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Now she had been at home for almost forty-eight hours, although she had been so heavily sedated at first that she would have no memory of her return. Last night he had slept with her in his arms, soothing her nightmares, comforting and cherishing her, and he would continue to do so for the rest of his life if that was what she wanted.
‘You should have let me go with Sheila,’ she told him shakily. ‘Now the whole town will know we’re supposed to engaged, and when they learn that we aren’t—’
‘Need they?’
His question stunned her. She tensed, and missed the warmth of his hands on her back as he removed them to frame her face so that she couldn’t avoid his searching study of her features.
‘Yes…unless you intend to carry this farce as far as marriage,’ she said fiercely.
‘Willingly. But to me it isn’t a farce, only the realisation of a need that was born in me the first time we met.’
She stared at him in disbelief. ‘When Vanessa introduced us? You can’t mean that.’
‘I don’t. Our first meeting was in the car park, when you stole my parking spot. I saw you, watched you, knew that I should have been furious with you, and yet all I wanted to do was to get out of my car, take you in my arms and tell you that I’d fallen in love with you.’
Charlotte looked at him, searching his face for some sign that he was making it all up, but there was none.
‘I’ve done everything the wrong way round. I wanted to do this slowly, properly—to win your confidence and then your love.’
‘And that’s why you plied me with champagne and made love to me?’ she asked shakily. A tender hope was growing quickly inside her.
‘That wasn’t my intention. Oh, I wanted to make love to you all right. But I wasn’t going to—at least, only a little, but then you looked at me and asked me if I wanted to, and all I’d been able to think about all day was the sight of you in that damned flimsy cotton thing, and—Oh, God, Charlotte, how you could ever for one moment have imagined that you lacked sex appeal, I have no idea. You were the sexiest sight I have ever seen, all the more so because you yourself were so deliciously unaware of the effect you were having on me. Every time I saw you, I had to fight to keep my hands off you.’
‘But no man has ever—’
‘Because you wouldn’t let them see what you were really like. Because you froze them off and they, poor fools, couldn’t see the real woman you were concealing behind those barriers you used so effectively.’
‘Not all of them,’ Charlotte told him in a low voice, and he knew she wasn’t referring to him.
‘He was sick,’ he told her rawly. ‘You must never think that it was something you said or did. It was because of his wife.’
‘I know,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘Oh, God, I was so frightened.’ Suddenly it all came pouring out, a catharsis of what she had experienced, her need to share it with him so intense that nothing could dam up the words. ‘And do you know what I thought when I felt it was unavoidable that he would rape and probably murder me?’
Oliver shook his head, aching to hold her as tightly as he could, but terrified of hurting her…or frightening her.
‘I was glad that there’d been you,’ she told him simply. ‘So very glad and grateful, because you’d shown me such pleasure, such…’
‘Such love,’ he said for her. His throat felt raw with emotion, and when he wrapped her in his arms he knew she would feel his tears against her skin. ‘Oh, God, Charlotte. I’ve been cursing myself to hell and back for that, loathing myself for not having the self-control to wait, to talk to you, to tell you how I felt about you first. I did everything wrong. I wanted to be with you when you woke up, but those damned workmen were there. And then you were so sick; you looked so ill. I thought I’d drive into town and get you something from the chemist. It never occurred to me that you’d just go straight to work.’
‘I had to. I thought you were going to say the usual thing about its being something we should both forget, that we should behave like adults.’
‘Is that the usual thing?’
She could hear the amusement in his voice and said defensively, ‘Well, you know what I mean. I didn’t dare hope that you might love me. You see, all my life my father let me know how unsatisfactory he found me as a daughter…as a woman—’
‘Yes, I know,’ Oliver interrupted her gently. ‘Sheila told me. Parents can do such appalling damage to their children, but you are a woman, Charlotte—the only woman, as far as I’m concerned. A very, very desirable and desired woman, whom I love very much. If you can love me too, that’s all I ask. This experience you’ve had…traumatic for any woman—’
