Out 0f The Night (HQR Presents)

by Penny Jordan

  Traditionally it was women who wanted and needed more from a man than the physical pleasure of his body. Hadn’t he already learned his lesson with Jolie? Hadn’t he learned then that not all women desired or needed love?

  He climbed into the front seat of the Land Rover, relieved when the engine turned over first time. The atmosphere inside the vehicle was strained and tense, almost as though they were two enemies forced together, and yet last night…

  Forget last night, he told himself harshly. She…Francine…an exotic name and yet one that jarred him somehow. She looked so soft and fragile sitting there in that huge sweatshirt, her face virtually free of make-up, her hair a silky veil that concealed her expression. Last night he had threaded that silky softness through his fingers, and felt its warmth against his skin. Last night she had made no secret of the pleasure she had found in his arms. This morning she was as cold and remote as the snow-covered hills outside.

  What was the matter with him, he derided himself, that he felt this need to look for something more than a mere casual sexual encounter; why did he have this feeling of loss, of betrayal, almost? Why did he persist in feeling as though last night had been something special and precious, a gift for him alone?

  There had been nothing shy or hesitant about the way she had touched him, nothing uninformed or uncertain in the caresses that had burned his skin and made him ache so much. And yet… He clamped down hard on his wayward thoughts. It had happened and now it was over, she had made that clear enough…

  As she sat miserable and silent beside him, Emily wondered what on earth Matt must be thinking of her. The very fact that he hadn’t referred to last night proved how little it must have meant to him. If he had just said something, made a gesture towards her…but why should he? He had given her the opportunity to draw back last night. She hadn’t taken it, so how could she blame him now for assuming that such casual and meaningless sexual encounters were a normal part of her life? After all, she had hardly behaved like a shy, inexperienced virgin, had she?

  Her face burned as she remembered exactly how she had behaved; even now it astounded her that she had had that primitive, intimate knowledge of how to please and arouse him. Never once had she been tempted to caress Gerry the way she had wanted—no, needed—to caress Matt…never once with Gerry had she experienced that delirious awareness of her own female power.

  The silence of the snow-bound countryside was all around them. They were over the top now and dropping down towards the small town where Matt would leave her. They would never meet again. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it, so why did she have this ridiculous desire to burst into tears?

  They had reached the outskirts of the town. Soon they would be going their separate ways. When she had first woken up this morning, and realised what she had done, she had felt that she would die if she ever had to see Matt again, and now, when they were about to part, deep inside her she felt a tearing, wrenching sense of acute pain, as though the last thing she wanted was to leave him ever again.

  ‘I’ll drop you in the centre of the town, shall I?’ Matt asked her roughly.

  Emily nodded her head; her throat was too raw with pain for her to speak. The roughness in Matt’s voice, which disguised his reluctance to let her go, she interpreted as impatience to get rid of her, and when he stopped the Land Rover at a con venient place she had the door open and was halfway out before he could do anything to stop her. If she hadn’t had to wait for him to hand her her things, he suspected that she’d have disappeared out of his sight without even saying goodbye.

  As she took her bag from him and their fingers touched, an electric charge burned his flesh, reminding him of last night’s passion. He wanted to say something to her, to reassure her that if there should be any repercussions…but a woman who made love so eagerly and so skilfully would never take those kind of risks. Which was just as well, because he certainly hadn’t given any thought in the heat of their lovemaking to the possibility that she might conceive his child. He wanted to reach out to her, to hold on to her, but he knew that if he tried she would rebuff him. He had her name—the make of her car. He could always trace her…

  And yet still he was tempted to hold on to her, to make her stay with him, to tell her how much last night had meant to him, how unexpected it had been, that need for her—the feeling of oneness, of rightness, of needing…of loving?

  As she walked away from him, Emily wondered if her legs would actually support her. She felt so weak, so shaky, so vulnerable and alone in a way she had never experienced before. That brief meeting of their fingers had run through her like lightning.

  Forget him, she instructed herself as she refused to give in to the temptation to look back at him. Forget him and forget last night. It’s over…finished. You’ll never see him again and you ought to be glad of it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘EMILY, I’ll be bringing a colleague home with me tonight. In fact, he’ll probably be staying here for a while until he finds his feet, so to speak. He’s an ex-pupil of mine who’s taking over the Modern History Chair from Peregrine Myers for a trial period of six months. I meant to mention it to you earlier. He rang me while you were staying with your parents.’

  Emily sighed. It wasn’t unusual for her great-uncle to bring a colleague home with him; occasionally they stayed overnight, but there was certainly enough room in the rambling old house to accommodate half a dozen visitors if necessary. However, Emily was remembering that it was almost a month since she had last been to the supermarket and stocked up, and, for all their often fragile appearances, her great-uncle’s colleagues always seemed to have hearty appetites. There would be a room to prepare as well, and she had just got to a particularly complicated part of Uncle John’s notes.

  ‘You’ve got that man from the publishers coming to see you tomorrow,’ she warned him. ‘Now you will remember, won’t you?’

  Her uncle had a notoriously bad memory and she was not altogether surprised that he had forgotten to mention the arrival of his colleague.

  Down here in the south, it already felt like spring. The snowdrops were gone and the daffodils were nodding their golden heads in the gardens and under the hedges.

  It was a month since she had visited her parents. A month since…her hands started to shake and she forced herself to banish the memories crowding her mind. Since her return from the borders there hadn’t been a single night when she hadn’t been tormented by dreams…by memories, and then more recently by fears, which thankfully had been banished earlier this week when her body had given her irrefutable proof that her idiotic and senseless behaviour had not created a child.

  For that she was profoundly grateful, and yet at the same time there had been a sharply poignant sense of loss in the knowledge that physically she would have nothing to remind her of that shared night with Matt.

  Not that she had wanted to conceive. She wasn’t equipped to bring up a child alone; she didn’t have the strength, the inner resources, and yet—and yet to have loved a man so intensely, to have been loved by him so intensely in turn that that loving had created a new life…

  She told herself that her feelings were sheer emotionalism; that men who raped could impregnate their victims; that many, many children were conceived in an act that had nothing of love in it, and yet that vague feeling of loss had persisted until she had grown impatient both with it and with herself.

  She had behaved like an idiot and the best thing she could do was to put the whole thing out of her mind and be grateful that she was free to do so. She still had no idea what on earth had compelled her to behave the way she had; but the initial shock and searing shame which had so stunned her had gone, leaving an odd guilty awareness that it was the pleasure of those hours she remembered most, and not the sick feeling of self-disgust which had followed them.

  To have made love, so passionately, so intensely with a stranger—it was so out of character for her. Half of her still did not truly believe she had done it; perh
aps she hadn’t, she reflected fancifully half an hour later, driving into town—perhaps she had just imagined the whole thing. If so, her imagination was far more powerful than she had ever realised.

  She parked and did her shopping with her customary efficiency. While she had been at home, Gracie had complained exasperatedly that Emily was allowing Uncle John to turn her into more of a housekeeper-cum-companion than the highly qualified research assistant she was trained to be.

  ‘With your qualifications, your intelligence, you could work anywhere,’ Gracie had expostulated when Emily had said placidly that she enjoyed the variety of her life with their great-uncle. And it was true—she did. Despite his absent-mindedness, her great-uncle had a brilliant brain, and Emily had discovered during the time she had been working for him that she was becoming as fascinated by the ancient Egyptians as he was himself.

  She hoped that the publishers would have some good news for him at their meeting. The publication of his book meant a great deal to him.

  As she stowed her shopping away in her car, she glanced at her watch and reflected that, with a bit of luck, she should just make it back to the house in time to warn Mrs Beattie about their unexpected visitor.

  When Emily had first come to work for her uncle, it had taken a great deal of tact and diplomacy to establish good relations with the woman who had been coming in to clean for her uncle two days a week for almost twenty years, but, once she had realised that Emily was not going to trespass on her territory, the two of them had established a good working relationship.

  This summer, with a bit of luck, she really might be able to persuade Uncle John to do something about restoring his half-wild garden to something approaching order, she decided as she drove home.

  In addition to its overgrown flower beds and wilderness of a lawn, the house also had a walled kitchen garden. It seemed a shocking waste to Emily that they weren’t taking advantage of this benefit and producing their own vegetables. With a bit of luck, if she could persuade Uncle John to get someone in to tidy the garden up a bit, she might be able to find the time to grow the vegetables herself.

  She knew that her parents and sister found it hard to understand this craving she had for settled roots, for permanency. What her mother termed her ‘domesticity’ was something alien to the rest of the family, all of whom seemed to have been either a restless adventuring type like her parents and sister, or great academics like her uncle.

  The notion that someone might actually find pleasure in running a home, in cooking and gardening, in providing the material comforts for others, was so foreign to her family’s way of life that Emily had for a long time striven to deny the need within herself to do these things. Now that she was older she had learned to accept this side of her nature and to channel it as productively as she could.

  What she really needed, Gracie had told her forthrightly, was a home of her own and a large family to go with it. ‘If you must be so horribly domestic, darling, then at least find yourself a gorgeous mate to provide you with a brood of kids. It seems such a waste thinking of you lavishing all that time and attention on someone like Uncle John. Let’s face it, he’s so wrapped up in his mummies, he hardly notices anything else.’

  Emily had shrugged her shoulders and pretended that her sister’s comment hadn’t hurt. Gracie hadn’t meant to hurt her—she knew that. It would simply never occur to her that a woman might yearn desperately for what she had so casually termed a mate and a brood of kids, and yet know at the same time that those longings were unlikely to be fulfilled. At least, not in the idealistic manner of Emily’s private daydreams.

  The world was changing and there no longer seemed to be a place in it for a woman like her. These days women were expected to want careers, to be ambitious, to juggle the demands of work, husbands and families, and still have time left over to look glamorous and worldly.

  Having it all, it was called. Emily grimaced to herself. Did no one realise yet that it was virtually impossible for any one human being, no matter how highly motivated, to reach such relentless standards of perfection, and that there were many, many women who, when faced with the impossibility of matching such a role model, felt that such unattainable heights of perfection only underlined their own inadequacies? Women were good at feeling guilty, Emily acknowledged; and now they were being given additional burdens of guilt to carry.

  Frowning a little over her introspective mood, which she knew full well was caused by her unwanted memories of Matt, she forced herself to concentrate on her driving instead of giving in to the self-indulgence of useless daydreams.

  Face it, she told herself cruelly, what happened meant nothing to him; it was just a brief sexual fling. You could have been anyone. Telling herself that helped to underline her self-contempt. What kind of woman was she? she asked herself bitterly as she stopped the car and started to unload the shopping, carrying it into the big old-fashioned kitchen, and putting the boxes on the scrubbed deal table. Was she really so insecure, so desperate that she had had to give herself sexually to the first man who had asked her—the only man who had asked her? she reminded herself mercilessly. Was she really so incomplete in herself that she had needed a stranger’s touch on her body to reinforce her sexuality?

  Her emotions protested that it hadn’t been like that, but the sterner, more critical side of her nature derided this weakness. It was useless trying to hide from the truth. The only good thing about the whole affair was that she was not pregnant, and that she would never have to face Matt again.

  She could hear Mrs Beattie moving about upstairs, and, telling herself that there had been enough emotional self-indulgence for one day, she went upstairs to warn her about the arrival of Uncle John’s colleague.

  Mrs Beattie was thorough but slow, and by the time, with Emily’s help, the most habitable of the spare bedrooms had been prepared for Uncle John’s colleague, there was barely time for Emily to check through the post to make sure that nothing urgent needed to be dealt with before starting on the preparation of the evening meal.

  Uncle John preferred plain food cooked and served in a traditional manner, although Emily occasionally mourned the fact that this prevented her from giving her more artistic culinary talents their head.

  This evening she had planned on serving a warming beef stew with dumplings, which she knew was one of his favourites. She only hoped that his colleague shared her great-uncle’s fondness for what Emily privately thought of as rather dull boarding-school fare. After dinner she would leave the two old men together while she got on with some more work on her uncle’s notes.

  Her uncle wrote out his notes in a cramped, almost indecipherable hand which initially she had found it almost impossible to read, but now, with the ease of long practice, she skimmed through the handwritten sheets beside her typewriter, and then settled down to read them more thoroughly.

  It had been an additional bonus that the long summer vacations of her university days had prompted her to take a short, intensive secretarial course, primarily in those days so that she could earn extra money to pad out her grant; but, since coming to work for her great-uncle, she had found her secretarial skills almost as important as her abilities as a researcher.

  As always, once she started to transcribe her uncle’s notes she quickly found herself so deeply embroiled in the characters unfolding in front of her that they became more real to her than her surroundings.

  Guiltily she acknowledged that she was probably culpable of humanising the bare bones of her uncle’s research to such an extent that his learned treatise on the everyday life of a wealthy merchant and his family and their position within the complex social hierarchy of Egypt was beginning to read more like a novel than a set of interlinking facts.

  However, whenever she passed over the completed pages for her uncle to read, he seemed quite happy with what she had produced; and, if certain small humanising details came from the odd snippets of information she herself had picked up when checking up for her uncle
on certain previous research he had done, Uncle John himself seemed unaware of it.

  She was so engrossed in what she was doing that the striking of the grandfather clock in the hall outside the study, reminding her that it was five o’clock and that her uncle and his friend would soon be coming in, made her sigh in mild frustration and put her work to one side.

  Although the house was centrally heated, her uncle always insisted on having an open fire burning in whichever room he was using, and Emily’s first task, after she had covered her typewriter and put away her work, was to go into the dining-room and put a match to the fire she had set in there earlier.

  The dining-room was a dark-panelled area which she was constantly trying to enliven and warm with the addition of bowls and jugs of flowers. Today a large pewter jug of daffodils and forsythia from the garden cast a warm pool of golden sunshine over the polished darkness of the oak sideboard.

  While she kept one eye on the fire to make sure that it wasn’t going to go out—it had appalled her to discover when she first came to live with and work for her uncle that none of the chimneys had been swept in over five years, and the dining-room chimney especially had a habit of belching smoke sulkily when the wind was in the wrong direction—she started to prepare the polished oak refectory table for dinner.