Revenge is Sweet: Getting Even

Triss shook both their hands then looked from one to the other. ‘You mean you don’t live here?’ she queried. ‘Together?’

Lola found herself pathetically wanting him to say something territorial like ‘No, but I’m working on it!’—but of course he didn’t. He merely shook his dark, tangled head and explained, ‘No. I live on the other side.’

‘Not in Dominic Dashwood’s house?’ queried Triss, with a look of surprise. ‘Has he sold up?’

Geraint shook his head again. ‘No. He’s still abroad. He asked me to keep an eye on it until he gets back.’

‘Why?’ asked Triss, with a nervous start. ‘Is security poor? I hope not—I only moved in here because I was told that I couldn’t be better protected if I lived in a nunnery!’

Her innocent remark caused Lola to go extremely pink around the ears and to stare fixedly down at her shoes as she tried not to imagine what she and Geraint might now have been doing if it had not been for the fortuitous—yes, fortuitous she told herself firmly—knock on the door.

‘Security on the estate is fine,’ said Geraint soothingly. ‘Or so Lola was just telling me. Weren’t you, sweetheart?’

Lola looked up and met his mocking glance with embarrassed eyes.

‘That’s right,’ she answered stiffly, wishing that he would not tease her like that in front of Triss—she was already feeling dumpy and inferior next to the statuesque redhead!

‘No, I’m looking to buy somewhere in England for myself,’ he explained as Triss stared up at him with her huge, amazing eyes. ‘My staying here is doing both me and Dominic a favour, really. He’s due back in a couple of months, and that news usually brings his legion of admirers out of the woodwork! I think he’s a little fed up with arriving home to find eager women laying siege to him!’

Triss Alexander clasped her pale hands together, for all the world as if she was about to utter a fervent prayer, and then turned her beautiful eyes on Lola and said the most extraordinary thing.

‘By the way, I want you to know that I have a—baby,’ she stumbled over the words, her whole face lighting up with a fierce kind of pride, and for the first time Lola could see why so many men considered her exquisitely beautiful.

‘But that’s wonderful,’ said Lola. It was instinct more than curiosity which made her gaze flick to Triss’s left hand, to see that her wedding-ring finger was quite bare.

‘When you’re reasonably well known—or have been—well, people think they have a kind of right to you, and I’m very nervous for his safety,’ Triss told them, her expression almost hypnotic as she looked at first Lola and then Geraint, as if committing their faces to memory. ‘That’s the main reason I moved to St Fiacre’s—because security is so tight.

‘No one really knows about him—the Press certainly don’t know! My sister-in-law delivered him—she’s a doctor. He’s my secret,’ she said, and hugged her arms tightly against her chest, as if her baby were there in her arms.

‘I’m telling you all this because you’re my immediate neighbours, and my mother once told me that if you placed your trust in neighbours then they would never let you down. Is that very naive of me, do you think, Geraint?’ She turned her extraordinary blazing eyes towards him, her generous mouth softening as she said his name in a way that made Lola’s chest inexplicably clench with fear.

‘I think it’s very clever of you,’ he answered drily. ‘And your mother. No trust so charmingly placed could ever be abused. Your secret is quite safe with me.’

‘He’ll be well protected on St Fiacre’s,’ said Lola encouragingly. ‘There are quite a few babies and toddlers living on the estate; you should be able to get to know some of them—’

‘No!’ Triss shook her shorn head with sudden emphasis. ‘I don’t want to! Not yet, anyway. The thing is. . .’ She chewed on her lip like a nervous exam candidate. ‘If anyone should come looking, or asking, for me—or for—Simon. . .’

‘We know nothing,’ said Lola comfortingly, and looked up to see the oddest expression on Geraint’s face—a mixture of anger and defiance that she could not for the life of her work out.

‘Are you in trouble?’ he demanded suddenly.

Triss hesitated, seemed about to speak and then changed her mind. ‘No,’ she answered firmly. ‘I’m not. I’m going to be just fine. And now I must go. I’ve left Simon in his pram—see.’ And her face became animated as she gestured to the drive behind her, to where a huge, old-fashioned coach-built pram stood parked on the gravel.

Lola’s eyes brightened. ‘Can I have a peep at him?’

‘Well. . .’ Triss beamed with maternal pride, Lola’s eagerness too infectious to resist. ‘He’s asleep. . .’

‘Just for a moment!’ urged Lola. ‘And I promise not to wake him!’

Triss gave a wry, crooked smile. ‘Actually, he’s so gorgeous I don’t really mind if you do!’ she confided.

Lola grinned. ‘You shouldn’t have said that!’

‘I know!’

Lola ran out into the crisp, early spring afternoon, slowing down to a stealthy creep as she quietly approached the pram.

Inside, bundled up in a white bonnet and soft, fleecy white shawls to protect him against the sharp March air, lay a baby, fast asleep, his chubby cheeks all rosy, a beatific little smile fixed to his mouth.

Lola stared down at him. People brought babies onto the aircraft every day, but somehow this was different. Seeing a baby fast asleep in the grounds of her own home made her experience a sudden ache, a primitive desire to have her own baby to hold in her arms.

It took every bit of will-power she had not to straighten his blanket or adjust his bonnet in the hope that he might wake and she would be able to pick him up!

Lola heard footsteps behind her, but didn’t bother turning round. ‘Oh, he’s gorgeous, Triss!’ she sighed blissfully. ‘Absolutely gorgeous! I could eat him up for breakfast! You lucky thing!’

‘It isn’t Triss,’ came an oddly strained voice, and Lola turned round to find that it was Geraint who had come up behind her, while Triss remained on the doorstep, bending down to retrieve one of Simon’s bootees, which had obviously fallen from her duffle-coat pocket.

Geraint’s eyes were unreadable. ‘I’m beginning to see what it is about you that made a wily businessman like Peter Featherstone leave you this house,’ he said unwillingly, in a voice which was almost bleak and held some indefinable note of tension. “There is something really rather irresistible about a woman who loves children so much.’

Their eyes met, and Lola felt as though she could lose herself for ever in that grey gaze. Her heart beat faster as she recognised that he had paid her the greatest compliment of her life. It would be so easy, she thought, much much too easy to love Geraint.

‘Here comes Triss,’ said Geraint suddenly, his voice breaking into the tense silence like a brick dropped on ice.

Triss moved towards them with a catwalk model’s natural grace. The March sun was pale and golden and it brought out the tawny highlights of her shorn hair as if an artist had carefully painted them in by brush. With her big eyes and rangy limbs, she looked like some exotic jungle animal that had wandered into a suburban garden by mistake.

Triss’s pale face was animated as she peered into the pram. ‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he?’ she cooed, her question directed more at Geraint than at Lola. ‘Though I know I’m slightly biased, of course!’

Geraint smiled back at her and glanced down into the pram indulgently. ‘That’s understandable. I think I would be too!’

Lola experienced the sour and bitter taste of jealousy as she watched them beaming into each other’s eyes as if the rest of the world did not exist. And at that moment she could have cheerfully wished Triss Alexander a million miles away.

She gave the other woman a level stare. ‘Your husband must be as delighted as you are,’ she observed neutrally, and then felt stricken with guilt, for the smile died like a withered leaf on Triss’s face.

‘I have no husband,’ she answered woodenly. ‘And no partner, either!’ she added, with a spirited touch of defiance. ‘I’m completely on my own.’

Lola was aware of the furious look which Geraint was directing at her, but even that could not possibly make her feel worse than she already did. Imagine making a mean comment like that to a mother on her own—even if she was a beautiful ex-model!

Geraint shot Lola one final glare before turning to Triss and saying soothingly, ‘Please don’t feel you have to explain your private life—certainly not to us. You don’t have a monopoly on convoluted relationships, that’s for sure!’ He absent-mindedly tucked in a stray corner of Simon’s blanket. ‘But any time you feel the need to call on a man—if your lights fuse—’

‘I can just about manage to mend a fuse, thank you, Geraint!’ retorted Triss crisply.

He smiled. ‘I’m sure you can. But if you’re worried about anything—anything at all—then call me. Please. Here’s my card.’ From the back pocket of his jeans he extracted a small cream-coloured card and, to Lola’s surprise, handed it first to her.

‘You write your number on it too, Lola,’ he suggested. ‘Then Triss knows she has allies on both sides of the fence.’

Lola nodded, feeling oddly deflated as she scribbled down her number with the slim gold pen Geraint gave her. If Triss Alexander had no husband, and no partner, then what hope did that give her with Geraint?

For it appeared that he had no partner either, and when the chips were down wouldn’t he prefer to spend time chatting up a stunning ex-model as opposed to a rather buxom air hostess he could scarcely be civil to for more than a minute at a time?

Triss’s mouth widened into the enormous, crooked grin which had graced magazine covers the world over. ‘Oh, thanks!’ she said. ‘Thanks! To both of you! And now I’d better get going. Simon will be waking up for his feed soon—and, believe me, I can cope with a tantrum-throwing art director far more easily than I can a small, hungry baby who seems to have me twisted around his little finger!’ She gave a happy shrug of contentment, and began to push the pram away. ‘Bye!’

‘Bye!’ called Lola, thinking that she would call on Triss tomorrow and offer to babysit. At least that might make amends for her nasty little remark about husbands.

Triss, had gone only a few yards down the drive when she turned to look over her shoulder and said, rather absently, ‘You must come over some time—for a drink, or something. Both of you, I mean.’

‘Sure! We’d love to,’ Geraint replied easily, and Lola was still too stricken with guilt to remind him that she had a mouth of her own and she didn’t need him to answer for her!

They stood side by side, watching Triss push the pram over the resisting gravel until she was out of sight.

‘I shouldn’t have asked about her husband,’ said Lola miserably.

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ he agreed evenly. ‘So why did you?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Perhaps—but I’d prefer you to tell me.’

She stared at a purple-blue clump of grape hyacinth, nestling beneath the budding branches of the cherry tree. ‘I guess I was being territorial,’ she admitted reluctantly, wondering if he would turn on his heel and run. ‘I had no right to be.’

‘You had no need to be,’ he corrected her quietly. ‘I’ve never juggled women in my life and I certainly don’t intend to start now! Anyway, Triss wasn’t interested in me,’ he concluded with a shrug.

‘Seriously?’

‘Uh-huh!’ He looked down and smiled into her eyes. ‘Seriously.’

She found that she loved the proprietorial way he spoke and she tried not to read too much into it, but it wasn’t easy. She let her eyelids fall, to conceal herself from that searching gaze. ‘Geraint. . .’ she began, when he put the palm of his hand beneath her elbow so that she was forced to look up at him, to lose herself in the stormy depths of his eyes.

‘You’re having dinner with me tonight!’ he declared roughly. ‘I don’t care whether it’s at your place or mine, or who cooks it. I don’t mind whether we go and shop now for ingredients, or whether we decide to explore the local restaurants later. I don’t even care if we go and eat an overpriced bar snack in the tennis club here on the estate—none of that matters.’

‘Why?’ she whispered, fascinated. ‘What does matter?’

His eyes gleamed. ‘Only that by the end of the evening it will be just you and me. Alone. I want to kiss you again, Lola. But properly this time. Without stopping. In private. Knowing that no one will disturb us.’

Lola gave a distressed laugh while her heart beat in a distracted rhythm. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to agree to have dinner with you tonight when you have virtually declared your intention to try to make love to me afterwards?’

‘Surely I can’t be the first man in your life to have been honest and up front about his desires?’ he challenged mockingly.

He was the first man whom she had found attractive enough to fear the challenge, but she wasn’t going to tell him that! And if she blurted out the truth—that she had never made love to a man, nor come even close to it—he would never believe her.

Because men had preconceived ideas about virgins. About how they looked and how they behaved. You could be a virgin if you wore no make-up and worked in a library. You could not be a virgin if you flew around the world, had more curves than you cared for and a ready smile which sometimes got you into trouble!

‘I could try saying no,’ she told him with a quiet dignity.

She saw him tense, saw a muscle begin to work quickly in his cheek. ‘You could try,’ he agreed softly.

‘But you’re so certain that you’d get rid of any opposition I might put up?’

‘Maybe,’ he admitted.

‘Because you’re the world’s most irresistible lover, I suppose?’

This clearly amused him. He raised his dark, beautifully shaped eyebrows. ‘What’s the matter, Lola?’ he teased softly. ‘Don’t you like having your objections kissed away?’

Lola swallowed down the acrid taste in her mouth.

It hurt, that was all; the realisation that he was playing with her hurt like hell. Because these teasing words were all part of the big mating game he doubtless played with lots and lots of different women.

Lola felt as though Geraint was the consummate fisherman, while she was like a big but unworldly fish who was being skilfully outmanoeuvred by him and was in grave danger of plopping plumply into his net!

‘Why?’ she retorted. ‘Do your women usually enjoy having their objections kissed away? If someone objects, then that implies they are resisting you. If you then change their mind—however enjoyable the methods you might use at the time to make them do so—then surely that also implies a certain degree of force, Geraint.’

He had gone very still, as still as the marble statue of Venus which Peter Featherstone had installed at the bottom of the garden, beside a tinkling fountain surrounded by irises which were the deepest, darkest blue whenever they flowered.

‘Never force,’ he disagreed softly. ‘Ever. But some women like to offer a token objection, a show of reluctance, if you like, rather than resistance. It eases their conscience. If, for example, they have been brought up to think that sex is wrong, or dirty, or in some way shameful—’

Lola’s breath caught painfully in her throat. Had he guessed, for heaven’s sake? She stole a glance at him but, to her relief, he did not appear to have noticed her reaction, he was so caught up in the fervour of what he was saying.

‘And that’s the very worst kind of rationale put around by men!’ Lola blazed, in a storm of temper. ‘Isn’t it still used as a pathetic kind of defence against rape?’

Geraint’s mouth thinned into a forbidding line, and a glimpse of hostile steel gleamed coldly in his eyes. ‘There is a distinct difference between a semi-reluctant kiss which may or may not develop into something more,’ he ground out, ‘and the kind of brutal assault you seem to have lumped it together with.’

‘Is there?’ she queried coolly.

‘Well, why waste time discussing it? Why not judge for yourself?’ he retorted silkily, his eyes darkening, signalling his desire to kiss her.

Lola waited, determined this time not to turn her mouth so eagerly towards him. Maybe if she looked at those delectable lips in a detached way for long enough she might have the strength to withstand him.

He was a master of control, she would say that for him. And she supposed he needed to be, in view of what he had just said. Because if he now demonstrated a tempestuous display of passion towards her then it could not possibly be categorised as fair play, not in the circumstances.

Which was why, Lola guessed, it seemed to take an eternity before his lips were within brushing distance of hers. Plenty of time for her to halt him in his tracks.

But she did not halt him; she did not move at all.

His eyes were narrowed, glittering with the bright, intense light of desire, and yet there was no conquering smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Instead, his gaze swept over every centimetre of her face, thoughtfully, almost ruefully, Lola thought.

He put his hands possessively on her shoulders and bent his face very close, and then she could sense the tension in him. ‘I generally find,’ he sighed, in an erotic whisper, ‘the anticipation of making love unbearably exciting, but tonight it seems almost unendurable.’

She knew she should be discouraging him from speaking to her in this rather shockingly frank way, and yet if she did that then he might not kiss her. And she badly needed him to kiss her. ‘D-does it?’

‘Mmm. Don’t you think?’

Lola swallowed nervously, but, thank goodness, he did not seem to be expecting much in the way of an answer.

Instead, he lifted his hand to trace the outline of her lips with one long finger, and when they trembled violently beneath his touch she saw him give a small smile. ‘Which does rather make a case for prolonging the wait for as long as possible. Wouldn’t you say?’

Lola stared at him hopefully. That sounded more like it! He seemed to be implying that he would offer her some traditional and old-fashioned restraint!

‘I suppose so,’ she said a little breathlessly, thinking that if there was any holding back to be done then she rather hoped that he would have the strength of character required to do it. Because right at that moment she wanted nothing more than to be locked intimately in his arms—and the rest of the world could go hang!

‘It’s just a little unfortunate,’ he reflected huskily, ‘that my body is steadfastly refusing to listen to what my mind is saying, which leaves me with nothing to do except what I’ve been wanting to do all afternoon. To kiss you.’ He gave her a lazy smile. ‘Unless you have any objection to that, Lola?’

She recognised that after everything she had said he was giving her the opportunity to stop him, but she didn’t need to utter a word—he must have read the answer in her eyes.

He slowly lowered his head, and his mouth blotted out everything with a heart-stopping kiss, effectively silencing her in the most satisfactory way imaginable.

To Lola it was exactly like being given a draught of sweet, cool water after an impossibly arid spell in the desert and she opened her lips beneath his, as though she was drinking him in.

Maybe she was just too fussy but kisses from other men, in the past, had been best forgotten. Either she had felt as if she had some kind of slimy mollusc clamped to her lips or she’d had an intrusive tongue thrust into her mouth in a way which had made her want to gag.

Apart from her ill-fated liaison with the pilot, of course. He had been a good kisser—but with him Lola had felt that much of it was cold-blooded technique—expertly learnt but with little true feeling.

Whereas Geraint. . .

Geraint kissed solely by instinct—as if her mouth was some new, uncharted territory and he was the laziest and most sensual explorer in the world, his lips caressing and inciting her to wind her arms voluptuously around his neck and to deepen the kiss herself with a new-found skill all of her own.

She felt his body shift in response.

‘Lola. . .’ he said indistinctly against her mouth.

Lola barely heard him; she was too caught up in the sensations he was bringing to burgeoning life. The blood in her veins seemed to grow thick and heavy and the urgent prickle at the tips of her breasts became acutely sensitive, so that even the bra and thin work blouse she wore seemed as uncomfortable as sackcloth.

‘Lola,’ Geraint said again, but more urgently this time, and Lola felt him grow hard against her and the blood rushed hotly to her cheeks as she realised that she had moved fractionally in response, to accommodate his surge of desire.

She registered his harsh entreaty and tore her mouth away from his with an effort, staring into eyes which were almost unrecognisable—very dark, and opaque with passion. ‘Wh-what is it?’ she asked unsteadily.

He shook his head as if in disbelief and was silent for a moment as he fought to control his breathing, before saying huskily, ‘We’d better go inside, sweetheart.’

‘Inside?’ she repeated stupidly.

Did his eyes soften, or was that just wishful thinking on her part?

‘It’s a little too. . .public here,’ he said quietly. ‘Why don’t we find somewhere where we can be more comfortable?’

The simple question brought Lola abruptly to her senses. She blinked as she glanced around her, realisation sinking in like a cake on which the oven door had been opened too soon.

They were standing in the middle of the garden, for heaven’s sake!

And today was the gardener’s day!

‘Oh, no!’ she cried, and ran back into the house, and was about to slam shut the front door, but Geraint was too fast for her. He was inside before she knew it and he was the one shutting the front door!

‘Get out!’ she yelled.

‘No!’

‘Geraint, please,’ she begged. ‘I want—’

‘I know what you want!’ he declared passionately. ‘And if you deny it I’ll know you’re lying because it’s there in your eyes, as clear as can be! And it’s what I want too, Lola. More than anything else in the world right now. You. You. Only you. I’ve wanted you since the first time I set eyes on you, when nothing else in that room existed except you. I want you so much I can’t think straight.’

It was an admission not of weakness but of vulnerability—at least where Lola was concerned—and it affected her more profoundly than anything else so far.

She could hardly believe that she—she—with her too generous curves and her hair which never looked tidy—apparently had the power to inspire the kind of passion in Geraint Howell-Williams which had given his face such a look of such unbearable tension that Lola went positively weak at the knees just looking at it.

Nervously, she wound a strand of glossy hair round and round her finger in a way she hadn’t done for years. ‘I just don’t know what to say,’ she told him honestly.

‘Don’t you?’ he queried softly.

‘No. I don’t seem sure about anything any more.’ She stared at him in confusion, thinking, somewhat belatedly, that he could at least have phrased his desire for her more eloquently than that strained, rather clipped ‘I want you so much I can’t think straight’. ‘Geraint,’ she demanded suddenly, ‘what would normally happen now?’

‘Normally?’ His voice was soft, with an undertone of danger. ‘I’m not sure that I understand you.’

‘I mean, if it was someone else you had said that to—about wanting them—what would they do?’ she persisted stubbornly as reaction set in like a cold chill. ‘What’s the form for this type of occasion?’

‘The form?’ he echoed softly.

‘Stop repeating everything I say!’ stormed Lola.

‘Then why don’t you say exactly what you mean?’

‘You know what I mean! I want to know what your other women do! Do they start necking here, in the hall, and allow you to make love to them on the floor? Or do they slip upstairs for their much needed shower, and then you join them, and . . . and . . .?’ Her voice tailed off miserably.