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‘Er…’ He was plainly waiting for some sort of response, so she began uncertainly, ‘Well, I…’
‘You have a very busy social life which precludes us from having dinner together in the evening, much as I would enjoy spending a relaxing hour or two in your company, unwinding from the day’s stresses, is that it?’
Was he making fun of her? He must know surely from Katie that her social life was very limited indeed: that she rarely went out, even though her friends were always complaining that she was in danger of turning into a hermit.
Deciding that he must be teasing her, she told him stiffly, ‘I was simply trying to say that I wouldn’t want you to feel you were under some kind of obligation to eat your meals with me.’
She started to turn away from him, determined to bring what was turning out to be a very dangerous conversation to a close, but as she did so she heard him saying softly, ‘Who says it would be an obligation? I was thinking of it more as a pleasure—an indulgence…’
Hazel could feel herself starting to tremble inwardly. If she didn’t know better she might almost have believed that he meant it—that he was actually subtly flirting with her, that he was actually trying to imply that he found her attractive and desirable. Which of course he could not possibly do.
He was involved with her own daughter, for heaven’s sake, and that knowledge, plus her own response to it, was making her feel physically sick.
She prayed desperately that Katie wasn’t too deeply in love with him, because she was almost certain he could not reciprocate the intensity of her feelings, and the last thing she wanted was for her precious daughter to be hurt. And sooner or later she would be hurt. With a man like this one that was inevitable. Sooner or later there would be someone else, a someone else, who, unlike her, would not think twice about responding to his overtures, to his warmth, to his sensuality, and when she did…
She shivered visibly, causing Silas to frown. ‘You’re cold. Perhaps we’d better go back.’
Go back… If only she could go back to before she had ever met him.
She had known him hardly more than twenty-four hours, and yet those twenty-four hours had changed her life irredeemably. Had changed her, showing her facets of her nature, of her innermost emotions and feelings, that she had never known existed. If she had known more about him before she had met him, if she had had time to prepare herself…but she suspected that nothing she could have done could have defended her from the enemy that was within herself.
Her father had been right to insist that she live a life of rigorous celibacy. Had he perhaps in some way seen within her what she had not…?
And yet if for all these years she had had this vulnerability, this aching, welling need for physical contact, for—to put it in its bluntest and cruellest form—sex, then why had it never manifested itself before? Why had she never felt like this with anyone else?
It was a question she was far too confused to know how to answer. Silas had already turned back in the direction they had come and she fell into step beside him, waiting as he mounted the stile ahead of her, and then freezing when instead of crossing it he turned round and held out his arms to her.
As she looked at him, she knew that she had already hesitated too long; that her body was already quivering with excitement and fear that if he picked her up now, no matter how remote and non-sexual his touch might be, there was nothing on earth that would stop her body from responding to him. Even now, standing here looking up at him, between one heartbeat and the next, she could already feel the heat of his body against her own, could already hear the fierce drumming of her own heart, could already sense how her body would melt and yield, silently urging his to respond to its wantonness.
Terrified of what would happen, of how she would humiliate herself and betray Katie if she so much as took one step towards him, she told him raggedly, ‘It’s all right, I can manage.’ She gave him a tight painful smile. ‘I am a woman, you know, not a child.’
It was the wrong thing to say. The look he gave her slowly encompassed every inch of her, making her feel as though she were slowly melting inside.
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‘Yes,’ he told her gravely, before he turned away from her. ‘I do know.’
And as he stepped down the other side of the stile, she was sure she heard him adding acidly under his breath, ‘After all, I am a man and not a boy.’
But she told herself she was imagining it. That she was letting her own feelings, her own needs put words into his mouth which he most probably had not uttered.
Later she told herself that it was because she was so engrossed in her own thoughts, her own guilt, that, while she managed to negotiate the stile fairly easily, once she was down on solid ground for some unfathomable reason she managed to trip over a totally non-existent bump in the ground.
Her small cry of apprehension was automatic, and so was the speed with which Silas turned round and caught hold of her, dragging her up against his body so that she was locked against him with far more intimacy than she would have been had he merely been helping her over the stile.
This could not be happening, she told herself despairingly as she felt the frantic thud of her heart and breathed in the warm, intimate male scent of him.
The wind had tousled her curls, blowing them across her cheek, and perhaps initially it was simply in automatic response to this that he lifted his hand and gently brushed them back, tucking them behind her ear, while he looked gravely into her eyes as though he was searching for something, waiting.
Later she told herself that this was when she ought to have pushed him away, ought to have made some move to let him know that his intimacy was unwelcome, when she ought to have remembered Katie, but instead she simply stared back at him, her lips parting slightly as she tried to breathe in enough oxygen to satisfy her cramped lungs, her ribcage lifting abruptly as she tried to breathe deeply, flattening her breasts against his body. With both of them wearing so many layers of clothes, it was impossible surely for him to feel their softness, much less be aware of the swollen, aching hardness of her nipples, and yet, she acknowledged painfully, he must have felt something, must have read some kind of invitation in her eyes if not in her body, because the hand resting against her curls suddenly became caressing, his thumb stroking her gently behind her ear, rather as she might have fondled a soft-furred cat, she thought dizzily, trying to fight against the sensations his touch engendered.
She knew she was breathing far too rapidly, that she was foolishly betraying things that should have been kept hidden. Another woman, a more experienced, accomplished woman, would never have reacted so immediately, nor so embarrassingly to so light a caress. Not even a caress really, more a subtle question, a suggestion…something from which both of them could quite easily have withdrawn and dismissed as a mere accidental brushing of his fingers against her skin, if she had not over-reacted so wildly to it, her body trembling, her eyes widening, her breath coming in tiny, frantic little gasps, that were surely as much of an invitation to him as though she had spoken the words out aloud.
Certainly he seemed to have no difficulty in correctly interpreting their message, because before she could even think of fighting, to check what she was feeling, his hand had cupped her jaw, turning her face up towards his. His body had somehow moved subtly closer to hers so that she was intimately aware of its strengths, and its weaknesses, although she tried frantically to deny the knowledge that the pulsing hardness she could feel so intimately had any existence outside her own over-active imagination.
Perhaps if she hadn’t been so desperately fighting that battle she might have managed to anticipate his kiss and to evade it, but as it was all she could do was to stare helplessly into the depths of his eyes like a mesmerised teenager, knowing that he was going to kiss her, knowing that she should stop him, and at the same time knowing that she was not going to do so.
For twenty years the only kisses she had known had been those of a very shy and reserved father, those of an exuberant and loving daughter, those of friends, brief female pecks on the cheek, and occasionally, very occasionally, when she had not been able to evade or avoid them, the unwanted and unwelcome and totally unarousing kisses of certain of her male acquaintances. Her only memories of Jimmy’s kisses were vague and unreal. He had bitten her lip once and it had hurt her. He had also scoffed at her reluctance to indulge in what he had termed ‘French kissing’ which to her at the time had seemed a distasteful and wholly unappealing activity.
