Harper was sitting relaxed in an armchair by a crackling fire that banished the spring chill of evening from the rear lounge, in which a Bach concerto played over a superb stereo system. Nikki much preferred the somewhat shabby comfort of this smaller room to the elegant formality of the huge front reception area, and she hovered in the doorway for a moment of unnoticed observation.
He had that rare undefinable quality of being able to combine sternness with sensitive humanity, a tough male with an impressive presence that nevertheless could meld with his environment, not overshadow it. He had shed the Shetland sweater in the heat of the room and was now clad in simple shirt and jeans, the hard lines of his face softened into a tranquility he had not exhibited in London. It was quite obvious just how much he loved his home.
One of the cats was in his lap, a striped orange, purring blanket of bliss. He raised one hand to stroke it absentmindedly, the long, graceful line of his fingers outlined against the fire, and a shiver rippled down her spine as if she, too, had been stroked. How much easier it was to warm to this quieter side of his personality and abandon all the defences his ruthless side erected.
He turned his head and saw her, blue eyes somehow uncertain, her wet black hair standing up in untidy peaks, and all the emotion inside her gravitated towards him in a rush at the welcome in his smile. He lifted the cat off his lap to dump it without ceremony on the floor, and it hissed in fitful irritation before slinking off to wash out its disgust in a corner.
“There you are,” said Harper. “Would you like me to pull over another armchair?”
She shook her head and walked over towards the fire, bare feet noiseless on the carpet. The warmth licked over her skin, melting away the chill that had begun to set in after her hot shower. “I like sitting on the floor.”
“Come over here, in front of me,” he murmured, dark eyes reflecting the glow from the fire, gold swimming over liquid depths of cinnamon and coffee. “Did you bring down a hairbrush? No? Never mind, I’ll use my fingers. Your hair will dry in no time.”
That carried such an intense promise of sensual pleasure that her legs were already buckling by the time she had arrived in the indicated spot, with the result that her body collapsed into an untidy heap at his feet so ridiculously like a supplicant before a king that her face broke into self-derisive laughter. She was only thankful that her head was downbent so that she wouldn’t have to explain the reason she was wearing such an idiotic expression.
Out of the frying-pan…She asked prosaically, “Is Charles still in his room?”
“Yes, he’s down for the night—a mixed blessing, as you’ll no doubt find out for yourself, for we’ll pay the price of having a peaceful evening by being awakened at an ungodly hour.” He had given her fair warning, and she had not rejected him, but still the light touch of his fingers threading throughout the short, wet strands of her hair to lift it sent a shock wave of sensation rippling through her. Her lips parted in a silent gasp that nevertheless betrayed her, for her body shuddered underneath his hand.
He said nothing, but continued to lift and separate the gleaming black locks in slow, gentle strokes until she vibrated with pleasure. Tension she hadn’t even realised she’d had melted from her muscles until she felt boneless with delight, her head too heavy to hold upright. Her eyelids fell half closed; she didn’t even notice how her head drooped to one side until the soft curve of her cheek connected with the denim-covered side of his knee. She jerked a little in surprise, but in instant sensitive reaction Harper’s hand cupped the side of her head to forestall her instinctive effort to straighten.
Ah. She sighed. The moment was only fleeting, a murmurous flash of decision in which letting her body relax on to his legs was much the preferable option to forcing herself upright into rigid withdrawal, and down crept her cheek again to rest properly this time on his leg, and stay. Those hypnotic, magical fingers began to play through her hair once more.
“How do you like it here?” he asked.
“I love it,” she replied, in spontaneous honesty. “You have a beautiful home.”
Her hair was dry. She could feel it; she was toasty warm all over. But still he stroked, and she couldn’t have moved away from him for the world.
“So are you glad you came?”
“Mm. Yes, I am. I didn’t realise it before, but I think I needed to get out of London for a while. This is all very refreshing.”
She could hear the smile in his voice as he asked her, “And what about all your doubts?”
“Harper,” she said drily, stirring underneath his hand, “I never did see you as a villain, otherwise I would have refused point blank to come, work or no work. What I was most concerned about was whether or not we could conduct our relationship with an honest integrity. I’m not into mind games.”
“No, you’re not, are you?” he replied after a thoughtful moment. “You say what you think, regardless of how difficult it is for you, or how it might prompt an adverse reaction. I admire that kind of courage. So you have no regrets?”
She smiled. “I have many regrets, but coming here isn’t one of them. Do you want to talk about work tomorrow, or would you rather do it tonight while Charles is in bed?”
“Have a heart,” he said with lazy amusement. “It’s my weekend, too. Let’s just relax for the precious little time we can. Then, before I leave for London, I’ll make sure that all the material you need to study is ready and waiting in the library on Monday morning. It’ll wait until then, and I can call through the week to see how you’re getting on, all right?”
She looked through her lashes at the dancing fire, blurred light and flickering shadow, and the long, stable length of Harper’s leg stretched out beside her. “All right. I just remembered,” she said and yawned. “Would you mind if I let Peter know your phone number, so that he can contact me if he needs to?”
“I don’t mind, as long as he’s discreet.” The deep voice was very soft, followed by his forefinger tracing the delicate curve of her ear. It tickled so much that she twitched and reached up to clap a hand over her ear, to which he chuckled and squeezed her fingers in wordless apology.
“Peter can be very discreet, especially when there’s profit involved,” she told him ironically, and he laughed.
“But of course I won’t tell him, if you don’t want me to.”
“That would be churlish of me. The poor man would be frantic if he didn’t know where to contact you. I’m content to trust your judgment. If you say he’s discreet, then I’ll believe he is unless he proves otherwise, which wouldn’t be difficult. Not very many people have my Oxford home number.”
He had resumed those slow, gentle finger strokes through her hair, watching the dark, gleaming head as it rested on his knee. Nikki’s small, bandaged hand slid away from her ear, revealing the long, vulnerable beauty of her curved neckline. Her skin was ivory-white and blue-shadowed, and he could just see the tiny beat of her pulse fluttering beneath the slim feminine jaw, as delicate as the beat of a butterfly wing.
“You’re very protective of your home,” she murmured, eyelids drooping.
“I have to be. I shelter some precious things here, and I am, as you so pungently pointed out yesterday, too rich, and too well-known, and sometimes attract some very unwelcome attention.” And despite the fortune in artwork and furnishings that decorated his house the very quality of his voice was such that Nikki knew he did not refer to material objects.
“I’m a protector, not a destroyer.” That was what he had said earlier in the car, and she began to have a sense of how completely he had meant it. He would watch over the people that meant a lot to him, compulsively, quietly, with a sharp eye to every detail even down to knowing the name of everybody who possessed his personal phone number.
That sort of unceasing diligence could have prompted in Nikki a sense of claustrophobia, but somehow it didn’t. She knew from first-hand experience how fatal it could be to assume that tragedy only happened to someone else; would her father be alive today had he taken more precautions instead of believing in his own myth of invincibility? The golden era of her youth had been an illusion, she realised, where everyone had been slightly drunk on the power drug.
Here and now was a different story. From earlier conversations, and from what she had just gleaned from him right then, she could see that Harper knew the uses and abuses of power so well that he kept the two halves of his life completely separate so that the private side was not influenced or damaged in any way by the public. It was no wonder she had begun to feel safe, deeply, instinctively safe in a way that she hadn’t since before her father died, and the adult inside her recognised it as a far more stable quality than that of her youth.
“Has Charles ever seen your house in Mayfair?” she asked in sudden apparent irrelevance.
Rueful respect threaded through Harper’s voice as he replied, “You never fail to see every nuance, do you? No, he’s never been to my house in Mayfair. Neither have Anne, or Gavin, or my mother or a whole circle of my friends. Gordon has; you have. Before she died, my sister used to come to London for the odd visit. Precious few see both halves of my life, let alone understand them.”
At last Nikki let her eyelids close, for they were simply too heavy. Surreptitiously she rubbed her cheek against the hard knee pillowing her head and murmured, “Don’t you find it a strain?”
“I find it a necessity,” he responded briefly, and she made a drowsy murmur of sympathy.
Drowsy? Nikki’s eyes fluttered open in surprise. Oh, surely not drowsy; she’d never sleep the first evening in a strange place in the company of a man who charged her up. Relaxed, that was what she was. It lapped at the edges of her consciousness, soothing a body already warm and content. Instead of fighting the relaxation, she let go.
“How amazing,” she murmured, as the fire and the shadows came together and melded. Everything was suddenly very clear to her.
He waited, but when she did not continue, he asked, stroking the hair from her brow, “What’s amazing?”
Nikki didn’t answer. She was sound asleep.
Harper sat for some time bathed in firelight as he watched the dark head on his knee. Then he stirred, and with patient gentleness bent to ease his arms underneath her slumbering, lax body and lift her on to his lap. Her only protest was a deep sound, halfway between a sigh and a light snore, as he slid his hand around the back of her skull to guide her head on to the broad support of his shoulder.
She looked like a child as he held her, the clear, translucent skin across her cheekbones flushed with warmth and sleep. She looked all woman, from the lush curves of her relaxed, parted lips to the softness of her body as she snuggled instinctively against him into a more comfortable position.
He thought no one was watching him, but he was wrong. After checking one last time on Charles, the housekeeper Anne made her way through the downstairs hall. She paused on the threshold of the rear lounge, having intended to ask if Harper wanted anything else before she retired for the night, but the question went unuttered as Anne saw him press a tender kiss to Nikki’s forehead. She saw, too, the look on his face as he cradled the young girl.
Nikki opened her eyes and stared at the roses on the ceiling. That was just too odd. She blinked; the roses remained, and after a few more moments of confusion she finally attached them to the canopy of the four-poster bed, not the ceiling. The ceiling was a plain sober white, she was in the four-poster bed, and the sun was high in the sky by the look of things outside her balcony door.
Heavens to Betsy, she’d overslept! Nikki thought about smiling from sheer refreshment, but she frowned instead. She didn’t remember how she had got to bed. All she remembered was how surprised she felt at the realisation that she was falling asleep, as she stared at the flames and Harper stroked her hair—downstairs.
He must have brought her up and tucked her into bed. She checked her body underneath the covers, her face flooding with intense colour. How sweet of him, how like the night in London, how—embarrassing. He had removed the trousers of her tracksuit so that she wore only her sweatshirt and knickers. What had run through his mind as he had eased the soft grey material over her slim legs with those clever, sensitive fingers?
“You have lovely legs.” A stab of sheer physical longing pierced through her; she didn’t know how to assuage it, but she knew that Harper did.
She remembered the gentleness of his hands, and the warmth from the fire, and how they had talked, and she remembered too how safe she had felt with him, and how the very quality of that safety had filtered through her mind and body.
Nikki stretched, feeling her body slide under the weight of the blankets. How wonderful she felt, how exotic and yet familiar. A stealthy noise came from her bedroom door, and Nikki turned her head to watch lazily as her doorknob twisted around. The door was pushed open with a great deal of stealth, and Charles’s dark, curious head poked around the corner of it. When he saw Nikki’s wide-awake, quizzical blue eyes on him, he made a strangled sound and ducked back out so that she laughed out loud and called for him to come in.
The boy sidled in, clad in thoroughly disreputable jeans and oversized shirt. He begged her, “Harper warned me not to disturb you, but I thought I’d check to see if you were already awake—you won’t tell, will you?”
“Of course not,” replied Nikki as she propped herself up on her pillows. “Anyway, you haven’t disturbed me, I was already awake just as you thought I might be. What time is it?”
“Almost noon,” he told her, with a hint of reproof as he threw himself on to the bottom of her bed. “You’ve slept through the morning. My grandmother’s here. She likes to be called Helena, that’s why I call her Granny.”
Nikki’s laugh bubbled out again. “Do you? And what does she do?”
He grinned. “She holds her mouth tight and looks down her nose at me.”
“Well,” Nikki said with mock severity, “I can see I’ll have to watch myself around you! Why don’t you go downstairs now, so that I can get dressed? I’ll be down soon.”
He grumbled but complied, throwing over one thin shoulder carelessly, “I’ll tell Anne you’re up. Want any breakfast?”
Not wanting to be any trouble, Nikki said, “No, thanks, but I’d love some tea. I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”
She was skipping down the stairs in ten, dressed in a plain cream blouse, an embroidered waistcoat and tan trousers. After her deep, dreamless sleep she looked lively, buoyant, her blue eyes sparkling with vitality.
She decided to go to the kitchen in search of her cup of tea, and ran into Harper as she rounded the corner. Both his hands shot out to catch and steady her as she rocked on her feet. She looked from the broad expanse of chest in front of her eyes straight up to his face, exclaiming with a laugh, “We seem to make a habit of colliding into one another—”
Her voice died away as their eyes met, and sizzled. It was like tapping into an insulated electrical current; everything in the world stayed completely normal while she heated up and fried under the intensity of his midnight-dark gaze. The serenity of their evening in front of the fire was gone, blown up in the silent explosion. Could this have been what he felt when he put her to bed, easing her clothing away from soft, slim thighs, slipping her between the private sheets? Her lips parted, eyes stunned as they clung to him, dilating into reflecting brilliant black.
Oh, how wrong could she be? Oh, how could she have imagined such a magnitude of sexual interplay tossing in the turbulent chocolate ocean of his eyes? One blink and Harper was nothing more than friendly, his hand lingering no more than necessary to make sure she had her balance, a light smile creasing his lean, handsome face for her tempestuous entrance.
She felt bereft and grieving for what had only been a betrayal of her own wishful thinking, and yet had seemed so real for a moment when she could almost have believed that he would greet her with passionate gladness. Instead he reached out with a brotherly hand to rumple her hair and say, much as he would to Charles, “Hello there, you must have slept well. I’ll introduce you to my mother after you’ve had your breakfast. Anne’s just cooking you up something now.”
She averted her face sharply, nostrils flared with an attempt to control a stupid, stupid urge to lash out and hit him. “I’d better go on back, then,” she said tightly.
He ducked his head in an effort to see her downbent face, where all the vitality had drained away, and asked with a sharp frown, “Are you all right?”
She threw her head back and smiled at him brilliantly. “Of course I’m all right; why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know,” he said in a soft, thoughtful voice, and she knew she had to leave fast.
“What a pal you were to tuck me into bed last night,” she told him, reaching up to pat his cheek as she danced around him. Harper’s grey head reared back as sharply as if she had indeed struck him, and something very like anger flared in those hard, fierce eyes, but Nikki had not lingered in the hall to witness it.
At the kitchen table Anne set in front of her a complete English breakfast, and, much to her surprise, Nikki ate it. But the flavour seemed absent from both the food and the day, burned away in the heat of a moment. She would not brood; she instead concentrated on all five animals begging at her feet, on Anne, on Charles as distractions. Later, when she was introduced to the slim, elegant, white-haired Helena Beaumont, Nikki concentrated on her.
The older woman was very much reserved but impeccably polite, and fragile in a way that was totally unlike the steel quality of strength inherent in Harper and growing in Charles. Nikki could just imagine the frail English rose beauty Helena Beaumont must have been in her youth. As the afternoon progressed the older woman seemed to unbend considerably, almost in direct contrast to the increasing tension Nikki sensed building underneath Harper’s smooth, sociable façade.
But she wouldn’t focus on him. Every time their eyes came close to meeting, Nikki’s slid away from the contact, afraid that he would intuit the severe sense of deprivation she felt in his company. Everything about her response to him that Sunday afternoon was quicksilver, half averted. She was being, as he was, so friendly, so polite, so inaccessible.
When at last Helena had bidden them all goodbye that evening after supper, exclaiming that she had stayed much later than she had intended, Nikki slipped away from Harper while Charles still provided some distraction.
She fled up the stairs and into her room to collapse on her bed. What was so wrong with her that she couldn’t even behave naturally around him? So what if her imagination ran riot whenever he so much as touched her? So what if he treated her with a simple friendliness—why should that scour such an abrasive path through her? She had to get herself under some kind of control. She had to get some fresh air. Nikki thrust off her bed, and went to fumble for the catch on her balcony door.
A cool breeze puffed like a sigh on to her overheated skin as she stepped out into the night. The Oxford sky was different from London’s. There wasn’t as much light pollution, and even the air smelled cleaner. She went to the railing and leaned against it, breathing in deeply the scent of flowers and newly cut grass, and rich, fresh-tilled earth while her galloping heart began to slow. Light from the bedroom behind her fell half across her body and on to the ground below, cutting a swath through the dark evening.
She didn’t know if she could sort through the tangled mess of confusion inside her, but she did know one thing. If she didn’t get a strong hold on herself, and soon, Harper was going to remark on it, and then what would she tell him? She didn’t want to tell him the truth, and he’d know if she didn’t. With any luck, she thought, he wouldn’t comment on the strangeness of their interaction today.
As it happened, however, Nikki was fresh out of luck.