PANIC OVERWHELMED HER. As Richard turned her round to face him, she lashed out at him, small ineffectual blows which landed harmlessly against his chest. Harmless to him, that was. To her…
As her bunched fingers made contact with his skin, hot and sleek, a silken covering for hard muscles, Livvy started to shake violently.
‘Let me go…’
The words threatened to choke her, or was it the tears her pride would not allow her to shed that were blocking her throat?
‘Livvy, stop it…listen…Oh, for God’s sake.’
She tensed as he picked her up, scooping her off her feet in irritated impatience with her refusal to listen to him, holding her against his body as though…as though he had never spoken those warning words to her, never acknowledged and forced her to acknowledge what was going on between them, but he had said those words. Said them and meant them.
It wasn’t just she who was tense now. He was, too. She could feel him looking at her and, even though she knew it was the wrong thing to do, the most dangerous thing she could do, she lifted her head and looked back at him.
His voice was hoarse, rough, a plea and a demand, his eyes dark with arousal.
When she raised her hands she would have sworn it was so that she could lever herself away from him and put some safe distance between them. So how was it then that, instead of doing so, she was actually allowing them to slide tentatively, caressingly almost, up over his shoulders, her lips parting in a tiny breath, a provocative sigh of wanting as she looked at his mouth?
It wasn’t like the other times he had kissed her. This time it was the kiss of a man who already knew he would be her lover, the kiss of a man who desired her and knew that she desired him. It neither forced or cajoled but simply, and far more dangerously, acknowledged and ignited what had already begun between them.
She didn’t remember how they had got into his bedroom or on his bed, she didn’t remember moving…didn’t remember anything at all but the feel of his mouth on hers, the sensation of drowning beneath a kiss so sensual that it stimulated her to a point that was almost unbearable.
She felt him undressing her and even helped him to do it, but it was without any real awareness of what she was doing. All that mattered…all she wanted was for him to continue holding her, touching her, kissing her.
When he broke the contact with her mouth, she whimpered protestingly, nuzzling into his skin, kissing and licking the warm flesh of his throat and then his shoulder, while he groaned in protest and his body arched, his hands holding her briefly away from him.
‘I want to feel you against me,’ she heard him telling her. ‘I want to feel all of you next to me, Livvy…all of you.’
She shuddered mindlessly. That was what she wanted too so why did he…why was he…?
As she felt his hands on her body, she realised he was trying to remove the last of her clothing, the thin cotton all-in-one against which the hard points of her nipples pressed eagerly and wantonly, flaunting their desire for him, so tender that she winced slightly as the soft cotton rasped against them when he removed it.
Instantly his hands were stroking her, soothing her, his lips caressing her swollen, tender flesh, drawing her nipple into his mouth where he bathed it with tender, moist heat.
She started to shiver, wild, fierce spasms of pleasure racking her.
She could hear him talking to her, telling her how much he wanted her, how desirable he found her, how the feel and scent of her body was arousing him, making him want to explore each and every centimetre of her to give her all the pleasure she could ever want.
He wanted her to touch him, he told her; he wanted her to hold and caress him, to feel the need which turned him from a rational human being into something, someone, completely at her mercy and so much in need of her that his senses, his essential being would die of starvation without her to nourish them.
He wanted her, he told her, as he suckled her nipples. He wanted her. His mouth brushed her midriff, her stomach, his tongue circling her navel.
Helplessly, she clung to him, her nails digging into his flesh, stifling the frantic moans of arousal clogging her throat by burying her mouth against him.
He tasted of soap and salt, his skin clean from his shower and yet musky with the scent of his arousal. He groaned when she touched him, smoothing her hand down over his back. His buttocks were flat and hard, the skin slightly paler than the rest of his body where it obviously hadn’t been exposed to the sun.
She experienced an unfamiliar erotic urge to trace that demarcation line, to follow it round to the front of his body.
She trembled wildly, molten with pleasure as his hand slid between her legs.
She had wanted him there for so long, touching her like that with sure, knowing fingers that seemed to know all the secrets of her sex and to take pleasure in exploring them.
He reached up to pull her down against him, smoothing the hair back off her face, his own miraculously softened by what they were sharing. She could see desire and need in his eyes, feel it in the response he was making no attempt to conceal from her.
He wanted her to see and know how much he wanted her, she recognised.
Already her body was responding helplessly to his touch, making her arch up eagerly against his hand.
‘I warned you it would be like this between us, didn’t I?’ he groaned as he kissed her. ‘I warned you that it would get out of control…That I would get out of control,’ he added thickly, as she was unable to resist the temptation to reach out and touch him, to caress him as intimately as he was her.
She wanted the taste of him in her mouth, she recognised achingly, the feel of him in her body; she wanted to wrap herself around him and never let him go, to abandon herself completely to him, to be so completely and utterly at one with him that nothing could ever drive them apart.
‘Livvy, Livvy…’ She felt him shudder as she started to press quick, aching kisses along his body, but when he realised what she was going to do he took hold of her and told her thickly, ‘No, no…That pleasure has to be mine.’
And in the end it was his mouth that caressed her with intimate, lingering skill, that caressed and coaxed and finally gave shockingly intense release to her wanton body.
She cried out to him as it happened, clung to him, weeping without knowing why she was doing so.
Later, he made love to her again, filling her with the powerful and longed-for surge of his body within hers.
This time, the release was slower, deeper, and carried with it, for her, an awareness of what this coming together of their bodies was really about, of what lay beyond the immediacy of their physical pleasure, of what this joining of their two physical selves had the power to create.
She wanted him, she recognised, deep within her, was driven to accomplish the satisfaction of that atavistic need not just because of the physical pleasure it gave her.
Nature knew that the closer man’s life-force was to its goal, the less distance it had to travel, the higher the chance was of it performing its task, and it was for this reason surely that it had implanted in her the need to urge and incite him to bury himself so deeply within her.
A child…Richard’s child; as the waves of pleasure broke inside her, Livvy shivered in feminine awe. That heat she could feel inside her, that ache within her womb…were they just the aftermath of pleasure or were they the beginnings of a new life?
She fell asleep in Richard’s arms, waking up in the darkness some time later, alone and cold.
Shivering, she slid out of the bed. What on earth had she done, and where was Richard? She opened the bedroom door and walked on to the landing, stopping as she heard his voice.
He was on the telephone to someone. She was just about to turn away, not wanting to eavesdrop, when she heard him saying quietly, ‘Look, George, it’s all right…Everything’s going to be all right…’
George…he was speaking to George…George, who could not make time to speak to his wife…George who apparently was too busy and too far away to contact. But not too busy or too far away to ring Richard, apparently.
She was just about to go downstairs and demand indignantly that he let her speak to George when he added, ‘I’ve told you, there’s no need to worry about her any more; I’ll deal with her. In fact it will be a pleasure,’ she heard him saying grimly. ‘I know exactly what to do to get rid of her.’
Livvy froze; she felt as though the blood had suddenly drained from her body. She started to shake with sick awareness of what she had done.
There was no doubt Richard must be talking about her…that it was her he intended to ‘get rid of’. And tonight she had walked right into his trap.
She had to get away from here, she recognised sickly. No matter what she had promised Gale, she couldn’t stay now. Not when she knew the humiliation that lay in wait for her. All the time he was touching her, caressing her, loving her, in reality he…
Loving her…She shivered violently. Was that really what she had thought? And after all that he had already said to her.
‘You fool…You fool…’ she taunted herself as she pulled on her clothes and quickly hurried into her own room. She didn’t bother trying to pack. She simply grabbed her handbag and headed for the stairs.
The kitchen door was half open. She could see Richard standing with the phone. He had his back to her, thank goodness. So he knew how to get rid of her, did he? Well, she would save him the bother, and the pleasure of further humiliating her. Oh, she could guess how much he would be anticipating that…anticipating reminding her of each whispered self-betrayal, each yearning touch and kiss…each word of longing and need kissed against his skin.
She let herself out of the front entrance of the house. Mercifully it had stopped raining, and the sky was clear, the moon almost full.
Her car was in the outhouse; the engine started first time.
She had just reached the beginning of the lane when the kitchen door was flung open and Richard came racing out.
She could see him in her rear-view mirror. He was calling to her, his shock plainly visible.
So he didn’t like being cheated of his plans to humiliate her, did he? Well, tough. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would let any man do that to her, no matter how much she loved him.
It must have started raining again, she decided, but when she switched on her windscreen wipers her view was still obscured.
It took her several seconds to realise that she was crying.
She drove slowly down the lane. There was no chance of Richard’s catching her after all. She tensed once or twice, wary of skidding on the mud and ending up as he had done in the ditch, but thankfully most of the surface water had drained away and her car was nowhere near as heavy as his.
She had no idea where she was going to go or what she intended to do.
For now it was enough that she had left him. Physically at least.
Emotionally it could take her the rest of her life to forget…Forget…She smiled bitterly to herself…Impossible. She would never forget. Not the pleasure, and certainly not the pain.
She rang Gale from a small village just after dawn, leaving a message on her answering machine saying merely that she was sorry and that she had not been able to stay…That she was all right and intended to use the rest of her holiday to see something of Europe.
After all, what else was there to do? She couldn’t go home. Not yet. She needed time and she certainly couldn’t go back to the farmhouse.
She drove all morning, stopping only when she recognised that she was virtually falling asleep at the wheel. She had no idea where she was, nor did she really care. She slept in the car and woke up dry-mouthed and feeling dirty.
A few miles further down the road she found an auberge where she booked a room.
Luckily the inn wasn’t very far from a town, where she was able to buy herself a few basic necessities and a change of clothes. She filled up her car with petrol and made an attempt to eat the meal she had ordered.
What was he doing now…? Waiting for her to crawl back to him? Did he know that she loved him? Had he thought that her sexual desire for him would be enough for him to torment her with?
In her imagination, she enacted series of vividly painful scenarios of him laughing at her, telling her he had never really wanted her.
‘I’ll deal with her,’ he had told George, and she had recognised in his voice not just dislike and contempt but an intention to punish as well.
She supposed it was partially her own fault. If she had not been so determined to stand by Gale…And if she had not been so stupid as to fall in love with him.
Hadn’t she recognised the first time she saw him that he was a very determined and ruthless man…? Why had she been stupid enough to imagine he would allow her to stand between the plans he and George had made?
He wanted the farmhouse, and George wanted to sell it to him. Her presence had made that impossible, and so he had waited and planned and then, when he had finally discovered a weapon he could use against her, he had done so with devastating effect.
‘I want you,’ he had said, and she had believed him, believed that if there wasn’t love then there was passion and need, but his passion had been ignited not by her but by his determination to succeed in removing her.
It was pointless dwelling on all the many small self-betrayals she had made. At least there was one small crumb of comfort. At least she would never have to see him again.
The pain felt as though something was wrenching apart inside her, splintering into a million tiny fragments of individual, agonising pain.
How could she be so weak…so stupid?
She travelled for one week and then another, aimlessly criss-crossing France, instinctively shunning the company of others, snatching a few hours of sleep during the day because she was totally unable to do so at night.
There would not be a child. She told herself she was glad, and for his sake she was, but for her own…
How long was she going to feel like this? Her heart gave her the answer…Forever…Forever.
Three weeks after she had fled from the farmhouse, exhausted physically and spiritually as well as emotionally, she turned the car in the direction of the place that had been her childhood retreat and solace.
None of the family lived there any more, but they were remembered, and Livvy was made welcome, the family who now owned the farmhouse and the land insisting on her staying with them. Their eldest daughter was living in Paris and would not mind her using her room, Livvy was assured. Too drained and weary to argue, she smiled her thanks and allowed herself to be drawn into the warmth of the Gironde family circle.
She could just as easily have walked into the river that ran along the boundary of the farmlands and allowed its waters to close over her head, she recognised dully, but that was a temptation she knew she must resist.
She stayed in France until not long before the beginning of the new school term.
She had not made contact with anyone at home; she had not felt strong enough to do so. She had worked, though, and she had convinced herself that life must go on, no matter how much of a painful burden she found that knowledge.
She said her goodbyes to the Girondes and headed back for home.
The phone was ringing as she opened the door. She ignored it, grimacing at the amount of mail piled up on the floor and sniffing the stale air of the closed-up rooms distastefully.
Life had to go on. Her pride demanded that it go on.
She froze as one envelope slid free of the others. Her name was written boldly on it. Without knowing how, she knew, she knew that it was from Richard.
She tore it up without opening it. What was the point? All it could do was hurt her even more.
She had things to do…food to buy, bills to pay, work to organise.
The weeks at the farm had tanned her skin, emphasising how slender she had become…How thin…Her hair had grown and needed trimming. Mundane, boring, routine things, the only things that were left in her life for her now.