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He had taught her so many things about both his sexuality and her own; not just in terms of the physical act of union, but also of the wide variety of small intimate pleasures that could arise from the lightest, most delicate, and sometimes often unexpected kind of touch. He had been both gentle and passionate, demanding and patient. He had been the best of lovers, and the worst of husbands.
She started to shiver suddenly as her body caved in under the pressure of her shock. Lewis still hadn’t looked at her properly nor she at him and yet she had recalled faultlessly and unwantedly the sensation of his hands against her skin, coaxing, stroking, loving…hands which she now saw were bunched into hard, tense fists.
He moved abruptly, flexing his fingers, a gesture unfamiliar to her and which, being unfamiliar, should have released her from her bondage to her unwanted memories; but instead it eroded her self-discipline, and anguish and desolation rose up inside her. She had changed and so of course must he, and it was foolish beyond all measure of her to mourn her own lack of knowledge of something so slight as an added mannerism.
He was tense; that involuntary flexing of his fingers proved that. He had been tense the night he’d told her he didn’t want her or their marriage any more, but tense in a different way: then he had used his tension as a barrier between them…a barrier which had told her, ‘Don’t come any nearer. Don’t even think about trying to touch me,’ and yet she had done so…foolishly, and his recoil from her had been instant and shocking, betraying his physical revulsion for her.
Alongside her, Ian was still talking.
‘Lacey almost single-handedly organised the appeal for Michael Sullivan; that was why I wanted the two of you to meet. Lacey, Lewis is—’
She couldn’t endure any more. The initial shock had faded now, but what was left in its place was even worse: a kind of sick anxiety, coupled with pain and something more…something she could not bear to analyse.
‘Ian, I’m sorry,’ she interrupted shakily. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay…’
As her dazed brain sought frantically for some excuse for her unscheduled departure, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Lewis had turned his head, and was looking at her.
Their glances met, meshed; blue eyes blazing into grey. Every never-ending in her body burst into painful life. It had been like that all those years ago. He had looked at her then with those amazing blue eyes, and then…
But then the look in his eyes had been one of admiration; or arousal and eagerness. Now it was one of…
Of what? she asked herself dizzily as she tried to look away. Absently she wondered why—when his body had so obviously matured from the slight thinness of his early twenties as though now he had finally grown into the height and breadth of the bone-structure nature had given him—his face seemed so much more sharply sculptured, so much harder, so much more shockingly masculine. He had never been good-looking in the almost too handsome fashion of a film star, but he had always had a potent, very unnerving almost—at least to her—aura of male sexuality which time seemed to have enhanced rather than lessened; and yet there was nothing overtly sexual about him. He was wearing a well-tailored plain navy suit, a crisp white shirt and a suitably discreet tie, his clothes very similar in fact to those worn by both Ian and Tony, and yet on him…
The slight movement of his body re-attracted her attention, her glance flicking helplessly towards it so that she was gut-wrenchingly conscious of the power of the muscles that lay beneath his skin, achingly aware of his body, his maleness, in a way she hadn’t been aware of a man’s physical masculinity in years.
‘I…I must go,’ she reiterated huskily. ‘I promised I’d go round and see Michael.’
‘But I thought we were going to finalise the formal winding down of the appeal,’ Ian protested. ‘I—’
‘I’m sorry, Ian. I…I can’t stay. Not now!’
She was almost gabbling now as she headed for the door, desperately conscious of the way Lewis was watching her, and desperately anxious to escape from the room before she panicked completely. She knew that her behaviour must, to Ian at least, seem totally out of character, totally immature and illogical, and that as such it must be completely bewildering him. Later she would have to apologise to him…to make some kind of amends for what she was doing, but if she stayed in this room with Lewis even one second longer…
She shuddered, acknowledging how, for one heartbeat, she had been horrendously tempted to close the gap between them; to walk up to him and be at his side as though it was her right to be there.
That had shocked and frightened her even more than her sexual awareness of him. He had hurt her so badly that she had believed that nothing would ever make her forget that pain, and yet in the space of a handful of heartbeats she had found herself recklessly, dangerously ignoring reality and allowing herself to pretend that they were still together…a couple…a pair…that they were still…still what? she asked herself sickly as she pulled open the door and walked through it. Still lovers?
The wave of heat that suffused her told its own betraying story.
Ian, who had followed her through the door and who was now reaching out to delay her, asked anxiously, ‘Is everything all right? You seem…different, somehow. I…’
‘I’m fine, Ian. It’s just that I feel so guilty about forgetting I had promised to see Michael today. I only remembered when I was halfway here, so it seemed simpler to explain in person.’
She had never known she possessed such a facility for fiction…for lying.
‘I’ll ring you tomorrow about the appeal. I…I am sorry.’
He was smiling at her, still quite obviously concerned, but, being the man he was, he made no attempt to restrain or question her, and it was only once she had reached the sanctuary of her car that she realised that she still had no idea what on earth Lewis was doing in town, nor, more importantly, how long he intended to stay.
To judge from his shock at seeing her, if he had had any intentions of staying on he must surely now have changed his mind, she reflected grimly and self-punishingly. Thank goodness Jessica was back at university!
Jessica. She felt sick inside. How would she feel if she knew that her father had been here in town and she, her mother, had not said one word to alert her? But Jessica had never expressed any desire to try and track down her father.
That did not mean that somewhere, buried deep inside her, there wasn’t a very natural desire to know more about him. She would hardly have been human if she had ever experienced that emotion, that need, even if loyalty to her mother had kept her silent on the subject.
As she sat in the car, knowing that she was still too shocked to drive, Lacey leaned her head back against the neck-rest and acknowledged wearily that she was now in danger of adding guilt to all her emotional burdens.
It was a long time before she felt physically and emotionally able to start her car and drive home. When she did, her fingers were over-tight on the wheel, a frown of concentration furrowing her forehead, and she tried desperately not to let her mental images of Lewis come between her and her driving.
