He was so changeable, so unfathomable, almost human one minute and then the next almost aggressively unpleasant and cold towards her.
She bent her head back over her work and didn’t raise it again until she had heard the door close behind him. A shower, he had said.
She shivered beneath the thrill of wanton fire that ran through her as she pictured his naked body and then hastily denied the image and its potent effect on her.
‘And as for you, you traitress,’ she accused the cat, as it leapt on to her lap, ‘you have absolutely no taste, do you know that? No sense of female solidarity; if you did, you’d have scratched him, not fawned all over him in that foolish, adoring manner.’
‘I forgot my jacket.’
Livvy flushed beetroot-red as she realised that Richard was standing right behind her and that he must have overheard every word she had just said. She hadn’t even heard him come back into the kitchen, and she certainly could not turn round now and give him the satisfaction of seeing her scarlet face.
It was enough that she had heard the amusement in his voice.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘AND you can see from the formation of them where over thousands of years the pressure of the water has worn away the softer rock to form these caves.’
‘Have they ever been inhabited?’ Livvy asked the guide curiously, as he paused to allow the tour to pause and acknowledge with awe the cavern that nature had created.
It was icy cold down here beneath the surface, especially after the heat of the summer sun outside, but Livvy had paid attention to the warnings in her guidebook and had dressed appropriately for her visit to the caves. Her question had been prompted by her awareness that, in other parts of France, along the Loire valley for instance and at other ancient sites, the caves there had been inhabited until quite rec
ently.
Waiting now for the guide to answer her, she remembered too reading that in the pitifully war-torn country which had been Yugoslavia refugees were having to resort to making their homes in the same caves which their parents and grandparents had inhabited during the Second World War. Now, glancing around the icy coldness of the cavern, she tried to envisage how it would feel to have to make such a place one’s home.
Several tunnels lay off the main gallery and she could well imagine the warren of passageways and caves which must honeycomb this subterranean world.
Like Theseus, though, in his quest to vanquish the Minotaur, one would need to be very sure of knowing one’s way around such a very complicated maze.
Such places had always both fascinated and repelled her. She could still vividly remember her first visit to the caves at Inglewhite at home; the shock of the icy cold air; the awe at the size of the huge stalagmites and stalactites. Stalactites hung on tight to the ceiling, stalagmites grew upwards from the floor with all their might, the guide there had told her informatively.
She smiled ruefully to herself now while she listened to the guide responding to her question.
When she had taken her own class on a similar trip, they had scorned such homely explanations, although she had recognised that same look of awe and fascination in their eyes as even the ‘coolest’ members of 5V witnessed the effect of the relentless power of nature.
‘That’s nothing,’ one of the boys had derided when they had entered the largest cavern, its ceiling so high above them that it was almost impossible to see it. ‘A semtex bomb could make a hole twice this size in seconds…this took nature millions of years.’
‘It takes man to detonate a bomb,’ Livvy had told him. ‘And man can always be stopped. Nature can’t…’
It had been the lake which had impressed them all the most, though; so deep that no one had even truly plumbed its depths, and so cold that it was unsafe for even the strongest diver to stay below the surface for very long.
Their guide was directing them down a narrow passageway. Livvy had been lucky; there were only half a dozen other people on this afternoon tour. Their guide was a young geology student, a trifle earnest perhaps, but interesting none the less.
‘I shouldn’t like to be down here if there was a flood,’ someone commented.
Livvy felt the brief frisson of fear that ran through the small group.
‘We are safe enough here,’ the guide assured them with a smile, ‘but there are other parts…other passageways and caves.’ He gave a brief shrug. ‘We do not allow the public to endanger themselves in them, though.’
As he painstakingly explained the safety precautions they used, Livvy found her attention drifting slightly.
There had been no sign of Richard Field when she’d left this morning. Not that she minded, of course. The less they saw of one another, the better, as far as she was concerned.
It was just as well he possessed that blind prejudiced view of her and that he so patently disapproved of and disliked her, otherwise…
Otherwise what? Just because his kisses had made her feel…
They made her feel nothing, she told herself firmly. Nothing at all.