by Penny Jordan
CHAPTER SIX
IT HAD never been destined to be recorded as one of the best days of his life right from the start, Piers was to acknowledge grimly, twenty-four hours after the event which was to change his life for ever.
For a start he did something he could never remember having done before. He overslept. He never overslept. Never. But this morning he had done, waking up abruptly with the beginnings of what promised to be a bad headache and an even worse mood.
And it didn’t make him feel any better to be forced to acknowledge that at least part of the cause of his mood was the fact that in his dreams his desire for Georgia had given him such an ache of longing for her that on waking he’d actually felt as though she had physically been there in bed with him, deliberately arousing him and then withdrawing from him, teasing him, tormenting him with the alluring promise of her softly naked body whilst, at the same time, refusing to allow him to touch her.
Angrily he pushed back the bedcovers. Lying in bed mentally going over his dreams wasn’t going to do anything to change them, or the message they were no doubt trying to give him.
Scowling, he headed for his bathroom.
* * *
Georgia wasn’t having a much better day. During his walk Ben had run off, dancing around her just out of her reach whilst she alternately tried to coax and order him back to her. In the end it had only been with the aid of a fellow walker whose pretty sheltie bitch Ben had taken a shine to that she had managed to get his lead back on him.
Back at the house she had fed him, and answered a telephone call from work concerning the disappearance of some papers she knew for a fact she had given to the office manager to be filed.
Now, as she concluded her telephone call, she realised that Ben was nowhere in sight—just like Piers, who presumably had got up early and left the house before she had come down.
His comments, his behaviour towards her had left her not just aching with longing for him but having to confront as well the reasons why she was reacting to him the way she was, the reasons she wanted him the way she did.
She was just reassuring herself for the hundred and somethingth time that she most certainly was not in love with him when she heard his furious shout, followed, as she rushed to open the kitchen door, by a far less noisy but far more ominous deeply angry call of, ‘Ben’. This shouting after Ben was coming to be a habit.
As she rushed to the stairs, her heart pounding nervously, Georgia stopped dead.
Ben was on his way downstairs, and in his mouth...
She swallowed and closed her eyes in dismay, praying that the shoe—that very mangled and chewed shoe Ben was so proudly bringing to her, his whole body wriggling with happy excitement—did not belong to Piers, even though she could see quite clearly that it was most definitely a man’s shoe, and the only man in the house was Piers.
As Ben dutifully dropped the shoe at her feet and then stood back, waiting for her to praise him, Georgia’s heart sank even further. She had been throwing sticks for him when she’d walked him, praising him for returning to her with them, and now...
As she looked up the stairs she could see Piers walking slowly down, watching them both.
‘This is your handiwork, I suppose,’ he accused her menacingly.
‘I... He...’ Georgia fell silent, then shook her head as she told Ben sorrowfully, ‘Bad dog, Ben.’
The dog’s tail dropped, and so did his nose, his eyes losing their expectant shine. Georgia could feel a huge lump forming in her throat as she forgot what an arch-manipulator Ben could be and remembered only that the dog was probably simply carrying out a ritual she herself had taught him.
‘That dog—’ Piers began, but Georgia, fearing what he might say, immediately leapt to Ben’s defence.
She told him quickly, ‘He wasn’t being deliberately destructive. He’s simply following his instincts of retrieval.’
‘With my shoe?’ Piers asked her sarcastically.
‘It’s because he relates to you as a member of his pack.’ Georgia defended the dog. ‘And he—’
‘Those shoes are—were—leather and handmade,’ Piers overrode her coldly.
Handmade leather shoes. Georgia’s heart sank even further. She could just imagine how much they would cost to replace, and, of course, she would have to offer to replace them, although technically Ben wasn’t her dog.
‘I’ll pay to replace them, of course,’ she offered quickly.
‘They’re handmade,’ Piers repeated. ‘That means they take time to be made. One can’t simply go out and just buy a pair...’
He really was enjoying making her squirm, Georgia decided, anger starting to replace her initial feelings of dismay and guilt.
‘Ben obviously shares your expensive tastes,’ she told him lightly. ‘But I’m sure they can’t be the only pair of shoes you possess.’
The dull ache in his head which Piers had woken up with had turned with unpleasant speed into the kind of headache he knew, from past experience, would quickly reach a raging crescendo of pain unless he took something for it...and soon. It infuriated him that instead of castigating the dog Georgia actually seemed to be defending him, and even implying that he, Piers, deserved to have his shoes destroyed. He hadn’t missed either that faintly scornful look in her eyes when he had pointed out to her that the shoes were handmade and expensive. Perhaps he had sounded like the worst kind of successful entrepreneur, but he hadn’t intended to be boastful—simply to make her understand the gravity of Ben’s crime.
‘No,’ he agreed, now suddenly as defensive over his choice of footwear as Georgia had been over Ben’s enjoyment of it. ‘They aren’t the only pair I have to wear, but right at this moment they are the only pair I wanted to wear, the pair I had chosen to wear. Not that it matters. The real issue here is—’
Ben, not getting the reaction he had hoped for from Georgia, darted forward and picked up the shoe, proudly carrying it right to Georgia’s feet and sitting down waiting for her to praise him. Helplessly Georgia looked from the dog’s expectant eyes to Piers’s condemning ones.
‘He isn’t being deliberately destructive,’ she repeated to Piers helplessly. ‘He thinks...he believes...’ She stopped as she saw the way Piers’s mouth was curling with biting anger.
‘Perhaps you were right after all... Perhaps he is far more intelligent, far easier to train than I believed,’ Piers told her with deliberation, sharply biting off each word as he delivered them to her almost like condemnatory blows.
‘I haven’t taught him to do that,’ Georgia retorted hotly as the meaning of what Piers had said sank in. ‘I throw sticks for him to retrieve...like any other dog owner, but as to shoes...’
She stopped, unable to hold the silent contempt of the look he was giving her, his eyes smouldering darkly with the dislike he so obviously felt for her in the angry whiteness of his face.
The pain in his head had reached a crashing crescendo, Piers recognised. It infuriated him more than he wanted to admit, even to himself, that Georgia should choose the dog above him; that she should defend Ben so determinedly, so tenderly and lovingly, even though she must know that he was right. And what made it worse was that he suspected that had the shoe Ben had chewed belonged to anyone else other than him she would have taken a completely different stance.
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ he accused her furiously.
‘Enjoying it!’ The unjustness of his accusation caused Georgia to retaliate immediately. ‘No, I am not.’
‘Well, you’d better make the most of it,’ Piers advised her as waves of nauseating pain began to lash the inside of his head. ‘Because you’re not going to find the situation anything like so funny when I present you with the bill for my shoes, and even less so when you explain to my godmother how your claims to be able to train her dog have resulted in him displaying the kind of antisocial behaviour that just confirms that he needs to be found a new owner—preferably one who doesn’t wear shoes,’ he finished
savagely.
Now Georgia’s face was as white as Piers’s and her pain nearly as great as well, although hers was located in her heart rather than in her head.
‘It isn’t up to you to say whether Ben stays or goes,’ she reminded him protectively.
‘No,’ Piers said softly, with such a vitriolic look that Georgia caught her breath in alarm, immediately moving closer to Ben and putting her hand protectively on his collar.
‘If you try to do anything to hurt or harm Ben...’ she began warningly, and then stopped as she saw the look that zigzagged briefly through Piers’s eyes, her breath catching in her throat. Pain... Piers had felt pain, had looked betrayed. Pain! But how could that be? Surely that meant...? But before she could follow up her intriguing line of thought Piers was turning away from her and heading back up the stairs to his own part of the house.
* * *
As he took the tablets he knew would help the pain of his headache to subside, Piers cursed himself for his lack of self-control. Jealous of a dog... What the hell was happening to him? He closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and deeply, telling himself he was doing so simply to speed up the progress of the drug through his system, but in reality he knew there was more to it than that...much more...
To his intense irritation, behind his closed eyelids all he could see was Georgia’s anguished face as she looked protectively towards Ben. Perhaps he had overreacted a little—but what man in love could calmly or rationally accept that the woman he loved cared more about a dog than she did about him?
A man in love!
Since when had he been that? He wasn’t inhuman. He had nothing against people falling in love. Love was a very wonderful and special thing. It was just that, for some reason, he hadn’t imagined it happening to him. Or, rather, he hadn’t imagined it happening to him in quite the fashion that it had. He had assumed that when love finally entered his life it—she would enter it calmly, in a dignified mature fashion. Not sweep in in a whirlwind of complex, volatile, challenging emotions that went from one extreme to the other and then back again in the space of a heartbeat. And certainly never, ever had he imagined that he would be competing for his beloved’s affections with a dog!
The tablets he had taken were starting to do their work, easing the pain out of his head. A glance at his watch revealed the unwelcome fact that it was halfway through the morning and he had things he needed to do.
* * *
Downstairs in the kitchen Georgia was nursing a mug of hot coffee whilst telling Ben severely, ‘You shouldn’t have taken his shoe, Ben.’
Soulfully he looked back at her. Previously, whilst she had known that Piers did not approve of Ben as a pet for his godmother, she had assumed that that was his main objection to the dog, but now...
Her heart missed a small beat as she remembered the look of bitter resentment Piers had given poor Ben. A look almost of hatred, and... And what? Georgia closed her eyes, not wanting to give a name to the look she thought she had seen in Piers’s eyes, and then opened them again as she heard Piers opening the kitchen door. He was dressed in a snug-fitting pair of faded jeans and a soft cotton shirt, and his shoes... She exhaled her breath in a sigh as she saw the casual footwear he had on.
As he followed the direction of her gaze Piers gave Ben a hard look.
‘It wasn’t his fault.’ Georgia quickly defended the dog, seeing it. ‘I...I should have kept an eye on him.’
She tensed as she saw the way Piers’s mouth was curling with contempt and derision, but he made no comment, simply sitting down and starting to look through the letters he had in his hand.
One of them was from the estate agent, and Piers frowned as he read it. The agents were pressing him to make a decision on the farmhouse he had viewed, reminding him that another would-be purchaser had expressed an interest in it.
Piers discovered that he had suddenly lost interest in acquiring any kind of large potential family house... What need did he have for one after all? A modern apartment would surely be far more convenient, and, if necessary, he could rent separate office accommodation.
He was glad that he had come to his senses before he had done anything so foolish as being tempted to put in an offer for the farmhouse, he told himself grimly.
* * *
After a couple of hours during which Piers and Georgia occupied themselves in different parts of the house—Piers doing some work whilst Georgia had an intensive training session with Ben—they accidentally found themselves in the kitchen together, having lunch. Little was said as they ate their respective meals.
As the silence between them stretched into a tautness that made Georgia’s nerve-endings tingle with apprehension, she wondered unhappily how much of Piers’s obvious antipathy towards her was actually caused by Ben’s crime of destroying his shoe and how much by Piers’s own regret about what he had said to her the previous evening. Well, if he thought she was silly enough to have taken any of what he had implied seriously...
Her head lifted proudly and, standing up, she called quietly to Ben, ‘Come on, boy, time for our walk.’
‘No...’ Piers’s sharp denial cut through the hostile atmosphere of the kitchen like a gunshot.
‘No,’ he repeated, ignoring the way Georgia’s hand crept protectively towards the dog’s collar. ‘I’ll take him. Let’s just see how much improvement you have been able to make with this so-called training you’ve been giving him. Not very much at all, if the events of the last few days are anything to go by,’ he added sardonically.
Georgia’s heart started to beat uncomfortably fast.
It was true that Ben was responding to what she was teaching him, but it was also true that he was a very independently minded dog, a free spirit of the canine world, so to speak, who, regrettably, had been used to being the pack leader for so long that he was reluctant to give up his role without something of a tussle.
Human beings, as he had made more than plain to Georgia over the last few days, were there to feed him and be protected by him; he had a very male and macho attitude towards that part of his canine heritage, as Georgia had noticed on their walks; for whenever a strange man happened to walk past them Ben immediately became very much the protective male dog guarding one of his pack. But it had to be admitted that human beings were not, in Ben’s considered opinion, his superiors in the pack pecking order, an assumption which Georgia had been doing her best to alter skilfully. However, she was becoming increasingly aware that Ben needed rather more than mere training. What Ben actually needed was a visit to a pet psychologist. However, she could well imagine Piers’s reaction were she to put this suggestion to him.
‘I...I don’t think he’s quite ready for that yet,’ she said instead, only to have Piers openly jeer at her as he asked her silkily,
‘What exactly are you trying to say? That I was right all along and that the dog is untrainable?’
‘No dog is untrainable,’ Georgia defended swiftly. ‘And Ben is a very intelligent animal.’
‘An intelligent animal who needs a new home,’ Piers agreed.
Fear and anger flashed through Georgia’s eyes.
‘You’re determined to get rid of him, aren’t you? You won’t even give him a fair chance. Have you any idea what it could do to him emotionally to be re-homed? Have you no feelings, no compassion...no perception? Have you no—?’
‘I’ve got a pair of ruined handmade shoes and a list of complaints that—’ Piers began sardonically, but Georgia cut through them all, her protective female urges coming to the fore as she sensed Ben’s growing danger.
‘Is that all that matters to you?’ she demanded heatedly. ‘Material possessions, other people’s opinions? Your godmother loves Ben; she—’
‘She only took him on because of you,’ Piers interrupted her furiously, ‘so don’t talk to me about feelings, because that was a piece of deliberate and cold-blooded manipulation and—’
‘It was no such thing. I had nothing to do with your godmot
her’s decision to give Ben a home,’ Georgia denied defensively.
‘You mean you aren’t going to admit to having anything to do with it,’ Piers countered coldly, ‘but you do have to admit that there is no way that that dog is a suitable pet for my godmother...’
‘You really hate Ben, don’t you?’ Georgia accused him. ‘If you want my opinion, you don’t just not like him, you’re jealous of him as well.’
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than Georgia wished passionately that she had not uttered them; but it was too late. Piers was looking at her with an expression that made her quake in her shoes.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Piers told her curtly, getting off his chair and walking determinedly towards Ben whilst Georgia looked on helplessly.
‘I really don’t think this is a good idea,’ she said quickly.
‘Why?’ Piers challenged her. ‘Or do I already know the answer? You’re afraid that I’ll discover that far from improving Ben’s behaviour—’
‘It is improving,’ Georgia insisted fiercely. ‘It’s just that my training programme is at a very delicate stage,’ she improvised, ‘and I’m concerned that it will confuse Ben having two different people giving him commands.’
The thin smile Piers gave her warned Georgia how easily he had seen through her desperate subterfuge.
‘Really? Then how on earth is my godmother going to control him if the only person he’s going to respond to is you, and the only commands he’s going to respond to are yours?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Georgia protested. ‘It’s just that, right now...’
‘Why not let me be my own judge of just how much progress he’s making?’ Piers challenged her softly, then snapped his fingers and said firmly, ‘Ben, here...’