Infatuation

'Lazy,' scolded Luke, appearing beside her. 'Is that all you're going to do all afternoon?'

'Probably,' she said without opening her eyes.

She felt him floating beside her, his bare arm brushed hers and a fierce awareness shot through her, her eyes flew open and their gaze met. Luke's hard face was sombre, his mouth level. After a few seconds he looked from her eyes to her mouth and Judith felt the crash of her heartbeat shaking her whole body. They seemed to be locked in a strange silence, the rest of the world a million miles away. Luke's head moved closer, she watched his face, hypnotised, his mouth was coming down towards her own with such infinite slowness that it was like being in a slow motion film. She stopped thinking, she was shuddering with a need that hurt. Then Luke's lips touched her mouth and she jack-knifed abruptly, thrusting him away and at the same second turning on to her front to swim for the side.

She pulled herself out of the water and began to run. Luke caught her before she had got three paces. His hands fastened on to her bare, wet shoulders and whirled her round to face him.

‘No. Luke…' she began before his mouth closed over her own again, opening her lips with a compelling heat before which she felt herself surrendering helplessly. She felt his fingers slide along her bare midriff, his hands moved on her wet back, one palm flattening against her waist to push her towards him while the other began to stroke along the smooth indentation of her spine, causing jagged splinters of mingled pleasure and pain to ache under her skin. She was trembling, shivering, conscious of his bare calves touching her legs, the roughness of the hair of his thighs pressed against her smoother skin. She tried to push him away, her hands on the broad, wet shoulders, but he was immovable. His ringers had reached the nape of her neck, he wound them into her tangled wet hair and pulled her head back, bent her slightly, her body shaped to fit beneath his, almost unbalancing her so that she could only cling to his shoulders to stay upright.

Luke lifted his mouth at last; with her eyes still shut she heard him say huskily: 'I've been wanting to do that for days.'

Her lashes were wet with tears, she opened her eyes and pushed him away angrily. 'You really are a bastard, aren't you? Baba's a friend of mine—I won't cheat on her, even if you're ready to!'

'I didn't intend that to happen, I wasn't planning to kiss you, but when you looked at me I…' he broke off, his mouth crooked. 'I'm so bloody jet-lagged I couldn't help it.'

'Do you have to try it on with every woman you meet? My God, if I looked like Baba I might understand you making a pass, but don't try to kid me you find me irresistible! I'm not that dumb.' Her face was stinging with angry colour. 'I don't like having routine passes made at me!'

'You're not dumb, you're plain crazy,' Luke said wearily. 'Don't tell me you don't know how I feel, because I've seen you look at me—I know you've noticed, you're too clever not to have realised.'

Judith didn't feel clever; she felt bewildered. She stared at him, her dark eyes wide, searching his face for clues. What was he talking about?

'I'm not going to apologise for falling in love with! you.' He was looking at her in a way that made her| heart flop over in sickening happiness. 'I'm a realist. It's happened and there's nothing I can do about it, nothing I want to do about it.'

'You can't,' she protested. 'I'm not beautiful, like Baba, I'm…'

'Even if you were so ugly you had to go around with a bag over your head, I'd still want to be with you all the time,' Luke interrupted with a sudden smile. '

Beautiful? No, my love, you're not beautiful—but then that isn't what I love about you, how you look. It's how you think. I love your sharpness and quickness, your sense of humour, your cool way of looking at things. I proposed to Baba on a crazy impulse. I wanted a wife. She was everything I'd thought I was looking for—she was beautiful and kind and sweet-tempered, she didn't seem to have any flaws at all. So I rushed into a proposal and everyone seemed pleased; my mother was delighted, Angela liked her, it was all perfect.' He turned his head, brushing back a wet strand of hair from his face, his eyes miserable. 'Until I met you, and fell in love and realised that I'd made a hellish mistake.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

JUDITH was stiff with shock, her skin icy, she had to sit down before her legs gave way beneath her. She stumbled to a lounger and practically fell on to it. Luke sat on the lounger next to her.

'How was I to know I was going to walk into you five minutes after getting engaged to her?' he said, more I to himself than her. 'If I'd never asked her to marry me, I'd never have met you anyway—that's the ironic part. Whoever arranges these things has a perverted sense of humour. One minute I was feeling quite pleased with life because Baba seemed to be exactly what I'd been looking for—the next I was in the middle of that fight with you at the nightclub, and that was when you started getting under my skin. I was ready to break things when you looked at me as if you thought I was a rat. I told myself it didn't matter a damn what you thought, but I knew it did. I should have been warned, then, but it still didn't dawn on me…'

Judith had stopped trembling now, she sat up, swallowing to clear her throat. 'I think we'd better go back to the house and get dressed now and I'd better leave. We'll pretend this discussion never happened, and as soon as I can, I'll find another job.' She had thought out what she was going to say before she said it; her voice sounded calm and level and her face, she hoped, gave the same impression, although she was not so sure of that. She did know, however, that facts were facts—she had been drumming that into herself since she was very small and they told her that her father was dead. From that moment she had been on her own, although at the time she hadn't understood that. It was only gradually that she had realised that her father's death had shattered her family life. After that, her mother was never there and her grandparents were so old. The symmetry of the' family had been destroyed overnight. Family life protects children from the cold winds of reality, she thought; most people don't realise until long after they have become adults that everyone is essentially alone in life. Judith had never that sort of shelter after her father died; she had envied other children their normal family backgrounds. She remembered vividly hearing her mother say: 'I must go out to work now, of course. Facts are facts, you can't change them by wishing.' It must have been embedded in her consciousness by the pain of the moment; from then on she had made herself face facts. She had to face them now.

'You can't back out of your marriage now; you'd hurt Baba too much,' she said.

'It would hurt her a damn sight more to be married to me when I love you. '

'She mustn't know.'

'You can't be serious,' he said, sitting up in a violent movement, his body stiff with denial.

'Love doesn't last for ever, you could fall out of love with me one day. ' Each word hurt, but she made herself say them.

'I think I fell in love with you the minute I saw you…'

'The first time you saw me you didn't even notice what I looked like,' she said, and he stared at her angrily. ‘We met in New York last autumn and you haven't even remembered…'

Luke looked confused. 'Last autumn? Did we? When?

'We weren't introduced,' she told him. 'I noticed you—but you certainly didn't even look twice at me.'

'That doesn't alter anything,' he said. 'Judith, I love you now.'

Judith was making herself think about Baba when she really wanted to hear Luke say again that he loved her; the words still beat in her ears, in her bloodstream, she had never thought she would ever hear him say that to her. She still couldn't quite believe he meant it, it was so hard to believe, but she couldn't refuse to believe in the tension she saw in his face, the piercing angularity of his facial bones beneath the damp brown skin. Luke was serious, he hadn't just been flirting with her when he kissed her just now; if he had smiled or tried to go on making love to her she might have doubted him, but his voice was so harsh and strained, he was so angry and miserable. That look on his face was the truth; there was no mistaking it.