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Only the previous week, when she and Anna had been talking about Anna’s coming baby, Anna had asked her gently if she had ever thought of marrying and having a family herself. Anna, gentle, kind, compassionate, was not the sort to pry, but Dee had been able to guess what she was thinking. They had been looking at the beautiful delicate layette, the little hand-embroidered items which Anna had bought for her baby, and Dee knew that her own envy had shown as she’d gently touched the tiny little garments.
She had smiled painfully, shaken her head and told Anna wryly that she was far too bossy and set in her ways for any man to want to put up with her. Of course Anna had demurred, but she had seen that Dee hadn’t wanted to pursue the subject.
How could she have? How could she have said to Anna that deep within her own tender, vulnerable heart she knew
that there was no way she could marry a man she did not love totally? No way she could marry a man she could not commit herself to utterly and completely, no way she could marry a man she could not trust utterly and completely. Only a man to whom she could tell her most secret hopes—and her most secret fears—and to whom she could reveal her inner self totally. And such a man, quite simply, did not exist.
There was no one, could be no one, to whom Dee could ever tell her deepest, darkest fears, to whom she could ever reveal her deepest and darkest secret. How could she, when the secret was not really her own, when to reveal the fear that had haunted her for so long would mean a potential betrayal of the man to whom she owed the deepest bond of loyalty there was—her father?
Once she had told someone else, anyone else, about the fear that lay over her life like a dark bruising shadow, once she had shared her fear, her doubt with someone else, it would be like opening Pandora’s box. It would be like... Dee started to shiver.
‘Sometimes I think you love your father more than you love me,’ Hugo had once told her almost accusingly, when she had explained to him that she had to go home for the weekend to see her father.
‘Not more,’ she had reassured him. ‘He’s my father,’ she had tried to explain.
Hugo had a different relat
ionship with his parents than she’d had with her father. For a start he had two of them, a father and a mother, and he had siblings, an older brother and two sisters. And, in the tradition of the British upper classes, he had been sent away to boarding-school, and so, to him, the closeness which had existed between Dee and her father—their mutual dependence on one another, the loyalty and love she’d felt for him—had been hard for him to comprehend.
Hugo...
Dee wrapped her hands defensively around her coffee mug, giving up any attempt now to pretend that she was going to work. It had been such a shock to see him again, but nothing like as much of a shock as it had been when he had kissed her. And yet Hugo and kisses were linked inescapably together in her mind, her memories. The one impossible to detach from the other.
Hugo and kisses...
Dee sat back in her chair and let her mind drift...
CHAPTER FOUR
‘MMM... Just imagine what it would be like to be kissed by that...’ Dee’s companion murmured appreciatively as she rolled her eyes and cast a slumberously eager glance in Hugo’s direction.
‘Don’t you mean him?’ Dee corrected her primly, affecting not to be impressed by the picture of stunning male sensuality that Hugo made, taut muscles rippling down his back and arms as he pulled powerfully on the oars of the boat he was helping to crew.
‘Mmm...what I wouldn’t give for an hour on my own with him,’ her fellow student breathed excitedly, ignoring Dee’s disapproving shake of her head.
‘Oh, come on,’ she protested when Dee refused to relent. ‘You can’t pretend that you can’t see how scrumptiously sexy he is.’
‘He’s very good-looking,’ Dee conceded sedately.
‘Good-looking! He’s a hundred, million, zillion times more than just good-looking,’ Mandy breathed blissfully. ‘He’s just a living, breathing, walking, talking hunk. He’s... Oh, no, he’s looking at us. He’s looking at us,’ she whispered frantically to Dee. ‘Dee, he’s looking at us...’
‘No, he’s not; he’s squinting because the sun’s in his eyes,’ Dee corrected her, but for some reason her own heart had given a funny little throb as Hugo had turned his head and appeared to look over in their direction. She knew perfectly well what her companion had meant when she’d tried to find the words to describe Hugo’s sexual appeal.
‘Lord, but I think I’d die if he ever actually spoke to me. I mean, Hugo Montpelier. The man...the hunk...the dreamboat. He could have any girl he wanted, but he doesn’t sleep around and he doesn’t have a steady. One of the third years actually tried to ask him out, but he said that he didn’t have time and that he was too busy. He’s quite definitely hetero, though, no doubt about that. One of the girls taking Modern Languages told me that she’d managed to get a snog with him at one of last term’s parties and that it was just to die for. She said she practically felt she might have an orgasm there and then, on the spot...’
Dee looked away. Her own sex drive was healthy enough, but her upbringing had been slightly old-fashioned. She had had dates, kissed boys, that kind of thing, and she knew that when she fell in love there would be no holding back from her, but she knew too that her passionate nature meant that she would only feel safe and secure giving herself completely in a relationship if she knew that her feelings were returned. Casual sexual experimentation, playful dabbling in the shallow waters of sexual curiosity were not for her. She was made for the deep, dangerous ocean, the primitive, primal life force of a sexuality that commanded and demanded total commitment from both sides—total commitment and total love.
But that did not mean that she was totally immune to the powerful aura of Hugo Montpelier’s strongly male sexuality. He wore it like a banner, proudly and fiercely, and yet at the same time he wore it like a shield, protectively and defensively. Dee had heard all the gossip and speculation about him, the excited girl-chat that went on in the hyped-up, female-hormone-drenched atmosphere of their first-year halls. She had listened to the fevered and feverish uninhibited fantasies of her peers, which ranged from the foolishly idiotic to the frankly obscene.
Less than two months into her first term at university, she might still physically be a virgin but mentally her sexual knowledge had been expanded in a way that quite frankly had left her feeling slightly shocked.
One of the fantasies she had heard expressed regarding Hugo was whether he could last long enough to fully satisfy an excited pair of girls who had graphically described just what they would like to do with him if they had him in bed with them, and just what they would like him to do with them.
‘Didn’t you know? It’s every man’s special fantasy,’ one girl had purred when she had seen Dee’s shocked expression. ‘And I should know,’ she had added tellingly, grinning at Dee. ‘Ask my twin sister. There isn’t a man alive who doesn’t think that he’s got what it takes to satisfy two women at the same time.’
‘Nor a woman alive who doesn’t know that he hasn’t,’ another girl had muttered sardonically to Dee as she’d overheard the other girl’s remark.
Three-in-a-bed romps might be what were in the minds of some of the girls who drooled over Hugo, but so far it seemed that none of them had managed to persuade him to join them. He had been seen escorting one girl, but she had simply turned out to be a friend of a friend and already virtually engaged, and he had been seen at a drinks party escorting the daughter of one of the university’s Chairs, but she had since gone to America to finish her education.
