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She knew from the tone of his voice that in another minute she would be released and pushed gently outside his door, and the knowledge was almost unbearable. She wanted to stay with him; to revel in the heady pleasure of touching him, of exploring the sculptured male contours of his body, to feel it respond to her own.
A tiny inner voice pleaded caution, but she ignored it.
‘Tara…’
‘Don’t send me away, James,’ she pleaded huskily. ‘Please… I’ve been thinking about… about what you said before you left, and…’ Head bowed, she studied the dark criss-cross of hairs curling against his chest, a weak, yielding sensation turning her stomach to jelly.
‘And,’ James prompted harshly, ‘I seem to remember that the last time you saw me you told me you hated me. If you merely want to repeat the sentiment, don’t bother, it’s one I can easily do without.’
He had changed during the last two months, Tara acknowledged, studying him properly. His face seemed leaner, the bones harder, and there was a smouldering intensity in the way his eyes lingered on her body that she had not seen before.
‘I don’t hate you, James,’ she said steadily, taking a deep breath. ‘I love you, and even though…’ Even though you don’t love me, she had been about to say, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to frame the words. ‘And… I want you to be my first lover. I…’
She got no further. Her body was crushed against the bronzed male flesh, James’s mouth plundering the soft hollow at the base of her throat, sending flickering tongues of fire licking through her veins.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ James muttered hoarsely. ‘Nothing’s changed… nothing at all,’ he added thickly. ‘I still want you so much it’s like a gut pain, even though I know I must be half out of my mind. Stop me, Tara,’ he warned huskily, nibbling seductively at her throat. ‘Stop me now, for God’s sake, because I’m warning you, there’s no way I can stop myself.’
‘I don’t want to stop you,’ Tara whispered back breathlessly. ‘Make love to me, James.’
The hours that followed were something she had never forgotten; a time of magic and delight.
James had been a considerate lover, drawing from her untutored body a response that shook her to her soul, drawing her gradually into a melting frenzy of need so that the pain of his possession was quickly swamped by the urgent tide of her own desire. It had been then that he had told her that he loved her; at the same time cursing himself for what had happened. Tara had merely smiled lazily, supine and relaxed, her body still awash with pleasure. For her the regret and remorse had come later—six weeks later to be precise—when she had discovered that she was to have his baby, and she had gone to him to seek his help and advice. But he hadn’t been there, and it had been Hilary she had had to face; Hilary who had laughed in her face when she asked uncertainly for James. Hilary who had told her cruelly that she had been merely one of his many brief diversions and that they had laughed about it together; laughed about her.
She had left without telling Hilary the truth. Later from Sue she had learned that James had flown to New York several days before Hilary had been due to leave for Hillingdon. They had met there briefly but not returned together. Tara knew why: Hilary had told her. ‘Can’t you understand, you silly little girl,’ she had said mockingly, ‘he’s had what he wanted from you—it’s over, and this is his way of telling you so. He doesn’t want you, my dear; you would bore him silly, all he wanted was a little divertissement—you poor little fool,’ she added, ‘Did you really think he cared? My dear, if I hadn’t been neglecting him so shamefully he would never even have looked at you. My God, it’s almost pathetic! What do you, a gauche inexperienced girl, have to offer a man like James; a man who enjoys the best that life has to offer and the women who can provide him with it?’
Tara remembered how she had been sick on the way home, humiliatingly and thoroughly. That had been the night her mother had taxed her with the truth and she had been forced to admit it, and life had never been the same again. She had thought herself grown up the afternoon James made love to her, but she hadn’t been. She finally grew up in the small living room of her home when her mother told her that she would have to have her illegitimate child adopted and she had refused.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE sound of footsteps approaching her bedroom door alerted Tara to the fact that she was no longer alone. Dragging her thoughts away from the past, she shivered slightly as she opened the door.
‘Feeling better?’ Sue questioned sympathetically, adding when she nodded her head, ‘You still look dreadfully pale. Your Mandy is a delight,’ she added, smiling. ‘You should see her with Piers—she’s so motherly. Simon’s a darling as well.’
‘He’s very sensitive,’ Tara told her. ‘Too much so, I sometimes think.’
‘At the risk of voicing a cliché, do you think perhaps he needs a father?’
‘A man to pattern himself on?’ Tara grimaced. ‘Despite what the psychologists would have us believe I still think the security of one parent is better than two who quarrel.’
‘I couldn’t agree more, and I’m glad you’re still as romantic as you always were. I’d have been bitterly disappointed if you’d been prosaic enough to say you might marry some pleasant, unexciting man merely to provide the twins with a father. Which reminds me, I came up here to tell you that Mrs Barnes is giving them their tea.’
‘I’ll go down and collect them,’ Tara murmured, following her friend to the door.
‘Tara—’ She paused, turning to glance at Sue’s faintly clouded face. ‘Do you find James much changed?’ Sue asked her hesitantly. ‘Alec says I’m imagining things, but there seems to be something different about him.’
‘It’s so long since I last saw him that I’m bound to find him changed,’ Tara told her in a clipped voice.
‘He never married again after Mother, you know, and yet I distinctly remember overhearing Mother tell him in the middle of a row that she’d never divorce him to let him go and marry someone else, so he must have thought about it.’
‘And changed his mind when he realised what he was giving up,’ Tara suggested sardonically, immediately wishing the words unsaid when Sue stared at her reproachfully.
‘Tara!’ There was shock and disbelief in her voice. ‘I know some people thought that James married Mother for her money, but I never expected you’d be one of them. You always seemed to get on so well. You know,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘I always had the impression that there was some mystery about their
marriage. One moment Mother had gone to the States on business—something to do with the death of one of her partners—and the next she was back, married to James, and yet I can never remember them actually seeming happy together.’
It was natural that Sue should want to make excuses for James, Tara thought tiredly—hadn’t she once done exactly the same? His marriage had been the one thing they had never talked about. The young possessed a wonderful facility for seeing only what they wanted to see, she thought cynically, but James hadn’t been a young teenager; how had he managed to blinker himself to the reality of his marriage? Or hadn’t it been necessary? Why fool herself, she had never been anything more than a simple entertaining interlude, a momentary diversion, the piquant sensation of being the subject of a young girl’s love.
‘Oh, I know James and Mother couldn’t have married for love,’ Sue was saying, ‘but I can’t believe that he married her purely for financial gain.’
