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Unfortunately, his clear cut route now to a successful outcome was proving elusive.
He adjusted his tie, raked his fingers through his hair and then hesitated. He knew that Violet was more than happy to meet him in the sitting room. After five days, she knew that house better than he did. How had that transpired? Because she was involving herself with his family. She and his mother appeared to have become best buddies. From his makeshift office in the downstairs library, he had a clear view of the back garden and had spotted them out there in the cold, slowly strolling and chatting. About what? He had casually asked her a couple of days ago and she had shrugged and delivered a non-answer. Was he going to push it? No. Ever since she had decided that it was her right to speak her mind, she had defied all attempts to smooth the strained atmosphere between them. In company, she was compliant and smiling. The second they were alone together, he was treated to the cold shoulder despite the fact that he had magnanimously chosen to overlook her outrageous, uninvited criticism of him.
He pulled the chair over to the window and sat down. At six-thirty in the evening, the room was infused with the ambers and golds of what had been a particularly fine and sunny day. In an hour, they would be leaving for a local restaurant. This had not been of his choosing. He would have been more than happy to have had a meal in, relaxed for ten minutes and then retired to catch up on his emails. But his mother had suggested it, to take her mind off the treatment which was due to commence at the weekend.
Or maybe, he mused darkly, Violet had suggested it...who was to say? His mind idly wandered over the events of the past few days. The clever way she had bonded with Dominic, involving him in the art preparation she was doing for her class, letting him guide her through some computer stuff for a website she wanted to set up to display the work of her more talented pupils. His mother had taken him to one side and confided that she had never seen Dominic so relaxed with anyone.
‘You know how wary he is of people he doesn’t know...’ she had murmured.
He didn’t, in actual fact. Which had only served as a reminder of what Violet had said about his communication skills.
He scowled and then looked up as the door to the adjoining bathroom slowly opened.
Immersed in her thoughts, with a towel wound turban style around her newly washed hair and another towel wrapped round her body, barely skimming her breasts and thighs, Violet was not expecting him. In fact, she didn’t register him at all sitting on the chair in the far corner of the room.
She was thinking about the past few days. Having a view on Damien and his relationship with his family seemed to have been the catalyst for the one thing she had been determined to avoid, namely involvement. She had told him what she thought about his relationship with his brother and, in so doing, she had unlocked a door and stepped inside the room. She hadn’t wanted to have opinions. She had simply wanted to do her time and then disappear back to her life. Instead, she was becoming attached and she had no idea where that was going to lead. Damien was barely on speaking terms with her. They communicated in front of an audience but once the audience was no longer around, the act was dropped and he disappeared into that office of his, only emerging long after she was fast asleep.
The bed which she had looked at with horror, which had thrown her into a state of panic because she had had visions of rolling over and bumping into him, had turned out to be as safe as a chastity belt. She was not aware of him entering the room at night because she was fast asleep and she was not aware of him leaving it in the morning because she was still sleeping.
She pulled the towel off her head and shook her hair, then she walked towards the bedroom door and locked it because you could never be too sure. Damien would already be downstairs. He would be making an effort.
Just like that, her mind leapt past her own nagging worries and zeroed in on Damien. She no longer fought the way he infiltrated her head. One small passing thought and suddenly the floodgates would be opened and she would lose herself in images of him. It was almost as if the connections to her brain were determined to disobey the orders given and merrily abandon themselves to reformatting her thoughts so that he played the starring role.
Without even looking in his direction, she was still keenly aware of everything he did and everything he said. There was no need to look at him because in her mind’s eye she could picture the way he looked, his expressions, the way he had of tilting his head to one side so that you had the illusion that whatever you were saying was vitally important.
He had stopped trying to corner his mother into making a decision about the house and whether it should be sold.
He had begun asking her about small things, like books she might have read and committees she belonged to in the village.
His conversation with Dominic was no longer a few words, some polite murmurings, a hearty pat on the shoulder and then attention focused somewhere else. Over dinner the evening before, she had heard him telling his brother about one of his deals which had run into unexpected problems with the locals because a vital factory had been denied planning permission, and the trouble they had taken to accommodate their concern.
Violet would rather not have noticed any of these details. She would rather he remained the one-dimensional baddy who barely had two words to say to her the second they were alone. She didn’t want to leave this house only to find herself wondering how the rest of their lives all turned out. She wanted to be able to put them all out of her mind and yet, the more absorbed she became in their dramas, the more difficult she knew that was going to be.
Still frowning, she dropped the towel to the floor and stepped towards the wardrobe. Her hair felt damp against her back and she lifted the heavy mass with one hand and, at that very moment, she saw him.
For a few seconds Violet thought her eyes might be playing tricks on her. She froze, her arm still raised holding her hair away from her body. Her brain refused to accommodate the realisation that he wasn’t safely downstairs but was, in fact, watching her as she stood in front of him, completely and utterly naked. When it did, she gave a squeak of absolute horror and reached for the discarded towel, which she wrapped tightly around her body. She was shaking like a leaf.
‘What are you doing here?’ She backed towards the bathroom door but, before she could make it to the relative safety of the bathroom, he was standing in front of her, barring her path.
For the first time in his life, Damien was lost for words. What was he doing there? Did it make any difference that it was his bedroom?
The thirty-second glimpse of her body had sent his libido into orbit. He was in physical pain and he fought to bring his senses back down to Planet Earth. The fluffy white towel was back in place, secured very firmly by tightly clenched fists, but in his mind’s eye he was still seeing the voluptuous curves of her body. He had caught himself idly wondering what she looked like under the dresses and the jeans and the jumpers. Whenever he had entered the bedroom to find her asleep, the covers had been pulled tightly up to her neck as though, even in slumber, she was determined to make sure that she kept him out. The first time he had seen her in jeans, his imagination had been up and running and her deliberate attempts to keep him at arm’s length had only served to increase its pace.
But nothing had prepared him for the mind-blowing sexiness of her curves. Her breasts, unrestrained by a bra, were far more than a generous handful. Her nipples were big pink discs that pouted provocatively and her stomach was flat as it planed downwards to the thatch of dark blonde hair between her thighs. All thoughts of self-denial were shattered in an instant. Every ounce of common sense that warned him against getting involved with a woman whose departure date from his life was any minute now, vanished like a puff of smoke.
‘You have to go,’ Violet said shakily. ‘I want to get dressed.’ She just couldn’t look him in the face. Her body was burning at the thought of his eyes on it. Even with the towel secured around her, she still felt as though her nudity was on parade.
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘We can talk...later...your mother and Dominic...’
‘Will be fine if they have to wait for us for a few minutes.’
He stood in front of her, as implacable as a solid wall of granite. Having made a concerted effort in the past few days to try and give her body as little option as humanly possible to feel any of that unnerving, unwelcome sexual awareness that seemed to ambush her at every turn, she was horribly aware of her racing pulses and the liquid heat pooling inside her. The silence stretched and stretched. She desperately wanted to get dressed and yet shied away from drawing attention to her nakedness under the towel.
‘I need to get dressed,’ she finally breathed and Damien stood aside.
Now that he had dropped all pretence of keeping life simple by not yielding to an attraction that seemed to have a will of its own, he could feel the stirrings of a dark, pervasive excitement coursing through him. Anticipation was a powerful aphrodisiac.
‘Of course,’ he murmured, stepping back further. ‘We can talk later.’ And they would.
