by Daphne Clair
She lifted her other hand and scratched at his wrist to try and free herself, but in an instant he had captured her other wrist and was holding them back on either side of her, pinning her against the door. She braced herself against it, preparing to kick out, but he said softly, 'If you kick me, my sweet, you'll regret it.'
She could believe it. She was learning to beware of that particular note in his voice, and the hold on her wrists was quite unbreakable.
'Those eyes,' he said. 'It's unbelievable. They're quite green now.' He was smiling, but that didn't fool her. He was raging underneath it, and she knew it. They were both ready to ignite, one way or the other, and the sexual passion that had erupted between them a few moments ago was translated into an equally fierce passion of fury now.
'Let me go!' she demanded, straining against his grip. But it only made her body writhe in a way that made his eyes glitter as he watched, and she stopped, panting with temper and exertion.
'Well, well,' he drawled. 'And a minute ago I could have sworn you couldn't get close enough to me! If I didn't know better, I'd have said you're unused to being kissed—that I scared you. No. The first time I saw you, you looked like a girl who had just been thoroughly kissed—and enjoyed it. Even then, I wondered what it was like—kissing you.'
'Well, now you know 1' she almost spat at him. 'The experiment is over, professor. (Can we go now?'
'Do you always kiss and run?' he asked. 'I feel sorry for Graeme. Is this how you treated him?' The veneer of mockery crumbled suddenly, and naked anger flared in his eyes, giving a bitter twist to his mouth, a harshness to his voice. 'My God, Stacey! You called me a tease, but you have it down to a fine art. You can't kiss a man like that, and then just walk away from him. Not from me!'
'Oh? So what makes you so different from every other man in town?' she asked derisively, hardly knowing what she was saying, but fastening on the last thing he had said. 'For heaven's sake, Alex, what do you want? Wouldn't it be better to try and forget it ever happened?'
'Is that what you want to do?' he demanded.
'Yes!'
His eyes searched her face, and she saw bafflement behind the anger. 'Can you do that?'
'I must,' she said desperately. 'You must, Alex. Can't you see that?'
'No, I don't see that,' he retorted. 'Tell me why.'
'You know,' she said, suddenly weary, and turning her head away against the door.
'I've said I don't know,' he said impatiently. He released one of her wrists and brought her head round, making her meet his angry stare. 'Tell me, Stacey.'
Her temper flared again. 'Because,' she said fiercely, 'if you haven't any sense of decency or loyalty left, I have!'
'Decency and loyalty ? Loyalty to whom?' He seemed quite at sea. His hands moved to her shoulders and he gave her a little shake. 'You're not going to marry Graeme?'
Bewildered at this change of subject, she dumbly shook her head.
'Then loyalty to whom?' he repeated. Then his face changed, showing both comprehension and contempt. His eyes fell to the locket which swung between her breasts, the soft gold visible tonight because of the depth of her neckline. 'David,' he said softly. 'Good grief! I knew you were sentimental, but I didn't realise you were obsessed.'
'I'm not talking about David!' Stacey cried. 'I'm talking about my mother!'
'Your mother!' His amazement was almost ludicrous. For the first time, Stacey began to wonder if she had made a monumental fool of herself, his hands fell from her shoulders, and he looked at her oddly. 'Stacey,' he said slowly, 'your mother is not a feeble old lady who needs your support. She is a very attractive woman who has a life of her own quite apart from you and Fergus, much as she loves you both. If there's any clinging vine in your family, it's you, Stacey. You may need your mother, but don't kid yourself that she needs you. In fact, if I'm not very much mistaken, she'll shortly be getting married again.'
During the first part of this speech, Stacey had found herself fighting a rising hysteria. Ready to tell him he was quite wrong in thinking she was clinging to her mother's apron strings, she was completely thrown by his last sentence.
'That—that's what I thought,' she managed to get out, while her mind tried to make sense out of her growing conviction that Alex was not going to marry her mother, against his last assertion that she would probably marry again.
'So you haven't been completely blind to Roger's rather diffident: attentions,' he said drily. Then, his gaze sharpening, he added. 'No, of course you weren't. That's what that little comedy of yours earlier on was all about, wasn't it?' His look became a compound of puzzlement and pity. 'Stacey, you're a little old to indulge in petty jealousy over your mother. Don't you realise that it's—well, a little sick?'
The conversation was taking on the aspect of some surrealist film—a crazy nightmare. Multiple misunderstandings, Stacey thought, absurdly pleased with herself in a moment of detachment for the aptness of her alliteration. She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts, but one thing stood out. Nothing was going to cut through this incredible web of cross-purposes but the blunt truth, in plain words, even though it made her look an utter idiot.
'Alex,' she said, very clearly and slowly, so that this time he could not mistake her meaning, 'I thought you were going to marry my mother.'
For long moments he stood perfectly still, his expression quite unchanged, as her words sank in. Then in turn, he shook his head, and frowned. 'How on earth could you think that?' he said finally.
'There were lots of things,' she tried to explain. 'I— must have misconstrued.'
'You surely did! You put two and two together and made approximately six and a half, did you?' His eyes were still reflecting some bewilderment, but she could see he was thinking over the last few minutes, and his face was beginning to assume a grim look.
'You said several times how attractive she was—you seemed—close to each other. And you often seemed to be out together,' she said in extenuation.
'Not together,' he corrected. 'At the same time. I sometimes drove her to Roger's place on my way here.'
'But you invited her to partner you at that party,' she reminded him.
'Because you weren't available, and I didn't know anyone else.'
'You hadn't asked me!' she flashed.
'No, because before I got the chance, you dropped the information that you were going out with Graeme that night. Your mother knew you were my first choice.'
'Oh.'
'Yes, oh.' The grim expression was definite now. 'And you think I was making love to you while all along I intended marrying your mother? Thanks!'
'I'm sorry, Alex,' she whispered miserably.
'So you damn well ought to be!'
He stepped towards her again, and she backed to the door. She groped for the handle and opened it, hearing voices in the hall downstairs, and someone calling for Alex.
'You're wanted,' she said, looking up at him pleadingly. 'Please go down.'
The voice called again, and he hesitated impatiently.
'Please, Alex,' she said again. She deserved his anger, but she couldn't take any more right now.
'Very well,' he said finally, as footsteps started up the stairs. 'But don't go away. I'll be back.'
He shut the door as he went out, and Stacey leaned tiredly against it, emotionally exhausted.
Several minutes later she opened it and made her way downstairs. People were gradually drifting away from the party, and she soon found her mother and made sure that they left too.
Alex's eyes glittered coldly at her as she said goodnight, and he stepped out on to the narrow verandah and gripped her arm as she made to follow her mother down the steps.
'I said to stay put,' he muttered into her ear. 'We have to talk, Stacey.'
Obeying an overwhelming impulse, and in spite of his obvious exasperation, she let her head fall momentarily against his shoulder. 'I know,' she said, and raised her eyes to his pleadingly. 'But not tonight, Alex. I—I've had e
nough.'
His hard gaze softened, and his grip slackened and moved in a brief caress.
'All tight,' he said. 'Maybe we both have, at that. I'll see you tomorrow.'
'Yes.'
He took her down the steps and walked with her in silence to the car, and Stacey walked as if in a dream. The street lamps suddenly went out as they walked, and the stars flung across the distant sky were hazy. Alex put his arm about her waist firmly, perhaps in case she should stumble in the sudden darkness, but then they were at the car, and her mother, already in, opened the door for her from inside.
He held it while she got into her seat, and handed, her safety belt to her, waiting until she had fastened it. Then he said, 'Thanks for coming, both of you. Have a safe journey home,' and closed the door.
In spite of the late night, Stacey got up and went to church with her mother the following morning. She had slept quite well, her brain in a curiously numb condition, unable to think at all about the events of the evening.
But in the morning it seethed with thoughts tumbling over themselves, with memories of kisses, of words. 'This is why,' Alex had said, when she asked him why he had wanted to take her out. 'This.' And he had kissed her, deeply and passionately. Was 'this' love? Or desire? Certainly something stronger by far than mere liking for her company.
She expected a phone call, but none came. She spent the morning painting, but her mind was not on it, and by lunchtime she had achieved little, and was vibrating with nervous agitation. By the time she had mechanically helped Fergus do the dishes, she was beginning to nurse a feeling of resentment against Alex. 'I'll see you tomorrow,' he had said, not suggesting a time, not even bothering to ascertain if she was free. It would serve him right if she wasn't here when he came. If he came. The intensity of their exchanges last night seemed unreal this morning. Possibly he had thought better of whatever it was he had felt last night, and decided not to pursue the matter any further.
It couldn't be true, and she knew it. If Alex had said he would see her, he would see her. But in the next half hour she began to recall his blazing anger, his intolerance in the face of her apology, and her nerves got the better of her.
'I'm going for a walk,' she told her mother, and fled into the streets.
She was wearing a skirt and clinging top, with sandals, and needed no jacket because the day was warm, although a soft breeze and scudding clouds prevented it being too hot for walking.
As always, walking calmed her, and after a long while she returned home, controlled and determined to be sensible and intelligent about things.
The determination fled in confusion when Alex rose to greet her from where he had been sitting talking to her mother in the lounge.
'Hello, Stacey,' he said, his eyes diamond-hard. 'I've been waiting for you.'
'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said. 'I thought you'd forgotten. After all, it wasn't a definite arrangement, was it?'
A gleam of anger lit his eyes, and her mother said reproachfully, 'Alex has been waiting almost two hours, Stacey.'
'Oh—I didn't realise I'd been out so long,' Stacey said truthfully, but she saw Alex glance pointedly at the watch on her wrist which had not even been consulted since she left the house, and then coldly at her face.
'I though we might go for a drive,' he said pleasantly. 'Will you need to change?'
'No,' she said, tempted to refuse, but realising it would be childish, and telling herself it was silly to be nervous of him. 'But I'll comb my hair and get a jacket.'
He saw her into the car with almost exaggerated courtesy, and drove in silence for a long while, out into the country and down a quiet road lined with macro-carpa trees that eventually climbed into bush-covered hills.
Stacey several times opened her mouth to begin some sort of conventional conversation, but the impulse died when she turned to his remote face. He had not looked at her once.
He turned into a little-used road, stony clay with tufts of grass growing in the middle of it, and parked the car under the shade of a fern-covered bank where lacy pongas fragmented the view of the blue sky.
Then he turned in his seat and appraised her with cool eyes.
'Why did you go out when you knew I was coming to see you?' he asked.
'You didn't mention a time,' she answered. 'In fact, I expected to hear from you this morning.'
'I see—so you decided to be out when I did come.'
Put like that, it sounded petty, and she began to protest, but he overrode her feeble, 'No ‑'
'I did ring once this morning, but there was no reply. I thought you were probably still sleeping. I knew you would be expecting me some time, so I decided to give you the morning to recover from your late night.'
Fergus was a heavy sleeper and would not have heard the phone, of course. 'My mother and I went to church,' she said. Then she added, 'I might have made some arrangement for today, anyway. You didn't ask if I was free.'
'I assumed that you would have mentioned it last night if you hadn't been,' he told her.
She turned her head away, studying the pink-tipped frond of a ladder-fern growing half-way up the bank beside the car.
Alex made a sudden, impatient sound, and reached out for her, his hand closing over her shoulder to pull her towards him.
'Don't touch me!' she said sharply, pulling away.
His hand fell away, and she saw it curl into a fist as she instinctively huddled away from him, against the door.
'O.K.,' he said. 'Perhaps it's better if I don't—yet. I thought it might break the ice. We're not getting very far, are we?'
'No.' She studied the dashboard of the car, then shot a glance at him, to find him looking baffled and rather fed up. 'I'm sorry I went out,' she said softly. 'I got—nervous, waiting for you. And it's true I didn't realise how long I'd been. I never looked at the time— I was thinking.'
'About us?' he asked, beginning to relax his rigid muscles slightly.
'Yes.'
'And ‑?'
'It didn't get me very far,' she confessed. 'Last night we were too—everything was so—so muddled.'
'Yes, it was, rather,' he agreed. 'Perhaps we should scrub last night.'
'You mean—p-pretend it never happened?'
He looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment before his deliberate reply. 'Yes,' he said. 'Would that help?'
'I think it would,' she said gratefully, ignoring a sinking feeling, the beginnings of depression. Was that why he had wanted, to speak to her—to ask her to forget the way he had kissed her and held her close to him?
Did he really want to forget that, as well as the less pleasant aspects of that interchange?
'Right,' he said, with the air of a man who has satisfactorily disposed of a sticky piece of business. 'Would you like to get out and walk for a bit, or have you had enough walking today?'
'This is different,' she said. 'In the bush. Let's walk.'
He took her hand as they went up the road that rapidly dwindled into little more than a track. His fingers were warm and strong and somehow comforting.
They didn't talk much, and when they came to a high part where the trees fell away down into a gully, and they could glimpse a view of rolling farmland, with the outskirts of the city hazy in the far distance, they stood side by side in restful silence before by tacit consent retracing their steps back to the car.
Alex drove home slowly, talking casually of nothing very important, and when they went in it was to find Roger having tea with Helen. For a moment the mere sight of him embarrassed Stacey, but she reminded herself that neither he nor her mother knew of her previous misconceptions, and managed to talk normally to him. She looked at him and listened to his talk with more interest than formerly, however, and realised that, his quiet manner hid a gentle wit and a quite obvious tenderness for her mother.
Fergus came in later with Tricia, and over a quickly assembled salad meal for which all the guests had been persuaded to stay, announced casually that they had just become engaged.
'Oh, that's lovely! I'm so pleased!' Helen rose and kissed Tricia's pinkening cheek.
Stacey added her warm wishes, and the two men shook Fergus's hand and added their congratulations.
'Do your parents know?' Helen asked Tricia.
'Yes. We told them first, this afternoon.'
'I'm invited to Christmas dinner with Tricia's family,' said Fergus. 'Will you mind?'
'No, of course not,' his mother answered. 'Perhaps Tricia might come to us for tea on Christmas Day.'
'I'd love to,' Tricia smiled.
'I've invited Roger here for Christmas dinner,' Helen said. 'What about you, Alex? You've been a part of the family for some time, I feel. Will you join us at Christmas?'
'Thank you, I'd like that.'
When Alex got up to leave, later, he asked Stacey to see him out. He stopped in the hallway with his hand on the door. 'By the way,' he said with a gleam of humour in his eyes, 'there's an exhibition of art on this week—a special Christmas exhibition. Perhaps you've read about it.'
Last night never happened. 'Yes,' she said innocently, 'I have.'
'May I take you to see it? And have dinner afterwards?'
'Thank you,' she said primly. 'That would be very nice.'
He stood there a moment longer, silent laughter lighting his eyes. 'What a very proper way you have of accepting an invitation, jade girl,' he said. 'I could pick you up after work—Wednesday all right?'
'Yes,' she nodded, repressing the flicker of something like alarm that he had caused, calling her that.
For a moment he looked as though he would linger. Then he opened the door, tossed her a careless 'Goodnight,' and was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Christmas Day began by being overcast and slightly grey, but by midday the sun had made its presence felt, and the temperature became pleasantly warm.
Stacey opened the door to Alex, and felt a surge of pleasure when she saw him, casually dressed in light grey slacks and a blue shirt opened at the throat.