by Penny Jordan
‘I don’t see why you should be so surprised,’ she interrupted him shakily. ‘After all, you were the one who told me that I’d be a fool to waste my opportunities, to throw away my chances of success by tying myself down with a husband and children.’
He had said that to her, but they both knew that what he had meant was that he would be a fool if he threw away his chances and tied himself down by marrying her. But he had deliberately chosen to make it sound as though he were thinking of her when in reality his motives had been entirely rooted in his own needs and wants. If he had thought about her at all, he would have made sure that she never got the chance to fall in love with him in the first place and he would certainly never have allowed her to believe that that love was returned, but then, as she had discovered over the years, men were adept at making women believe they were acting in their best interest and for the most altruistic of reasons when in fact they were doing almost exactly the opposite.
‘You’ve changed, Holly.’
She smiled mirthlessly at him, and said lightly, ‘I should think I have, although I prefer to think of it as growth rather than change. I must go, Robert. I’ve got a board meeting this afternoon and I’m already late.’
She realised as she said it that it sounded more like the defiant boasting of a frightened child than the cool, reasoned comment of a woman too protected and safe from the kind of vulnerability she had once known to be remotely affected by a chance meeting with the man who had once been the cause of her greatest unhappiness.
The look Robert gave her seemed to reinforce her own thoughts.
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll wait,’ he said softly, and it wasn’t a kind comment. ‘Odd how different our perceptions are from reality. You’re every inch the sleek, sophisticated, successful businesswoman now. I wonder, has she completely obliterated the girl I once knew?’
His comment stunned her. She had no idea what had motivated it or why he should be so deliberately cruel as to mention that girl. He must know how much anguish he had caused her...how much pain... how much self-revulsion when eventually she had come through the madness of begging and entreating him not to leave her, of pleading tearfully with him to stay...to love her instead of leaving her.
He had changed too...because the Robert she had known would never have made a comment like that. The Robert she had known—the Robert she had thought she had known, she reminded herself as she looked away from him, fiercely stabbing the car into gear, and gritting her teeth. But that Robert had never really existed.
As she started to move away, Robert stepped back from the car, telling her drily, ‘Next time, remember, set out a bit earlier.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she told him through her gritted teeth. ‘Now that I know you’ve bought this place, wild horses wouldn’t drag me within a mile of it.’
Ten minutes later, when she finally pulled out on to the main road, she was still shaking, still cursing herself for her folly in giving in to her need to make that childish verbal defiance. Why on earth hadn’t she simply remained cool and uncaring, shrugging aside his comment and just driving off without giving in to the need to react to it?
Well, at least she had made her position plain. As far as she was concerned, his presence in the village wasn’t welcome, and she wished he had not chosen to come back. She was glad that it was extremely unlikely that she would have to have any kind of contact with him, although, womanlike, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth a single man could possibly want with such a huge barn of a house.
She was of course late for her board meeting, apologising to the other members when she hurried in.
As they discussed the new packaging, she remembered Patsy’s hint about Gerald not even being on the board. For some time she had been contemplating inviting him to join them as a non-executive director. He was a well-balanced, cautious man who would help to offset Paul’s ebullience, and he was their accountant.
‘I hear Robert Graham has just moved into the area,’ Lawrence Starling commented to her after the board meeting.
Lawrence was their newly appointed sales manager. Paul had head-hunted him from one of the multi-nationals. Single and two years older than her, he was beginning to develop a semi-proprietorial attitude towards her that Holly was trying to discourage.
‘Yes, I believe so,’ she agreed dismissively.
‘Strange sort of thing for him to do—I mean to move out here...’
‘He grew up here,’ Holly informed him.
‘Oh, I see. Look, Holly, I was wondering: there are one or two aspects of the new packaging I wanted to bring up at the board meeting, but with your being late there really wasn’t time. I know Bob Holmes wanted to get off to play golf, and I didn’t want to delay him. Could we discuss them over dinner tonight?’
‘No, I’m sorry, I already have an engagement,’ Holly told him truthfully. She hadn’t missed the none-too-subtle way Lawrence had let her know that Bob was playing golf, and, while she was forced to agree with Paul that Lawrence’s aggressive marketing tactics were beginning to pay off, she found his incessant need to put others down and his uncurbed ambitious desire both distasteful and wearying. And besides, in a sense what she had said was true, even if her engagement was merely with her garden and her desire to make sure that the new forget-me-not plants were tucked up in their beds just as soon as possible.
‘Tomorrow, then?’ Lawrence pressed her.
Firmly Holly shook her head, telling him, ‘I think you’d better wait and discuss it with Paul when he gets back. You know that he has overall charge of marketing.’
The sullen look Lawrence gave her irritated her, but she didn’t let it show. Why was it that men had this annoying propensity to change from ‘I know best’ father figures to sulky little boys whenever the former bullying manner did not work? Why could so few men accept a woman as their equal and rejoice in her success and her skills? Why must they always feel so threatened and be so antagonistic? Perhaps it was time that someone discovered a way of re-programming the entire male species.
If they did, one thing was for sure; it would be a woman who would make the discovery and implement it...no man would ever admit that his psyche needed any kind of change.
Reminding herself that she was perhaps being a little unfair and that there were many, many men who were comfortable with and supportive of their female partners’ success in life, she headed for her office.
* * *
IT WAS SIX o’clock before she was able to lift her head from her paperwork and think about preparing to go home.
An hour later, as she drove past the entrance to the lane past the Hall, she noticed that two men were working there, putting in the supports for a rough-hewn farm-style gate.
Well, Robert certainly hadn’t wasted much time there, she reflected as she put her foot down on the accelerator and sped past.
She was half a mile further down the road when she heard the all too unwanted sound of a police car siren. When she looked in the mirror and saw the driver flashing his lights at her, she cursed under her breath and pulled in to the side of the road.
She had been speeding, if only marginally, and she of all people ought to have known better. The number of times she had complained to Paul that he drove too fast— And now she was the one to get booked.
The police officer was polite but unrelenting; she wondered what he would have said if she had pleaded in mitigation that it had been the soreness in her heart caused by the memory of an old love-affair that had caused her to put her foot down and break the speed limit. Since he was a man, it was all too probable that he just would not have understood, she told herself as she listened gravely to his caution. Her first driving offence in over ten years of blemishless driving. And it was all Robert’s fault.
She was still glowering and mentally blaming him when she eventually drove off, this time keeping a much stricter eye on her speed.
Rory had gone but the newly turned earth of the flower-beds showed how ha
rd he had been working. The forget-me-nots were small dots of soft grey-green against the darkness of the earth. She lingered in the garden, studying them, telling them not to be overawed by their well-established perennial bedmates, and then paused to console and reassure those same larger plants, coaxingly promising them that the new arrivals were no threat to them, and that the summer extravagance of their pinks, silvers, whites and blues would be all the more spectacular after the sharp colour contrast of the bright spring yellows and blue of the bulbs and forget-me-nots.
It was almost an hour before she had finished her tour of the garden, and although it was still light she could smell the crisp early autumn scent infusing the air.
Yesterday morning she had spotted a heron investigating the fish pond, which meant that this weekend she would have to string wires from the vine eyes in the brick surrounding the pond to stop him from helping himself to her fish.
The irritation and anxiety produced by her run-in with Robert was slowly fading as her senses responded to the peace of her garden.
If, ten years ago, someone had told her that she would become so devoted to such a homely pursuit, that she would find so much solace and pleasure in it, she would have bitterly denied what they were saying. A small smile touched her mouth. It was time she went in. She was going out this evening.
Their local market town’s seventeenth-century assembly rooms had recently been renovated and reopened, providing an elegant setting for a number of events. Tonight’s event was a small charity affair; a well-known cellist who supported the charity would be playing for them, and there was to be a light supper afterwards, provided by the local WI.
As a prominent business figure locally, Holly had been approached to support the charity and in addition to buying tickets she had also given a generous donation. The bowls of pot-pourri scenting the rooms had been provided by her company, their perfume a distillation of natural products and one which she personally thought was evocative of the period in which the assembly rooms had been built.
The evening was to be a formal affair—black tie for the men and gowns for the women, preferably with some sort of Regency look about them to complement the setting. When she had originally bought the tickets, Holly had assumed that Paul would be escorting her, but then this trip to South America had intervened.
Instead she was now being partnered by a relative newcomer to the area.
The building of a new private hospital just outside the market town had resulted in an influx of medical personnel. John Lloyd was the new hospital’s chief administrator. A Scot in his late thirties, divorced with two children, he had made no secret of the fact that he found her very attractive.
However, he was old enough and intelligent enough to accept that while she enjoyed his company Holly did not wish their relationship to progress any further.
For this evening’s occasion she had had made an Empire-style dress in eau-de-Nil silk with silver embroidery around the hem. Over it, she was wearing a dark green velvet cloak lined with the same silk as the dress. The outfit had been an extravagance, but, as Paul had pointed out, the event was being photographed both for the local paper and the county magazine and she would be photographed in her role as head of the company so that it was important that she presented the right appearance.
With the aid of her electric curling-tongs she managed to produce enough feathery ringlets in her fine hair to be caught back in a soft ethereal tangle, vaguely reminiscent of the correct period hairstyle.
When she was dressed and ready, she pulled a face at herself in her mirror. This kind of event was not really her style, although the charity in aid of children in need was one she was more than happy to support.
Personally she would far rather have made an anonymous cash donation than participate in this kind of event, but she quelled these thoughts, telling herself that she was being very unworldly in thinking that the money she and others had spent on outfits for the affair could far more sensibly have been donated direct to the charity. As Paul had pointed out to her when she had said as much to him, there were those who, while they were quite happy to buy expensive tickets for such events, would never have considered donating any such sum without the event to back it up.
John arrived on the dot at half-past seven. Holly didn’t invite him in. Years ago she had learned to be wary of naïvely allowing men to mistake her natural warmth and friendliness for sexual encouragement.
After Robert, the heady and dangerous sexual desire he had aroused within her had died completely, leaving her somehow bereft of any ability to respond to men on a sexual basis. As a form of self-preservation it couldn’t be beaten, and, in the new restrained mood of sexual constancy and celibacy which seemed to have doused the sexually ferocious fires of earlier decades, she had been able to reflect that perhaps after all Robert had done her a favour in destroying her ability to be sexually responsive to other men.
As she smiled at John and locked the door behind her, he murmured appreciatively, ‘Mm...nice perfume.’
Immediately she tensed. She had her back to him, but she could tell from the way she could feel the warmth of his breath against the back of her neck that he was leaning towards her.
‘Do you think so? It’s our new one,’ she told him brightly, firmly stepping to one side and turning round.
‘Officially we shan’t be launching it for a while yet. It has a floral base, but we’ve added some subtle extras to bring it into line with current tastes.’
‘It’s very sexy. And so are you...especially in that dress.’
Hurriedly Holly pulled her cloak more firmly around herself, suddenly uncomfortably conscious of the way the light from the security lights was highlighting the soft pale fullness of her breasts. The dress had a slightly lower neckline than she had expected. She remembered at the time that the dressmaker had pointed out to her that it had been de rigueur at the time the Empire line was made so popular for the neckline to reveal the upper curve of the wearer’s bosom.
The way John’s glance lingered appreciatively on her body made her feel both uncomfortable and irritated. She told herself that she probably ought to feel flattered by his admiration and interest; he was after all a very attractive man but on the one and only occasion when he had taken her in his arms and kissed her she had felt nothing at all, other than a mild sense of curiosity, quickly followed by panic and revulsion when the tenor of his kiss had become too passionate.
And yet with Robert...in Robert’s arms... She trembled suddenly, remembering how he had made her feel, how her whole body had trembled with eagerness and expectancy. How she had so wantonly and willingly moved closer to him, little moans of anguished expectation filling her throat as her body anticipated the pleasure he would give it. She had given herself to him so eagerly, so naïvely, believing he loved her as she did him. Sexually she might have been inexperienced, but there had been no hesitation in her response to him, no holding back, no restraint, no thought in her head of even attempting to control the emotions he aroused inside her. His merest touch had been enough to send her into a seventh heaven of delirious joy; the lightest brush of his fingertips against her skin, the gentlest touch of his mouth on her lips. And how she had ached for the intimacy of being held close to him without the barrier of their clothes; how she had quivered with longing and need to feel the sensual stroke of his hands on her breasts, her belly... He had cautioned her a little sometimes, groaning against her throat that she made it impossible for him to take his time and to lavish on her all the sensual joy he wanted to give her, because her immediate response to him destroyed his self-control.
She could remember so vividly the first time they had made love; before then there had been kisses and then caresses, so intimate and arousing that she had ached and begged for his complete possession, but he had told her that there was too much risk, that while she was unprotected from an unwanted pregnancy they must be content without that ultimate intimacy.
She could remember even n
ow her first nerve-racking visit to the family-planning clinic, her fear that the doctor would turn down her request, but she had been over eighteen—just, and, although he had eyed her thoughtfully and had spoken to her at great length about her relationship with Robert, eventually she had been given the precious prescription.
She had said nothing to Robert of her decision. He had received her tremulous news in a frowning silence which she had only later recognised should have alerted her to the truth, but then eventually there had come the evening when she had cried and begged him not to hold back, and when he had given in to her whispered pleas and the eager yearning of her body.
They had been lovers for just over six months when he had dropped his bombshell and told her that he would shortly be leaving for America.
She supposed he must have mentioned his decision to accept the post-graduate course at Harvard, but if he had she had deliberately pushed it to the back of her mind, telling herself that their love for one another was bound to be far more important to him than any plans he might previously have made for his career. Their love... She smiled cynically to herself as she felt the aching shadow of that old pain clutch familiarly at her heart. The love had been all on her side, only she had been too much of a fool to see it. She couldn’t blame him for taking physical advantage of that love; after all, she had been the one to instigate that intimacy, to urge and encourage him to make love to her. No, it wasn’t his fault that she now found it impossible to experience sexual desire; it was her own, her feelings a direct revulsion against what she felt had been her own lack of self-control, her own inability to face reality, her own stupid self-deception. She was never going to allow herself to fall into that kind of trap again. Never!
‘You’re very quiet,’ John commented as he drove towards their destination. ‘Problems at work?’
‘No, not really. I was just thinking about the launch of the new perfume,’ Holly fibbed.
‘But surely that’s Paul’s responsibility?’