Conveniently His Omnibus

‘Lillian is an extremely mentally disturbed young woman, Sophy,’ he said quietly. ‘If I give you my word that she and I have never been lovers and that I would never want her as my lover, would you believe me?’

‘Where is she now?’ Her throat was dry with tension.

‘With Harry and Mary-Beth. I managed to persuade her to drive me over there yesterday afternoon. I thought you were angry with me because I hadn’t told you what was happening. I should have done but our own relationship seemed too tenuous...so fragile that I felt I couldn’t risk destroying it by burdening you with problems that weren’t really yours. Especially after the shock of Chris’s attack.’

‘She said you loved her...’ Her voice was cracked and uneven. ‘She said you wanted to divorce me.’

‘She’s a very sick person, Sophy, so totally out of touch with reality that I’m afraid she’ll never be wholly sane again. Believe me, I did nothing...nothing to encourage her in her fantasies.’ He smiled rather grimly. ‘There was only one woman on my mind whilst I was in Nassau and that was you. Do you believe me?’

‘Yes.’ She said it huskily and knew that it was true. Her heart somersaulted as he lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to her palm, caressing it softly with his tongue.

‘How did you know what Lillian had said to me?’

‘Mary-Beth told me. She also told me something else.’ Sophy tensed and looked at him, remembering her own admission to Mary-Beth that she loved him.

‘She said you were frightened of thunder storms,’ Jon told her softly, ‘and that she’d told you to bury your head under a pillow. I’m glad you chose my pillow, Sophy.’

She could feel the heat coming off his skin, and being in his arms was like coming home to safety having known great pain and fear. His mouth touched hers, lightly, questioningly and she clung to him, abandoning all pride as she was swamped by her own shattering response to him.

She could feel his heart thudding erratically against her, his mouth hot and urgent as it moved over her own. She wanted him to go on kissing her for ever, but already he was releasing her, putting a distance between them.

‘I still haven’t been entirely honest with you.’

She thought for a moment her heart-beat had stopped. He smiled gravely at her and said quietly, ‘When I asked you to marry me I had no intention of it ever being merely a convenient arrangement, devoid of love and physical contact.’

‘You hadn’t?’

He shook his head, said ‘No,’ and then laughed at her expression. ‘I begin to think you’re the one who needs glasses, Mrs Philips,’ he teased her softly, ‘otherwise you’d surely have seen that I’d been lusting after you ever since you came to work for me. From the very first time we met in fact.’

She stared at him in disbelief, stammering, ‘But...but I thought—’

‘That I was a sexless, vague, confirmed bachelor, more interested in computers, than human beings,’ he said wryly. ‘Oh, yes, I do realise that and I had been cursing my far too effective armour plating for quite some considerable time. It was the look on your face when you heard David saying that Louise had wanted to get into bed with me that finally gave me hope.’

‘What sort of look?’ Sophy asked him suspiciously.

His smile was both innocent and tantalising. ‘Oh, the sort that said you were looking at me as a man instead of simply your lame dog boss.’

Sophy shook her head. ‘But why pretend to be something you weren’t, Jon? Why pretend to be so sexless and...dull?’

He hesitated for a moment and then said slowly, ‘I know this will make me sound unattractively vain but when I first went up to Cambridge, like many another before me I wanted to have a good time. My father was comfortably off...those were the days when teenagers didn’t have to worry too much about getting a job...when, in fact, our generation thought it was the hub of the whole world. It was my first real time away from home, I had a generous allowance and a small sports car my father had bought me when I passed my ‘A’ levels. I wasn’t short of congenial feminine company. In short I lived a life of hedonistic pleasure rather than scholarly concentration. That all came to an abrupt end just after my third term. My tutors started complaining about the standard of my work...that sobered me up quite a bit, until then I’d never really had to work, you could say that it had all come too easily to me. Then a friend of mine was sent down—drug trafficking; a girl I’d gone out with died—all alone in a filthy squat with her arm all bloated out with septic poisoning from using a dirty needle—she was mainlining on heroin. I had to identify her. It all brought me down to reality.