by Penny Jordan
‘I can imagine.’
Hazel gave him a quick, doubting look, wondering if he was mocking her—if he was comparing her lifestyle to his own and deriding her as a dull middle-aged woman whose life was so lonely and boring that a simple evening’s outing became something of immense importance and excitement, far more so than the event actually justified. But when she looked at him there was nothing other than sincere enthusiasm to be read in his eyes. But even so…
‘Katie loathes Gilbert and Sullivan. The last time she came with me, she complained that she was eaten alive by mosquitoes.’
‘I know the feeling. I experienced the same profound boredom and irritation when I foolishly agreed to accompany my nephews and godson to a pop concert.’
‘Katie likes pop music,’ she told him defiantly.
‘I expect she does. At her age so did I. She’ll grow out of it. We all do.’
What did he mean, he expected she did? Surely he must be aware of Katie’s tastes, her likes and dislikes? Surely he could hardly have failed to notice Katie’s love of the latest pop music, played so loud that it positively hurt one’s eardrums? As Katie’s lover he must be intimately aware of her likes and dislikes. Or was he the kind of man who had no interest in the woman in his life when they were not together in bed?
Her senses immediately repudiated such a suggestion. Because—or so she told herself—she could not bear to think of Katie, her clever, beautiful Katie being foolish enough, needing enough, to allow herself to become involved with a man, any man, who would treat her so badly.
No, that was more her role. She was the one whose inexperience, whose lack of knowledge, whose lack of self-worth, might dangerously lead her into such a relationship. Not that she had the intention of becoming involved in any kind of emotional or sexual relationship, much less one with…
She gave a small shiver. Her thoughts, her feelings, were rapidly escalating and getting beyond her control.
‘Cold? That’s my fault. I’ve kept you standing here far too long.’
She was smiling in denial, before she could check the foolish response of her unwary heart, acknowledging that even if she had been cold the warmth of Silas’s smile would have dispelled it.
They were standing so close to one another that if either of them took a single step it would bring them close enough for their bodies to brush lightly together, for him to lift his arm and put it around her shoulders, for him to take hold of her and turn her towards him and…
Her stifled gasp made him turn his head and frown at her. For a moment she thought that he had actually looked into her heart and read what she was so desperately trying to conceal.
He was her daughter’s lover, she reminded herself despairingly, praying silently for help, for someone or something to help her with the struggle which was rapidly outrunning her self-control.
She tried to concentrate on how humiliating it would be for her, and how painful and upsetting for Katie, if he should guess what was happening to her and tell Katie. Her daughter would have every right to feel shocked and disgusted with her. She felt both those emotions herself and more.
She could not understand why, after all the years since Jimmy’s death, when she had never felt the slightest sexual inclination or desire, when no matter how much she might have sometimes ached for emotional closeness with a man who might love and cherish her she had never once experienced anything like the fierce, sharp, painful splintering of sexual chemistry she was feeling now, it had to be for this man of all men.
Was it because he was Katie’s…because in some dark and hitherto unplumbed or suspected corners of her psyche, she was jealous or resentful of her daughter? Her soul cringed back from the thought in mute horror. She knew instinctively that it wasn’t so. But in that case what was the explanation?
Was it perhaps her age—her hormones? Wild theories and thoughts jumbled together in her head. She had read in magazine articles that sometimes women approaching middle-age were prone to what might be termed erratic behaviour. She was after all thirty-six.
‘Does your knowledge of the locale extend to knowing somewhere where we could have lunch?’
The quiet question had to be repeated before its meaning registered. She stared at Silas with panic-blinded eyes that made him frown and search her face, before asking softly, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
She had thought that intimacy between a man and woman began with physical touch, but she had been wrong, Hazel acknowledged sickly as her body, her senses responded violently to the sound of his voice, almost as though its cadences, its warmth, its male tones had thrown an invisible circle around them both, locking them within it.
‘I… I… Katie will be wondering where we are,’ was all she could manage to say.
Her throat felt raw and painful. She was embarrassingly aware that inside she was trembling with shock and emotion. She could never remember feeling like this in all her life. Not even when she had discovered she was pregnant, and certainly not when she and Jimmy…
‘I shouldn’t think so. She gave me the impression that she intended to spend most of the day with her friend. I may not know a great deal about young women of her age, but it seems to me that once two of them get together they appear to have an endless amount of topics to discuss.’
‘I…’ Why wasn’t she telling him firmly and plainly that she could not have lunch with him? Why wasn’t she reminding both herself and him about Katie?
Why was she behaving like such a fool? Just because he was offering to buy her lunch, it did not mean that he wanted…
What? To go to bed with her? Of course he didn’t. He was simply being polite. She was, after all, Katie’s mother, and if he hadn’t already guessed the state he reduced her to then her present behaviour, refusing to have lunch with him, and generally behaving like a green girl of sixteen, would pretty soon alert him to the truth.
‘I… Lunch would be very pleasant,’ she heard herself saying huskily, while her heart bounced around inside her ribcage like a rubber ball, and nothing she could say to herself about good manners and behaving with maturity could truly dismiss the tiny frantic pulse of excitement that refused to respond to all her exhortations to disappear.
They ended up eating at a very pleasant country pub, several miles away from Gawsworth, where they were given a table within a view of the huge log fire, and where the food was simple and very satisfying.
When Silas glanced at his watch and announced regretfully that it was time to leave, Hazel could hardly believe that over two hours had passed so quickly.
He had a way of drawing her out of her normal reserve, of getting her to talk about herself and telling her in turn about himself, that had made her realise how starved she had been of this kind of mental stimulation, how starved she had been of the company of an attractive, interesting man, who seemed to find her equally interesting and attractive.
But that was nonsense, of course. It had to be, she told herself as they left the pub. He was just being polite, that was all. And she, like the fool she was, was over-reacting. The trouble was that she was so unused to male company that she had forgotten how to respond to it.
‘Fancy a short stroll before we head back?’ Silas asked her, pointing out a footpath that led from the car park. ‘I could do with some fresh air, and some exercise to help me digest that lunch.’
Silently, Hazel nodded.
The path led down a narrow lane bounded by overgrown hedges, and then over a stile and across a field, dipping down towards what looked like the course of a small stream.
The stile proved a little difficult for her to navigate. One of its struts was missing, and as she struggled with it she cursed her lack of inches. Someone of Katie’s height would have made it with ease and elegance, while she, with her small stature, was having to clamber over it in a most unsophisticated and crab-like fashion.
She had just about made it when Silas realised her predicament and offered, ‘Let me give you a hand.’
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br /> Before she could protest he was turning back to her, sliding his hands beneath her arms as he leaned forwards and lifted her over the stile so easily that she might have been a child. Despite his age he was quite obviously extremely physically fit, she acknowledged as he lowered her towards the ground.
Although his touch was completely sexless on his part, she was acutely conscious, even through the thickness of her clothes, of the pressure of his palms against the sides of her breasts, and of the intensity and unexpectedness of their reaction to that pressure. And thankful that he could not see what she could feel: that her nipples had hardened and were pushing urgently against the constriction of her clothes as though willing him to become aware of her femininity and its responsiveness to him.
Shame coiled in her stomach and left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth. The moment he set her down, she moved quickly away from him, hoping he would put her heightened colour down to the briskness of the breeze.
Desperate to get herself back to normal, she rushed into nervous questions about his work as she tried to distract her senses away from her physical awareness of him.
He told her that he had always wanted to write, but that as a lecturer he had been well aware of the difficulties in establishing a career for himself as a writer, and had decided that his writing must always be a hobby and a self-indulgence when almost by accident he had been introduced to a publisher, through a mutual acquaintance, and had been encouraged to let the former see one of his manuscripts.
‘I’ve been lucky,’ he told Hazel, smiling at her when she automatically demurred, for once overcoming her own shyness and hesitancy, to assure him almost fervently that he was one of her favourite authors and that his historical sagas had that special something that made them outstandingly readable.
Suddenly aware that she was perhaps being overenthusiastic, she stopped abruptly, and said uncomfortably, ‘I suppose you must get tired of people telling you that.’
‘Never, when it’s genuinely meant,’ he assured her warmly. ‘Although I must admit I do feel rather embarrassed at being the recipient of such undeserved praise.’
‘It isn’t undeserved,’ Hazel insisted, stopping walking to turn and look earnestly at him. ‘Katie’s probably already told you how much I enjoy your work.’
‘She has mentioned it,’ he agreed gravely. ‘But I rather thought she might be dangling an extra carrot in front of me, so I didn’t pay too much attention.’
Not quite understanding what he meant, Hazel hesitated.
‘I’m very grateful to you for allowing me to stay with you,’ Silas told her quietly. ‘A writer isn’t the easiest person to have around at the best of times, but most especially when he’s working. We do tend to be a rather self-absorbed and selfish lot. I sometimes work quite late into the night. I hope the noise from my typewriter won’t disturb you…’
‘I’m sure it won’t,’ Hazel told him. She wondered sensitively if he was subtly warning her that once he was working he would expect to be left strictly alone. Well, she could understand that. Her own work as an illustrator could be mentally and sometimes even emotionally draining, and she too needed her privacy if she was to work successfully.
‘I expect you’ll want to be left strictly to yourself when you’re working,’ she said now, determined to make it clear to him that she wasn’t going to be forever popping in and out offering him cups of tea and food. ‘If you want to make yourself a drink or a snack then please feel free to do so, otherwise—well, I don’t bother much with breakfast and when I’m working I tend to have a sandwich or something light, and then in the evening we… I expect you’ll want to make your own arrangements.’
‘Meaning that that’s what you’d prefer me to do?’
His question was too blunt, too direct.
She blinked and wondered furiously what he expected her to say.
‘Er…’ He was plainly waiting for some sort of response, so she began uncertainly, ‘Well, I…’
‘You have a very busy social life which precludes us from having dinner together in the evening, much as I would enjoy spending a relaxing hour or two in your company, unwinding from the day’s stresses, is that it?’
Was he making fun of her? He must know surely from Katie that her social life was very limited indeed: that she rarely went out, even though her friends were always complaining that she was in danger of turning into a hermit.
Deciding that he must be teasing her, she told him stiffly, ‘I was simply trying to say that I wouldn’t want you to feel you were under some kind of obligation to eat your meals with me.’
She started to turn away from him, determined to bring what was turning out to be a very dangerous conversation to a close, but as she did so she heard him saying softly, ‘Who says it would be an obligation? I was thinking of it more as a pleasure—an indulgence…’
Hazel could feel herself starting to tremble inwardly. If she didn’t know better she might almost have believed that he meant it—that he was actually subtly flirting with her, that he was actually trying to imply that he found her attractive and desirable. Which of course he could not possibly do.
He was involved with her own daughter, for heaven’s sake, and that knowledge, plus her own response to it, was making her feel physically sick.
She prayed desperately that Katie wasn’t too deeply in love with him, because she was almost certain he could not reciprocate the intensity of her feelings, and the last thing she wanted was for her precious daughter to be hurt. And sooner or later she would be hurt. With a man like this one that was inevitable. Sooner or later there would be someone else, a someone else, who, unlike her, would not think twice about responding to his overtures, to his warmth, to his sensuality, and when she did…
She shivered visibly, causing Silas to frown. ‘You’re cold. Perhaps we’d better go back.’
Go back… If only she could go back to before she had ever met him.
She had known him hardly more than twenty-four hours, and yet those twenty-four hours had changed her life irredeemably. Had changed her, showing her facets of her nature, of her innermost emotions and feelings, that she had never known existed. If she had known more about him before she had met him, if she had had time to prepare herself…but she suspected that nothing she could have done could have defended her from the enemy that was within herself.
Her father had been right to insist that she live a life of rigorous celibacy. Had he perhaps in some way seen within her what she had not…?
And yet if for all these years she had had this vulnerability, this aching, welling need for physical contact, for—to put it in its bluntest and cruellest form—sex, then why had it never manifested itself before? Why had she never felt like this with anyone else?
It was a question she was far too confused to know how to answer. Silas had already turned back in the direction they had come and she fell into step beside him, waiting as he mounted the stile ahead of her, and then freezing when instead of crossing it he turned round and held out his arms to her.
As she looked at him, she knew that she had already hesitated too long; that her body was already quivering with excitement and fear that if he picked her up now, no matter how remote and non-sexual his touch might be, there was nothing on earth that would stop her body from responding to him. Even now, standing here looking up at him, between one heartbeat and the next, she could already feel the heat of his body against her own, could already hear the fierce drumming of her own heart, could already sense how her body would melt and yield, silently urging his to respond to its wantonness.
Terrified of what would happen, of how she would humiliate herself and betray Katie if she so much as took one step towards him, she told him raggedly, ‘It’s all right, I can manage.’ She gave him a tight painful smile. ‘I am a woman, you know, not a child.’
It was the wrong thing to say. The look he gave her slowly encompassed every inch of her, making her feel as though she were slowly melting inside.
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‘Yes,’ he told her gravely, before he turned away from her. ‘I do know.’
And as he stepped down the other side of the stile, she was sure she heard him adding acidly under his breath, ‘After all, I am a man and not a boy.’
But she told herself she was imagining it. That she was letting her own feelings, her own needs put words into his mouth which he most probably had not uttered.
Later she told herself that it was because she was so engrossed in her own thoughts, her own guilt, that, while she managed to negotiate the stile fairly easily, once she was down on solid ground for some unfathomable reason she managed to trip over a totally non-existent bump in the ground.
Her small cry of apprehension was automatic, and so was the speed with which Silas turned round and caught hold of her, dragging her up against his body so that she was locked against him with far more intimacy than she would have been had he merely been helping her over the stile.
This could not be happening, she told herself despairingly as she felt the frantic thud of her heart and breathed in the warm, intimate male scent of him.
The wind had tousled her curls, blowing them across her cheek, and perhaps initially it was simply in automatic response to this that he lifted his hand and gently brushed them back, tucking them behind her ear, while he looked gravely into her eyes as though he was searching for something, waiting.
Later she told herself that this was when she ought to have pushed him away, ought to have made some move to let him know that his intimacy was unwelcome, when she ought to have remembered Katie, but instead she simply stared back at him, her lips parting slightly as she tried to breathe in enough oxygen to satisfy her cramped lungs, her ribcage lifting abruptly as she tried to breathe deeply, flattening her breasts against his body. With both of them wearing so many layers of clothes, it was impossible surely for him to feel their softness, much less be aware of the swollen, aching hardness of her nipples, and yet, she acknowledged painfully, he must have felt something, must have read some kind of invitation in her eyes if not in her body, because the hand resting against her curls suddenly became caressing, his thumb stroking her gently behind her ear, rather as she might have fondled a soft-furred cat, she thought dizzily, trying to fight against the sensations his touch engendered.