‘What does it matter what I want? It’s what you want that matters,’ she cried, her voice thin and high.
‘Is it?’ He shifted sceptically in his chair, and it creaked mournfully. ‘How self-sacrificing of you. But I make it a rule not to have sex with women who believe themselves in love with me.’
Have sex? Believe? How often did it happen, for God’s sake? Julia battled her rage. He was still avoiding the issue.
‘All right,’ she said gently. ‘Let’s pretend I’m not in love with you.’
He removed his hands from the desk, hiding them behind the barrier of the desk. Julia remembered what it was like to have them drifting across her body, cupping her breasts, stroking a lazy path to her thighs. Oh, Hugh.
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Why?’
‘Haven’t you found solace already?’
‘What?’ Julia was bewildered by the harshness of the sudden accusation.
‘I saw you, the other night, coming out of Richard’s room.’
‘Spying?’ she demanded, her heart leaping. Was he jealous?
‘Passing by.’
‘You’re not going to bring up that hoary old groupie theory again, are you?’ she scoffed. ‘Richard and I aren’t lovers, never have been. He was trying to take my mind off your rotten behaviour. He knows I’m in love with you.’
‘No, Julia. You’re in love with some kind of image of me that you’ve created in your own head.’
‘God, I wish I was,’ said Julia fervently, having considered, and finally dismissed the idea herself. ‘A fantasy Hugh would be so much more accommodating than you are. I even love the beast in you.’
He flinched. ‘And what about your pathetic attempts to thrust me into the bosom of my family? Isn’t that trying to make me someone I’m not. Trying to make me into the kind of man you expect to love?’
‘I’m not trying to change you. Just to discover who you really are. To help free you from whatever it is in your past that stops you from loving, or letting yourself be loved …’
‘What in the hell do you know of the past!’ His savage ferocity forced Julia back into her chair, even as he rose violently to his feet, his own chair crashing over with the movement. ‘I’ll say it again, Julia, I am what I am. Don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.
‘Stay out of my life! Keep your damned inquisitiveness to yourself!’
‘It’s not inquisitiveness!’ Julia wasn’t afraid. She preferred this to his punishingly logical calmness. ‘It’s because I care. I know you didn’t have a very happy childhood—’
He gave a hoarse laugh. ‘I don’t need your pity, Julia, any more than I need your love,’ he ground out. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m precisely where I want to be.’ There was loathing in his very contemplation of her pitying him.
Julia got up and moved towards him, speaking passionately: ‘I don’t. Oh, I feel sorry for the boy, that scrawny twelve-year-old who took up weightlifting to escape the bullies. But not for the man. I don’t pity the man. You’ve made yourself into something that doesn’t need pity. I may not like the things you are, but that doesn’t change the way I am. That doesn’t stop me wanting or loving you. And don’t fool yourself that you can do without love entirely, Hugh. Without love you wouldn’t be here today. You wouldn’t have Connie or Michael, or your brothers and sisters. If you deny love, you deny them; and you don’t really want to do that, Hugh, do you? You want the best of both worlds. You want love but you don’t want to have to acknowledge or understand it. Hugh … Hugh!’
The last was a desperate plea. She came right up to him and struck him on the iron chest with her tiny fist. As she touched him a shudder passed through his body and she shuddered also, as if his anger, his pain, his tortured confusion passed physically over to her. She felt it as if it was her own. Hugh was staring at her, not seeing, and his hands came slowly up to rest on the close, curving arch of her hipbones and grip hard, clenching, as if he would wring the love from her body.
Instinctively Julia arched towards him, pulling his head down with her fists on his shoulders, going up on her toes to kiss him, groaning with satisfaction as his arms went around her and he held her so tightly her bones ached. For long, long moments they were locked in a desperate embrace as he yielded to hot, urgent passion. The large hands slid to the small of her back, pulling her soft thighs against him. He was as hard as iron, driven by her sweetness into unleashing his demons upon her. He used her roughly, but not hurtfully, and she was exultant at his surrender.
But then, at her moment of triumph, he suddenly tore himself out of her arms, white-faced, and stared at her in a kind of tormented horror.
‘No. No.’ He scrubbed his mouth with the back of a shaking hand, wiping out the ecstasy of the last few minutes, speaking raggedly, the soft voice splintered with purpose. ‘I refuse to do something that we can only regret.’
He was gone. Slamming out of the room, out of her life … and this time it was Julia who was left alone to contemplate an empty future.
CHAPTER TEN
‘I THINK you’ve been putting on a little weight,’ Phillip Randolph ran a critical eye over Julia as he came into the kitchen after farewelling the last of his dinner guests. He had been back for three weeks, entertaining almost every night, and Julia had avidly welcomed the intense activity. She was uneasily aware that for the first time in her career she was looking on cooking as a distraction, rather than as the main focus of her life.
And it wasn’t working.