She made a soft protest beneath his mouth, trying to wrench herself away. As she struggled, she felt the top buttons of her nightshirt give, and fly across the room.
‘My goodness me, not the sort of thing Maud would approve of at all!’The taunting mockery of Rory’s voice made Rebecca freeze. ‘What an impetuous lover you are, Frazer—you didn’t even bother to close the door!’
Rory walked insolently into the room, then frowned as he looked down at the floor.
‘And not just impetuous,’ he commented softly, ‘but rough as well.’ He picked up the buttons and said to Frazer’s impassive back, ‘It really isn’t necessary, you know. I’ve always preferred my…ladies to do their own undressing, haven’t I, Rebecca?’
Rebecca prayed desperately that Frazer wouldn’t move. During their brief struggle the front of her nightshirt had come completely unfastened and she knew from the rough contact of his shirt against her skin just how much of her body would be exposed if he moved away now.
She felt his muscles tense as he prepared to turn round, and reached out, gripping desperately at his arms.
She saw the way he frowned as he looked into her eyes, and, unable to tell him why she didn’t want him to move, she begged him silently to stay where he was.
‘Get out, Rory,’ Frazer said starkly, still looking at her. Rebecca released her breath in a shaky sigh as Rory obeyed the command.
Frazer waited until he heard Rory going downstairs before demanding harshly, ‘Still protecting him, Rebecca? You haven’t stopped loving him at all, have you?’
He was starting to pull away from her. Trembling with tension, her hands fell away. She shook her head in denial of his accusation and said huskily, ‘You’re wrong—I—’
‘Wrong? Then why the pleading look?’
As he lifted his body from hers, Rebecca made a frantic grab for the front of her nightshirt, but Frazer stopped her, his frown deepening as he saw what she had already realised. When she struggled to push him away, the buttons on the nightshirt, which was old and well worn, had been torn off, exposing her body virtually from her throat to her waist, and if he had moved away from her while Rory was still in the room his brother would have had an uninterrupted view of her naked breasts.
Now, instead, it was Frazer who was looking down at her bared flesh, holding her hands in his so that she couldn’t do anything to conceal herself from him.
‘You stopped me because you didn’t want him to see you like this?’
He sounded almost incredulous, and that hurt her, angering her for long enough for her to forget her embarrassment and say fiercely, ‘Is that so very surprising?’
‘Yes, when you’ve already been lovers.’
Although he was watching her, his voice had lost some of its harshness as though the focus of his attention was no longer Rory and her relationship with him. His attention was, she recognised shakily, focused on her. She took an unsteady breath and then another, unaware of the provocative lift and fall of her breasts as she fought against the dizzying sensation Frazer’s concentration on her was evoking.
‘Or was it not so much that you didn’t want Rory to see you, rather that you didn’t want him to know that you’d revealed yourself like this to me?’ he suggested silkily.
Rebecca was astounded both by his suggestion and by her own reaction of pain to it, and yet despite her chaotic thoughts all she could manage to say was a husky, ‘I didn’t reveal myself to you! It was an accident.’
‘Rory wouldn’t have thought so,’ Frazer told her.
Suddenly Rebecca had had enough.
‘I don’t care what Rory would have thought, and I don’t care what you think either!’ she lied angrily. ‘If you can’t understand that I might feel embarrassed then that’s your fault and not mine.’
‘Well, I certainly didn’t think you were clinging to me like ivy because you wanted me in your arms,’ he told her drily, then added softly, ‘And as for being embarrassed…’
Shockingly, his hand brushed briefly against her skin, following the line of her open nightshirt, his knuckles grazing against her nipple for a heart-stopping second that almost paralysed her.
He frowned as he felt the ripple of sensation that convulsed her, the evidence of the effect he was having on her quite plain in the sharpness of her indrawn breath and the open hardening of her nipples. He breathed in as well, his eyes suddenly smoky dark, the silence between them heavy with tension.
Outside her window, Rebecca heard a blackbird break into song, shattering both the silence and the tension. Quickly she drew back from Frazer, pulling her nightshirt protectively across her body.
He let her go, standing up and saying curtly, ‘It might be better if you stayed in bed today.’
‘To keep me out of Rory’s way?’ she asked bitterly, but she was speaking to an empty room. Frazer had already gone.
Later, when she felt strong enough, she would examine the pain of her reactions to him, of her knowledge that nothing had really changed, that he still had the power to affect her in the most intimate and dangerous way.
Her only consolation was that at least Frazer himself seemed oblivious to her real feelings towards him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NOT that it was much consolation. Tired of her own company, and fearing that if she spent much more time alone brooding on what had happened she was likely to go quietly mad, Rebecca got up less than an hour after Frazer and left her, justifying doing so by telling herself that it would be selfishly unfair to lie in bed pretending to be an invalid with so many people in the house. Mrs Norton was a first-class housekeeper, but she had more than enough on her plate, coping with Frazer, Aunt Maud and the twins and with the addition of two and potentially three extra people to cater, and she deserved whatever help Rebecca herself could give her.
Mrs Norton, however, didn’t seem to share that view, and told Rebecca firmly that she had no right to get up from her bed, not when Frazer had expressly said that she was to remain there.
‘Frazer has no jurisdiction over me,’ Rebecca informed the housekeeper drily, then wished she had not been so forthright as she heard Rory saying in amusement from behind her, ‘I shouldn’t let your new fiancé hear you saying that if I were you. Where is he, by the way?’
Forced to admit she had no idea, she was relieved when Mrs Norton came to her rescue, announcing that Frazer had gone over to the Research Centre, but that he would be back in time for lunch.
‘Shame on him, deserting you and not even telling you where he was going,’ murmured Rory, taking hold of her and guiding her towards the door, saying smoothly, ‘I get the impression that Norty would rather have us out of her kitchen, and besides, there’s something I want to
discuss with you.’
Rebecca stiffened, anticipating some very tricky questions such as why she had allowed her supposed fiancé to go on believing that the two of them had had an affair when both she and Rory knew that to be a fiction.
Ever since she had realised that Frazer fully intended to go through with his plan of pretending that they were engaged, Rebecca had been worrying about this. Surely if she and Frazer were supposed to be in love and on the verge of getting married, the first thing she must have told him was the truth about that fictitious affair, and yet, to judge from the fact that he had deliberately tried to cause friction between Frazer and herself this morning, Rory seemed to have accepted quite readily that they were in actual fact engaged. Men were odd creatures, Rebecca decided as she followed him resignedly, not into the sitting-room, but the old-fashioned and slightly shabby study-cum-library, which she had always thought of as Frazer’s private sanctuary.
She even felt slightly uncomfortable at being in here in his absence, as though she were in some way trespassing.
Rory, however, did not seem to share her unease, although she noticed that he didn’t sit in the large chair behind the old-fashioned partner’s desk, but instead took one of the two chairs either side of the fireplace, motioning to her to take the other.
‘What is it you wanted to discuss with me, Rory?’ she asked him, wondering if she had been naïve in believing that he had fallen for Frazer’s fib about their relationship and if he had perhaps deliberately waited to get her on her own to attack that fib, knowing that she was vulnerable and weaker than Frazer, but to her surprise he sat forward and said seriously, ‘I wanted to talk to you about the twins. Aunt Maud is agitating for them to be sent to boarding school.’ He frowned and said sulkily, ‘She keeps on making a damned fuss about the fact that we’ve left them with Frazer. With your experience you seem by far the best person to consult about where to send them.’ He drew his chair closer to her own. ‘Lillian seems to have this ridiculous idea that I should ask the company to give me a UK-based job, but I’ve told her if she wants to spend her life playing mother then she’ll have to do so on her own, because there’s no way I’m going to tie myself down to a mortgage and suburbia.’