CHAPTER SIX

‘WE COULD both do with a bath,’ Guy announced, grimacing in self-disgust once they were safely inside the kitchen.

He hadn’t said a word during the cold, wet walk back to the cottage. How had he known where to find her? Campion wondered as she stood and shivered. How had he known she even needed help?

‘You go first,’ she offered awkwardly.

‘I can manage down here.’

Again that harsh tone. Her muscles tensed as she recognised that he was avoiding looking directly at her. Why? Was it because of their discussion earlier, or because of the way she had reached out towards him? Had it suddenly struck him that she might take his words seriously, that she might think he was actually attracted to her? Did he really think she was so stupid?

‘Upstairs, Campion. Unless, of course, you get a thrill out of watching men strip off.’

Her skin burned. He couldn’t have thought of a more cruel way to taunt her.

All the way back she had avoided looking at his body, but now she couldn’t help it. She could feel the heat burning up under her skin as he turned his back on her and deliberately started to remove his sweater and shirt. Her mouth went dry. She ached to be able to reach out and touch him, to see if his skin felt as warm and male as it looked. And then she realised that Guy was turning round.

With a small, choked cry, she fled upstairs.

She had a bath, washed her hair, dried it as best she could with a towel, grimacing at the tangle of curls that hung on to her shoulders. Pulling on her bathrobe, she gathered up her wet clothes and headed back to her bedroom.

As she walked in, she saw that Guy was standing with his back to her, staring out of the window. Like her, he was dressed in a towelling robe. His legs beneath its short hem were bare and brown. Her own toes curled protestingly into the carpet. She didn’t want to see him like this. It made it all so much harder.

He turned round abruptly and stared at her, and instinctively she tugged at her robe and wished that she had been able to do something more sensible with her hair.

‘We have to talk…’

Of course. She ought to have expected that.

‘There’s nothing to talk about, Guy,’ she said wearily. ‘You needn’t worry. I didn’t take what you said seriously.’

A muscle twitched in his jaw.

‘Like hell! You took it seriously enough to walk out of her and damn well nearly kill yourself.’

Kill herself? Did he actually think…?

‘That was an accident. I walked out in a temper, I admit, but you don’t think I actually…’

Guy pushed his hand into his hair. He looked tired.

‘No, no, of course not. But you must see that we can’t go on like this. I think it would be best if I left…’

Oh, God! But wasn’t it what she had been expecting? For the sake of her pride, if nothing else, she mustn’t let him see how she felt; she mustn’t let him guess at the pain exploding inside her. She opened her mouth to make a cool, composed response and then, to her horror, she heard herself crying out bitterly, ‘Do you really think I’m so much of a fool that I believed you, Guy? Did you honestly think I had deluded myself into believing that you wanted me? You’re quite safe, you know. I never had any intention of asking you to prove that you weren’t lying.’

‘What…’

He was looking at her rather strangely, with a different grimness round his mouth, and a glimmer of something in the back of his eyes that made her stomach kick dangerously.

‘Just what in hell are you talking about? You may not be a fool, but you certainly have the lowest self-esteem of any woman I’ve ever met.’

The softness in his voice unnerved her. He had turned round and was watching her, and she had the curious sensation of being trapped and defenceless.

‘I’d hardly call it low self-esteem to realise that an attractive, virile man is extremely unlikely to be consumed with desire for me,’ she said proudly, determined not to let him see how much the admission hurt.

‘Then what would you call it?’ Guy demanded, without taking his eyes off her face.

‘Reality,’ she told him firmly. ‘You said you were going to leave…’ She wanted him to go quickly, before she broke down and begged him to stay. If she did that… She tried to breathe, and felt her whole body quiver with pain.

She turned her back on him, and so it was a shock to feel his hands on her arms, dragging her round to face him. He was breathing hard, as though he had been running. And he looked angry, furiously angry. Her heart kicked in her chest, and she shivered beneath a frisson of sexual need.

‘That was before,’ he told her cryptically. ‘God, Campion, I’ve never known a woman like you. Have you really no idea what you are, what you’re doing to me? All this time… At first I thought—’ He shook his head and continued after a pause. ‘There has to be a way to get through to you.’

Still holding on to her, he looked round the room. Before she could protest, Campion found herself dragged in front of an old-fashioned Victorian pier-glass which threw back to her their full-length reflections. He dwarfed her in height and in breadth. He made her look small and frail. With her hair tumbling around her shoulders, she looked different, even to herself.

‘Look at yourself,’ he commanded her huskily, dragging the robe from her body, exposing her nudity, not just to his gaze, but also to her own. Before she could react, before she could cry out in protest, he was shrugging off his own robe.

‘Look at us,’ he demanded softly. ‘And look at what you do to me.’

He stood without touching her, watching the colour crawl up under her skin as she hurriedly looked away from the open arousal of his body.

‘This is reality,’ he told her. ‘This is the way you make me react, the way you make me feel. You say you’re undesirable. To whom? A man without grace or intelligence, who once hurt you badly? Have you any idea how insulting I find it to be classed with him? Have you any idea of how angry you make me when you tell me that you aren’t desirable? Have you any idea of how much you make me ache and long to take hold of you and show you just how wrong you are? I want you, Campion, and I think you want me, too.’

He was turning away from the mirror and towards her.

‘No! No, I…’

‘Yes.’ His voice, thick and oddly muffled, made Campion’s mind spin. She felt his mouth touch her skin, not teasingly or lightly as she had expected, but hungrily, fiercely, like a man out of control. She shuddered beneath its pressure, her throat arching back, her body absorbing the heat of his. She could feel the furious thud of his heart, and her own started to race in time to it. She moaned as his mouth savaged her throat. This was nothing like how she had imagined it might be. She had visualised him as a controlled, even distant lover, but there was nothing in the least controlled or distant about the way he was touching her. He shuddered against her and moaned her name against her skin. Somehow or other, her arms had tightened around him. Her breasts were pressed against his chest and, as he moved, it created a delicious friction against their tender peaks.

His hands moved over her, shaping her body, making her ache to touch him in turn. His mouth had reached her jawline now. She turned her head, her eyes wide and dark with arousal.

‘Kiss me. Kiss me, Guy…’

She wasn’t aware of saying the words, only of the feverish need building inside her.

He lifted his head, his hands cupping her face, his skin flushed with dark colour.

‘Oh, my God, yes. This is how I’ve wanted to see you. This is how I’ve wanted to make you feel.’ His lips touched hers, and she trembled. She felt Guy’s body tense, then his head lifted again so that she was denied the contact she craved. She opened the eyes she had closed in anticipation of the pleasure of having his mouth on hers.

He was staring down at her.

‘Open your mouth, so that I can kiss you properly…’

In a dream, she obeyed his command. It was nothing like the kisses she had experienced with Craig. Kisses which, if she was honest, had not really moved her at all. With Guy, it was different. Her whole body seemed to melt beneath the heat of his touch.

She felt him lift her, and marvelled absently at his strength; she felt the coolness of the bedclothes against her naked back, and the warmth of Guy’s weight as he took her back into his arms.

He kissed her again, lingeringly this time, as though she was a rare delight that had to be savoured, and she responded eagerly, hungrily to his touch, barely aware of the way she was caressing the naked length of his spine until he groaned against her mouth, unable to control the fierce thrusting movement of his body.

‘I wanted to do this slowly, to make it special for you, but you’re making it impossible for me to think of anything but how much I want you.’

Campion shivered, the words arousing her almost as much as his touch. This was a dream, it had to be, and she gave herself up to the pleasure of it voluptuously, arching her body sinuously to Guy’s touch, feeling pleasure and power flow through her as he responded to her allure.

‘You’re beautiful, even more beautiful than I’d imagined.’ His hand cupped her breast, and Campion tensed for a moment as he looked down at her, to where his hand lay against the paleness of her own flesh.

‘Beautiful,’ he repeated huskily, and Campion gasped as he bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth.

She had never experienced a sensation like it. Her whole body convulsed on a wave of feeling so strong that, for a moment, it almost frightened her.

A woman’s instinct she had not known she possessed told her that Guy was dangerously close to losing control. She touched him tentatively, stroking the narrow curve of his hip and the flat plane of his belly. She felt the harsh rasp of hair against her fingertips. It was an electrifying sensation. Instinctively, her fingers drifted downwards, and then stilled as she realised just what she was doing.

‘My God! What is it you’re trying to do to me?’

She froze as she heard the harsh, almost anguished words. Guy moved, looking down at her. He looked angry, and she shivered, all her old uncertainties sweeping back. She had hurt him somehow, done something he didn’t like. She felt confused and ignorant. It was ridiculous at her age to know so little about male sexuality. Craig had never encouraged her to touch him.

‘I—I didn’t mean to hurt you…’

Tears weren’t far away, but she fought them back.

‘Hurt me?’ She could feel Guy’s tension. He muttered something under his breath, and she felt her skin almost hurt with embarrassment. Then suddenly the tension seemed to leave him, and his hands were moving over her body, stroking her, caressing her, catching her up in a tide of sensation that allowed her to do nothing other than feel.

She felt the arousing stroke of Guy’s fingers against her inner thigh, and she held her breath, aching with an unfamiliar tension, an unknown need. She wanted… She gasped in protest as his hand moved away and then touched her again. She could feel his mouth moving softly against her shoulder, but neither sensation was what she wanted. She wanted… Her body started to shake, her throat tight with the effort of controlling the soft moans of need she was having to suppress. She moved, trying to tell Guy without words what it was she wanted, but he seemed oblivious to her need.

Then, so suddenly that it was almost shocking, he released her, bracing his hands flat against the bed on either side of her as he said quietly, ‘You weren’t hurting me, Campion, at least, not the way you meant. That was what you were dong to me—what I was just doing to you.’

She stared up at him, not knowing what to say, and then humiliation overwhelmed her. What kind of woman was she that she didn’t even know, that she had to be shown… She made a tiny sound of self-disgust and tried to turn away, but Guy wouldn’t let her.

He took her back in his arms and stroked her sensitive skin until she was pleading with him in breathless, husky whispers to end her torment, reaching out for him, touching him, sobbing in a mixture of triumph and release as he cried out her name and finally let go of the control he had used to keep them both in check.

She tensed briefly as he entered her, but there was no pain, no fear; only a wonderful feeling of rightness, of relief and then of dazzling joy as she became aware of her body’s instinctive response to his powerful thrusts.

What began as the smallest trickle of sensation built up so quickly that its climax took her by surprise: a fierce storm of sensation that made Guy cry out her name as he lost himself completely within her.

She felt the release of his body within her own, felt it and rejoiced in it with a primitive sense of power she had not known existed. Her body ached, but it was a pleasurable ache, a triumphant ache. She felt Guy leave her, and her flesh grew chilled, but he was simply pulling the bedclothes back over them, his body cushioning hers, warming it, cherishing it.

She drifted off to sleep on that thought.

* * *

When Campion woke up it was dark, and she was so thoroughly disorientated that for a moment she could barely remember who she was, let alone where. Guy lay sleeping beside her. She turned her head to look at him. Her insides quivered and melted, and then surged with quickening desire.

She quelled the sensation, disconcerted by her own sexuality, but the tiny, burgeoning ache refused to go away. Was this how Lynsey would have felt? Or would she have been angry with herself for allowing herself to feel like this for a man whom she felt she hated? She would not have expected to find such pleasure in her marriage bed, and she would resent its discovery and the power it gave Dickon over her.

Silently, Campion got out of bed and found her robe. Ten minutes later she was downstairs, typing furiously, lost in her work. So lost, in fact, that she didn’t even hear Guy coming downstairs himself.

He asked wryly, half an hour later, ‘Can I interrupt?’

She almost jumped in shock.

‘If this is the effect making love with me has on you, I can see we’re going to have to do it more often.’

He was teasing her, she knew, and she was grateful to him for lightening what could have been a very difficult moment.

‘Why did you sneak out of bed like that?’

She looked at him. ‘I thought you were asleep. I didn’t want to disturb you.’

The way he looked at her made her blush, and he laughed when he saw it.

‘I don’t suppose I can tempt you away from that typewriter for long enough to show you exactly how much you do disturb me, can I?’

For one crazy moment, she actually contemplated getting up. What on earth had he done to her?

‘I…I really ought to finish this.’

‘Yes, I know.’ He bent down and, to her shock, she felt his lips move against her neck. A pulse point started to thud beneath his mouth. She badly wanted to turn to him and let him know how he was making her feel, but she was still too unsure of herself, still too new to such sensations to feel entirely comfortable with them.

‘I…I suppose we ought to be thinking about something to eat…’

‘Right now, what I want to eat is you.’

The words shivered across her skin, conjuring up images that made her feel weak and dizzy. Unlike her, Guy had dressed, and when he looked at her she felt acutely conscious of her nudity beneath her robe, but she had been so anxious to get to her typewriter that she hadn’t even thought about getting dressed.

‘You frightened me to death this afternoon. Do you realise that? If I’d lost you…’

The anguish in his voice shocked her. She turned her head to look at him, and something elusive and haunting in his eyes vanished, as though he didn’t want her to see his feelings.

‘I tell you what, I’ll make dinner, but first you have to pay a forfeit.’

‘What? Promise to wash up?’

‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’

The way he looked at her as he drew her to her feet made her insides turn over. As he bent his head to kiss her, his hand slid inside her robe. The sensation of his fingers against her breast and then her nipple made her moan softly beneath his kiss. Instantly, his touch hardened, demanded, and just as instantly she responded to it, aching to feel the hard strength of his body against her, aching to experience again that delicate rapture she had never known existed.

She wanted to cling to him when he realeased her but, instead, reluctantly she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

‘This isn’t going to get the dinner cooked, is it?’ he said ruefully. ‘You have a very undermining effect on my self-control, you’re a very dangerous woman.’

A dangerous woman. She smiled to herself when he had gone. If she was a dangerous woman, then what did that make him?

* * *

From somewhere or other, Guy had found candles—only plain white kitchen ones, but he lit them with a flourish worthy of the most expensive and intimate restaurant and, as she sat down on the chair he pulled out for her, Campion marvelled at the versatility of this man whom she had originally dismissed as a lightweight chauvinist.

He had cooked a chicken casserole, and its succulent fragrance filled the room, but it was the sight of the wine bottle on the table that made her eyebrows lift in silent interrogation.

‘I had to go down to the village. Champagne would have been more appropriate, but the off-licence doesn’t stock it.’

He grinned at her and she smiled back. The off-licence was a tiny row of shelves in the cluttered general store that was the only retail outlet the village possessed, beside the chemist’s shop and the launderette.

‘I feel I should have made more of an effort to dress up.’ Campion touched her hair awkwardly. She wasn’t used to this feeling of wanting to please someone, of almost needing to see that slow, warm smile that began at the back of Guy’s eyes and spread until his whole face was illuminated by it.

‘I like you just the way you are.’

Incredibly, she could almost believe he meant it, and she gave a soft gurgle of amusement.

Once, long, long ago, she had tried to dress to please a man. Her face clouded as she remembered.

‘Don’t think about him,’ Guy demanded tersely. ‘He and I are two different men, Campion, and I don’t like it when you compare us.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘There’s been no one since, has there?’ he questioned abruptly, as though he already knew the answer.

‘No.’ She looked away from him. ‘I must seem very naïve, very inexperienced.’ She pulled a face. ‘Attractive in a very young woman, perhaps, but not so attractive in someone my age.’

She bit her lip and winced as he took hold of her abruptly.

‘Will you stop doing that?’

She stared at him, hurt by the rough anger in his voice.

‘Doing what?’

‘Running yourself down,’ he told her curtly. ‘Experience doesn’t guarantee physical pleasure.’

‘I didn’t even know how…how to touch you.’ Her face flamed as she looked briefly at him. ‘That was what was missing from my book, wasn’t it?’ she asked, suddenly illuminatingly aware of what had been behind his cricitisms. ‘Knowledge…experience…’

‘Sort of, but it was the emotional impact I was looking for, not the physical.’ His hand touched her face, and instantly she quivered in response. Immediately, his eyes darkened and the breath stopped in her throat. ‘Keep on looking at me like that, and we’ll be eating this chicken for breakfast,’ Guy told her ruefully.

It broke the tension. She laughed and watched, loving him as the smile broke out across his face.

How could she have not known before now that she loved him? She shivered, suddenly aware of how fleeting this precious time with him might be. He had said nothing of love, nothing of permanence, nothing of anything more than the fact that he wanted her.

‘Come on, let’s eat.’

He made her sit down, while he served the meal and then filled her wineglass.

Over dinner they talked, their conversation covering a wide diversity of subjects. He was entertaining to talk to, and a generous listener, Campion discovered, as the wine relaxed her and she told him about the loneliness of her childhood and the horror of Craig’s deceit.

‘I envy you coming from such a large family,’ she confessed. ‘Do you see much of them?’

‘Not as much as I’d like. I normally spend Christmas with Ma, but this year she’s going to Canada. Ian has just got engaged, and of course he wants her to meet his fiancée and her family.’

‘So you’re the only one who’s not married?’

Her face burned as she realised what she had just said.

‘By accident, rather than choice.’ The look he gave her was direct and firm. ‘I was engaged briefly when I was twenty-two, but she changed her mind when she realised how long it would be before we could marry. I couldn’t leave Ma to cope on her own. Ian was still at school at the time, and the girls just about to start university. Don’t look like that. It wouldn’t have worked anyway…’

She couldn’t tell him that the tears shimmering in her eyes were for own stupidity in so nearly denying herself this precious time with him. He was such a very special man, and she was still marvelling that he could actually want her. Beautiful, he had called her, and he had touched her body with slow reverence, as though he did indeed find it worthy of such worship.

‘No pudding, I’m afraid.’

‘I couldn’t eat another morsel,’ she told him, and it was true. She ached to be back in his arms, wanted only the voluptuous, heady delight of feeling his skin against her own. Perhaps it was the wine that had brought on this feeling of wantonness, or perhaps it had always been there, buried deep inside her, waiting for his touch to release it.

‘Coffee?’

‘Please.’ She had to get herself under control. Guy might not want to make love to her again so soon…

‘I thought we might go over the work I did this afternoon…’ Her voice shook slightly, and she wondered if he could detect how she was really feeling.

‘Fine. Coffee in the sitting-room, then?’

‘I ought to make it. You made dinner.’

‘You can make breakfast in the morning, instead.’

Her heart missed a beat, and she found that she couldn’t look at him. Breakfast. Would he spend the night with her? Would he…her body went hot with desire, while her mind shrank from the intensity of her feelings. Instead of easing her need for him, their lovemaking only seemed to have increased it.

When he came in with the coffee, her head was bent over the newly typed pages, but she wasn’t reading them.

She passed them over to him, and watched as he sat down. He read them quickly and thoroughly, pausing every now and again to re-read a few lines. Tension invaded her. What if it wasn’t any good? What if the re-writes were every bit as unsatisfactory as her initial attempt? She had found this afternoon that she was no longer able to judge her own work; all she could do was to pass on to Lynsey her own feelings and experiences.

‘That’s good,’ he said quietly when he had finished. ‘Now I really feel that Lynsey is alive. I like the way she reacts to Dickon, the way she fights against her physical desire for him and tried to deny it. It makes an interesting point of conflict. You get very involved with your characters, don’t you?’ he asked softly.

For no reason at all, her throat had gone dry.

‘Well, yes. I suppose I do. But what makes you say so?’

‘The other night, when you fell asleep in the chair, when I picked you up and carried you upstairs, you called me Dickon.’

All at once she remembered that elusive, nagging sense of unease. Her face burned and she wanted desperately to look away from him.

‘Don’t be embarrassed. I like knowing that our lovemaking inspired you to write like this. In fact, I find it very arousing to know that I gave you so much pleasure. I did give you pleasure, didn’t I, Campion?’ he murmured. ‘You certainly pleasured me. So much that I wanted to experience that pleasure again.’

‘Now?’ Campion quavered, unable to believe that that tiny, husky whisper of sound came from her own throat. What was it about this man that could reduce her to this mass of quivering, desirous flesh?

She wasn’t aware of standing up, of moving at all, in fact, but she must have done, because she was in his arms and his hands were going under her sweater to find her breasts. She moaned as he touched them, her nipples instantly responsive.

He undressed her quickly, almost desperately, stripping off his own clothes with swift economy of movement. They made love in front of the fire.

Guy’s mouth touched her everywhere, teaching her new things about her sexuality, arousing her to the point where she knew nothing other than her overwhelming need for him.

She reached out to touch him in turn, but he stopped her gently, and as he moved over her in the firelight she realised the reason for his visit to the village.

He saw her glance and said quietly, ‘It seemed safest. I didn’t think you’d be…protected in any way.’

‘No. No, I’m not.’

She ought to have felt relieved and pleased, and she did, of course, but a tiny part of her registered the fact that he didn’t want there to be any risk of her conceiving his child, and therefore that he didn’t want their relationship to be anything other than transitory.

She had expected that this time the intensity of his possession would have lessened, but it was just as fierce, just as tumultuous.

As she lay awake in the aftermath of their lovemaking, she prayed that, when the time came, she would be able to let him go with grace and dignity, and that she would never embarrass him and humiliate herself by revealing how much she loved him.