‘Are you sure you don’t mind about Sir John coming?’ Freddie repeated, standing up. She firmly pushed him back into his chair.
‘I told you. It’s settled. When were you two thinking of leaving?’
‘Next weekend, we thought, but it all depended on you…’
‘Suits me. Anyway, Freddie, darling, do you mind if I go upstairs and have a bath? I mean, I know I haven’t seen much of you recently, but maybe we can plan on being together a bit more next week. We can enjoy the last week here together, and then good riddance!’
She glared at him, because mysteriously his puzzled, boyish face had metamorphosed into the hard, arrogantly chiselled features of Nicholas, and left the room.
She spent the next thirty minutes luxuriating in the bath and trying to persuade herself that leaving London was precisely what she wanted to do. Deep down. She held up one soapy hand and ticked off the reasons why. Firstly, there would be no Lady Jessica in Yorkshire. She would be free of the uncomfortable jealousy that swamped her every time she was in the other woman’s presence. Secondly, the air was cleaner up north, and she would be able to cycle everywhere in the open air instead of rushing around by Underground—like a mole. Thirdly, Sir John would give Freddie the stability he had so missed when their grandfather died. He would be no problem now. His life, if not hers, had some direction.
And of course, overwhelmingly, she would be free of Nicholas. She would no longer have to confront that hard, sexy face on a daily basis. She would no longer find herself dwelling on his attractiveness, both physically and intellectually, and then be forced to spend the next few hours reminding herself that it was all a useless game.
No. There would just be the three of them.
It was a wonderful prospect, she thought glumly, wrapping the large, fluffy towel around her. She frowned miserably and decided that she couldn’t be happier, since everything was going to be sorted out.
She was so busy re-convincing herself that things couldn’t be better that she almost missed the dark figure sitting comfortably on the chair in the corner of the room. She was about to throw aside her towel, when her eyes caught his reflection in the dressing-table mirror, and she spun around as though suddenly given a huge electric shock.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Her voice was trembling and she clutched the towel to her, backing away from him, even though he had made no effort to come towards her.
Nicholas smiled, but it did not quite manage to reach his eyes. ‘Waiting for you.’
‘Why?’ she bit out, then continued, not giving him the opportunity to reply, ‘And you could have waited somewhere else!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, folding his arms across his chest in the attitude of someone who had just arrived and was settling in for an indefinite stay, ‘the door was unlocked.’
‘That’s no excuse!’ Leigh replied in a high, shaky voice. ‘Banks are open during the day—that doesn’t mean you can feel free to have a quick nap in one if it takes your fancy!’
‘That’s an obscure metaphor,’ he said calmly, and she had the sudden feeling that whereas he was a little uncertain when she had first emerged from the bathroom he was now, as usual, totally in control. Her display of anger had placed her in the vulnerable position, and her lack of clothes didn’t much help either.
‘You know what I mean,’ she answered, trying to inject a similar note of calm into her voice, ‘and, besides, what are you doing back here so soon?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought that you were dropping Lady Jessica off.’
‘I was and I did.’
He looked at her, and she could have kicked herself for indulging that particular piece of curiosity. She had thought that they would have had an explosive reconciliation, slept together for the rest of the day, and he had seen right through her remark to what had been going on in her head.
She was seething with jealousy, like some silly sixteen-year-old whose best friend had stolen her boyfriend—and he knew it.
She turned away with a sour taste in her mouth.
‘I came here to find out what the hell’s going on with you,’ he said, leaning forward so that his elbows were resting on his knees. ‘I mean, I thought we were getting along so well at Gerry’s place, however inappropriate it was, and then this morning you were like a block of ice, for no apparent reason.’
Getting along well? Leigh thought fiercely. No apparent reason? The words reverberated in her head until she felt giddy.
‘No, please don’t change,’ he said urgently, as she made a move towards the wardrobe. ‘I want to finish what we started a long time ago. As I said, there are things to be settled between us. I want to make you mine.’
He had risen from the chair and Leigh watched in horror as he walked towards her. Didn’t he understand that what they had started could never be finished? Couldn’t he get that through that thick skull of his? She loved and wanted this man more than she would ever have dreamed possible, but she had finally come to her senses and seen that she could never accept the crumbs that he had to offer.
She opened the door to the wardrobe and snatched at the first dress that came to hand, one of her old cotton affairs that she had almost forgotten existed.
His hand reached out and grasped her by the wrist.
‘Well?’ he asked, his voice quick and breathless. Close to, she could see the naked passion in his eyes, a burning light that pierced through her and began kindling her own inner heat. It frightened her because she realised beyond the shadow of a doubt that his hold on her would never be relinquished merely because she might decide to put some distance between them.
The thought filled her with anger. Why should she be the one to suffer? Her going back to Yorkshire damn well wasn’t going to have any lasting effect on him. He would shrug his shoulders and get back to work. She, on the other hand, would probably spend the rest of her days pining for him, a man who didn’t deserve two minutes of her thoughts!
It just wasn’t fair! She stared into the inviting depths of his eyes with frozen antagonism.
‘What’s changed,’ she said with careful self-control, ‘is me. So I admit that I was attracted to you, but I was a fool to ever think that sleeping with you would have been fulfilling for me. I very nearly made a mistake once.’
‘Are you saying that you’re no longer attracted to me?’ Nicholas asked, watching her face with savage intensity. ‘That you’ve changed into someone who wouldn’t give me the time of day?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Fine. Don’t.’ She leant over to retrieve her dress from the bed and felt his hands on her shoulders. ‘Get your hands off me!’ she very nearly shouted, straightening up quickly. Her still damp hair clung around her neck like seaweed and underneath the flimsy barrier of the towel she could feel her heart thumping in her chest.
‘Kiss me and then talk to me about change.’ He half closed his eyes and bent slightly towards her. ‘I’ve been thinking of you all day, dammit. I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. You can’t just tell me that you want nothing to do with me. I won’t allow it.’
‘You won’t allow it?’
The audacity of the man staggered her. She would have walked away from him, her head held high, if it weren’t for the vice-like grip of his fingers on her shoulder-blades.
‘How can you expect me to?’ he moaned huskily, one hand moving to warm the back of her neck. ‘You’re in my thoughts all the time. Every time I close my eyes, every time I blink, I have visions of your naked body in front of me and it’s been driving me mad!’
The warmth of his breath was doing funny things to her, making her perspectives shift in a most alarming way. She stood back firmly, pulling away from him, and blinked.
She felt like saying, Well, how do you think I’ve been feeling, when I’m not only attracted to you, but in love with you as well? Instead, she said tonelessly, ‘Y
ou think the worst of me, and yet you still want me. Too bad.’
He gave a short laugh, and ran his fingers frustratedly through his tangled black hair. His eyes ran the length of her body. His movement then was so swift that Leigh didn’t know what was going to happen until he pulled her back to him and tugged her head back, his fingers clasped hard in the damp, knotty mass of her hair.
‘Look,’ he said with a dark flush, ‘I was wrong about you, all right? Dammit,’ he muttered forcefully, ‘how can you tell me that you want me out of your life? You’re still as attracted to me now as you ever were; we know that. And I’m going to prove it to you.’ His lips ground down savagely over hers, prising her mouth into submission. Leigh struggled and gave a small, defeated moan as her body went limp against his.
It was useless fighting with him. He was bigger and stronger than she was. It would only take him one flick of the wrist to prove that. But that didn’t mean she had to give in to him.
She felt his mouth roving feverishly over his, his tongue licking against hers, and, with a superhuman effort of will-power, she refused to respond, even though her body seemed to be slowly melting under his caresses. She continued to clutch at her towel, her body clenching when she felt his hand grasp her naked bottom, stroking the smooth skin upwards to the small of her back.
Every touch was agonising. She tried desperately to think of something terribly dull and boring, but nothing could distract her from his urgent siege on her senses.
Nevertheless her rigid body must have finally cut through to him, because his caresses gradually lost their fervour, and he stepped away from her in bafflement. ‘What are you trying to prove?’ he demanded harshly, turning away from her and walking towards the window, his hands clenched in his pockets.
‘I’m trying to prove that what I told you last night, what I’m telling you now, wasn’t said for fun. I meant every word of it. I don’t want an affair with you, I don’t care if you realise now that I wasn’t after your money. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to leave me alone. Is that so difficult for you to understand?’
Nicholas shook his head and sighed impatiently.
‘I don’t believe you.’ But his voice bore the slightest inflexion of uncertainty.
‘You don’t have a choice,’ Leigh informed him.
He didn’t. He stared at her and she could see the realisation of what she was saying beginning to sink in.
He wouldn’t rush across to her, she thought, because she didn’t mean that much to him. He had wanted her, but he wasn’t going to fight to have her. He certainly wasn’t going to declare undying love and ask for marriage, which, deep down, was what she knew she wanted so very badly. Why should he? Lady Jessica was just around the corner, and Leigh was certain that the other woman would have him back if he asked. And he wouldn’t have to promise her anything at all, because, from what she had seen over the past few weeks, Lady Jessica was quite happy to sleep with him whether marriage was on the cards or not.
She had probably broken things off through a fit of pique, and pique was the simplest of emotions to vanish with a touch of adroit persuasion.
‘I intend leaving here pretty soon,’ Leigh said with a hint of defiance, wanting to spark a reaction out of him.
‘When?’ He looked vaguely surprised, but not taken aback.
‘Probably this coming weekend,’ she replied in a dull voice. Inside she was screaming for him to go. She hated what he could do to her, and she hated the fact that, however much she would have liked it, she had no power over him at all. ‘And you might as well know that your grandfather has decided to come with us. Freddie and me. We’ll both be out of this house and out of your hair for good. And, before you start voicing your suspicions, no, I’m not after your grandfather’s money. Although, quite frankly, I don’t give a damn what you think.’
‘I see,’ he said coolly, walking across to the door, his eyes glancing uninterestedly at her. ‘I’ll know now to make the necessary arrangements for someone to take over from you at work.’
‘It shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘No. The money’s good enough.’
Leigh mumbled her agreement. Her heart was pounding painfully in her chest, and yet here she was, having this trivial conversation with the man who had single-handedly managed to wreck her life.
She watched as he turned the doorknob and quietly let himself out of her room, then she ran to the door, locked it, and sat heavily on the bed. Her body was still burning from the need to have him near her. Maybe, she thought bitterly, she should have a cold shower. Perhaps that was how she was destined to spend the rest of her days-—having cold showers—because even the thought of him was enough to make her tremble with want.
The prospect didn’t thrill her. She had a vivid picture of a shrew-faced, middle-aged lady who spent half her time under a running cold shower, and the other half glaring jealously at couples walking hand in hand. It would all be his fault.
The ache was still gnawing away at her the following morning when she arrived at the office. She had braced herself to see Nicholas, to act as though nothing had happened between them because that was how he himself would act, but in fact there was no need. He was out of the office, and, she was told, he would be for the rest of the week.
‘He’s had to go down to Devon to see some people relevant to one of his cases,’ Richard, the older of the clerks, informed her.
‘Well,’ Dave corrected, ‘he didn’t have to. He decided to at the last minute.’
Leigh could feel disappointment flooding into her. So he had decided to make sure that he didn’t set eyes on her again before she left. She wouldn’t even have the small leeway of a week to take her final sidelong, hungry glances at him, to fill her head with images of him because they would have to last her the rest of her life.
She worked in a daze for the balance of the day, hardly noticing what was going on around her. It helped that they were very busy, so her silence didn’t arouse curiosity. It was merely taken for granted that she was too engrossed in trying to keep up with her workload to have much time to chat.
And she did her utmost to encourage the impression. She spent the day frowning with her most businesslike and rushed-off-her-feet frown, and generally did her best to look harassed and overworked. Richard and Dave left her to herself, and underneath the veneer she indulged in a never-ending flow of thoughts and regrets.
What if her grandfather had not died? What if that wretched brother of hers had not become entangled with the law? What if their solicitor had not seen fit to contact Sir John without first informing her? Most of all, what if she had been sensible enough to listen to her head and not her heart?
By the time she left the office, she felt as exhausted as she had spent the day trying to look. She stopped off to buy a newspaper, and tried to plan as many things as she possibly could for the evening. Freddie and Sir John would be in, of course, playing their game of chess, which seemed to have developed into a soothing habit for the both of them. If she didn’t do something, anything, there would be just too much time on her hands for her to think about Nicholas.
She dawdled on the way back to the house, stopping to browse in some of the shops on the high street, anything to kill time and have the comfort of strangers around her. She almost indulged in a mad impulse to buy something thoroughly expensive and totally unnecessary, but who knew what her source of income would be over the next few weeks? She had no intention of relying on Sir John to keep her and Freddie in board until she found work.
Expensive impulse-buys, she consoled herself, were the sign of a weak person. Instead, she bought a bar of chocolate and derived the same wicked feeling from eating it very slowly on the walk back to the house.
Now that the prospect of never seeing Nicholas again had become a reality, everything she did seemed to be in slow motion. Time dragged in a way which she would not have thought believable, and years seemed to have elapsed before dinner was finally over and she had retired
early to bed with her newspaper.
She glanced through the front pages, her eyes skimming over the inevitable stories of other people’s terrible misfortunes. Then she came to the page that she disliked reading, but always read anyway. The gossip page. A handful of insights into the lives of the rich and famous.
She saw it almost immediately. It screamed at her from the very centre of the page. It had been given the prime spot and the journalist had focused salaciously on every delicious detail of one of London’s most eligible bachelor’s forthcoming marriage to one of London’s most eligible débutantes. The gilded couple. Nicholas Reynolds and Lady Jessica.
Leigh felt her face blanch and she had apparently developed rigor mortis in her hands, because they could neither turn the page, nor could they release their vicelike grip on the paper. She read the article, which was brimming over with jocular chumminess, very quickly at first, then more slowly. Then she re-read it, at a snail’s pace, the implication of what was written in front of her finally sinking in.
Marriage. Lady Jessica and Nicholas. She had been wrong about Lady Jessica. She had mistakenly thought that the glamorous débutante had been willing to have an affair with Nicholas, no strings attached, but obviously she had been holding out for something more. Perhaps that had been the source of their argument? The ultimate choice between marriage or nothing? Well, she had got it.
She had trapped the biggest fish in the sea, according to the article. There was a picture of her, smiling, her head thrown back for the camera. At just the right angle, of course.
Nicholas might have deferred the inevitable marriage to have a quick fling with her, but she had killed that. Her revelation about Sir John’s decision to live with them had no doubt made him rethink his admission that perhaps she was not the gold-digger he had assumed.
Leigh crumpled the paper ruthlessly and flung it across the room, then she jumped out of the bed and began throwing her clothes into her suitcase.
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