Escape from Desire

She moaned in pleasure as he pushed aside her nightdress. ‘Have you any idea what undressing you did to me?’ he demanded hoarsely as his hand cupped her breast, his thumb stroking sensually over the already aroused peak. ‘Have you any idea what just having you here in this house does to me? I might despise myself for wanting you, but I still do. It’s like a sickness in my blood. God knows I loathe myself for it, but sometimes the sheer pleasure of giving in to one’s weaker impulses overrides the cautious voice warning of the self-disgust to be endured later. This is one of those moments, Tamara … and you want me too, for all that you’re engaged to Mellors. Your body wants me,’ he told her huskily.

Tamara was past responding coherently. Her hands locked behind his head, revelling in the silky feel of his dark hair, pleasure swelling in waves through her body as his mouth explored the shape of her breasts and the valley between them, his weight shifting to allow him to explore the trembling contours of her body.

‘It doesn’t feel any different,’ he told her in a drugged voice, ‘at least not outwardly. What’s it like, knowing his child is growing inside you?’ His mouth touched the vulnerable swell on her stomach and all Tamara’s muscles contracted in ecstasy and pain. If only she could tell him the truth and say that it was his child, and that she delighted in the knowledge of its being there. But these were words that could never be spoken. In a moment of weakness he might want her as he did now, but Tamara was in no doubts as to his real feelings for her.

Her sensitive flesh quivered as Zach’s mouth possessed each breast briefly before it returned to explore the sensitive curve of her throat, her own lips pressing feverishly hot kisses against his damp skin, her fingers tugging impatiently at his shirt buttons.

‘Are you like this with Mellors?’ Zach demanded hoarsely. ‘Are you, Tamara—tell me!’

His words brought her back to reality, reminding her of the low opinion he had of her. Tears ached in her throat. A brief knock on the bedroom door stiffened her body, and Zach got up with a muffled curse.

‘Telephone, Colonel,’ Tamara heard Johnson call. ‘It’s Miss Julie.’

Julie! Tamara turned away from Zach, burying her face in the rumpled bedclothes, overcome with the pain of her own self-delusion.

‘I see your fiancé’s back.’

The words were like a douche of cold water, and Tamara stiffened in her chair. They were having lunch and these were the first personal words Zach had spoken to her since that night in her room. She was in no doubt that he regretted the incident and wanted to make it plain to her that it had been nothing more than an aberration brought on by physical desire for a woman—any woman!

‘I saw him this morning.’ Zach told her. ‘He was out riding—with his secretary.’

Somehow Tamara managed to go on eating without betraying her shock, although the food tasted like sawdust and she felt she would never be able to swallow it.

‘You didn’t know, did you?’ Zach goaded. ‘It seems to me that he’s nowhere near as keen to marry you as he ought to be. Never mind, you still hold the final trump card, don’t you?’

‘Miss Julie’s arrived, Colonel.’

Not for the first time Tamara blessed Johnson’s timely interruption. She had heard from Mrs Wilkes, whose daughter had given birth to another son, that Zach had asked her to prepare a room for his friend. It was a room several doors down from her own, and Tamara had been fiercely relieved to know it wasn’t the one adjacent to Zach’s, which Mrs Wilkes had told her was part of the master suite which Zach occupied. Not that that really meant anything. There was nothing to stop Julie sharing Zach’s bed, or he hers.

When he went to welcome her, Tamara took herself off to the library. They had almost completed the third chapter. The book had come on extremely well, and after the earlier incident Zach had taken care to ensure that Tamara was not overworked.

She was checking some typing when he walked in, a vivacious redhead at his side, her smile faintly chilly as she surveyed Tamara.

‘So this is what keeps you chained to the country!’ she complained, her sapphire blue eyes hardening over Tamara’s face.

‘Yes,’ Zach agreed blandly, ‘my book. Nothing else would keep me away from you,’ he assured her, sliding his arms round her waist and pulling her against him, before kissing her.

Tamara felt sick. She tried to concentrate on what she was doing, but all she could see was Zach’s face, Zach’s body, Zach’s arms round another girl.

‘Darling,’ Julie purred when he eventually released her, ‘that’s what I call a welcome! I’m beginning to think you weren’t fibbing after all when you said you missed me.’

‘How long can you stay?’ Zach heard him asking her as they left the room.

Tamara didn’t hear the answer, but the next few days were sheer purgatory. It seemed that no matter where she went to escape from them, be it in the house or the grounds, she was fated to come across Zach and Julie, more often than not in one another’s arms.

‘T’ain’t right,’ Mrs Wilkes sniffed one morning, when she had been summoned upstairs and ordered to prepare a breakfast tray by Julie, who was still apparently in bed, although it was gone ten o’clock. ‘Fancy piece with nothing to her but a flighty mind. The Colonel’s a fool if he ties himself to that one.’

‘He’s a grown man, Mrs Wilkes,’ Tamara reminded her in a hard voice. ‘And now you really must excuse me, I want to try and get this chapter finished.’

As Mrs Wilkes confided to her daughter later, she knew when she wasn’t wanted—and why!

On the third evening of Julie’s visit Tamara excused herself from dinner. At breakfast the following morning she handed Zach the completed three chapters—perfectly produced by the word processor.

‘If you don’t mind I think I’ll return to London this afternoon,’ she told him calmly. ‘After all, I’ve done the job I came to do …’

‘Oh, but I do mind,’ Zach said lightly. Julie was still in bed, and during her visit for some reason Zach had taken to delaying his breakfast until Tamara had hers. She daren’t let herself think about the reasons for such a deviation from his routine, nor to wonder whether it had anything to do with the hours spent with Julie after she herself had gone to bed.

Tamara refused to respond to the goad. She had the feeling that he was deliberately baiting her, but she couldn’t understand why. He had Julie now, so why continue to torment her?