by Sara Craven
He glanced around. ‘So, where’s the weeping willow?’
Rhianna bit her lip. ‘That’s neither kind nor fair.’
‘Perhaps I’m not feeling particularly charitable. And you didn’t answer my question.’
‘She’s gone out,’ Rhianna said.
His brows rose. ‘Good news at last,’ he said softly. ‘So, why don’t we forget about the cinema and stay here?’
If she took two steps forward, she thought, she’d be in his arms, all questions silenced. He wanted her. She wanted him. Simple.
Except it was nothing of the kind. Because she knew, none better, the dangers of sex without any kind of commitment. She’d heard them being paraded only a little while ago, in this very room.
She was aware of her own feelings, but not his. Diaz was still an enigma to her. He’d spoken of her running away five years before, but he’d made no attempt to follow. He’d let her leave Penvarnon alone and, as far as he knew, friendless. It had been Francis Seymour and Carrie who’d stood by her, not him.
And he was here with her now only because of this nameless, inexplicable thing between them that had burst into life that night in the stable yard, subjecting her to the torments of the damned ever since.
Something apparently that he’d not been able to forget either, even as he lived his life, made his money and slept with other women.
An appetite in him that she’d aroused and he wished to satisfy. And when he’d taken all she had to give and he was no longer hungry—what then? What was to prevent him just walking away, leaving her used up and discarded? Like Donna?
And all on the strength of one short-lived and disastrous encounter when she was eighteen years old.
I’m worth, she thought, far more than that.
Aloud she said, ‘Because Donna will be back very soon. So it appears that it’s the cinema or nothing.’ She added coolly, ‘And in your present mood, Diaz, I have to say the second option seems preferable.’
‘I could make you change your mind.’
Yes, but not my heart…
‘Why, Mr Penvarnon,’ she said mockingly, just as if she wasn’t weeping inside, ‘how very uncool.’
The look he sent her was long and totally deliberate, stripping away the concealing robe in order to create her nakedness in his imagination. And knowing what he was doing, and why, made it no easier to bear.
She stood, her body burning, hardly able to breathe, until at last he turned away, and she heard the outside door close behind him.
Then she sat down and covered her face with her hands.
She’d thought at the time that it was the nadir—the depths—the worst that could happen.
But I was wrong about that too, she told herself now.
She got up from the sofa, pushing her hair back from her face. She’d come down here to pack, she thought, not indulge in useless introspection. Therefore pack she would.
Be positive, she adjured herself. After all, there could hardly be more than another twenty-four hours for her to endure in his company. And if there was still a measure of physical attraction between them, then it could not be allowed to count. She didn’t need it, and nor did he. Finis.
She opened the wardrobe and gave the selection of clothes there a jaundiced look.
She’d keep out her coffee linen dress, she decided, pulling a face, and stow the rest in her travel bag. But as she dragged it from the back of the cupboard it toppled over, and a medium-sized brown envelope slid out of the front pocket.
Rhianna picked it up, frowning. It was addressed to her, in handwriting she didn’t recognise, she thought as she weighed it speculatively in her hand. Who on earth? And what on earth?
She wasn’t in the mood for mysteries, but she couldn’t help being curious all the same as she ran a finger under the flap. Inside she found a folder of photographs and a note.
She sat down on the bed, switched on the lamp, and read the note first.
Dear Miss Carlow,
We found this when we had the bedroom unit in the flat taken out. It must have fallen down behind it. We could see it belonged to your late aunt, and thought you might want to have it, so I put it with your things. I hope I did right. M. Henderson.
So, Rhianna thought with a grimace, I seem to have a legacy from Aunt Kezia after all. How very weird.
She opened the folder and tipped out the handful of snapshots it contained.
It was an odd collection, all apparently taken round Penvarnon House and its grounds. None of the local views she might have expected. Just people. And clearly not posing. No one was smiling or saying ‘cheese’ because they’d glanced up and seen a camera on them.
And Aunt Kezia had been no photographer either. The angles were odd, capturing her subjects’ back views, and the shots were hurried and blurred because the subjects were moving.
She studied them more closely, recognising Francis Seymour in several of them. But mainly they featured another man entirely, and for a bewildered moment she thought, It’s Diaz. Why did she take all these pictures of Diaz?
Then she looked again, and realised that this was Diaz as he would be in ten or twenty years time—broader, heavier and greyer. But the resemblance was almost eerily strong, and she said, under her breath, ‘Of course—it’s his father. It’s Ben Penvarnon.’
The next one showed a woman seated on the terrace at the house, her head bent, her body slumped, and it was only when Rhianna looked more closely that she realised she was sitting in a wheelchair.
How cruel, she thought, of Aunt Kezia to take a photograph of Esther Penvarnon, her employer, like this, and how unnecessary.
The rest all seemed to be of Moira Seymour, taken invariably from a distance and only just recognisable. In one she was standing near the top of the path down to the cove, glancing back over her shoulder, as if she knew there was a camera trained on her. In others she was emerging from the shrubbery, pushing the bushes aside, her face white and formless, or standing under the shadow of a tree with her husband.
There was something strange, even furtive about the photographs, Rhianna thought with distaste as she shuffled them together to replace them in the wallet. Then paused, because there was something else there. A slip of folded paper.
A cheque, she realised, for twenty-three pounds, made out to K. Trewint, and bearing the signature Benjamin Penvarnon. It was over twenty-five years out of date, and had clearly never been presented.
Rhianna stared at it in utter astonishment. How could her aunt possibly have overlooked such a thing? She’d have backed her to pay it into her account the same day—even if it had only been for twenty-three pence. So how could she have forgotten?
She refolded it and put it back in the wallet with the snaps, aware that her breathing had quickened. She felt as she’d done once when she was very young, when she’d turned over a stone in the garden only to release a host of creeping things that had scuttled everywhere. She’d screamed, knowing that if one of them ran over her sandal she wouldn’t be able to bear it, and that she’d be sick or worse.
Now, she just felt—grubby in some odd way, wishing very much the bedroom unit at the stable flat had stayed where it was, with its secret intact.
Her instinct told her to destroy the entire folder, but she could hardly throw it overboard. It didn’t seem fair to the dolphins. So she’d have to take it back to London with her and get rid of it there, she decided, tossing it back in her bag.
And now what she needed most in the world was a shower, she thought with a sudden shiver.
In the bathroom, she stripped and walked into the cubicle, rubbing handfuls of her favourite gel into every inch of her skin as if she were taking part in some essential decontamination process. Then she stood, head thrown back and eyes closed, allowing the cool, refreshing torrent to pour over her until every last trace of foam had gone.
She turned off the shower at last, with a sigh of relief and pleasure. Twisting her hair into a thick mahogany rope in order to squeeze out the exces
s water, she stepped back into the bathroom.
She’d heard no sound above the rush of the shower. Had felt no prickle of awareness. Yet he was there, standing in the doorway, watching her. Waiting for her.
She halted, hands still raised, totally, sublimely exposed, as a slow, quivering heat suffused her body under his silver gaze. As she acknowledged that it was much too late for even a token attempt to cover herself.
Nor was there any point in asking what the hell he thought he was doing there, because she already knew. But she had to say something—if only to break this taut and terrible silence stretching between them.
Her voice a husky whisper, she pleaded, ‘Diaz—no…’
‘You are so beautiful.’ The words seemed torn from him. He moved, lithe as a panther, walking over to the pile of towels to take one and envelop her in it before, without haste, blotting the moisture from her skin.
‘How can you do this?’ she protested again, her voice shaking. The slow movement of his hands on her body through the layer of towelling was already an unbearable, shameful incitement. He was shirtless again, and the clean, sun-warmed scent of his skin filled her nose and mouth, turning her dizzy. ‘Feeling as you do—despising me?’
‘Because this is unfinished business between us, Rhianna, and you know it.’ He spoke calmly. ‘And whatever you’ve been to Simon Rawlins, it hasn’t stopped me wanting you, although God knows I’ve tried.’
A fist seemed to clench inside her, and she knew she needed to stop him urgently, tell him everything before it was too late.
‘Please,’ she said, rapidly. ‘Please, Diaz—you must listen. You don’t understand…’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand.’
He lifted her into his arms, stifling any further protest with the hard pressure of his mouth, and carried her into the other room. The coverlet on the bed had been turned back in readiness, and he put her down on the snowy sheet, followed her down.
Kneeling over her, he unwrapped the towel from her body and tossed it on to the floor. Stripped off his shorts and sent them to follow the towel, before stretching himself, naked, beside her.
‘I need to erase him,’ he told her quietly, almost conversationally, looking down into her widening scared eyes. ‘To wipe him from your mind and memory for ever. To prove to you that you can’t live in the past, Rhianna, and set you free. To show you that there’s a present, and there can be a future.’
‘No,’ she said hoarsely. ‘You’re so wrong. There never will be—not without the man I love.’
He smiled with faint bitterness. ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But at least I can try.’
He put his hand on her stomach, smoothing the damp skin with almost exquisite care, and she felt the pleasure of it shiver through every nerve-ending in her body.
‘And you don’t have to worry,’ he added softly. ‘I swear I’ll be gentle.’
‘Oh, God.’ Her voice sounded stifled, caught as she was between terror and desire, as she realised what he meant. Remembered what he believed. ‘Diaz—no. There’s something I must say. Please let me go.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will. As I promised. But not yet. We’ll talk later. Afterwards.’
He leaned down and kissed her again, his lips moving on hers this time in a slow and seductive quest, coaxing them apart, preparing her for the heated, silken invasion of his tongue, carrying her, as some reeling corner of her mind acknowledged, beyond denial. But not beyond shame.
When at last he raised his head she was breathless, wordless, her pulses playing all kinds of tricks as she stared up at him through the veil of her lashes.
‘I should have made love to you weeks ago,’ he told her huskily. ‘That night at your flat when I found him there. But I was too angry then. You were right to send me away. Before that you wanted me, and I knew it. Later, when I realised you were still sleeping with him, I told myself that it was too late—that I could never come near you—never bear to touch you again—not after—him.’
His mouth twisted. ‘Yet here I am. Needing you so badly that I’m prepared to forget decency and reason, along with everything else that should be keeping us apart. I no longer have a choice.’
His stroking hand moved slowly upwards, over her midriff and ribcage, to cup the soft swell of her breast, his thumb grazing her nipple and awakening it to hot, aching life.
‘We could even treat it as a pact,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll release you from Simon and you, my lovely Rhianna, you can release me—from you. And maybe we’ll both have some peace at last. Show me what you like.’
He bent, taking her tumescent rosy peak in his mouth, caressing it with the sweet agony of his tongue, making her gasp, her body arching involuntarily towards him.
She had only instinct to guide her. No prior knowledge of what the responses of her flesh might be to his hands and lips, or what he, in turn, might expect from her.
All those love scenes, taunted the only rational part of her brain still functioning. All that simulated ecstasy. And now that you’re faced with reality instead of play-acting you haven’t got a bloody clue…
And yet this is what you’ve longed for in all those long, empty years since you were eighteen—for Diaz Penvarnon to take you in his arms again and make love to you. To bring you to fulfilment as a woman.
No guilt. No shadows from the past. Just two people on a bed, together, just for a while.
And even if it is happening for all the wrong reasons, it’s probably all you’ll ever have of him—your one chance of happiness—so give him the only gift you have to offer and be thankful.
As if he’d picked up some unspoken cue, she heard him say, on a soft breath of amusement, ‘This is usually a duet, sweetheart, not a solo. Aren’t you going to touch me too? Let yourself remember how you once enjoyed being in my arms?’
She reached up to his shoulders, stroking the taut skin, feeling the strength of bone and the play of muscle under her shyly exploring fingers.
With a murmur of satisfaction Diaz drew her closer into his arms, kissing her mouth again, while his own hands slowly traced the length of her long, supple spine, moulding the rounded curves of her buttocks.
She moved against him deliberately, the breath catching in her throat as she felt the answering pressure of his aroused hardness against her belly. She reached down, her fingers shyly seeking a more intimate acquaintance with all that iron male strength, but Diaz forestalled her, his hand on her wrist.
‘Easy, my love,’ he whispered, dropping light kisses on her eyelids, his lips tugging softly at her long lashes. ‘I’ve waited far too long for this to be in any hurry, but God knows I’m only human, and I’m not sure how much of that particular delight I can bear right now. So let’s—take our time.’
He began to caress her body, his fingertips brushing the creamy satin of her skin, and Rhianna lay, sighing through parted lips, her entire being subsumed in this glory of sensual pleasure he was creating for her.
And where his hands lingered his mouth followed, tasting the hollows at the base of her throat, the inside curve of her arms, the indentation of her navel, the faint swell of her hips and the slender length of her thighs.
She was moving restlessly beneath his touch, her flesh burning, eager for more. When his mouth took hers again she clung to him, her passionate response lacking all inhibition.
His lips returned to her breasts, suckling on their hard, aroused peaks, making her moan aloud, while his hand slid down to the shadowed cleft between her thighs and paused there.
He lifted his head and looked down at her, at the fever-bright eyes, the storm of excited colour along the high cheekbones, and the swollen, reddened mouth.
He said harshly, ‘Do you still want me to stop? To let you go?’
‘No.’ Her voice was a shadow of itself. ‘Oh, God—please—no…’
He began to touch her there, in the hot, secret centre of her, and she offered herself unequivocally to the intima
cy of this new exploration, the mastery of his subtle fingers irresistibly enticing.
She’d never believed it could be possible to feel with such intensity, she thought as her breathing splintered, her mind and body focussed almost painfully on the sensuous stroke of his hand as he sought her tiny sheltered nub of sensitive flesh and brought it to aching delicious life.
Don’t stop. The words were a silent scream in her head. Never stop…
Her body awash with fluid, scalding excitement, she heard him say hoarsely, ‘Darling now.’
As he moved over her, above her, Rhianna obeyed instantly, clasping the rigid silken shaft of his virility with shaking fingers and guiding him into her with a little sob of anticipation.
Then, between one heartbeat and the next, everything changed. Because the last thing she’d expected was that it would hurt. That his physical possession of her would cause actual pain. The kind that made her flinch and tense into resistance, crying out before she could stop yourself.
Because that notion of virginity as a barrier to be breached was surely a myth belonging to past generations?
Yet here she was, with beads of perspiration on her forehead, sinking her teeth into her lower lip.
Diaz was suddenly very still. He said urgently, his breathing harsh and ragged, ‘What is it? What’s wrong? Darling, tell me…’
Then as he looked down at her, looked into her shocked, scared eyes, she saw realisation dawn—and a kind of horror.
He whispered, ‘Oh, my God,’ and lifted himself out of her—away from her—in one swift movement of utter finality, flinging himself on his side, his back to her, his breathing hoarse and ragged.
She lay staring at the ceiling, trying to say something—his name, perhaps, out of a throat tight with tears.
But eventually it was Diaz who broke the silence. ‘You’ve never done this before.’ It was a statement, not a question. He turned back slowly to face her, pulling up the sheet to cover the lower part of his body and propping himself on an elbow. ‘Simon Rawlins was never your lover, and you’re not having his child. Because until a few moments ago you were virgo intacta.’