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The sea off the coast can be a little bit rough, though.'
Sara was almost beginning to get the impression that he was subtly trying to put her off—either that or intimidate her.
Dryly she told him, 'My father's a keen sailor and I used to crew for him.'
Giving him an old-fashioned look she added in an even dryer tone, 'The year I was fourteen we both did the Round Britain race crewing for a client of my father's.'
'Did you win?' Nick asked her mock innocently.
Sara gave him a sharply incisive look but he held her gaze.
'No. We were placed tenth,' she replied calmly and then couldn't resist adding, 'But we came out with the best time for a purely amateur crewed boat.'
'I spent a couple of summers sailing off Cape Cod when I was at university,' Nick told her casually, but Sara wasn't deceived. Well, if he wanted to play 'anything you can do I can do better' games that was fine by her. She certainly wasn't going to back down.
FOURTEEN AND crewing in something as dangerous as the Round Britain race—Nick frowned as he left her.
Her father must have been mad to allow it. She was such a slender scrap of a thing. She could quite easily have been swept overboard. Just thinking of the danger she would have been in made his whole body tense.
WHAT ON EARTH had she committed herself to, Sara wondered anxiously as she watched Nick walk away.
She tried to comfort herself by thinking that she could always change her mind and refuse to go but she knew already that her pride just wouldn't allow her to take that escape route.
Of course, there was always the chance that Frances would not want her to take the weekend off; but, predictably, when Sara mentioned it to her later Frances agreed immediately to her request.
Sara thanked her hollowly. Now there was nothing to stop her from going to Pembrokeshire with Nick.
'Thank you very much!' she silently mentally cursed fate.
'YOU'RE GOING HOME?' Saul frowned. 'Now look, Nick...'
'It's only for the weekend,' Nick assured him. 'I need to check the state of the house—that sort of thing.'
'Mmm... Well, if you've made up your mind I don't suppose I can stop you,' Saul acknowledged.
'No, you can't,' Nick agreed dryly.
'I can't stop you, Nick,' Saul continued quietly but with firm elder brother authority, 'but I can and must remind you of how foolhardy it would be of you to prejudice your own recovery by doing anything stupid or dangerous.'
Foolhardy and dangerous—well, that just about ac-curately summed up his plans for his time in Pembrokeshire, Nick acknowledged, albeit not the way that Saul meant. On this occasion it would be his emotions that would be in danger and the risks he was taking with them that was foolhardy rather than with his physical safety.
Still, there was always the chance that Sara would back out. A woman who as a girl had taken part in one of the most gruelling sailing races there was—
back away from any challenge—who was he kidding?
HONOR LOOKED AT the silent telephone. She had just had the strangest feeling. Living as she did so close to and in harmony with nature, Honor had long ago ceased to question or doubt these occasional darts of
'intuition' she experienced. She and Father Ignatius had discussed this phenomenon in great detail without either of them being able to come up with a rational explanation for it other than to acknowledge, as the priest had said, that there were both historical and bib-lical anecdotes and written confirmation to prove its existence.
Thoughtfully she walked over to the telephone. David, touchingly, had already added Olivia's number to their personal directory.
Her hand was reaching out for the receiver when the telephone started to ring. After a look at the caller's number she cried urgently, 'David, come quickly, it's for you.'
As SHE HEARD the familiar male voice responding to her telephone call, Olivia took a deep breath. This was the hardest and the most humiliating thing she had ever had to do.
'Hello...it's me—Olivia,' she announced herself abruptly.
On the other end of the line David closed his eyes and willed his own voice not to falter or betray what he was feeling as he prayed that somehow she would sense and accept the love he was sending to her.
LESS THAN FIVE minutes later it was all arranged. Olivia would drop the children off every morning with David and Honor on her way to work. David would take them to school and collect them again in the afternoon and she would pick them up from David and Honor's on her way home from work.
THAT NIGHT, curled up alone in her bed in a small protective fetal ball, she allowed herself to give in to her feelings. Was there something about her that meant she was destined to forever be alone, to forever be denied the experience of being truly and completely loved?
'MOLLY, wait...'
Her eyes dark with anxiety, Molly turned to look impatiently at Caspar.
'I have to go,' she repeated.
'I know that,' Caspar acknowledged. 'But how will you get there if your car still isn't ready? Why don't you let me take you?' he suggested before she could say anything.
'Let you take me?'
Molly's forehead pleated in a quick defensive frown.
The light-hearted flirtation they had been indulging in had been one thing, but what he was suggesting now was something else.
Gravely she looked at him.
This wasn't any time for her to be indulging in her own emotional needs, especially with a man like Caspar; but he was already walking towards her, already taking control of the situation and her and she, fool that she was, was letting him do it, luxuriating almost in the sensation as he removed from her shoulders the burden of dealing with the practicalities of the situation.
As he took charge, Caspar couldn't help contrasting Molly's behaviour to Olivia's. He couldn't remember the last time Olivia had unquestioningly allowed him to play his male role. These last few years she had seemed to challenge every decision he had made, pouring scorn on them and on him, undermining him to such an extent that it had begun to eat away at the very essence of his maleness. Molly's acceptance of his help made him feel ten feet tall and capable of doing anything and everything she might ask of him.
As he looked at her, her eyes shiny and dark with the tears she was so obviously determined not to shed, he had to fight not to take her in his arms right there and then and comfort her.
IT SEEMED TO Olivia to be hours before she finally fell asleep to dream despairingly and longingly of being wrapped securely in Caspar's arms whilst he held her and whispered to her that he understood and sympathised with everything that she was feeling. In her dream she told him truthfully that he was the only person she felt secure and safe with, the only person she could be herself with and admit her fears and failings to.
Caspar!
As she felt the tender familiar brush of his mouth on hers, tears seeped from beneath her closed eyelids.
CHAPTER TWELVE
STUBBORNLY Sara had refused to allow Nick to pick her up for the drive into Pembrokeshire, insisting instead that they made the journey to his cottage separately in their own individual cars; but now as she followed his skilled handling of his large four-wheel-drive vehicle in her own much smaller and less comfortable compact car, all the doubts and fears Sara had fought to keep at bay behind the battlements of her pride began stalking her with a vengeance.
They were in Wales now and through Aberystwyth, following the coast road. It was a wet day with a grey mist rolling in over an even greyer sea, the hypnotic sound of her windscreen wipers failing to do anything to soothe down Sara's oversensitive nerve endings.
She had, as instructed, packed warm practical clothes. When they had met up at their arranged meeting place earlier in the day, Nick had got out of his car and come striding across to her. Dressed in jeans and a casual shirt he had still had the power to make her go weak at the knees—and to suddenly and un-wontedly realise just why she was behaving in such an uncharacterist
ic and self-destructive way.
'I thought we'd stop for lunch on the other side of Aberystwyth,' he had told her. There's a small town that I think you'll like with a particularly good seafood restaurant.'
And now they had reached that town and Nick was pulling off the road and into the small market square.
Almost numbly Sara followed him, parking her car next to his at the harbour front in the space he had left for her.
Even in the harbour the sea was choppy, the small moored fishing boats bouncing like corks on the heavy swell of the grey foaming water.
Sara was glad of the warmth in the fleece she had pulled on over her jeans and top as she stepped out into the cold damp air, deliberately ignoring the hand Nick put out towards her. She had never felt more on edge and anxious...not even on that supposedly so important first time. Losing her virginity had been nothing when compared with what she was contemplating doing now, a mere basic rite of passage with a boy she remembered with a vague amused fondness and who had been as nervous and uncertain about the actual mechanics of what they were doing as she had been herself. She had been eighteen then, though—a girl—and now she was a woman. Woman enough for a man like Nick Crighton?
She shivered causing Nick to say irritably, 'I don't bite, you know, Sara...' before adding in a lower and far more sensual undertone, 'at least not in public.'
