Naive Awakening

by Cathy Williams

  There was a whole lot more she could have said on the subject, but the words remained in her head, swirling in taunting patterns until she wanted to scream.

  ‘I wasn’t patronising you…’

  ‘Weren’t you? Maybe you were just taking me for a fool, then. A fool who would fall into bed with you because, of course, she has no principles, is only out for what she can get.’ Her voice was shaky and hysterical, but she was too angry and humiliated to care. ‘I bet it didn’t even cross your mind that you wouldn’t convince me with those clever, expert hands of yours, that it didn’t matter that you disapprove of me, that you’re involved with someone else, that…’ She ran out of steam and stared at him, her eyes aching from the effort to control her desire to burst into tears.

  ‘I could hit you!’ he said savagely.

  ‘And prove what? That you’re bigger than me? Stronger than me?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ he warned thickly, ‘and don’t try to tell me that you didn’t want me as much as I wanted you.’

  ‘Not enough to swallow my dignity!’

  ‘And would you have swallowed it if the stakes were high enough?’ he asked in a harsh voice. ‘Would you have swallowed it if there was something slightly more solid on the cards? Marriage, for instance?’

  There was a long silence and Nicholas looked at her slowly, with dawning comprehension.

  ‘I see. You want me to believe that you’re no gold-digger, yet you can’t deny what I’ve just said, can you?’ The question hung in the air and remained unanswerable.

  Leigh wished to God that she could say something, deny it so that she could erase that scathing look in his eyes, but she couldn’t lie. He was right. She had never slept with anyone, not because, as he thought, she was saving herself for the right eligible bachelor, but because to have slept with anyone without the warmth of sharing their love would have been repellant to her.

  She got up and walked out of the room, her head held high, and as soon as she was out of sight she ran all the way to her bedroom and lay on the bed, her head thumping, until the tears came.

  So this is what pain feels like, she thought miserably. How on earth am I ever going to survive a weekend in his presence?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE drive up took much longer than Leigh had expected. The roads were busy, and it seemed as if every burst of speed from the powerful car was immediately curtailed by a pile-up somewhere along the motorway.

  A couple of times she heard Nicholas swear softly under his breath, clearly irritated by the hold-ups, despite Lady Jessica’s persistent efforts at conversation. Poor Lady Jessica. Leigh felt sorry for her. Couldn’t she see that trying to drag a verbal response from him was about as successful as trying to get blood from a stone? His replies were uninterested grunts, interspersed with colourful rhetoric on the state of the traffic, which he treated as an aggravating conspiracy designed to get on his nerves.

  He was clearly in a foul temper, and making very little effort to hide it.

  Maybe, she thought, he was coming down with something. Gastric flu, mumps, the plague, anything that would make him feel as lousy as she did at the moment. Except, it was so much easier to cure a physical ailment. Emotional ones were unfortunately slightly less resistant to antibiotics and few days’ bed rest.

  And her emotions felt as though they had well and truly been put through the wringer.

  The memory of his lovemaking had relentlessly refused to let her go to sleep until the early hours of the morning, and a mixture of her conscience and a sore head were very successfully managing to give this entire stupid trip the proportions of a nightmare.

  The only good thing was that he had mentioned nothing of what had happened between them the night before. No sarcastic remarks, no snide insinuations and no taunting post mortems, in which she would be certain to emerge the loser.

  Not, she thought, that there was any reason to give in to those things. She doubted that she was important enough to warrant more than a shrug of the shoulders as far as he was concerned.

  If only she could similarly shrug her shoulders and carry on as though nothing had happened.

  God, however could she have let things get so far? She recalled her provocative behaviour with a shudder. She had literally thrown herself, and all caution, to the wind. Who knew what might have happened if she hadn’t pulled back? A little voice told her that she knew all right, and she blanked the thought out.

  She glanced surreptitiously at him from under her lashes and met his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘There’s really no need to keep checking to see if I’m still here,’ she said irritably. ‘Believe me, I don’t have a suicide wish to let myself out of the car while it’s still moving.’

  ‘Thank you for that piece of information,’ Nicholas replied drily. ‘You can’t believe how it sets my mind at rest.’

  Lady Jessica glanced sharply at him.

  ‘How much further?’ she asked.

  Leigh saw the other woman shift slightly, and realised that she was placing her hand on Nicholas’s thigh.

  Very discreet, she thought. Cars obviously meant far more to Lady Jessica than mere instruments of transport from A to B. Who knew where her hand would be if she weren’t lurking in the back?

  ‘Another half-hour,’ Nicholas replied briefly, ‘thank God.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ Lady Jessica murmured, ‘what a bore for you, all this driving, but don’t worry, I’ll do my best to relax you when we get to Fairbanks.’ She laughed se-ductively and caught Leigh’s eyes with an expression of triumph.

  Leigh fought back the desire to grit her teeth, and yawned.

  ‘Tired?’ she heard Nicholas’s deep voice interrupt her thoughts, and she flushed. Did the man miss nothing?

  ‘I’ll be glad to stretch my legs,’ Leigh said politely. ‘Comfortable though your car is, there’s a limit to how relaxing any journey can be after a couple of hours.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve got something on your mind,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘Tension can manifest itself in so many ways.’

  Leigh frowned. She knew that he was referring obliquely to their lovemaking and she was determined not to respond.

  ‘My dear!’ Lady Jessica exclaimed, sensing the undercurrent, and not caring for it. ‘You obviously haven’t much experience of long-distance travel! Have you ever been abroad?’

  ‘Only to France,’ Leigh said shortly.

  ‘By plane?’

  ‘Ferry.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s different! Believe me, if you think this is bad, then you ought to try flying to the West Indies! Terribly claustrophobic, even in first class!’

  Poor you, Leigh wanted to say, enduring the agonies of aeroplane claustrophobia merely to spend a few weeks lazing on a warm golden beach and sipping cocktails. What torture.

  Instead she said drily, ‘Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind the next time I find myself outside a travel agency, with a few thousand pounds in my hand to throw away.’

  She heard Nicholas’s deep-throated chuckle and couldn’t resist a slight smile of shared amusement.

  After twenty minutes of twisting lanes, the car slowly eased through two impressive pillars of stone, up into the open courtyard in front of an awesomely large façade of windows and soft clambering ivy.

  They had left the city behind, and were surrounded by open countryside, but even as Leigh stepped out of the car she was vaguely aware that not too far away civilisation was throbbing, waiting greedily to make its way into this carefully preserved piece of uncultivated nature, like a voracious predatory monster.

  Still, it felt good to be out of London. Better than she had imagined, even though she had become quite fond of the traffic and the noise. It was easy to become accustomed to the crowded, swift pace of city life until a glimpse of something less hurried showed you that the charms of the countryside weren’t so inaccessible after all.

  She stretched her arms and legs, feeling them tingle after the constr
iction of the car.

  She reached back for her overnight bag, and Nicholas said to her, ‘Leave it. The butler will bring it up for you.’

  ‘Of course. Silly me,’ Leigh said with mock self-admonishment. ‘When will I ever get used to someone else doing what I’m perfectly capable of doing myself?’

  ‘You saying something?’ Nicholas cocked his head thoughtfully.

  ‘Nothing of interest. Just talking to myself. Perhaps I’m going mad.’

  Gerry was standing at the door, casually dressed in a pair of shorts adorned with alarmingly bright emblems of tropical birds, and a short-sleeved white shirt. Lady Jessica was talking to him, telling him about the horrendous traffic they had encountered on the journey down, her high voice carrying across the courtyard to where Leigh and Nicholas were still standing.

  ‘Poor darling Nicholas must be absolutely exhausted!’ Lady Jessica gave a tinkle of laughter and Leigh looked skywards. She turned to Nicholas as they began walking towards the front door, and asked in a saccharine voice,

  ‘And is poor darling Nicholas absolutely exhausted?’

  He looked down at her lazily and drawled, ‘No more than you, I expect.’ His grey eyes bored into her, challenging her to read something hidden in his words, and she returned his stare with a bland expression.

  ‘Actually, I was a bit tired on the drive up, but I feel quite revived now.’ She did too. ‘The air smells so much cleaner here.’

  ‘But not as clean as in Yorkshire?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said gravely, ‘there’s nothing as fresh or as pure as the air there. On a fine morning, you would swear that there was no such thing as acid rain or the greenhouse effect.’

  ‘You make me wish that I had come back sooner than I did,’ Nicholas said softly.

  Before she could answer, Lady Jessica stepped resolutely towards them, her dark eyes darting suspiciously, and linked her arm through Nicholas’s.

  ‘We’re in the green room,’ she said coyly to him.

  Leigh forced her face to remain expressionless. She reached out to kiss Gerry perfunctorily on the cheek, her mind still busy with images of Nicholas, Lady Jessica and a big brass bed in the middle of a green room. He pulled her towards him and dipped his head slightly, so that Leigh was startled to feel the moistness of his lips against hers. Her instinctive reaction was to pull away, but he pre-empted her resistance by placing his hand gently but firmly behind her neck.

  She was aware of Nicholas standing behind her, and on a devilish impulse she responded briefly to Gerry’s kiss, before tugging free of his hold.

  Let him insinuate and warn, she thought. He can’t tell me what to do.

  ‘What a warm welcome!’ she said shakily, brushing her hair away from her face. ‘Is this how you greet all your female guests?’

  He laughed delightedly. ‘Only the special ones,’ he said in a wicked voice. Leigh smiled. Somehow Gerry could not sound wicked if he tried. He was too nice, too appealingly transparent.

  ‘And there are quite a few of those, aren’t there, Gerry?’ Nicholas said conversationally.

  ‘Not since I met this stunning creature.’ He took her hand and led her inside the house.

  Leigh’s eyes wandered over the elegant proportions. Since moving to London, her ingenuousness had become slightly tarnished at the edges.

  Not so tarnished, though, that she wasn’t impressed by the grandeur of her surroundings. Muted, superbly furnished, and if it could be compared to a person it would be to someone wonderfully understated and terribly well bred. She got the feeling that if this house could speak it would be telling Gerry to please change into something more respectable, and could everyone keep their voices lowered?

  It was hard to think that Gerry, chatting animatedly at her side, in his gaudy shorts, would one day inherit the place. She had no doubt, though, that by then he would have become far more conservative than he would probably believe possible now.

  Nicholas and Lady Jessica were no longer around. They obviously knew the layout of the house quite well, and had vanished to their bedroom. Well, Leigh thought, Lady Jessica had promised to help him to relax, and where better to help someone to relax than in the privacy of the bedroom?

  She pushed the thought to one side, and followed Gerry up the stately staircase, channelling her interest into questions about the house and the various portraits on the walls.

  The place, she learned, had been handed down through the generations. Along the staircase, in fact, the generations gazed down at them, politely eavesdropping their interchange.

  ‘One day I’ll own all this,’ Gerry said next to her, with a sweeping, grandiose gesture.

  Leigh grinned wryly.

  ‘You’ll be the lord of the manor,’ she joked. ‘Well, you’ll have one hell of a cleaning job on your hands. This place must have a thousand rooms.’

  ‘Oh, we have people who come in to clean,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ Leigh glanced at him with feigned disbelief. ‘I would never have guessed!’

  He chuckled and leaned close to her, placing his hand on her shoulder and whispering in her ear, ‘Don’t you take anything seriously?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she protested, brushing him off uncomfortably.

  ‘Do you take men seriously?’

  An image of Nicholas flashed through her head. Tall, dark, cynical, with those eyes that seemed to see everything and give away nothing in return.

  ‘Occasionally,’ she laughed uneasily.

  ‘What about me? Do you take me seriously?’

  ‘Well…’ she began, hoping that this wasn’t leading where she thought it was, but before she could finish her sentence he was holding her possessively by the waist, his blue eyes burning down into hers.

  ‘What about this?’ he asked huskily. ‘Do you take this seriously?’

  Then he kissed her, and this time there was nothing light-hearted about his mouth pressed against hers, his tongue forcing her lips apart, his hands gripping her tightly and making any thought of escape useless.

  Leigh fought against an awful, hysterical desire to run away. She liked Gerry, there was something about his boyish nature that appealed to her, but she was not attracted to him, and his searching eager mouth filled her with dismay.

  His hands left her waist and travelled the length of her spine, coming to rest under the swell of her breasts.

  Her body tensed, and she pushed him back. The movement caught him unawares, and he released her reluctantly.

  ‘Gerry…’ she began kindly, feeling very much like someone standing over a child, murmuring soothing words in preparation for a spoonful of spectacularly awful medicine. She stared up at him, searching for the right expression of tact and firmness, and looked past him to the banister. Nicholas looking down at them, one hand thrust into his trouser pocket, in the attitude of a man who had unexpectedly come across a cabaret show and had stayed on to enjoy the spectacle.

  Leigh felt her cheeks begin to burn as she was subjected to his scrutiny, then he walked away.

  The sudden sight of him had momentarily deprived her of the power of speech and she glared up at the empty space he had left behind, only to find Gerry staring at her curiously.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he muttered awkwardly.

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Leigh brought her thoughts back to the present, and took his arm lightly. ‘But I’d rather not say it here…’

  Gerry glanced upstairs shrewdly. ‘You mean just in case we’re overlooked…again?’

  She felt a rush of bright colour fill her face.

  ‘Overlooked…?’ she said faintly.

  ‘By the big bad wolf.’ Gerry’s loss of equilibrium was slowly disappearing. He was one of those people who seemed to be programmed to bounce back, whatever the circumstances. He was a sunny-natured individual, and he treated unforeseen upsets in his life as minor inconveniences to be lingered over for a few sad moments before being stepped over in everlasting pursuit of the ray of sunshine
just around the corner.

  Leigh didn’t know whether to feel piqued or relieved at his unspoken acceptance of what she was going to say. Relieved, she decided. Enormously relieved.

  ‘I’m surprised, though,’ he was murmuring, as they began heading up. ‘Not his style at all to eavesdrop. Funny.’

  ‘Hysterical,’ Leigh remarked tonelessly. ‘Tell me when I ought to start laughing. Anyway, we really have to get a few things straightened out. Shall we go downstairs somewhere?’

  ‘My bedroom?’ Gerry suggested. ‘I promise not to come near you.’ He looked at her woefully, and added, ‘Scout’s honour.’

  ‘You were a scout?’

  ‘Dib-dib.’ He grinned.

  He was true to his word. He listened patiently while Leigh spent ten minutes beating around the bush, finally to tell him more bluntly than she had intended that what she felt for him did not extend beyond friendship.

  ‘Friendship,’ Gerry repeated with a resigned grin. ‘Trust me to fall in love with a girl who isn’t even predictable enough to want me for my money.’

  Leigh laughed. I wish you’d tell that to Nicholas Reynolds, she thought.

  ‘I don’t suppose all this has anything to do with Nicholas Reynolds, does it?’ he asked slyly.

  Leigh turned away. It was a stupid idea to have accepted Gerry’s proposition to have a serious discussion in his bedroom of all places. It suddenly felt horribly small and claustrophobic, as though the walls were closing in.

  It also encouraged strange responses. I mean, she thought, where on earth had Gerry got the idea that Nicholas Reynolds had anything whatsoever to do with her lack of attraction to him? The two didn’t follow at all. For a start, couldn’t he see that she and Nicholas had nothing in common at all? It was perfectly obvious to her. She might find him attractive, but he had nothing to do with her reactions to anything, for heaven’s sake. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  She threw Gerry a pitying smile. ‘What an idea,’ she said, standing up with purpose. ‘Nicholas Reynolds happens to be the person I work for…’

  ‘And live with…’

  ‘But not in the way you’re implying!’ Leigh said hotly.