by Penny Jordan
The plumber arrived during the afternoon, and she was too busy going over his plans with him to give detailed thought to her conversation with Helena.
Chase was the only one who could tell her if he had lied and why, but in her present vulnerable state she couldn’t see herself tackling him.
She went to bed early, shivering a little as she admitted that Helena was right. The house did seem very empty at night, her small single bed distinctly lonely and uncomfortable. She slept lightly, woken several times by the church clock, finally falling into a deeper sleep in the early hours of the morning.
She didn’t know what woke her. One moment she was deeply asleep, the next she was alertly awake, the tiny hairs on her arms prickling warningly. There was no sound at all from the encircling darkness, but some sixth sense warned her that she wasn’t alone in the house. She thought desperately about the telephone, far too far away downstairs. A sob of pure terror rose up in her throat, and she shrank back against the bedclothes, knowing she had not simply been imagining things when she heard soft but definite footsteps on the stairs. They paused outside her door, and Somer froze.
The door was pushed open, creaking faintly in the time-honoured tradition of ghoulish movies.
‘Somer, are you in there?’
‘Chase!’
A horrible weak feeling invaded her senses and she felt them slip swiftly away from her. The darkness of the room became inky black and stifling. Dimly she was aware of Chase, calling her name with sharp anxiety and coming towards her.
* * *
‘BETTER NOW.’
Somer opened her eyes slowly, conscious of a slow thudding behind her. Gradually she realised that the thudding was Chase’s heartbeat and that she was cradled in his arms, supported against his chest.
‘I fainted.’ She said it almost incredulously.
‘You certainly did. Hardly the most flattering welcome I’ve ever had.’
‘But what are you doing here?’
‘We had a date—remember, or didn’t you get my note.’
‘Your note, and your message,’ Somer told him stiffly, trying to pull away. ‘What happened? Did she tell you that she didn’t want to share you? Is that why you’re here to tell me that the charade is over?’
‘She?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know who I mean,’ Somer said hotly. ‘Clancy Williams, she called to see me several days ago—to tell me that you were taking her out to dinner, and not to expect you home until late—if at all.’
Above her head Somer heard Chase mutter something unflattering. ‘And you believed her? After what had happened that morning?’
Somer tried to sound nonchalant. ‘So you made love to me…so…I’m hardly the first…’
‘And of course I’m not Hollister. Even though your body responds to mine as though it had been designed for it,’ Chase said bitterly. ‘Somer, I didn’t drive down here in the middle of the night to argue with you.’
‘Then what did you come for?’
‘This.’
She was already in his arms, and there was no way she could avoid the fierce possession of his kiss. She tried to resist but it was impossible. Her own hunger joined Chase in the battle against her.
‘If it was kisses you wanted,’ she forced herself to say shakily when Chase released her, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t go to Clancy.’
‘She doesn’t stock the right brand.’ It was dark, but she could readily imagine the lazy, seductive smile curving Chase’s mouth. ‘And I’m very fussy about my kisses. You see I developed a taste for these particularly rare ones a long time ago.’
‘Chase, stop it,’ Somer protested huskily. ‘You keep on playing games and I can’t keep pace with them.’
‘Games?’ She felt his body tense. ‘Such as?’
‘Such as telling me that you had to marry to inherit your uncle’s money.’
‘Ah, my dear sister’s been talking, has she?’
‘So you did lie to me…but why? Why try to blackmail me…all that trouble you went to…why, Chase?’
‘Why? You mean to say you really don’t know?’ He laughed harshly. ‘Somer, have you any idea what you did to me five years ago? God, you were like a kick in the gut. I reacted to you the way I’d never reacted to any woman. I wanted you and you seemed to want me too. I knew you were young…too young…. I saw you in the lift and spent the rest of that day arguing against trying to see you again, and then you came up to me and virtually invited yourself out with me…and then what happened?
‘I came down to earth with a bump. I knew what you wanted from me, or so I thought and you weren’t the first. Any good photographer soon gets to learn that there’ll always be those women who are ready to make themselves available in return for first-class shots of themselves. When you asked me to photograph you I wanted to strangle you, even though part of me had been waiting for you to ask. You were too young and too promiscuous, or so I thought until you knocked the ground from under me by telling me the truth.
‘I could have killed you, do you realise that? You didn’t want me at all, you told me naïvely, you just wanted a man, any man to take your virginity, and God help me, you’d picked on me. You’ll never know how tempted I was…how much I wanted to take you there and then and stamp you as my possession, to make love to you until you couldn’t think straight and then…’
‘Then discard me as punishment,’ Somer put in huskily, ‘instead unwittingly, you conceived an even better punishment. You made me doubt my own sexuality. Andrew had rejected me and now you were rejecting me.’
‘And mine was the rejection you remembered?’
Somer didn’t deny it.
‘It wasn’t like you think at all, Somer,’ Chase told her softly. ‘After you ran out on me like that I tried to find you. I realised you were upset and I wanted to see you, to explain to you why I had to stop, why I couldn’t make love to you.’
‘And why couldn’t you?’ Somer asked painfully. ‘Initially you seemed to want me.’
‘Oh, I wanted you all right. I more than wanted you, that was the whole trouble. I didn’t want to hurt my pride that that was all you wanted from me. But when I tried to find out who you were and where you’d gone I drew a complete blank. Judith was on reception when I made enquiries about you and she pretended not to remember you. She even searched through the visitors’ book to find your name and address, but she told me you mustn’t have signed in.’
‘Why?’ Somer was amazed. ‘Why should she do that?’
‘Who knows? Perhaps because she sensed even then that Hollister wasn’t totally immune to you, no matter what he might have said.
‘When I got back home I developed your photographs. I wanted to burn them, to destroy all my memories of you completely, but every time I tried to do it I couldn’t. Helena found one of them. It was in my wallet…’
‘You carried a photograph of me in your wallet?’
‘Right next to my heart,’ Chase told her with wry self-mockery. ‘I reckoned that was the closest I’d ever get to you. I used to think about you and torture myself wondering who you’d eventually given yourself to, and whether he’d felt the same way about you as I did.’
‘And how was that?’ How calm she sounded, and yet her heart was beating out a wild tattoo of hope.
‘What the hell do you think?’ Chase challenged, drawing away from her and standing up. He walked across the window and remained silhouetted there, a barely definable tension hardening the muscles of his body. ‘I wasn’t a boy, even then, Somer, unsure of my feelings, or ignorant in any way about the depth or intensity of them. I know it sounds trite to say this, but I fell in love with you almost on sight. Oh, I fought against it, I told myself you were just another pretty, promiscuous kid on the make and that I’d play you along, get you out of my system, and no harm done on either side. But I knew the harm had already been done when you asked me to photograph you, and then when you told me the truth! Now do you understand why I couldn�
��t make love to you then?’ he grated thickly. ‘And why I couldn’t resist the temptation to do exactly that when you told me why there’d been no one else?
‘The first time I made love to you was in anger—I thought you’d been with Hollister; I couldn’t believe it when I discovered you were still a virgin. You told me it was because you were still in love with him. Was that true, Somer?’
It was like preparing to leap blindfolded into space, terrifying, exhilarating, requiring an act of courage and faith, and it took all her strength to do it.
‘No,’ she admitted softly. ‘No, Chase, I lied to you.’
‘Because…’ he pressed softly.
‘Because I loved you,’ Somer murmured, ‘even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I knew the first time you touched me after our marriage, that I wasn’t incapable of feeling, and I knew exactly why I hadn’t been able to respond to anyone else. I told myself that you were to blame, that you had destroyed my ability to respond because you had rejected me, but it wasn’t entirely true. If you had made love to me when we first met the result would have been exactly the same.’
‘Oh no, it would not,’ Chase corrected explosively, turning round and striding determinedly towards her. ‘If I had made love to you then we’d have been married long before now…I wouldn’t have needed to blackmail you. I couldn’t believe it when I saw your photograph in the papers. Once I knew properly who you were I found out as much as I could about you, then I laid my plans. I worked out everything in advance, including the phoney will. I wanted you so badly that this time I wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way.’
‘Not even Clancy Williams?’ Somer said provocatively. ‘And you can pretend there wasn’t anything between you? I saw how much she wanted you.’
‘Yes, you did, didn’t you?’ Chase agreed wryly. ‘All part of my nefarious master plan—a plan which backfired dismally. I wanted you to be as jealous of me as I was of you! I always knew exactly what Clancy was—she’d made a couple of plays for me in the past. Half the reason she wants me now is that I’ve become unavailable, and she can’t bear frustration—any more than I can,’ he added significantly. ‘I knew you responded to me sexually, you see, and I thought that if I could just make you jealous, it might be like a proverbial spark to dry tinder…that in the wake of jealousy would come love.’
‘Umm…only you’d got them the wrong way round. The love was already there.’
‘And you don’t love Hollister?’
‘No. I don’t believe I ever did, but I was terrified you would guess how I felt, so I let you believe I loved him. That time when you saw us together, I hadn’t known he was in London.’
‘Will you forgive me for blackmailing you into marriage, and forcing you to share my bed…or rather my sister’s bed?’
‘I’ll forgive you that—I think,’ Somer agreed. ‘But I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to forgive you all those nights I slept alone.’
‘It was the only way I could keep my hands off you,’ Chase admitted, groaning softly. ‘I’ve been up to my neck in negotiations for the American rights of Clancy’s new series, and it’s been like fighting my way through a quagmire. She’s been as difficult as all hell, and I haven’t been able to tell her to get lost until the series was all tied up. Sleeping with you at Helena’s was absolute purgatory… I told myself that separation was the only thing that was going to stop me from going raving mad. But those few nights…waking up with you in my arms was sheer bloody hell. The only thing that stopped you from being well and truly ravished was the thought of those brats of hers bursting in on us. I still have nightmares about it happening and Ben airing his knowledge about the human reproductive system over the breakfast table.’
Somer giggled.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ Chase told her lazily. ‘Are you really sure you love me?’ He said the words lightly, but Somer could feel the fine tremor in his fingers as they touched her face, finding her mouth and then stroking along her throat.
‘Shall I tell you…or show you?’ she murmured softly. Her lips seemed to find his jawline without any hesitation and she just caught his softly suppressed groan as she teased tender kisses over his unshaven skin.
‘Both,’ Chase pleaded hoarsely. ‘I’ve been so starved for you, Somer, that I need all the reassurance you can give me. Contrary to what you might think, I’m not in the habit of blackmailing people, or of forcing them into unwanted marriages. There were times when I woke up thinking I had gone stark raving mad.’
‘And now?’ Somer asked, still busily engaged on the delirious discovery that Chase’s skin was every bit as responsive to her kisses as hers was to his.
‘Now, modest always to a fault, I am forced to concede that I was gifted with a brilliant foresight, permitted to very few men. And you still haven’t told me that you love me,’ he reminded her softly, pulling her into his arms and lowering her against the mattress.
Momentarily Somer sobered. ‘I love you, Chase, in all the ways there are. The night you traced my father for me I wanted badly to tell you then…’
‘And I thought I had told you just how much you mean to me,’ Chase whispered. ‘I was going to come home that night and admit what I had done, I couldn’t wait any longer… I wanted you at my side as my wife…not someone I had forced into an unwanted relationship. I told myself there was something there…that we could make it work.’
‘When you rang up I thought you were having second thoughts…that you were spending the evening with Clancy. I wanted to dismember you.’
‘Very blood-thirsty. I was having dinner with her, and her agent…and the American series producers, and half a dozen other people so that we could thrash out the final details. The series will bump our ratings sky-high, and I can tell you I heaved a mammoth sigh of relief when she finally signed. Clancy’s problem is that she’s so used to playing a femme fatale that she can’t believe that in real life she’s more than resistible. At least as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Fire-proof, are you?’ Somer teased.
‘Not where you’re concerned. Want to put it to the test?’ His lips were brushing the tender skin beneath her ear, and Somer gave herself up to the heady pleasure of enjoying the shivery sensations spreading through her skin.
‘This time we’ve got all the time in the world,’ Chase told her huskily, ‘and no insecurities.’
‘So why is it that I get the feeling that you’re a man in a very big hurry?’ Somer teased breathlessly only seconds later, when she knew without a trace of shame that her body was already craving his immediate possession.
‘I’m in a hurry?’ Chase tormented back. ‘So it’s all one-sided, is it?’
* * *
LATER THEY made love again, Chase groaning that he would be glad when they could share a decent-sized bed. ‘You know what the trouble with you is,’ Somer teased. ‘You’ve no sense of adventure.’
‘Oh, is that what it is?’
Warm male laughter filled her ears. ‘Well, we’ll see who’s got a sense of adventure.’ With breathtaking skill he touched and caressed her with an intimacy that left her shaken with the knowledge of her own responses, and as though he knew how she felt Chase enfolded her in his arms, murmuring soft words of love against her skin.
When she woke up in the morning, Somer glanced at him to discover that he was still asleep.
He woke up almost immediately and smiled at her.
‘Still love me?’
‘More than ever,’ Somer assured him, ‘and I’ll love you twice as much if…’
She had been about to say, if you go and make me a cup of tea, but the very act of lifting her head from the pillow provoked a wave of nausea that had Chase following her abrupt flight to the bathroom.
‘Somer…what’s wrong, are you all right?’
He looked anxious, almost grey, as he surveyed her pale face. ‘You, an uncle four times over, and you still don’t recognise the morning sickness when you see it
?’ Somer scoffed, when she had recovered, watching the enlightenment drawn on his face. ‘Helena would be ashamed of you.’
‘A child…you’re carrying my child.’ He came across to her, and gathered her in his arms, his hand spread possessively across her still flat stomach.
‘Child?’ Somer’s eyebrows rose. ‘Do you think so? I was thinking we ought to insure against twins.’
An hour later as they sat in the chaos of the kitchen drinking coffee Chase said quietly, ‘Are you really happy about all this, Somer? A husband…a family? Six months ago.’
‘Six months ago all I had in my life was my father and a computer,’ Somer told him briskly. ‘My father I want to keep, but the computer—I’ll gladly trade it for other things. Chase, I love you.’ She stood up, slipping her arms round him, feeling his body take heat from the contact with hers.
‘Umm,’ Chase whispered huskily. ‘Do you think whatever you’ve got in there will object if I take you back to bed and make love to you again?’
‘It might not, and I certainly wouldn’t, but Helena is heading for the back door and I’m pretty sure she would.’
Chase released her with a groan just as his sister stepped into the room.
‘Chase!’ She looked surprised to see him. ‘You never said Chase was coming down,’ she said to Somer.
‘She didn’t know,’ Chase grinned at his sister. ‘I suddenly decided I couldn’t do without her any longer, and now I’m taking her back to London with me. She needs someone to take care of her. She’s been doing far too much.’
‘Far too much of something,’ Helena agreed drily, adding, with a knowing grin, ‘am I right in thinking this ‘‘taking care of her’’ involves a good deal of…’
‘Never you mind what it involves,’ Chase interrupted, returning her grin, and later when she had gone Somer mentally blessed her sister-in-law, for not giving in to the temptation Somer had seen bursting from her to tell Chase that she was well aware of the reasons for his excessive high spirits.
Instead of going out to dinner to celebrate as Chase had planned, they ate quietly at home. Somer cooked for them, and then curled up on the settee, her head in Chase’s lap, while they talked. Soon talk gave way to languid silences and small murmurs of pleasure.