Force of Feeling

by Penny Jordan

  Afterwards, Campion realised that it must have been Lucy who told Meg Drummond, but at the time she had no idea that Meg had found out, let alone that she was in a fever of frustration.

  Campion was bound to have girls, Meg’s busy mind reasoned. Two girls…her nieces…she was never going to be allowed to know if Campion continued to refuse to get in touch with Guy. And yet she loved him, Meg was sure. She couldn’t resist talking about him; she stayed near the Drummond house, when it would have made more sense to shun any contact with Guy’s relatives. If she hated him… Well, from what Meg had heard, it seemed she had every reason to do so. What on earth had possessed Guy to leave the girl alone, without putting up any sort of fight?

  But, remembering the look on her brother’s face when she last saw him, Meg didn’t pursue that particular thought. Guy hadn’t looked like that for many years, thank God. But how long did he mean to stay away? Guy had never been a good letter writer, and during the brief telephone calls they had received since his departure he had been curt and abrupt, not his normal self at all. Because work on the script wasn’t going well, or because he was missing Campion?

  Meg knew that he and his author were renting a house some way outside Hollywood but, knowing her brother, she doubted that he would be joining in the glamorous Californian lifestyle. He was more likely to be working obsessively, smothering any pain he might feel in the sheer volume of work, just as Campion was working away at her new book, hiding away in her latest story when real life seemed unbearable. The latest information, that Guy wasn’t due home for some time, worried Meg. But she couldn’t do everything by herself. She needed someone to help her.

  She considered asking Tait, and then discarded the idea; when one got down to basics, men had no imagination. They thought in straight lines, logically and single-mindedly. Women were different, and something definitely had to be done.

  * * *

  Guy received the telegram at the end of a long, hot Hollywood day which he had spent alternately arguing with the film’s director and placating Julien Forbes, whose book was being used as the basis for the film.

  Julien was objecting to various changes the director wanted to make, and, while Guy had every sympathy with him, he was beginning to wish he had never agreed to help. Agents were persona non grata on any film set, and if he hadn’t been desperate to get away from England, and if Julien hadn’t been so insistent, he would have recommended someone else for the job.

  He knew damn well what was bugging him, Guy acknowledged derisively: a certain woman whose image he just could not get out of his mind, whose body he ached to have beside him at night when he went to bed, whose conversation he missed damnably. Campion. What was she doing? Who was she with…the same man who had been sharing her room in Cornwall?

  When the telegram came, he thought for a moment that she had sent it. She’d decide that her freedom was worth less than what they had enjoyed together, and she’d sent for him to come to her…

  He took the telegram from the messenger and read the simple message.

  ‘Come home immediately. We need you,’ it read, and it was signed ‘Meg and Alison’.

  He headed straight for the phone.

  * * *

  Alison had joined the Drummonds for their evening meal for the second evening in succession; Meg had insisted to her twin that she needed some moral support in case Guy arrived. A phone call to his house had elicited the fact that he was on his way to England, but they had not been able to discover when to expect him. Naturally enough, Tait was aware of his wife’s and his sister-in-law’s tension; the air was practically humming with it.

  Both of them literally jumped in their seats when the doorbell rang, and Meg went peagreen when Tait got up and said calmly, ‘Stay here, I’ll answer it.’

  He was looking anything but calm when he walked into the dining-room five minutes later, an exhausted, unshaven Guy at his side.

  As she looked at her brother, Meg felt a pang of remorse. He looked dreadful—pale and tired, but, more than that, almost haunted.

  They had almost finished their meal, and after one look at his wife’s guilty face, Tait said succinctly, ‘Right, kids, out.’ He waited until the door had closed behind them before saying, ‘All right, Meg. What’s going on?’

  Meg looked appealingly at Alison, but her twin could only shake her head. She had gone as pale as Guy, and, looking at her stricken face, Meg knew that there was only one person who was going to be able to go through with their plan, and that was herself.

  She cleared her throat, alarmed to discover that the look in Guy’s eyes made her feel about five years old.

  There was only one way she was going to be able to do this… It was too late for tact or diplomacy. She took a deep breath, and Tait warned her, ‘Meg, you’ve brought Guy rushing half-way across the world in the belief that the family’s suffered some kind of tragedy. I think you owe it to him to tell him why, don’t you?’

  Meg discovered for the first time in her life that she was actually frightened of her brother. Gone was the indulgence, the tenderness she had always known, and in its place was a hard, unyielding anger.

  ‘Guy, it’s Campion…Campion Roberts.’ She gulped nervously. ‘She…she’s having a baby…’

  Just for a fraction of time she saw the shock and anguish in his eyes, and then it was gone, leaving them flat and cold.

  ‘And you’ve brought me God knows how many thousand miles to tell me that a woman I haven’t seen in months is pregnant. Why, for God’s sake?’

  He didn’t know! He really didn’t know, Meg realised, and if it hadn’t been for that illuminating moment of betrayal when she had seen the truth in his eyes, she couldn’t have gone on.

  Underneath the table, she groped for Alison’s hand and, holding it tightly, she said huskily, ‘The baby…babies are yours.’

  There was an electric, humming silence, which Tait broke up by saying dazedly, ‘Meg…’

  But no one was listening to him. Guy stood up and gripped Meg’s arm, bruising it without realising what he was doing, his face white and strained beneath the Hollywood tan, and two day’s stubble.

  ‘Say that again,’ he demanded thickly.

  Meg lifted her head and looked into his eyes, her heartbeat slowing back to normal. It was going to be all right… She had been right. He did care.

  ‘Campion is carrying your child…children,’ she amended, with a brief smile. ‘She’s having twins.’

  She reached out and touched him then, her eyes soft and pleading.

  ‘Guy, she loves you so much. What happened between you… Every time I see her, she asks me about you, even though I can see she’s trying desperately not to. Those poor little babies… Our nieces!’ she added. ‘We had to make you come home, you must see that,’ she persisted when he made no reply. He looked, in fact, as though he had stopped listening to her, an arrested expression, which she had no difficulty in recognising at all, lightening his eyes.

  ‘Couldn’t you have chosen a less drastic method?’ he asked drily, but the anger had gone from his face and body, and he was even beginning to smile slightly.

  ‘Such as what?’ Meg demanded rallyingly. ‘Come home—Campion is pregnant?’ She shook her head and clung to his arm, demanding, ‘Oh, Guy, you do love her, don’t you? I was so sure you must, and I wanted desperately to tell her. She looked so forlorn, so…unhappy, but I dared not, just in case I was wrong. And then, after her fall—’ she added artlessly, ignoring the warning look her husband gave her.

  ‘Her fall! What fall?’ Guy demanded. ‘Is she all right? Is she…’

  ‘Guy, she’s fine,’ Tait told him calmly. ‘She fainted rather badly some time ago, but since then she’s been fine. At least, physically.’

  ‘She misses you dreadfully,’ Meg intervened.

  ‘That’s enough, Meg.’ Tait told her crisply. ‘I don’t think Campion would be too happy if she knew you were betraying her confidences like this…’

 
She turned from her husband to her brother and demanded ‘Guy, what are you going to do?’

  ‘That, my dear wife, is none of your business,’ Tait told her firmly.

  * * *

  Campion couldn’t remember such a perfect day. The sun shone, the air was balmy, bees hummed in the long grass she was too lazy to cut. The house was hers and, despite all her protests, she loved its pastel-washed walls and soft chintzes. And the nursery. She smiled and patted the mound of her stomach. Two and a half more months, and she could quite easily spend them all here in the orchard, lazing in the sun.

  Nature had given her a gift she had not expected, over and above her two unborn children. She had given her peace…sanctuary from her heartache, a breathing space in which normal emotions were suspended to allow her to concentrate solely on the new lives she carried.

  Above her, high in the sky, a plane droned. She closed her eyes, lulled to sleep by the sound. She slept a lot these days. A sign of depression, an inner voice nagged, but she didn’t listen to it. She stretched out on the blanket and sighed softly.

  * * *

  It was the shadow coming between her and the warmth of the sun that woke her. She looked up and saw the shape of a man; the sun dazzled her eyes, and she struggled clumsily into a sitting position.

  ‘Guy…’

  ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me?’

  No preamble, no skirting round the subject, just that fierce, angry question.

  It threw her off guard, making it impossible for her to pretend she didn’t know what he meant.

  He was dressed in a suit, and he looked hot and uncomfortable, but his skin was tanned. A legacy from his stay in the States? As he looked at her, he tugged at his tie and released the top buttons of his shirt.

  A familiar sensation curled through her body. Desperately she looked away from him. She didn’t want to feel like this, to want him, to love him…

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Meg,’ he told her tautly, his nostrils flaring slightly as he bit out, ‘God, can you imagine how I felt, learning that you were carrying my… children, right out of the blue, when I thought…’

  ‘It must have been a shock,’ Campion agreed coolly. She was feeling slightly dizzy, probably because she had been lying in the sun. She tried to stand up, and winced as she felt the pins and needles attack her ankle.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Guy demanded sharply, dropping to the ground beside her. One hand touched her shoulder, the other her foot. She could smell the hot male scent of him, and it made her catch her breath, bringing back memories of what it had been like to be able to touch him, to caress him.

  ‘Campion!’ His voice was roughly urgent, forcing her to look into her eyes. They were dark and strained. ‘Why…why didn’t you say something?’

  His hand moved from her foot to her stomach, splaying across its swollen bulge. She was only wearing a thin cotton dress, and the heat from his skin was so intimate that she might have been naked. She felt the twins move, and in other circumstances she might almost have laughed at the expression on his face as one of them kicked hard against his palm. Dark red patches of colour burned high up on his cheekbones. He released her immediately, and she tried to quell her instinctive feeling of rejection.

  ‘What was there to say?’ she said in answer to his question. ‘You’d made it plain that our relationship was over.’

  ‘I…I what? What the hell are you talking about? I loved you. I thought I’d made that more than clear.’ He shook his head, as though he couldn’t grasp what she was saying. ‘I loved you, but I didn’t want to trap you into a commitment given in a haze of sexual ecstasy.’ She saw him grimace. ‘I wanted to give you time…time to experiment a little, to find yourself, to explore your sexuality. I told myself that, if you did love me, I had nothing to lose, and that, if you didn’t, trying to tie you to me wouldn’t work anyway. I didn’t want to treat you like Craig did.’

  ‘You loved me?’ Campion couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re lying! You took me to bed, as part of your job as my agent.’

  ‘So that you would re-write the book? How dare you believe that, after what we had together? How could you credit such arrant nonsense with any shred of reality?’

  He had taken hold of her and was practically shaking her. He was furious with her, Campion recognised.

  ‘When we got back from Wales, you walked away from me without a word,’ she challenged bitterly. ‘All that week I was away, I kept hoping you’d ring me.’

  ‘I did better than that. I went to see you. I’d driven all evening to get there. God, I’d missed you so much! I couldn’t stay away any longer. I had to tell you how I felt, whether you were ready to hear it or not. I got the number of your room from reception.

  ‘I suppose I was pretty arrogant. I was sure you’d welcome me with open arms, so sure that I didn’t say a word to you about my plans to visit you on tour. I simply turned up, because I wanted to surprise you…wanted to see pleasure in your eyes when you looked at me. Only it didn’t work out that way, did it?’

  She stared at him, stunned by the bitterness in his voice.

  ‘I went upstairs…you were just going inside your room. There was a man with you—’

  ‘A man?’ Suddenly, she remembered. ‘It was you,’ she said huskily. ‘The man we thought had got the wrong floor. I wasn’t well—Antony was helping me to my room. I barely knew him!’

  His jaw tensed. ‘At Christmas, when I tried to talk to you, you told me there was someone else.’

  ‘I lied. I’d just heard…’

  ‘Yes, I know what you’d just heard,’ he interrupted tersely. ‘Meg and Alison have been filling me in. It seemed that they didn’t want to lose you any more than I did. God, I could shake you until your teeth rattle! How could you think…?’ He shook his head suddenly, looking suddenly unutterably weary and vulnerable. Campion caught hold of his sleeve.

  ‘I was so insecure, Guy. What we had was so new, so precious, I couldn’t…’

  ‘Trust me?’ he asked bitterly.

  ‘No. Trust myself, my judgement. I’d been wrong once—’

  ‘Yes, when you were nineteen…a child.’ He took hold of her face, and she saw the muscle clench in his jaw as he looked at her. ‘I knew from the first I loved you, but what I didn’t bargain for was how much that love was going to disrupt my life. I thought I could pretend that my work was still important when I couldn’t see you each day. I thought I had the strength to go away and stay away when I realised you didn’t want me. I even thought I had the strength to let you make your own choices instead of putting pressure on you, but here I am…ready to beg.

  ‘I’ve spent weeks in Hollywood, just wanting to get on the next plane home and take you in my arms. Have you any idea what I’ve been through these last few months, or how I felt when my sister blurted out that you were carrying my child…children?’ he amended huskily. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I was frightened,’ she told him simply. ‘I didn’t see how someone like you could possibly want me, and I was afraid of being hurt again.’

  He didn’t answer her in words, but the expression in his eyes made her look away.

  ‘Tait says you haven’t been well.’ He was searching her face as he spoke. ‘You fainted.’

  ‘It wasn’t important,’ she reassured him. ‘I’m all right now.’

  ‘How all right? Well enough to get married?’

  ‘Married?’ She felt her pulse jerk under his fingers where they circled her wrist.

  ‘We’re a little old-fashioned about these things in my family,’ he told her drily. ‘Meg tells me she’s never going to speak to me again if I do her out of her nieces.’

  ‘Nieces?’ Campion’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Oh, Meg has a thing about little girls. She’s convinced me that she and Tait will only produce boys, and she seems to be right. She’s equally convinced that you and I are going to produce girls, this time round, at least…’
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br />   ‘And is that why you want to marry me? Because Meg doesn’t want to be deprived of her nieces?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he told her softly. ‘It’s because I don’t want to be deprived of the woman I love, or the children she’s going to give me,’ he added, putting his hand on her stomach.

  Pleasure quivered through her, and as though she had spoken it out aloud he muttered thickly, ‘Campion! God, how I’ve missed you.’

  And then he was kissing her, fiercely, hungrily, letting her see how wrong she had been, and how much, how very much he did need her.

  It was a long time before he released her.

  ‘I’ve come straight here from the airport,’ he told her as they walked into the house. ‘Do you suppose I could beg a bed for the night?’

  ‘There’s only mine…’

  They stopped walking, and she quivered as he drew her towards him.

  ‘And it’s not very big,’ she tried to say, but his mouth was muffling the words, and anyway she didn’t think she cared how large or small the bed was, just as long as they could share it.

  * * *

  ‘Should we be doing this?’ Guy asked with sensual contentment several hours later.

  The evening sun poured in through the open windows, gliding their bodies, his dark and lean, hers pale and swollen with the burden of the new life she carried.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ Campion wriggled closer to him, her breath catching as his hand lazily caressed her breast, sensitive now in the later stages of her pregnancy.

  There had been a brief moment when she had felt uncomfortably aware of her pregnancy and her clumsiness, but Guy had soon dispelled it, telling her and showing her how erotic he found her changed shape.

  His mouth replaced his fingers and she sighed rapturously as he tugged gently on her nipple.

  His hand lay splayed across her belly, and when he released her, abruptly lifting his head from her breast, she looked at him in concern, until he made her gurgle with laughter by saying in awe, ‘My God, we’ve got an audience. One of them kicked me!’