by Penny Jordan
‘Matt and I are old friends,’ she protested when she had found her voice. ‘No one would ever think that.…’
‘You were lovers?’ Kieron grated. ‘You’d be surprised. I thought you were myself, until I found out you were virtually untouched.…’
‘Like the Sleeping Beauty awaiting the Prince’s kiss?’ Briony flung at him. ‘Is that what you think, Kieron? That you only have to touch me and I’ll waken up? I’m sorry to have to disappoint you. I’m frozen all the way through.’
‘You melted the other night,’ he reminded her softly, watching her eyes so that there was no way she could conceal her shock wave of reaction.
‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ she countered bravely. ‘Nicky’s accident…the shock.…’
‘Yes, I know all about that,’ he agreed harshly. ‘You don’t need to put into words that you wouldn’t have let me within fifty miles of you if your defences hadn’t been cracked wide open. But they aren’t unbreachable. Remember that next time you feel like defying me!’
He turned on his heel before she could respond, leaving her feeling stricken by the realisation that he had spoken the truth. Where Kieron was concerned she was dangerously vulnerable, and she would have to work ceaselessly to ensure that her defences were never breached again. She had already endured the galling bitterness of lovemaking without love once; she could not survive that agony again.
CHAPTER SIX
THEY left the reception in a shower of rice and confetti, to the tune of goodnatured teasing from their colleagues, although Briony noticed that neither Gail nor Matt was there to wave them off.
‘I didn’t think you’d thank me for organising a honeymoon,’ Kieron said sardonically as they drove out of London. ‘Although seeing you dressed—or should I say undressed—like that is giving me second thoughts.’
‘Then forget them,’ Briony said crisply. ‘You told me to buy a new outfit and I did.’
‘What a pity you can’t always be so delightfully obedient,’ Kieron mocked. ‘Where am I to sleep tonight, by the way, or can I guess?’
A deep flush mantled Briony’s cheeks. They had decided to move down to the house Kieron was renting from his friends the day after the wedding took place, and to Briony’s surprise Kieron had raised no objections to her insistence that she and Nicky stayed in her own house until then. However, her poppy-flushed cheeks were the result of a last-minute quixotic impulse this morning before the taxi arrived with Mrs Johnson which had taken her upstairs to the upper flat’s double bedroom, which was still furnished, where she had made the bed up with fresh sheets and placed a clean nightdress conspicuously across it. The moment Mrs Johnson arrived she regretted the foolish gesture. What on earth did it matter what the woman thought of her marriage?—but with her own taxi at the door it had been too late to run upstairs and rectify her mistake.
‘Perhaps Nicky will let you share his bed?’ she suggested with a touch of humour.
‘Or perhaps his mummy will let me share hers?’
‘No!’
‘So vehement,’ Kieron mocked gently. ‘I seem to remember a time when you couldn’t wait for me to share your bed.’
Briony was too chagrined to look at him. How could she survive their marriage if he was constantly going to be throwing the past in her face?
‘Perhaps what you taught me there made me want to ensure that there was never a repeat performance!’ she threw at him to conceal her embarrassment.
The car suddenly screeched to a halt, flinging her hard against the passenger door, the blow knocking the breath from her body. Kieron’s hands were on her shoulders, his eyes glittering with fury as he pulled her towards him.
‘Don’t you ever accuse me of anything like that again!’ he muttered menacingly through gritted teeth. ‘Or I really will give you something to complain about. And while we’re here.…’
His mouth covered hers bruisingly, his hands in her hair, tangling the curls. The kiss robbed her of breath, hard and angry in its demand, and then he released her and thrust her back into her seat.
‘Now you look as though you’ve just got married,’ he grated with satisfaction.
‘I’m sure Mrs Johnson will be most impressed,’ Briony said bitterly. ‘But you needn’t have bothered. Other people’s impressions don’t worry me.’
Briony had done her best to prepare Nicky for their new life. He had been told about the wedding, but had expressed little interest, being far more concerned with when his daddy was actually coming to live with them.
Already he doted on Kieron, and Briony had suffered several pangs of jealousy watching them together. Already, in a few brief days, Nicky seemed to have grown from a baby to a little boy.
He toddled out of the house the moment the car stopped, suffering Briony’s swift hug with impatience before turning to his father and demanding to be carried.
‘I’ll put him to bed,’ she said over her shoulder to Kieron as they entered the house. ‘Why don’t you give Mrs Johnson a lift home?’
‘On your wedding night?’ the latter exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it!’
‘How about letting me put Nicky to bed?’ Kieron suggested when she had gone.
‘Can’t you be content with being his father?’ Briony lashed out at him. ‘Must you usurp my role as well?’
‘You mistook my intention,’ Kieron said quietly, his body suddenly tense. He had been putting Nicky on the floor, and as though sensing the anger in the adult voices the little boy whimpered protestingly and clung to Kieron’s legs.
‘You looked tired. The doctor said you weren’t to overdo things. You hardly ate a thing at the reception. I was going to suggest that I put Nicky to bed while you rested, and that then I made us an omelette.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Kieron, stop the play-acting!’ All at once her self-control snapped. Was Kieron deliberately trying to make her feel guilty and unreasonable? If so he was succeeding. Even Nicky was looking at her with a frown in his dark blue eyes. ‘I’ll see to Nicky.…’ she began, and then remembering the yet-to-be-attended-to upstairs bedroom, changed her mind and said flatly, ‘Oh, what’s the use? You do it if you must, only don’t bother with an omelette for me. If I had to eat anything I’d choke!’
She let herself out of the flat while Kieron and Nicky were in the bathroom.
Upstairs the evening sun poured into the comfortable double bedroom, shining through the thin cotton nightdress she had placed on the bed. She was just reaching it when the door opened, and Kieron’s exasperated voice said, ‘So there you are! Nicky wants his duck and I.…’
She had her back to him, but she knew the instant he saw the nightdress, because his voice suddenly changed, sharp with disbelief, and it didn’t need his soft, ‘Well, well, it seems as though I am going to have a wedding night after all,’ to warn her what a precarious position she had placed herself in.
‘I put it there because of Mrs Johnson,’ she began defensively,
‘You did? A woman who not two hours ago was telling me that she didn’t give a damn about other people’s impressions? I don’t believe you.’
‘Believe what you damned well like. I wouldn’t sleep with you willingly if you were the last man on earth!’
‘You wouldn’t get the chance,’ Kieron replied brutally, ‘if that shapeless cotton sack is the nearest you can get to wearing something enticing.’ His fingers flicked disparagingly at the garment in question, high-necked and faded from numerous washings, and hurt tears stung Briony’s eyes, although why she should be hurt she could not have said, but as though his contemptuous words had touched a deep buried nerve she quivered with mingled pain and indignation, longing to deliver an equally effective snub back. The nearest she could get to it was to demand breathlessly, ‘I don’t suppose you sleep in anything?’
‘Certainly not,’ he agreed suavely. ‘And I haven’t had any complaints as yet.’
As she stalked towards the door, he caught her by the arm, his eyes mocking and i
ntent.
‘Was it just for Mrs Johnson’s sake, Briony?’ he asked softly. ‘Or was that woman you’ve tried to bury so deeply making her presence felt again?’
‘I don’t know what you mean!’
The way he was looking at her was making her feel oddly breathless, her skin quivering under the lazy circling caress of his thumb against its softness. She tried to avoid his eyes, staring instead straight in front of her, which was a mistake, for all she could see was the hard expanse of his chest and the dark hair curling crisply there, all sorts of treacherous memories suddenly surfacing with devastating clarity.
‘I’ve got to go to Nicky,’ she mumbled huskily. ‘Please let go of me.’
He released her, but did not move away, and she was unbearably conscious of the maleness of him as she brushed past his motionless body, her face on fire with anger at the deliberately enforced intimacy.
* * *
‘But how soon will we be there?’ Nicky demanded for the third time. They were sitting in Kieron’s car heading for the new house. Briony had not made her mind up what to do about her own and Kieron had suggested that for the time being they let the flats on a temporary basis, fully furnished, until she came to a decision.
She had hardly slept, and Nicky’s excited chatter filled the silence which seemed to stretch between herself and Kieron. She had gone straight to bed as soon as Nicky was asleep, claiming that she was exhausted, despite Kieron’s request that they talk. What did they have to talk about, she wondered bitterly, apart from their son?
It was still early enough in the summer for the countryside to be fresh and green, despite the long weeks without rain, and in any other circumstances Briony would have enjoyed the outing. The powerful car ate up the miles, the air-conditioning maintaining a pleasantly cool temperature, but although she tried to concentrate on the passing landscape Briony found it impossible to relax.
The house was in a small village, Kieron had told her, adding that he would do something about getting her a small car so that she could get about. As she knew from working with Doug a newspaper editor’s life was subject to a good many pressures and demands, not the least of which was being called out at any time of the night or day when emergencies arose, and surely Kieron would prefer to be closer to the centre of town.
When she voiced these doubts he shrugged them aside, saying that the house was only a temporary measure, adding glintingly, ‘Planning on how fast you can get rid of me, already?’
She didn’t know how she was going to endure his constant presence; after one day the pressure of striving for normalcy was beginning to tell on her to such an extent that she felt continually on edge; tearful and nervy, ready even to snap at poor little Nicky.
Although they found the village without any problems, Kieron had to stop and ask the way to the house. It was down a narrow, rutted lane, a black and white timber building with a thatched roof and latticed windows peering out from beneath thatched eaves. A cat basked on the worn flags flanked by lavender bushes, and Briony caught her breath in disbelieving wonder, turning spontaneously to Kieron to comment shakily, ‘It’s beautiful!’
‘It was an old Tudor barn before it was renovated, and extended,’ Kieron informed her, stopping the car. ‘The garden’s a bit on the large side, although I’m given to understand that a gardener goes with the place. Apparently there’s even a swing in the back garden for Nicky. That should keep you climbing out of any more apple trees,’ he told his son.
They all got out of the car, Kieron producing some keys from his pocket and unfastening the gate, which Briony was relieved to see had a proper catch. Nicky was inclined to be over-adventurous at times, and she would have to watch that he didn’t stray.
She and Nicky followed Kieron up the path, Nicky tugging free of her restraining hand to run up to the basking cat, exclaiming with pleasure, ‘Pussy!’
The cat endured his attentions for several seconds with basilisk eyes before stretching and disappearing into the shrubbery, but by then a butterfly had caught Nicky’s fascinated attention, and he was toddling hurriedly after that. Kieron had unlocked the front door, and Briony made to walk past him, gasping with indignation as he suddenly swung her up in his arms.
‘What are you doing with my mummy?’
It was the first time Nicky had showed any signs of possessiveness, his dark blue eyes as stormily angry as his father’s could be as he stood in front of them.
‘I’m carrying her over the threshold of our very first home. Perhaps other aspects of our union haven’t been quite as custom dictates,’ Kieron drawled to Briony, ‘but I see no reason why this one shouldn’t be, do you?’
‘Put me down!’ Briony demanded.
‘Why?’ he mocked. ‘Are you frightened that I might carry you up those stairs and demand those conjugal rights you promised me yesterday? With my body.…’ he reminded her softly.
Nicky, impatient of these adult discussions, tugged impatiently at Kieron’s trousers.
‘Put my mummy down!’ he demanded.
With a mocking look at Briony Kieron complied. ‘Have you been teaching him to say that?’ he taunted.
To her relief the cottage had three good-sized bedrooms. Kieron came upstairs while she was unpacking Nicky’s things in the smallest of them.
‘Is it too much to hope that you’ll perform the same service for me?’
Briony pretended not to have heard him. It did odd things to her pulse rate to think of touching his clothes—clothes which had been worn next to his flesh.
* * *
The days fell into a similar pattern. Despite his faint stirrings of jealousy Nicky was devoted to his father, and Briony normally got up early with Kieron so that the little boy could see him before he left for work. Since their arrival at the cottage, Kieron had become far more distant and there were no more of those barbed comments she had come to dread. Often it was late when he got home, and then he started spending odd nights in the flat in London. Briony told herself that she was glad. She could sleep far more easily when he wasn’t there, and yet that wasn’t true. She found it ridiculously difficult to sleep when he was away, and Nicky got fractious, demanding to know when his daddy was coming back.
One evening the phone rang and a man asked for Kieron, introducing himself as the owner of the cottage. He sounded most anxious to know how they had settled in, and on impulse when he had rung off, Briony dialled the number of the London flat, intending to tell Kieron about the call.
The phone rang for a long time, and she was just about to hang up when someone picked up the receiver, and a female voice called, ‘I’ve got it, darling, I expect it’s the paper. What a time to ring!’
Briony recognised the voice instantly as Gail’s and hung up quietly. She didn’t know why the knowledge that Gail was with her husband in his flat should cause her such bitter pain that she wanted to scream with the agony of it, but it did.
‘Mummy sad?’ Nicky asked sorrowfully.
Kieron returned home the following night, and although Briony had told herself that she would simply behave as though the phone call had never happened, she found it impossible even to speak to him.
He flung his jacket over a chair, wrenching off his tie and dropping into a chintz-covered chair, with a weary, ‘God, I’m tired!’
‘Perhaps you should try sleeping more often,’ Briony said sweetly.
His eyes had been closed, and suddenly they flew open, nearly black with anger and exhaustion.
‘And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he asked bitingly. ‘A red-blooded man has certain needs and tensions and if they aren’t satisfied he sometimes finds it damned hard to sleep—but of course you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’ he taunted.
They had supper in stony silence, Briony getting up the moment the meal was over to stack the dishes in the dishwasher and tidy up the kitchen. When she went back to the living room Kieron was fast asleep, his features oddly vulnerable and more like Nick
y’s than ever. Telling herself that it was merely that resemblance that tugged so insidiously at her heart, she hardened it against him and went upstairs. Let him sleep down there if he liked! She wasn’t going to wake him.
She heard the phone ringing through a fog of sleep, dimly, without actually waking up, and in the morning there was a note propped up against a milk bottle telling her that Kieron had been called out by the paper.
‘Thanks for the TLC,’ he had scribbled sarcastically on the bottom of it, and she crumpled it up angrily, and flung it in a wastepaper basket.
What was the point of Kieron insisting on marrying her so that he could be a father to Nicky, when even at weekends he went to work, she thought savagely, refusing to acknowledge that it wasn’t merely the little boy who suffered during his father’s absence.
As much to work off her bad temper as anything else she dressed in old jeans and a tee-shirt, spending most of the morning weeding one of the large flower beds, while Nicky toddled about close by chattering happily to himself. He was an imaginative child, and listening to his mysterious monologue Briony felt a renewal of all her love for him.
By lunchtime her back and legs were aching from bending over, and after tidying up the weeds she took Nicky in for a rest, while she showered.
The sound of a car in the lane brought her rushing to the window, her hair still damp as she pulled on a thin silk robe, but it was Matt who was walking up the garden path, not Kieron.
She ran downstairs to let him in, too suprised by his unexpected arrival to question what he was doing there. If anything he looked more dejected than ever.
‘It’s Mary,’ he told her unhappily when Briony had made him a cup of tea. ‘She’s threatening to leave me again. She complains that I’m boring and that I never take her anywhere. But how can I? Kieron works us like galley slaves. Our circulation has shot up these last few weeks, but he says he won’t rest until he’s made the Globe the best selling paper in the country. I’m so tired out when I get home that all I want to do is fall asleep, but Mary just can’t seem to understand.’