by Robyn Donald
Excitement began to soar beyond rational thought; sensation, rich and multifarious, flooded her. She grasped his lean hips and held him there while she moved against him, and when his heavy eyelids lifted she smiled and drowned in blueness as wave after wave tossed her higher and higher beyond some impalpable barrier where she was nothing but feeling, so consumed by ecstasy that she cried out as her body shuddered beneath his.
And then he clamped her hips in his callused hands and went with her into that place where nothing else existed but the two of them. For long moments they remained wrapped in each other’s arms while the aftershocks of orgasm buffeted through them, leaving them slick with sweat that cooled slowly, yet faster than desire and passion.
When at last he pushed himself up on his elbows she gave an inarticulate murmur of protest and opened sated, drowsy eyes. He looked, she thought with a jolt of the heart, strained, although he smiled and bent to kiss her mouth gently.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, turning onto his side so that she could breathe more easily. He didn’t loosen his gnp.
After a while she realised that he’d gone to sleep, and outrage warred with amusement.
It somehow made him seem much more—human—and she had to admit that she was tired too.
And more than content to stay where she was.
Oddly enough, just before she drifted off to sleep, her last, barely conscious thought was that she was glad his jilting Aura had never been in this house.
Jacinta woke hours later, to complete bewilderment. A soft light shone through the uncurtained windows, but she wasn’t in her own room—and then, as her night-accustomed eyes roamed the room, she remembered.
Fully-clothed, Paul was standing in the window. Suddenly racked by embarrassment at her nudity under the sheet, she said uncertainly, ‘Paul?’
‘I’m here.’
‘I know.’ Her fingers plucked nervously at the sheet. ‘What—?’ The words wouldn’t come. She swallowed, and started again. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Wondering how I’m going to tell my cousin that I’ve broken his trust and slept with the woman he’s engaged to.’ He spoke with grim distinctness, every word an arrow directed at himself as well as her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PAUL’S words hummed and buzzed in her ears, echoing so that she couldn’t make sense of them. Secret, inchoate dreams she’d been building in her unconscious mind shrivelled into dust, doomed before she’d even recognised them.
‘What?’ she asked.
He didn’t turn, but the light of dawn caught on his hair ‘You heard me,’ he said evenly.
Jacinta forced herself to speak with slow, painstaking care. ‘I thought I heard you. Where the hell did you get that idea?’
‘From Gerard, of course,’ he said, scorn icing the words. ‘He told me when he arranged for you to stay here.’
She drew in a deep, ragged breath and sat up, arms folded across her breasts to hold the sheet in place. Her hair fell across her shoulders, slippery and warm. If she let herself, she’d remember the way his hands had speared through it ..
‘I don’t believe this,’ she said, trying to sound reasonable and sensible. ‘Gerard wouldn’t have told you that because he knows it’s not true.’
‘He said that you’d kept it secret because universities don’t welcome affairs between tutors and students. It makes sense.’ His voice was studied and dispassionate, as though they’d never lain together locked in the most intimate embrace of all, breasts crushed against chest, legs intertwined, mouth to mouth, open to each other.
She shook her head, seizing on what seemed to her chaotic mind to be the flaw in his argument. ‘I’m not his student now.’
‘True, but he’s going to be your supervisor next year.’ Although he didn’t move, she shivered at the icy condemnation in his tone.
He was serious. Or was this a perverted sort of kiss-off?
She said heavily, ‘Do you honestly think that I’d be—here—if I was secretly engaged to Gerard?’
‘It depends on why you’re engaged to him,’ he said almost indifferently. ‘If it’s because you want security, then, yes, you might well feel that I’m a better bet than he is. I don’t blame you for that—your childhood must have been lacking in stability.’
‘That’s big of you,’ she said between her teeth. ‘As it happens, you’re quite wrong. My mother kept me fed and loved, and that’s the sort of stability most children need.’ A sudden memory narrowed her eyes. ‘I suppose you thought I was eyeing up Dean and Laurence Perry too, seeing which one offered the most stability.’
‘It seemed possible,’ he said stonily.
Pain began to niggle behind her eyes. ‘I must be extraordinarily stupid. That’s why you kept bringing Dean’s Brenda into the conversation.’
‘It doesn’t matter. What does matter is Gerard.’
‘I don’t believe this.’ Exhaustion numbed her mind, making it impossible to follow her fleeting fragments of thought to a logical conclusion. Ignoring the sheet, she pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and strove desperately for composure.
Eventually she was able to say woodenly, ‘He’s never touched me. Never. Not even a kiss.’ She paused, but Paul said nothing, didn’t move. A wild mixture of emotions clogged her throat. ‘If I’d thought he was in love with me I wouldn’t have accepted the computer, or worked for him—’
‘Or let him subsidise your accommodation?’ Paul interpolated smoothly.
Jacinta’s head came up. ‘What?’ she croaked.
In a clipped, metallic voice he said, ‘He subsidises your rent at the flat—the flat he found for you—by fifty dollars a week. He plans to pay out more for your tuition fees next year.’
‘He said he knew of a grant,’ she said hesitantly. ‘For women whose tertiary education has been interrupted by family concerns. It’s given out by a trust.’
‘Gerard’s trust.’ He didn’t try to hide the scorn that blazed through his words. Inexorably he went on, ‘And the flat? Did you really believe his tale of someone who was in Oxford on a scholarship?’
‘I had no reason not to,’ she cried out, realising for the first time how naive she’d been.
‘It didn’t occur to you,’ he drawled, ‘that to accept the offer of accommodation from a man who was sexually interested in you—’
She leapt out of the bed and flew across to him, hand upraised. ‘He wasn’t—I didn‘t—oh!’
For he’d caught her hand and twisted it behind her back, not painfully but with relentless speed, bringing her up against him. He was wearing a cotton robe in some dark material, thin enough to reveal his arousal.
Her breath stopping in her lungs, Jacinta registered the sharp aroma of danger Her rage ebbed into humiliation as she stared into his implacable eyes, and she shivered, the cool morning air flowing through the open window and over her naked body.
‘Don’t ever hit me,’ Paul said, his voice so soft she barely heard it, yet each word resounded through her head. He was holding onto his control with the thinnest of reins, and for the first time in her life Jacinta was truly afraid of a man.
Gerard had bragged that his cousin never lost his temper, that no one had ever seen him angry. Gerard had been wrong.
That icy, concentrated contempt terrified her.
‘Why would he do all that for you if he didn’t plan to marry you? He’s never been the sort of man who resorts to prostitutes, and he’s too intelligent to pay out for a woman with a prostitute’s mind. He’s been helping the woman he loves, the woman he plans to marry.’
Her hold on reality slipping, she closed her eyes. ‘No,’ she whispered.
‘I’ve known my cousin for as long as he’s lived, and he’s not a liar.’
‘He lied to both of us,’ she shot back on a surge of adrenalin. And because she couldn’t surrender to the despair that threatened to exhaust her, she whipped up her anger to add savagely, ‘Unless he felt that lying was the only way he could prot
ect me from you.’
His features clamped into an impervious mask. ‘If so, it didn’t work,’ he said, coldly sardonic. ‘And if he thought you needed protection from me, that still implies a much closer relationship than you’re admitting to. A man is only so protective of the woman he calls his.’
Jacinta jerked her arm, and he released her as though she fouled his hands. Hot denials hovered on her tongue, but she could see from his bleak, uncompromising face that nothing she could say would convince him that Gerard had lied.
Accepting that it was useless, she turned away and drew in a long, agonising breath while she struggled for the strength to get her through the next few minutes.
‘For God’s sake put some clothes on,’ Paul said between his teeth.
Shame and embarrassment roiled over her. She walked quickly back to the small pile of her clothes on the floor and began to get into them.
It didn’t help that she understood. Aura had run away with Paul’s best friend; he had just spent the night with the woman he believed to be engaged to his cousin. Not only did he despise Jacinta, he despised himself.
Steadily she said, ‘Men don’t own women.’
He smiled, and a shiver ran down her spine. ‘Tell that to a jealous lover.’
‘I’m not going to debate that,’ she said fiercely, yanking on her shorts. ‘You know it’s wrong. No one has the right to own anyone else. As for Gerard, he lied.’
‘So you say.’
She swallowed, knowing it was hopeless to protest her innocence. He believed his cousin.
And that, she thought painfully, was an even greater betrayal than his physical rejection of her.
Without bothering to put on her bra, she shrugged into the shirt and began to fasten the buttons, concentrating fiercely on the mundane task because it was all she had to keep the demons of despair at bay.
‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to tell him.’
‘It’s none of his business,’ she said, but without conviction.
The quotation from Shakespeare was burnt in letters of fire across her brain, along with the one he’d murmured to her the preceding evening. She’d never, she thought savagely, be able to read Shakespeare again without having both scenes, last night and this morning, spring to life again.
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one
Take honour from me, and my life is done.
A dangerous honour, she thought bitterly.
A swift glance revealed Paul’s austere, ruthless profile against the light of the day outside; she thought of Vikings, of men who held to their conscience in the face of death. Because he hated himself for betraying his cousin’s trust, he was putting them both through the rigorous hell he assigned to violators of his code.
He said, ‘I can’t let him marry you knowing that we—’
‘Wanted each other? Slept together?’ She scooped up her sandals and headed towards the door. ‘Don’t spoil your relationship with Gerard over me,’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘I’m not going to marry him, or sleep with him, ever. Whatever relationship he’s implied is a product of his imagination and exists only in his head. He needs a psychiatrist.’
It wasn’t a very satisfying parting shot but it was all she could think of. Back in her room she sat down on the bed and tried to reassemble her thoughts, but after a moment her sandals and underwear dropped from limp fingers and she gave in to the luxury of tears, curling up in a ball on the bedcover while she wept.
It was the sudden transition from heaven to hell, she thought drearily, the abrupt and shattering destruction of all her illusions.
Perhaps she’d deserved to have them destroyed. She’d been utterly credulous.
Shame dried the tears. Why had Gerard lied? Why, when she wouldn’t accept money from him, had he come up with this elaborate deception—helped, of course, by her gullibility?
Simple kindness was no answer. Had he truly fantasised that her acceptance of his help meant that she was falling in love with him? Surely he didn’t plan to reveal the amount she owed him and suggest the oldest way in the world to repay it?
Jacinta got up and walked across to the window. Several blackbirds immediately shrieked a warning from the lawn and flew low and straight into the garden border.
He was sick, or he was like Mark, who fed a shaky ego on women’s vulnerability And she’d fallen for it. Was there something in her that signalled to men that she was a fool?
She owed Gerard money she wasn’t going to be able to repay. Unless she used her mother’s money.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she whispered thickly, resting her head against the cool glass.
She stayed like that until the sun bounded up over the edge of the sea. Then, exhausted and aching, she collected clean clothes together and went to the bathroom.
As she dried herself in front of the big mirror she looked gravely at the soft red marks on her breasts with a heavy-lidded, sated gaze that the morning’s events hadn’t been able to banish.
Paul had tempered his great strength until his control had snapped. And even then he hadn’t hurt her; her skin was fine and easily bruised.
A wave of erotic longing gathered in the pit of her stomach. As an initiation into the delights of making love—sex, she corrected—hers had been wonderful. Perhaps Paul had been born knowing how to bring a woman to the heights of ecstasy, but experience had refined that initial understanding to a skilled, passionate mastery that overwhelmed her.
Yet in some basic way he mistrusted all women.
Because of the woman who’d left him to run away with his best friend? It was too easy, too pat. Other men had endured similar experiences yet learned to trust again.
Her mother used to say ‘Look to the child’ when they discussed the foibles of friends and neighbours. Probably the root cause of Paul’s mistrust, of his rigid insistence on honour, lay buried deep in his childhood.
While she’d showered her unconscious had made her decision for her. She’d give up her university studies and find a job, using her mother’s legacy to reimburse Gerard.
Back in her room she began to pack, biting her lip to hold in the tears until she managed to achieve a measure of self-control.
A knock on the door made her freeze, her breath solidifying in a hard lump at the centre of her chest.
Don’t be silly, she told herself as she went across to open it. He won’t hurt you.
Paul stood outside, his expression remote and guarded. ‘We have to talk,’ he said. His eyes, their blueness leached of emotion and warmth, focused on the suitcase at the side of the bed. ‘But not now. Jacinta, there’s an emergency at sea—a boat’s on fire—and I’m going out with Dean in a spotter plane from the Aero Club. Wait here until I get back. And don’t make any arrangements until you hear what I have to say.’
A hidden, fugitive hope persuaded her to say, ‘All right.’
He nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said, meticulously polite as ever, and turned and strode down the hall towards his room.
It was a long morning. After Jacinta had finished packing she went into the kitchen and forced down toast and coffee.
Fran said, ‘That’s not going to keep you going for long.’
‘It’s enough. Why are Dean and Paul searching for a boat that’s on fire?’
‘Because the idiot has no idea where he is,’ Fran said shortly. ‘He radioed in to the coastguard, but he’s out of sight of land so he’s lost.’
Aren’t we all? Jacinta thought cynically.
Still cocooned in a merciful numbness, she cleared everything from the computer so that no one would be able to read her manuscript, and put the two sets of diskettes into her suitcase.
At morning tea Jacinta surrendered to her driving curiosity and asked Fran as casually as she could, ‘How long have you worked for Paul?’
‘Five years; since my marriage broke up,’ the housekeeper told her readily. ‘But my dad used to work for his parents, so I’ve known him all my life. He was a lovely
boy: a bit serious and always very responsible, and that smile of his—well, you know what it’s like.’
Once she’d left Waitapu she’d never see that smile again. Jacinta said, ‘His parents are both dead, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. His father was a hard man and you didn’t cross him—everyone liked him as well as respected him, though. He was a good man. A bit like Paul, really, without the charm. Paul got that from his mother. She was lovely, but she was sort of distant, as though she didn’t really live in this world. I don’t think she knew how to deal with children.’ Fran glanced out of the window. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I thought we might have rain today. Look at that front coming up.’
By lunchtime it was raining properly. Jacinta couldn’t eat anything, and she couldn’t settle either. Was that distant mother the clue to Paul’s character? A hard father and a distant, charming mother...
Fran, who’d apparently been keeping an eye on her, came into the morning room as she put down a book, and said, ‘Why don’t you watch a video?’
‘I suppose I could.’ Perhaps a video would help keep the gnawing agony at bay. She might be able to lose herself in a good story.
‘There’s a stack of them in the bottom left-hand cupboard there, underneath the bookshelves,’ Fran said.
The books in the morning room were the sort kept to entertain visitors—local history and geology, books by New Zealanders. Paul’s main collection was kept in his office, into which Jacinta had never even looked, let alone stepped. He also read magazines of all sorts: literary, science, farming, and manufacturing and business. Jacinta had enjoyed herself with the contents of the morning room bookshelves, but she’d never bothered with the videos.
They turned out to be an interesting selection. Several classics, some very good dramas, a few comedies, and items that had been taped from the television, most labelled in a strong hand.
Fascinated, because these were programmes Paul had wanted to watch, Jacinta sat through a hard-hitting political discussion recorded a few months previously, a programme on a small New Zealand town she remembered seeing some years ago with her mother, and what appeared to be an amateur video of a pastoral show.