Naive Awakening

by Cathy Williams

  The coffee-shop turned out to be the lounge in a very expensive hotel. All subdued and quiet. She remembered the elderly man’s comment about the station platform being too unromantic for a conversation, and she desperately wished that she were back there now. Discomfort was a great aid to anger.

  Here it would be altogether too easy to relax. She settled back into the comfortable chair, and realised that she was hungry.

  He must have read her mind, because he ordered coffee and sandwiches, informing her that he was starving. ‘You must be too,’ he commented, and she shrugged, managing nevertheless to make her way very rapidly through three ham and cheese toasted sandwiches, and a slab of chocolate cake. It settled happily on her stomach, and relaxed her even further.

  This was one of the reasons that she so loved him, she realised. He always seemed so tuned in to her needs, even the elementary ones. Was it like this with Lady Jessica? A knife twisted somewhere inside her, and she bit back the tears.

  ‘Tell me why you ran away,’ he said casually, as though their broken conversation at the station had only been a few seconds prior. ‘Was it because of what you read in the newspaper?’

  ‘Newspaper?’ Leigh tried to look blank, and succeeded only in looking guilty.

  ‘Hmm. The one I found lying on your bed, open at the page announcing my imminent marriage to one Lady Jessica Thompson.’

  Leigh didn’t comment. To deny having seen the article would have been transparently obvious. On the other hand, to admit that she had read it, in fact had devoured it word for word and very slowly, would have been tantamount to an expression of how she felt about him.

  She stuck her finger on to a cake crumb and licked it, resolutely ignoring him.

  ‘Well?’ he persisted.

  ‘All right,’ Leigh conceded irritably. ‘I read the article, and it came as a bit of a surprise, but that’s not why I left.’

  ‘Ah.’ Nicholas sat back, his arms folded across his chest, and stared at her expectantly.

  ‘I left because…’ She thought quickly. ‘Because there’s a problem at the house.’ There. It sounded plausible. She knew it did, because the smug expression had been wiped off his face. He looked taken aback. Leigh smiled politely at him and licked another cake crumb from her finger.

  ‘What kind of problem?’ he asked, frowning.

  This was beginning to get ridiculous. She might have guessed that one small white lie only led to much bigger, more elaborate and not quite so white lies.

  ‘Water.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Yes. One of the pipes burst.’

  ‘In that case,’ Nicholas pointed out, hanging on to the subject like a dog with a pet bone, ‘why didn’t you say that from the start? Why all the coyness? Were you hoping that I would adopt a caveman approach to get you out of that station?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Leigh said loudly, noting with relief that this time there were no spectators within earshot.

  ‘Because it certainly worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t want to be dragged here!’ she denied hotly. Somewhere inside her a little voice told her that this was precisely what she had wanted. She had wanted to prolong the time she had in his company, and she was glad that she was sitting here, because at least she was invigorated instead of pathetically miserable.

  ‘I think you did,’ Nicholas said roughly, ‘and, more than that, I don’t believe a damn word about any burst pipes. You would have mentioned it to Freddie before you left, and he would have told me immediately. In any case, even if all the pipes had packed it in, why race off in the dead of night? You wouldn’t have been able to do a thing, and common sense would have told you to wait until morning. So, you see, I’m not buying your little story, so try again.’

  She didn’t. The burst pipe was the best she could come up with under duress, and it was miserably lacking in credibility. She fidgeted with her coffee-cup, then stuck her hands under her thighs and sat on them, because it was the only way she could manage to keep them still.

  ‘So we’re back to that article,’ he commented. The exhaustion seemed to have vanished from his face now that he had thrown her on the defensive. Barrister’s tactics again, she thought sourly.

  ‘I had no idea you were going to marry Lady Jessica,’ she finally admitted, knowing that he would not let the matter rest until he had dragged the truth out of her.

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Then what made you change your mind?’ She could not conceal the edge of bitterness in her voice, but she couldn’t care because in a few hours’ time she would be on that train out of London and out of his life. For reasons best known to himself, he had succeeded in detaining her, but it was only temporary.

  She had not realised it, but she had leaned forward and was sitting on the edge of the chair, her hands gripping the sides, as she waited for his answer.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Leigh laughed acidly. ‘You’re telling me that the newspapers got it all wrong? Right down to the picture of a gleeful Lady Jessica? I’ve heard of the Press fabricating stories, but not to that extent!’

  ‘Maybe I should make myself clear,’ Nicholas interjected.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘And stop pretending to be so damned indifferent,’ he said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Fine. I’m listening.’

  ‘The story wasn’t altogether untrue. They quoted Jessica absolutely correctly when they printed that our marriage had been announced.’

  Leigh felt as though she had dropped a thousand feet, leaving her stomach somewhere very far behind. Her knuckles were white from gripping the chair. She was sure that her nails had pierced the thick velvety material, but for the life of her she couldn’t relax her hold. His words, reverberating in her head, would not allow it.

  ‘But,’ he continued, then paused as though he wanted to marshal his words very carefully, ‘what they didn’t know was that any wedding announcement was news to me.’

  ‘You’re saying that she lied?’ Leigh whispered. Some of the colour that had drained away from her face was returning. ‘But why?’

  ‘I suppose I was largely to blame,’ he said heavily. ‘I assumed things that weren’t so. For instance, I assumed that we viewed the relationship from the same perspective. Something to be enjoyed, but with no pretence of permanency. She certainly seemed to accept it willingly on those terms.’

  ‘Or maybe,’ Leigh said slowly, ‘she didn’t. But you just never read the signals correctly.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Nicholas conceded after a while. ‘I can be remarkably thick in some areas.’ He looked directly at her and she felt a strange fluttering in her stomach. The charm of the devil, she thought. Was that why he had rushed back to London? Because he wanted to make sure that she didn’t believe what had been printed, since he still wanted to get her into his bed? She knew that it was an unfair assumption, but it was so much easier to fight him when she had some form of weapon on her side.

  ‘I don’t know when,’ he said soberly, ‘her light-hearted fling with me developed into something more…obsessional. I only know that when we broke off our relationship she was inflamed.’

  ‘You broke it off, didn’t you?’

  Nicholas nodded and asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she told me a completely different story. She said that it had been her decision, and left me in no doubt that she could have you running back to her at the snap of her fingers.’

  ‘Really?’

  Leigh nodded. ‘Anyway,’ she said, rising, ‘now that we’ve talked, perhaps we should be heading back to the house. I’ll have to be up early tomorrow to catch my train.’

  Nicholas stood up with her, his face in shadow.

  ‘I don’t want you to catch that train,’ he said in a low voice.

  A wave of confusion swept over her. Why was he doing this to her? Didn’t he realise that those softly spoken words had the power to turn all her decisions on their head?

 
; She gazed up at him mutely.

  ‘You’re so exquisite,’ he muttered with a wrenched sigh. He reached out towards her with his hand, and Leigh’s head snapped back.

  ‘You mean you want to go to bed with me.’

  ‘Of course I do, isn’t it obvious? I’ve wanted to from the very first moment I saw you striding up that corridor at the magistrates’ court, all that time ago. I took one look at you, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything so powerful in my life before.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ Leigh said helplessly. She sat back down, afraid that if she didn’t her legs would collapse from underneath her. ‘You thought I was a gold-digger, an opportunist. You said so!’

  Her head was swimming and a thousand thoughts were jumbled chaotically in her mind, desperately trying to make sense out of what she was feeling.

  ‘I was wrong. I never really believed that, but it helped for a while to believe the worst, since I could still pretend to myself that all I felt for you was some kind of primitive physical attraction.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and his eyes when they met hers were defensive and sheepish at the same time. ‘I didn’t want you to get under my skin, dammit. I’d had a couple of near-misses with women who saw me as a meal ticket.’

  ‘The girl at university?’

  Nicholas looked at her in surprise. ‘She was one of a few. But how the hell do you know? No, don’t tell me, that conniving old grandfather of mine.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I might have guessed that he’d spare no effort in his little game of throwing us together.’

  She shrugged. So what if he didn’t think the worst of her? That didn’t mean anything, did it? He still saw her as a desirable commodity, no strings attached. But a little flame of hope was licking into her reasoning.

  ‘It didn’t work though, did it?’ she asked dully. ‘I’m still not into sleeping with men just because they want me to.’

  ‘Dammit, woman,’ he said uncomfortably, ‘listen to what I’m saying. It’s not just that. Sleeping together. You…you do things to me, things I can’t even find the words to explain, and I’m normally so clever with words.’ She could hear the frustrated bewilderment in his voice, and trembled. ‘I want you, Leigh. Right now. Here, if it were possible, but, as it’s not, upstairs, in the decorum of a bedroom.’ There was an urgency to him, and a soft groan escaped her lips.

  ‘No,’ she repeated weakly, ‘I told you. Why don’t you listen to me? I’m not a plaything. I don’t operate with the same set of rules as you do.’

  He didn’t reply. He held out his hand, and this time she took it and felt an intense passion sweep over her, an electric current that held her in its grip.

  She heard him book the room, the best in the hotel, took the lift up with him, all in silence, all with the sensation of events happening in a daze. It was what she had fought against so desperately. But she just couldn’t fight any longer. Now she knew that she had to sleep with him, whatever the consequences.

  She would be hurt, that was as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun. But the pain would be less than the agony of a lifetime of regret, of knowing that she had sacrificed the only fulfilment she could ever have with a man to a set of rules. A set of rules which were relevant in the Victorian era, but were way out of date in the twentieth century.

  The hotel room was massive. Her experience of hotel rooms was precisely nil, but, even so, she instinctively knew that this was luxury at its most unconstrained. Huge bed, beautiful wooden furniture, thick dusk-rose carpet that made her want to slip off her shoes and wriggle her toes in it.

  ‘Your face can be so expressive,’ Nicholas said with a laugh, although underneath she could sense that he was almost as tense as she was. Funny, when his experience of women was so wide.

  ‘Meaning?’ She threw him a teasing look, delighted by the fiery response it sparked off.

  ‘You’re a witch, woman,’ he grated out, lifting her off her feet and dumping her unceremoniously on the bed. Then they were both laughing. He began to remove his clothing, staring down at her, willing her to look at him.

  She did. Her eyes feasted on his deliberately slow movements. God, she wasn’t laughing now. Her heart was beating so loudly that it drowned all the other little noises in the room, and a fine perspiration had broken out over her body.

  Nicholas was marvellously unselfconscious about his body. He had rushed back to London straight from work, and was still in his suit. He tugged away the tie and unbuttoned the sober white shirt, exposing enough of his tanned, lean torso to make her feel heady. The man certainly knew the business of seduction, she thought.

  There was something terribly intimate about undressing in front of a spectator. Nicholas watched her face as he stripped off, smiling slightly at her expression, then he sank on to the bed next to her and reached across, nuzzling her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he murmured, his teeth gently nipping her skin, ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  Leigh winced and closed her eyes. A physical blow would not have been more painful, because she knew how far from the truth he was. He could do more than hurt her—he could shatter her life into a million useless fragments. In fact, hadn’t he already done as much? The person lying here in the bed bore only a physical resemblance to the one who had reluctantly travelled down to London with her brother.

  ‘Leigh,’ he murmured, ‘sweet fool. It’s that set of rules of yours, isn’t it?’

  She nodded and said, ‘You’re right. I am a fool.’

  ‘Shall I tell you what my set of rules has always been?’

  No, she wanted to shout, but she kept still, waiting for the inevitability of his answer.

  ‘I’ve always put my career before everything else. Sure I’ve been out with women, lots of them, but I never let them intrude on what I felt was the most important part of my life—namely, legal success.’

  The words sounded excruciatingly familiar. She could have quoted them word for word, if he had asked her.

  ‘Until you came along, that is,’ he muttered against her skin, and she felt a wave of pleasure wash over her.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You heard, dammit!’

  ‘I want to hear again.’

  ‘You managed to throw me wildly off course.’

  What he was saying was managing to throw her wildly off course. Leigh lay back, her eyes half closed as he slowly unbuttoned the front of her dress and slipped his hand underneath to caress her bare breast. She moaned and his fingers curved around the hardened nipple, rolling it between his fingers, then his mouth replaced his fingers and pulled wetly against it, sending fierce sensation shooting through her.

  He tugged off her dress, tossing it on the ground, and buried his head between her breasts, his hands massaging them until she wanted to scream out for more. When he raised his head to look at her, his eyes were hot with passion.

  ‘What are you trying to tell me, Nicholas?’ Leigh dared to ask. After all, what had she got to lose? If he shot her a blank look, then she would be no worse off than she was half an hour ago when she decided to sleep with him, whatever the consequences. But maybe, just maybe, he would say that he cared for her, that she was more than simply a passing fancy. If he did, then her euphoria would last a lifetime. It would have to.

  ‘What would you like me to say? That I love you?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Leigh said in a tiny voice, closing her eyes and risking all, ‘because I happen to love you, and, believe me, you weren’t part of my plans either.’

  ‘My darling.’ He tilted her head back, and besieged her neck with kisses until she squirmed helplessly against him. ‘Haven’t you guessed by now? I thought I was so transparent! Like one of those lovesick adolescents I always pitied. I love you, you witch. I love you, and need you and want you. Just when I thought that life had no surprises left to offer, I met you, and now that I’ve got you in my arms I’m never going to let you go…’

  Later, as they la
y in each other’s arms, his hand gently caressing the swell of her breast, Nicholas said thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that crafty old devil hadn’t had this in mind when he asked me to go up to Yorkshire and bail your brother out. And when he suggested that the best thing might have been if the two of you came down to London.’

  ‘Do we forgive him?’ Leigh teased, melting as his fingers found her hardened nipple.

  ‘Difficult not to when we’re walking up the aisle.’

  Her eyes shone. ‘Are you sure it’s what you want?’

  ‘Just try and talk me out of it,’ he said roughly. ‘And after that, how do you feel about living in London? With frequent visiting rights to Freddie and Grandfather?’

  ‘Just try and talk me out of it,’ she sighed happily. ‘And how do you feel about a family? Because we haven’t taken any precautions, and who knows where this lovemaking has led—?’

  He stroked her stomach lovingly. ‘What better place for all this sweet love to go,’ he whispered with a smile, ‘than to our baby?’

  eISBN 978-14592-6259-1

  NAÏVE AWAKENING

  First North American Publication 1998.

  Copyright © 1992 by Cathy Williams.

  All rights reserved Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills. Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A