by Penny Jordan
She started to get up to take their plates to the sink, but Val forestalled her, announcing that it was his turn to do some work.
As he walked past her chair he refilled her glass and she stared at it owlishly. Was that the third or fourth time he had filled it? She felt too pleasantly hazy to worry… too interested in the stories Val was telling her about his research into the family.
He had already explained to her that his name was Russian in origin, and that his mother had Russian blood. He had three sisters, he had informed her, all of them older than him and all of them married with families.
'It's a wonder I didn't grow up in terror of the female sex,' he told her with a grin as he handed her a generous helping of rhubarb fool. 'You wouldn't believe how much they bullied me.'
'No, I wouldn't,' Sorrel agreed darkly. 'They probably spoiled you to death.'
'Not a bit of it,' he assured her with a grin.
'What did they think of you coming over here to meet your English relatives?'
'Oh, they were all for it,' he told her promptly. 'In fact, they bet me that I'd probably go back with a…'
'With a what?' Sorrel asked him, curious not so much to know what he had been going to say, but the reason he had stopped so abruptly, giving her a look that was almost wary.
'An English wife,' he told her smoothly. So smoothly that she felt sure, for some reason, there was something he wasn't telling her.
But the wine had made her feel so woozy and relaxed that it was too much of an effort to hold on to the thought, and so she let it slip away, asking instead, 'Why should they think that?'
'Because that's what our original Llewellyn ancestor did. He was shipped over as a convict. He stole a loaf of bread. He was lucky it was only one loaf, otherwise he'd have been hanged and not transported, and that would have been the end. He was lucky in being chosen as an overseer by one of the colonists, mainly because he had some knowledge of farming methods—and after he'd served his seven years, he came back to England.'
'To find a wife?' Sorrel asked him, fascinated, but for some reason Val seemed reluctant to tell her any more.
'This is delicious,' he told her. 'Is there any more?'
'Yes. I'll get you some.' She stood up and then sat down again abruptly as her legs turned weak and wobbly and the room spun dizzyingly around her.
'Something wrong?'
'The wine. I've drunk too much of it… It's so strong.' And yet it didn't seem to have affected him, Sorrel noticed.
What she needed now was a couple of cups of strong coffee to sober her up, but when she tried to say as much the words became hopelessly tangled.
'I think you'd better just come and sit down by the fire,' Val told her, grinning at her.
'Not the fire,' Sorrel mumbled, 'fresh air.'
'In this weather? You're kidding!'
'Fire needs stoking. Upstairs as well,' Sorrel told him as she tried to stand up for a second time.
'Leave everything to me. Hey, it has gone to your head, hasn't it?' she heard Val saying in a voice that seemed to hold more of a suspicion of laughter than concern, and then she was swept up into his arms and deposited in front of the range in one of the two easy chairs, her head spinning so badly that she closed her eyes and moaned faintly. It was the wine, of course, and nothing to do with the wholly unexpected sensation of being picked up and carried in Val's arms, her head resting against his shoulder, her face turned into his skin so that her lips were almost touching the warm brown column of his throat. His skin fascinated her. She wondered woozily if he was tanned all over, and then blushed guiltily at the wantonness of her thoughts.
'Fire too hot?' she heard him asking her solicitously, and she opened her eyes reluctantly to find he was leaning over her, arms braced either side of her on the arms of the chair.
His shirt was open at the throat and she was sure she could see dark hair growing there. She had an odd squirmy feeling in her stomach—a sensation hitherto unknown to her. Andrew's torso was almost hairless, his skin very pale. He hated sunbathing and she remembered had only reluctantly removed his shirt when they had spent a day in Pembrokeshire, walking along the cliffs with Simon and Fiona during the summer. Her brother had laughed at him, Sorrel remembered, and although she knew she hadn't been meant to see it she had not missed the look of pity Fiona had given her.
Perhaps it was true that Andrew wasn't a very male man, certainly nothing like as male as Val. She gave a tiny shiver and, to her consternation, felt the hard, calloused weight of Val's palm against her forehead.
'Just checking to see if you had a fever,' he told her when her eyes opened wide.
'If anyone should have a fever, it would be you,' she told him crossly. 'Walking through that snow…'
'What would you have preferred me to do? Stayed in my car and frozen to death?'
The sensation of pain that struck her astounded her. She looked at him with confused, anguish-glazed eyes and suddenly his face came properly into focus and in his eyes she saw a predatory male look that made her body tense; then she blinked and it was gone, and she knew that she must have imagined it.
'Bed for you, I think,' she heard him saying wryly, 'before you pass out on me down here.'
'Won't pass out,' Sorrel told him indignantly. 'Can't—can't go to bed… not with you…'
She thought she heard him chuckle as he bent to pick her up, but her head was whirling round so much that she had to concentrate all her attention on that.
'If it bothers you that much, I can always doss down on the floor. It won't be the first time. I slept rough often enough when I was prospecting.'
'Prospecting?' Sorrel questioned him drowsily as he headed for the stairs. She could get quite used to being held in his arms, she decided woozily. There was something very pleasant about the sensation of him all around her. She liked the scent of his body, the maleness of him. It made her want to nestle and cuddle up against him.
'I'm a geologist, remember?' he told her.
The stairs were steep, but he reached the top barely out of breath, Sorrel recognised admiringly. She tried to imagine Andrew picking her up and carrying her to bed once they were married, but the image refused to form, and the wine-induced elation spinning through her body suddenly turned to dejection.
She wanted to marry Andrew, she reminded herself. And there was more to marriage than having a husband strong enough to pick her up in his arms. Andrew had different strengths… far more important strengths. But, dredge her brain though she did, she couldn't for some reason recall just what they were.
'This looks cosy,' she heard Val say appreciatively as he carried her into the bedroom.
One of the oil lamps stood in the deep window embrasure. She had left the curtains open, and outside the sky had cleared and the moon and stars were throwing glittering white light across the snow-covered hills.
'Looks as if it's freezing out there,' Val commented as he put her down on the bed. 'Of course, there's always the tried and true remedy of the old bolster down the middle of the bed,' she heard him musing.
'We don't have a bolster,' Sorrel told him. She felt deathly tired, her tongue somehow swollen and awkward in her mouth, making it difficult for her to enunciate clearly—nothing to do with her mother's elderberry wine, of course. Or was it? She tried to remember how many glasses she had had, and couldn't. She also tried to sit up, and groaned feelingly as the room spun round her.
She heard Val chuckle, but it was too much of an effort to open her aching eyes and look at him.
Habit dictated that she get up and get ready for bed, but she felt so comfortable… The thought of the cold bathroom was less than appealing.
She felt Val move, his footsteps on the bare boards of the floor making the bed shake so that she could feel the tiny reverberations beating inside her skull and all the way down her spine.
'Well, Cousin Sorrel, which is it to be?' she heard him murmur against her ear. 'Are you going to condemn me to sleeping on the floor, or
am I going to be allowed to share your bed?'
'Not my bed,' Sorrel told him crossly. 'Can't sleep on the floor, no spare bedding.' Her mother wouldn't be at all happy if she allowed their guest to spend a freezing cold night sleeping on bare boards, she thought muzzily. 'Have to share the bed…'
'Good girl.'
She winced, wishing he wouldn't speak so loudly. Her head was pounding and she gave a tiny moan.
'Don't worry. I won't tell the fiancé that we spent the night together.'
'Andrew would understand,' Sorrel told him quickly. She felt the bed move and opened her eyes. Val was leaning across her, easing down the bedclothes on the other side of the bed.
'Would he?' he asked her, his eyebrows lifting. 'I don't think I would in his shoes. Come on,' he added, watching as the expressions came and went muzzily in her eyes, her reactions slowed down by the effect of the wine. He had had no idea it would be quite so potent, nor that she would have such a weak head. All he had intended to do was to get her to relax a little, to stop her from being so uptight. 'Let's get you undressed and into bed.'
At the word 'undressed', Sorrel started to struggle away from him, danger signals flashing rapidly through her brain. Her hands clutched at her sweater, and Val laughed.
'Look, I promise you I have no designs on your virtue. I just thought you might be a little more comfortable without your sweater and jeans.'
He was right, of course, and his logical comment was no reason for her to suddenly suffer a rush of blood through her body that left every single part of it tingling in a most unnerving way.
'I can manage,' she told him fiercely, watching him warily, but he made no attempt to touch her, simply sitting back against the bottom of the bed and watching her.
'Where have I heard those words before?' he mocked her drily. 'Tell me, Sorrel, what does this fiancé of yours think of such stubborn independence?'
Stubborn? Her? She glowered at him.
'Andrew respects my need to be my own person,' she told him frigidly.
'Seems to me that respect seems to play a mighty important part in this relationship of yours.'
The sardonic twist of his lips brought her sharply back to awareness.
'Respect is very important in a marriage,' she told him.
'I agree, but surely not to the exclusion of everything else? Do you love him, Sorrel?' he asked her gently.
His question caught her off guard and made her focus determinedly on his face. There was no humour teasing the darkness of his eyes.
'Yes. Yes, of course I do,' she told him in a high, uncertain voice that wobbled a little, as though she wasn't quite as sure as she wanted to be.
'And when he kisses you, how does he make you feel?'
Her eyes widened in shock. There was no way he should be asking her that kind of question.
'Does he make you tingle all the way from the tip of your head down to your toes?' Val pressed, in a voice that suddenly seemed to be melting her bones, turning them into warm treacle. Or was it the mental image he had unwittingly drawn for her that was making her melt? An image of her body held in his arms, while his mouth…
She stared at him in utter confusion. It was the wine; it had to be. She had never in her life before experienced such wanton and thoroughly shocking desires.
'That's just romantic nonsense,' she told him stoutly. 'No one ever really feels like that.'
'Don't they?' His glance dropped to her mouth and Sorrel almost but not quite swayed towards him. The shock of her own illogical behaviour was enough to stop her, and to her relief Val got up off the bed, saying casually, 'I'll go downstairs and stoke up the boiler, if you're sure you can manage to get to bed by yourself. Don't worry, little cousin, you're perfectly safe. I have no intention of harming you or hurting you. By the look of you, by the time I come to bed you'll be fast asleep, dreaming the sweet, chaste dreams of innocent virgins. I'm looking forward to meeting this fiancé of yours. I don't think I've ever come across his like before.'
And the way he said it made Sorrel reflect crossly that it hadn't been a compliment.
She ought to have felt relief once he had gone. His absence ought to have galvanised her into getting ready for bed, while she had the privacy to do so, but she felt wholly reluctant to move. She thought of that cold, uninviting bathroom in contrast to the bedroom's delicious warmth… She snuggled down against the duvet with a faint sigh.
CHAPTER THREE
« ^ »
Someone was moving her… lifting her… turning her… and Sorrel muttered protestingly in her sleep, conscious of a thread of laughter running through the soft words which rumbled against her body and yet which remained merely an alien sound. She felt a shaft of cool air touch her skin and protested again, wanting to burrow back into the warmth of the bed. There were sounds, familiar and yet distant, and somehow, like that rumbling voice, comforting. She sighed and relaxed back into her deep sleep, acknowledging with pleasurable voluptuousness the granting of her request to be restored to the burrow of warmth from which she had been removed.
Val, neatly folding the jeans and sweater he had removed from her, as well as the lace-edged thermal vest, smiled as he looked at her. She reminded him of a chestnut mare he had once owned: all delicate bones and high spirit. He had come to Wales with no fixed ideas on the family he was coming to find, and he had certainly had no intentions of embroiling himself in their personal affairs.
This was supposed to be a break, a chance to recharge his batteries, a chance to get away from the relentless pressure of running a successful multi-million-dollar business.
He moved away from the bed, suddenly restless, remembering his sisters' teasing before he left Perth. Would he, like their ancestor, bring back a wife from Wales? Would a soft-spoken Welsh girl be able to achieve what their Australian sisters had not, and make him fall in love?
Love… What the devil was he thinking about? Love, the kind that could be shared by a man and a woman, wasn't something he had any personal experience of. Desire, yes, he knew all about that… but, little as he knew about love, he suspected it was a great deal more than the woman curled up fast asleep in the middle of the large bed. For all that she claimed she loved this fiancé of hers, she had no more awareness of what love was than a newborn kitten. What were her family thinking about? Why didn't they stop her… show her? He frowned and checked himself. She wasn't his responsibility. He was here on holiday, that was all. There was no point in getting involved. He looked at her sleeping face. How outraged and angry she had been to discover he was a man! He chuckled. It was a natural enough mistake, he supposed. The heat from the fire was making him sleepy, reminding him of how long it had been since he had last slept. He stretched, his body lithely muscled and honed to peak fitness by the hours he spent working outdoors, testing their boats. From geologist to boat builder; but he found a great deal more satisfaction in what he was doing now than he would ever have done in working for some large conglomerate. And he had been lucky; the money he had invested in that first small boatyard had multiplied over and over again. Perth was a boom town, full of people with money to spend, as the marinas full of new boats could testify. In the wake of the Americas Cup victory, sailing fever had gripped the country, and nowhere more so than on the Swan River town of Perth. Yes, he had caught the roller at the right moment, and for a while the success of his business had been enough to satisfy all his emotional needs. But there was more to life than work and financial success. He was thirty-five years old and as his sisters kept reminding him, not getting any younger. There were any number of sun-bronzed beautiful girls who hung around the marinas and the boatyards, who would be only too pleased to capture his attention, and had he been ten years younger he might have been interested. Strange, the changes the years brought. At twenty-five he had been stuck in the middle of the desert working his guts out as a geologist, with not a woman in sight.
There had been relationships at home, but none of them strong enough to survive his
long absences, and they had ended without regret on either side.
Now it seemed he had reached an age where a pretty face and a willing body just weren't enough to stir more than cursory desire.
He shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to the other and looked at Sorrel. Why was she so set on marrying this fiancé of hers? A man whom, even if she herself didn't yet realise it, she didn't love. Out of loyalty? Out of fear of committing herself to a more dangerous relationship? Out of a deep-seated maternal need for children? Whatever the reason, she was making a mistake. A marriage needed far more than wishy-washy mutual respect as its foundations.
He had brought some logs upstairs with him, and he fed the fire with them, and then replaced the fireguard. He had already found the bathroom. No shower, of course, and freezing cold. Well, he had experienced worse. Much worse, he acknowledged humorously, looking at the pristine white linen of the sheets and the faded but beautiful patchwork quilt. The room held a faint scent of lavender and beeswax. It mingled pleasantly with the woody smell of the logs. He stripped off his jeans and woollen sweater and, unzipping his overnight bag, removed a towelling robe.
Sorrel grumbled in her sleep as she felt herself being ousted from her deliciously warm spot in the centre of the bed and gently levered on to cold linen sheets. She shivered, her body heavy with stubbornness, not wanting to be moved. Sliding into the bed beside her, Val discovered the reason why she had been curled up in the middle of the bed. The mattress dipped slightly in the centre.
Scrupulously aligning himself in his own half of the bed, he too winced a little at the coldness of the linen sheets, and reflected that he was beginning to understand why some men wore pyjamas. Unfortunately he didn't possess any. As a token gesture to modesty—Sorrel's and not his own, since he had long ago lost any inhibitions he might once have felt about his nudity—he had retained his briefs. His feet were frozen and he just about managed to resist the temptation to slide them into the warm space vacated by Sorrel's body. He chuckled a little to himself, contemplating her outrage were he to warm them in the manner supposed to be traditional to married men. From what he had seen of her body when he had undressed her, Sorrel's neatly rounded bottom was shapely enough to tempt any man.