by Penny Jordan
‘Last night?’
If anything his voice had become even more curt, carrying an edge to it that warned Imogen she was trespassing on a no-go area. But, as Imogen had discovered in the years she had been away, she possessed her own brand of strength and courage, and the issue that lay between them was not one she was going to allow to be ignored.
Moving closer to him, she reiterated softly, ‘Yes, Dracco, last night. You do remember last night, don’t you?’ As she spoke the gentle mockery in her voice gave way to a soft liquid tenderness that shone in her eyes and curled her mouth. ‘Last night, when you made love to me. You do remember that, don’t you?’ she teased.
‘What I remember is that we had sex.’
The brutality of the cold words ripped into the shining delicate warmth of Imogen’s hopes and dreams.
Now it was her turn to repeat Dracco’s words.
‘Sex.’ She could hear the stammering anxiety in her voice, the desire to be reassured, but Dracco was already turning away from her, looking irritably towards the front door, as though he couldn’t wait to escape.
‘Dracco,’ she protested, and she could hear the pain trembling through her voice. ‘It wasn’t just sex. It was…’
Helpless in the face of his remoteness, she couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘love’, to expose it and herself to the savage pain of his contemptuous dismissal. Instead her voice trailed away on an unsteady protest that held echoes of her childhood insecurity as she told him, ‘It was more than that.’
‘It was sex, Imo,’ Dracco overrode her tersely. His head was turned away from her but she could see his profile, see the bleak downward turn of his mouth, the grimness in his expression, which warned her that he wanted the conversation brought to an end.
But there was a stubbornness in her that refused to allow her to let go, and, as though he sensed it, she heard him draw in his breath in open exasperation before he turned fully towards her. His gaze, clinical, cold, rejecting, swept her from head to toe.
‘Sex, that’s all,’ he repeated. ‘No more and no less.’
All the fiery passion that was so much a part of her nature rose up inside Imogen.
What she had felt with him, for him, last night was too important to be swept aside. She believed in her feelings and her instincts, even if Dracco didn’t, and she was prepared to fight and fight hard if she had to to have them recognised.
‘I’m twenty-two years old, Dracco; I’ve been independent for the last four years. You might remember me as a naïve teenager, but the woman you held in your arms last night, the woman you made love with—’
‘Was a naïve virgin,’ Dracco cut across her impassioned speech. He was watching her with almost clinical detachment to see how she reacted, how she recovered from the cutting edge of his blow. ’It’s true that I do remember you as a child, Imogen. A very immature and romantic young teenager, who idealised the physical relationship between men and women, and who could only allow it into her life wrapped in the pretty packaging of “love”. You claim to be mature. But a mature woman would never have clung to her virginity the way you have to yours.’
The cruelty of his clinical dissection of her took Imogen’s breath away. It was as though he was determined to strip every last bit of emotion from what they had shared and turn it into something cold and meaningless.
‘Psychologically for you,’ he continued ruthlessly, ‘the mere fact that you have had sex with me—and enjoyed it—means that you have to convince yourself that the physical arousal and desire you felt had to be the product of “love”. Loving someone, Imo, means knowing them, accepting them, valuing them as they are. You and I do not…’
Imogen was not prepared to listen to any more. Boldly she stepped up to him; so close to him in fact that she was virtually touching him. As she put her hand on his arm she felt his muscles lock against her touch.
‘Imo, I’ve got an appointment I have to keep, and I’m already dangerously close to being late for it.’
Willing him to allow her through the barriers he had thrown up against her, Imogen leaned into him, whispering, ‘Dracco, please… Last night must have meant something to you. I—’
‘It meant a great deal.’ Imogen felt tears begin to sting her eyes. But her relief was short-lived.
Instead of reassuring her as she longed for him to do, Dracco told her crisply, ‘It meant that, if we are lucky, nine months from now we shall have a child—I shall have a son or daughter who carries your father’s blood, which is, after all, what this is about.’
He couldn’t have made it any plainer to her that she meant nothing to him, Imogen recognised, as he sidestepped her.
Her vision blurred as she stared towards the stairs she had come down less than half an hour ago, her hopes so high, her belief so sure!
Dracco had reached the front door.
Somehow she managed to make herself turn towards him. ‘And if…if we aren’t lucky?’ she challenged him desperately.
There was a small pause before he told her quietly, ‘Then in that case we shall just have to try again until we are.’
As he opened the door and walked through it Imogen felt a shudder tear through her body as though it and she were being ripped apart. How could she endure that? The cold lovelessness of the act of sex with a man who did not love her but whom she…
She didn’t cry. She couldn’t! The pain was like a wound inflicted so deep within her body that it destroyed internally without any outward evidence of the injury.
Dracco got down the drive and as far as the main road without giving in to his emotions, but once there he recognised that, feeling as he did right now, he was a danger to himself and to others.
Cursing sharply beneath his breath, he pulled off the road and stopped his car.
He had lied to Imo about the urgency of his appointment. He was on his way to see David Bryant to sign the new will he had had the other man draw up.
‘You want to make Imogen and any child she might conceive the main beneficiaries of your estate?’ David had commented when Dracco informed him of his wishes. ’We’re talking about a very large inheritance, Dracco. You say you want Imogen to have full control of it?’ He had paused uncertainly. ‘It is customary where such a large amount is concerned to appoint trustees or set up a trust fund.’
‘There is no one I trust more than Imogen,’ Dracco had responded firmly.
Imogen would never know just what last night had done to him, the sheer unbearable immensity of the guilt and remorse it had brought him—and the pleasure! So much pleasure that it was impossible to quantify it. How could he measure something that had been so longed and hungered for? How could he estimate the breadth and depth of how he had felt when after a virtually sleepless night he had leaned over in the first minutes of the new day to look down into her sleeping face?
Even in her sleep she had been smiling, her lips curved in soft, sensuous warmth. The tears of release and fulfilment she had cried in his arms had gone, but their salty trail had lain gently crystallised on her skin. Beneath the bed-clothes she’d been naked, and the temptation to run his hand possessively down her body from the top of her head right the way to her toes, just for the luxurious pleasure of knowing she was there, had almost overwhelmed him.
He knew he had given her pleasure—would have known it even if she had not cried it out to him in a voice of shocked, delighted wonder—simply from the way her body had responded to him, fitted itself around him, accepted and embraced his touch upon it and within it.
But he had always known that there would be pleasure between them; had known it from the moment he had looked beyond the shy awkwardness of the girl she’d been and seen the woman she would become. She had desired him then with all the innocent hunger of a young girl’s awakening sexuality and he had known it, and known too that he was equally drawn by longing to her as she was to him. The only difference had been that he’d been an adult and she had not. An adult male with an adult male’s need
s for a mate, a woman.
Dracco closed his eyes and breathed in, filling his lungs.
What he had told her about wanting her father’s blood to run in the veins of his own child had been true, but it was only a small part of the truth.
John Atkins had been an astute and loving father. He had seen as clearly as Dracco had himself the growing intensity of Imogen’s youthful crush on Dracco.
‘She imagines herself in love with you,’ John had told him in a no-holds-barred man-to-man conversation he had instituted shortly before Imogen’s sixteenth birthday.
‘I know,’ Dracco had concurred. ‘I love her, John,’ he had told his friend and mentor rawly, ‘and I know too that she is far too young as yet—’
‘Dracco,’ John Atkins had interrupted him immediately, ‘I don’t dispute your feelings, but, as Imogen’s father, I would ask you to give me your word that you will allow her to have time to grow up and experience life before you tell her of your love. If you love her you’ll understand why I’m asking you this.’
And of course Dracco had, even though the thought of having to stand to one side and watch whilst the girl he loved grew into womanhood with someone else had torn him apart.
‘If you and Imogen should eventually become a couple,’ John Atkins had continued emotionally, ‘and I can promise you that there is nothing that would give me more pleasure, Dracco, it has to be as two equals, adults, not now whilst Imogen, for all she thinks she is passionately in love with you, is still little more than a child. I know how hard what I’m asking of you is going to be but, for Imogen’s own sake and for the sake of the love I hope you may one day share, will you promise to say nothing of your feelings to her until she is twenty-one?’
Twenty-one. Five years! But Dracco had known why John was demanding such a promise from him, and he had given it. Had Imogen been his daughter he would have done exactly the same thing.
He had told himself after her father’s death that he owed it to his friend and mentor to protect his only daughter, if necessary against himself, but then circumstances had left him with no choice other than to marry Imogen, for her own sake.
How he had agonised over that decision, ultimately seeking the advice of Henry Fairburn, John’s solicitor and oldest friend.
He had told himself that he would not break his word to John, that he would somehow find the strength to make sure that his marriage to Imogen was in name only and that she knew nothing of his feelings for her.
But then as they’d left the church she had asked him if there was someone he loved, and he had known that she knew the truth, had seen in her eyes that she already knew the answer to her own question. Her reaction to it had made it plain how she felt.
After all, there was no more obvious a way of stating that someone’s love was not wanted than to run away from them.
Lisa had taunted him about it, saying that he should have left Imogen to play teenage sex games with someone of her own age, claiming that the thought of having sex with a real live man had probably terrified her.
‘A real man needs a real woman, Dracco,’ she had told him, her hand on his arm, stroking it suggestively. He had shrugged her off, barely able to conceal either his dislike or his pain at losing Imogen.
Out of guilt and remorse and pain he had managed to stop himself from going after Imogen and bringing her back.
How could he possibly have claimed to love her and then forced her to accept that love when she didn’t want it?
And then David Bryant had told him about the letter he had received from her, and, almost as though he was watching himself from a distance, a part of Dracco had looked on in grim contempt whilst he set about making plans to…
To what? Couldn’t he even admit to himself what he had done? Well, perhaps it was time he did. He had manoeuvred and manipulated Imogen into coming back to him. And the result had far exceeded even the most fevered scenarios conjured up by the long lonely nights of wanting her.
To hear that note of wonderment in her voice earlier when she had talked about last night, about them ‘making love’, had made him want to take hold of her right there and show her that last night had been a mere fraction of what they could share together. But what he wanted from her was a lot more than the orgasm-induced emotion of physical satisfaction. What he wanted was her love, a love that matched his own; a love that went way beyond the giving and taking of pleasure in bed. Yes, it was satisfying to know that physically Imo wanted him, but it was a bitter, tainted pleasure. It was her love he wanted, not her body, and how the hell could he ever win that after what he had done?
Even now Dracco found it hard to explain to himself why he had overreacted so uncharacteristically when Imogen had assumed that he wanted a divorce.
Yes, of course he wanted her to have his child, and, yes, he very much wanted to share a blood tie with the man who had meant so much to him, but to use that as an excuse to force Imo to consummate their marriage… There was no acceptable explanation for what he had done.
Dracco opened his eyes. He had kept track of Imogen all the time they had been apart, knowing that it was what her father would have expected him to do.
He had never for one moment intended… But somehow things had got out of hand; and he had found it far harder to control his feelings than he had expected. The reality of dealing with a fully grown woman and not a girl had brought it home to him how dangerously vulnerable he actually was.
He had tried to keep as much physical distance between them as he could, working away from home, sleeping downstairs in the study. But last night all those plans had been crushed out of existence, along with his self-control. Last night he had done the very thing he had promised himself he would never, ever do under any circumstances.
And now Imo was telling him that she loved him. Not because she did—dammit—but because he was her first lover, her only lover. For a woman as idealistic as Imogen, that meant she could not allow herself the physical pleasure they had shared without convincing herself that she must love him. But she hadn’t loved him when she had run away from him on the day of their marriage.
He had seen the hurt in her eyes when she had turned away in the hallway just now, and he had ached to take her in his arms and tell her just how he felt about her, just what she did to him, had always done to him.
Right now he didn’t know which was causing him the greater pain—his love for her or his guilt.
Dracco closed his eyes again. He had no idea how long he had been sitting here in his car, and neither did he care. He was back in the study of the house he had just left, Imo’s father’s study. It was the morning of Imo’s seventeenth birthday, the morning she had run downstairs to him and begged him shyly for a birthday kiss, when he had known that he had to plead with his mentor and friend to release him from his promise.
‘Yes, I know how hard it is, Dracco,’ John Atkins had accepted gently when Dracco had finished his terse little speech. ‘But Imogen is only seventeen.’
‘Seventeen going on a thousand,’ Dracco had groaned. ‘She looks at me sometimes with all the knowledge of every woman that ever lived in her eyes, and then at other times…’ He had paused and shaken his head. ‘At other times she looks at me with the unknowing innocence of a child.’
‘And it is the innocence and the future of that child I would ask you to protect and respect, Dracco,’ Imogen’s father had responded gently, getting to his feet and coming to Dracco’s side, placing his hand on Dracco’s arm in a benign, almost fatherly gesture.
He had paused before continuing in a sterner voice, ‘If you love her you will want her to give you her love as a woman, not take from her the naïve love of a child.’
His words had hit home, and Dracco had acknowledged their truth.
‘Nothing will ever change the way I feel about her,’ he had told the older man fiercely. ‘But for her sake I will do as you ask, and I will wait.’
‘It is nearly as hard for me as it for you, Dracco,’ Imogen
’s father had told him gently. ‘When I said I love you as a son that is exactly what I meant, and I can think of no greater pleasure than having you marry my daughter unless it is that of holding your children. But Imo is far too young yet to be burdened by a man’s love. She needs time and space to grow up properly.’
Dracco hated himself for what he had done last night. He felt corrupted by his own emotions, his love, his desire, the constant, aching need for Imogen that had flared into a fiercely unstoppable conflagration the moment he had touched her.
He could feel it still now, knew he would feel it forever, just as he would love her forever.
It was over an hour since he had stopped his car. Reaching for his mobile, Dracco put a call through to David Bryant to explain that he was going to be late for their meeting.
Tugging viciously at the nettles growing in amongst the roses she could remember her mother planting, Imogen muttered an angry protest as she felt them stinging her through the thickness of the gardening gloves she had found in the old-fashioned potting shed.
Dracco’s rejection of her love and the scorn with which he had reacted to it and to her, instead of making her question the validity of her feelings had somehow had totally the opposite effect and brought out in her a passion ate strength she had not guessed she possessed.
How dared he try to tell her that she did not know what love was? She tugged furiously on another nettle, giving a small sound of triumph as she threw it into the wheelbarrow without getting stung.
How dared he imply that she was some kind of naïve ninny who thought that just because she had sex with a man she must be in love with him?
Another nettle joined its fellows.
And as for his comments about her virginity… Well, it just so happened that the reason she had not…that she was still…had been still…had nothing to do with naïveté or timidity; it was simply that she had never met a man she had wanted enough.
Imogen yelped in pain as her momentary loss of concentration, whilst she battled against the dangerous images her brain was sending, resulted in a sharp reminder that nettles, carelessly handled, could and did sting.