CHAPTER SEVEN

SAUL had not planned to make any breaks in his journey, but a hold-up on the motorway had delayed him and he had rung Christie from his car to warn her that he would be arriving later than they had arranged.

She had laughed, telling him not to worry, adding drily that she hoped he wasn’t expecting to arrive to find a cordon-bleu-standard cooked meal waiting for him.

‘I’m working on my notes for this damned conference,’ she told him, adding ruthlessly, ‘besides, eating heavy meals after four in the afternoon isn’t good for the digestive system.’

‘Don’t worry, there’s no need to apologise,’ Saul assured her, grinning to himself as he caught her sharp intake of breath and heard her fierce and immediate,

‘I wasn’t apologising.’

She had always risen quickly to the bait, as impulsive and sometimes as ungoverned as he was controlled and careful. They had quarrelled fiercely sometimes during their growing years, Christie accusing him of benefiting from their father’s favouritism to her disadvantage.

He had denied it then, too full of youthful male arrogance to see the pain behind her anger. Now he understood her far better. She had far more ambition than him and it was channelled into her own beliefs and goals, unlike his.

He frowned as he hung up. What was the matter with him? It was too easy to blame his father for his present dissatisfaction with his life, too easy and unfair. His father had never forced or coerced him into doing anything.

He realised just in time that he was approaching his motorway exit. He would be at Christie’s sooner than he had expected after all.

Half an hour later he drove through Thresham. The small market town was virtually deserted. Too small to attract the attention of the planners of the sixties, it still had its narrow streets and its huddle of timber-framed and small Georgian houses.

He winced though to see the neon sign of a fast-food restaurant in the town square, although, to judge from the group of teenagers gathered outside it, not everyone shared his aversion. Fast food wasn’t a wholly new invention after all, he mused. One only had to think of the pie and sweetmeat sellers who would have thronged this square on a busy market day.

He couldn’t be very far away from Carey Chemicals, he realised, and on a sudden impulse he pulled to the side of the road and opened his briefcase, searching for the map and plan that had accompanied the investigator’s report.

He had virtually to drive past Carey’s on his way to his sister’s. It was gone nine o’clock and going dark. A good time to take a discreet and unofficial look at the place.

Carey’s had long ago ceased to need to run shift work, and as far as he knew from the report there was no official nightwatchman. What was the need? Carey’s had precious little left to steal. Gregory James had seen to that.

He found the lane easily enough. It was bumpy, un-tarmacked, and in the glare from his headlights he could see the signpost indicating ‘Walkers, this way’. He had forgotten that the site was bisected by a right of way that ran virtually through its centre.

Alex would not like that. Or at least he would not have liked it had he genuinely been intending to run the company as a going concern, instead of merely using it in order to take advantage of the proposed government grants.

Saul could see the purpose of the government’s scheme. It would be a good way of both furthering research into new drugs, and at the same time ensuring that the expense of successful ones was kept to a minimum for the National Health Service. But how many people would see it as Alex was doing, as a means purely of boosting their own profits?

Why should he concern himself over that? It was more Christie’s territory than his. She was the guardian of the family’s morals, not he.

He would have to be careful about what he told her, he admitted wearily as he parked his car and switched off the engine. He frowned to himself, aware of a growing sense of distaste for what he was going to have to do.

But what was the alternative? Give up his job. He would never get another. Alex would see to that. He had an ex-wife and two children. He couldn’t afford moral scruples.

But could he afford not to have them? Could he go on the way he was, with the canker of self-dislike eating into him, destroying him?

As he got out of his car he heard an owl hooting. When he looked up he saw the small bodies of tiny bats swooping and darting around the upper storey of the old corn mill.

He paused for a moment to study their busy movements. As a boy he had lived in East Anglia, flat, open countryside where in those days it had been safe for a child to roam at will. In his imagination he had travelled the secret fens with the free traders, evading the government’s excise men sent to hunt them and their illegal cargoes of French goods down, and then when he was older he had spent endless hours studying the wildlife with his father.

He felt a sudden ache deep inside. He had loved his father so much, wanted to please him … wanted to make up to him for all that his own life had lacked; to give him the success he had wanted so much. But his father was dead and had been for nearly ten years, and there was no one in his life to whom he could offer the gift of attaining his father’s ambitions for him.

A feeling of intense melancholy, of loneliness swept over him. He was tired of the way he was living, of the cynicism that had eroded the brightness of his dreams. He was tired of the constant power struggle with Alex, but most of all he was tired of himself, he acknowledged as he turned on his heel and walked over to the buildings.

* * *

Davina sighed as she closed her office door. The corridor lights were off but she knew her way well enough, and there was just enough light from outside to lessen the darkness.

It had been a long day. This morning she had had a deputation from the shop stewards representing the unions. They had wanted to know what was going to happen to the company.

She had answered them as honestly as she could, and she had seen the fear in their eyes when she was forced to admit the possibility of the company’s having to close. She was hoping that they could find a buyer, she had told them.

‘Who the hell would want to buy this place?’ one of the men had demanded sourly. ‘We’re working in conditions that aren’t fit or safe.’

Davina flushed at the accusation in his voice. There was nothing she could do to refute it. She had seen their working conditions for herself and had been appalled by them.

‘I’m sorry, but there just hasn’t been the money to re-equip,’ she had told them, but her voice had faltered as she thought about the money that Gregory had gambled away.

She was a rich man’s daughter, and, although she had learned young to be frugal, over the last few years she had indulged herself with the luxury of good, well made clothes, expensive clothes; and she had been acutely conscious of the fact that the suit she was wearing had probably cost more than many of her employees earned in a month, even though it was several years old.

She had seen in the eyes of the two women shop stewards present that they were equally aware of the disparity in their situations, and again guilt had engulfed her.

A buyer. Would the bank be able to find one? The manager had warned her that he had grave doubts.

She had reached the reception area, which was empty and in darkness. The air smelled stale and faintly dirty. While no expense had been spared in fitting out Gregory’s office, the reception area, the first place a potential customer saw on his or her arrival, was shabby and unappealing. Davina’s nose wrinkled in faint distaste as she hurried through it, opening the door and stepping out into the pleasantly fresh evening air.

She locked the door and then turned round. Her car was several yards away. As she hurried towards it she turned the corner of the building without looking up, her mind on the company and her problems, so that the totally unexpected sensation of walking straight into another person, when she had believed herself to be completely alone, sent her body into an automatic physical reflex action of panic.

The man—she knew it was a man even before she was able to look properly at him—caught hold of her as she tried to step back from him. She tensed as she felt his fingers gripping her arms, all the warnings she had read and heard about the danger of being a woman out at night on her own suddenly flooding terrifyingly through her.

The man was holding her too tightly for her to break free, and so instead she beat frantically at his chest and heard the surprised exhalation of air he gave.

That calmed her a little, making him suddenly seem less powerful, making it obvious that the contact between them had shocked him as much as it had done her.

At the same time Saul realised how much he had startled her. He had seen her coming round the corner, walking quickly, her head down, but it had been too late for him to call out a warning to her and she had walked straight into him.

Now he reacted instinctively to her panic, pulling her close against his own body and holding her pinioned firmly there while he told her quietly, ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you.’

She looked up at him then, a quick, startled, questioning look that fully revealed her face to him.

Davina James.

He recognised her immediately from her photograph, but what the photograph had not told him was how oddly fragile she was, how large and brilliant her eyes, how vulnerable the soft fullness of her mouth.

She was trembling slightly. He could feel the fast race of her heart, and to his own surprise he reacted instinctively to the subliminal messages of her body, tightening his grip on her, realigning his body slightly so that there was less distance between them, and then stopping abruptly as he realised what he was doing, halted by the sudden sharp awareness of how quickly and unexpectedly his physical responses had changed from an instinctive reaching out to fend off her unsuspecting collision with him, an action he would have used to anyone, either man or woman, to something that was only just a hair’s breadth away from outright physical arousal.

What was the matter with him? He was daily in just as close physical contact with dozens of women, beautiful young, desirable women. No one who worked in a city environment could not be. Every day there were countless small incidents of accidental close physical contact, in lifts, on the Tube, in offices. The accidental brushing together of human bodies in the close, confined spaces of modern living was a fact of life, and it was certainly not something that normally disturbed him.

In fact … He grimaced to himself, unwilling to admit how long it had been since he had even fleetingly thought about sex, never mind had it. There just wasn’t the room in his life to form that kind of relationship and just lately there hadn’t even been the need.

‘Let me go.’

The furious words brought him back to reality. He stepped back a little, flexing his fingers, thinking quickly.

Now that she was over her initial shock, she was furiously angry; angry enough, he recognised, to jeopardise all his plans before he had even begun to put them into action. The last thing he needed now was to be reported to the police as a potential prowler or worse.

‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised, smiling at her, using the techniques of body language and control he had learned over the years, stepping back from her but trying to keep his face in the shadows, lifting up his hands, palms open.

Davina’s heart was still beating too fast. He was well spoken, calm and authoritative, and now that he had released her her intuition told her that she was not in any physical danger from him.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded quietly. ‘This is private property.’ He might have apologised, he might have released her, but the adrenalin was still surging through her veins; shock and fear had turned to anger laced with the feeling of insecurity that came from being in a situation that was not fully under her own control.

She knew that she was probably over-reacting, but she couldn’t help it. Beneath her anger lay the uncomfortable knowledge that for a handful of seconds, as he held her, she had felt an unmistakable frisson of sexual awareness … of sexual need?

This was ridiculous. She wasn’t some sexually deprived widow, desperate for physical contact with a man, any man, because she had lost her husband.

If she wanted sex she could have it with Giles, couldn’t she?

The earthiness of her own thoughts blunted her anger, filling her with self-distaste.

‘I must have missed the footpath,’ she heard Saul telling her calmly.

It was a good job he had remembered that footpath sign. It gave him a perfect excuse for being where he was. He saw the hesitation in her eyes, and the quick searching glance she gave him. Luckily he was casually dressed.

A walker who had missed the signpost for the footpath. It was quite feasible, of course. In fact, it did sometimes happen, but it was already virtually dark. Too dark for someone who didn’t know where the footpath lay to risk following it?

Contrarily, although she wanted to press him, to challenge him, something made her hold back. Caution … the sense of self-preservation and hesitancy she had developed as a child; an awareness that it might not be wise to ask questions whose answers might provoke the still, placid waters of safety.

‘The footpath is over there,’ she told him curtly, gesturing towards the open fields.

‘Thank you.’ There was nothing in his voice to give rise to the sharp quiver of tension that touched her. His face was obscured by the shadows, but she caught the reflective glitter of his eyes as he answered her.

He was a tall man and lean, but unexpectedly hard-muscled. She shivered a little. It had been a long time since she had been in such close, intimate contact with a man’s body.

Not really since Matt.

Matt … what on earth had made her think of him? There was no similarity between the two men at all. Matt had been just over average height, fair-haired, solid, an amiable, easygoing man, full of laughter and warmth, and her instincts told her that, quite apart from their physical differences, the last thing this man would be was easygoing.

But he had still, however briefly, made her sharply aware of her body’s sexuality.

He was turning away from her now, walking with a long, well paced stride. She watched him until he was out of sight before heading for her car.

The unexpected encounter had disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.

Saul waited until he was sure she had gone before returning to his own car. There was no point in risking looking around now. She might just decide to come back.

As he started his car the file on the front passenger-seat slid forward, the contents coming out. As he reached out to pick them up Saul saw the photograph of Davina.

On paper Davina James had seemed the least important of the elements surrounding Alex’s desire to buy out Carey’s, but in the flesh … In the flesh she was threatening to complicate matters in a way that made him instinctively fight to suppress his awareness of those complications.

Anger, irritation and the familiar surging panic of somehow no longer being totally in control of every aspect of his life tensed his body.

He pushed Davina’s photograph to the back of the other papers and stuffed them all quickly back into the file before driving off.

* * *

She supposed she ought to make herself some supper but she really wasn’t hungry, Davina admitted as she let herself into the house. Instead she felt charged with an unfamiliar, disconcerting physical and emotional energy, a restlessness that matched her quickened heartbeat and tense movements.

It came to something when an accidental run-in with an unknown man could put her into such an advanced state of reaction, she thought grimly as she stared at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. Her face was slightly flushed, her eyes huge and dilated. Even her mouth seemed softer, fuller. As though she had been kissed.

She banished the thought, irritated that it should have formed at all. What was the matter with her? The last thing she had time for now was idiotic wayward thoughts of that kind. Hadn’t she got enough to worry about without imagining …?

Imagining what? That he … the walker had kissed her? Thank God he hadn’t done. The whole incident had been difficult enough for her to handle as it was.

She stripped off her suit and blouse. Being at Carey’s always left her feeling grimy.

Matt had once told her that, per capita, English women had the best bodies in the world. The trouble was, he had added, that they were also the best at concealing that fact. He had then gone on to describe eloquently and erotically the visual delight a man might enjoy in observing the way an Italian woman wore her clothes and moved her body, or the subtle sensuality of cool hauteur that matched a Frenchwoman’s immaculate grooming and posture.

It had been shortly after that that he had taken her to London shopping, exhausting her with his energy and his enthusiasm, and astonishing her with his concentration on even the smallest detail of not just how clothes were constructed but how they felt to the touch, how they moved, how they embraced a woman’s body.

But then, of course, as an artist, such things had been important to him.

He was dead now, an accident in California. She had read about it in the papers and had quietly mourned his loss. Not as her lover, but as a gifted and talented man who had also possessed great humanity and generosity.

In her bathroom she stripped off her underwear, glancing briefly at her body in the mirrors. It had been Matt who had taught her not to be ashamed or embarrassed about her femininity, not to seek out its imperfections but instead to celebrate its individuality.

He had been a good man, a kind man, a man she had been lucky to know and whom she had never regretted knowing, but why on earth that walker tonight should have reminded her of him she had no idea.

She tensed as she saw the immediate sexual tension change her body, her breasts swelling slightly, lifting, her nipples erect, flushed with heat, her stomach muscles clenching, her stance altering infinitesimally in the way a woman’s stance did when she thought about the intimate physical contact of standing close to a man she desired.

Irritated, impatient, and too much on edge, she turned away and stepped into the shower, lathering her body with quick efficiency and rinsing off the soap, reaching for her towel, firmly refusing to give in to the temptation of looking at herself in the mirror again.

What was she afraid of seeing?

Defiantly she stared into the mirror, throwing the damp towel to one side. Her body was slim and firm, her skin smooth and unblemished.

If she closed her eyes she could still remember how it had felt to have Matt’s hands touching her, Matt’s mouth on her skin. Matt’s hands, Matt’s mouth, not those of tonight’s stranger, she told herself fiercely.

Matt. Not him … Matt!

* * *

The first time she had met Matt had been one sultry afternoon when she’d returned from shopping to find him lifting the heavy stone slabs that formed what she had always privately considered to be a particularly ugly patio. She had mentioned a month earlier to the owner of the local garden-maintenance company they used that she would like to have that part of the garden redesigned, and he had promised to send someone round to look at it.

Matt, it transpired, was that someone. He had stopped work when he saw her and as her eyes had flicked uncomfortably away from his bare, sweat-damp torso he had reached easily for his discarded shirt, pulling it on, taking care to allow her to stay a comfortable distance away from him as he showed her the sketches he had prepared for a pretty paved sunken garden.

He had taken a temporary job on the landscaping side of the business, he told her later when she took him a cup of tea. Later still she learned that he and Owen Graham, who owned the company, had been at public school together. She also learned that Matt was a wanderer, a traveller, a man who could never be tied to one place or one person for very long.

She had been drawn to him immediately. There was something open and warm about him that touched her starved senses. She had no awareness of him in the sexual sense, not then. She had long ago abandoned any thoughts of herself as a sexually functioning woman, and especially as a desirable woman. She and Gregory no longer had sex, and she felt no desire to experience with another man the misery and sense of inadequacy she had suffered on her honeymoon.

Gregory had his other women. She had learned to recognise the signs and, while inwardly she ached with the pain of disillusionment of all that she had once thought her marriage would be compared with what it actually was, she told herself that in many ways Gregory was no worse than other women’s husbands.

It was true that they might not be as persistently unfaithful as Gregory but, all too aware of her own inability to respond to him, she felt guiltily that she must just accept that he would seek sexual solace elsewhere.

The thought of divorcing him and perhaps beginning a new relationship with someone else was as alien to her as the thought of flying to Mars …

And it wasn’t even as though she was particularly unhappy. Not now … she had been at first, but now she had learned to accept the limitations of their relationship and to live within them. She just wasn’t the adventurous or independent type, she told herself when the small voice of despair and disillusionment deep inside her broke through the defences she had put up against it.

It had been at Gregory’s insistence that she had handed over the care of the garden to Owen’s company. She suspected that Gregory’s insistence had more to do with appearance than because he wanted to spare her the hard work. Hard work which she had actually enjoyed, and which she still enjoyed.

She was trying an experiment with a group of pink hydrangeas in one of the borders through which she was growing a darker pink clematis, and she was just studying the effect of the first opening flowers of the clematis against the paler pinks of the hydrangeas one morning when she looked up to see Matt walking across the lawn towards her.

For some reason she suddenly felt oddly embarrassed and nervous. She flushed a little as he approached her, but he hadn’t seemed to notice, remarking pleasantly, ‘A good combination. You have a good eye for colour.’

‘Not me,’ Davina admitted, his calm words relaxing her. ‘I’m afraid I’m only a copyist.’

‘The effect is good none the less, and there’s nothing wrong with being a copyist. That’s how I’ve earned some of my best commissions.’

From her brief conversations with him, Davina had learned that Matt was an artist, who supplemented his small income from commission by doing casual work for a variety of friends.

He was a man of odd contrasts, physically sturdy and slightly heavily built, and yet unexpectedly deft and gentle in his movements; he worked manually, but his accent betrayed his upper-class origins.

She knew that he had never been married, and suspected that he cherished his freedom. He seemed to have travelled all over the world, and he was obviously intelligent as well as extremely articulate. But what surprised her most of all about him was his obvious lack of material ambitions.

He didn’t run a car; he lived in a small cottage he was renting from a local farmer, laughing about its lack of facilities, its ancient stove and even more ancient hot-water system.

Davina laughed too as he described to her the rough shower arrangement he had rigged up in the yard, and then abruptly her stomach tensed, her body stilling with shock as she suddenly had a sharply clear-cut mental image of him standing there, his solidly muscled body glistening with moisture, his skin, water-sleek, tanned, furred by the soft golden hairs visible to her now on his arms.

Her mouth went very dry. She tried to swallow and was shaken by a fierce frisson of sensation that was so unexpected, so unfamiliar that the shock of it froze her. And then, as the mortified colour flooded her skin, she was frantically glad that Matt had had his back to her.

After that she kept away from the garden on the days when he was working, disturbed and distressed by her physical reaction to him, terrified that he might become aware of it and of embarrassing them both.

She missed the conversations she had had with him. She had recently discovered the books of Gertrude Jekyll and become a devoted fan of her work, and Matt had been a fund of knowledge about her colleagues and peers, especially the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

And then totally unexpectedly one morning when he was not due to work at all he arrived at the house with a brown-paper-covered package.

‘I spotted this in a bookshop in Chester,’ he told her as she invited him in.

Flustered, Davina offered him a cup of tea. He moved very easily and lightly for such a solidly built man and the realisation that he was standing directly behind her flustered her even more.

‘What is it, Davina?’ he asked her quietly, very gently taking hold of her and turning her round so that she was facing him. ‘Is something wrong?’

She shook her head. Tiny thrills of sensation were running up her arms and down her body, sensations that sprang directly from the sensation of his hands on her bare arms.

‘So you haven’t been avoiding me as a means of telling me that you know how much I want you and that my wanting isn’t reciprocated, then?’

Davina stared at him, as confused as though he had spoken to her in an unfamiliar language, which indeed he had. Davina was not used to hearing men telling her that they wanted her.

‘Now I have shocked you.’

He was smiling. She could hear the rueful amusement in his voice, the total lack of embarrassment or self-consciousness.

‘You’re blushing,’ he told her, releasing her arm to brush his knuckles gently across her hot face. And then he saw the tears filling her eyes. ‘Davina, my dear, what is it?’

He was holding her now, holding her as a child and not a woman.

‘Please don’t cry. I never intended to upset you or offend you.’

‘It isn’t … You haven’t …’ she managed to tell him, and then, like the lancing of a too painful, too long-concealed inner wound, she was telling him about Gregory, about her marriage, and even, most astonishingly of all, about her own deep and humiliating fears that she was somehow unable to function properly as a sexual woman.

Matt let her talk, not trying to halt the tumultuous flood of half-sentences and words, letting the pain spill out of her to be soaked up by the comfort of his physical closeness, his gentle, accepting, uncritical silence.

Later, recalling the event, she would marvel at the extraordinary way in which she had so easily and so speedily cast aside the caution of a lifetime and confided to Matt things she had barely been able to allow herself to admit even in the privacy of her thoughts, but it was as though once she had started it was impossible for her to stop, impossible for her to stem the impulsive disjointed torrent of words that carried with them in their fast flow all the detritus of pain and insecurity she had carried with her for so long.

Matt let her speak, not trying to interrupt or stem the flood, and when the words had finally ceased to pour from her he produced a large crisply clean white handkerchief and commanded gently, ‘Come on, blow.’

He was so calming and relaxed after the high emotion of her outpourings that it made Davina laugh.

‘That’s better,’ Matt told her approvingly, and then while she was still looking up at him, laughter mingling with her tears, his expression changed, a subtle but somehow very distinctive change that made her heart beat faster and her body become charged with a different kind of emotion.

‘I can’t tell you why your husband doesn’t want you, Davina,’ he said softly. ‘But what I can tell you is that it isn’t any fault of yours, and as for your being sexually undesirable …’ He smiled at her again, a rueful, slightly crooked smile that made her breath catch in her throat and her heartbeat rocket into sudden acceleration. ‘Come and have supper with me tonight. I’ve had some ideas about the garden I’d like to discuss with you.’

He saw her expression and his smile deepened.

‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘I shan’t try to seduce you. In my book, desire must be a mutual need in order to make it a mutual pleasure. I want you, Davina, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to take you to bed and to show you all the reasons why that husband of yours is wrong, but until you tell me that you want me as well I shan’t do so. You’ve nothing to fear from me, Davina.’

But everything to fear from herself, Davina acknowledged shakily. Common sense and caution told her to refuse his invitation, but recklessly, wantonly, she ignored their chiding voices.

Her father was away on a golfing holiday, and tonight, as with most nights unless they were entertaining, Gregory was unlikely to return home until the early hours of the morning, so there would be no one to carp or question where she was or with whom.

Even so, she couldn’t quite meet Matt’s eyes as she said huskily, ‘Thank you … I’d … I’d like that. The garden does need a lot of replanning,’ she added quickly, guilt making her underline the purpose of her visit. ‘I’ve been wondering about separating the garden into different sections …’ Her voice trailed away and she knew she was flushing, even though what she was saying was perfectly true.

‘I’ve got some books you might like to look at,’ Matt told her. ‘I could make some preliminary sketches incorporating different features.’

‘You’re … you’re very kind,’ Davina told him, swallowing hard, wishing her voice wouldn’t tremble so betrayingly nor her skin flush so hotly.

He was laughing a little now, his eyes bright with amusement as he leaned towards her, his fingertips touching her hot skin, just brushing the corner of her mouth. ‘You’re trembling,’ he told her, watching her, watching her mouth. ‘You’ll tremble even more when we’re lovers, when you cry out my name at the apex of your desire.’

She couldn’t conceal the effect his words were having on her, and nor could she control the fine thrill of pleasure that ran through her as her body reacted physically to the heady sensual promise of his words.

The oddest thing of all, she reflected dizzily later, having gone over and over a hundred times or more the entire incident in the hours since he had left, was not just that he had actually said that he had desired her, but that she had believed him, and had actually responded to him; had actually felt her body’s physical response to all that he had said.

She could feel it even now, could even conjure up a sharply erotic echo of that fiercely thrilling sensation just by closing her eyes and imagining the sound of his voice, by visualising a mental image of him; by recalling everything he had said to her; everything he had done, everything he had promised.

Her heart jerked nervously. What on earth was she contemplating? They could not possibly become lovers. It was totally out of the question. She simply was not that kind of woman. She was married, for one thing, and if her marriage was not the relationship she had hoped for, well, that did not mean that she should fling herself headlong into the arms of the first man to approach her.

Where was her common sense, her caution, her self-restraint, her pride? Did all the things she had lived her life by suddenly mean nothing because a man had told her he wanted her? She had never felt like this before; never felt particularly deprived because of the paucity of the sexual side of her marriage. In fact, she had been guiltily relieved when Gregory had stopped having sex with her. She was not highly sexually motivated, she knew that. She did not feel intense sexual desire, so why, suddenly and totally contrarily, had she experienced that wholly unfamiliar and sharply thrilling surge of need and awareness?

Hot colour burned her skin as she closed her eyes in self-distaste. She ought to be ashamed of herself. She was ashamed of herself, and she certainly wasn’t going to go and have supper with Matt tonight. He would understand, of course, when she didn’t turn up. But what would he understand? That she was disappointed because he had said that he would not attempt to seduce her? Her face burned even more hotly at the thought.

Even so, it wasn’t until she was actually getting changed that she was prepared to admit to herself that she was going to go.

She drove to the cottage slowly and nervously, fiercely reminding herself that nothing was going to happen, that they were merely going to discuss replanning her garden, but that didn’t stop her heart from beating nervously, nor her body from tensing in nervous anticipation.

But it was too late now. She had reached the cottage, and there was Matt, opening the door and waiting to welcome her.

Her heart literally feeling as though it had lodged somewhere in her throat, blocking it, she got slowly out of her car and walked even more slowly across the cobbled yard, pausing briefly as she felt the soft cushioning of something underfoot and looked down to discover that someone had planted a variety of mosses in the cracks between the cobbles.

Her tension momentarily forgotten, she studied them, entranced by the subtlety of the soft greens and yellows against the grey of the stone, realising that only Matt with his artist’s eye could have chosen such a delicate and yet effective colour scheme.

‘Like it?’

She had been so absorbed that she hadn’t heard him move, and now suddenly she felt breathless and dizzy as she lifted her head and realised how close to her he actually was.

He smelled clean and fresh, of soap rather than any artificially created scent, and she was suddenly acutely and keenly aware of him as a man. He was dressed casually in jeans and a soft faded cotton shirt and, like him, his clothes smelled of clean fresh air and soap.

Dizzily she stared at him, helplessly caught up in the tide of her own awareness, fighting to remember why she was here as he led her towards the cottage.

The front door opened straight into a small sitting-room, where a log fire burned in the grate, casting softening shadows over the room so that at first one didn’t notice the shabbiness of its furnishings, only the warmth of their colour.

Old faded rugs softened the bleakness of the stone floor, woven throws disguising the splits in the leather-covered chesterfield. A variety of plants in pots cluttered the window-sill, and almost every inch of wall space seemed to be filled with shelf after shelf of books.

Thoroughly bemused, Davina simply stood absorbing her surroundings, both drawn to and fascinated by their alienness, by their total contrast to her own home. Here nothing was rigid or formal; here nothing shrieked too self-consciously and gratingly of wealth and status; here everything was soft and mellow, inviting one’s touch, soothing one’s senses.

Matt, watching her, marvelled at her naïveté and her innocence. She had absolutely no awareness whatsoever of her own overflowing sensuality. He had never seen a woman respond so quickly nor so enticingly to the visual stimulation of her senses. He had witnessed it first while he watched her in her garden, his artist’s eye immediately aware of the way she touched her plants, of the way she responded to the texture and colour of them.

It was the same now in this room. He could almost see the way her senses were responding to its warmth and colour.

She was starving inside, he recognised. Not for the crude physical appeasement of mere sex, but for the true fulfilment of the sensuality she had been forced to suppress. He would teach her to enjoy that sensuality, to appreciate and to laud it. He would make love to her here in this room in front of the fire, which would cast its warming glow over her pale satin skin; where its curves and hollows would glow, mysteriously pale and vulnerable in the shadows and where she would cry out tremulously beneath his touch.

He would make love to her in the sunshine as well; in the long sweet grass of the cottage’s small neglected orchard, where her skin would smell of sunlight and where she would protest a little at the brilliance of that sunlight on their entwined bodies until he showed her the delight of its warmth on their skins.

And if he stayed long enough he would make love to her in winter, their bodies locked together in the warmth of the high old-fashioned brass bed upstairs in the cottage’s single attic room, while outside the snow would lend an eerie delicacy to the light and her breasts would glow rosily pink from the roughness of his skin against their soft tenderness as he suckled on her nipples.

Davina, totally absorbed in her wondering visual exploration of the room, had no idea of his thoughts. When she looked at him he was watching her quietly, smiling slightly at her.

‘You’ve made it so …’ she shook her head, searching for the right words, and could only say helplessly ‘… so … so you.’

He grinned at her, and as she watched him she realised that she had never known this with anyone, man or woman; that she had never shared laughter with anyone before; that she had never wanted to share laughter, nor indeed thought of herself as the kind of woman who did laugh very much; but suddenly with Matt it seemed easy to laugh, easy to kick off her shoes and to curl up on the chesterfield, as he suggested, while he brought her the books he wanted her to see.

They were well worth seeing, and very quickly she was engrossed in their contents, exclaiming enthusiastically and enviously over the photographs of the gardens they detailed.

When she lingered wistfully over a photograph of a pergola heavy with fat pink old-fashioned roses Matt produced a sketch-pad and quickly showed her how such a feature could be used to break up her own garden. As she pored eagerly over his sketch Davina forgot how hesitant and doubtful she had been about spending the evening with him, watching in awed pleasure as his pencil quickly created for her a visual image of how her garden might be transformed.

‘It looks wonderful, but I doubt if either my father or Gregory would agree,’ she sighed wistfully.

‘Why ask them?’ Matt challenged her, and suddenly her heart thumped heavily and disturbingly. ‘You’re an adult, not a child, Davina,’ Matt told her. ‘You have the right to define your own life, to make your own decisions and to be held responsible and accountable to no one but yourself.’

Again her heartbeat quickened. They were not, she knew, merely discussing any changes she might want to make to the garden, but before she could say anything Matt put down his sketch-pad and got up.

‘Suppertime,’ he told her cheerfully, and then when she too would have risen he shook his head, his hand on her shoulders, gently pressing her back into the chesterfield. ‘No, you stay here,’ he told her.

He wasn’t gone very long, and when he came back he was carrying a tray with a platter of meats and cheeses on it.

‘I’ve discovered a marvellous deli in Chester,’ he told her as he put down the tray. ‘Hang on a sec and I’ll get the wine.’

The wine was clear and cold, misting the plain glasses into which Matt poured it, glasses that Gregory, with his love of heavily cut expensive crystal, would have disdained, but Davina knew the moment she tasted it that this cool, clear liquid with its sharp burst of taste was far superior to anything her husband would ever have served.

‘Like it?’ Matt asked, watching her.

She nodded.

‘Good. It’s Italian, from a small family-run vineyard. They don’t produce much commercially,’ he added carelessly, not telling her that the vineyard belonged to an uncle who was one of his godparents, nor that the wine they produced was not sold commercially because its production was the hobby of the aristocratic Italian conte who owned the vineyard, and that to be given a bottle of his cherished wine was an honour accorded to few people.

When he had given Matt the wine he had told him eloquently that its bouquet was as delicate and erotic as a virgin’s first tremulous climax, and it seemed very fitting to Matt that he should share it with Davina James, who, while maybe no virgin in the strict physical sense, was still unawakened in a way that very few modern virgins could claim to be.

The wine, the unexpected and unfamiliar textures and tastes of the spicy meats and the soft cheeses, were all so new and different to Davina that her enjoyment of them filled her senses. She only drank one glass of wine, knowing that she was driving, but even that one glass seemed to warm her body, sending a singing vibrancy through her veins that made her suddenly, acutely and nervously aware of Matt and the fact that they were alone.

When she put down her plate and protested huskily that she had stayed too long and must leave, Matt made no attempt to stop her. Gravely he helped her on with her jacket, making no attempt to do anything other than formally and carefully assist her with it, before walking with her out to her car.

When he opened the door for her he did so without any flourish or sexuality, and she told herself that the small shiver of sensation she felt as she got into the car was one of relief and gratitude rather than disappointment.

She was actually about to drive away, when he leaned down and said to her through the open window, ‘Davina … remember, if you want me, or need me for anything, you can always find me here.’