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‘Better...than that...impossible!’ Dee assured him blissfully.
‘Oh, Dee, Dee, is it any wonder that I love you so much?’ Hugo praised her adoringly. ‘I should not have met you, you know. You shouldn’t really have existed. I didn’t plan for this to happen. I wasn’t going to fall in love, and I certainly didn’t want to make the kind of lifetime commitment I want to make to you to any woman until I was at least thirty.
‘It’s just as well that you and I share the same ideals and the same ambitions. I don’t think I could have borne it if you’d been the kind of woman who expected me to stay at home and get myself the sort of job my father wants me to get. Something in the City that will make me a lot of money. I’m not going to be much of a catch as a husband, you do realise that, don’t you? Our children will complain and all your friends will think that you’re crazy to love me. Your father will quite definitely disapprove...’
‘No, he won’t,’ Dee denied. ‘He’ll admire you for what you’re doing—and it is admirable, Hugo, to want to help others. I couldn’t love you so much as I do if you were any way different from the way you are, and I certainly wouldn’t want to change you or the plans you’ve made.’
‘Mmm...it’s providential, isn’t it, that you’ll have completed your degree course just about the same time as I finish my Ph.D.? There’s no way I can make time to go back to working in the field until I finish it, but once I have, once we’ve both completed our studies... There’s so much I want to do, Dee. So very, very much...’
‘Mmm...I know,’ she agreed, and then added with sweet provocativeness, ‘You haven’t even touched the champagne, and then there’s the Jacuzzi... How long have you booked the suite for?’
‘Just tonight,’ Hugo told her ruefully.
‘Just tonight? You mean we’ve still got it for a whole twelve hours?’ Dee teased him, mock wide-eyed.
‘A whole twelve hours,’ he agreed, but he was mumbling the words a little because Dee was kissing him.
‘Then we don’t have a moment to waste, do we?’ she told him as she trailed her fingers slowly over his body.
‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ he agreed.
CHAPTER SIX
DEE woke up with a start. Her heart was pounding and her mouth felt dry. She had slept heavily but not refreshingly, almost as though she had been drugged, and as she lay in bed she was conscious of an unfamiliar reluctance to get up, almost a dread of doing so, as though by remaining where she was she could hold her apprehensions and low spirits at bay.
Unfamiliar? Not exactly. Not totally. There had been a period after her father’s death, a time once the urgency of the immediate calls upon her time and attention had slackened a little, when she had experienced a similar longing to crawl away and hide somewhere safe and womb-like. She had had to fight to overcome it, to tell herself that the decisions she had made had been right and necessary, to urge herself to go on. Resolutely she threw back the bedclothes and slid her feet to the bedroom floor.
Her bedroom was her own secret, special place, somewhere that no one else was allowed to enter. Not so much because it was a private sanctuary, Dee recognised, but because of what she knew it betrayed about a deeply personal side of her nature.
The walls were painted a soft washed colour, somewhere between blue and green, and the windows were draped in gossamer folds of creamy white muslin. Th
e same fabric fell from the ceiling and was gathered back softly at either side of her double bed, which, like the chaise longue at its foot and the comfortable bedroom chair by the window, was covered in a cream-coloured cotton brocade. The carpet too was cream. The whole ambience of the room was one of soft delicacy. A stranger looking into Dee’s bedroom and making a character assessment of her from it would have judged her to be soft and ethereal, a creature of fluid, feminine moods and feelings, a dreamy water sprite of a woman, whose sensibilities were as delicate and tender as the petals of the fresh cream flowers that filled the bowl on the pretty antique table she used as a dressing table.
As Dee showered and then dressed she acknowledged that the cause of her sense of wanting to curl up protectively and let the world get on without her for a while were the two completely contradictory forces lining up against one another for battle inside her head.
On the one side was her need to persuade Peter, without either alienating him or even more importantly hurting him, that it was time for him to step down from the foundation committee, and her knowledge that the best way to achieve that goal would be to win Hugo’s support, to actively court his help and approval of her plans, whilst on the other was her totally opposing need to have nothing whatsoever to do with him, to blot him completely out of her thoughts, her mind, her life, her heart.
Abruptly Dee stopped brushing her hair, her body convulsing in a small involuntary shiver.
She had fought that battle once, fought it and, she had believed, won it, inch by painful inch, hour by agonising hour. She put down her hairbrush and stared unseeingly into her mirror. She was afraid, she acknowledged grimly. Afraid of having to re-enter the long, painful time of darkness she had already been through once, afraid of what might happen to her if she allowed Hugo to come back into even the smallest corner of her life, and that was why she had been so reluctant to face the day.
Yes, she was stronger now than the girl she had once been, but then she had had the advantage of being motivated, driven by what she had considered to be almost a crusade; then she had had zeal and youth on her side. Now...
Now she still believed as firmly as she had done then that she had made the right, the only decision, but now the brightness of her fervour, her belief was shadowed, obscured sometimes by her own inner images of what might have been, the child or children she might have had, the life, the love she might have shared.
As a young man Hugo had been, if anything, even more fervent in his beliefs than she had been herself, and, unlike her, he had been sharply critical of what he had termed the selfishness of a materialistic society and those who supported it. As an idealist, his views had sometimes been diametrically opposed to those of her father—or so it had seemed at times.
‘What do you expect my father to do?’ she had demanded angrily of him once in the middle of one of their passionate arguments. ‘Give all his money away...?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Hugo had snorted angrily, in defence of his own beliefs.
He had been equally passionate about how important it was for those involved in aid programmes to be completely free of even the faintest breath of scandal, of anything that could reflect badly on the cause they were representing. Oddly enough, that had been a belief he had actually shared with her father.
Perhaps because she was a woman, Dee was inclined to take a more reasonable and compassionate view. Human beings were, after all, human, vulnerable, fallible.
There was no point in giving in to her present feelings. She would, she decided firmly, take the bull by the horns and drive over to Lexminster so that she could both see how Peter was and either talk with Hugo or arrange a meeting with him so that she could raise the subject of the committee with him.
Her mind made up, Dee told herself that she had made the right decision. What had happened...existed...between her and Hugo all those years ago had no relevance to her life now, and it certainly had none to his. Her best plan was simply to behave as though they had been no more than mere acquaintances, and to adopt a casually friendly but firmly distancing attitude towards him.
