‘I’m sorry if I delayed you,’ she told him sharply, turning away from him, and then, summoning all her courage and her pride, she turned back to him and said coldly, ‘If you’re so desperate for a woman that the mere sight of one is enough to arouse you, then perhaps you’d better not come here again. I don’t want you in my life, Neil,’ she lied, forcing herself to look directly into his eyes, praying that he wouldn’t guess at the betraying truth that her lies concealed. That she was so desperately in love with him that she was in grave danger of humiliating herself completely.
‘That wasn’t the impression I got five minutes ago,’ he told her tautly.
For a moment she was lost for words, and then she said huskily, shrugging her shoulders as negligently as she could, ‘You’re a very experienced and powerful lover…naturally you aroused me sexually.’
‘And that’s all there was to it, is that what you’re trying to tell me?’ he demanded grimly.
She had gone too far to back down now. If she did, he might start questioning why she had felt the need to lie and protect herself in the first place.
‘Yes,’ she lied bleakly. ‘What else could it be?’
She thought for one moment that he was actually going to take hold of her, but he seemed to think better of it, because he stepped back from her and finished fastening his tie, and then said curtly, ‘There isn’t time to finish discussing this right now, but don’t think I’m letting it go here, Rue, because I’m not.’
And then he opened the door and walked through it, leaving Rue feeling so mentally and physically drained that she simply could not move.
It was almost half an hour before the full import of what he had said sank in, and when it did she got up and walked unsteadily towards the window, staring in the direction of the Court. It frightened her that she should feel so abandoned and lost simply because he was going away for a few days.
Why was he going to London? What would he do there? Who would he see? Women far more accommodating and sophisticated than she was… women who would be only too glad to take what he was offering and… With a tiny moan of pain, she turned away from the window, glad of the interruption when her telephone rang.
To her surprise it was her solicitor, and the news he had for her surprised her even more. It appeared that he had received another approach from the builder’s solicitors, repeating his offer to buy the cottage and its land.
Immediately Rue told him to tell the builder that he was wasting his time and that there was no way she was going to sell.
That night she didn’t sleep well, her dreams haunted by images of Neil. She woke up aching with longing for him, unbearably tempted to take what he was offering her and give in to the tormented urgings of her own body, even while her heart begged her to reconsider, reminding her that she wanted much much more from Neil than sexual gratification…that she would never be content with a brief, meaningless affair, which she suspected would cause her more pain in the long run than if she stood firm now and refused to s
ee him again.
And yet, even as this acknowledgement formed, she ached to see him again. To hear his voice…to be with him… She shuddered, acknowledging the power of her love for him, and its potential destructive effect on her life.
* * *
SHE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT she had known loneliness before, but she hadn’t, Rue acknowledged as three days passed without her seeing or hearing anything of Neil and she had to face the unpalatable knowledge that it was too late now to try and exclude him from her life. Her love for him had grown so unexpectedly, so quickly, that to tear its roots out of her heart was going to be an impossible task.
Wisdom preached that, for her own peace of mind, once he did come back she should see as little of him as possible, and yet every time she remembered the hunger she had seen in his eyes, the need she had felt in his body, wisdom was drowned beneath the demanding voice of her love.
She told herself that it was just sex that he wanted from her, that she was a convenient body—a safely convenient body, an inward voice of cynicism told her, a woman whose age must mean that she was unlikely to have the same foolishly romantic illusions a younger girl might cherish. And yet he had been so tender to her…so kind.
As he would to anyone who aroused his compassion. Compassion and desire, a potentially explosive mixture, but nothing like as dangerous to him as it was to her.
He didn’t love her. If he had done, surely he would have told her so, would have spoken of loving her, not wanting her. She had so little experience of the male sex…too little knowledge of their emotional make-up.
* * *
HORATIO’S WOUND HEALED; the grey clouds lifted and the sun came out again; her work kept her busy and time should have disappeared like mist in the hot morning sun, but it didn’t.
The nights were the worst. Nights when she unrepentantly lay awake remembering how it had felt when Neil touched her. Nights when she deliberately forsook the panacea of sleep in favour of the torment of fevered imaginings of how it could have been if…
And when she lay in bed thinking of Neil so intimately, her body ached for him.
He had been away three days when Hannah came round, cheerfully announcing that she and her family were going away on holiday.
‘A friend of a friend has a villa in Spain and they’ve asked me to revamp the interior.’ She looked at her friend’s wan face and said shrewdly, ‘I suppose there’s no point in asking you to come with us.’
Quickly Rue shook her head, and then, conscious of her friend’s thoughtful look, said defensively, ‘How can I? I’m far too busy for one thing, and for another there’s Horatio.’
‘Wouldn’t Neil look after him for you?’ Hannah asked her.
‘He’s away at the moment,’ Rue told her, deliberately turning her head away so that Hannah couldn’t guess how much just talking about him affected her.