by Penny Jordan
Hannah got up on shaky legs, trying to master her apprehension as she walked towards the communicating door and opened it.
Silas was seated behind his desk. He looked up at her with a frown as she walked towards him. Her letter lay opened on his desk.
‘Sit down,’ he told her grimly.
Weakly she did so, her heart quailing as he got up and walked around the desk towards her, perching on the edge of it, not perhaps deliberately intimidating her, but the effect was there, none the less. It was intimidating having him so close to her that the scent of his body, mingling with the soap and cologne he used, should torment her own senses into flaring awareness of him…not as her boss, but as a man.
‘What exactly is the meaning of this?’ he demanded silkily, holding her letter.
Hannah couldn’t look at him. Instead she focused on the window behind his desk, as she said as steadily as she could, ‘I thought my letter was self-explanatory. I’m handing in my resignation.’
‘Because you find your skills are not compatible with the responsibility of the job,’ he taunted her bitingly, reading from her letter. ‘Come on, Hannah. You know that’s nonsense. If that had been the case, you’ve never have been offered the job in the first place. What’s going on? Or can I guess?’ he suggested softly.
So softly that she was trapped into looking directly at him, and then wished she hadn’t as she found herself mesmerised by the silky challenge of his gaze.
‘You want to leave because of what happened between us the other night, don’t you?’ he challenged.
Hannah swallowed. Her voice seemed to have become trapped somewhere in her throat. She shook her head, and then said explosively, her voice raw and husky, ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’
‘No, I can see that. For pity’s sake, Hannah, you’re a sophisticated, educated woman. What was it about one kiss that makes you turn your back on a job we both know you’re ideally suited for? If it bothered you so much…’
‘It didn’t,’ Hannah lied desperately, stepping back from him, suddenly so desperately aware of him, so conscious of her danger, so terrified of what she might betray if she stayed and let him continue to question her that she fled to the door before he could stop her, saying huskily as she reached it, ‘I’m leaving, Silas. That’s all I need to tell you.’
‘Hannah!’
She froze as he bellowed her name, knowing that he was going to come after her, and then to her relief Gordon Giles, who had returned that morning, walked into the room, smiling genially at her, and saying urgently to Silas, ‘Silas, I need to talk to you. Something’s come up with the Howland people. Can you spare me ten minutes now?’
Almost tangibly aware of the frustration he was experiencing, Hannah didn’t wait to hear what he replied. Instead she went into her own office, checked through the already tidy drawers, picked up her coat, and was half-way towards the lift before she realised that she was safe and that Silas wasn’t going to come after her.
She didn’t want to go straight home, unwilling to face the silence of her flat, but she knew she had little alternative. She was going to have to start looking for a new job immediately, and she was probably going to have to reclaim her car from her father. She felt guilty about that, but she knew he would understand.
The phone rang a couple of times during the day, but she was terrified of answering it, just in case it was Silas trying to persuade her to change her mind.
* * *
A WEEK PASSED; the longest week of Hannah’s life. Even though she knew there were things she had to do, she felt no sense of urgency, no motivation, no purpose. For the first time since she had left university, her life was not directed towards a specific goal.
For some inexplicable reason, her career, the cornerstone of her life, meant nothing.
Instead of scouring the papers for a new job, instead of approaching the upmarket and discreet agencies which handled the high-powered positions for which she was qualified, she found herself simply sitting and staring into space, watching the river for hour after hour.
Her mother was concerned enough about her to make the trek to London, arriving anxiously and unexpectedly on Friday morning, and insisting on dragging Hannah out to do some shopping when she discovered how little food she had in her fridge.
‘Starving yourself isn’t going to achieve anything,’ she announced forthrightly, causing Hannah to object and then fall silent as she realised how long it actually was since she had last eaten properly.
‘Hannah, it isn’t too late…’ her mother said softly once they were back at the apartment and sitting down to the meal she had prepared. ‘Get in touch with Silas. Tell him you made a mistake.’
But before she could finish Hannah was shaking her head. ‘It’s no use,’ she said dully. ‘If he’d wanted me back, he’d have been in touch with me himself.’ She turned to her mother and said self-contemptuously, ‘He probably recognised the way I feel about him. Just as you did. The classic office syndrome…falling in love with one’s boss.’
While her mouth turned down bitterly with the full painful weight of her own self-analysis, her mother watched her unhappily.
‘Hannah, come home,’ she suggested impulsively. ‘It will do you good…’
Hannah gave her a wry smile.
‘Crawl back into the safety of the parental nest? You don’t know how tempting that is.’ She stood up and paced the small room like a caged animal, her body wild with tension and pain, and much as her mother ached to help her she knew there was nothing she could do.
‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ Hannah said at last, swinging round to look at her. ‘The ultimate career woman. That’s me. I’ve done exactly what I know is right, and yet I feel as though my whole life has suddenly blown up in my face. If I come home now, I’ll never find the guts to leave again,’ she said tiredly. ‘I’ve got to work this out for myself, and the first thing I’ve got to do is to find another job.’
She spent the entire weekend doing so, only giving in to the exhaustion and misery on Monday evening when she got home from a round of agency interviews, during which she had inexplicably found herself totally uninterested in every position that had been suggested.
Too exhausted to change out of her interview uniform of pin-striped suit and tailored silk shirt, she slumped into a chair and lay there with her eyes closed, trying to summon the will to fight the feeling inside her which grew every day.
Being apart from Silas hadn’t killed her love for him. On the contrary, her feelings only seemed to grow sharper and more intense with every day that passed. Instead of being free to concentrate on her career and her life plan, she found herself dwelling almost obsessively on every second of the time she had spent with him, going over and over again every small incident…not as she had fully intended, putting her time with him in the past as a closed incident, so that she could go on into her carefully planned future, but totally abandoning that future in favour of minutely reliving every small particle of time she had spent with Silas.
She could barely understand it, or the change in herself, and could only cling grimly to her faltering belief that she had done the right thing.
Common sense urged her to get up and make herself something to eat. She had gone out without breakfast and been out all day without a meal. Her appearance was beginning to suffer for it; her hair and skin becoming lacklustre, her energy levels dropping dramatically.
In the distance she heard her doorbell ring. Reluctantly she opened her eyes. Not her mother again, surely? And yet there was a tiny betraying spark of hope that it might be. A telling weakness that showed her more than anything else how vulnerable she had become. Telling herself that it was probably only one of her neighbours on the cadge, she went to answer the bell’s sharp summons.
The evenings were drawing in early now; they were well into autumn, and the coolness of the air as she opened the door made her shiver convulsively, and think longingly of the vicarage’s large open log-burning f
ires, forgetting in the nostalgia of the moment the inconvenience of cleaning them out.
Lost in her own private thoughts, the figure outside the door remained only a shadowy entity in the darkness until he stepped forwards and into her hallway, enunciating fiercely, ‘Hannah!’ as he saw her shudder in recognition and mistook its cause.
At the sound of his voice, every nerve-ending in her body had become alert.
Silas! Silas, here… The joyful leap of her heart, the fierce, pounding, dizzying pleasure that rocked her, told their own story, even though in their aftermath she might feel dread and anger that he had breached her defences and invaded the privacy of her home.
She shivered again, her teeth chattering, and this time he realised it wasn’t revulsion at the sight of him that caused her tremors. Seizing her arm, he slammed the door and bundled her towards her sitting-room, wincing a little in the harshness of the overhead lights, and glaring belligerently around the starkly furnished room as he muttered, ‘Haven’t you heard of subdued lighting?’
Almost as though it was someone else who spoke the words, Hannah heard herself saying quietly, ‘Subdued lighting is for lovers. I don’t need it.’
Her emotionless words seemed to set off some kind of explosion in Silas, as he thrust her down into her sofa. He stood towering over her and enunciated bitterly, ‘Just as you don’t need me, is that it, Hannah? You’ve made quite a career out of not needing things—and people—haven’t you? Of standing alone, of doing your own thing and to hell with anyone else…’
Hannah felt her face burn; there was just enough truth in his accusation to make her feel uncomfortable, but she tried to defend herself by saying quickly, ‘It’s my affair how I choose to live my life!’ And then she got up and put as much distance between them as she could, standing defensively with her back to him as she stared out of the window at the Thames so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.
‘I don’t know why you’ve come here, Silas.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ he exploded, and even without looking at him she could feel his anger and winced beneath the force of it. ‘Let’s forget the obligatory opening passages, shall we, Hannah? They aren’t true, anyway. You know damn well why I’ve come here. The same reason I kissed you, the same reason you gave in your notice, the same reason you haven’t got the guts to turn round and look at me now, damn you…’
And, without her knowing that he had moved, he was suddenly behind her, turning her round, holding her with such fierce urgency that her blood started to beat a wild tattoo of delirium through her veins, despite her attempts to stop it.
‘I’ve tried not to do this,’ she heard him saying in an unfamiliar, thickened voice, while his mouth was buried in the warmth of her throat, caressing the softness of her skin, making her tremble and turn weak in his arms.
‘I’ve tried to listen to all the logical arguments I’ve had with myself about the potential impermanence of love, about the problems of sharing my life with a woman who’s as goal-orientated as I am myself, about the difficulties we’ll face, but none of it makes the slightest damn difference. I close my eyes, and I can see you and feel you, and my body dissolves in the kind of heat I haven’t felt in ten years, if then; and all I want to do is to hold you like this…to touch you…to kiss you…’
His voice faded—muffled by her hair—as his mouth caressed the silky skin behind her ear, making her quiver, sending startlingly powerful darts of sensation racing through her body.
His teeth nipped her earlobe, his breath warm and moist against it, causing her to draw a deep breath and cling desperately to her rapidly disappearing self-control. As his hand slid inside her jacket and unerringly found and moulded her breast, she reached out to him with agitated hands, pushing firmly against his collarbone with the heel of her palms, while demanding unsteadily, ‘Silas, are you mad? How dare you come in here and…’
‘And what?’ he asked her, his mouth so close to her own that she hardly dared to breathe. ‘And do this? Or this? But I do dare, Hannah, because I know it’s the only way I have of breaking through those defences of yours, of proving to you that you and I can have something worthwhile together.’
She opened her mouth to protest, and found the words silenced as he kissed her. Not tentatively or questioningly, but as though they were already known to one another, as though he was already familiar with her needs and pleasures; as though the mere feel of the moistness of her lips beneath his own was enough to send him out of his mind.
Indeed, he devoured them as though it was, stroking, biting, sucking on their soft outline until Hannah couldn’t resist him any longer, and opened her mouth to him with an eagerness she would once have scorned.
His hand tightened against her breast, and he made a thick sound of pleasure in his throat, his fingers tugging at the buttons on her shirt until he had them unfastened and could slide his hand inside it and push aside the barrier of her bra to caress her bare skin.
It was everything she had known it would be, and yet like nothing she had ever dreamed she could feel; she felt both angry and elated that she had not experienced it before, as she felt the sensations roll over her, experiencing them with the same intensity she had once given to her studies—so sharply alive, so intensely aware, so swamped by feeling that she actually felt tears of sharp pleasure spurt in her eyes as his fingers found her nipple.
As her tears touched his mouth, Silas lifted his head and stared into her eyes before she could conceal the expression in them from him, and then said unsteadily, ‘Your first time…the first time anyone’s touched you like this…shown you you can feel like this… Oh, Hannah, have you any idea what you’re doing to me?’
And then it seemed to Hannah that he went a little wild, picking her up with an ease that in other circumstances would have surprised her, but which now seemed wholly natural, carrying her to the sofa, where he nestled her against its cover and proceeded to cover her face with small kisses, and then her throat, so that she arched beneath the heat on his mouth in trembling awareness of her feminity. Then he moved to the open V-neckline of her shirt, and then lower, until his mouth teased the hard peak of her nipple through the silk of her shirt, until she cried out at the unbearable torment, held his hand in her palms and tried to push him away so that she could remove the barrier between them and feel the exquisite sensuality of his mouth tugging at the swollen heat of her nipple. But as she looked down towards him, she saw how the wet silk clung to her body, revealing the pale flesh of her breast and the dark, tormented hardness of its aureole. Silas was breathing heavily, his weight pressing her into the sofa, his body, she now recognised, fully aroused. Her heart missed a beat, and then another. She took a deep breath and shuddered as she felt the drag of the damp fabric against her breast. Her eyes wide and dark with arousal, she removed her hands from his face and down to her blouse. He didn’t break the mesmeric hold of his eyes on her own by so much as a flicker of an eyelid, but his face suddenly went dark under a hot rush of blood, and he said thickly, with an urgency that fired her own senses, ‘Yes, Hannah… Yes…’
And, with a deliberate wantonness she had never suspected she might be capable of, never mind actually enjoy, she sat up smoothly, and slowly removed her shirt and then her bra.
No man had ever seen her naked, and she had never desired, nor imagined, that any man would. What she was doing went totally against everything she had planned for her life, and yet, while part of her mind registered the fact, another part gloried in her feminine triumph, telling her to be proud of the beauty of her body and the power it had to make Silas suddenly start to shake and reach for her, burying his face against her throat and groaning as he gently kissed the soft hollow at its base.
‘I knew you could be like this, the first time I saw you,’ he whispered rawly. ‘I wanted you to be like this then, and yet I didn’t. I was terrified of the intensity of my reaction to you. You weren’t what I wanted in my life. I wasn’t ready for a woman like you. In fact, I
’d already decided that my life was better off without love. Far less complicated. I felt I owed it to my aunt to concentrate on the business. And then I saw you and it seemed that fate was mocking me.’
Her hand touched his head, stroking the clean, dark hair, a tremor of understanding and compassion rocking through her. All he was doing was echoing her own thoughts. How much less complicated they seemed when they were shared with someone else. How much less important everything seemed when she held him like this and felt the easy warmth of his breath against her skin.
He raised his head abruptly and cupped her face in his hands.
‘Hannah, if I stay, I’ll make love to you. There’s no way I’ll be able to stop myself. For over a week I’ve kept away, telling myself that you don’t want me, that your decision was the right one, and then this morning when I woke up I knew I just couldn’t go on any longer without you.’ He leaned his forehead against hers.
‘I don’t want you just for today, Hannah. I don’t want an affair…a relationship without commitment or promises. I may not have wanted to admit it at first, but I love you, so think carefully now, because unless you can open your life to me completely…unless you can make enough space in it for me on a permanent basis, it’s better that we part now.’
Hannah stared at him. How could he do this to her, torment her like this, while her body ached for him? She didn’t want to talk… She wanted…
She flushed darkly as she realised exactly what she did want. Silas was only being sensible, and it wasn’t his fault that half of her wished that he wouldn’t be, that he would simply take her and make love to her.
The primitiveness of her own thoughts shocked her. What had happened to her beliefs?
‘What is it to be, Hannah?’ Silas pressed her. ‘A shared life, with all the pain and pleasures that implies? We can work together, side by side, but inevitably there could be times when your career will take second place. I’d be lying if I pretended not to know how much it means to you, and I’d also be lying if I said that I didn’t want children.’