‘I hope this one will be a boy,’ Livvy heard her saying ruefully to her husband as she patted her stomach. ‘I think I already have enough rivals.’
‘A boy, another girl, I don’t mind, just so long as you are well and happy,’ her husband responded, leaning forward to touch her.
They looked so happy. It was a pity that Richard Field wasn’t here with her to see them. With her? A small shiver shot through her. She was becoming dangerously obsessed with the man.
‘What if you fall in love?’ Jenny had teased her.
She had denied it, and in doing so had perhaps tempted fate?
But surely fate could not be cruel enough to allow her to fall in love with someone like Richard Field. And surely she had far too much sense?
She delayed going back to the farmhouse for as long as she could. Richard Field was on the telephone when she got back.
Tactfully, she didn’t linger in the kitchen, placing her shopping on the table and then heading for the door without unpacking it. She could do that later when he had finished.
He had his back towards her and he was speaking quietly in monosyllables, as though he didn’t want her to overhear what he was saying.
For some reason, that irked her. He had a right to want to keep his conversation private, of course, but there was no need for him to act as though she was the sort of person who was going to try deliberately to eavesdrop.
Because of the siting of the phone, she had to walk past him to get into the hall, but she kept as much distance between them as she could, intending to make it plain that she had no interest in either who he was talking to or what he was talking about, but naturally, since she had to walk within a foot or so of him, she couldn’t help overhearing his low-voiced curt, ‘No…I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ and could recognise that the person on the other end of the line was a man.
However, it wasn’t until she was upstairs in her own room that she realised why his voice had been oddly familiar.
When she did, she put down her hairbrush and raced downstairs.
Richard was still in the kitchen but he had finished his call.
‘That was George, wasn’t it?’ she demanded without preamble. ‘On the phone just now, you were speaking with George?’
Her anxiety for Gale fuelled her sense of outrage.
‘Why was he ringing you?’ she asked him, something she would never normally have done. ‘Did you tell him how upset Gale is…how worried…?’
‘Don’t you think that’s something Gale is perfectly capable of telling him herself?’
So it had been George. Livvy sat down, her voice quivering huskily with anger as she reminded him,
‘How can she? He’s in Japan and apparently so busy that he hasn’t got time to speak to her properly. He had time to speak to you, though, didn’t he?’
Disillusionment shadowed her voice. ‘I suppose he wanted to know whether or not you’ve decided to buy this place,’ she said dully, talking more to herself than to him. It shocked her that George, whom she had always thought of as so steady and reliable, was behaving like this, even though her conscience prompted her to acknowledge that Gale was perhaps not the easiest woman to live with, and that Richard had been right when he had told her that Gale was inclined to treat her husband more like another child than a man.
‘Gale needs George,’ she said unsteadily. ‘And so do the boys. Can’t you see what you’re doing by encouraging him to behave like this? Just because you’ve got a grudge against the female sex, that’s no reason for you to…to try to destroy Gale’s marriage. You’re not a man…you’re a spoiled child. You—’
She didn’t get any further. He was hauling her out of her seat, his hands locked round her arms, his body blocking her escape, even if she could have pulled away from him.
‘So I’m not a man?’
It had been there between them all week, smouldering dangerously like a peat fire, just waiting for something to fan it into an open conflagration. And she had just supplied that something.
She tried to stop him, to make her protest, both verbally and physically, but deep down inside her there was some reckless, wanton part of her that actually gloried in what she had done, feeding on the shock of frightening excitement that ran through her.
When he kissed her, although neither of them acknowledged it, both of them knew that what was happening had nothing to do with the challenge she had given him and that it was simply an excuse, a sop to the convention demanded by their minds and their stubborn rejection of the deeper, far more primitive needs which really motivated them.
This time her mouth was aware of the taste and texture of his, aware of it and hungry for it, the hands she had curled into tight fists to push him away straightening, flattening against his chest, feeling its heat, moving exploratively over him, no longer pushing him away, exploration giving way to something that was far more of a caress. And all the time he was kissing her, holding her, his hands, like hers, spread flat against her skin, moving down over her back and on to her hips.
She tensed for a moment as he drew her closer to him, shivering as she recognised that the reason for her hesitation was not because she didn’t want to experience the physical knowledge of his arousal, but because she did.
She trembled as she took that final self-betraying step, the small moan she made in her throat a surrender, not so much to him, but to her own feelings. He couldn’t know how alien all this was to her, how aloof she had always held herself from such casual intimacy, how bemused she had felt when friends had tried to explain to her how such sexual intensity felt, how it could overwhelm common sense, caution, and even reality