by Penny Jordan
She shuddered and gripped the worktop. What on earth was she trying to do to herself? Guy would never want…
‘Good, you’re just putting the kettle on. I’m ready for a drink.’
Campion stared at the open doorway, and Guy, as though she had never seem him before in her life. All the colour drained from her skin, leaving it so pale that he frowned and instinctively took a step towards her.
‘Campion, are you all right?’
He was going to touch her and she couldn’t let him do that. Not now… Frantically, she backed away from him and said huskily, ‘You’re back.’
‘Yes, don’t you remember? I came back last night, having spent the evening driving round in circles, trying to work off my temper.’
Last night. He had come back last night. She had a vivid memory of her own surprise at waking up in bed this morning, when she had known she had fallen asleep in the chair. She fought to get hold of another elusive and very worrying memory, but it slipped from her.
‘Miss me, did you?’
He was smiling at her, and her whole body burned with pain and resentment. How dared he pretend that he cared how she felt, one way or the other? How dared he treat her in this mock flirtatious manner, when they both knew he couldn’t possibly find her remotely attractive? It was an insult to her intelligence. It was… She fought to get a grip on herself, to stop herself from betraying to him what she was feeling.
‘As a matter of fact, I was too busy working to miss you,’ she told him coolly.
‘Yes, so I noticed. I read what you’d done. Didn’t you see the note I left for you?’
He’d read her work, before she’d checked it herself? The same hollow feeling she’d experienced earlier came back, but this time it was stronger, more painful.
‘It’s coming along nicely,’ Guy continued, apparently oblivious to her tension. ‘Will she take him in the end?’
‘Will who take whom?’ Campion asked him, confused.
‘Lynsey. Will she take Dickon? The King’s choice.’
Campion had the uncomfortable feeling that there was more to the casual question than she could see.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.’
Guy was giving her an odd look, a mixture of exasperation and…tenderness. Tenderness? She looked away from him. She was letting her imagination go too far.
‘Your Dickon’s a very strong character,’ Guy told her. ‘Perhaps he won’t give Lynsey much choice. Unlike me, he seems to have an overwhelming passion for small, high breasts…’
He was alluding to the passage she had written describing Dickon’s awareness of her heroine, but, as he spoke, Guy was looking at her…at her body, Campion realised on a sudden flush of anger. He was looking at her breasts, surely hardly noticeable beneath her thick clothes. What was more, he was looking at her as though there was nothing he wanted more than to strip those clothes from her body and to take her breasts into his hands and…
What was she doing to herself? Her mind seemed to have devised its own cruel form of torment for her. She knew that there was no possibility of Guy looking at her with such yearning desire, and, if he was doing to, it could only be to taunt her…to mock her.
On a fiercely protective surve of rage, she retorted dangerously, ‘Yes, I think everyone knows what you have a passion for.’
For a moment, Guy looked almost unsure of himself. Hard colour stung the high planes of his cheekbones, and then abruptly he was smiling at her, his smile loaded with mockery and malice.
‘Do they? What?’
Now, when it was too late, she wished she hadn’t been so quick to challenge him. Instead of responding, she shrugged her shoulders and turned her attention back to the kettle.
‘If you’re making breakfast, I’ll have bacon, eggs and toast. But first I need a shower. I’ve just been out to check on the generator. If we have another power cut like last night’s we’ll need it.’
So he was staying. The relief that filled her also humiliated her. She had to turn away from him so that he wouldn’t see it in her eyes. She wanted to tell him that he could make his own breakfast but, after all, yesterday he had made hers.
He was a very confusing man, she acknowledged as he went upstairs. Before, if she had given any thought to the matter, she would have considered him to be the type of man who expected the woman in his life to be subservient to him, to put him first in everything and to wait on him hand and foot. And yet, already he had demonstrated to her how wrong those preconceived ideas of hers were. He had tackled the household chores willingly, cheerfully and very ably, more ably than she had herself, she acknowledged fifteen minutes later, as she battled with the Rayburn’s hotplates, so different from her own modern gas cooker.
Guy came down as she was staring miserably at the congealing and hard eggs she had just tried to cook.
She didn’t hear him come in, and the unexpected weight of his hand on her shoulder as he leaned over to look into the pan made her jump. She turned quickly and saw him frown as his fingers investigated the narrowness of her bones beneath the thick padding of her clothes.
‘You don’t look after yourself properly,’ he stunned her by saying. ‘You’re too thin.’
‘I’m not thin, I’m slender,’ she snapped at him. ‘Not all men like women with curves like—like Marilyn Monroe.’
As she spoke, she had a vivid mental picture of the woman she had seen waiting for him in reception the last time she had visited the offices. She had been a stunningly curvaceous brunette, her figure encased in a clinging jersey outfit.
Her words had been purely defensive, and so she was surprised to see the anger flash suddenly and dangerously into Guy’s eyes. His grip on her shoulder tightened, and irrationally she began to feel acutely vulnerable and frail. He wasn’t a heavy man, but he was tall and broad and, from the pressure those fingers were exerting, a very fit man.
‘What are you trying to say to me, Campion?’ he asked bitingly. ‘That I don’t have the intelligence to respect a woman for what she is? Do you really think I’m the kind of man who looks for Barbie doll measurements in a woman and nothing else? Or don’t you credit me with the sensitivity to see your insult for what it was? For your information, I like women—all kinds of women, but what I find most attractive and exciting about them is their personalities.’
He was lying to her. She had seen the women he dated.
He was looking away from her now and into the pan.
‘Mind you,’ he added with a grin, ‘it does help if they can cook… What is this?’
He prodded her cast-iron eggs with the fork, and Campion glared up at him.
‘Mmm…not exactly easy-over, are they?’
To her horror, instead of snapping back at him, Campion felt tears begin to sting her eyes.
It was years since she had cried, aeons ago… She never gave way to feminine emotion, and yet here she was, ready to burst into tears simply because a man criticised her cooking.
Even as she derided herself for her weakness, she acknowledged that it wasn’t really the eggs; they were simply the thing on which her emotions had focused.
What she wanted to cry for was the destruction of her womanliness, for the fates that had been so cruel in forming her as a woman who ached and yearned to form a loving bond with a man she could want and respect, and yet whose outward physical appearance made it impossible.
Through a blur of tears, she saw Guy move away from her. Her body felt cold, as though it had enjoyed the warmth of the proximity of his. She was humiliating herself, dissolving into tears in front of him like this. He would be embarrassed and uncomfortable. Men always were when women cried.
She remembered how her mother had cautioned her not to give in to her tears after Craig had told her what he really felt for her. It would upset her father, her mother had told her. Men did not like tears. Tears were a weapon that women used to get their own way, and which men quite rightly resented.
Campion had turned
her head away the moment she felt the betraying prickle at the back of her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything. The kitchen was a watery blur. All her concentrating went into trying to control her emotions.
‘Hey, it’s all right. Come and sit down.’
She froze as she felt Guy’s hands on her shoulders, gently propelling her to the table and pushing her down into a chair.
‘Come on, have a good howl, and then you’ll feel better.’
A soft white handkerchief was pressed expertly against her face, and it took her several seconds to overcome her shock and take hold of it for herself.
‘I never cry.’
What on earth had she said that for?
‘Then you should. Women who don’t cry throw things.’
She put down the handkerchief and stared at him.
‘It’s a way of releasing tension.’
Guy was sitting on the edge of the table, looking at her. There was such a tender look in his eyes that she blinked, and then blinked again when it didn’t disappear.
‘Why is it you’re so desperately afraid of showing emotion, Campion? You’re going through a very stressful time,’ he added quietly when she made no response. ‘There’s no reason for you to feel ashamed because…’
‘Because I can’t fry eggs,’ she interrupted savagely.
To her fury, he laughed. ‘Ah, well, that’s another story. Using a Rayburn takes a bit of know-how… Want me to show you?’
She didn’t want him to show her anything. She wanted him to leave her alone and free her from the dangerous spell of his intimacy. He was reacting to her in a way that was totally unfamiliar to her; treating her… treating her as a woman, she recognised with a quick start.
‘Who taught you?’ she asked coldly. ‘One of your women?’
He didn’t like that, and no wonder. She saw the tenderness fade from his eyes, to be replaced with a cool sternness that made her quail slightly.
‘No, as a matter of fact, my mother taught me,’ he said quietly.
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes. I was her eldest child. My father died when I was twelve, and Ma had to go out to work. She taught me to cook, so that I could prepare a meal for the others when we got home from school.’
‘The others?’
He smiled then, and it was a smile she couldn’t wholly interpret; she saw that it held love and resignation, and other things as well, and she was pierced with a pain that was compounded of loss and envy and a terrible, aching unhappiness that she knew nothing in her life would ever totally dim.
She loved him… She loved this intelligent, beautiful man who had women falling over themselves to attract his attention. She loved him, and part of her twisted in mortal agony that she could be so foolish and so vulnerable.
It hadn’t happened overnight. It had to have been there for some time, growing slowly and dangerously. This time together at the cottage had acted like a forcing house, making her recognise what was happening to her.
Before, she had been able to ignore the insidious growth of her feelings, pretending that her awareness of him sprang from dislike and resentment; here, at the cottage, there was no barrier behind which she could hide from the truth. She loved him.
‘My sisters and brother,’ he told her softly.
She turned away quickly so that he wouldn’t see her envy. She had hated being an only child; had longed for the companionship that came from being part of a family. Perhaps she had even turned to Craig out of that need.
‘You have sisters and a brother?’
‘I certainly do. Alison and Meg are twins, they’re three years younger than me, and Ian is the baby of the family. He had just started school when Pa was killed. It was a wrench for Ma to leave him and go back to work. She lost the baby she was carrying when my father died.’
‘What—what happened to him?’ Campion asked, barely aware of saying the words.
It amazed her that he could talk to her like this. She never discussed her private past life with anyone.
‘He was killed by a hit-and-run driver two days before Christmas.’
Champion turned an appalled face towards him.
‘Christmas! How dreadful…’
‘I can see what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong,’ he told her quietly. ‘Of course, we never forgot, but Ma never allowed the spirit of Christmas to be damaged for us by Pa’s death. They were two separate things, and she treated them as such. She still does.’
‘Where—where does she live?’
‘In Dorset, close to the girls. They’re both married now, with families. Ian is working in Canada… What about you?’ he asked, deftly removing the eggs from the pan he had put down on the table.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. Do you have a large family… brothers—sisters?’
‘No.’ Her voice sounded oddly harsh and she took a deep, steadying breath, and said less forcefully, ‘No, I was an only one. My parents died some time ago.’
‘An only one. You must have been very lonely.’
She wanted to deny it, but the words clogged her throat.
‘Come on,’ he added, smiling at her. ‘Here beginneth your first lesson in the correct use of a Rayburn cooker.’
Bemused, Campion allowed him to lead her back to the stove. Silently, she watched his easy movements, and listened as he instructed her.
‘Ma brought us all up to be self-sufficient. We had to be. My father was insured, but that only paid for the house.’
This time, the eggs were cooked perfectly, but Campion couldn’t eat hers.
In the space of a few minutes, her whole world had turned upside-down. How could she have dared to love Guy? How could she have been so stupid?
Guy made the coffee, and watched her as she sat, motionless, staring into space.
‘Something’s wrong,’ he said quietly. ‘Want to talk about it?’
To talk about it? What on earth could she say? I’ve just discovered that I love you?
‘It’s nothing. I was just thinking about the book.’
She saw the shadow cross his face, and for a moment he almost looked rebuffed, as though she had somehow hurt him.
Wishful thinking, she told herself as she got up awkwardly. ‘I’d better go and make a start.’
He didn’t follow her, and she should have felt easier without his presence, but the words just wouldn’t flow. She sat and stared at the typewriter, without seeing anything.
‘Mental block?’
She hadn’t heard him come in.
‘I…’
He picked up the manuscript.
‘She’s a lot like you, isn’t she? Remote… alone…’
‘Like me?’ Campion shook, as she said bitterly, ‘No, she’s nothing like me. For one thing, she’s beautiful, while I…’
‘While you do everything you can to deny that you’re a woman,’ Guy interrupted calmly. ‘But you are a woman, Campion.’
What was he trying to do to her? Didn’t he realise how frighteningly vulnerable she was? Why was he looking at her like that, as though—as though—?
‘Oh, I know you do everything you can to deny your feminity. Scrape back your hair, disguise your body…’
‘What am I suppose to do?’ she demanded, suddenly losing control of her feelings. ‘Deck myself out in make-up and alluring clothes, in the hope that a man might come along who’s deceived into thinking that I’m actually desirable? Don’t you think I have more pride than to…’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Guy interrupted flatly. ‘You are desirable.’
What was he trying to do to her?
‘No. No, I’m not.’ She saw the way he looked at her, and laughed harshly. ‘Don’t you think that I wish I was? I know the truth, Guy. I had it pointed out to me and underlined quite plainly when I was nineteen.’
‘How?’
She stared at him, shocked into silence by his question. How had they got to this point? How had she been stupid enough to
betray so much to him?
She looked round the small room, seeking an escape.
‘You tell me that you aren’t desirable. Well, I’m telling you that you are. Would you like me to show you just how much I want you, Campion? When I carried you up to bed last night, I wanted to stay with you. The reason I walked out last night was because I couldn’t trust myself to stay. I look at you and I ache to touch you, to make love to you.’
‘No! No, I won’t listen. You’re lying to me. Craig—’
‘Craig,’ he pounced, watching her. ‘Who’s Craig?’
She was shivering with a mixture of shock and pain, but he made no attempt to touch her, to comfort her.
‘My—my ex-husband…’
She had surprised him now. She saw it in his face; in the way he suddenly went very still, his gaze sharpening and hardening slightly.
‘You’ve been married…’
Suddenly, she picked up his thoughts.
‘What did you think? That I was still virginal and inexperienced?’ she asked bitterly. ‘At my age? Yes, I’ve been married. I was married when I was nineteen.’
‘And when did you and your husband part?’
She thought about lying to him, but dismissed the notion and said tiredly, ‘A week after we were married. He didn’t want me. He just wanted my parents’ money, and once he realised that it wouldn’t be forthcoming he couldn’t wait to get rid of me.’
‘You’d been lovers…’
‘Yes. Before we were married, we—he made love to me. He told me he thought I might be pregnant. I believed him, and so we ran away and got married.’ She shrugged. ‘I was very young…very naïve.’
‘And because of this—this man, you really believe that you’re undesirable? Because one man—’ he began incredulously. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’
‘No, Craig made me see the truth, that’s all. I’m just not the kind of woman that men desire.’ She wasn’t going to repeat the insults and taunts that Craig had thrown at her; words that she could never forget, wounds that would never heal.
‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. I’ve got work to do.’