‘There must be no end of women willing to cook meals for you, though,’ Abigail said, without thinking, and he frowned slightly.
‘I try not to encourage that,’ he commented, staring at her over the rim of his coffee-cup. ‘I don’t want any woman carving out a little niche in my apartment and then thinking that she’s indispensable.’
‘No, of course not,’ Abigail said evenly. ‘Indispensable isn’t a word that figures in your vocabulary, so I remember you telling me.’ And even if he hadn’t, she would have guessed. Ross Anderson was not a fireside and slippers man. Wasn’t that why he had found Martin so dull? Wasn’t that why he found the whole concept of stability so boring? He lived life in the fast lane, a wealthy, powerful man who preferred to avoid the clutter of a little woman back at the ranch, cooking supper and waiting for his return. He enjoyed women but he didn’t want to be encumbered with one.
In which case, Abigail thought, what am I doing here? The question confused her.
‘Should we try and see if we can clear a path out of here?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘The snow doesn’t seem so bad, and perhaps if we could make it to the main road we’d be all right.’
Ross stood up and came over to where she was standing by the kitchen sink. ‘I’m not sure if I find the thought of leaving here all that appealing,’ he said in a low voice that made her head spin.
He slipped both his hands underneath her jumper and circled her nipples with his fingers, smiling as her breathing quickened.
‘Do you?’ he asked, pushing up the jumper so that her breasts were exposed.
‘Not when you do that,’ she said shakily, looking into his eyes and seeing the reflection of her own desire. He bent to lick the erect nipples and she groaned.
‘We should try and make a start,’ she murmured weakly and he sighed, straightening and lowering her jumper.
‘I suppose so. The snow’s definitely on the way out. I’ll go out and see what can be done. What kind of car have you got?’
She told him and he frowned thoughtfully. ‘I’ll start the engine anyway,’ he said. ‘Make sure that the damn thing will still go after this. If we can make it to my car, we’ll stand a better chance.’
The cottage seemed disconcertingly empty without Ross in it. The cosy charm which had filled her with a relaxed glow now irritated her, and was somehow lifeless and stifling. She kept peering out of the window, watching him while he shovelled away the snow, with the steady hum of the engine in the background. The car had started up first time and, because the cottage was set amid trees, the actual fall of snow on the ground was thick, but not so thick that it couldn’t be cleared, at least partially, with a great deal of work.
Abigail watched the steady rise and fall of Ross’s shoulders, the grim concentration on his face. It would be strange getting back to London. She wanted to keep seeing Ross, even though she hated the dependency she was beginning to feel. It was as if he had got into her bloodstream and, now that he was there, was running wild through her, turning her into someone else. The calm, detached person had given way to someone more elemental, and that frightened her.
There’s nothing wrong in sleeping with him, she argued with herself. Why shouldn’t she enjoy the pleasure he gave her while she could? What would be the point in fighting the intense physical attraction she felt for him? Would that make her a better person?
She drifted back to the sofa and tried to read, while outside the snow cleared to give way to hazy, unwilling sunshine.
It was mid-afternoon when Ross came back inside, stripping off his clothes immediately and wiping his face with his arm.
‘Well?’ she asked, jumping up.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what about some coffee and I’ll deliver my progress report?’
She made him a cup of coffee, with her body on red alert now that he was back inside the cottage, and waited while he thirstily drank.
‘I think we could be out of here tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘The snow’s stopped and with any luck that’ll be the end of it, and with what I’ve cleared, and some thawing overnight, it shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘That’s a relief,’ she said dubiously, and their eyes met in shared understanding.
‘It’s not going to end just because we’re no longer here,’ he said. ‘I’d still want you whether we were in the Lake District, London or Timbuktu for that matter.’
‘I can’t work for you and…’
‘Why not?’
She shrugged and turned away. Now that she was facing it, the prospect of returning to reality was frankly awful. She didn’t want to get back to the steady grind of London, and she could already feel an insistent voice in her telling her that what had happened between them had been madness, lunacy. For a while they had been swept out of time, but she would have to come back down to earth.
‘Look at me, Abby,’ he commanded, putting down the coffee-cup and turning her to face him. ‘There’s an electricity between us, and there’s no point in pretending that it doesn’t exist. Neither of us is looking for any kind of commitment, and we get along well together. Why agonise about it?’
He shot her a persuasive smile, a question in his raised brows.
When he smiled like that, Abigail found it very hard to think straight.
‘Tell me that you don’t want my company and I’ll get out of your life,’ he murmured, with a hint of caress in his voice.
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ she said, muddled. ‘Martin and I, well, I thought that he was the real thing, I thought that what I felt for him was love.’
‘Love confuses things,’ Ross said bluntly. ‘I’ve witnessed enough divorces among my friends to be in any doubt that what starts out as love ends up as bitterness. Love is a selfish emotion and a misleading one. People in love think that it will get them through anything, but love and real life don’t go together.’
‘That’s very cynical,’ she said, disturbed.
‘Is it? The statistics prove my point.’
‘The statistics also prove that for every one marriage that ends in disaster, there will be another that doesn’t,’ she pointed out, and he shook his head impatiently.
‘That’s a gamble I’d rather live without.’ He stared at her and his eyes were hard and inflexible. ‘If you’re looking for love, Abby, then we might just as well finish this before it starts.’
‘Is that the speech you give to all of your girlfriends?’ She didn’t want him to see how much his words had affected her. It was a silly, hypothetical conversation anyway. She wasn’t looking for love. She had too soon ended one relationship to even think about finding another, not that Ross Anderson would qualify as a candidate for a serious relationship anyway. She was intensely attracted to him, but it was a purely physical thing.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, searching her face.
‘Oh, you couldn’t,’ she said lightly, turning away so that his probing eyes couldn’t read the expression on her face. ‘You’re right, neither of us is looking for commitment, and you could only hurt me if I did want something more, if I were in love with you.’ She laughed and it sounded brittle. ‘And of course, I’m not.’
‘That’s good,’ he said, looking away, with a dull flush on his cheekbones.
‘I still don’t think that I could become your mistress, though,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I know that it’s a bit like trying to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted, but…’ She hesitated. ‘I’ve never…I’m not promiscuous; I don’t run around with men.’
‘I know,’ he said with an intimate laugh that made her blush.
‘It would make working together very difficult.’
‘Only if you let it.’
She sighed. ‘Can I think about it?’ she asked, even though it was more a statement of fact than a question.
He shrugged, and when he spoke there was the same teasing tone in his voice, although his mouth was hard. ‘Trying to tell me that if it comes to a choice bet
ween your job or me, you’d choose the job?’
He didn’t like that, she could see. Ross Anderson was not used to rejection. He had a staggering sexual appeal and had probably been bowling women over from the cradle. She doubted that any woman had ever told him that she would have to go away and think about whether she wanted involvement with him.
‘It’s a very good job,’ she commented mildly. ‘I would find it very difficult to get another one quite like it.’
He was finding it difficult not to scowl, and he changed the conversation abruptly, talking about the weather conditions. The snow had vanished as quickly as it had come, and he told her that they would have to make a run for it, literally, as early as possible the following morning. It would be stupid to bank on clear weather indefinitely.
‘What shall we do about my rented car?’ Abigail asked, relieved to be on neutral ground. ‘I could always follow you back to the motorway, and then return it to their head office in London,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘We’ll see,’ he replied negligently. He was keeping his distance, and she suspected that there was an element of pique behind that. He might be attracted to her, for whatever reasons, but he wasn’t about to beg, and they spent the rest of the evening chatting amicably enough, but then he merely nodded when she went upstairs to her bedroom after a cup of coffee, and branched off into the guest room. The heating had returned three hours earlier and not only was it now warm everywhere, but there was also hot water, enough for a shower. There was also light, wonderful light, instead of walking around in a state of pervading greyness, broken only by candles and the glow from the fire. In a way, she missed the romantic semi-darkness, but in another she was relieved that things were back to normal. It helped. It made what had happened between them seem like a dream, and dreams were no threat to her peace of mind.
It was a slow process getting from the cottage to his Range Rover, and without much discussion they decided that she would follow him down to London. It would save him having to send someone along to collect her car.
That suited her fine. She wanted the time on her own anyway; she needed to think. Ross still hadn’t said a word to her about what would happen to them once they returned to London, and she hadn’t broached the subject. Now, with the car travelling south, and civilisation reminding her at every turn that the reality that she had tried to push away in the cottage was inescapable, Abigail felt the true force of her stupidity sinking in.
She had made a grave mistake. She could see that now, in the quiet of her car, without that dark, handsome face compelling her to ignore her judgement and take what was on offer. She had learnt nothing from what had happened in Boston. She wondered whether he was similarly regretting what had happened between them.
When they got to London, with his car slowly covering the miles so that she could keep up in hers, she flashed her headlights at him twice and disappeared in the direction of her apartment.
She unpacked her bags from the car and trundled inside, and the mundaneness of the flat hit her as soon as she stepped through the front door. The dishes were still standing on the draining board in the kitchen, right where she had left them, the plants were in dire need of water, even the cushion on the sofa where she had sat before she left still bore the indentation of her body. What had happened at the cottage had been a wild fire that had raged through her system, scorching through everything, and that fire had been extinguished. Hadn’t it?
Her mother called to ask her where she had been, and then, once she had established that everything was all right, spent half an hour reiterating her thoughts on the broken engagement and trying to persuade her daughter to reconsider her idiot behaviour.
‘You’re a fool,’ she said, and Abigail could picture the pursed lips and the disapproving shake of the head. ‘You’ll end up on the shelf if you’re not careful, my girl. Martin was right for you, a nice young man.’
‘Martin was not right for me, Mother,’ Abigail said quietly and with conviction. ‘In fact, I can safely say that the best thing I ever did was breaking off our engagement. Now that’s the end of that, and I don’t want you ever, ever to bring the subject up again.’
Which left her mother speechless and by the end of the conversation obligingly subdued. Maybe, Abigail thought with a twinge of satisfaction, all my mother needed was a firm hand. From adolescent quaking, she had progressed to silence when it came to dealing with her mother, and now she wondered whether what had been needed all along had simply been forthrightness.
Martin then called to tell her that he had been worried because he and Alice had heard on the news how badly the Lake District had been affected by snow and power cuts. They chatted briefly, and she could already feel the stilted tenor of their conversation as a prelude to what would eventually come. She would keep in touch with them both, because of Alice, but visits would be polite rather than warm and no doubt eventually they would be reduced to Christmas cards with a quick note to exchange news. She didn’t dislike Alice because of what she had done—after all, Martin had hardly been her property at the time, if he ever had been—but there would always be an edge of wariness in their dealings with one another. That was life.
She called the car rental company to inform them that she would be delivering the car back to London, which sent them into a paroxysm of confusion and paper rustling. By the end of the day she felt dead on her feet and depressingly defeated.
She made herself a light dinner of beans and spaghetti, which tasted fairly awful, and was about to clear the dishes when the doorbell went. She felt herself freeze. She couldn’t face Ross, not yet. She had to have some time to regain her composure, and if that was him at the door, she knew that her composure was destined to head straight through the window.
She was so convinced that it was going to be him that when she opened the door, making sure to leave the chain on, it was almost a relief to find Fiona standing outside.
‘It’s very cold out here,’ the other woman said, when Abigail made no attempt to remove the chain.
The relief was giving way to curiosity, and she pulled open the door and stood aside so that Fiona could enter. Which she did with great presence, the self-confident, easy stride of a woman who knew that she would be noticed wherever she went.
She was wearing an ankle-length ivory coat, which would have looked ridiculous on anyone else, but which gave her an air of studied elegance that suited the tailored pale hair and the diamond-cold eyes. Abigail observed her in silence, and then politely invited her to sit down.
Fiona glanced at the chair, as if looking for germs, and then lowered herself languidly down. Her movements were all poised and graceful and Abigail observed them with dry amusement. Did Fiona ever let her hair down, she wondered, or did she even go to sleep wearing a face that looked ready to be photographed?
‘I’ve come to see you about Ross,’ Fiona said, leaning forward with one hand falling over her knee.
‘Oh, yes?’ Polite but wary, not giving anything away.
‘I know where you were these past couple of days. Stuck up in some cottage in the middle of nowhere.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘I told him that there was no need for him to go on some silly rescue mission, but he had got it into his head that you needed a knight in shining armour. I told him that you already had one, in fact you were going to be married to one, and he said that that would never take place, that the whole thing had been called off.’ She raised her blue eyes to Abigail’s, looking for confirmation.
‘Yes, it has,’ Abigail said awkwardly.
‘Why?’ The voice was still cold and there was a glimmer of pure hatred behind the azure eyes.
‘Look, what’s the point in talking about all this?’
‘You slept with him, didn’t you?’ Fiona asked, and Abigail went red. ‘I knew it.’ She stood up and began to pace around the room, her expression grim. ‘How could you? He’s mine!’
‘He doesn’t belong to anybody,’ Abigail began, but she could hear the g
uilt in her voice, the admission that what she had done had been reckless and unwise. Fiona heard it too. She faced Abigail from across the room, with her arms folded.
‘He’ll never marry you,’ she said with cold dislike. ‘You’re his secretary, for God’s sake! He might play around with you for a while, but he’ll never settle down with you!’
‘I don’t want to settle down.’
‘Yes, you do! You’re in love with him. Do you think I’m blind?’
Abigail could feel the colour drain out of her face, and she held on to the back of the sofa for support. In love with him? Of course she was. It stared her in the face and she couldn’t even deny it. And all the time she had convinced herself that what she felt had been no more than attraction, a normal reaction to a man like Ross Anderson, something she wasn’t particularly proud of, but something which she felt she could shrug off without lasting damage. All along she had convinced herself that she was mad to have let her guard slip, but that the spectre of Ellis Fitzmerton was enough to save her from the true insanity of falling in love with Ross.
Now, in retrospect, she could see that all the symptoms of something much deeper had been there. He had grown on her over the months: she had spent too long being a part of his life, getting to know his dry sense of humour the way he thought, the way he looked sitting back in his chair, dictating to her, or leaning over her to explain something. Everything had sunk into her subconscious and had taken root. She knew now what she had confusedly denied to herself, which was that she would never have made love with him if she hadn’t been deeply in love with him. Martin had been a shadow which she had tried hard to make real, but he had never fuelled her the way Ross did.
Fiona smiled triumphantly. ‘You’re not in his league. If he were serious about you, he would have told me to get lost, wouldn’t he?’ Abigail didn’t say anything, and Fiona continued in the same relentless voice, ‘I don’t know if you think you have any sort of hold over him because you shared a bed, but you haven’t. You’re not the first woman he’s slept with. You’re…’ She searched around for the most insulting description she could think of and came up with it. ‘You’re comic relief, the buffoon in a Shakespeare play, for God’s sake! He’s already forgotten about you! Two nights in a cottage, that’s all it meant to him! I suppose you threw yourself at him. The plain, desperate little secretary laying her meagre selection of goods on the shelf and begging for them to be taken.’
Beyond All Reason Page 14