The cold night air hit her, making her shiver. Immediately Silas put his arm around her, pulling her back into the warmth of his body, his gesture almost an automatic one, as though they were in actual fact a couple and he had held her like this many times before.
‘You’re cold,’ he stated matter of factly. ‘Let’s get back to the car.’
He had parked a few minutes’ walk away, and although Hazel tried discreetly to pull away from him he made no attempt to let her go.
‘I’m sorry for behaving like such a fool,’ she apologised when they reached the car and Silas opened the passenger door for her.
‘Don’t apologise,’ he told her. ‘It was my fault. I upset you.’
‘You had every right to be angry with me,’ Hazel told him as she closed her door and he got into the car beside her.
‘Angry!’ He turned to look at her as he fastened his seatbelt, frowning a little. ‘I wasn’t angry. Disappointed, hurt maybe, because I felt you’d misjudged me, but I wasn’t angry, Hazel.’
‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I—’
‘I’m glad you did. In fact…’ He paused and looked at her and then asked mildly, ‘Does Katie know that you thought she and I were lovers?’
‘Yes,’ Hazel admitted. ‘I couldn’t understand why the two of you seemed to want to spend so little time together. She thought it was funny. She wanted to tell you there and then, but…well, I asked her not to.’
She yawned suddenly, overtaken by a wave of emotional and phy
sical exhaustion.
‘You’re tired,’ Silas commented. ‘And no wonder, heaving that damned desk around and then getting that bedroom ready for me.’
‘I’m thirty-six, not seventy-six,’ Hazel retaliated drily.
Silas had been about to start the car’s engine, but now he paused and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve heard you say something positive about your age? You look younger than many women of thirty, and yet you try desperately hard to give people the impression that you’re at least twenty years older than you actually are. All the time in your response to people, you seem to be telling them not that you’re a highly desirable woman, but that you’re a woman who has put the years of her sexuality behind her. Most women of your age these days would be most affronted if anyone were to suggest that they were sexually past it, so to speak.’
‘I’m not most women,’ Hazel told him stiffly. ‘My father—’
‘Your father locked you away in an emotional chastity belt, yes, I know,’ Silas broke in grittily. ‘You were barely sixteen when Katie was conceived. Little more than a baby yourself, and in all the years since her birth I suspect that you’ve remained as unawakened sexually as you were when she was conceived.’
This wasn’t the kind of conversation she ought to be having with him. It was far too dangerous, far too laden with potential hazards.
‘If you’re going to ask me why I’ve never made any attempt to experiment sexually, then the answer is that obviously I have a very low, not to say virtually non-existent sex drive,’ she told him fiercely, ‘and now could we please change the subject? You brought me out to dinner so that we could discuss your book.’
‘A very low sex drive,’ he repeated musingly, ignoring the latter part of her speech. ‘Mm…or perhaps a father who made you feel so guilty and ashamed of your sexuality that you were emotionally coerced into suppressing it.’
‘Well it’s hardly of world-shattering importance now either way, is it?’ Hazel interrupted him. ‘After all, at thirty-six I’m hardly likely to—’
‘There you go again, Silas told her. ‘At thirty-six you’re hardly likely to what? Fall in love? Why on earth not? Thousands do…every day.’
‘Yes, teenagers. People in their twenties—’
‘No,’ Silas contradicted her ruthlessly. ‘Not just people under thirty. I have an uncle. He never married, never wanted to, and then when he was sixty-five he went on a cruise, met someone, fell in love and married her. They’ve just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary and they’re as much in love now as they were when they first met, and before you ask, no, she isn’t some young girl, in fact Louise is actually three years older than Frank. Before they met she’d had a very hard life, a husband who treated her badly, and then left her with five children to bring up. Those hardships are reflected in her face and it was those, her vulnerabilities as much as her strengths, that drew my uncle to her.
‘Love isn’t restricted to the very young, Hazel, and why should it be? Isn’t it true after all that all too often it’s something they take for granted and frequently abuse? Older people can fall in love too, you know.’
‘Even those as old as thirty-six,’ she said shakily.
‘Even those as old as forty-one,’ he told her softly, startling her into looking directly into his eyes.
It was a mistake. Her heart missed a beat and then another. She suddenly discovered that it was hard to breathe.
Was Silas going to kiss her, and what if he did? she wondered in panic. Would she be able to stop herself from responding to him? Would she…?
As the frantic thoughts flooded through her head and she tensed her body against them, Silas smiled at her, and then turned the key in the ignition.