‘But sometimes she has bad days. On a bad day she manages a bottle of vodka, mixing it into orange juice or coffee, any time of day.
‘I freak out and she treats me as a huge joke, won’t discuss the problem because she hasn’t got a problem, she says. Apparently, I’m a spoilsport. I take a few drinks much too seriously. I should lighten up.’
‘But it certainly sounds like she’s got a problem,’ Diane observed. She hesitated. ‘Does she have … you know – have help?’
He drew in a breath so deep that it dug a pain in his chest as her question chewed his conscience. ‘Wouldn’t hear of it. I suppose I ought to be going to one of these groups that support the family of a drinker. But then —’ He blinked out of the window at the black shadows in the hedgerow. ‘It would be an immense waste of time. She’s headstrong and drinking has made that worse. I read that the decision to stop drinking has to come from the drinker and I let that excuse me from taking any initiative. The truth is that you can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped, especially if they sneer at you for trying.
‘And sometime I wonder if I’m the cause. Everything. Maybe it’s me? Have I driven her to drink? But, if so, why didn’t she leave?’ And why haven’t I?
In the confines of the car he could smell Diane’s personal scent, warm and clean. He breathed it in. Soothing. Everything about her soothed him.
‘So, to turn your earlier question back on yourself – you must’ve loved her, to marry her?’
He turned in his seat. ‘I probably did love her but I was nowhere near wanting to marry. She was my girlfriend and I was happy with that. But suddenly she confessed that she was pregnant, with all the tears and fears and the interminable brave conversations about abortion that went with a surprise baby. I hated the idea of abortion. I knew that if we got married, she’d keep the baby. Natalia. It was the right thing to do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, simply.
‘What was done was done and soon and we were OK when the girls were babies. We were too focused on them to get on each other’s nerves. But Natalia and Alice have grown up and moved out.’ His shoulders tensed. ‘And Tamzin and Valerie have a strange relationship. Close, but unhealthily tolerant. Blind to each other’s problems, each effectively endorses the other’s self-destructive behaviour.’
It felt quite natural to sit in the fast-growing dark confessing his problems to this unusual woman who seemed always to be so composed and pragmatic. He found himself wondering what his life would have been like if he’d shared it with a woman who didn’t fall into banshee mode whenever … well, whenever she damned well felt like it. Imagine living in a home that was peaceful, with a woman who was restful instead of rocking the house with screams and bellows.
In the twilight, he could make out the curve of Diane’s cheek and the straightness of her nose, the shift in the pattern on the fabric of her top as it folded around the contours of her breasts. And he was becoming aware of a need. The kind of need that a man might feel when tucked away with a woman he’d noticed from the instant he glanced across a waiting area and saw her staring at a policeman, a polite smile of astonished disbelief on her lips. If ‘noticing’ meant a clunk in his chest and eyes that refused to look away.
The need began to grow. He felt his breathing quicken.
‘We’ve got more of a habit than a marriage,’ he said, deliberately, trying to push her into a reaction. ‘We share a bed but it’s a big bed with a lot of space available. I’ve forgotten what meeting in the middle of all that space feels like. It’s been a long time since we … met in the middle.’ He waited, looking for signals.
But, no. No empathetic tuts or feminine clucks, no sympathetic hand on his arm. ‘Difficult,’ she agreed, neutrally, instead.
Irritation reared like a tormented bear inside him. He was spilling his guts about the situations he had to juggle every day and she called it ‘difficult’! ‘I’ll tell you what’s “difficult”,’ he snapped, goaded. ‘Being alone with a woman like you and having to behave!’ He froze as he realised that his thoughts had made it, uncensored, to his voice.
She shifted, minutely.
The silence magnified his words. They rang around inside his head. This, surely, would earn him a blast of indignation and fury. He braced himself for an icy, ‘I think you’d better take me back to my car!’
But Diane seemed more curious than explosive. ‘Why don’t you want to behave?’ She even sounded as if she might be smiling in the dark at his effrontery.
Having been honest to the point of lunacy, he felt obliged to crash on. ‘Because my problems usually absorb all my energy but I’ve realised that I’m more interested in you than in my problems and I can’t remember the last time I felt like that. I want to step off the world – my world – and into bed with you.’
She didn’t react at all.
The silence drew out. She was utterly still, staring into the evening.
He sighed. He’d better apologise. Reassure her that he really was reasonably safe and that these uncharacteristic sentences would soon stop popping out. He’d got used to missing sex because he was the kind of man who expected to feel guilt about cheating on his wife. Fidelity was just another habit.
But instead of uttering an apology, his mouth seemed to want him to lean across and brush his lips gently across her temple. When she stiffened but didn’t draw away, he let his mouth drift lower, feeling first the tingling brush of her eyebrow on his lips and then the soft flutteriness of her eyelashes. Her smooth cheekbone, her jaw. His mind churned with what the hell he was doing driving a woman off to dark lanes and propositioning her. It must be the stress. An urge for release.
Oh yeahhhhh … He almost groaned aloud at the idea of finding release with her.
She was still.
And then he was kissing her mouth, his tongue stroking the supple softness of hers until, slowly, she responded, making his heart bump around with the pleasure of her proximity, her warmth. His hand wandered onto her upper arm, the back of his thumb brushing the side of her breast. And his palm moved in to investigate. He felt her jump. Tense. I’ve passed her boundaries ... he expected her to yank away with aghast demands to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He held his breath. But his hand continued to cup the delicious heaviness of her breast with a kind of helpless magnetism.
Then he felt her relax and her arms slide slowly about his neck, making him pull her against him as hard as he could, the stupid centre consol digging into his lower ribs and preventing him from feeling her body properly against his as he kissed and kissed her, shuddering, wanting her so much it sucked the air from his lungs.
‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ she whispered. ‘But I like your car.’
It took fully ten seconds for him to credit the evidence of his ears, wishing he could see the expression in her clear blue eyes. Ten seconds of listening to his blood pounding in his ears. ‘Here?’ It seemed a long, long time since he’d had sex in a car. It was a long time. He glanced at the steering wheel, the bulky consol, the automatic gear shift. His heart flailed about in the astounding knowledge that she seemed to want him, too. ‘Let’s go somewhere a lot more comfortable. With a bed.’
Instantly, she shook her head. ‘A hotel, without baggage and a prior booking? Running the gauntlet of desk clerks trying to hide their titters? Between here and there I’ll get cold feet.’
Personally, he felt the clerks could go to hell; hiding titters was in their job description. But he desperately didn’t want her to get cold feet because, right now, she was so hot, plastered against him so that he could feel every beat of her heart. Even so, her words made him admit, reluctantly, ‘If you’re not sure perhaps we ought not –’
‘It’s been a long time since Gareth and I … met in the middle, too. And I don’t think I’ve ever had sex in a car,’ she mused.
He groaned, willingly disconnecting with reality, tightening his arms so that her breasts pushed against him in a way that killed
his last gentlemanly inclination. ‘It’ll be easier in the back – No, hang on, not here.’ Limbs like rubber, he started up the car, pulled out into the road then backed up, swinging past the end of the cemetery wall and into a grassy track that ran beside it. Back, back and back, until they were fifty yards from the road.
In gallant mode, he raced around the car to open her door but, typically, by the time he got there she’d opened the door perfectly well for herself and was sliding into the back seat, leaving him to run a fruitless circuit of the vehicle, through the grass and nettles like an idiot, to reach the other door and fall in beside her.
The back seat was cold and the heat they’d begun to generate hadn’t made the switch of venue.
With a nervous movement, she flicked back her hair.
Her hair was beautiful. He put out his hand to touch, stroke, slowly, from the crown of her head, feeling the silk slide beneath his palm until he reached the nape of her neck and could gather it into his fist and pull her gently, experimentally, to see if she’d come to his kiss. He watched her eyes close and her lips part as, slowly, tentatively, she did.
And then desire was a hot explosion and he heard her whimper as he kissed her too hard, threading his hands underneath her to drag her onto his lap, thrusting against her, running his hands over her bare legs and pulling her dainty sandals from her feet, touching each toe with his fingertips, breathing hard. The world outside the car spun away. He wished the seats in front weren’t such an unaccommodating barrier, that the roof of the car wasn’t bearing down, or the width of the car would allow him to lie her down and savour every inch of her body. And that it wasn’t nearly dark. He wished he had all the space and light he wanted to undress her slowly and explore everything delicious that he had in his hands.
But it wasn’t going to be like that. Not this time. He could wriggle off only some of her clothing because they were, after all, in a public place in their purple velvet evening and he couldn’t discount the damage potential of someone walking up the track. But, on the other hand, he wanted her too much to call a halt.
He tried not to hurry. He desperately wanted to enjoy the moment, threading his fingers in her sinuous hair while he fed from the softness of her mouth and she clutched fistfuls of his shirt and got breathless. He examined the patterns of her spine and loved the softness of the nape of her neck. But his hands were programmed with their own course and in no time he was establishing that her pretty red buttons sprang open quite co-operatively, and that her breasts were cool and mobile and wonderful in his hands. He stroked her until her composure broke and she began to use her entire body to stroke him back.
Her sweet mouth inflamed him almost as much as hauling out her knickers from beneath her skirt. He went half-mad when she let her head fall back so that he could nibble at her throat, loved her erratic breathing, her clutching fingers.
‘Don’t stop,’ she whispered.
‘No longer possible,’ he gasped.
He had forgotten how it felt to want somebody so desperately that he ached, arched, gasped, groaned, reached, lifted, slid … there.
Sex had never satisfied him more.
Every limb heavy. Alive. Satiated. Replete. Complete. His heart slowing into a languorous, after-sex rhythm.
Her skirt was still gathered around her waist. His legs were uncomfortably confined both from her wonderful hot weight and from lack of space. If they’d gone to a hotel they would be stretched out together beneath the sheets, now, revelling in naked afterglow. He’d be able to feel the softness of her stomach and the firmness of her hips pressed against him, warmth against warmth, flesh against flesh. But he could put up with what he had.
At least, as hemmed in as they were, every inch of her was hot against every inch of him. ‘Fucking hell,’ he breathed. He meant to say: that was fantastic, that was wonderful, you were incredible. But all that made it out was, ‘Fucking hell. Fucking hell.’
‘Mm.’ Her cheek squashed against his shoulder, her breath warm on the side of his neck.
He stroked her back, admiring the milky gleam of her skin in the glimmer of the moon, kissing the top of her head, tangling his fingers in her hair, hardly able to believe what had just happened.
She sighed. ‘I suppose I ought to go back for my car.’ She didn’t move.
‘Of course. I’ll take you.’ Neither did he.
‘In a minute.’
‘Yes. Soon.’
She yawned without lifting her face from the pillow of his shoulder and her hair tickled his chin. Then she shivered. Feeling around in the darkness, he located his jacket and slid it around her shoulders.
She straightened, to snuggle into it, humming with pleasure. Her hair spilled around her shoulders and her breasts. ‘You do like leather.’
Appreciation rumbled in his throat. ‘I sure as hell like you in it. You look like my favourite fantasy.’
She wriggled and stretched. ‘It feels lovely. The lining’s probably pure silk.’
He stroked her hair over one shoulder. ‘That’s how you feel. Silk. Or satin. Your skin …’ He sucked in his breath as his hands found their way inside the jacket. Her hair spilled over the leather and over the whiteness of her flesh.
It was some time before he took her back for her car.
Chapter Eight
What have I done?
Riding back to the Ackerman, Diane felt as if she’d just become a complete stranger to herself.
She was super aware of the powerful Mercedes around her, the soft seats that had so recently been beneath her knees; their squishing swishing marking the rhythm of the sex she’d just enjoyed. Enjoyed a lot.
The tunnel vision of desire had shot past sense and integrity and she’d hurled away quarter of a century’s monogamy. And enjoyed that, too.
In the close confines, James’s thrusts had bumped her head on the roof. ‘Sorry – too enthusiastic!’ Even while he laughed, he was drawing her down to kiss her better, his laughter fading as he took up a slower, less boisterous rhythm.
What was I thinking?
I rode him as if frightened he’d stop. I didn’t want to be brought back to my senses.
James had laughed again to find that all his change had chinked out of his pockets and into the dark recesses of the upholstery. Sex seemed a merry experience for James.
And she’d shared the joy.
Back in the car park at the Ackerman, she took a breath to say so as he rolled his car to a stop close to hers. But a shout whipped away her attention.
‘Diane!’
She gazed in horror at two men barging out of the brightly lit hospital foyer, the heavy glass door closing slowly behind them.
James frowned through the windscreen. ‘Who are these guys?’
‘Shit.’ She fumbled for the door handle, heart galloping, legs tangling, panic overhauling guilt by a short head. ‘You’d better go.’ She made – casually, she hoped – for her own vehicle parked under the sodium lights, hoping to hear James purr away equally casually behind her.
But what she heard was the engine being switched off and the creak and thud of a door opening and closing.
Trying desperately to ignore James, she watched the men stride towards her. A deep vertical line engraved the negligible area between the brows of the first man, his brown hair slicked straight back from his disgruntled expression. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
The second was a flabbier, taller, slightly younger version of the first, the vertical line less deep, the hair flicked to the side and over his face. The disgruntlement register was about the same. ‘No one knew where you’d gone and why you hadn’t taken your car. Our Gary didn’t, nor the nurses.’
Diane unlocked her door. ‘I needed something to eat, James gave me a lift.’ It would be odd not to acknowledge him as he was leaning against the Mercedes with his hands in his pockets, dark brows low over watchful eyes.
Both men turned simultaneously to stare at James with identical who are you and
what do you want? expressions.
James simply stared back.
Diane’s pulse quickened. ‘Have you met James North?’ She managed to open her car door. ‘He’s Valerie’s husband, Gareth’s brother-in-law. James, this is Ivan and this is Melvyn, Gareth’s half-brothers.’ She inserted the ‘half’ deliberately. The Jenner brothers made such a deal of their blood being thicker than the proverbial water, none of them seemed to like being reminded that this especially thick blood was not drawn from identical gene pools.
James nodded.
Melvyn and Ivan merely stared.
Ivan was the first to look away. ‘Can you come home with us for a while, Diane? We need a meeting about our Gary. You can come in my car.’
With a quick movement Diane threw her handbag onto her passenger seat and a twist of her body put her behind the wheel. ‘I’ll follow you.’ Then, ultra casually, ‘’Bye James. Thanks for the lift.’
Slowly, James lifted a hand in farewell, exchanged one last stare with Ivan and Melvyn, and slid back into his car.
Diane let out her breath, giddy with relief.
Her hands, she noticed, were trembling. It took two goes to find the ignition with the key.
If she was a scarlet woman she was not much bloody use at it. How the hell did people carry on affairs? Her heart was bounding about as if already dodging accusations.
Half an hour later, ensconced on Ivan’s huge sofa, she smiled, accepted a cup of tea from Megan, Ivan’s wife, and began to relax and realise that her in-laws were behaving exactly as usual, so I had sex in the back of a car tonight! couldn’t be emblazoned across her face as she felt it must be. Somebody would’ve mentioned it.
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