by Penny Jordan
Sara looked at him in some surprise.
‘You want children?’
Ian, who was in his early thirties, had been very voluble in his belief that children were a nuisance, a hindrance to the kind of life he personally wanted to lead and somehow or other she had supposed that the majority of unmarried men in their thirties must feel the same way.
‘Very much; don’t you?’
The directness of his answer and the question that followed it shook her a little bit. No matter how comfortable she felt with him, she was still surprised by his straightforwardness.
‘Yes…yes, I do,’ she admitted a little hesitantly. ‘In fact…’ She paused, and then reminded herself that there was no need for her to conceal her true thoughts from Stuart as there had been from Ian.
‘In fact, just before I left London, my next-door neighbour, a close friend, was suggesting that I ought to consider finding someone to marry who shared my love of children. She claims that that’s what she did. That she heard her biological clock ticking away extremely loudly and extremely fast, and that when she met Ben, and discovered they had a great deal in common, she married him, knowing he would be a good father for their children, rather than because she was in love with him. In her case it all worked out very well, since she does now love him very much.’
‘Mmm. On the face of it, and using today’s mores and standards, it does seem a cold-blooded arrangement, and yet it isn’t really so very many generations ago that marriages were arranged either by one’s parents, or other family relatives, for reasons that had very little to do with the emotional needs of the parties concerned, and on the face of it those relationships worked.’
‘Probably because people’s choices were so much more limited. Divorce wasn’t possible and so they had to stay together, and, of course, then in every stratum of society the time that husbands and wives actually spent together was far more limited than it is today. Families played a much larger role in people’s lives than they do now. Newly married couples had the support and advice of not just parents and siblings to call on, but a vast clan of aunts, uncles, cousins and more.’
‘Yes, that’s true. I take it you don’t consider your friend’s advice worth taking?’
Sara paused as she reached his Land Rover.
‘In one sense, yes. In others…’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘I do want children…very much, I always have done. But to marry a man I don’t love…’
‘There are many differing degrees of love,’ Stuart surprised her by saying. ‘Perhaps it sounds cynical, but I suspect that the securest and most enduring foundation for a stable relationship between a man and a woman isn’t necessarily based on the euphoric and very often totally unrealistic state we describe as “being in love”.
‘Mutual understanding: mutual goals, respect, leavened by a shared sense of humour, will in my estimation take a relationship a good deal further.’
Sara was shocked enough to protest. ‘But what about desire? Surely…’
He was standing close enough to her for her to see the way the tawny gold of his eyes suddenly became darkly brilliant. An unfamiliar frisson of sensation twisted through her and her skin suddenly burned with heated colour as she reacted to him with a mixture of embarrassment and shock.
What on earth was she doing raising such a topic with a man she barely knew? It wasn’t, after all, a subject she would even have raised with Ian. In fact, it was a subject it would have been impossible to raise with Ian.
‘It is possible to experience desire without love, of course, but using that kind of physical need as something on which to base a permanent relationship isn’t something I personally would ever contemplate. Nevertheless, there has, I agree, to be desire, but desire like love itself takes many shapes and forms. And what is desire? A couple for whom sex is the most important part of their relationship would say that sex is desire, but there are other couples who, although they might not admit it, are more strongly motivated by a desire for money, a desire for social position, even a desire for children, and these desires are the most important focus of their relationships.
‘For me a marriage founded on mutual goals, mutual trust and respect, a mutual willingness to make the relationship work, plus a mutual desire to have children, are more important than intensely powerful sex, no matter how alluring that particular desire might sometimes seem.’
‘If you want children so much, why…?’
Sara stopped. How on earth could she have forgotten so quickly that Stuart, like her, had lost the person he loved?
‘Why haven’t I married?’ he finished for her, tactfully easing her embarrassment. ‘Probably because I haven’t found the right woman. It isn’t easy being married to a man with a job like mine. It’s demanding work, involving long hours, and limited financial reward. The trees need constant attention even when one has an experienced and well-trained staff. Holidays, that sort of thing, are a luxury I simply can’t afford, and it takes a very special kind of woman to accept the limitations my work would place on our ability for personal freedom.
‘One of the reasons I relocated out here was because, apart from anything else, the old site was in an area which had slowly become more and more urbanised, and finding staff was growing increasingly difficult.
‘Boys who were quite willing to work outdoors in the summer when the weather was good were not quite so happy about outdoor work in the winter. Moving to a farming community where it would be easier to find people prepared to take on outdoor work seemed a sensible idea.’
He smiled at her as he handed her up into the Land Rover and then closed the door. When he had walked round to the driver’s door, climbed in and set the vehicle in motion, he continued, ‘It isn’t just the care and maintenance of the trees while we’re growing them, which is difficult enough. They have to be grown in such a way that, when necessary, we can lift them with a good solid root-ball. Not easy when you’re talking about a half-grown tree which might in maturity reach eighty feet and weigh a couple of tons. There’s also the problem of supplying adequate after-sales care, to ensure that the newly transplanted tree doesn’t die. I’ve lost a couple through poor care on the part of the new owners, and I can tell you there’s nothing more soul-destroying. I hate to see a healthy tree die out of sheer ignorance and neglect, especially when I know it’s a tree that ought to have survived and flourished.’
The emotion he was feeling was deepening his voice, making it slightly harsh and abrasive. He really loved his trees, Sara recognised, and if he felt like that about them then she couldn’t help reflecting what a wonderfully caring father he would be.
It was amazingly easy to picture him mentally with his two little girls and his sons as well, a happy smiling woman by his side, she acknowledged wistfully. Why on earth had she rejected him, the woman he had loved? If she were loved by a man like Stuart…
A man like Stuart? But she loved Ian, who was as different as it was possible to be from Stuart.
This was ridiculous, she chided herself, as Stuart changed gear and turned into the manor’s drive. She was obviously suffering from some kind of reaction to the trauma of the last few days, seeing in Stuart all the virtues she now realised that Ian did not possess.
Seeing his virtues was one thing, she derided herself, but picturing him as the father of four children was quite another.
‘I haven’t got round to using the main entrance to the house as yet,’ Stuart told her apologetically as he brought the Land Rover to a halt in the cobbled yard.
‘In fact, as far as the house is concerned, I’m afraid I just haven’t had the time to do a great deal with it. I bought the place because of the land—the house was an ancillary feature, and I have to admit I didn’t even look round it properly. I didn’t realise until I moved in how large it is.’
‘Well, it certainly has the potential to hold a large family,’ Sara murmured, adding mischievously, ‘A very large family.’
He turned in his seat and looked
at her.
‘Indeed it does,’ he agreed wryly. ‘It’s large enough for a veritable tribe of offspring.’
They both laughed, and as they did Sara realised how impossible it would have been for her to have shared this moment with Ian. His sense of humour was sharp and cutting, malicious sometimes, and confined to the foibles and vulnerabilities of people he knew combined with how they measured up to his own very individualistic table of good and bad points, a table which seemed to be largely comprised of media and social ‘in’ jokes and rules.
‘By the way,’ Stuart asked her, ‘I was wondering. Would you still be willing to cast your expert eye over the havoc I’ve created with my paperwork? You did say…’
‘No problem. I’d be only too glad to,’ Sara assured him. ‘It will give me something to keep me occupied while I wait for Mum and Dad to come home.’
‘Well, it will take quite a while to show you over what we’re doing here. I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to stay for lunch. Not one of Mrs G.’s offerings this time. I bought some stuff while I was out this morning. I don’t know if you like fresh salmon.’
‘I love it,’ Sara assured him. ‘And I’d also love to see over the house. If you don’t think it’s too intrusive of me to ask.’
‘Not at all,’ Stuart assured her. ‘Although I warn you it isn’t exactly Homes and Gardens.’
Sara laughed. ‘Good,’ she told him with a smile. ‘Other people’s perfection always makes me feel dreadfully inferior.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ Stuart agreed, as he opened his door. She made to do the same, but he stopped her.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a long way down out of this thing. I’ll come round and give you a hand.’
Sara could have told him that she’d been scrambling out of Land Rovers since she was no higher than her father’s knee, but for some reason she refrained.
There was something undeniably pleasant, after Anna’s scathing and cruel remarks about her lack of sexuality, her lack of femininity, in having a man perform the small courtesy of helping her out of his vehicle even though it might be unnecessary.
It made her feel fragile, and delicate, all the things she knew quite well she wasn’t and never had been. It made her feel that she was a woman, she recognised in startled comprehension, something that Ian hadn’t done in a long time, and something she hadn’t allowed any other man to do, because of Ian.
And so she waited, with her door closed, smiling at Stuart as he opened it for her, releasing her seatbelt, so that she could start to climb out of the Land Rover.
She had assumed that Stuart would simply give her a guiding hand, an arm to lean on if necessary as she stepped down on to the ground, and was therefore startled when instead he reached into the Land Rover and placed his hands firmly on her waist.
As he leaned towards her, their eyes were virtually on the same level. His were a dark warm gold, flecked with tawny highlights. They were very masculine eyes, she acknowledged, despite the length and thickness of those dark lashes. They were also very perceptive eyes; eyes that seemed to recognise her momentary shock at the sensation of his hands against her body, warming her flesh through her jeans and shirt, making her suddenly almost painfully aware of the fact that virtually the only physical contact her body had had with that of a man had been limited to the clumsy caresses of her teenage years; that there had never been a time when a man had held her like this as a preamble to a more intimate embrace; that she had never in fact experienced the sensual tension that came from knowing that the male hands resting on her waist would soon be sliding upwards over her ribcage to caress her breasts, that the dark male head so close to her own would soon be obliterating the light as they shared the intimacy of a lovers’ kiss.
A lovers’ kiss. Unable to stop herself, she looked at Stuart’s mouth. Her heart was thudding frantically, her breathing jerky and unsteady.
An embarrassing sensual awareness of him as a man seemed to rocket through her, totally throwing her off guard. She started to tremble, to shiver as her body was gripped with an unfamiliar tension, a sharp aching need that seemed to burst into life inside her, taking over her entire nervous system so quickly that she was given no chance to control it. She closed her eyes, feeling sick with shock and self-disgust.
‘Sara… Are you all right?’
Her eyes opened automatically, focusing on Stuart.
‘I…I…’
‘You’re trembling.’
He said it almost accusingly, his grip on her waist tightening.
What on earth could she say? How on earth could she explain? She couldn’t. Impossible to tell a man, any man, however nice he was, that you were trembling because your body for some totally unknown and embarrassing reason had suddenly decided that it found him so sexually desirable that your brain couldn’t control its response to him.
Even now, her body was still reacting to him, her nipples taut and stiff, her stomach tight with a sensation she couldn’t remember experiencing in years. How could she tell him any of that? How could she tell him that she had looked at his mouth and for one insane awful moment had not only wondered what it would feel like against her own, but had actually been in danger of leaning towards him; of physically betraying her yearning, aching need to experience his kiss?
She did not want him really, she assured herself. It was all because of Anna, because of Ian. Anna’s cruel gibes about her lack of sexuality had gone deep and left a festering poison, which had somehow erupted in that appallingly embarrassing wave of heat and need, so that for a moment she had actively wanted to prove Anna wrong by…
By what…? Wanting Stuart to make love to her?
She was still trembling, shocked both by what she had experienced and her own ability to understand it.
‘Sara.’
She heard the urgency, the concern in Stuart’s voice.
‘I…I’m fine…’ she lied shakily.
She could tell from the way he was looking at her that he didn’t believe her, but she was grateful to him when he didn’t press her, simply lifting her down out of the Land Rover. And she needed his help now, she recognised weakly. She felt so disorientated, so feeble…so…shocked and shaken by what she had just experienced.
As he swung her down to the ground, her hair brushed his face. She felt the sudden brief tension in his hands, before he set her down and released her.
‘Nice perfume,’ he commented, his voice almost rough, his face averted from her.
Perfume? She was puzzled.
‘But I don’t wear perfume. At least…’ She had washed her hair this morning and she could only presume that it was her shampoo he could smell. It gave her an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach to know that he had been close enough to her to inhale the scent of her hair. What if she had inadvertently moved just that little bit closer to him…? Would she then have felt the warmth of his breath against her skin? Would he…?
‘Look, if you want to change your mind… If you’re not feeling up to this…’
She heard what he was saying and tried to focus on it, shaking her head in quick negation of his suggestion, telling him quickly, ‘No, no. I’m fine.’
As he closed the Land Rover door she watched him, her glance sliding almost compulsively to his mouth. What if he had kissed her then when he was lifting her out of the Land Rover? What if he had actually read her mind and…?
She swallowed hard. She ought to be heartily glad that he had done no such thing. It was embarrassing enough as it was that she should actually have experienced those sensations, never mind having him recognise her vulnerability.
What was happening to her? she wondered in self-revulsion. All through the years when she had loved Ian, had wanted him, she had never been remotely interested in any other man, had never experienced the least desire for anyone else. And yet here she was…
It was just reaction, that was all—reaction to Anna’s cruelty, reaction to reality…reaction to the dis
covery that she had wasted so many years in idiotic daydreams and fantasy. Her reaction to Stuart was undoubtedly only her body’s way of desperately trying to prove that Anna had been wrong in telling her she was sexless and undesirable. Now that she was aware of her vulnerability she would be able to control and monitor it. There was no real reason for her to feel alarmed and apprehensive. Once she had thoroughly analysed and understood her uncharacteristic behaviour it wouldn’t happen again.
Feeling a lot happier now that she had explained to her own satisfaction just why she had reacted in such an unexpected and potentially embarrassing fashion, she fell into step beside Stuart.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘HOW about a quick tour of the house followed by lunch?’ Stuart suggested once they were inside.
‘Wouldn’t you prefer me to look over your paperwork first?’ Sara offered.
He smiled ruefully at her. ‘I’m afraid to risk letting you see the chaos it’s in on an empty stomach.’
‘As bad as that?’ Sara sympathised.
‘Worse,’ he assured her.
Sara laughed. She was getting to like him more and more. In fact she couldn’t remember ever feeling so instantly at ease with anyone. If only she hadn’t had that idiotic reaction to him while he was helping her out of the Land Rover. Thank goodness he at least hadn’t realised the effect he was having on her.
‘If you can just hang on for a sec while I get the lunch on, I’ll do my best to act as an adequate tour guide. I expect you know more than I do about the house’s history. One day when I’ve got rather more time to spare than I’m likely to have for quite some time to come I’d like to research the house’s past more thoroughly, sort out the reality from the myths. It’s changed hands so often.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Sara agreed, telling herself that it was ridiculous of her to feel an unmistakable if slight tinge of feminine chagrin at the efficient way he moved around the kitchen, deftly preparing the salmon for their lunch. She was all for men and women sharing their household tasks in theory, but in reality, much to her own astonishment, she was discovering that she felt a small frisson of resentment when confronted with the evidence that such a very male man was obviously completely self-sufficient.