Livvy gasped in outrage. ‘That’s not true! I’m simply on holiday; and besides, Gale would never do anything like that, even if…’ She bit her lip. What was she doing, allowing herself to be drawn into this kind of argument with him?
She had guessed from what Gale had told her that she and George were at loggerheads over the farmhouse and that Gale was upset because George was spending so much time away from home, but she had not thought that their problems were serious enough to actually threaten their marriage.
‘All Gale wants is a chance to talk to George, but that seems to be impossible while Robert Forrest… What kind of man is he, anyway?’ she exploded, her emotions suddenly breaking her self-control. ‘If George and Gale are having problems, then he’s the one to blame. No wonder his own wife left him. I’m only surprised that he found anyone idiotic enough to marry him in the first place.’
She stopped abruptly, angry with herself. What on earth was she saying? She didn’t even know the man and it was completely out of character for her to criticise someone without any real justification. It was his fault, this arrogant, interfering, unwanted male interloper in her life who stood watching her with those cold, dangerous eyes. He was bringing to the surface a side to her nature she had never even known existed.
The cold from the stone floor was beginning to strike an icy chill through her feet. All she wanted was for him to go, to leave her in peace; but he was not going to do so, she recognised, and she could not now leave herself…not without totally losing face and letting him know that he had got the better of her, and there was no way her feminine pride was going to allow him to do that.
He had not come for a holiday, no matter what he might pretend, she was sure of that, and she also suspected that he was not going to admit his real purpose to her, for no other reason than that it seemed to give him some sort of perverted pleasure to bait and torment her. Whatever his original plans had been—possibly a brief look around the farmhouse over the period of a couple of days before returning to Britain—he now intended to stay.
But he wanted her to leave, she recognised. Well, she wasn’t going to.
She told him so, her expression dogged as she said fiercely, ‘I’m not leaving and you can’t make me.’
For a moment she wondered if she had gone too far. There was a look in his eyes that told her how much…how very, very much he would have liked to prove her wrong by physically picking her up and depositing her in her car if necessary.
Instead he shrugged his shoulders, powerfully broad beneath a suit far too formal for a man who claimed to be on holiday.
‘That’s your choice,’ he told her dismissively, adding in a voice as thick and soft as cream, ‘Mind you, I shouldn’t have thought there would be much locally to interest a woman of your type.’
Her type? Livvy tensed. What did he mean? What was he trying to imply now? she wondered warily. Whatever it was, she knew it wasn’t anything complimentary. For all its smoothness, there had been something as rough and as dangerous as jagged broken glass beneath the softness of his voice.
‘What do you mean, my type?’ she challenged him. Women were not types. They were individuals, each one of them a special and complex interweaving of a variety of traits that made them so. To suggest anything else was not merely to demean her but to demean her whole sex as well.
‘You don’t really need an answer, surely? But since you asked…’
From mild contempt the grey eyes changed, registering a brutal sexual speculation that rendered her powerless to do anything but stand there while he subjected her to a slow visual, sexual exploration that left her feeling numb with shock and disbelief. No man…no man had ever, ever looked at her like that. No man had ever dared; nor had she contemplated the idea that any man ever would. It was something so totally outside her experience, her existence, that the shock of it left her incapable not just of movement but of speech as well.
Her body knew what he had done, though, and it still managed to register its outrage and fury, her skin, her whole body flushing with such heat that she could feel it burning beneath the thin barriers of her T-shirt and wrap.
She had not realised before, she thought dizzily, that it was not just cold, and sometimes—very, very rarely now—a certain frisson of sensual awareness that could make her muscles tense like that and her nipples suddenly harden and push fiercely against her clothes. Anger could do it as well.
‘You have no right. You know nothing about me…about my type,’ she told him huskily, her throat thick with a mixture of shocked emotional tears and ferocious rage.
‘I know as much as every other heterosexual male who’s passed through the usual teenage rites of passage via the sexual games offered by more juvenile versions. The pouting-mouthed, wide-eyed, tousle-haired just-got-out-of-bed look does have a certain louche appeal to inexperienced boys.
‘Fortunately one grows out of it and becomes rather more discerning with maturity.’
Livvy could hardly believe what she was hearing. The way she had just heard herself described bore so little resemblance to the truth that in any other circumstances she would have found it laughable. Her, a pouting parody of some kind of sexual bimbo? She was anything but…and as for her tousle-haired just-got-out-of-bed look… Surely he didn’t think…couldn’t think that it was with sexual motive in mind that she had staggered out of bed and come down here…not when she hadn’t even known who her unexpected and unwanted visitor was…
She took a deep breath and said angrily, ‘Look, Mr…’ She paused, floundering, realising that she didn’t even know his name.
He seemed to hesitate, to pause slightly warily before telling her curtly, reluctantly almost, ‘R…Richard Field… And since it seems that we’re going to be co-tenants here I suppose it might be as well to know your name. Not that I intend to make much use of it…’
For a moment Livvy was tempted to turn her back on him and walk away, but good manners and custom forced her to supply him with the information he had requested.
‘Olivia…Olivia Lucy,’ she told him, her voice just as curt as his had been. No need to tell him that no one other than officialdom ever referred to her by her full name, nor to say wistfully how much she sometimes wished that they would. Olivia Lucy had an elegance, a sophistication to it which was completely lacking in ‘Livvy Lucy’.
‘Olivia…’ Unexpectedly his expression changed, the devastating sexual scrutiny he had subjected her to previously replaced by an equally devastating and somehow far more unsettling searching thoughtfulness that left her holding her breath, as though something of tremendous import was somehow being weighed in the balance.
When he eventually looked away from her, she derided herself angrily for her reaction. Who was he to sit in judgement on her? She didn’t like him any more than he liked her. In fact, if anything, she probably detested him more, felt even more contempt for him than he had shown that he felt for her.
A woman of her type. She could feel herself starting to grind her teeth. Well, there was one thing she intended to make sure he did know about her, and that was that a woman of her type found a man of his type utterly loathsome and detestable, she decided as she turned her back on him and walked out of the room.
Just as soon as she could, she intended to telephone Gale and find out exactly what was going on, but first she needed to g
o back upstairs and get dressed.