by Penny Jordan
‘Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?’ he suggested gruffly, when the resultant flames had died.
Sara shook her head. ‘No. I won’t, if you don’t mind. I’ll be better off keeping myself occupied.’
Oddly, once he had gone and she was back in the office, supposedly compiling information regarding the various stages of growth in the newly planted nursery beds, it wasn’t Ian who kept interrupting her work, and causing her to stare unseeingly into space, but Stuart himself.
Once she touched her mouth with curious, trembling fingers, her body going hot and softly fluid as her senses conjured up for her the sensations she had experienced when he’d kissed her.
She was still trembling minutes later even though she had snatched her hand away from her mouth as guiltily as a small child caught with its fingers in the biscuit barrel.
She couldn’t understand what was happening to her, couldn’t reach out and take a firm grasp of the at times nebulous, and at other times astonishingly powerful and strong feelings she was experiencing so that she could hold on to them and subject them to the calming influence of logical analysis.
She couldn’t understand why it was that when Stuart kissed her—Stuart whom she had come to regard as a friend and companion—she should feel this powerful upsurge of desire and sexual responsiveness, of almost swooning need to experience even more intimacy with him, while when Ian had kissed her—Ian whom she loved—she was left with a sharp sense of disappointment, of an awareness of dissatisfaction and emptiness.
At half-past five, when Stuart hadn’t returned, she was guiltily conscious of the fact that her work output had fallen far below her own high standards, and that she had spent by far the major proportion of her mental energy in trying to solve the mystery of why Stuart’s touch, Stuart’s kiss should affect her in the way it did.
At six o’clock she tidied up her desk and got ready to go home, cowardly aware that half of her was anxious and confused at the thought of seeing Stuart while her senses were still so disturbed, still so aware of how he made her feel when he kissed her.
The other half, even more worryingly, was urging her to wait, to delay, to busy herself with tasks that would keep her here in Stuart’s home until the onset of dusk drove him inside.
Why? Because she was anxious to ensure that what had happened earlier was not going to have an adverse effect on their working relationship? Or because she wanted…needed physically and emotionally to see him, to be with him, to…?
Quickly she cut off her thoughts before they could encourage her down what caution warned her could be a very dangerous path.
Over supper she was so engrossed in her own thoughts that her mother had to address the same question to her several times before she heard it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I was miles away.’
‘Not missing London, are you, dear?’ her mother asked her anxiously. ‘We’re enjoying having you here at home so much, but…’
‘No, I’m not missing London at all,’ Sara assured them, half surprised to realise how truthfully she had spoken. She had adapted to living and working here in the country far faster than she would have expected, had she ever actually stopped to contemplate the issue.
Of course every time she thought about Ian and Anna, and most especially about Anna’s cruel revelations, she burned inwardly with pain and anguish, that pain as sharp as though someone had poured salt on an unhealed wound.
Only wasn’t salt supposed to have a cleaning, cauterising effect on wounds—hadn’t it once been a remedy for them?
Was the very sharpness of her pain somehow or other actually helping her to separate herself from the past? Was the thought of being somewhere where she might inadvertently come into contact with Ian and Anna so much an anathema to her that it made her revolt against the thought of returning to London?
But London was a very big place; the chances of her actually coming into contact with Ian and his fiancée were so remote…
So what was it that was keeping her here in Shropshire? The comfort and protection of her home…the warmth of her parents’ love…the fact that she had a new and absorbing job?
Yes, all of these could contribute to her desire to stay, to prolong her sabbatical from her ‘real’ life, but none of them could surely be responsible for the deep atavistic thrill of fear-cum-rejection that had gripped her at the mere suggestion that she might want to return to London.
After all, London was the place where she had spent most of her adult life; where she had lived and worked very happily for the last decade. Was it purely because of Ian and Anna that she now found that the very last thing she wanted to do was to return there? After all, she had friends there, a pleasant social life, access to all manner of events that could not be catered for in a small rural environment.
Later on that night when she ought to have been asleep the question returned to vex her.
Outside the full moon beamed its light into her room through the curtains; she could hear the calls of the nocturnal creatures who like her seemed to be made restless by its subtle power. Why, when her mother had asked her if she wanted to return to London, had she experienced such intense revulsion…such sharp awareness of how much she dreaded the prospect and how little she wanted to return?
And why, when Stuart had kissed her, had she experienced all the emotions, all the vivid intense feelings which she had never experienced in Ian’s arms?
Worrying questions to which she could not find any satisfactory or acceptable answers, questions which kept her awake and restless until well into the early hours of the morning.
CHAPTER SEVEN
STUART was avoiding her, Sara was sure of it. It was all very well for him to tell her that the sudden spell of exceptionally warm and dry weather meant that the nursery plantation in particular needed constant monitoring and attention; he still had to return to the house at some time or another. And yet no matter how early she arrived, or how late she stayed, ostensibly keeping on top of the greater volume of work arising from a sudden upsurge in demand for the trees, Stuart never seemed to be there.
It had been at her suggestion that he had placed additional advertising in several monthly magazines, including Country Life, and even she had been surprised at the volume of enquiries this advertising had brought.
Was it because of that kiss that they no longer shared those long and amazingly wide-ranging conversations she had enjoyed so much?
Miserably she acknowledged how much she was missing Stuart’s company, and then, over a week after that highly charged scene, he walked into the office halfway through the afternoon, his face so set and strained that at first she imagined there had been some kind of accident.
She was halfway out of her chair, exclaiming anxiously, ‘Stuart, what’s wrong?’ when he shook his head, telling her tersely,
‘Nothing, it’s just…’ He stopped and turned his back on her, going to stand in front of the window, so that his body blocked out the light, turning the small study shadowy and somehow very intimate.
‘There’s something I want to say to you,’ she heard him saying curtly. Her heart gave a frightened, anxious bound. Was he going to tell her that he didn’t want her working for him any more? She could feel the pain, the despair the thought brought.
His back was still and set, his spine and his muscles tense. Her own body stiffened in response, in anticipation of what she had guessed he was about to say. She didn’t want to listen to him, didn’t want to hear him saying that he no longer needed her…didn’t want to face up to the fact that, for whatever reason, he no longer wanted her in his life.
The friendship between them which had come to mean so much to her and which she had thought so well founded, so securely based, quite obviously was a total fiction, which she had created for herself and which could never have been as important to him as it was to her.
Her mouth had gone dry, her palms nervously sticky. Pride told her not to wait until he had sai
d the actual words, but to anticipate him, to tell him she had guessed what it was he wanted to say, and that she quite agreed that it was time for her to leave…to return to her real life, but even as the words jostled for order in her brain, and she tried to get her tongue round them, he pre-empted her by asking brusquely, ‘Did you mean it when you said that you’d be prepared to marry a man in order to have children?’
At first she was too stunned to speak, too stunned almost to even take in what he was saying. Her mind, her body, her emotions had been prepared for a far different question to this, and were not programmed as yet to deal competently with it.
His question had completely confused her, and it was several seconds before she could stammer, ‘Well, yes…yes, I did, but—’
She wasn’t allowed to continue; still without turning round Stuart interrupted her. ‘Good. In that case I have a proposition to put to you.’
‘A proposition?’
The bewilderment and confusion was clearly audible in her voice. Stuart turned round, the tension easing out of his face slightly, an almost rueful expression taking its place as he told her, ‘Well, perhaps “proposal” would be a better word to use, although, being mindful of the romantic connotations of that particular word…I’m asking you to marry me, Sara. Oh, I know this is probably neither the time nor the place; I can see how much I’ve shocked you, which does not bode well from my point of view, but I’ve been turning the whole thing over and over in my mind, trying to think of the best way to approach you, and in the end I decided that… Well, suffice it to say that I decided the best approach was probably the most straightforward one…’ He gave her a wry glance. ‘I think John Senior thinks I’m off my head. We were just about to start planting out the new stock, when I suddenly knew I couldn’t delay things any longer. I’ve left him surrounded by damn near five hundred mixed saplings.’
Sara stared at him. She was, she discovered, shaking slightly, like someone caught up in the aftermath of a bad shock.
‘You want to marry me? But—’
‘I want a wife,’ Stuart told her emotionlessly. ‘Like you, I want a family, and it seems to me that since the two of us share so many interests, so many aims, plus the fact that we get on so well together, it must surely mean that a marriage between us must have at worst a fifty-per-cent chance of surviving and at best, given that such a marriage is something we both want and we’re both prepared to commit ourselves to, a far higher chance of surviving than many marriages between two people who consider themselves to be in love and who also consider that that single emotion will be strong enough to bind them together for an entire lifetime.
‘I’m not trying to pressure you, Sara; your reluctant acceptance isn’t what I want, and, before you say anything, I have to admit that this is something I’ve been turning over in my mind for quite some time; that I’ve had time to become accustomed to the idea, to let it take root and grow, and, as it’s grown, I’ve found myself coming to believe more and more firmly in it. You on the other hand haven’t had any time as yet to do any of these things. I can see that I’ve surprised you…shocked you. Please don’t reject the idea out of hand. Give yourself time to think about it. I’m quite prepared to wait. In the circumstances I wouldn’t expect anything else than that you should need time to think it over…perhaps even to discuss it with your family.’
‘But we don’t love one another,’ Sara protested huskily. ‘I… You…’
She was thinking as she spoke about that other woman. The woman he had loved. She was, she discovered, thinking about her, and wondering almost angrily if Stuart would have proposed to her if he hadn’t suffered her rejection, which was surely an idiotic thing to do, especially in the circumstances; especially when she herself…
Amazingly, instead of wanting to tell him immediately that there was no way she could even consider his proposal, never mind accept it, she discovered that her mind was flitting from one trivial aspect of the situation to another almost as though it was afraid to focus on the real nucleus of what had been suggested.
Marriage to Stuart… Marriage to a man whom she didn’t love… Marriage to a man who did not love her… It was a ridiculous suggestion, almost an insulting suggestion, and yet when her brain redirected the focus of the question and asked her how she felt about marriage to Stuart she was astonished to discover how easily and smoothly her emotions seemed to adapt to it. Marriage to Stuart…children with Stuart… Living here with Stuart and their children…
Unconsciously her eyes registered her confused emotions. She realised that Stuart was watching her and flushed a little.
‘It’s… It’s…’
‘All so unexpected?’ he asked her wryly.
‘I…I can’t believe you mean it.’
‘Take it from me, I do. In fact I’ve been nerving myself to discuss it with you since the first night we met.’
The night they’d met? But she hadn’t told him about Margaret’s advice that she should look round for a man whom she liked and with whom she could comfortably and compatibly live until the next day. She puzzled mentally over this for a few seconds and then realised that Stuart was still waiting for her to make some kind of response to his proposal…his proposition.
‘I…I just don’t know what to say,’ she admitted helplessly.
‘Does that mean you do know what to say, but don’t want to offend me by doing so, or does it mean that you aren’t entirely averse to the idea, but that you need rather more time to think it over?’
‘Yes,’ she told him, and then shook her head. ‘I mean, no, I’m not averse to…to marrying you, but that I… Well…I wasn’t expecting—’
‘You mean, this is so sudden, Mr Delaney,’ he interrupted her, lightening the mood by teasing her a little.
Sara laughed, grateful to him for injecting a little humour into the situation. ‘Well, yes, it is,’ she agreed. ‘I mean, I know you—’ She stopped, unwilling to say that she knew that he loved someone else, and that presumably that someone else, like Ian, was now forever out of his life. ‘Well, I know that for both of us this marriage will be a sort of “second-best”,’ she amended hurriedly, unable to look at him, in case she saw in his eyes the pain caused by the knowledge that she was not really the one he wanted, the one he would have chosen, had he had the power of free choice.
To her surprise he checked her straight away, telling her almost curtly, ‘I don’t in any way see a marriage between us as being second-best; far from it. In fact in my view…’ He stopped and then said more calmly, ‘I’ve already said that I don’t want to pressure you. I know what I want and I know that if you choose to marry me we’ll have all the ingredients to make ourselves an extremely happy and enduring marriage, and a background for our children which will give them the best possible atmosphere in which to thrive and develop. Think about it, Sara. Obviously the sooner you feel able to give me your decision…’
‘At least we can be sure of one thing,’ he added, turning away from her slightly. ‘There can be no doubt that sexually we’re going to be extremely compatible.’
How on earth did he know that? How on earth could he know it? She opened her mouth to ask him and then closed it again, conscious of a naïveté and self-consciousness that tied her tongue and kept her silent, while her pulse raced and a sensation like a tiny jolt of electricity burned through her body…an excitement…an awareness…an almost guilty knowledge of the way she had felt when he’d kissed her and how eagerly her senses had responded to him, how much she…
‘I’d better get back to my saplings,’ she heard Stuart saying behind her. ‘If you wish you can call it a day and go home. I appreciate that I’ve hardly chosen the most appropriate circumstances in which to approach you, but—’
‘No, no… After all, it isn’t as though we’re—’
‘In love,’ he supplied almost grimly for her. ‘No, I suppose not. Even so, a little finesse…’ He paused by the door and turned to look at her.
‘No matt
er what you think now,’ he told her quietly, ‘as far as I’m concerned, a marriage between us would never come into the category of second-best. How you choose to view it is of course your own affair.’
He was gone before she could make any response.
Now that she was on her own, she felt rather as though she had fallen asleep and had a particularly vivid dream, but realistically she knew she had not been dreaming and that Stuart had in actual fact suggested to her that they might marry.
And yet what startled her most of all about the entire incident was not his proposal, but her own reaction to it, her own almost instinctive awareness of how easy it would have been to say yes, then and there…of how easy it was to contemplate the reality of being married to Stuart…
But he was right; it was something she needed to think through properly, to consider and then reconsider. Not just for her own sake. Not even for his, but, most importantly of all, for the children they both hoped they would have. She might be able to take the risk of making a mistake for her own sake, but not for theirs, never for theirs.
When she did as Stuart had suggested and went home she found her parents in the kitchen. Her mother was making pastry for a pie and her father was sitting in front of the range reading his newspaper.
‘Sara, you’re home early—is something wrong?’ her mother asked anxiously as she walked in.
She shook her head, and then, a little to her own surprise, heard herself saying shakily, ‘Stuart has just asked me to marry him.’
Later she told herself that she had intended to qualify her announcement, to explain that Stuart’s proposal had been prompted not by love and passion but by logic and reason, but somehow or other in her mother’s excited response to her news she found that by the time she had the opportunity to intercede and explain what had prompted his proposal it was too late because her parents had assumed that they were in love.