ONE MORE DAY and then she would be back at work.
Thank goodness. She needed something to occupy her time and her thoughts.
And her heart as well?
Livvy dismissed the thought, stifling the pain that came with it.
She hadn’t heard from Gale since Sunday morning and, although she missed her cousin, she was determined not to go back on what she had said.
For so long as Robert Forrest remained a part of her cousin’s life, she could not do so.
She stopped her car and got out. The supermarket had been crowded and she felt tired and jaded, her nerves constantly on edge.
Now, as she went to unlock her door, she was glancing over her shoulder as though half expecting Robert Forrest to materialise behind her.
Robert…it suited him. She gave a fiercely bitter shiver. How long was it going to be like this…how long would it be before she finally started to get over him?
Knowing what he was, which ought to have made it all so much easier, might have increased her misery but it had not decreased her love.
She pushed open her door, wincing beneath the weight of her heavy shopping bags.
There was somebody standing in her living-room. A tall, dark-haired man who had no right whatsoever to be there.
As he came towards her, the earth seemed to tilt beneath her feet. She saw the anger in his eyes and made a small helpless sound of pain.
He took the shopping from her, his fingers manacling her wrist as he almost dragged her into her sitting-room.
‘Just what the hell are you trying to do with yourself?’ he demanded roughly. ‘If you lose any more weight, you’ll…’
It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t eat, she wanted to tell him. It wasn’t her fault she hurt so much inside, ached so much with the burden of her unwanted love, but stubbornly she held the words back, dragging herself out of his grasp to demand bitterly,
‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’
‘Gale gave me her key,’ he told her.
Gale…Another betrayal. Livvy stifled her pain.
‘She had no right to do that,’ she told him stiffly. ‘She knew I didn’t want to see you. Please leave. Otherwise…’
Otherwise what? Otherwise I might break down completely and tell you just how much I love and need you?
‘I’m not leaving until I’ve said what I’ve come to say,’ Robert told her grimly. ‘And you will listen to me, Livvy. You owe me that much at least…’
‘Owe you?’ She stared at him, fighting down the hysteria exploding inside her.
‘Well, don’t you? Walking…running out on me like that…What was it you were so afraid of, Livvy? That I might want more from you than you were prepared to give?’
That she might want more? He was confusing her, Livvy recognised, deliberately trying to turn the conversation, the situation to his own advantage.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she challenged him. ‘Why did you pretend to be someone else…?’
‘You were the one who mistook me for a potential buyer for the farmhouse,’ he told her quietly. ‘The last thing I’d expected to find when George had given me the keys for the place so that I could have a few days’ much needed solitude was to find it already inhabited by a very disturbing and aggressive woman. It seemed more sensible to let you go on seeing me as the enemy…than…’
‘Sensible? Deliberately to deceive me?’
The look he gave her had something haunted and pain-filled about it.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But you see, I didn’t know then…You called me a misogynist, Livvy, and it’s true that I have felt a certain mistrust of your sex…My marriage…’ He shook his head. ‘My marriage was something that should never have happened. It was all my own fault. I was twenty-one when Claire and I met; she was slightly older, twenty-four. I suppose I was too young and too idealistic to know what real, genuine love was. Because I wanted her and she seemed to want me, I decided that we were in love. And then she told me that she was pregnant…Carrying my child. We’d barely known one another three months. Foolishly I’d assumed…I think I knew even then, before I married her, that all I’d really felt was physical desire, but she was carrying my child…’
He grimaced painfully. ‘Or so I thought…That, like the love she claimed to feel for me, was another fiction, but by the time I realised the truth, by the time she told me that she’d made a mistake and there was to be no baby after all, it was too late and we were married.
‘I thought she was as devastated as I was by the way our marriage seemed to be falling apart, but she laughed in my face when I tried to talk to her about it. She told me that the only reason she’d married me in the first place was to get back at her married lover for refusing to leave his wife; that and the fact that I was rich enough to give her a comfortable lifestyle.
‘After she told me, I discovered that not only did I not desire her any more, but that it was physically impossible for me to be in the same room with her, never mind actually touch her.
‘Then I found out that she had started meeting her married lover again.
‘I could have divorced her, of course—I had the grounds—but my pride wouldn’t allow me to admit what a fool I’d made of myself, and it didn’t suit her to divorce me… Not then…However, all that changed when her lover’s wife left him.
‘In order to keep everything quiet and discreet, I agreed to the large divorce settlement she demanded…My pride again.
‘She died three weeks after the divorce became final…with her lover…I felt guilty about that…the car he was driving had been paid for with the money she got out of me. I felt guilty but I resented her as well for burdening me with that guilt.
‘I didn’t love her, but I didn’t hate her. I did hate myself, though…I told myself I’d only got what I deserved for being such a fool. That if I’d been less idealistic and more honest with myself, I’d have realised what I felt for her was only desire instead of trying to glorify it…to change it into something it wasn’t. I was too proud to admit that I could be that much of a victim to such a basic human drive…that I didn’t have more selfcon-trol…I swore I’d never fall into the same trap again.
‘And then I saw you and there was nothing I could say or do that was strong enough to make me stop wanting you. I was unfair to you, Livvy, totally wrong about you…but please try to understand that was the only way I had of defending myself.’
‘Defending yourself? From what?’ she demanded.
He looked at her for a long time before saying slowly, ‘From loving you.’
‘From loving me?’ Livvy wondered if she was having some kind of hallucinatory fantasy. She blinked and then blinked again, but no, he was still there.
‘Stop lying to me, Robert,’ she protested huskily. ‘You don’t love me. You told me in France that you—’
‘I told you lots of things,’ he interrupted her quietly, ‘but those were only words. I thought I’d shown you just how shallow and meaningless those words were. I thought I’d shown you in my arms just how much you do mean to me…’
‘By having sex with me?’ Livvy tried to make her voice sound scornful, but it wobbled very betrayingly instead.
‘No. By making love with you,’ Robert corrected her. ‘Why did you leave like that, Livvy? Have you any idea how much what you did has tormented me…how much…?’
‘I heard you on the phone to George,’ Livvy told him grittily, lifting her chin. ‘I heard what you said to him about knowing how to get rid of me.’
Robert was staring at her. She had shocked him now, she recognised, but there was no triumph in the knowledge, only a dull, aching pain that told her how much she had wanted to believe what he had said to her…how much she had ached to believe that he cared about her.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she repeated. ‘You said to George that you knew how to get rid of me…’
‘Not you… Oh, my God, how could you think…? Livvy, Livvy, I was talking about Sandra…That day—my secretary had rung me at the farmhouse; she had strict instructions not to get in touch with me unless it was absolutely urgent.
‘Gale had rung her demanding to talk to me about George. I already knew from you how angry she was, and apparently Sandra had been trying to make contact with me as well. I had to speak to George but I couldn’t do so with you around, so I drove into town to use the fax machine there.
‘When I eventually managed to make contact with George, I discovered that he had come to his senses where Sandra was concerned, but that she was trying to blackmail him over some letters he’d written to her.
‘When you heard me speaking to George later, it was Sandra I was talking about. Not you.’
Livvy looked at him. She could see that he was telling her the truth.
‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that you did lie to me about who you were,’ she told him shakily. ‘You say you love me…but how can I believe that when—?’
‘I lied to you because I was afraid, Livvy. You see, I knew the moment I set eyes on you how vulnerable I was to you, and the last thing I wanted in my life was that kind of vulnerability. When my first marriage broke up, I swore I’d never allow myself to get involved like that again. I didn’t love Claire and it was my pride that was hurt more than my emotions when I discovered the truth about her. My pride that made me determined never to let another woman get close to me.
‘I tried to convince myself that you were like her…to deny what I knew was happening to me; and then, when that didn’t work, I told myself it was just sex. Even then, though, I knew it wasn’t true. If it had been…
‘Well, work it out for yourself. If it had just been sex, would I have tried so hard to get you to leave? I knew then, you see. I knew that moment I touched you…held you…
‘And then, when it did happen. I didn’t even bother trying to fight it…I wanted you too much…’
He had closed the space between them and was reaching out to take her in his arms. Held close against his body, breathing in the wonderful, precious male scent of him, Livvy felt her anger starting to melt away.
‘But if I hadn’t come upstairs when I did…’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ he told her. ‘Sooner or later it would have happened between us…if not by accident…’
As she lifted her face to look up at him, he smiled at her and bent to whisper something in her ear that made her face flush slightly.
‘You see…I would never, never have let you get away from me…and once we had been lovers…
‘You do love me, don’t you?’ he whispered against her mouth, and beneath the words Livvy could hear the hesitancy and uncertainty. It swept away the last of her doubts.
‘Yes, I love you,’ she whispered back as she clung to him. ‘Like you, I didn’t want to.’
‘But, like me, you’ve discovered that there are some things, some emotions that we can’t control.’
She was still in his arms half an hour later when the telephone started to ring. Reluctantly pushing him away, she told him, ‘That will probably be Gale.’
‘Tell her you’re far too busy to talk to her now,’ Robert whispered against her throat. ‘Oh, and warn her that she’d better prepare herself for a wedding. A very early wedding…’