she going completely mad? He was a farmer, not a wizard, she reminded herself sternly.
Ignoring the inner voice that warned him that nothing could be gained by prolonging his own agony, Finn made for the narrow lane Maggie had hurried down. But just as he was about to enter it he heard the familiar voice of his closest neighbour, an elderly farmer, who blocked Finn’s access to the lane as he proceeded to complain to him about current farming conditions. Knowing that beneath the older man’s complaints lay loneliness, Finn felt obliged to listen, even whilst he was inwardly cursing his appearance for preventing him from following Maggie.
What was she doing in Shrewsbury? Why hadn’t she gone straight back to London? She had never told him exactly what it was that had brought her to Shropshire—they had been engrossed in discoveries about one another of a far more intimate and exciting nature than any mere mundane exchanges concerning their day-to-day lives.
Maggie…Finn closed his eyes as his ache for her throbbed through every single one of his senses.
As she reached out to unlock her car, Maggie gave a swift look over her shoulder. There was no sign of Finn anywhere in the car park. She told herself that she was glad he hadn’t followed her. And if he had done she would naturally have told him that he was wasting his time. Wouldn’t she? She started the car, then paused, giving the car park a final sweeping visual search before slowly driving away.
The auction wasn’t due to take place until the following morning, but the agent for the sale of the estate had agreed to see her, and Maggie was still hoping that she might be able to pe
rsuade him to allow her to buy the Dower House before it went to auction. She was prepared to pay over and above its reserve price if necessary. She had to buy the house for her grandmother, who had sounded even more quietly unhappy than before when Maggie had rung her from the hotel.
Lambton was only small, a traditional country town with a mixture of various styles of architecture showing it had grown and developed over the centuries, and as she parked outside the agent’s office Maggie realised that she could probably have walked there from the hotel faster than she had driven. Or at least in theory, she reflected with a rueful look down at the ravishingly pretty and impossibly high-heeled shoes she was wearing.
Finn would have taken one look at them and immediately rejected them as ridiculous and impractical—which no doubt meant that in his eyes at least she and the shoes were a good match.
Finn. Why on earth was she allowing herself to think about him—again? Had she forgotten already what he had said to her? Had she forgotten too that he had actually expected her to move into that remote farmhouse? A clever ruse, of course; he must have known that what he was suggesting was totally impossible, and would no doubt have been caught totally off guard if she had agreed. Still, from what she heard from her girlfriends, as being dumped went it had at least been original.
As she pushed open the door to the agent’s office she had to battle against a dangerous feeling of loss that had somehow insidiously and unwarrantedly found its way into her thoughts, and she warned herself that she should be thinking about the reality of the situation instead of grieving for some foolish fantasy that she was very fortunate to have walked away from.