Gerry shot her a mildly curious look. ‘“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”’
‘A scout and a philosopher as well,’ Leigh said, tartly. ‘Is there any limit to your talents? Anyway, in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s more or less engaged to Lady Jessica.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that…’
‘Well, from the way she clings to him like a limpet, anyone would be forgiven for thinking so.’
‘Jealous?’
‘Ha! Of course not.’ But she didn’t care for the way that Gerry was looking at her.
‘Time for me to go and change.’ She walked across to the door. ‘And thanks for being so understanding about everything…’ she said over her shoulder.
Gerry’s eyes gleamed. ‘That’s quite all right,’ he murmured good-humouredly. ‘I think I understand a whole lot more than I did to start with.’
Leigh pretended not to understand him. She rested her hand on the doorknob, and was about to turn it when she heard him say behind her, ‘Be careful with Nicholas, though. I wouldn’t like to see you hurt.’
Leigh didn’t turn around, but his remark had shaken her. He was obviously talking in the dark, guessing at things without realising how uncomfortable his little half-truths were making her feel.
‘Don’t worry on my account,’ she said, staring at the door. ‘I can’t be hurt by Nicholas Reynolds because I don’t feel a thing for him.’
The conversation had given her some food for thought, though, and she spent the remainder of the day carefully monitoring her reactions to Nicholas.
It was difficult. Alarmingly so. They had a light lunch of salad, then went for a walk through the estate, and all the while she talked in a loud, cheerful voice to Gerry, while her eyes slid across with disconcerting regularity, to Nicholas and Lady Jessica, both of whom, she noticed sourly, spent most of the time ahead of them.
She was conscious of each detail of their behaviour, the way Lady Jessica’s hand wound around Nicholas’s, the way he leant towards her when he spoke, as though every word he uttered was of paramount importance.
The ploy of the inveterate charmer. No wonder he was so successful in his job. He could sell ice to Eskimos.
Was it any wonder that Lady Jessica was hanging on to him for dear life? She had probably already started a collection of aprons and darning kits for when she finally trapped him into marriage. The funny thing was that she was the last person Leigh ever would have imagined to be bowled over by a man. She looked the sort of woman who would be more comfortable in the role of the piper playing the tune. Which only went to show exactly how potent Nicholas’s charm was.
By the end of the day, she could not have remembered a word Gerry had said to her, even though she had responded with all the right shows of enthusiasm and interest. She could, however, have recalled with no trouble whatsoever every gesture Nicholas had made towards Lady Jessica, and she would have been able to improvise most of their conversation, because, from what she had seen, it left very little to the imagination.
Lady Jessica, she thought as she prepared for bed later that night, would not have been giggling girlishly if he had been chatting to her about world poverty or the plight of the suffering.
She picked up her book, determined to focus her attention on an altogether more worthwhile subject, only to find that after five minutes the words were blurring over and her thoughts were once again straying to the inevitable.
Two in the morning, she thought with surprise, looking at her watch. A time when most people would be in bed, asleep, instead of lying awake and churning over a guest-list of unwelcome thoughts.
The house was silent. Everyone, she assumed, was fast asleep. Except her. If this continues, she thought, I’ll be a raving insomniac within a fortnight.
She tossed aside the book in disgust, and sat up, refusing to spend the next twenty minutes counting sheep.
On the spur of the moment, she slipped on her dressing-gown, and tiptoed downstairs. She was pretty certain that she could have waltzed her way down to Chopin and not succeeded in awakening anyone, but something about the size and silence of the house produced the same effect on her as the village library where she had worked, a thousand years ago.
She felt as though if she made the slightest sound a thin-lipped, cantankerous woman with her hair tightly coiled up would spring from the shadows and proceed to tell her off roundly for disturbing the peace.
So she made her way very quietly downstairs, hesitatingly going in the direction of the kitchen. Once she was safely there, she relaxed and poured herself a glass of milk, and vaguely wondered whether she might be lulled into sleep if she stared hard enough at the pendulum of the clock on the wall. It worked in the movies, didn’t it?
If only Nicholas Reynolds would stop invading her mind like a dose of woodworm, crawling in until he was everywhere.
It should, she reflected, be the easiest thing in the world to do. The reasonable, logical side to her said so. If she was attracted to him, then that should be something she could handle with no problem at all, especially when she had the sense to put it all into perspective.
She frowned and wished that reason would put up more of a fight instead of giving in the minute the going got rough.
She had made up her mind to return to her bedroom, and find the prospect of sleep more attractive than she had so far, when a vague noise from somewhere further down towards the right wing of the house caught her attention.
It had not been loud, or even very definite, more a suggestion of a noise, but Leigh felt her hair stand on end.
An open window, she decided. The branch of a tree brushing against the outside wall. Or maybe a fox knocking over something, somewhere outside? All three sounded plausible, but instead of making her way up the staircase she found herself wandering towards the direction of the noise, even though it was really the very last thing she wanted to be doing.
She didn’t believe in ghosts, but on the other hand weren’t these old places renowned for headless bodies floating about and making nuisances of themselves?
She was about to turn back, when she saw a streak of light emanating from underneath one of the doors, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
Gerry. Of course. He had told her that he kept peculiar hours, often staying up until the early hours of the morning, and only managing to retire to bed when the rest of the world was getting up.
He had said that it was a function of his brilliant mind which restlessly avoided something as mundane as sleep, and she had laughed out loud at that, informing him that it was doubtless a function of his body which had become far too accustomed to a diet of nightclubs and casinos and wild parties that carried on until dawn.
She had every intention of pulling his leg about this. Up at this hour in the morning!
She pushed open the door and froze. It wasn’t Gerry in the room at all. It was Nicholas, and he was staring at her as though she were mad.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said, breaking the silence, and allowing his eyes to roam the length of her scantily clad body.
Leigh pulled her dressing-gown as tightly around her as she could, acutely conscious of the nudity of her legs. How on earth was she to know when she left her bedroom, with nothing on but a tiny nightie and an almost as tiny dressing-gown, that she would end up bumping into the one person in the entire household she didn’t want to see? Come to that, the one person in the entire universe she could well do without.
She hovered uncertainly by the door, not knowing whether to dash back up the stairs to the sanctuary of her bedroom, or else to attempt some semblance of sophistication by remaining where she was and meeting his curiously interested gaze with indifference.
‘Are you going to linger there by the door for the rest of the morning?’ he asked, and Leigh noticed with irritation that even at this hour there was nothing tired or jaded about him. He seemed in total control of the situation, which was more than could be said for her.
&nbs
p; ‘I—I had no idea you were in here,’ Leigh stammered, remaining where she was.
‘Why should you?’
‘I only came down for a glass of milk,’ she explained. ‘I was on my way back upstairs.’
‘And if you had known that I was the one here, that is precisely where you would be now…?’
Leigh shrugged.
‘Oh, come in, girl,’ he commanded impatiently, ‘I’m not going to eat you. I know you probably think me capable of just about anything, but, believe me, I haven’t adopted a cannibalistic lifestyle so far.’
‘No.’ She took a hesitant step forward.
Before she could change her mind, he rose to his feet and shut the door behind her.
It was accomplished so effortlessly that Leigh only realised what had happened when the door was firmly shut and she was facing Nicholas across the room.
And, she thought with dismay, apart from the bedroom, it was unlikely that there was another room in the house as intimate as the one they now found themselves in.
It was small and without the splendour of the remainder of the house. On the contrary, there was something homely and slightly cluttered about this study, with its wood-panelled walls, barely visible behind the shelves of books, most of which were hard-bound and appeared very old. Whose fingers had leafed through those books hundreds of years ago? Were their spirits hovering somewhere now, watching her discomfort?
The Persian rugs which interleaved on the floor were well worn, their faded colours just managing to hark back to a time when the colours were vibrantly exotic. One corner of the room was dominated by a large mahogany bureau, and in the other Nicholas sat comfortably in a tan leather reclining chair, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes fixed on her with that lazy interest that sent the blood rushing to her head.
Leigh avoided looking at him. She walked across to the bureau and perched precariously on the edge. Why on earth was she here? she wondered. She was getting used to the strange effect he seemed to have on her actions, but this one really took the biscuit. There had to be a thousand more appealing places she could be at three in the morning. Her bed, for one thing. She folded her arms, and adopted a well-this-is-very-interesting-but-I’m-pretty-tired expression on her face.
Nicholas looked not in the slightest sympathetic, and she was beginning to feel acutely conscious of her dress, especially as he was in his trousers and shirt.
‘So what,’ he drawled, ‘brings you down here at this ungodly hour of the morning?’
‘Milk.’
‘Oh, yes. Milk. What else?’
‘I was thirsty. Anyway,’ Leigh added, not knowing why she should be the one to do all the answering when his presence in the study was every bit as peculiar as her own, ‘I might ask you the same thing. What are you doing here?’
His eyes shifted to the row of books above her head.
‘As a matter of fact, I never managed to get to sleep. I gave up pursuing it and came down here instead. To find a book.’ He stood up and walked across to the bookshelf, fingering the leather-bound volumes absentmindedly.
‘Well, I won’t keep you,’ Leigh mumbled. With his back more or less to her, and to the door, it seemed the most opportune moment to beat a hasty and as dignified as possible retreat back to her bedroom.
Before she could slip casually off the bureau, however, he spun around and stared at her with disconcerting thoroughness.
She kept her legs pressed tightly together, wishing desperately that she were at least wearing bedroom slippers, and drew her arms around her body in an embarrassed attempt to ward off his scrutiny.
‘You’re not.’ He laughed shortly. ‘I’d be the first to tell you if you were. In fact, it’s a refreshing surprise to find someone still up at this hour.’
‘Even if it’s only me? You do surprise me. Isn’t Lady Jessica awake?’ she couldn’t resist inserting, curiosity getting the better of her resolve to handle the situation with monumental indifference.
‘It’s possible, I suppose.’ He shrugged and sat back down in the leather recliner, rubbing his eyes with his thumbs.
It crossed her mind that for someone who couldn’t sleep he looked awfully tired, but there was no way that she was going to mention that. Nevertheless, it softened the barriers which she was trying to erect, and with a sense of shock she realised that what she was feeling towards him was a peculiar type of tenderness.
She looked away in confusion, aware that her hands were trembling. She promptly stuffed them into the pockets of her robe, clenching her fists into tight balls.
‘You mean you don’t know?’
Nicholas looked at her impatiently. ‘You’re obsessed with that woman. Does it matter whether she’s up or not? I’d still be down here trying to find a book whether she was sound asleep or else doing nude impersonations on top of the bed.’
Leigh stared at him in surprise. The cynicism surprised her because it was so sudden and so out of keeping with his character. Normally he adopted an attitude of amused disdain to anything he found mildly unpleasant.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ he taunted.
‘I…I’m sorry,’ Leigh stammered inconsequentially.
‘Are you? Whatever for?’
‘For…for disturbing you here,’ she improvised wildly. ‘You look awfully tired,’ she blurted out. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow. Late nights have a tendency to take their toll the following day. Don’t you think? Perhaps not. You must be used to late nights.’ I’m rambling, she thought with acute embarrassment. Any minute now I’ll be pouring out my life history.
‘I am,’ he said drily, ‘though lately there seem to have been rather a lot of them. But I don’t expect you’re overly interested in my late nights, are you? Now that we’re both here, and the rest of the world is asleep…’
‘Or doing nude impersonations on top of the bed.’
‘Whatever,’ he carried on, but the lines of tension around his mouth had softened. ‘Now that we’re here, don’t you think that there are more riveting things we could discuss?’
He had been tapping on the wooden surface of the desk with his fingers. He now stopped, and fixed her with bright, unflinching eyes.
‘Like what?’ she muttered into the silence, wishing that he would resume the tapping because that at least had distracted her from the silence in the room.
‘Don’t you know? Can’t you guess?’
‘No idea,’ Leigh said with a high laugh. ‘But if you want me to hazard a guess, then I’d say it had to do with your suspicions of me. Maybe the odd quip about my nocturnal ramblings here having something to do with stealing the family silver?’
‘Nothing like that at all. In fact, you’re way off target.’ He got up and strolled towards her and she looked at him in rising alarm.
‘In that case,’ she said, backing away, ‘I have no idea. I’ll go upstairs and sleep on it, and give you my answer tomorrow.’
‘Oh, I’ll give it to you now.’ He raised his arms and propped himself against the door with his palms, trapping her. ‘Nothing to do with my suspicions of you. More in the line of carrying on where we left off the other day.’
‘Carrying on?’ she repeated faintly.
‘Oh, yes. We started something that wasn’t quite finished. I think it’s time we rectified that, don’t you?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOR a second Leigh’s body went as soft and as limp as a rag doll’s, then panic jolted her into action.
She pushed against him, giving soft grunts of effort as his arms enfolded her in a rigid hold. She was getting nowhere at all. All that latent strength was holding her tight. It was like trying to beat a retreat through a door of steel.
When Nicholas was obviously tired of her frantic writhing, he pinned both her wrists behind her back in one fierce movement and twisted her body up to face him.
Leigh stopped fighting instantly. It was pointless anyway, and, besides, she had decided to adopt a differe
nt ploy completely. She looked up at him and sighed wearily.
‘All right,’ she said in a tired, defeated voice, ‘you win. You’ve proved that you’re stronger than me. Big deal. I can tell you, though, that men who feel that they can win points with a woman by brute force don’t impress me at all.’
Nicholas grinned suddenly, his grey eyes glinting down at her. ‘Doesn’t it? What about a bit of gentleness, then?’ He slackened his hold on her, his hand moving to stroke her arm.
She ignored the treacherous urge to be swept away by the hypnotic, rhythmic caress, and pursed her lips tightly together.
Did he think that he could do precisely what he liked, treat her precisely how he wanted, insult her as offhandedly as he cared, and then act as though one smile from him was enough to guarantee immediate forgiveness?
‘What about letting me go?’ Leigh asked evenly. ‘That would impress me most of all.’
‘And what about our unfinished business?’
‘We don’t have any unfinished business between us!’ she snapped. ‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s in the past, and that’s exactly where it’s going to stay.’
‘You mean you don’t want me to make love to you? Here? And now? You don’t want me to touch you until you can no longer resist? Until neither of us can?’
His words conjured up a powerful throb of desire that left her shaking. She wrenched herself free and moved towards the armchair, afraid that if she didn’t she would find that her legs were too wobbly to support her.
‘That’s right.’
Nicholas walked across to stand in front of her, his hands in his pockets, a half-smile lurking on his lips, and she could have screamed in sheer frustration. The man was so damned self-confident! Years of having his own way with the opposite sex had built up a staggering assurance in his own appeal.
Staggering, Leigh thought frostily, and arrogant. She pulled her robe around her and crossed her legs, and focused her mind on her disastrous behaviour the night before. One mistake like that was marginally excusable. Another would be sheer madness.
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