‘After all, we both know your opinion of me, don’t we?’ she demanded bitingly. ‘I’m surprised that you’re prepared to admit to wanting me. Wouldn’t it be more in character for you to blame me, to accuse me of trying to seduce you?’
‘I wish I could,’ he told her flatly. ‘At least that way…’
Livvy frowned. Why wasn’t he making use of the opportunity she had given him to underline his original condemnation of her? She wanted him to, she acknowledged fiercely, needed him to do so to help her reinforce the wall she was trying to erect between her feelings and what she knew to be reality. The more he showed himself to her as a man it ought to be impossible for her to love, surely the easier it would be for her to get over her ridiculous feelings for him?
‘If things continue as they are,’ he was telling her, ‘inevitably we are going to end up in bed together. It’s an explosively dangerous situation, but no matter how good the sex between us might be, we both know…’
Livvy couldn’t bear to listen to any more.
‘If you’re so worried about what might happen, the solution is obvious, isn’t it…?’
He looked at her. ‘Is it?’
‘Yes. You must leave. That way there won’t be any temptation…any problem…any danger.’
‘I must leave?’
‘Yes,’ Livvy persisted stubbornly. ‘I was here first and besides, I promised Gale…’ She stopped abruptly.
‘You’re very loyal to her.’
His comment surprised her. ‘She needs someone to be,’ she told him stiffly. ‘It ought to be George…if he was loyal to her—’
‘Or she to him,’ Richard interrupted her quietly.
The way he was looking at her made her heart ache with love and pain. ‘I’m not leaving,’ she told him shakily. ‘You’re the one who seems to think…who feels…’ She stumbled over the words, unable to find the right ones to express what she wanted to say, and angry with herself for her confusion.
‘And you don’t agree with me, is that it? Any man, every man could…’
‘Why are men always so vain, so obsessed with the power of their sexuality and women’s vulnerability to it?’ Livvy demanded suddenly, hating him and herself for what he was obviously thinking, for what she by her own actions had allowed him to think: that she found him so sexually desirable that she was totally unable to resist him. ‘When you first arrived you couldn’t wait to tell me that you knew my type, that you considered I was the kind of woman who used sex to barter with, who had so little respect for herself that virtually any man… But now it’s different…now suddenly it’s you who’s responsible for arousing my dangerous sexual desires. Do you really, honestly think you’re so irresistible? Well, let me tell you, you’re not.’
The look he gave her made her eyes burn with shamed tears. He was looking at her as though she had disappointed him, let him down. Didn’t he understand that she had had to do it to protect herself…to protect them both?
‘You know that isn’t what I meant at all,’ he told her levelly. ‘I was wrong in my initial assessment of you, I acknowledge that. It seems I was also wrong to believe that we could talk to one another as two adults, that we both had the maturity to be open and responsible with one another…’
He was walking away from her, opening her door and then quietly closing it again behind him.
She’d had to do it, Livvy told herself. She had had no option. So why was she standing here crying, painful, aching tears welling up in her eyes and sliding helplessly down her face? Why had her victory over him left a sour, bitter taste in her mouth?
* * *
Was it never going to stop raining? Livvy stared glumly towards the window.
The storm Monsieur Dubois had forecast had broken in the early hours of the morning, the day after her confrontation with Richard. Since then they had each kept their distance from one another, avoiding one another as much as possible. This morning Livvy had hoped to go out, but with the rain so heavy that she couldn’t even see across the yard it was pointless even trying to think of doing any sightseeing. She was working upstairs in her room; the kitchen was somewhere she avoided as much as she possibly could do now.
She heard the phone ring and tensed. Richard was downstairs and would answer it. If it was Gale…but apparently it wasn’t, because there was no foot on the stairs, no voice saying that the call was for her.
She bent her head back over her work and then frowned.
Ten minutes later, when she heard the sound of the BMW’s engine being started, she got up and hurried over to the window. Richard was going out. Where on earth to, in weather like this? Was it something to do with the phone call he had just received?
For some reason his absence from the house, instead of helping her to relax, made her feel more uneasy and on edge.
Outside it was murky, no more than half-light, the rain still a heavy, relentless downpour. The cat had taken up almost permanent occupation by the range. It got up and wound itself between Livvy’s legs while she made herself a hot drink.
Livvy glanced across at the phone. Perhaps while Richard was out she ought to ring Gale and find out if she had spoken properly to George yet.
She dialled her cousin’s number. Roderick answered the phone. He had a cold, he told her, and he was off school. Livvy sympathised and waited for him to fetch Gale.