DISTURBINGLY Robert was dressed not as the image projected both by the financial Press and the sleek bulk of his expensive car suggested—in the immaculate formality of a business suit and shirt—but in jeans and a checked shirt worn under a soft leather blouson jacket, the clothes soft and well-worn, lacking the image-conscious stiffness of clothes conspicuously brand new and bought ‘for the country’.
No, these were clothes he was used to wearing, familiar and chosen for comfort. And yet for all the casualness of his clothes there was about him a very strong aura of power and control, emphasised by the impatient, semi-hostile way he was approaching her car, his forehead creased in a frown as he called out curtly to her once he was within earshot.
‘I’m sorry, but you must have missed your way. This is a private lane—’
He stopped speaking abruptly, his frown deep-ening as he stared into the car and then demanded incredulously, ‘Holly?’
She forced herself to remember that she was thirty and not eighteen. Her face felt as stiff as wood but somehow she managed to get her lips to creak into a facsimile of a polite and distant smile.
‘Hello, Robert—’ she began, but before she could continue he interrupted her, demanding,
‘Were you looking for me?’
Looking for him? Now she was thirty, the spell of his unexpected appearance broken as she stared at him with cool irritation, not unmixed with anger at his arrogance. Did he think she was still a silly little girl of eighteen, needlessly running after a man who no longer wanted her?
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she told him. ‘Actually I didn’t realise you were here. I had heard that you’d bought the Hall, of course, but I’m afraid I was just using your lane to take a short cut back to the main road. Something I’ll have to get used to not doing...’
It gave her a sharp sense of pleasure to be able to deny his assumption that she had been looking for him and even more to know that it was the truth.
‘The Hall’s been empty for so long—’ she started to add, but he cut across her comment, telling her,
‘Well, I intend to have gates placed at either end of the lane, which should deter future trespassers, although in your case you could always have planned your journey so that you didn’t need to take a short cut. As it is, one of us is going to have to reverse.’
Meaning that she was going to have to reverse, Holly suspected as she deliberately refused to make any response to his comment about the gates. The Hall had been empty for so long that she wasn’t the only person using the lane as a short cut, and, while she could understand that any new owner would want to maintain his privacy, she felt that Robert’s comment to her had been double-edged, a means of warning her that the lane wasn’t the only thing that was out of bounds as far as she was concerned.
Was he really so arrogant as to imagine that she still cherished the idealistic and stupid daydreams she had held at eighteen? Or was she simply being over-sensitive, over-reacting because of what Patsy had said earlier and because of the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly, of realising that, no matter how many times she had seen his photograph in the papers, it had not prepared her for the reality of him, for the sheer maleness of him, and for all the ways in which her stupefied senses were being bombarded by their awareness of him?
All right, so he was still one hell of a sensually attractive man, she fumed inwardly, and, all right, so a part of her was dismayingly vulnerable to that sensuality, but it was surely a vulnerability which was being heightened by shock—a vulnerability she would soon have under control?
After all, nothing was as great a deterrent to the headiness of physical excitement and awareness as the dulling mundaneness of proximity.
‘I’d better be the one to reverse,’ she heard Robert saying to her. ‘After all, we’re closer to the house than we are to the main road.’
She focused on him, automatically starting to thank him, but he was already turning away from her.
He reversed the large Mercedes with a smooth dexterity which she envied.
For a birthday present last year, Paul had booked her on to an advanced driving course, and, while she felt she had learned a good deal from it, she had finished it feeling inwardly that she lacked many of the assets needed to make a truly good advanced driver. Her worst fault, she knew, was that she was inclined to daydream while at the wheel...as she had been doing just now.
The lane ran outside the main wall of the Hall and gates from the stable yard opened on to it. For the last few years they had remained closed, rotting slowly away, as the Hall remained empty, but today they stood open, and as Robert reversed through them into the stable yard she found herself slowing down so that she could peer curiously towards the house.
It was a long time since she had last been inside it—an unauthorised visit during a village fête held in its grounds when she had been much younger. Then she had been awed and amazed by the size of the rooms, wondering what on earth one very old lady would want with so many. She must have been eight or nine at the time. Paul, of course, had been the instigator of that piece of naughtiness. Robert had gone with them as well and it had been Robert who had rescued her, when she discovered that her legs were too short to make it over the open window-sill through which they had made their illegal entry into the house.
It had been from the secure haven of his arms that she had faced the irritation of Mrs Powers’ housekeeper, who had demanded to know just what they were up to, and it had been Robert who had apologised and smoothed over her anger. She ought to have realised then that a male with such a powerful ability to refocus female emotions would never be content to marry early and settle for a placid domestic life.
After that incident she had worshipped Robert, but since Paul had bluntly told her that neither he nor Robert wanted her interfering in their games she had docilely restrained herself to worshipping him in silence and solitude.
Suddenly realising the construction which Robert might put on the fact that she was virtually sitting still with her car engine idling, she was just about to drive away when he got out of his own car and came towards her.
An absurd flood of self-consciousness made her duck her head, conscious of the burning heat searing her pale skin. She was blushing—something she had believed she had stopped doing a decade ago. She prayed that the soft swing of her hair would conceal her heightened colour from Robert, quickly starting to change gear as she prepared to drive off, but he had now reached her car and had placed a restraining hand on her own window.
‘I had hoped to see Paul, but I understand he’s away on business...’
‘Yes,’ she agreed tersely.
‘Never mind, I’ll have plenty of time to catch up with him once he gets back. When will he be back, by the way?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’
‘Mm...well, I’m renting a small cottage locally while I oversee the renovation of this place, so I’m going to be around for the foreseeable future.’
He was leaning on the window as he spoke to her. She could smell the leather of his jacket, the soap tang of his skin. His hands were tanned, the nails clean and trimmed, but not manicured. There was a graze across the back of his hand and a small cut on one finger. She wondered how they had got there...perhaps in defending one of the lovely women he always seemed to be photographed with from the attentions of the paparazzi? She switched her glance from his hand to her own. Hers too bore the odd scratch. She had been attacked by an over-vigorous climbing rose at the weekend, angrily defending its right to spread itself just as far and fast as it chose. The rose had definitely been the victor of that battle, but she had warned it of stiff pruning to come in the autumn if it insisted on its greedy absorption of territory that was not its to appropriate...
In a garden, order had to be imposed if havoc was not to result.
‘I’ll let Paul know that you’re back,’ she told Robert, still unable to look at him properly.
‘He’ll be married by now, I expect?’
‘No, Paul is the proverbial rolling stone who refuses to gather moss.’ In fact her brother had a more off than on and very volatile relationship with a woman friend who was divorced with two small children and who had told him plainly and bluntly that, while she enjoyed going to bed with him, she had no intentions of prejudicing her children’s security by introducing into their lives a man who was only going to play at being there for them.
‘And you...I hear that you’re still single as well.’
His comment jarred, reminding her of so many things she did not wish to remember.
‘These days women don’t need to marry to lead fulfilled lives, and at thirty—’
‘You’re still young enough not to have to worry too much about the ticking away of your biological clock. I know,’ he agreed, suavely interrupting her. He had shifted his position somehow so that she was increasingly aware of him and his effect upon her senses, and now she turned towards him too quickly, her eyes widening as she realised just how close to her he was, as he leaned down towards her, his eyes only inches from hers as she inadvertently looked straight at him.
‘Strange how things worked out...I’d always imagined you’d marry young, have children—’
‘I don’t see why you should be so surprised,’ she interrupted him shakily. ‘After all, you were the one who told me that I’d be a fool to waste my opportunities, to throw away my chances of success by tying myself down with a husband and children.’
He had said that to her, but they both knew that what he had meant was that he would be a fool if he threw away his chances and tied himself down by marrying her. But he had deliberately chosen to make it sound as though he were thinking of her when in reality his motives had been entirely rooted in his own needs and wants. If he had thought about her at all, he would have made sure that she never got the chance to fall in love with him in the first place and he would certainly never have allowed her to believe that that love was returned, but then, as she had discovered over the years, men were adept at making women believe they were acting in their best interest and for the most altruistic of reasons when in fact they were doing almost exactly the opposite.
‘You’ve changed, Holly.’
She smiled mirthlessly at him, and said lightly, ‘I should think I have, although I prefer to think of it as growth rather than change. I must go, Robert. I’ve got a board meeting this afternoon and I’m already late.’
She realised as she said it that it sounded more like the defiant boasting of a frightened child than the cool, reasoned comment of a woman too protected and safe from the kind of vulnerability she had once known to be remotely affected by a chance meeting with the man who had once been the cause of her greatest unhappiness.
The look Robert gave her seemed to reinforce her own thoughts.
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll wait,’ he said softly, and it wasn’t a kind comment. ‘Odd how different our perceptions are from reality. You’re every inch the sleek, sophisticated, successful businesswoman now. I wonder, has she completely obliterated the girl I once knew?’
His comment stunned her. She had no idea what had motivated it or why he should be so deliberately cruel as to mention that girl. He must know how much anguish he had caused her...how much pain... how much self-revulsion when eventually she had come through the madness of begging and entreating him not to leave her, of pleading tearfully with him to stay...to love her instead of leaving her.
He had changed too...because the Robert she had known would never have made a comment like that. The Robert she had known—the Robert she had thought she had known, she reminded herself as she looked away from him, fiercely stabbing the car into gear, and gritting her teeth. But that Robert had never really existed.
As she started to move away, Robert stepped back from the car, telling her drily, ‘Next time, remember, set out a bit earlier.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she told him through her gritted teeth. ‘Now that I know you’ve bought this place, wild horses wouldn’t drag me within a mile of it.’
Ten minutes later, when she finally pulled out on to the main road, she was still shaking, still cursing herself for her folly in giving in to her need to make that childish verbal defiance. Why on earth hadn’t she simply remained cool and uncaring, shrugging aside his comment and just driving off without giving in to the need to react to it?
Well, at least she had made her position plain. As far as she was concerned, his presence in the village wasn’t welcome, and she wished he had not chosen to come back. She was glad that it was extremely unlikely that she would have to have any kind of contact with him, although, womanlike, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth a single man could possibly want with such a huge barn of a house.
She was of course late for her board meeting, apologising to the other members when she hurried in.
As they discussed the new packaging, she remembered Patsy’s hint about Gerald not even being on the board. For some time she had been contemplating inviting him to join them as a non-executive director. He was a well-balanced, cautious man who would help to offset Paul’s ebullience, and he was their accountant.
‘I hear Robert Graham has just moved into the area,’ Lawrence Starling commented to her after the board meeting.
Lawrence was their newly appointed sales manager. Paul had head-hunted him from one of the multi-nationals. Single and two years older than her, he was beginning to develop a semi-proprietorial attitude towards her that Holly was trying to discourage.
‘Yes, I believe so,’ she agreed dismissively.
‘Strange sort of thing for him to do—I mean to move out here...’
‘He grew up here,’ Holly informed him.
‘Oh, I see. Look, Holly, I was wondering: there are one or two aspects of the new packaging I wanted to bring up at the board meeting, but with your being late there really wasn’t time. I know Bob Holmes wanted to get off to play golf, and I didn’t want to delay him. Could we discuss them over dinner tonight?’
‘No, I’m sorry, I already have an engagement,’ Holly told him truthfully. She hadn’t missed the none-too-subtle way Lawrence had let her know that Bob was playing golf, and, while she was forced to agree with Paul that Lawrence’s aggressive marketing tactics were beginning to pay off, she found his incessant need to put others down and his uncurbed ambitious desire both distasteful and wearying. And besides, in a sense what she had said was true, even if her engagement was merely with her garden and her desire to make sure that the new forget-me-not plants were tucked up in their beds just as soon as possible.
‘Tomorrow, then?’ Lawrence pressed her.
Firmly Holly shook her head, telling him, ‘I think you’d better wait and discuss it with Paul when he gets back. You know that he has overall charge of marketing.’
The sullen look Lawrence gave her irritated her, but she didn’t let it show. Why was it that men had this annoying propensity to change from ‘I know best’ father figures to sulky little boys whenever the former bullying manner did not work? Why could so few men accept a woman as their equal and rejoice in her success and her skills? Why must they always feel so threatened and be so antagonistic? Perhaps it was time that someone discovered a way of re-programming the entire male species.
If they did, one thing was for sure; it would be a woman who would make the discovery and implement it...no man would ever admit that his psyche needed any kind of change.
Reminding herself that she was perhaps being a little unfair and that there were many, many men who were comfortable with and supportive of their female partners’ success in life, she headed for her office.
* * *
IT WAS SIX o’clock before she was able to lift her head from her paperwork and think about preparing to go home.
An hour later, as she drove past the entrance to the lane past the Hall, she noticed that two men were working there, putting in the supports for a rough-hewn farm-style gate.
Well, Robert certainly hadn’t wasted much time there, she reflected as she put her foot down on the accelerator and sped past.
She was half a mile further down the road when she heard the all too unwanted sound of a police car siren. When she looked in the mirror and saw the driver flashing his lights at her, she cursed under her breath and pulled in to the side of the road.
She had been speeding, if only marginally, and she of all people ought to have known better. The number of times she had complained to Paul that he drove too fast— And now she was the one to get booked.
The police officer was polite but unrelenting; she wondered what he would have said if she had pleaded in mitigation that it had been the soreness in her heart caused by the memory of an old love-affair that had caused her to put her foot down and break the speed limit. Since he was a man, it was all too probable that he just would not have understood, she told herself as she listened gravely to his caution. Her first driving offence in over ten years of blemishless driving. And it was all Robert’s fault.
She was still glowering and mentally blaming him when she eventually drove off, this time keeping a much stricter eye on her speed.
Rory had gone but the newly turned earth of the flower-beds showed how hard he had been working. The forget-me-nots were small dots of soft grey-green against the darkness of the earth. She lingered in the garden, studying them, telling them not to be overawed by their well-established perennial bedmates, and then paused to console and reassure those same larger plants, coaxingly promising them that the new arrivals were no threat to them, and that the summer extravagance of their pinks, silvers, whites and blues would be all the more spectacular after the sharp colour contrast of the bright spring yellows and blue of the bulbs and forget-me-nots.
It was almost an hour before she had finished her tour of the garden, and although it was still light she could smell the crisp early autumn scent infusing the air.
Yesterday morning she had spotted a heron investigating the fish pond, which meant that this weekend she would have to string wires from the vine eyes in the brick surrounding the pond to stop him from helping himself to her fish.
The irritation and anxiety produced by her run-in with Robert was slowly fading as her senses responded to the peace of her garden.
If, ten years ago, someone had told her that she would become so devoted to such a homely pursuit, that she would find so much solace and pleasure in it, she would have bitterly denied what they were saying. A small smile touched her mouth. It was time she went in. She was going out this evening.
Their local market town’s seventeenth-century assembly rooms had recently been renovated and reopened, providing an elegant setting for a number of events. Tonight’s event was a small charity affair; a well-known cellist who supported the charity would be playing for them, and there was to be a light supper afterwards, provided by the local WI.
As a prominent business figure locally, Holly had been approached to support the charity and in addition to buying tickets she had also given a generous donation. The bowls of pot-pourri scenting the rooms had been provided by her company, their perfume a distillation of natural products and one which she personally thought was evocative of the period in which the assembly rooms had been built.
The evening was to be a formal affair—black tie for the men and gowns for the women, preferably with some sort of Regency look about them to complement the setting. When she had originally bought the tickets, Holly had assumed that Paul would be escorting her, but then this trip to South America had intervened.
Instead she was now being partnered by a relative newcomer to the area.
The building of a new private hospital just outside the market town had resulted in an influx of medical personnel. John Lloyd was the new hospital’s chief administrator. A Scot in his late thirties, divorced with two children, he had made no secret of the fact that he found her very attractive.
However, he was old enough and intelligent enough to accept that while she enjoyed his company Holly did not wish their relationship to progress any further.
For this evening’s occasion she had had made an Empire-style dress in eau-de-Nil silk with silver embroidery around the hem. Over it, she was wearing a dark green velvet cloak lined with the same silk as the dress. The outfit had been an extravagance, but, as Paul had pointed out, the event was being photographed both for the local paper and the county magazine and she would be photographed in her role as head of the company so that it was important that she presented the right appearance.
With the aid of her electric curling-tongs she managed to produce enough feathery ringlets in her fine hair to be caught back in a soft ethereal tangle, vaguely reminiscent of the correct period hairstyle.
When she was dressed and ready, she pulled a face at herself in her mirror. This kind of event was not really her style, although the charity in aid of children in need was one she was more than happy to support.
Personally she would far rather have made an anonymous cash donation than participate in this kind of event, but she quelled these thoughts, telling herself that she was being very unworldly in thinking that the money she and others had spent on outfits for the affair could far more sensibly have been donated direct to the charity. As Paul had pointed out to her when she had said as much to him, there were those who, while they were quite happy to buy expensive tickets for such events, would never have considered donating any such sum without the event to back it up.
John arrived on the dot at half-past seven. Holly didn’t invite him in. Years ago she had learned to be wary of naïvely allowing men to mistake her natural warmth and friendliness for sexual encouragement.
After Robert, the heady and dangerous sexual desire he had aroused within her had died completely, leaving her somehow bereft of any ability to respond to men on a sexual basis. As a form of self-preservation it couldn’t be beaten, and, in the new restrained mood of sexual constancy and celibacy which seemed to have doused the sexually ferocious fires of earlier decades, she had been able to reflect that perhaps after all Robert had done her a favour in destroying her ability to be sexually responsive to other men.
As she smiled at John and locked the door behind her, he murmured appreciatively, ‘Mm...nice perfume.’
Immediately she tensed. She had her back to him, but she could tell from the way she could feel the warmth of his breath against the back of her neck that he was leaning towards her.
‘Do you think so? It’s our new one,’ she told him brightly, firmly stepping to one side and turning round.
‘Officially we shan’t be launching it for a while yet. It has a floral base, but we’ve added some subtle extras to bring it into line with current tastes.’
‘It’s very sexy. And so are you...especially in that dress.’
Hurriedly Holly pulled her cloak more firmly around herself, suddenly uncomfortably conscious of the way the light from the security lights was highlighting the soft pale fullness of her breasts. The dress had a slightly lower neckline than she had expected. She remembered at the time that the dressmaker had pointed out to her that it had been de rigueur at the time the Empire line was made so popular for the neckline to reveal the upper curve of the wearer’s bosom.
The way John’s glance lingered appreciatively on her body made her feel both uncomfortable and irritated. She told herself that she probably ought to feel flattered by his admiration and interest; he was after all a very attractive man but on the one and only occasion when he had taken her in his arms and kissed her she had felt nothing at all, other than a mild sense of curiosity, quickly followed by panic and revulsion when the tenor of his kiss had become too passionate.
And yet with Robert...in Robert’s arms... She trembled suddenly, remembering how he had made her feel, how her whole body had trembled with eagerness and expectancy. How she had so wantonly and willingly moved closer to him, little moans of anguished expectation filling her throat as her body anticipated the pleasure he would give it. She had given herself to him so eagerly, so naïvely, believing he loved her as she did him. Sexually she might have been inexperienced, but there had been no hesitation in her response to him, no holding back, no restraint, no thought in her head of even attempting to control the emotions he aroused inside her. His merest touch had been enough to send her into a seventh heaven of delirious joy; the lightest brush of his fingertips against her skin, the gentlest touch of his mouth on her lips. And how she had ached for the intimacy of being held close to him without the barrier of their clothes; how she had quivered with longing and need to feel the sensual stroke of his hands on her breasts, her belly... He had cautioned her a little sometimes, groaning against her throat that she made it impossible for him to take his time and to lavish on her all the sensual joy he wanted to give her, because her immediate response to him destroyed his self-control.
She could remember so vividly the first time they had made love; before then there had been kisses and then caresses, so intimate and arousing that she had ached and begged for his complete possession, but he had told her that there was too much risk, that while she was unprotected from an unwanted pregnancy they must be content without that ultimate intimacy.
She could remember even now her first nerve-racking visit to the family-planning clinic, her fear that the doctor would turn down her request, but she had been over eighteen—just, and, although he had eyed her thoughtfully and had spoken to her at great length about her relationship with Robert, eventually she had been given the precious prescription.
She had said nothing to Robert of her decision. He had received her tremulous news in a frowning silence which she had only later recognised should have alerted her to the truth, but then eventually there had come the evening when she had cried and begged him not to hold back, and when he had given in to her whispered pleas and the eager yearning of her body.
They had been lovers for just over six months when he had dropped his bombshell and told her that he would shortly be leaving for America.
She supposed he must have mentioned his decision to accept the post-graduate course at Harvard, but if he had she had deliberately pushed it to the back of her mind, telling herself that their love for one another was bound to be far more important to him than any plans he might previously have made for his career. Their love... She smiled cynically to herself as she felt the aching shadow of that old pain clutch familiarly at her heart. The love had been all on her side, only she had been too much of a fool to see it. She couldn’t blame him for taking physical advantage of that love; after all, she had been the one to instigate that intimacy, to urge and encourage him to make love to her. No, it wasn’t his fault that she now found it impossible to experience sexual desire; it was her own, her feelings a direct revulsion against what she felt had been her own lack of self-control, her own inability to face reality, her own stupid self-deception. She was never going to allow herself to fall into that kind of trap again. Never!
‘You’re very quiet,’ John commented as he drove towards their destination. ‘Problems at work?’
‘No, not really. I was just thinking about the launch of the new perfume,’ Holly fibbed.
‘But surely that’s Paul’s responsibility?’
‘Yes, it is—at least the launch of the new range is down to him but it was my idea to produce it; we’ve invested an awful lot of time and money in it...’
‘Well, if it makes other women smell as good as you, then I should say from a man’s point of view that you’ve definitely got a winner on your hands.’
Even as she was smiling and accepting his compliment Holly was conscious of an inner dismay, an inner sense of anxiety in case the situation somehow got out of her control. She liked John and she didn’t want to lose his friendship, but sexually... She gave a tiny shudder, uncomfortably aware that for some reason seeing Robert this afternoon had heightened and underlined her lack of desire for John to such an extent that she couldn’t contemplate him even touching her without experiencing a sharp sense of rejection.
Damn Robert, damn him, she cursed inwardly. Why did he have to come back here? Why?
John parked his car in the market square, empty of stalls and already half full of cars, most of whose occupants were no doubt headed for the same destination.
The assembly rooms were illuminated by discreet floodlights which showed off the newly cleaned stone and the elegance of the Georgian windows and the fanlight above the door.
Holly and John were warmly welcomed by their local MP and her husband. She was on the charity committee and Holly knew her quite well—a woman closer to her mother’s age than her own, who was very well thought of locally and who worked hard for the community.
‘Holly, I love your dress!’ she exclaimed admiringly, adding, ‘I’d like to have a word with you later, if I may. We’re hoping to organise a Christmas fair to raise some more money, and we shall be looking to local businesses for whatever help they can give.’
Smilingly Holly assured her that they would be pleased to help before walking through into the anteroom to leave her cloak.
The recital was to last two hours with a short break halfway through. Holly and John’s seats were close to the front. As they were being directed towards them, a familiar male figure standing talking with another group caught her eye.
She froze immediately, causing John to bump into her and to reach instinctively for her arm as he did so.
Inside Holly could feel herself beginning to tremble. She felt sick and angry at the same time, idiotically close to tears of anger and resentment as she focused on the tall dinner-suit-clad figure of Robert.
He was standing with his back to her, a small dark-haired woman in an expensive designer dress clinging to his side. Holly recognised her immediately as the widow of a local entrepreneur. Although she was in her early forties, she was still a very sensually attractive woman. Too much so, Holly had heard. Apparently she wasn’t very well liked by her own sex.
‘It’s that “helpless little me” act of hers that gets me,’ one of Holly’s friends had admitted through gritted teeth at a party where Angela Standard had appropriated her husband. ‘Especially when I know she’s about as helpless as a praying mantis. Everyone knows that she only married Harry Standard for his money. I mean he was close to fifty when they married and she was barely twenty-five...’
Then Holly had taken her friend’s comments with a pinch of salt, but now she was suddenly so searingly and shockingly jealous that she could easily have crossed the room and torn that pale, clinging hand from Robert’s dark-suited arm.
The intensity of her own emotions made her shake inside with sick awareness of how inappropriate and dangerous her feelings were.
She turned away blindly, cannoning straight into John.
‘Hey...are you OK?’
There was concern and warmth in his voice as he held her. Her eyes blurred with anguished tears, her throat filling with them so that she couldn’t speak, shaking her head as she tried to insist that there was nothing wrong. Blindly she pulled away from him, ignoring the curious and speculative look the girl showing them to their seats was giving her.
She felt hot and cold at the same time, sick with an anger that was directed against herself for her idiotic response to the sight of Robert with someone else.
As she sat down in her seat, she tried to tell herself that it was the unexpected shock of seeing him that was responsible for what she was feeling; that if she had anticipated that he might be here and prepared herself for it accordingly she would never have reacted in the way she had; but the arguments failed to convince her, and throughout the first half of the recital she was barely aware of the glorious sounds filling the room, so deeply engrossed was she in her own painful thoughts.
When at the interval John suggested going to the bar for a drink, she shook her head. The last thing she wanted to do was suffer seeing Robert again. She had no idea how on earth she was going to get through the supper following the recital, and wondered if she could possibly plead the excuse of not feeling well in order to escape early.
The thought of having to come face to face with Robert again made her feel sick with tension. Every time she closed her eyes, trying to get control of herself, she was tormented by vivid flashing images of Robert with Angela clinging possessively to his arm.
‘If you want a drink, don’t let me stop you from having one,’ she told John huskily.
‘No, it’s OK. Look, are you sure you’re feeling all right? If you’d like to leave...’
Holly bit down hard on her bottom lip, her guilt increasing with every second. She was behaving like a child...a fool. So Robert was here escorting another woman. She had known for over ten years that he had never loved her the way she had him—had known that and had, or so she thought, come to accept it, so why was she feeling like this now?
During the decade of his absence she had never allowed herself to think about him, to dwell on what he might or might not be doing, and she had thought that the past and her love for him were safely behind her.
People were beginning to return to their seats. The interval was over and with it her opportunity to slip discreetly away.
Throughout the entire second half of the recital panic clawed damagingly at her stomach. She sat tensely on the edge of her seat, sickly wondering how many of the other guests here tonight would remember the love she had once had for Robert. After all, she had never made any attempt to hide it, and many of them were her contemporaries, people with whom she had grown up, people who had known both her and Robert well during their shared youth.
Her close friends had come to accept the fact that she appeared uninterested in men and marriage, putting it down to the fact that the success of her business occupied her time and emotions so fully that there was simply no room in her life for anything or anyone else.
Some of them, she knew, envied her. They told her so openly, contrasting their lives as wives and mothers with what they perceived to be the freedom and excitement of hers, not appearing to realise the discipline her work demanded, the burdens it placed upon her, the responsibilities she had to carry.
But what about those others who would be here tonight, people who knew her less well and were less inclined to see her through the rose-tinted glasses of friendship? Might not they remember the old Holly, the immature, shy girl who so openly and so disastrously adored her lover, who had been too shocked, too distraught when he left her to make any attempt to conceal what she was feeling?
Her closest friends had tried to console her then, telling her that she would soon forget him, coaxing her to try to put the past behind her, and once her pride had fought its way through the anguish that had almost destroyed her she had allowed them to think that they had been right.
She had taught herself not to flinch when people mentioned Robert’s name; and even Paul, who was perhaps closer to her than anyone else, had no idea how much the destruction of her dreams still had the power to make her ache inside, even though these days she could acknowledge how foolish and impossible those dreams had been, how flimsy the foundations which had supported them.
But now the one thing she had never allowed herself to contemplate occurring had occurred... Robert was back.
But why? When he had left, when he told her about his intention of going to Harvard and from there to climbing the corporate ladder and estab-lishing his own business, he had made it plain to her that he saw his future in the ruling cities of the world—that he saw himself as a man who lived internationally, who called no one place his home, who had neither the need nor the desire for roots.
‘But I love you,’ Holly had wept, and he had looked at her then, a long, disquieting look that had ripped the scales of self-deceit from her eyes and made her confront the truth.
‘You said you loved me,’ had been her whispered response to the silent look he gave. ‘You said you loved me...’
‘Yes, I know,’ he had acknowledged quietly. ‘But you must understand...I have other needs, other plans.’ Such damning, cruel words.
She had cried then, bitter tears of self-betrayal and loss, begging him to retract them, but he had refused.
‘You’re eighteen, Holly, with your whole life in front of you. You’re an intelligent girl. You can’t honestly want to tie yourself down now to married life...to children...to the kind of financial and intellectual poverty we’d both suffer if we married now.’
He had hurt her so much and some part of her had believed that she deserved that hurt for being stupid enough to allow herself to believe that when he said he loved her he meant it. She had been merely a brief sexual diversion, that was all—an idiotic, adoring, virginal child with whom he could amuse himself for the brief length of one short summer while he waited for his real life to begin.
She shuddered inwardly, her body writhing in tormented self-disgust as she remembered the way she had behaved...not just when she had learned that he was leaving her, but long, long before that, when she had given herself to him with abandonment and joy, when she had trembled beneath his touch, crying shocked tears of tormented pleasure at the first intimate possession of his body, when she had cried out beneath its masculine heat and thrust, imploring him, begging him to touch her, hold her, fill her with the hard pulse of his male flesh.
There had been no holding back, no self-protective awareness that she was giving him too much, that she might later regret being so open about her feelings for him, her emotional and physical need of him.
That physical abandonment to her desire for him shamed her now as much as her emotional abandonment had done. Even the thought of it was enough to make her tense her muscles, to make her flesh cry out in silent anguished protest at its own weakness. She had sworn then that never, ever again would she allow herself to repeat that kind of self-betrayal.
‘Holly, are you all right?’
She realised abruptly that the recital had come to an end, that people were moving in their seats, the room filling with the muted sound of their conversations. Chairs scraped back on the wooden floor, the noise painful to her ears. She felt suddenly as though her senses had been scraped raw, as though she was suffering through them in the same way that one suffered through a raw patch of tender skin.
She badly wanted to shake her head and to tell John that she felt too ill to stay for the supper reception, but her pride wouldn’t let her. How would it look if she left now? How many people would put two and two together and make four...would guess that it was because of Robert’s presence here that she had fled?
‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Just a bit of a headache, that’s all.’
She stood up shakily, an outwardly composed blonde woman who was completely unaware of the attention she was attracting or the reason for it.
Her companion was, though, and he wished for the umpteenth time that he could find a way of breaking down her barriers, of making her respond to him as a man and not just as a friend. She always wore an outer cloak of cool sophistication and calm that was almost immediately belied by the sombreness of her expression, the sadness that always seemed to lurk in her eyes. In so many ways she fascinated and drew him, and not just because of the way she looked. She was always so selfcontained, so immaculate, so perfectly poised and turned out that his need to see her with her mouth swollen after love, her hair tangled by his fingers, her eyes languorous and heavy, her breathing quickened, sharp and desirous, was sometimes so great that he ached to reach out and take hold of her. But he knew how unwelcome his sexual attentions would be, how little she wanted him in that kind of way.
There were women who lacked a definite sex-drive and men as well, but for all her coolness, her remoteness he didn’t think that Holly was one of them; she reminded him somehow of a child who was burned and who was now afraid of fire.
A group of people were approaching them. John touched Holly’s arm to draw her attention to them.
Holly turned her head and immediately tensed. Their local MP was coming towards them, smiling warmly at them, and behind her, along with two or three other people, was Robert...and of course Angela.
‘Holly. There you are. You must remember Robert? Yes, of course you do. He and Paul were good friends, weren’t they? You’ll have heard of course that he’s bought the Hall?
‘I’m trying to persuade him to let us use the minstrel’s gallery there for a performance by the local madrigal society. It would be such a wonderful setting.’
‘Not right now, it wouldn’t,’ Holly heard Robert saying drily. ‘The place is full of woodworm and just about to be sprayed against its spread.’
Everyone was laughing. Angela clung possessively to Robert’s arm. Didn’t she realise how ridiculous she looked—a woman of her age? Even if she was a very, very attractive and feminine forty-odd. Stop it, Holly warned herself. Stop it at once.
She forced her lips to frame a smile, the kind of smile she had so painstakingly learned to put on the public face those occasions when she had to appear as one of the new successful women of the nineties. It was a calm, cool smile, the kind of smile that said yes, she knew she was successful, and that yes, she knew she was attractive, and that she had the self-confidence in herself to carry off both these assets without the need to flaunt them like banners of war in the face of those who were less fortunate.
She could see Angela glancing dismissively at her, her own smile a definite cat-that-got-the-cream smile, a sensual, satisfied smile that said quite positively, ‘Yes, I’m all woman and he’s all man—and mine.’
Holly deliberately avoided looking directly at Robert, saying as calmly as she could, ‘Hello, Robert.’
‘Holly...’
No mention of their meeting earlier in the day, no comments about her success...her metamorphosis from shy teenager into successful woman of the world; but then what had she expected—that he would take one look at her and immediately announce that he had always regretted leaving her, that not a single day had passed without him wanting her?
As she touched John lightly on the arm, and excused them both to their hostess, fibbing that she was starving and longing to get to the buffet, she derided herself inwardly for her stupidity.
It was over, finished, and had been for over a decade. There was no point, no purpose in her continuing to torment herself like this...none whatsoever. So why did she?