She busied herself with the breakfast, trying not to listen to the spontaneous bursts of laughter from the breakfast table; trying not to feel excluded from the charmed circle Slade seemed to have woven around the three of them.
Kirsty and Lance tucked appreciatively into the heaped plates she set before them.
‘Mmm, lovely,’ Kirsty sighed appreciatively ‘You’re almost as good a cook as Mum. You’ll never know what I had to go through to get her to agree to this weekend,’ she added, assuming a hard-done-by air that brought a brief smile to Chelsea’s lips. She knew how easily Kirsty could bend both her parents round her little finger. ‘It was only when Dad came bursting in with the news that you were actually living in the same house as Slade that she suddenly had a change of heart. Poor Mum—she wasn’t for telling me at first, but I soon wormed the whole thing out of her. It was absolutely hysterical really.’ Kirsty’s brown eyes laughed as she darted a mischievous look from Chelsea to Slade. ‘Cee, I would have just loved to have been there when she coaxed you into that femme fatale act. I wondered what on earth you were playing at, wearing that fabulous dress and the new make-up.’
She wanted to vanish, Chelsea thought with mild hysteria; dissolve into thin air disappear beneath the table, anything rather than face the look she knew must be in Slade’s eyes.
Beneath the table Lance, more astute and observant than Kirsty, kicked her swiftly on the ankle. She paused, staring from her aunt’s pale face to Slade’s coolly unreadable one, her eyes widening in surprise.
‘Oh, Cee,’ she exclaimed apologetically, ‘have I put my foot in it? Haven’t you told him yet?’ She turned impulsively to Slade, her hand on his arm as she smiled coaxingly up at him with a confidence Chelsea envied.
‘Slade, don’t be cross. Knowing my aunt she must have hated pretending like that. You see, poor Mum thought that I was all poised for a heady affair with you. I soon put her right, of course. If only the silly thing had said something to me—but no. Off she goes worrying poor Cee and persuading her—–’
‘To make the heroic self-sacrifice of diverting my lustful intentions from you to herself,’ Slade supplied dryly for her.
Completely unabashed, Kirsty grinned up at him, while Chelsea forced herself to drink her coffee as though nothing had happened, longing all the time to simply get up and run as far and as fast as she could away from Kirsty’s humiliating disclosures.
‘Look, Kirsty, I think it’s time we made a move,’ Lance murmured awkwardly,
‘Any messages for Mum?’ Kirsty asked Chelsea blithely, finishing her coffee. ‘She told me to ask you when you were coming home.’
‘Soon.’ For the life of her Chelsea couldn’t raise her head and look across the table. Tension coiled up inside her like a wire. If Slade had wanted retribution before what on earth must he think now that he had discovered that the whole thing had been nothing but a sham right from the start? How he must despise her! She reached for her coffee, but her hand shook so much she daren’t lift the cup. Having witnessed at first hand his manner towards Kirsty, her own suppositions were both crude and shabby, and she couldn’t understand how she had been stupid enough ever to believe them.
Right from the start she had recognised the fact that Slade possessed a powerful attraction to her sex, but instead of drawing the sensible conclusion that that being the case he was hardly likely to interest himself in a seventeen-year-old girl she had bulldozed over all the warnings of common sense and convinced herself instead that he was another Darren, intent only on seeking childish adoration.
‘Cee, are you all right?’ She looked up from the table to find Kirsty watching her anxiously. ‘You looked so pale. Are you okay?’
‘She’s still getting over a bad dose of ‘flu,’ Slade explained calmly before she could speak.
In the rush of goodbyes, there wasn’t time for Chelsea to speak privately with her niece, but all the time she was conscious of Slade’s intimidating presence and the knowledge that sooner or later she was going to have to face him.
She delayed the inevitable as long as she could, but eventually the small, dilapidated car of which Lance was so proud was disappearing down the road and the moment could be delayed no longer.
Quite what she expected Slade to say, she didn’t know, but his speculative, ‘So you’re Kirsty’s aunt?’ and the look which accompanied it surprised her.
‘Yes.’ Her voice was betrayingly husky and uncertain as she turned away from him. They had been watching Kirsty and Lance leave from the study window, and now Chelsea was acutely conscious of Slade’s presence behind her. Her legs seemed to have turned to jelly. She longed to turn round and face him, but somehow she just couldn’t find the courage.
‘The one who got involved with some married man?’
Her hand crept to her throat as though it could still the hectic pulse throbbing there, every vestige of colour leaving her face.
‘Kirsty told you about that?’ she asked incredulously.
‘That and much, much more. You see, she was desperate to go to drama school and wanted me to intercede with her parents, but in fairness she wanted me, to know the reasons they were against her going; that she was not merely the victim of parental arbitrariness—so she told me about you.’
It took less than a second for his words to sink in, and then bitterness welled up inside her, mixed with a pain and humiliation which made her long to escape.
Without looking at Slade she moved towards the door, but he barred it with his body.
‘Chelsea!’
Shaking, she refused to obey the command implicit in his voice and look up at him. He knew everything; every tiny humiliating detail. She closed her eyes against the tears she knew were forming there. Dear God, how could this have happened to her? She imagined Kirsty innocently confiding in him about her poor unfortunate aunt who had suffered an unfortunate romantic attachment in her teens, and because of it had remained a frigid virgin ever since. She could just imagine his reaction, his pitying amusement.
‘Is it true?’ he asked quietly.
His question seemed to shatter her bitterly fought for composure.
Tears flooded her eyes. ‘Is what true?’ she asked wildly. ‘That I discovered the man I thought I loved didn’t give a damn about me and only wanted me because he enjoyed sleeping with inexperienced virgins? That I allowed my sister to persuade me into behaving like a tramp to distract your attentions from Kirsty? That I escaped from my married lover’s house with my virtue intact and my pride in tatters?’
‘Damn you!’ Slade swore unevenly, stunning her into silence. ‘You know very well which…’
‘They’re all true,’ she flung at him, ‘even down to the fact which I’m sure Kirsty told you—that I’m still, after all these years, a virgin. Go on,’ she told him, her voice high with defiance, ‘laugh… I’m sure you’re dying to!’
‘Laugh?’ He looked bitterly at her. I feel more like crying.’
Her breath seemed to leave her lungs on a painful gasp. She wanted to scream at him that she didn’t want his pity, but she managed only to say fiercely, ‘I don’t want your tears!’
She tried to push past him, but he reached for her, grasping her upper arms and hauling her against him, the yellow specks in his eyes coagulating in a look that was fiercely molten.
‘Who said they were for you? On the contrary, I’d be crying for myself. The very first time I saw you I thought you were the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to take you in my arms and never let you go. I couldn’t believe my luck when you seemed to feel the same attraction, but I was speedily disillusioned. You certainly wanted me to think you wanted me, but there was no real desire there. I wanted to punish you, to hurt you, to make you respond to me, not whatever it was that had brought you to my side. I thought at the time it might have been greed, or even a purely feline desire to hang another scalp on your belt. You acted out your role perfectly, but no one can fake desire, and I knew you felt none for me; until we wer
e in my apartment—it was like discovering a volcano under feet of ice, and then that damned phone rang and when I came back you were gone. No woman had ever done that to me before, and it infuriated me; all the more so because I knew you had responded to me. I asked Ralph about you, but he claimed he didn’t know you. I tried to put you out of my mind, but you wouldn’t leave. And then I came up here and discovered you in my own home, playing out what I thought was a falsely assumed role of demure innocence. I was right about the role-playing, but I’d got the roles the wrong way round, hadn’t I?’ he demanded grimly.
‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ Chelsea admitted defeatedly. ‘I only went back with you to your flat because I was frightened that if I didn’t you’d go back for Kirsty.’
‘I ought to beat you for thinking that, although I suppose you thought you had just cause.’ Slade pushed his hand tiredly through his hair. ‘Now that I know the truth I can understand a hell of a lot better…’
‘You mean you can see why I couldn’t resist your lovemaking,’ Chelsea said bitterly, ‘now that you know I’m a frustrated, sex-starved spinster?’
He seemed to freeze, his eyes darkening, suddenly. ‘Can’t you?’ he asked softly. His thumbs were stroking sensuously against her skin, and she shuddered with the pleasure his touch invoked. ‘If that’s true, I’m sorely tempted to carry you upstairs to my bed and keep you there until you’ve promised that you’ll marry me. Sexual attraction might not be any substitute for love, but…’
Chelsea, stared incredulously up at him. ‘You’d marry me purely because you want me sexually?’
‘I’d marry you because I simply can’t envisage how I’m going to get through my life without you,’ Slade corrected her savagely. ‘From the moment you walked into my life it’s been like that for me. When I came up here I told myself you were nothing but a little tramp; that I’d be wiser letting you have Tom if that was what you wanted. I tried to despise you because I knew no matter what you felt for Tom I could arouse you sexually. I told myself that if I possessed you I’d manage to exorcise you.’
‘I thought you wanted to punish me, to teach me a lesson,’ Chelsea half whispered. ‘Over Christmas, when I came back from Darkwater and found that you were still here…’
‘And promptly caused me some of the worst hours of my life,’ Slade supplied. ‘In more ways than one. First putting me through the torture of trying to find you in that damned blizzard. The only reason I didn’t go to New York was because I was worried about you, all alone here, and what thanks do I get? First you run off and then you stretch my self-control to the ultimate limits, in a way I hope I never have to endure again,’ he said huskily, shuddering as he drew her against him.
Vividly Chelsea remembered that evening and the events which had followed.
‘I wanted you so much,’ she said painfully. ‘But without love…’
‘Sometimes one person’s love is big enough for two,’ Slade said softly.
She flushed then, thinking that all along he had known how she really felt about him; perhaps even before she had known herself.