by Penny Jordan
Her uncle, like most males of his generation, enjoyed a little cosseting, and Emily was quite happy to indulge him in this small vice. She knew how much he liked sitting down to dinner at a table set with the heavy polished cutlery he had inherited from his Victorian grandparents, and the equally old and treasured Meissen dinner service.
When she had finished she surveyed the room, with its warm, burning fire, its polished wood, its gleaming silver and its red and gold-banded china, and she wondered if her great-uncle had the faintest idea of just how much work went into the production of such a welcoming setting, and how much more work there would be after dinner was over.
Each piece of the precious, fragile china had to be carefully washed and dried by hand, each piece of cutlery polished—tasks which Emily always felt it was unfair to leave to Mrs Beattie.
And yet at heart she didn’t really mind. There was something very satisfying about knowing she was, if only indirectly, responsible for such a welcoming scene. Another instance of how unfitted she was for modern life, she decided as she headed back to the kitchen. She could certainly never envisage herself in a role where she called any human being her superior, but this need she had to find an outlet for her homemaking instincts seemed to get stronger rather than weaker as time passed.
Her uncle would expect to sit down to dinner at half-past eight; he would want to give his guest a glass of the expensive dry sherry he favoured first, and of course the man would have to be shown his room and given time to settle in. Emily sighed as she glanced at her watch. Half-past six. She hoped her uncle wasn’t going to be too much longer.
Almost on cue she heard a car arriving outside, its soft, subtle purr surely indicating a machine far more expensive than the diesel-fuelled vehicles belonging to the taxi firm her uncle always used when she wasn’t driving him. She frowned as she took off her apron, automatically smoothing the plain, neat front of her dark grey dress before stepping into the hall.
The door opened. She heard her uncle’s voice, and then another: male, vibrant, and shockingly familiar. She stood frozen where she was, while the effect of that voice was like an electric shock to her system. Disbelief, fear, anger, shock; all of them flowed through her in a jangling discordant series of silently screamed protests.
Matt! But it couldn’t be. Not here!
Her head was swimming; she felt sick and dizzy, her heart beating rapidly so that she almost felt as though she were hyperventilating. She forced herself to take a deep, calming breath and then another as she stood in a betrayingly defensive position, her back almost up against the panelling of the hallway as she instinctively sought protection in the shadows.
Her uncle walked in first, his conversation and walk more animated than Emily remembered it being for a long time, and then Matt followed him—but a different Matt from the one she remembered.
Gone was the ragged hair and beard, and in its place was a smoothly shaved and intensely masculine jaw. The untidy, overlong hair had been cut, the jeans and sweater replaced by the standard don’s uniform of sports jacket well worn at the elbows, beneath which he was wearing a checked shirt and a plain tie. It was odd how her brain retained the facility to monitor and record these small, so unimportant details, while her body refused to free itself from the sick tension that chained her to where she stood.
‘I’ll just introduce you to my niece. Marvellous girl. I wonder…’
She saw her uncle peering myopically around him, and forced herself to move.
The silent prayer she was uttering that by some miracle Matt wouldn’t recognise her went unanswered as she stepped shakily out of the shadows, and monitored with acute anxiety the immediate recognition that widened his eyes and then narrowed them as he focused on her with an intensity that made her stomach churn.
‘Ah, Emily, my dear, there you are. Come and let me introduce you to our guest. Matt…this is my niece, or rather, my great-niece, and assistant, Emily Blacklaw. Emily, this is the colleague I was telling you about—Matt.’
Far faster to recover than she could ever have been, Matt was extending his hand towards her. She put her own into it reluctantly, all too conscious of the hardness of the calluses on his palms, calluses which had brushed her skin and sensitised it to heights of almost unbearable desire.
‘Emily…’
That faint hardening of tone as he said her name wasn’t something she had imagined, she knew, and, despite all the efforts of her self-control, she could do nothing to prevent the hot, guilty tide of colour staining her skin. She couldn’t speak, and she knew that the effort she made to smile and behave normally fell a long, long way short of his own almost urbane reaction to her.
But then, he had probably had a lot more practice at this sort of thing than she had had herself, she reflected bitterly, remembering how, when he had touched her, there had been nothing tentative or unknowing about the movement of his hands and mouth.
Sublimely unconscious of the ferocity of the hidden currents surging between his niece and his colleague, her uncle said, good-humouredly, ‘Emily, perhaps you’d show Matt his room, and then, if you’d like to join me in my study for a pre-dinner glass of sherry, Matt…’
There was nothing she could do—no escape route she could take. Rigidly keeping her back to him, Emily walked towards the stairs. She knew he was following her, even though he moved so lightly that she couldn’t hear his footsteps.
She waited tensely for her uncle to open his study door, her fingers tightening on the banister rail as she felt the heat of Matt’s body close behind her on the stairs. Every instinct she possessed urged her to forget pride and everything else, and to take to her heels and run, but before she could do any such thing she felt his fingers closing round her wrist, forcing her to stand still as he caught up with her.
Some last spark of bravado made her say haughtily, ‘Yes…what is it?’
The look he gave her was glacial. ‘I’m surprised you need to ask. I’m introduced to the great-niece of a colleague, a young woman by the name of Emily Blacklaw, but I already know that same young woman by a completely different name. I think in the circumstances some explanation is merited, don’t you?’
‘Francine is my second name,’ Emily told him stiffly.
‘And a convenient disguise to hide behind, should I have tried to follow up our…er, acquaintance.’
Emily compressed her lips. They both knew that there was scant chance that he would have wanted to do that, but it was impossible to tell him why she had lied. Why just for once she had wanted to be someone other than herself.
‘You must think what you wish,’ she told him curtly. ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you.’
‘No, indeed,’ he agreed. He was watching her almost gravely, an expression in his eyes that made her body feel as though it were covered in scalding heat. This confrontation with him, so unexpected and so unwanted, was bringing home to her, if she needed it reinforcing, the full intensity of the sordidness of their encounter.
Inwardly writhing with self-disgust, forcing herself to forget that in his arms she had felt neither guilt nor any loss of self-respect, but rather the reverse—that she had in fact felt loved, cherished, desired, wanted, loved…
‘But you didn’t want me to find you, did you?’
Alarm bells were starting to ring in her brain. Why did he keep asking her that? Surely he had as little desire to meet her again as she had him?
‘I can’t think of any reason why either of us should want to see the other again,’ she told him stiffly.
‘Can’t you?’ The look in his eyes made her stomach twist sharply. Heat suddenly flooded her, a heat which had nothing at all to do with the searing, burning self-disgust she had felt earlier. A heat that had its roots in the dangerous wanton ache that was so quickly and treacherously infiltrating her body. She could think of only one reason why he might have wanted to see her again. She shuddered as she stood staring defiantly into his eyes. Did he really think that she would be wi
lling to indulge in a sordid sexual liaison with him—a liaison through which they both indulged their sexual needs without any softening, lifting, shared emotional commitment? What sort of woman did he think she was? She bit her lip in mortification, suddenly unable to look at him any longer. It was obvious just what he thought she was, and with good reason.
‘Of course,’ he was saying coolly, ‘there could be another reason why you deliberately concealed your real identity. It could be that there is already someone else in your life. Someone for whom I was used as a substitute…’His voice hardened dangerously over the last word, but, oblivious to her danger, Emily reached eagerly for the lifeline he had unwittingly thrown her.
Someone else… Yes, that was it. She would have to pretend that there was someone else, for the duration of his visit at least. That way she could ensure that he didn’t make any attempt to repeat the intimacies they had shared so unexpectedly and so dangerously.
Quite how she knew that he was a man who would never accept being used in the way he had just described to her, she had no idea, but that knowledge was like a life-raft and she clung desperately to it, heedless of the reckless note of desperation in her own voice as she said quickly, ‘Yes. Yes, there is someone else—’
She broke off as the study door opened and her uncle came out. ‘Emily,’ he called up to her, seeing her standing on the stairs. ‘There’s a telephone call for you. Someone called Travis.’
‘Travis.’
What on earth was her sister’s fiancé ringing her for? Had there been an accident? Was something wrong with Gracie?
As she started to hurry downstairs, tugging her wrist free of Matt’s confining grip, he leaned forward and said menacingly, ‘Travis—and just who is he?’
Later she had no idea what on earth had made her say it; it was so out of character for her to lie—and such a mammoth and idiotic lie as well, but then, everything she had done when she was in Matt Slater’s company was out of character, so that her quick, automatic lie of, ‘Travis is my fiancé,’ tripped off her tongue so easily and so unexpectedly that she could hardly believe she had actually spoken the words.
As she hurried into the study, she found that her heart was beating at what seemed to be twice its normal rate. She picked up the receiver with a hand that shook visibly; curling her fingers round it, she said tensely, ‘Travis, it’s Emily. Is anything wrong?’
‘No…no, nothing like that. It’s just that my folks are planning a trip to England. They’re leaving in three months’ time, they both want to visit your part of the world and Gracie suggested that your uncle might be able to put them up for a couple of days and that you might be able to show them around. Feel free to say no, if it’s going to be too much trouble.’
Trouble… She wanted to laugh in sheer hysteria. Trouble was the man she had left standing on the stairs. Trouble was the feeling she got inside when she looked at him. Trouble was the sick, awful knowledge that she had got herself into a situation completely beyond her experience—a situation she had no hope of being able to cope with.
‘No,’ she heard herself saying. ‘It won’t be any trouble. If you could just let me have the dates when your parents will be here…’
They chatted for a few more minutes; her sister, it seemed, was out shopping with her mother-in-law-to-be, and, conscious both of the cost of the call and the fact that Matt Slater was probably still standing on the stairs waiting for her, Emily said her goodbyes as quickly as she could.
He was, and he broke off his conversation with her great-uncle when she reappeared, waiting until they were out of earshot to demand abruptly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were engaged?’
‘You never asked.’
There was an unexpectedly grim silence, almost as though he was angry with her, but why should he be?
‘I see. Where is he? Why isn’t he with you?’
‘He had to go back to Australia.’
‘And because he wasn’t available, you made love with me, as a substitute—is that it?’ he accused.
They were outside his room now. Emily stopped, wishing she could find a way of ending this awful ordeal. Keeping her face averted, she shrugged nonchalantly and, she felt, unconvincingly.
‘I…I suppose I was missing him so much that…’ Her voice trailed off uncomfortably as she tried and failed to imagine herself, if she had been engaged to anyone, actually making love with someone else.
‘You were missing him so much that you used me to relieve your sexual need.’ He sounded furiously, bitterly angry, Emily recognised numbly, and hearing it put into words, and such words, made her shudder with self-loathing—but there was no way out now.
‘Yes. Yes, I’m afraid I did.’
There was an odd quality to his silence, but she couldn’t risk looking at him to see why. ‘This is your room,’ she told him stiffly, pushing open the door. ‘I’ll leave you to settle in. Uncle John likes to have dinner at eight-thirty.’
She was starting to turn away from him when he reached out and took hold of her arm, restraining her. ‘Tell me something,’ he enquired softly. ‘Is there any likelihood that you’re—er…going to miss this fiancé of yours while I’m staying here as a guest of your uncle? Because if there is…’
This was what she had been dreading. What she had tried to protect herself against, ever since she had stood in the hallway and seen that sharp, assessing look in his eyes.
It was worse, far worse than anything she could have imagined. The humiliation and anguish of it poured through her like burning acid. She went white with shock and pain, wrenching her arm away from him as she stammered wretchedly, ‘No… What happened between us happened…but it won’t happen again. I want to make that completely clear to you. You may make a habit of indulging in casual sex,’ she told him bravely, throwing all restraint aside, ‘but I can assure you that I do not.’
‘Because you’re in love with your fiancé.’
His question threw her. She stared at him for a moment and then said quickly, ‘Yes… No… That is, I wouldn’t indulge in casual sex even if I weren’t engaged—’ She broke off, biting her bottom lip, and then said huskily and truthfully, ‘I can’t explain why…what happened between us did happen.’
She swallowed, suddenly feeling drained and defeated, and was stunned to hear him saying softly, almost gently, as though he was trying to reassure her, ‘You were missing your fiancé, you were lonely…confused… Tell me about him. What does he look like?’
Emily blinked, thrown into complete confusion. What did Travis look like? She tried to remember, and managed to stammer awkwardly, ‘Well, he’s tall…and blond…’
‘You’ll have to show me his photograph. You do have a photograph of him, don’t you?’
Her mouth dropped. Of course she didn’t. At her side, Matt was saying helpfully, ‘I only mention it in case I’m likely to meet him.’
‘No…no you won’t,’ Emily told him quickly, tensing when he took hold of her left hand and said quietly, ‘You don’t wear his ring.’
‘No…no…there hasn’t been time yet. We only told my parents a little while ago. Travis had to go home to tell his parents. No one else in the family knows.’
‘He’s gone home, without you?’
Why was he asking her all these questions, pushing her, making her tell him more and more lies? ‘I—I couldn’t really go. There’s Uncle John’s book… Look, I must go downstairs—the dinner—’
‘Such reluctance to talk about the man you love. Most women like nothing more, especially when they’re newly engaged.’
‘Well, I’m not most women,’ Emily told him sharply, finally finding the strength to hurry away from him.
‘No,’ he agreed under his breath, watching her walk stiffly towards the stairs. ‘You certainly aren’t.’
He was frowning as he walked into his room, recalling the small, betraying stain he had found on his sleeping-bag. It had stunned him with disbelief at first, reinforcing his own crazy
feeling that what had happened between them was no casual, meaningless encounter, but something special… something rare…something almost predestined. And then to discover that the woman who had given herself to him so passionately, so completely, had been a virgin and he her first lover. Impossible, surely. But the evidence was there.
He had begun to wish more than ever that he had not let her walk away from him. But he had been so stunned by his own reaction to her, so overwhelmed by the intensity of his desire to make her stay, so caught up in the shocking reality of his own emotions, that she had been gone before he could think of protesting.
And then, when it was too late, he had realised that where an experienced woman, confident enough of herself and her sexuality to indulge so carelessly and passionately in sex with a stranger, might just be able to walk away from what had happened without giving their intimacy a second thought, a virgin, a woman who had had no previous lover, a woman who for whatever reason had never allowed her body to experience whatever need had driven her into his arms, was scarcely capable of the same dispassionate detachment; and, if he had not wanted to find her for his own sake, he must surely then have wanted to find her for her own, to make sure that she was all right…that she was not suffering any emotional or psychological scars from what they had shared.
He had tried to trace her, once he was free of the formalities of taking up his new temporary post, going back to the town where he had left her to check up at the garages there, but it had seemed that none of them had dealt with the removal and repair of her car. Having drawn a blank there, he had had to hurry back to Oxford before he could widen his net still further—to try to find a way of curing himself of what he had been feeling over a long period of sleepless nights, when all he could think about was how she had felt in his arms.
Looking at it dispassionately, it wasn’t hard to guess why she was so scared. She must be petrified that this fiancé of hers would discover what she had done, presuming of course that he knew she was a virgin. He scowled suddenly. She had claimed that she and this Travis were lovers, but of course that was simply to deceive him. He had seen the terror in her eyes, the fear that he would betray her. His scowl deepened. Just what sort of man did she think he was?