He paused whilst Maggie tried to guess what was coming, impatient to get her phone call out of the way, let Gayle know that with the river no longer flooding she would soon be back in London, so that she could tell Finn about the exciting plans she had been making for both of them. Plans that meant that the sooner she did get back to the City, the sooner she could be starting to work on the wonderful life they would be sharing together.
‘Yes?’ she urged Finn curiously. They had already told one another of their love, so it couldn’t be that
‘I want you to move in here with me, Maggie.’
Finn could see the shock that Maggie wasn’t quite quick enough to banish from her eyes and his heart felt like granite inside his chest, a heavy leaden weight of black, bleak disillusionment.
‘Maggie?’ he pleaded rawly, when she continued to look at him in silence. ‘I know you’ve got your city life, your city commitments…’ He turned away from her a little, not wanting her to guess what he was thinking. She had told him about her business, her headhunting agency, and somehow he had managed not to betray to her his own feelings of distaste for the way of life she was reminding him of.
For a moment Maggie thought that he was just teasing her, that his suggestion was some kind of unfathomable male joke, but then she realised that he was actually serious. A fierce rush of emotion seized her—panic, fear, anger—forcing a deep chasm between her and her earlier feeling of love. In its place was a sense of betrayal, of disillusionment, a shocking and unwanted return from the idealistic world she had been creating in her own thoughts to one of reality.
‘Me move in here? No, that’s impossible,’ she told Finn immediately, shaking her head as she pulled back from him. ‘How could you possibly think—?’ She stopped and looked round the kitchen and then back at him, unable to vocalise the full extent of her disbelief.
‘Impossible?’ Finn challenged her flatly. ‘Why?’ But of course he already knew the answer to his own question, just as he also knew that she was unlikely to give it to him, to be honest with him. His knowledge of her duplicity lay heavily against his heart. She had said that she loved him, but he himself had heard her call another man ‘darling’, with a note of soft tenderness in her voice that had said how much he meant to her.
He had hoped, prayed, that she might tell him about her lover, that she might say something, anything that would explain, excuse her lack of honesty, but she had said nothing, had given herself to him with a sweet hot passion that he had been totally unable to resist even whilst he had been despising himself for not being able to do so. For the first time in his life he had had to admit that he was unable to control his own feelings, unable to stop himself from loving her even whilst all the time knowing that she was committed to someone else.
When she had claimed to love him she’d been lying to him. When he had asked her to come and live with him she had refused—because of that someone else and the commitment she already shared with him. But she was obviously not prepared to tell him any of this. And if that made her a liar then what did it make him? What had he wanted her to tell him? That there was another man in her life but that because of what they had shared he now meant nothing to her whilst he, Finn, meant everything? Where the hell did he think he was living? Certainly not on planet earth. Cloud cuckoo-land was more like it.
A quick fling, a few days of sexual excitement with a stranger—that was all he was to her. He had known so many women like her in the old days, known them and felt sorry for them, for all that was missing from their lives, never imagining that one day he would fall in love with one of them.
Silently his stubborn heart begged her to confide in him, to justify its belief in her against the cynical contempt of his brain.
Maggie felt as though she was in shock. How could Finn possibly have imagined that she could live here? Angrily she blamed him for the destruction of her happy plans. And yet instead of exhibiting guilt, as he ought to be doing, something in Finn’s manner was suggesting that he felt she was the one who was at fault. If he really loved her, as he had claimed to do, he would know instinctively how impossible it was for her to live somewhere like this.
The cold weight of his own disillusionment and pain lay like lead against Finn’s heart, entombing it. Bitterness filled him, darkening his eyes and hardening his mouth in a curt line of contempt.
‘You’re right,’ he agreed savagely. ‘It is impossible. What were you planning to do, Maggie? Just disappear without a word, without a Thank you for having me? I should have remembered, shouldn’t I, that city women like you get a thrill out of indulging in a little bit of rough now and again—especially when it can be kept hidden away…walked away from? Well, perhaps before you do go I should really give you something to remember me by.’
Before Maggie could escape Finn moved, trapping her between the kitchen wall and his body and placing his hands on the wall either side of her as he deliberately lowered his mouth towards her own and began to kiss her with a savage passion that stripped away any veneer of polite social convention, revealing the raw, naked intensity of his anger—and his desire.
And hers she admitted bitterly as the sheer physical strength of her own need burned through her. Beneath his mouth she opened her own, taking angry biting kisses from his lips, her hands curling into small fists that clawed at the front of his shirt as she both clung to him and tried to force him away. The weight of his body as he lowered it against hers to imprison her made her want to fight against what he was doing and at the same time not merely to succumb to it but to feed it, until they were both consumed in the flames of their mutual hatred. She hated him and she wanted him. She wanted to destroy him and she wanted to wrap her body around him, draw him deep into it and keep him there, her prisoner, to do with as she willed, to make him helpless and dependent on her, to make him ache for her, need her, want her, to make—
The shock of Finn abruptly releasing her almost made her stumble, and that he should be the one to reject her made bitter passion burn in her eyes as they faced one another in silence.
It was Finn who broke that silence, speaking in a voice so empty of emotion that it caught at a vulnerable nerve ending she hadn’t known she possessed, thickening her throat with tears of loss she would have died rather than let him see.
‘I don’t know which of us I despise the more.’
‘I thought it was my sex that was supposed to be changeable,’ Maggie responded, keeping her voice as light and indifferent as she could. ‘This morning you swore you loved me, and now—’
‘It wasn’t love,’ Finn interrupted her harshly. ‘God knows just what it was, but it bore as much resemblance to love as the devil does to an angel.’ Only he knew, thank God, just what it cost him to deny his feelings, to put pride and reality before the intensity and vulnerability of his love, the love he had now sworn to himself he must destroy.
Afraid of what she might, say, what she might betray if she allowed herself to speak, Maggie turned on her heel and left.
CHAPTER FOUR
MAGGIE hadn’t realised that Shrewsbury was such a busy town. No, not a town, a city, she reminded herself, remembering her earlier phone call with her assistant Gayle. She had driven here in the hire car Gayle had organised for her and, having parked it, had set out to find the small designer shop Gayle had informed her the city possessed in order to buy herself some clothes. The city itself, though, had proved more distracting than she had expected. More than three-quarters enclosed by the loop in the river within which it was built, it possessed a strong sense of itself and its history.
It was here that the Welsh marauders had been held at bay, here too that the rich sheep farmers had brought their flocks. Maggie stopped, the bleakness of her own thoughts momentarily suspended as she caught sight of an entrancingly pretty courtyard down one of the city’s medieval wynds. And then, as she turned the corner, she saw the shop she had been looking for, its windows as artfully temptingly dressed as any one of its London peers.
Pushing open the door, Maggie went inside, and a warmly smiling assistant came towards her. Giving her a quick shrewd look, Maggie recognised in the black suit she was wearing the cut of one of the fashion scene’s most cherished designers. Quickly she explained what had happened and what she was looking for.
‘I think we’ve got the very thing,’ the assistant told her. ‘It’s a bit late in the season, but one
of our regular clients, who is your size, cancelled part of her reserve order.’ She gave Maggie a small smile. ‘She met someone whilst she was working in New York and she’s gone over there to be with him.’
Whilst she chatted she was moving through the clothes rails, deftly removing several items which she displayed for Maggie to examine. There was a mouthwatering honey-coloured full-length cashmere coat, butter-soft and blissfully warm, that Maggie fell immediately in love with even before she tried it on. When she did so, the gleam of approval in the assistant’s eyes made Maggie wonder what Finn would think if he could see her in it—a weakness which she instantly tried to wall up behind a defensive barrier of sternly abrasive thoughts as she warned herself of the folly of allowing herself to think about him.