‘Were you just getting up? I’m sorry, I didn’t think,’ she apologised breathlessly, and in the next instant the appalling possibility that he might not have been getting up alone slammed into her heart and mind.
He didn’t move.
‘Are you going to start making a nuisance of yourself, Fee?’ he enquired unpleasantly, giving her a twisted smile. ‘I told Deng he could let you in because I knew it would embarrass you to have him turn you away, but that’s as much as I can do for you. For the last time, I am no longer interested in having an affair with you, and perhaps it’s time you cultivated some pride after all, if you can’t control your feelings. I had hoped last time was a one-off lapse, due to the heat of the moment.’
Humiliated, she dropped her gaze, and was on the point of fleeing, but then anger rose.
‘What are you interested in, then, Simon?’ she asked softly, approaching the stairs.
‘Not you, anyway, so don’t bother coming up,’ he advised her brutally.
Fee was trembling from head to foot, but she still started up the stairs.
‘Then I won’t bother you again,’ she promised him bitterly. ‘But I would like to…thank you for what you did. In Australia.’
An exasperated sigh escaped him. ‘Oh, yes, the Press couldn’t resist it, could they? If I’d merely done what I went there to do, there’d have been no charge, no consequent attention…Oh, come on up, then, and I’ll tell you what it was about, but then I want you out of here.’
He looked exhausted, Fee noticed as she reached him and he drew back to let her precede him into the house as if making sure she had no opportunity to touch him. His tan seemed to have faded, faint bruise-coloured smudges lay under his eyes and the tension about his mouth gave him a harsh, slightly haggard look.
But his eyes themselves were hard and cool with rejection, and she shivered slightly under the cursory inspection they gave her face and ultra-slender figure simply clad in jeans and her favourite loose black T-shirt.
‘Here?’ she questioned, hesitating at a door, and Simon nodded briefly, following her in.
The lounge was a long, beautiful room, its décor all light elegant colours, a few pieces of Chinese jade and the books, video cassettes and compact discs crowding some substantial shelving providing character.
‘Yes, you’re entitled to know that you don’t need to worry about Sheldon ever again,’ Simon allowed decisively as she turned to face him. ‘I was going to get Charles to tell you. Additionally, if you like, you could have recourse to various restraining orders, possibly even charges, although defining the nature of his calls might cause problems; for instance, did he ever actually threaten you, or was it pure harassment—persecution? Anyway, as far as a charge goes, it would have to apply to those you received before you left Australia. But that’s one of the things I went there to look into, because Charles’s original idea, if a charge was possible, to get you to take one of the calls and listen long enough to get a decent recording for a voice-print ID would have been too upsetting for you, and he had taken to hanging up if Charles or Babs answered. Plus I assumed, rightly, I hope, that you wouldn’t actually want to go ahead with anything that would attract publicity, but I needed to show Sheldon that you could, and that you would if he didn’t stop. That’s it, really, except that when I went to see him I looked at him and all I could think of was what he’d tried to do to you, all I could see was you, standing there listening to him when he rang, so I hit him.’
‘For me.’ Fee’s eyes searched his face, but it didn’t soften.
Simon shrugged. ‘He deserved it, although I shouldn’t have done it, but I think I always subconsciously meant to…He found the authorities unsympathetic. They knew why I’d done it, and they let him know how much I’d given them concerning those calls and hinted that I’d prove vindictive, perhaps go to the Press, if he went ahead with the assault charge. He’s not a popular man. It wasn’t a deal, just Sheldon showing some signs of sense and self-preservation. Now that he realises just how much is known by how many people, he’ll be too busy patching up his reputation to risk bothering you again.’
‘I’m glad. Simon…’ Fee put out a shaky hand but he ignored it.
‘Now will you please leave, Fee?’ he demanded bitingly.
‘Yes.’ She knew she would have to, and tears stood in her eyes. ‘It was nice of you to care, and to take the trouble, because you don’t usually, do you? That’s why I thought you might…still want me.’
Simon’s face tightened.
‘I do not want to have an affair with you,’ he enunciated slowly, clearly near the end of his tolerance.
It made all her other unanswered questions irrelevant, and she averted her gaze.
‘Then…just thank you,’ she whispered chokily as she began to move past him. ‘I’m sorry to have…bothered you—I’ll always love you!’
She just couldn’t help herself.
‘And what about my past?’ Simon retorted with caustic derision. ‘Not to mention all your little comments to the effect that I’m too old for you? You’ve changed your tune lately, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t care about your previous lovers any more. And you were right that time you said you were the perfect age for me. You’re the one who has changed,’ she countered accusingly.
Simon’s fists were clenched at his sides and he flung his head up, staring hard at the ceiling for a moment.
‘Because, once and for all, Fee, I am no longer interested in getting you into my bed. What does it take to put you off?’ he demanded cruelly, and winced slightly as he saw her lips quiver. ‘Don’t look like that! Damn it, how do you think I feel when you come here, and look at me, and say things—?’
‘Now you know how I used to feel, when you first started this whole business,’ she flared resentfully, out of an unbelievable depth of pain, ‘before I knew I loved you, and before you changed your mind.’
‘Yes, I should never have begun it, I should never have let myself be attracted to you, because by the time I realised it had no future it was too late for you, wasn’t it? And if you won’t leave me alone, if you’re going to haunt me like this…how the hell am I going to go on resisting you?’
A jolt of comprehension drove the breath from her lungs as she absorbed what he had just said, and it was several seconds before she could speak.
‘What do you have to resist if you don’t want to have an affair with me any more?’ she asked in a small quavery voice, suddenly afraid of hope.
‘The temptation to make you—to ask you to marry me!’ Simon lost control of his temper with characteristic suddenness. ‘To ask you to let me give you all those old-fashioned things you want, to stay with me all our lives, and be there always, and make a family with me, and all the things I never thought I wanted and now when I do I can’t have them. I can’t have an affair with you now, and I can’t marry you either because how could you ever be happy and secure, knowing me as you do, knowing what I’ve been like all my life…? Oh, God, Fee, what are you doing to me now?’
She had come to him, her hands clutching instinctively at his upper arms as she stared at him in absolute astonishment.
‘Simon, you said people shouldn’t get married. You’ve said it twice that I remember,’ she recalled, her voice cracking.
‘Oh, Fee, I thought I knew it all, didn’t I?’ Simon groaned. ‘I didn’t believe in marriage because I’d seen too many marriages failing, but I’ve realised lately that the people concerned either didn’t love or else didn’t know how to love properly. You do know how to love, and now I do too—Don’t touch me, darling. It nearly killed me to have you in my arms last time and to have to pretend—’
‘I want to, and I don’t want you to pretend anything,’ Fee insisted unsteadily. ‘But you don’t have to marry me, Simon.’
‘I know, I can’t, but I can’t bear anything less. It would be too easy for you to get away from me when I made you miserable, and you started wondering if I was being faithful…And how cou
ld you ever know?’ he concluded in an intense whisper.
‘Just because I do know you. You couldn’t change like this and want such things if it wasn’t something drastic…’
Fee’s voice faded away as she absorbed the magnitude of the change in him, and awe crept into her gaze as she went on staring at him.
Simon gave a faint uneven laugh and she was aware of a slight tremor in his hands as they came to rest at her waist.
‘Oh, it’s drastic, which makes the way it all crept up on me highly ironic—and it has happened twice over. I couldn’t believe it when I had to give you up all over again. You see, it was always there. There were things, feelings I’d deliberately put out of my mind the first time around because I knew they had no future. I remember coming across you holding hands with Warren Bates years and years ago, and feeling as if the ground had collapsed under my feet. I knew I couldn’t have you, you were too young to have handled what I felt for you, so I convinced myself that you were too young to have a relationship with him either.
‘In fact, the way I behaved then was sheer jealousy. It was on the same occasion that you tipped your drink all over me and ended up in my lap, and I found myself wanting to keep you there and hold on to you, and take you away with me and look after you. That‘s why I was so vile. It was a kind of defence; I was so afraid of being tempted to take advantage of you, especially as you were such a kind child, and terrified of revealing what I was feeling, because I suspected you’d find it too disturbing to deal with. You were so vulnerable…Oh, I didn’t think what I was feeling amounted to anything more than the usual sort of attraction I went in for, my darling, but I knew I couldn’t follow it up for your sake, that I had to bury it.
‘It was only later, analysing it, that I realised it was more than attraction, that if I could bring myself to consider you at all and suppress my own selfish inclinations…then I adored you, Fee. It was the second hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, letting you go, accepting that you’d probably meet and marry some nice young man in Australia. I didn’t expect you to come back. But you did, with that sensual way of moving, a softly sophisticated image and a way of standing up for yourself that seemed to suggest you could take care of yourself these days; and with an affair with Sheldon behind you—as I thought.
‘So it appeared that you were no more an idealist than I was now, that you enjoyed playing at love, the way I did, so I thought I’d like to have you in my life for a while, my next affair. Only I kept catching myself acting out of character, trying to be much nicer than I really am, partly because I wanted you to think well of me, but also simply wanting to take care of you and not hurt you in any way—because I think I must have sensed how vulnerable you really still were.
‘I kept seeing beyond the sophisticated facade, glimpsing the reality, but I suppressed my suspicions every single time they were aroused. As it is, I should have known for sure, I should have guessed at once. There were so many clues—for instance, the fact that you regarded me as old! That made you very young…I think I probably did know when you told me the truth about Sheldon when we were in Macau, but again I deliberately ignored it. I didn’t want to believe it and have to give you up a second time over.
‘But I couldn’t go on kidding myself any longer once you’d told me the truth about yourself in so many words. That hit me badly because I only fully recognised and accepted what I was feeling for what it was when you told me you’d never had any lovers at all. I suddenly saw myself as another Sheldon, a selfish would-be seducer of innocents if I took advantage of what I knew you were feeling, and I knew I could have had you then…I had to be strong for both of us, and God, it was difficult!’
‘But if you’d told me what you really felt?’ Fee prompted gently as he fell silent, his face set in taut lines of regret, and her heart could hardly contain the joy of knowing that punching Vance Sheldon was only the least of the things he had done for her sake, because there had also been the self-denial, the sacrifices she had believed him incapable of. ‘This time, anyway, because I think you were right four years ago—I wouldn’t have known how to deal with it. But now…I would have known you weren’t taking advantage then, but by the end I wouldn’t have really cared if you were, you know.’
‘I do know. You never expected or asked for any equal return of your love, did you?’ Simon closed his eyes momentarily as a spasm of emotion shook him. ‘You’re so undemanding and I’m so selfish, but I do love you, Fee.’
‘I know you do.’ She slipped her arms round him happily. ‘But I wish I’d known before.’
‘How could you when I was having such a hard time accepting it myself? And when I did—oh, Fee, you might have laughed at what I went through if you weren’t too kind. A lot of people I know would definitely have laughed, and I’d deserve it,’ he acknowledged with a slightly tired smile. ‘The great intellect, wriggling and writhing in search of solutions. Your innocence confused me even more because it seemed that Babs and the others who treated you as a child must be right after all, and yet my sense of you was as a woman, and the woman I love and desire. I knew I couldn’t have my usual kind of affair with you, but I didn’t know what I could have. I’d never seen myself as a husband, faithful to one woman. It just never occurred to me for a while, and when it did I knew it would be no good for you.
‘That’s why I was so foul-tempered; when I still believed we were going to have an affair, I could be patient, because I was so sure of you, but without any hope whatsoever…I couldn’t ask you to marry me; I still know I shouldn’t, but I can’t take any more, Fee. If you’re brave enough to risk it, I think I’m desperate enough to let you.’
Starry-eyed, she laughed shakily as she held him tight with trembling arms.
‘It hasn’t got anything to do with bravery. Cowardice is more like it because I don’t think I can live my life properly without you—and why should I have to when you’ll love me and understand me and look after me so well?’ she concluded on a note of rising confidence.
‘Oh, Fee, you don’t know—’ Simon broke off,
clearly still struggling.
‘But I do know,’ she contradicted him tenderly and saw his tense expression relax into a smile. ‘And you said it yourself just now, Simon—I also know how to love.’
‘Yes, you do!‘ he realised elatedly. ‘You’re the one with all the understanding.’
‘Is it so very hard to give up your freedom?’ she went on mischievously.
‘It was never freedom,’ Simon admitted slowly, his arms closing round her.
‘Could you kiss me, then?’ she invited him, and after an infinitesimal hesitation he did so, with a depth and tenderness that made her heart stop and then race.
‘What is it?’ he asked concernedly as he raised his head, because suddenly she was shaking violently, overwhelmed by reality’s impact.
‘It just seems so incredible…that you should love me, and like this!’ she confided brokenly, her bright lips trembling. ‘Simon, I’m not clever or stupid enough for you.’
‘You’re perfect,’ he reassured her. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve always known—that that inane standard of mine just didn’t apply where you were concerned.’
‘Then…Simon, I want, I need…Oh, I don’t know how to ask you,’ she confessed and was stopped by his thumb brushing across her mouth as he took her face between his hands.
‘Are you sure, Fee?’ he questioned her tenderly. ‘I can wait now that I know you’re going to be mine.’
Fee shook her head.
‘I’m not a child!’ she asserted passionately.
‘I know, you’re a lovely, loving, sensitive woman, as I always knew in my heart until the fact of your innocence got me so confused…And my woman,’ Simon added with a touch of proud possessiveness, and paused, studying her still uncertain expression for a moment before she saw him make up his mind. ‘But it happens quite naturally, Fee. Trust me, my darling; you really can this time.’
It did and she could, and much later that day, when neither of them had any doubts left about either each other or themselves, Fee smiled rapturously, eyes resting adoringly on the bright head that lay against her breasts. Simon had loved her with such passionate tenderness, and he had told her things so personal and private that she knew she had his heart in her safekeeping as surely as he had hers, and that their life together would be one of mutual cherishing.
‘You’re amazing,’ she murmured simply and he raised his head, smiling down into her delicately flushed face, his eyes mirroring the love-languor in hers.
‘And I worship you,’ he offered seriously in return. ‘I never want to be apart from you, not for a minute…When I thought I couldn’t have you, I consoled myself that at least I’d have your presence, at the office, but then you asked to be transferred. I was all set to refuse, but then it occurred to me that once again I’d be behaving like Sheldon, trying to force you to remain in a situation that made you miserable. Will you come and work for me again? At least until we have our children?’
Fee laughed. ‘If poor Miss Sung-Li will forgive us for messing her around one more time!’
‘A lot of people are going to be annoyed for a variety of reasons,’ he acknowledged wryly. ‘Fee, I know you hate crowds of people looking at you, but can you bear a proper wedding? Now that I’m doing this, I need to do it thoroughly—I want everyone to know we belong together and be as sure as we are…Are you really going to marry me?’
‘Really!’
‘I’m actually getting married!’
He sounded so startled, but so pleased with himself at the same time that she hugged him.
In fact no one was annoyed although many were astonished when their wedding took place three weeks later, although Charles was slightly put out because he had wanted to give Fee away and Simon, with his gift for getting things done efficiently, had spoiled his fun by locating Jim Garland somewhere in the Karakoram and persuading him to come home; Angela too had been found and was rallying bravely after the news that an apprehensive but happy Babs was going to make her a grandmother in eight months’ time, and she and Jim had decided to be friends for the day. Miss Sung-Li was beaming.
Trust Too Much Page 17