To Tame a Proud Heart

by Cathy Williams

  ‘I have no doubt that you’ll believe exactly what you want to believe.’

  ‘And you don’t care! And what about when temptation positions itself in front of you?’

  He looked at her with a perplexed frown. ‘What on earth are you rambling on about now?’

  ‘Helen?’ She felt quite wretched but took great pains not to show it. ‘Helen Scott? You gave her my job without even telling me! What else did you give her?’

  His lips thinned. ‘You little fool! Is that what that troublemaker told you? She isn’t working for me! Why do you blindly believe whatever you’re told? Sometimes I feel I could wring your neck, woman! Now, shut up and look at me.’

  She raised her eyes to his face and her pulses gave a leap.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said in a rough voice. ‘Touch me.’

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’ His mouth twisted into a dry smile. ‘You think that if you disassociate yourself from me you can pretend that nothing’s happened, but you’re still attracted to me, Francesca, aren’t you?’ His voice had sunk to a mocking drawl that brought a flush of colour to her cheeks.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she lied, staring into his wintry eyes with an odd sense of animal panic. ‘I hate myself for what’s happened. I gave in to one crazy impulse and it wrecked my life. I know that we’re married now, but I don’t want anything to do with you.’

  ‘What do you think is going to happen if you give in to me again?’ he asked softly, tilting her chin up with his fingers so that she was forced to look at him. ‘Do you think that the heavens are going to fall down on you?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ she whispered. ‘It’s pointless, all this talk.’

  ‘Like it or not, we’re going to have to talk about it,’ Oliver said in a hard voice. ‘You’ve never had to face anything unpleasant in your whole life, have you, Francesca? That’s why you’re finding it so difficult to face this.’

  ‘Would Imogen handle the situation any better?’ she asked bitterly. ‘You’re so eager to point out what a hopeless failure I am. Is that because you’re measuring me against impossible standards? I’ll never be like your ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Have I ever told you that you’re a hopeless failure?’ he asked with curiosity. His senses had sharpened, and she knew that she would have to tread carefully, or else she could very easily end up revealing much more than she wanted to.

  ‘You implied it,’ she muttered. ‘I know I’ve had a privileged background. I can’t help that.’

  ‘Are you jealous of Imogen?’ he asked. ‘Just like you were jealous of Helen Scott? What do you think that means?’

  She pulled away from him and walked across to the bedroom window.

  She had known that he was going to ask her that. She should never have brought Imogen into the conversation at all, just as she shouldn’t have mentioned Helen. But she hadn’t been able to prevent herself. She was blindly jealous. Helen, she realised now, was no more than a mischief-maker, but Imogen would always be a lurking threat.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, coming up behind her. ‘Answer me.’

  ‘Are you jealous of Rupert?’ she asked him back, avoiding the question.

  ‘You weren’t engaged to Rupert,’ he reminded her smoothly. ‘Nor had you ever slept with him.’

  She was glad that she wasn’t looking at him, glad that she was staring in an unfocused manner at the stretch of lawns outside, because that meant that he couldn’t see the play of strong emotion on her face.

  ‘And if I had?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘That’s a hypothetical question.’

  ‘Pretend that it isn’t.’

  ‘All right.’ He paused, and she wondered what was going through his mind. ‘I can’t be jealous of a man so obviously unsuited to you. If you had been engaged to him, it would only have been a matter of time before you came to your senses.’ She felt rather than heard him turn away. ‘Go and have your shower, Francesca, and then get some sleep.’

  ‘Yes, I think I will.’ She walked across to the bed, collected some clothes and headed for the bathroom, making sure that she didn’t look at him en route. She felt drained—utterly drained.

  She took a long shower, and when she emerged half an hour later Oliver was no longer in the room. He had cleared the clothes from the bed, and she opened one of the drawers to find them neatly stacked away in separate little disordered bundles, which brought a reluctant smile to her lips. She cleared the lot out, folded them all, put them away again, then thought that she’d never get to sleep, but did as soon as her head hit the pillow.

  Francesca opened her eyes to see Oliver standing over her in a pair of tan shorts and a T-shirt, and there was a wry smile on his mouth.

  ‘How long have you been there?’ she asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. ‘Hovering. It’s bad manners to hover.’

  She felt better for the sleep. With a shock she realised that she had more than slept the clock round. She hadn’t thought that she was particularly tired, but she must have been because she had been dead to the world for such a long time.

  ‘You redid all my unpacking,’ he said, lightly teasing, sitting on the bed next to her and depressing it with his weight. ‘What was wrong with my efforts?’

  ‘You’re supposed to fold things neatly before you put them away,’ she said, still feeling drowsy, and rather liking the way he was sitting there on the bed next to her when she didn’t stop to think about it.

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘Thank you for sharing that with me. I can honestly say that that will change the course of my life.’

  She laughed, and then asked suspiciously, ‘Why are you being so nice?’

  ‘Isn’t it easier than being nasty?’ he quipped, which made her grin again, though warily. ‘Now, come along,’ he said, in the voice of someone hustling along a young child. ‘The world is waiting outside for you—swimming pools, strange-looking plants, warm blue sea, white sand, lunch.’

  ‘Lunch,’ she said, slipping past him off the bed and heading towards the bathroom to change. ‘I’m starved.’

  She slammed the bathroom door behind her and had a bit of a do trying to get into her shorts, which were already too tight for her. She managed to zip them up, but only just, and she realised ruefully that tight waistbands were now more or less out of the question.

  ‘Lunch on the beach, I thought,’ he said as they left the room and headed outside, which seemed a wonderful idea to her. She stole a sideways glance at him from under her lashes and felt that familiar quickening of her senses.

  He was right. There was no sense in being antagonistic towards one another, circling each other like adversaries. It was a great deal less effort and a great deal less wearing on the nerves to be pleasant.

  ‘Sounds marvellous,’ she said politely.

  They walked through the gardens, past the turquoise swimming pool with its faithful cluster of semi-clad bodies stretched out on sun-loungers, past bright green hedges interspersed with brilliant red flowers, then down a few steps towards the beach—eight uneven, steep stone steps, and he turned around and held her hand, the gesture without any sexual undertones.

  ‘There,’ he said, turning to face her. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it,’ she said, looking from one end of the long beach to the other. The water was calm, almost without ripple, and blue—the sort of perfect aquamarine blue that you saw in photographs and suspected of being touched up here and there. There were a few sun-loungers with people lazily dozing on them, a few towels laid out on the white sand, but really it was virtually empty.

  They walked towards a small round table, shaded underneath an umbrella which seemed to grow out of its centre like one of the bright flowers they had passed along the way. Behind them and a little to the right was a bar, with a barman incongruously kitted out in a red and black outfit, and a chef, also incongruously kitted out in a white chef’s uniform and a chef’s hat.

  Francesca
pulled one of the sun-loungers towards her, stretched out on it with a towel behind her head, closed her eyes and told Oliver that he could order her whatever he wanted to for lunch.

  ‘I could eat a horse,’ she said, wishing that she had brought a straw hat with her.

  ‘I’ll find out what kind they do,’ he said seriously from above her, and she smiled. ‘And cover your face with something,’ he continued. ‘You’ll end up the colour of a lobster otherwise.’ He tossed a newspaper over her, which made her yelp in surprise, but she took his advice and put it over her face so that it blocked out the sun.

  She felt lazy and relaxed. It was the sun, of course. The warmth had the same effect as a glass of good wine. It made you feel mellow and easygoing. She lay perfectly still in her bikini, wondering if this was what a piece of bread felt like when it went into a toaster.

  ‘Don’t tell me the hormones are sending you to sleep again,’ she heard him say in a lazy drawl.

  ‘Sun and hormones are a bad combination,’ she informed him, not bothering to take the newspaper off her face.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  ‘Come on where?’ She lifted the newspaper and peered at him. He was pulling a lounger towards a clump of coconut trees.

  ‘Somewhere a bit quieter,’ he said, returning and waving her off the chair so that he could do the same with hers. She followed him, clutching her bag with her suntan cream and dark glasses.

  ‘Food will be ready in about fifteen minutes,’ he said, pulling his T-shirt over his head. ‘Two horse burgers and chips.’

  ‘Very healthy,’ Francesca said, laughing. For some peculiar reason she felt suddenly very shy with him. ‘We don’t want to start getting the baby into bad eating habits, do we?’

  Their eyes met and there was the briefest of silences—a silence charged with all sorts of meanings, but mostly with that bond between them that lay there inside her—then he said in an oddly rough voice, ‘We most certainly don’t. We can’t have a baby screaming for a plate of cholesterol the minute she comes out of the womb.’

  Francesca smiled again, but she felt slightly unsteady. For perhaps the first time she had thought of the baby not as the catalyst to a host of problems but as a miracle growing inside her.

  ‘Now lie down,’ he ordered. ‘On your stomach. While you still can.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  He didn’t answer. He squeezed some lotion out of one of the tubes and she lay down, half closing her eyes as he began to spread the suntan cream over her, his hands moving slowly and rhythmically—first her shoulders, then along her back, along her waist, then down to her thighs and legs. There was nothing sensual in what he was doing, but a delicious sensation of contentment began spreading through her.

  The sun was making her fuzzy-headed, she thought languorously. It was so hot that even thinking of bristling at him for what he was doing made her feel tired.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Turn over.’

  She wriggled onto her back and lay with her arms hanging down on either side. When she opened her eyes she could see the slight swell of her stomach—noticeable, she knew, only to her because she was looking for it—and his dark head, as he began spreading the lotion along her feet.

  When his hands began their rhythmic movements along her thighs she knew that her breathing had quickened and that a moist awareness of him was spreading through her. She shifted so that her legs were closer together, but his hands were already working their way upwards over her stomach.

  ‘You’re beginning to put on some weight,’ he said in a surprised voice. ‘I hadn’t noticed before.’

  ‘It only shows because I’m wearing this,’ Francesca answered self-consciously.

  There was an intimacy now in what he was doing which she hadn’t noticed there before. Or perhaps, she thought, she was imagining it. She looked towards the snack bar to see whether the chef was bustling his way across to them, but no one was coming, and in this secluded little area they were virtually unnoticed. Lower down, towards the sea, odd couples occasionally strolled by, but they hardly glanced in their direction.

  ‘It suits you,’ he said, circling her stomach with his hands, not looking at her face. ‘Makes you look more rounded.’

  The sun, pouring through the fronds of the palm trees above them, threw a dappled pattern over him which moved every time he did. Francesca could not tear her eyes away from the dance of sun and shade on his body. She felt spellbound.

  He squirted some more cream onto the palm of his hand and worked his way over her ribcage.

  ‘Your breasts are fuller too,’ he remarked in the same slightly surprised voice.

  Their eyes met, and in the peaceful rustle of the breeze she could hear her own breathing—soft and quick, like a gentle panting.

  ‘Where on earth has our lunch gone?’ she asked, in a desperate attempt to break the fascination he held her in, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from his, and it was no surprise when his hands moved to massage the roundness of her breasts, which were pushing against the flimsy material of the bikini top. She could feel her nipples harden and swell under his manipulation, aching for the rub of his fingers over them.

  ‘Oliver…’ she said, on a small, protesting sigh.

  ‘Oliver, what?’ he asked, smiling crookedly at her. ‘Oliver, keep doing what you’re doing? Oliver, I want you to make love to me?’

  He trailed his finger along her cleavage and then outlined the throbbing contours of her nipples, taking his time.

  ‘Oliver, stop,’ she said weakly. She glanced across and sat up. ‘Here comes our food.’

  He laughed and followed the direction of her eyes. ‘Saved by the bell,’ he said lightly, mockingly, and she ignored him, waiting until their food had been deposited in front of them—two oversized beefburgers which smelt wonderful, enough chips to keep several people happy, and two tall, very cold, very colourful drinks, with a piece of pineapple wedged over the rim of each glass.

  Her body still felt as though it was on fire, as though it had been denied something which it had desperately craved.

  She looked at him—a quick, veiled look—and wondered how she was ever going to fight this man who had been her lover, and was now her husband.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FRANCESCA knew precisely what was going on in Oliver’s head. Or at least she felt that she could make a pretty accurate stab at it.

  They were now husband and wife, and even though he wasn’t in love with her he saw no reason why he shouldn’t sleep with her. He had been at his most charming during the day—so charming, in fact, that it was difficult to believe that there was so much going on underneath that veneer of civilised pretence.

  Because that, she felt, was what it was. This, she thought, was all very well for him, but what about her? She could see herself sinking ever deeper into the quagmire of her emotions if she let him make love to her, and then one day, probably in the not too distant future, when he had tired of making love to her, he would look at her and realise that, baby or no baby, he could never love her, and where would she be then?

  He had told her that as far as he was concerned he intended their marriage to be much more than just a marriage on paper, but she knew with a sense of foreboding that no marriage could survive without the bond of love. It was a realisation that would come to him over time.

  Being married to him would legitimise their baby, but it left her floundering in a frightening sort of limbo, too scared to commit even more than she already had, but equally scared that her feelings for him ran too deep for her to resist the pull of his attraction.

  She felt torn between the devil and the deep blue sea, not knowing what stand she could take, and too inexperienced even to begin to know how to tackle the problem.

  If she were ten years older, she might have accumulated enough knowledge of the opposite sex along the way to enable her to treat their relationship with the same adult cynicism as he obviously treated it. But she wasn’t. She
could look back now and see how hopelessly naïve she had been to make her attraction to him so patently clear.

  She had never slept with a man before, and her boyfriends had been playmates rather than anything serious. Temptation had been something she had never had to tackle, so when it had presented itself to her she had reacted in what she realised now to have been the worst possible way—she’d yielded.

  Was it any wonder that Oliver couldn’t see why there should be any physical barriers between them now? How was he to know that the reason she had made love to him in the first place had been because he meant so much to her—so much more than a transient, pleasurable flirtation?

  She stood in the middle of the room, with the balmy ink-black night pressing against the windows, lost in thought, frowning, and she jumped when he said in a rough, mildly impatient voice, ‘What’s the matter with you now?’

  She looked up to find him staring at her, and there was amused irritation on his face.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ she said hastily, which she feebly hoped might put an end to the conversation. ‘I was just thinking,’ she continued nervously.

  He sighed and walked towards her, and she had to steel herself not to start backing away, or, worse, to rush towards him and bury herself in his arms.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘are the most moody, most bloody illogical person I have ever met in my entire life. Ten minutes ago you were laughing downstairs with me and now you’re acting as though Judgement Day is just around the corner.’ He put his hands on her shoulders and she froze.

  There wasn’t a bed downstairs, she wanted to inform him.

  ‘Am I?’ She tried a laugh. ‘It’s just that I seem to have developed a headache.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ he said drily. ‘Surely you can do better than that, Francesca?’

  ‘I have got a headache,’ she insisted irritably. ‘You talk about me reading hidden meanings behind everything you say. Well, why can’t you take what I tell you at face value?’