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A beam of spring sunlight gleamed in his hair, touched the side of his forcefully handsome face and her heart swelled inside her breast. He was so gorgeous it sometimes hurt to look at him, and her body melted, just melted when he came to stand behind her, slipping his hands around her waist then slowly lifting them to cup her breasts.
He leant his face against the side of hers, his lips warm on her pinkening skin and she felt her breasts harden and fill the palms of his hands.
‘Then, we’ll head for the woods,’ he murmured, adding silkily as his thumbs stroked her pouting nipples, ‘Unless you have another form of exercise in mind?’
‘Walk,’ she said chokily, moving away. ‘To begin with,’ she added, but her smile was thin. They had always met in the woods, relishing the dark secrecy, their own precious privacy. The reminder put a heavy slab of sorrow in her heart.
She didn’t want reminders, not today. Today was all they had left, and she would only be able to make it a happy memory if she didn’t remember the past. So she wouldn’t remember it. They were different people now and all she had to do was to pretend, just for today, that they’d only just met, had just fallen in love.
Tomorrow would be soon enough to get back to normal, to get on with the life she knew and could rely on.
‘Fine.’ Black eyes glinted wickedly as he took her hand. ‘I’m ready for the afters whenever you say the word. Let’s get the “begin with” over.’
They were still holding hands as they wandered slowly beneath the cool green canopy, taking the rarely trodden paths, the only sound that of their feet in the undergrowth, the music of birdsong and the ever-present murmur of the stream.
Idyllic, Caroline thought, or at least it should have been. But it wasn’t working. Every step brought back memories of that long-ago summer when she’d believed she’d met her so
ul mate, when she would have trusted him with her life. How could she divorce herself from the reality of his callous betrayal?
‘I’ve got something I want to show you,’ he said as they emerged into a clearing on the banks of the stream. ‘Remember Ma’s falling down rented cottage?’
Seemingly oblivious of her now sombre mood, he strode ahead of her, holding back the branches of a hazel, his boyish grin lighting his face.
She had no option but to follow, her heart sinking as she recalled that dreadful day. It had taken her a while for everything to sink in. Her father had paid him to go away and stay away. Maggie Pope had confirmed that he was the father of her baby, had confirmed that he’d shrugged, had laid all the responsibility on her and had swaggered away.
So she’d written that letter, in case he’d already left the area, and it had been easy. All the hurt and bitterness had spilled out onto the paper. And of course he’d already gone.
‘Not here,’ his austere-featured mother had answered her enquiry. So Caroline had pushed the sealed envelope into her hands. ‘Then, give him this if and when you see him again.’
Now the cottage had been transformed, she registered numbly. Before, it had been barely habitable, the extensive garden filled with the produce Mrs Dexter had grown to sell and which had remained unsold. Now the stonework was sturdy, the leaking roof re-thatched and a sizeable, sympathetic extension added, an extension so well executed it might always have been here.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Ben turned to her, tucking an arm around her, pulling her close to his side.
Caroline pulled away, her features pale and serious. So much for their precious stolen day, for pretending they had no shared past. ‘Does your mother still live here?’ she asked dully.
The cottage didn’t look lived in and the once productive garden was a jungle of weeds, so she didn’t think she did. She sighed heavily. She’d tried so hard to block out thoughts of his past betrayal, just for this one day, but being here had made that impossible. ‘She never did like me.’
‘She was afraid of you,’ Ben commented lightly as he took a door key from the pocket of the stone-coloured jeans he was wearing. ‘She knew how I felt about you and kept telling me it would all end in tears!’ He had opened the carefully restored oak-plank door and it swung back easily on its hinges. ‘She was always telling me that the young lady from the big house would never settle down with the local tearaway who had a bad reputation and even worse prospects!’
He loomed over her and Caroline felt something wither and die inside her as he traced the line of her cheek with a caressing forefinger and added gently, ‘You didn’t ditch me out of snobbishness, Caro. But because of your upbringing you were unable to make a long-term commitment, I understand that now. And you were very young.’
He had been young at the time, too. And sooner or later he would have abandoned her as he’d abandoned Maggie and their baby; sooner rather than later if her father had demanded the return of that money because, typically, he hadn’t kept his side of their bargain. Yet he was talking as if she had been the one to blame for everything that had happened.
Ben put a hand beneath her elbow, urging her over the threshold and as if he sensed her resistance he said lightly, ‘To answer your question, Ma now lives with her sister Jane in Derbyshire on what used to be the family farm. The land was sold off when their parents died within six months of each other around five years ago. They share the farmhouse.’
They were in the main living room and it seemed much larger and lighter than it had been on the only occasion she’d set foot inside the cottage. Her eyes must have been showing her bemusement because Ben told her, ‘When Ma and I lived here, this room was divided by a hardboard partition. She slept behind it and I had a room upstairs with crumbling floorboards and a leaking ceiling.’
So there was light coming from two windows now, and lots more space. The rusty old cooking range had been taken out, revealing a wide inglenook where logs would blaze in the winter. The overhead beams had been cleaned of their peeling layers of black paint and were their warm natural colour.
‘The place was a pigsty when we lived here,’ Ben confided. ‘But because of that the rent was low. We couldn’t afford any better.’ He had drawn her to the deep window-seat at the far side of the room and she had let him, reluctantly, too low-spirited now to argue. ‘You would have seen her around after we came to live here but you never knew her. I think you should. I’m sure you’ll get on like a house on fire when you get to know each other properly.’
He had taken her unresisting hand and they were sitting close in the confined space but Caroline didn’t feel anything. Just numb.
‘People thought she was hard, unfriendly,’ he admitted. ‘But that was simply a defence mechanism. She called herself Mrs Dexter but she was never married. She simply allowed people to think she was widowed or divorced.
‘My father worked with a travelling fair. She and Jane, the sister she was closest to, had sneaked away to the forbidden and “wicked” fairground when it first arrived. That was where she met him. A week later they all packed up and moved on and a few weeks on she found she was pregnant.
‘Her parents didn’t throw her out but they made life uncomfortable. They were devout members of a narrow religious sect and made no secret of the fact that she had shamed them. She stuck it out until I was two.’
