Worthy of Marriage

by Anne Weale

  Her pride came to her rescue. ‘Aren’t you being rather presumptuous in assuming that I would wish to become…involved?’ she said, echoing his slight pause before settling for the word ‘involved’.

  She lifted her chin, an angry sparkle in her eyes. ‘Because I didn’t rebuff you when you kissed me isn’t grounds for supposing that I would have been compliant if you had attempted to take it further.’

  Suddenly the situation became untenable. She knew that she couldn’t swallow another mouthful of coffee or pretend that nothing had happened while he called for and paid the bill. She had to get out of here.

  ‘Would you excuse me?’ She pushed back her chair, picked up her bag and walked away from the table as if on her way to the ladies’ room. Instead she walked past that door and out of the building.

  She felt angry, hurt and humiliated. There could only be one reason why he was backing off from an emotional involvement with her: because he didn’t consider her good enough to have any place in his life other than as a dogsbody to his mother.

  How could she have been so stupidly mistaken as to think he was warming towards her…might even be starting to feel the way she felt about him? What a fool he must think her, to have to have it spelt out that she was beneath his touch and always would be.

  She wondered how long it would be before he realised she wasn’t in the cloakroom but had left the restaurant. By now she was halfway down the hill to the village. Suddenly it hit her that not only had she left her shawl on the back of her chair but she didn’t have the key to the house. He did.

  Biting back an expletive she had picked up in prison where most of the inmates used strong language as a matter of course, she regretted not bringing the spare key that hung on one of the coat hooks in the hall. To have to hang about in the street until Grey showed up was the last thing she wanted to do, but there seemed to be no alternative.

  Had this been an English village, she could have gone to the pub and had another glass of wine. But she knew she would feel uncomfortable if she went into the bar here. At night it was a masculine stronghold. Even by day the local women didn’t use it. They seemed to lead separate lives, sitting outside their front doors with their chairs turned away from the street as they gossiped with their neighbours, sometimes sewing or knitting.

  Had the church been open, she could have sat in there. But she was fairly sure that, except when a mass was being held, it was kept locked.

  She could go for a walk on the lanes that traversed the small vineyards on the floor of the valley. But although it was bright moonlight now, there were clouds spreading from the west and before long it might be dark.

  As Lucia was debating what to do, Grey was replacing his billfold in his back trouser pocket and leaving the restaurant, cursing himself for mishandling the situation. A veteran of many delicate business negotiations, he knew he had made a botch of something far more important to him.

  At first, when Lucia had jumped up and left the table, he had thought she was going to take refuge in the washroom until her visible outrage was under control, or had vented itself in a bout of angry tears in the privacy of a cubicle. Growing up with three sisters, he had learnt early on that tears which, among men, were reserved for life’s deepest griefs, were for women a more frequently used safety-valve.

  Despite that knowledge, the thought of Lucia in tears gave him an uncomfortable feeling in his gut. Also, although the door to the ladies’ loo was round a corner, out of his line of sight, it had not been many minutes before instinct had told him that she might have been angry enough to walk out on him altogether. That she had left her shawl behind was probably an oversight.

  Questioned, the man behind the bar near the entrance had confirmed that the señorita had left.

  Now, as he strode down the hill in pursuit, Grey wondered what the hell he could say to put things right between them…or as right as they could ever be while the present constraints on his life remained in place.

  No acceptable explanation came to him. The real one he could not share with her. From her point of view, it probably wouldn’t make sense. Women saw life from a different perspective. They had their own set of imperatives. A typical example of their thinking was his mother. She had given up everything else she valued out of love for his father. It had been a purely emotional decision made in the heat of a young girl’s passion for a man unwilling to make any concessions.

  It had been a mistake. But women were like that. The moment they fell in love, they threw common sense to the winds. She should have waited, tested the depths of her feelings. Instead, brought up to believe that there was only one true love in the world for her, and his father was Mr Right, she had jumped into a marriage that could be one of the reasons she was in hospital now.

  His own experience was the opposite of hers. At nineteen he had suffered a bad bout of calf love that had served as a kind of inoculation and, for years afterwards, had seemed to make him immune, not to desire but to the tender feelings that made the difference between lust and love.

  For some time he had tried to deny the tenderness Lucia evoked in him.

  Now she had made it clear that although she found him physically attractive, she could never forget that he had been the instrument of her downfall, the man whose evidence had led to a nightmare ordeal that would probably give her bad dreams for the rest of her life.

  ‘Aren’t you being rather presumptuous…?’ she had flung at him, and he could not deny it. On the strength of a single kiss, he had made a crass idiot of himself. He should have kept his mouth shut. What had he hoped to gain by half-explaining things to her?

  Near the bottom of the hill, where the lane took a turn between two houses before joining a narrow street, Lucia looked over her shoulder. Having no serious expectation of seeing Grey coming after her, she was surprised to see him tearing down the slope, his long-legged stride covering the ground at a pace that meant when she reached No 12 he would probably have caught up with her.

  Wondering what he would say, if he was in a black temper with her for walking out on him, she quickened her pace.

  It had been light when they came through the narrow lane at the back of the church on the way out. Now, in the shadow of the granite-block building, it was dark. But even if Grey had not been following, she would not have felt any nervousness about who might be lurking in that dark space. The village felt a safe place.

  I should like to live here, she thought. Then, unbidden, came the after-wish—with Grey. But she knew that was only a crazy pipe-dream. She could adapt to this simple rural life. Grey never could. His place in the world was fixed, and it was on a plane from which she was forever excluded.

  There was no place for someone with a prison record in the rarefied atmosphere of his élite world.

  He caught up with her moments after she reached the front door of No 12. Unfurling the shawl and holding it by its corners, he reached a long arm over her head and dropped it into place round her shoulders. It was done as swiftly and deftly as a matador swirling his cape.

  ‘If I hadn’t realised you had gone, you would have had a long chilly wait for me to come with the key,’ he said dryly.

  He sounded surprisingly calm. But she felt he must be furious inwardly. She was probably the only woman who had ever walked out on him.

  Grey unlocked the door and reached inside to switch on the hall light. Then he stood back and gestured for her to precede him.

  In the hall, Lucia said briskly, ‘Goodnight,’ and made for the staircase, fully expecting a hard hand to fall on her shoulder and spin her round to face him.

  It didn’t happen. He said, ‘Goodnight,’ and she heard him double-lock the door. Before she had reached the top of the stairs, he had gone into the kitchen, perhaps to make himself some more coffee.

  She was still awake when the church clock struck one and then, a few minutes later, repeated the single chime.

  By this time she was bitterly regretting the way she had handled things. I
nstead of making that stupid pride-driven remark about his presumptuousness, what she should have said was, What kind of painful complications?

  Seconds earlier he had asked her not to be angry or offended. But, full of her own feelings, she had ignored that. Loving him, she should have been more sensitive to whatever was on his mind.

  From downstairs came a sound that, had she been sleeping, she wouldn’t have heard. The sound of a light being switched on at the far end of the hall. Moments later, straining her ears, she caught the sound of a door being opened and closed. Was he going to the bathroom next to his bedroom that doubled as a downstairs cloakroom when the owners of the house had visitors?

  Mrs Calderwood sometimes went to the bathroom during the night but Lucia doubted if Grey did. In a few minutes she would know because, if only faintly, the flush would be audible.

  When she didn’t hear it, or the click of the switch as he returned to his room, she concluded that, like her, he couldn’t sleep and had gone to the kitchen for a hot drink or possibly a nightcap.

  This was confirmed when she scrambled out of bed and went to the window. A broad beam of light from the kitchen window was illuminating part of the courtyard.

  In one reckless instant Lucia made a decision. Slipping her arms into the sleeves of her cotton robe, she pulled it round her and fastened the sash. Then, briefly, she used her hairbrush.

  Barefoot, so that the sound of her mules on the treads would not announce her coming, she went down the stairs.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the kitchen door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GREY was leaning against the worktop that divided the kitchen area from the dining space. There wouldn’t have been room for a robe in the small grip he had brought with him. He was wearing a towel wrapped sarong-fashion round his hips.

  Lit by downlighters fixed between the ceiling beams, his lightly tanned shoulders and chest had the sheen of polished stone. For a man in his middle thirties, he was in great shape, but his torso reminded her of sculptures of the Athenian athletes of Ancient Greece, not the exaggerated musculature of modern body-builders.

  Straightening, he asked abruptly, ‘What are you doing down here?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. I came down for a drink.’ She glanced towards the electric kettle. It had a red light in the base that glowed when it was switched on. The light wasn’t on at the moment.

  ‘Water?’ He opened the fridge and reached for a bottle of spring water stored on a shelf in the back of the door.

  His movement revealed that behind him, on the worktop, was a tumbler of straw-coloured liquid that she took to be whisky and water.

  ‘No, not water…a gin and tonic.’

  She went to the tray where some bottles of spirits were kept. There were glasses in the cupboard above it. She took down a tall glass, removed the cap on the bottle of gin and poured out a generous slug. Gin and tonic had been her father’s favourite drink. She had always preferred wine.

  Behind her, she heard the snap and fizz of a can of tonic being opened. When she turned, he was holding it out for her.

  ‘Thank you.’ She took the can from him.

  ‘Your feet will get cold…better drink it in bed,’ he advised, making it clear he did not welcome her presence.

  ‘Clay tiles aren’t cold like terrazzo. I have more on than you do.’ He was also barefoot, she had noticed.

  His mouth compressed disapprovingly, but whatever he was thinking he kept to himself.

  Lucia put her glass to her lips and swallowed some Dutch courage. ‘As you’re down here, shouldn’t we talk?’

  ‘It was you who cut short our last conversation,’ he said curtly.

  ‘I know, but—for your mother’s sake—I’m prepared to go through the motions of being…friendly.’

  He picked up his glass and drank from it. She had the intuitive feeling that, for reasons beyond her grasp, he was close to some personal snapping point. But he couldn’t feel more tense than she did, poised to do something totally out of character. Or, if not out of character, certainly something she could only contemplate because she was desperately in love with him.

  ‘Friendship is not an option,’ he said dismissively. ‘We can, as you say, put up a front for my mother’s benefit. But we’ve both put our cards on the table and there’s no viable meeting point. It’s best if, as far as possible, we keep out of each other’s way.’

  ‘There is an alternative,’ she said.

  ‘If you mean your leaving—no. That won’t do,’ he said flatly. ‘It would worry and upset my mother. Anyway you’re not ready to launch out on your own yet.’

  ‘You underestimate me, Grey…I could survive on my own. But I don’t think that’s necessary. Life is about adapting to circumstances. Earlier tonight you talked about our mutual desire to go to bed together. Straight off the top of my head, as advertising people say, my reaction was guarded. Now I’ve had time to think it through. If neither of us wants a serious involvement, but we do want to make love together…then why not? Other people do…all the time. It’s really not such a big deal.’

  She moved towards him, put her glass on the counter and placed her palms lightly on his hard chest. Trembling inside, but outwardly calm, she tilted her face up to his. ‘Let’s go for it,’ she said softly.

  Grey’s fingers snapped over her wrists like handcuffs. Knowing he didn’t mean to hurt her, she managed not to wince.

  ‘What’s made you change your mind?’ he demanded. ‘At the restaurant you said you didn’t agree with casual relationships.’

  ‘You took me by surprise. Until tonight I’ve never been sure how you felt about me. I only knew how I felt about you.’ She drew in her breath. ‘I want you. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone. I want to spend what’s left of tonight in your arms.’

  For an instant, before she closed her eyes and parted her lips, she saw the blaze of desire in the dark grey eyes looking down at her. The next moment she was in his arms, being kissed with a passion that wiped all thought from her mind, leaving her senses in charge.

  The feel of his arms around her, the fierce ardour of his kiss, was even more blissful than the kisses conjured up by her imagination. She relaxed into his embrace, swept away on a surging tide of emotion, not caring where it might carry her or where she might be washed up.

  In the small part of his mind that was still functioning rationally as he crushed her pliant body against him and felt the intoxicating softness of her lips under his, Grey heard the warning bells and chose to ignore them.

  He had been aroused from the moment she entered the kitchen, looking infinitely desirable in the thin robe that, when she moved, gave tantalising hints of the lovely body it concealed.

  He couldn’t believe she had offered herself to him so openly and generously. She had always seemed too reserved to speak with such candour. Her frank declaration of her desire for him had excited him more than anything any woman had ever said to him.

  He kissed her until he could feel her heart hammering as wildly as his own. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her to the door, using his elbow to depress the lever-type handle.

  ‘I’ll put out the lights,’ she said, in a husky murmur, reaching for the switches.

  In the seconds before the kitchen was plunged into darkness, he saw a glow in her eyes that had never been there before.

  Neither of them had thought to draw the curtains at the windows in the hall and the light from the street lamp was enough to show him the way to his bedroom. It was Lucia who opened the door, and he closed it behind them with his shoulder.

  As the room was not overlooked, he never drew the curtains. The moon was no longer full, but still gave enough light to show the double bed and the rumpled sheet he had thrown off when restlessness had driven him to get up.

  He set Lucia on her feet on the oriental rug between the end of the bed and the chest of drawers. Then he untied the sash round her waist and slid the robe off her shoulde
rs. Her nightdress was made of some thin stuff that, in this light, was transparent. He could see the quintessentially feminine contours of her waist and hips and anticipate how silky smooth they would feel, in a moment, under his palms.

  As the nightdress was not the kind that would slip off her shoulders and slide to the floor like the robe, he took handfuls of the filmy fabric and drew it upwards. She helped him by raising her arms like a child being undressed. Moments later she was naked.

  For the second time he picked her up and held her against his chest, the feel of her cool bare skin and the first sight of her breasts making the blood race through his veins like a riptide.

  He walked round the end of the bed and lowered her onto the mattress, letting her go reluctantly for the moment it took him to shed the towel round his hips.

  When he undid the towel, and dropped it, and Lucia saw the whole of his tall strong body in all its magnificent masculinity, there was a small fraction of time when she wondered if she was mad to have offered herself to him without the smallest degree of commitment on his side; on the contrary, a plain and unequivocal disclamation of commitment.

  Then she knew that it didn’t matter. She loved him as she would never love any other man. If this one night was all she would ever have of him, it would be better than nothing: one brilliant memory to treasure for the rest of her life.

  Love was about giving, and her body was all she had to give him.

  She lifted her arms to embrace him. A moment later he was beside her, sliding his arms beneath her, bending his head to kiss her.

  The sun was shining when she woke up, alone.

  A small clock on top of the chest of drawers showed it was nearly eight. She had overslept by an hour. Not surprising, considering how little sleep they had had.

  A song came into her head. ‘One Night of Love’. She had heard it on the radio while she was nursing her father, in a programme on hit songs of the past. Sung as a duet by a man and a woman with the perfect articulation fashionable in the days of wind-up gramophones and records three times the size of compact discs, it had stayed in her memory, not the words but the title and the lilting romantic tune. She hummed it now as she lay wondering where Grey was.