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Impulsively she spanned the aisle with her slender arm and placed her hand over the one lying on his seat-rest. The back of his hand felt cool and hard against her palm, as if the tanned skin were sheathing cold steel rather than warm muscle and sinew. Rosalind had somehow expected that an accountant would have hands that were soft and pampered. Maybe it was all that exercise on his computer keyboard that made his fingers feel as if they were capable of cracking walnuts!
Even more disconcerting, the hum of the aircraft was transmitted to her via her touch—a prickling vibration which shot from the point of contact right up the length of her arm, raising the fine hairs on her skin as if it were charged with electricity.
Luke looked down at the small, pale, delicate hand cuddled protectively over his.
Absorbed in her imaginative reconstruction of his orphaned boyhood, Rosalind missed the significance of the slight, premeditated pause before he added with stark pathos, ‘It was an accident. My father died too.’
Her hand contracted, along with her tender heart, her fingers curling comfortingly between his. The engine hum in her arm increased to a steady tingle that spread up her shoulder and down over her collar-bone. ‘You were an orphan? Oh, Luke...how awful for you. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
He turned his head. She was leaning towards him, her vibrant restlessness momentarily subdued by the desire to comfort, her creamy skin pale with the intensity of her feelings, her beautiful eyes wide with anxiety and muted with sorrow.
All for a virtual stranger.
Where in the hell were her self-protective instincts? wondered Luke James with a savage dissatisfaction. Damn it, she was making this too easy...
Or was she? Luke had good reason to know that she wasn’t as vulnerable and unsophisticated as her tender expression of compassion invited him to believe. Her apparent openness was an illusion. To an actress of Rosalind Marlow’s calibre the lies would come tripping off the tongue. He might admire the act, but he didn’t have to believe in it.
‘No. No one.’
The tight-lipped answer touched a painful chord inside Rosalind. She couldn’t imagine life without her large, loving family. The chord continued to resonate, reaching deep into the secrets of her soul.
She could see the awareness of his loss still there in the back of Luke’s eyes, the ghostly reflection of an old bewilderment. And, behind that, an even deeper, colder, darker emotion that she couldn’t identify.
‘Relatives? Surely you had someone...?’
There was a palpable tension in the set of his shoulders. “I was fortunate to be adopted,’ he said tonelessly, sliding his hand abruptly out from under hers and placing it out of reach in his lap.
‘I’m glad,’ said Rosalind quietly, undismayed by his physical withdrawal. Some people were natural touchers and others weren’t. The Marlows were an expressive lot, both physically and verbally.
‘Everyone should have a family, don’t you think? Even if it’s an artificially constructed one,’ she continued, her smile tinged with a fleeting wistfulness. ‘It’s our family that teaches us to expect love and trust and loyalty from those around us, so that when we go out into the world we’re not afraid to pass on our trust to others, to admit that we’re all interdependent...’
‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls...’ he murmured.
‘Exactly! Although, actually, it’s “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee”,’ said Rosalind, a stickler for getting her lines right. She-was delighted to find out that he had at least a passing acquaintance with poetry. Perhaps he was still redeemable. ‘Have you read much John Donne?’
‘Enough to misquote him occasionally. The remnants of a classical education.’
‘Oh? Where did you go to school?’
He named a private boys’ school, famous for its academic excellence and strict code of behaviour—also for the level of its fees. She wondered whether his parents’ estate or his adoptive family had paid for his education.
‘Were you a boarder?’ she contented herself with asking.
‘Yes, I was.’
He uttered the words with pride, but Rosalind thought that packing young children off to live in institutions was a barbaric practice and said so. She shuddered delicately. ‘All the Marlows went to a state school, thank God, where we were relatively free to express our individuality. I could never have stood boarding-school. All those petty rules and restrictions. I would have rebelled simply on principle.’
‘Your parents didn’t set restrictions on your behaviour when you were a child? They didn’t expect you to adhere to minimum standards of decency and self-control?’
There was a bite to his questions that made her a trifle defensive. The Marlow brand of home discipline might have been liberal but it had never been lax. ‘Yes, of course they did, but their rules were tempered with heaps of love and humour and a very broad tolerance, and we weren’t threatened with expulsion from the family if we did something wrong!’
‘I was never threatened with expulsion either.’
‘Probably because you never dared do anything wrong,’ dismissed Rosalind knowingly. ‘How did you manage in the dorm? Aren’t boarding-schools filled with budding little sadists and thugs who lord it over everyone younger and weaker than themselves?’ Her voice acquired a pitying husk. ‘You must have suffered more than your share of bullying—’
‘Must I?’ he interrupted crisply. ‘Why?’
‘Well, you’re not exactly built like a rugby player, are you?’ she said frankly, giving him the once-over. As her eyes settled back on his face she noticed his heightened colour and the tell-tale rigidity of the muscles in his jaw and—Uh-oh, she must have bruised his masculine sensitivities!
