Marriage Make-Up

She had later admitted to him that if he had taken her there and then, in the middle of the quadrangle on the short, sweet grass, she doubted that she would have made any move to stop him. That was the kind of effect he had had on her, even though at the time she had still been a virgin and her experience of the opposite sex had been limited to Lloyd’s chastely explorative kisses and attempts at a bit of mild petting.

When she had discovered that Sam was not, as she had assumed, a fellow student, but a newly appointed junior classics lecturer, who had just completed his doctorate at Harvard, she had been completely mortified and shocked.

He had read her a mild lecture about riding her bicycle through a prohibited area and then sent her on her way, and she had not expected to see him again.

Only two days later he had turned up at her lodgings, carrying a book which had fallen out of the basket of her bike. She could remember how embarrassed she had been about the fact that he had discovered her almost in tears over a newspaper story she had been reading.

The article had been accompanied by heart-and conscience-rending photographs of grave-eyed starving children in the Third World, which had made Abbie exclaim passionately to Sam, once he had discovered the reason for her tears, that she could never bring a child into a world where so many, many children were so desperately in need.

‘I expect you think I’m being over-emotional, don’t you?’ she had asked him self-consciously when she had herself back under control, but he had shaken his head.

‘No, I don’t,’ he’d told her sombrely. ‘As a matter of fact…’

He had never finished what he had been about to say because one of Abbie’s fellow lodgers had returned, bounding into her room to request Abbie’s assistance in the search for a borrowed book she had misplaced.

Sam had refused her offer of a cup of coffee, but it had been close to the beginning of the summer recess at the time, and to her astonishment, two weeks later, when she was lying in the garden of her parents’ home sunbathing, he had turned up and invited her out.

He had explained later that he hadn’t felt he was in a position to ask her out before, bearing in mind the fact that she was a student and he a lecturer. When he had explained that he’d felt uncomfortable about being thought of as the kind of lecturer who took advantage of his position to coerce young female students into sexual relationships with him, she had fallen even more deeply in love with him. He was so straightforward, so honest, so moral…Too moral on occasions…like the time he had refused to take her back to his rooms with him and make love to her.

‘You don’t want me,’ she’d accused him tearfully.

In reply he had taken hold of her hand and placed it on his body. The strength and size of his erection beneath her hand had both shocked and excited her, and when he had seen the way her face flushed and she couldn’t quite meet his eyes he had laughed and then sighed, gently lifting her hand away as he’d told her softly, ‘You see, it’s too soon and you’re—’

‘Don’t you dare tell me I’m too young,’ she had interrupted him passionately. ‘I’m twenty…almost…’

‘And I’m twenty-six…almost,’ he had told her.

‘That’s only a difference of six years,’ she had protested.

‘You’re a virgin still, and I’m not,’ he had told her implacably. ‘You’re still playing in the shallows, whereas I—’

‘I can learn. You can teach me…’ she had told him fiercely. ‘You…’

He had closed his eyes then and taken her in his arms.

‘Oh, God, don’t tempt me like that,’ he had whispered to her, and his voice had been shaking—not with laughter, as she had first suspected, but with a mixture of emotions so potentially awesome and mind-blowing that she had trembled with excitement merely to think about them.

She had trembled as well when he had kissed her properly the first time, and for many, many times after that.

But it hadn’t just been sex…desire between them…

Abbie closed her eyes as the still painful memories engulfed her.

The first time Sam had kissed her properly had been on their second date. She had happened to mention that she wanted to go and see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was being performed traditionally at Stratford, not intending to hint and certainly not expecting him to offer to take her there. The play had simply been extremely well reviewed and she had semi-hoped that her parents might offer to take her as a special treat.

When Sam had rung and said that he had got two tickets, and asked if she would like to go with him, she had been too breathless with excitement at the thought of seeing him again to co-ordinate her thoughts and ask any kind of logical or practical questions. So when he had arrived to collect her, fortunately a little early, dressed in all the formal elegance of a dinner suit, her mouth had parted in a soft ‘oh’ of surprised shock whilst her eyes had registered her shy but very wholehearted and feminine approval of his sensually male elegance.

‘I thought we could go somewhere and have some supper after the play,’ he had suggested, as much to her parents as to her, Abbie had recognised, watching as her mother beamed her approval and her father coughed and muttered something about being sure he could trust Sam to get her home at a decent time.

Fortunately, long, floaty cotton dresses had been ‘in’ that year, and worn for everything from casual pub drinks to far more formal affairs. Hers had been new, the soft mixture of greens setting off her fair skin and blonde hair and matching her eyes quite spectacularly—or so the sales girl in the shop had told her. It had had a little high round neck, with cut-away sleeves and a keyhole cut out at the back, the soft cotton falling into a floaty A-line skirt.

The pretty white silk wrap her mother had rushed upstairs to lend her had given the dress a more formal and elegant air, and Abbie remembered how she had blushed to the tips of her ears and curled her toes in her shoes as she’d felt her body’s dangerous reaction to the way Sam had glanced oh, so briefly at her body, in such a way that it made her feel sure that he knew just how, beneath the thin cotton of her dress, her breasts were bare, her nipples tightening and pushing wantonly against the fine fabric…

It was over an hour’s drive to Stratford, and for the first half of the journey Abbie had sat in blissful silence, too excited and overwhelmed by Sam’s presence to make any attempt at conversation.

Later, she had managed to relax enough to comment that it had been a lovely day, and Sam had replied, equally gravely, that, yes, it had and that the rest of the week promised to be equally fine. Had she been sunbathing? he had asked her casually.

‘Yes,’ she had agreed, adding that she had to be rather careful about going out in the sun because her skin was very fair and sensitive. She would never, she had admitted ruefully, have the wonderful golden tan that other girls seemed to get so easily and which was so fashionable.

They had been on a quiet stretch of road at the time, and Sam had turned his head and looked gravely at her before reducing the car’s speed and reaching out to gently run his fingertips the full length of her bare arm. It was a gesture that had had her trembling with pleasure even before he had encircled her wrist and lifted it to his lips to caress the sensitive area where her pulse thudded visibly just beneath the surface.

‘Your skin, like you, is perfect as it is,’ he had told her huskily, and as his gaze had once again moved briefly to her breasts she had had a shockingly vivid mental image of his dark head bent over their nakedness whilst his mouth suckled first one sensitive tip and then the other.

Hurriedly she had looked away from him, half afraid that if he looked into her eyes he might actually read her thoughts.

The intensity of her own desire for him was still something she had not wholly come to terms with. By mutual consent she and Lloyd had agreed that, whilst they wanted to remain friends, friends was all they wanted to be; they still went out together occasionally, and they still enjoyed one another’s company, but she had needed no proof that she had made the right decision in admitting to herself that, much as she liked Lloyd as a person, for them to have become lovers would have trapped them both in a relationship which could never go anywhere. She had found that out in the way she felt about Sam. Nothing had prepared her for physically reacting so intensely to a man, or her own growing emotional dependence on him.

She was already half afraid that she was in danger of falling in love with him. What else could explain her immediate and overwhelming attraction to him?

It had been a perfect summer’s evening, the air sweet and balmy, the feel of Sam’s dinner-suited arm against her bare skin as he helped her with her wrap and they walked away from the car towards the theatre deliciously exciting and sensual.

Very much aware of the interested and appreciative looks Sam was attracting from the female halves of other couples heading in the direction of the theatre, Abbie had felt proud and elated that he had chosen her as his date, as well as just a little bit wary that some other woman might try to take him away from her. He was, after all, a very compellingly attractive and male man: tall, broad-shouldered, with just a hint of muscle beneath his well-tailored suit, his dark hair thick and shiny, his eyes a bright, laughing blue and not cold at all, but rich and warm and full of silent messages she was half afraid to interpret.

The discovery that he had booked a private box for them had made Abbie stare at him in stunned delight.

‘I’ve ordered us some champagne,’ Sam whispered to her as they were shown to their seats. ‘I hope you like it…’

‘I love it,’ Abbie fibbed, not wanting to admit that the only time she had really tasted it was at weddings, and then only the odd half-glass.

Her parents had been rather uneasy at first when, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she had got herself a job working in a local hotel serving at the tables in the restaurant, but Abbie had insisted that she wanted the independence of feeling she was contributing towards her own upkeep, even though she knew they were more than willing, as well as able, to support her through university.

Once she had left home for university she had not told them at first that she had got herself a part-time job working in a small local pub, sensing that they would be concerned.

They knew now, though, but knew also that Abbie still avoided drinking alcohol herself. It was too expensive for one thing, and for another she didn’t seem to have much of a head for it. But she would rather have died than confess to Sam that the champagne with which he had filled her glass just before the curtain went up tasted far too dry to her uneducated palate, and was already making her head swim slightly.

During the interval he took hold of her hand and asked her if she was enjoying herself and then added semi-harshly, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this. You do realise that, don’t you?’

She wasn’t really sure what he meant until he explained.

‘You weren’t meant to arrive in my life like this, not now…It’s too soon and I’m not prepared, although how the hell can anyone ever be prepared for…? You’re such a baby still,’ he groaned as he removed the champagne glass from her trembling hand and took her in his arms. ‘And the last thing I need is the kind of havoc that falling in love with you is going to cause in my life.

‘I had everything so carefully planned,’ he whispered against her lips as he caressed them gently with his own mouth, teasing them with light, delicate butterfly kisses which for some reason caused a dark flush to run up under his own skin, and his grip on her wrists as he held her away from his body tightened so much that it almost hurt.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he whispered remorsefully to her as he raised each wrist to his mouth in turn and kissed it gently. ‘It’s all your fault that I’m feeling like this…behaving like this,’ he told her rawly. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as sensible and level-headed, too cautious and logical to get involved in…You’ve made me realise that I hardly knew myself at all.’

‘You can’t be in love with me,’ she had protested shakily, but her eyes had given away her real feelings and she had seen the way his own reflected that knowledge.

‘No, I can’t, can I…?’ he drawled self-derogatorily. ‘After all, I hardly know you…you hardly know me, and we haven’t even been to bed together yet…How can I possibly be in love…?’

As she looked at him, her inhibitions relaxed by the cocktail of the champagne she had drunk and her own emotions, she told him bravely, ‘I…I haven’t been to bed with anyone. But…but I know I want to go to bed with you, Sam…I want it to be you who…I want it to be you,’ she had finished in a soft, quavery little voice, and that was when he had kissed her properly for the first time in the darkened shadows of their box. Kissed her with his arms wrapped tightly around her, his body pressed against hers as his hands caressed her, his mouth hard and hot on hers, his tongue stroking her lips, coaxing them apart whilst she shivered with emotion and arousal, willing to give him anything, everything, if only he never took his mouth away from hers again.

She couldn’t remember sitting through the rest of the play, but they must have done, and she couldn’t remember much about the meal they’d had afterwards either. All she could remember was how much she had wanted to be alone with Sam, how much she had ached and yearned for him; how she had felt as he’d gently coaxed her to eat some of the dessert she had ordered and then felt unable to eat, lifting the spoon to her mouth, watching her whilst her lips parted and her face flooded with colour as her body and her senses recognised the sensuality, the sexuality of what he was doing, even whilst mentally she was still a stranger to such intense intimacy.

He had taken her straight home that evening, and on the evenings that had followed, but then, one Thursday, he had asked her how she and her parents would feel if he asked her to go away with him for a weekend…

‘When?’ had been her single, breathless response.

‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning,’ he had told her.

Downstairs the telephone rang, but although she heard it she was still lost in the past. Abbie made no attempt to go and answer it. She didn’t want to remember all this, she told herself frantically. She didn’t want to relive it all again…to experience the pain of it all again. Not even from the safe distance of the years and the knowledge that separated her from it. But it was too late to hold back the memories, too late to stem the rushing tide sweeping down over her.

Please, no, she protested silently, but she knew it was no use. She had already allowed herself to remember too much, and she would now have to endure what she herself had set in motion. Her body trembling, she closed her eyes and gave in.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I JUST can’t believe this wonderful weather that we’re having, and the forecasters are predicting that the heatwave is going to last at least another week…’

As Sam turned his head to look at her Abbie realised, with indignation, that he was laughing at her. He had picked her up from her parents’ house half an hour ago, as arranged, firmly refusing to tell her where they were going as he placed her case in the boot of his car.

It had given her a funny little feeling inside to see her case nestling next to his, her heart giving a fierce, excited skip.

‘What are you so nervous about?’ Sam was asking her now.

‘I’m not nervous,’ Abbie denied untruthfully.

‘Oh, yes, you are,’ he told her softly. ‘You always talk about the weather when you’re nervous…’

‘No, I do not,’ Abbie protested, and then she looked at him and her heart melted, along with her nerves and her last-minute doubts about what she was doing.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Sam told her gently, the laughter disappearing from his eyes to be replaced by an emotion that made her head pound dizzily. ‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do…’

‘But I do want to,’ Abbie told him, and then blushed hotly and tried valiantly to hold his eyes as he looked straight into hers, praying that he wouldn’t further tease her by demanding, You want to what? He didn’t, but the look he was giving her was far more toe-curlingly explicit than any words could ever have been.

She still couldn’t quite believe that he wanted her so much…that he was, as he’d told her himself, falling dangerously and completely in love with her.

Once during the journey, when she turned to look at him, her eyes widening as she saw the way his hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel, he told her huskily, begged, ‘Please don’t keep on looking at me like that. If you do I’m going to have to stop the car and take you in my arms and kiss the hell out of you, and once I start to do that…’

Abbie could feel her whole body, her face, starting to burn with the heat of what she was feeling. She could sense, see how dangerously close to losing control he was, and along with her instinctive sense of awe and virginal fear she also experienced a sharp thrill of feminine power and pleasure in the knowledge that she could have such an effect on him.

‘The first time we make love I want it to be perfect for you, on a bed heaped high with the softest down and feather pillows, in a room that smells of roses and summer. I want to watch the sunlight on your body, high up in a turret, somewhere where we can be completely alone, just us and the sounds of nature and the living, breathing universe around us reaching us through narrow-latticed paned windows.

‘Way, way below us there’ll be a river, wide and slow-moving, the water soft and clear, and in the pool that it forms we’ll swim together under a moonlit sky, and then we’ll make love again on the grassy bank, still warm from the day’s sunshine.

‘The moonlight will turn your body to lissom silver. I’ll follow its path with my hands and my lips. Your body will welcome mine with a sweet mixture of semi-pagan innocence and knowing that is in all women, a gift, but most especially in yours. Your skin will feel as cool as silk and only the hunting owl and the night sky will hear us when we cry out the unbearable ecstasy of our mutual need.’

‘Stop it…stop it…’ Abbie whispered shakily. Her whole body was on fire with arousal and desire for him, and she had a mad urgent impulse to beg him to stop the car and make love to her there and then.

There was a tight, aching need deep within her body, a pulsing that brought a hot flush of colour to her skin. How much further was the hotel he was taking her to? How much longer before…?

‘Are you hungry? Would you like to stop somewhere for a drink and something to eat?’ Sam asked her ten minutes later.

The prosaic question after the sensual seduction of his earlier words caught Abbie off guard. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Surely he knew, must know, that the only sustenance she needed was him; the only appetite she had was for him.

Such wild and wanton thoughts were still unfamiliar enough to her to make her catch her breath and shyly avoid looking directly at him.

The road they were on had started to climb now; the countryside around them was changing. They were, Abbie recognised, driving through the Welsh borders, a wild, almost pagan part of the countryside she had secretly always thought incredibly romantic.

Here in this land once called the Welsh Marches, which still bore the visible scars of its medieval history in its ancient castles, it wasn’t hard to mentally picture the armoured knights who had once patrolled these borders, to imagine one could still hear the faint clash of steel upon steel, the mingled cries of the injured and the victorious, to imagine as one drove past the derelict and sightless arrow slits of the castles that one had almost caught a glimpse of a pale, feminine wimpoled face watching anxiously from above.

‘This is one of those places where the past feels very, very close, isn’t it?’ Sam’s quiet comment, so closely echoing her own thoughts, made her shiveringly aware of how easily he could attune himself to her, of how much they seemed to share above and beyond the urgency of their sexual desire for one another.

She was still too young to fall in love helplessly and for ever, to commit herself to one man, one relationship for life and beyond, but she suspected that that was exactly what was going to happen to her.

It was not too late for her to change her mind, to call a halt to what was happening, she comforted herself; there was still time.

‘Almost there now,’ Sam told her.

The hotel was a fairy tale thing set in an almost magically perfect wooded valley, a cream stone, early Edwardian folly mansion designed as perfectly and as irresistibly as a Walt Disney castle straight out of Sleeping Beauty. A breathtaking jewel of a building, with its pale cream turrets and lichen-green tiled and scalloped roofs, set against a stunning backdrop of gently sloping protective hillsides clothed in softer green trees, surrounded by immaculately cared for lawns and flowerbeds dropping away to the river which ran through the bottom of the valley.

They had had to drive across a bridge over it to get to the main gates of the hotel and then up a sweeping cream stone drive. The hotel itself was hidden from view until the very last minute, Abbie’s only sightings of it the tantalising glimpses she had caught of it as the road into the valley had spiralled down from the surrounding hills.

‘It…It’s…’ She looked at Sam as he brought the car to a halt in the discreetly concealed car park to the rear of the hotel, which had obviously at some stage been a private home.

As she glanced towards the delicate turrets Abbie remembered how he had described making love to her. Then she had thought he was simply using his imagination. Now…

‘I heard about it from one of the senior lecturers,’ she heard him telling her quietly, answering her still unspoken question. ‘He brought his wife here to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary.

‘It was originally built by a very wealthy heiress as a secret hideaway where she could meet her lover. She came from a titled family connected to royalty and was destined for an arranged marriage. Her lover came from a different social circle. They would never have been allowed to marry, but every summer, from the year she married to the year he died, she came here to spend time with him.

‘When he died she shut the house up, unable to endure it without him; she left it as a gift to his family.’

‘How awful,’ Abbie protested. ‘To love someone like that all of your life and yet never be able to be truly together, to share. But always to have to keep your love a secret…’ She shivered suddenly.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Sam asked her in concern.

‘Nothing,’ she fibbed. How could she tell him that the story he had told her had cast a cold little shadow over her own happiness, that she felt that somehow the place, beautiful though it was, was haunted by the unhappiness of a woman forced to hide her love and publicly deny it? It was as though somehow her unhappiness threatened to taint Abbie’s own joy…as though her blossoming love would be spoilt and endangered.

Her thoughts were ridiculous, she told herself fiercely, especially when Sam had gone to so much trouble to make this, their first time together, as special and memorable as possible.

‘Would I be correct in guessing that you’ve booked us a tower room?’ she quizzed him, striving to throw off her sense of sadness and unease by smiling brightly at him.

‘Now, why, I wonder, should you think that?’ he teased her back as he removed their luggage from the boot of the car and then locked it.

It wasn’t just a room he had booked for them, Abbie discovered ten minutes later, it was an entire suite with, she noticed, wide-eyed, not one but two bedrooms.