by Penny Jordan
Behind her she heard Giles saying roughly, ‘They reminded me of you, of the colour and texture of your skin, of the way you smell,’ and then he was holding her, burying his mouth in the nape of her neck and then the side of her throat, and she realised that he had actually chosen the flowers himself.
Something inside her, some hard, tight part of her which had never been breached, swelled and ached with the emotion she had locked away inside it. Astoundingly she felt her eyes prick with tears and her heart … her heart, not just her body, ache with feeling.
Giles was pressed up hard against her back. She could feel him trembling, knew how much he wanted her, and yet he still released her, apologising rawly, ‘I’m sorry. That was crass of me.’
Lucy looked at him. One of her flatmates had commented on how attractive he was, how solid and male-looking. She herself hadn’t really been aware of it before, but now suddenly she was.
Angry with herself and for some reason a little afraid, she reacted instinctively, adopting her normal manner of protective cynicism, shrugging as she flicked the petals of one of the roses with her polished fingertips and commenting, ‘Well, there certainly isn’t any need to rush, is there? I mean, we’ve got the whole long weekend. Four whole days.’
The look in Giles’s eyes stunned her.
‘A lifetime wouldn’t be enough for me, Lucy,’ he told her hoarsely.
After that, to be allowed to go upstairs on her own while he unpacked the car threw her a little.
The house had five bedrooms, two with their own bathrooms. She chose the smaller of these, oddly drawn by its softly pretty country décor. The ceiling sloped down to a pair of dormer windows, and it had been papered with a pretty cottagey paper. The bed was high and old-fashioned, with proper bedding instead of a duvet. The floor was carpeted in such a pale peach carpet that it made the whole room seem full of warmth and light.
The bathroom off the bedroom was simple and functional. The sanitary-ware was white and old-fashioned, the bath huge with enormous brass taps. As a concession to modern-day living, a wall of neat cupboards had been installed with, Lucy was pleased to see, mirrors set above them and decent lighting. The floor was polished and sealed, a proper door on the shower instead of the plastic curtain they had in the flat.
She heard Giles coming upstairs and opened the bedroom door.
‘I haven’t booked dinner anywhere for us this evening,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d feel like doing.’
It was obvious what he felt like doing, Lucy reflected to herself. She was torn between irritation and a sudden and sharply unexpected frisson of tension, of nervousness almost. Her, nervous … and of Giles? Impossible.
‘Well, what I feel like doing right now is having a shower,’ she told him coolly. ‘And what I shan’t feel like doing afterwards is …’ She hesitated deliberately, watching him, waiting for him to become either angry or hectoring, but instead he simply looked steadily back at her. ‘I’m hungry,’ she told him pettishly, suddenly unsure of herself, and afraid because of it. ‘And I certainly don’t intend to play the little woman and start cooking.’
She reached out, took her case from him, and then retreated, closing the bedroom door on him. She waited for several minutes, wondering what he would do, and then she heard him going back downstairs.
As she stripped off her clothes and showered she wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or disappointed that he had taken her dismissal so calmly. Most of the men she knew would have been demanding their pound of flesh by now and no mistake.
She eyed herself in the mirrors as she stepped out of the shower. She had a good body; her breasts were perhaps a little fuller than fashion dictated, but her waist was enviably narrow, her legs long and slender, her bone-structure that of an expensive, fragile racehorse. Her skin gleamed with health and with the scented moisturiser she was fanatical about using. She had the beginnings of a soft peachy tan.
There was a hectic flush along her cheekbones and her eyes looked huge, as though she had been on drugs, she recognised tensely. She dried her hair and then took her time dressing and reapplying her make-up.
There was no sign of Giles. The house was so quiet that she even wondered if he had perhaps gone and left her, but when she went to the window and looked out she could just about make out the outline of the car in the darkness.
She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She had been through this often enough before to know what it was all about, she reminded herself as she walked downstairs.
So why was she feeling so nervous … so on edge?
She had almost reached the bottom step when the kitchen door opened and Giles appeared. He had changed too, and his hair was damp as though he had showered. He must, she realised on a small spurt of shock, have used one of the other rooms.
‘Supper’s ready,’ he told her.
Supper was ready. Lucy stared at him. What had he done? Certainly he could not have sent out for a takeaway, not here.
‘I thought we’d eat in the sitting-room,’ he added a little uncertainly.
Lucy nodded, for once lost for words.
An hour later, greedily eating the last of her chocolate mousse, she admitted to herself that she was impressed.
The food, which, Giles had told her shyly, he had brought with him in a hamper from London, had been wildly delicious and, she suspected, wildly expensive. There had been champagne, pink champagne, which she knew others looked down on, but which she loved.
They had started the meal with tiny wild strawberries, and then there had been delicious cold salmon served with delicately flavoured salads, a sorbet laced with something alcoholic, and then proper, darkly bitter chocolate mousse, and she had greedily eaten both hers and Giles’s.
It had been food chosen not for a man but for a woman, and again she was confused by Giles’s sensitivity in so accurately gauging her tastes.
Now, curled up on the settee while Giles removed the remains of their meal, she felt relaxed and replete. She felt, she recognised on a sudden startled stab of awareness, happy.
The scented candles Giles had lit while they ate still burned, filled the room with their fragrance, warm and musky. She breathed it in sensuously.
She was wearing a simple shift dress, simple in design, that was. It had been perilously expensive, so soft and fragile that all she was able to wear underneath it was a tiny pair of briefs.
Now as she moved into a more comfortable position on the settee she was aware of the sudden sharp peaking of her nipples, and the slow unfolding ache of desire inside her.
When Giles came back she smiled languorously at him, her eyes narrowed and mysterious. He came across to her, leaning over her. His hand cupped her face. It felt good against her skin, cool and firm. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, tentatively, hesitantly almost. She let her lips part, rubbing the tip of his thumb with her tongue, her eyes closing sensuously, but there was nothing calculated or deliberate about the gesture, she was genuinely aroused, and as she arched up towards Giles she heard him mutter thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lucy …’
He had never kissed her so fiercely before, so hungrily. She heard him telling her unsteadily that she tasted of chocolate, but then she teased him with her tongue and he stopped saying anything.
She had never, she realised breathlessly later, wanted to make love so much with any man. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to be rid of her clothes and for Giles to be rid of his. She could feel how aroused he was and that knowledge excited her.
She tugged impatiently at the buttons on his shirt, spreading her hands flat against his chest, licking and nuzzling his bare throat and then his chest, laughing softly as she heard him groan and felt the sweat springing up on his skin.
He fumbled with the zip on her dress the first time he tried to unfasten it, but instead of irritating her his hesitancy only seemed to sharpen the excitement coiling inside her. When he finally unfastened it and the dress slid to a silky heap at her feet, lea
ving her body virtually naked, gilded by the light of the candles, its sheen enhanced by the soft cream backdrop of the settee, the dark arousal of her nipples as perfect as the deepest of the velvet-petalled roses, Giles didn’t touch her. He simply looked at her.
Men had looked at Lucy before, but none of them had ever looked at her like this, as though they were beholding a miracle, a vision; none of them had ever looked at her with heaven in his eyes.
And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.
His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.
But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.
The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.
Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.
When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’
She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.
‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’
Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.
She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.
To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.
When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.
He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.
She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.
‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.
The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’
It shocked her that he should know her so well already, that he should know that after the intimacy they had shared she now needed some time to herself, to distance herself a little from the intensity of that intimacy, to recover the emotional isolation that was so necessary to her.
She was a sensual woman, but she was also one who had absorbed too many of the sexual insecurities suffered by her mother when she was abandoned by Lucy’s father.
Although when making love she had no inhibitions at all about her body, she preferred to perform the ritual of cleansing her skin, of preparing herself for the world, on her own.
While she could enjoy the love-play that went with sharing a shower or a bath with her lover, she did not like to share what was to her the greater intimacy of preparing herself to face the outside world. No man had ever realised that so immediately and instinctively as Giles had known it.
After he had gone she pictured him making her breakfast, squeezing the oranges, picking the roses. So much care … so much planning must have gone into every fine detail of this weekend with her. She liked that. She liked knowing that he had gone to so much trouble. Where another woman might have disliked his lack of spontaneity, Lucy did not. To her spontaneity equalled fecklessness, the same restlessness which had driven her father to leave her mother. Giles wasn’t like that. Giles was careful, thoughtful. He made plans.
* * *
It was a magical weekend, extended by an extra two days because neither of them could bear to break the spell.
Once Giles could add knowledge to his love for her, his lovemaking took on a special quality that took it worlds beyond anything Lucy had known before.
And it wasn’t just in bed that he surprised and delighted her. He took her out, sightseeing, shopping, entrancing her with his determination to spoil and indulge her.
It was only when they were driving back to London that he confessed to her that he hadn’t hired the house at all, but that it belonged to his godmother.
Lucy already knew that both his parents were dead. He had been born to them late in their lives, an only child maybe, but one who had still had the love of both his parents.
When he said he loved her he meant it, Lucy recognised, and she was beginning to suspect that she loved him as well.
Strangely, that did not terrify her as it might once have done, and when three months later he proposed, she accepted.
* * *
They were idyllically happy. Secure for the first time in her memory, gradually Lucy let her defences down.
Children, he must want children. She had tested him before they were married, but he had shaken his head and told her roughly that she was all that he wanted.
‘Maybe one day, if you want them,’ he had told her. ‘But girls, Lucy, not boys, otherwise I shall be jealous of them.’
She had laughed then. His words seemed to set the final seal on her happiness.
And they had been happy, Lucy remembered achingly. Too happy perhaps. Perhaps the very quality and intensity of her happiness ought to have warned her.
She had never intended to become pregnant. It had been an accident; a brief bout of food poisoning which had nullified the effect of the contraceptive pill she was taking. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was too late for her to opt for an early termination.
She had been frantic at first, angry and resentful, with Giles as well as with the child she was carrying. She was thirty-three years old and the last thing she wanted was a baby.
Although she tried to suppress them, all the fears she had had before she fell in love with Giles resurfaced. She was alternately anxious and emotional, angry and depressed, but stubbornly she refused to explain to Giles what was wrong. He thought it was because she was pregnant without wanting to be and that she blamed him for it, when in fact she was suddenly terrified of turning into her mother; of producing a child which Giles would reject along with her.
She couldn’t analyse her fears and she certainly could not discuss them with anyone. Her doctor was old
-fashioned and disapproved of mothers-to-be being anything other than docilely pleased with their condition.
The more her pregnancy developed, the more afraid Lucy became, the more trapped and angry she felt. And as the weeks went by she could almost feel Giles withdrawing from her. Where once he had always slept as close to her as he could, now he turned away from her in bed.
Her body was changing. She was carrying a lot of water with the baby, which made her seem huge. It was no wonder Giles didn’t want her any more. He denied it, though, and claimed that it was for her sake, because he could see how tired she was, how great her discomfort.
She couldn’t sleep at night, twisting and turning. She woke up one night and Giles wasn’t there. She found him sleeping peacefully in the spare room. She woke him up, furious with him, blaming him for everything, telling him how much she hated him … how much she hated the baby.
She felt more afraid and alone than she had ever felt in her life. She was so used to having Giles to lean on, having Giles to love her, and now suddenly it seemed as though he didn’t any more.
She couldn’t bear people asking her about the baby, and when they did her whole body would tense with rejection, but some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed drove her.
She found she was instinctively adjusting her diet; exercising her body less vigorously, sleeping for longer; it was as though some part of her outside her control was ensuring that, despite her conscious resentment and misery, her baby was being well looked after.
The first time she felt the baby kick she was in the garden picking flowers for a dinner party. She dropped them in shock and stood there, her eyes suddenly brilliant with tears, but when Giles came home she didn’t say anything to him.
A gulf seemed to have opened between them. He couldn’t even seem to look at her these days without wincing, and when he kissed her it was a chaste, dry peck on the cheek.
The people they were entertaining that evening were a local solicitor and his wife. Giles was well established at Carey’s now, even though he detested Gregory James. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed pushing his way up the corporate ladder, and as long as he was happy Lucy had been happy as well. He was a good husband financially, generous, giving her her own allowance. His godmother had died just after their marriage and the money he had inherited from her he had invested to bring them in an extra income so that they lived very comfortably.