Unwilling Surrender

by Cathy Williams

  ‘As soon as possible. We can take the shuttle out of Heathrow Airport to Glasgow and then drive to the cottage. Arduous, but it’s the only way of getting there. I’ll give you a call as soon as I find out the details. We can meet at the airport.’

  ‘What about the weather?’ This consideration had only just occurred to her, but there was no way that she was going to find herself stranded in that cottage, which she knew from old was in the middle of nowhere, alone with him. That was the sort of stuff that bred nightmares.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Snow?’ she said patiently. ‘Impassable roads? Stuck miles away from civilisation?’

  ‘Dear me,’ he murmured with an aggravating note of mockery in his voice, ‘we can’t have that, can we?’

  ‘It’s not a joke!’ Christina snapped. ‘I have no intention of being stuck up there with only you for company.’ Her skin prickled at the mere thought of it.

  No doubt there were hordes of women who would give their right arm to be in that situation. No doubt that was what was flashing through his mind even as he stood there, looking down at her with that annoying half-amused look on his face. But she was going to make it absolutely clear that she was not to be counted in that number.

  She would listen to the weather reports and if there was any mention of snow—any mention of a passing flurry, for that matter—she would cancel that trip without giving it a second thought.

  ‘There was a time,’ he countered smoothly, ‘when you would have found that thought quite appealing.’

  She met his eyes and looked away in sudden confusion.

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ she heard herself asking.

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean, Tina. Remember that crush you had on me? You must have been all of what—fifteen? Sixteen? Sweet sixteen and never been kissed? I should have been flattered, but it was awkward, wasn’t it?’

  Christina’s mouth went dry. She wanted the ground to open and swallow her up. Anything to spare her from this awful, nightmarish embarrassment washing over her.

  ‘You must have—’

  ‘Stop it!’ she interrupted in a high voice. She took a deep breath, counted to ten, and when she next spoke she was relieved to hear that some of her self-control had returned. ‘I was young. And stupid. Very stupid. Fortunately for me, I was cured of that little problem. So there’s no point in dragging it up, is there? The fact of the matter is I’m not going unless the weather reports are favourable, and that’s that.’

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to meet his eyes, so she stared at her fingers instead. A thousand things were running through her head, but really they all amounted to the same awful, vicious circle of memories that she had tried to put to the back of her mind. She had been so naïve. She had literally thrown herself at him and he had laughed with that sickening mixture of surprise and genuine amusement. ‘You’re a child,’ he had told her but what he had meant was that she just didn’t possess the easy charm and bold beauty of the women to whom he was already drawn.

  What a picture she must have made, with her mousy brown hair and brown eyes, next to those blondes and brunettes and redheads who had adorned his parents’ house with predictable regularity during the university holidays.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I have no intention of getting stuck in ten-foot snowdrifts either. Not that your honour isn’t safe with me, so you needn’t fear anything on that score. You’re Fiona’s friend and...’ He shrugged and the unspoken words hung in the air, their meaning crystal-clear. He found her physically unappealing, was what he was saying, so she could relax, but instead of reassuring her it brought tears of anger and humiliation to her eyes. It reminded her of how she had felt when her teenage crush had been ever so smilingly handed back to her.

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said stiffly, looking at her watch. It was nearly five in the morning. He had been there much longer than she had thought. Hours. ‘Now do you mind? I want to catch up on some sleep. As you do too, no doubt.’ She hadn’t meant to, but her voice implied that he needed the rest since he had spent the night doing God only knew what, but it didn’t take a genius to imagine.

  ‘Oh, I think I’ll go to the office,’ he said casually, reaching down to turn the doorknob.

  She removed her hand from it quickly, to avoid any contact between them, then immediately hoped that he had not noticed her reaction.

  ‘At this hour?’

  ‘I have a lot of paperwork to clear before I can go anywhere. You aren’t, believe it or not, the only one whose tidy little schedule has been interrupted.’

  ‘I never said that I was,’ she muttered.

  ‘You don’t have to. The implication was there in your voice. You always did have a way of saying much more with your silences than with your words.’

  That piece of insight startled her. Had he noticed that? It was a trait which she herself was aware of. She thought of it as tact, because she knew that if she relentlessly said what was on her mind there would be quite a few people who would be unnecessarily offended by her remarks. So she often kept silent, allowing her thoughts to supply the missing bits in her conversations.

  But no one had ever been aware of this ploy. He must, she now thought, be incredibly perceptive to have picked that up from their numerous but casual encounters over the years.

  Perception along those lines made her uneasy. It made her think that he could read her mind, and she didn’t like that sensation.

  ‘Really?’ she said blankly. ‘I’ll expect to hear from you a little later, then. If I’m not in, you can always leave a message on my answer machine.’

  ‘Fine. But make sure you’re around from this afternoon. I’ll probably try and get us on the earliest flight after lunch.’

  It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a command. Be home after twelve or else.

  She shut the door on him after he had gone and retired to her bedroom, where she spent the next hour trying to court sleep.

  But it was difficult. She felt as though she had been abruptly swept up in a whirlwind and, now that she had been let down from it, she still couldn’t quite manage to find her feet. One minute she was in control of things, her diary all planned out with her various jobs, her social life, if not buzzing, then ticking over. The next, everything had been turned upside-down and she was off on some foolish rescue mission with a man who, after all these years, could still succeed in making her feel acutely uncomfortable with herself.

  And that made her cross. Why did he arouse that reaction in her? Was it because, in the enforced intimacy of her flat, the power of his personality had seeped into her and made her over-conscious of herself?

  That had to be the explanation, she decided. In the past, she had seen Adam frequently enough, but always in the company of other people. When they had been alone, she had been usually waiting for Fiona to put in an appearance. She had been able to step back and view him with detachment, never putting herself in a situation where his presence could overwhelm her.

  Tonight, though, it had been different. There had been no one else around to dilute the sheer force of his masculinity. She had been obliged to face him, one to one, and she had found her composure wanting.

  All the more pathetic, she told herself with disgust, when he had made it clear that he found her quite unappealing as a member of the opposite sex. I don’t care, she told herself philosophically, I’m no longer addicted to him. But she would have to watch herself. She had no intention of being tripped up by that stupid charm of his. That wouldn’t do at all. She now had a plane trip and a car ride alone with him to contend with and, if she was going to sit through the whole thing in a state of nervous tension, then she would end up in need of medical treatment at the end of it all.

  She finally drifted off to sleep and when she next opened her eyes it was after nine o’clock.

  She had appointments. Two to cancel. She sprang out of bed, bustled into the lounge for her diary, and rang them bo
th.

  Mrs Rafferty, her first appointment, who wanted photographs of the interior of her house taken for inclusion in a book she was writing on stately homes, was easy enough to pacify. She had been working on her book for two years. A short delay in the photographs was not a matter of life or death.

  Her second client, however, was somewhat harder to placate.

  Mrs Molton was an irascible woman at the best of times. Now she listened while Christina made her excuses, then she bellowed down the line, ‘This isn’t good enough!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Molton,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid it’s unavoidable.’

  ‘Unavoidable? The word doesn’t exist in my vocabulary!’

  Christina could well believe that, thinking of her now. Thin, wiry, with a voice that could shatter glass.

  ‘And what about the dogs? My little poopsies? Don’t you think that it isn’t stressful for them, having to pose for photographs? They’re beautifully groomed. Today you would have got it right, I know it.’

  Christina thought of her subjects, two corgis as irascible as their owner. Was it any wonder that this shoot was taking twice as long as it should have?

  ‘I can rearrange you for next Tuesday,’ she murmured, not wanting to stray on to the subject of the two infernal hounds.

  ‘And I can always rearrange you, young lady!’ Mrs Molton informed her testily down the line. ‘You’re not the only photographer in the world, you know. My niece may well have recommended you, but that doesn’t mean that I have to employ you. The world,’ she continued in a booming voice that belied her stature, ‘is full of talented photographers. I’ll allow myself and my poopsies to be rearranged just this once, but not again!’

  Christina released a long sigh as she replaced the receiver.

  Thank you, Adam Palmer, she thought. Now if I lose this job, however unchallenging it may be, I blame you entirely.

  She spent a desultory morning throwing things into an overnight bag and lethargically reviewing some negatives for a job which she had undertaken a fortnight previously and which were due for submission to a magazine in a week’s time, but her mind was working overtime.

  She kept thinking of Adam. She thought of the way his body moved, the way his eyes were somehow fierce yet coolly mocking at the same time. Had she forgotten all that, she wondered, or had she shoved it to the back of her mind?

  These were irritating questions. She was acting like the silly teenager she had been all those years ago. She was no longer a teenager and she liked to think of herself as too clever to let herself be swayed by a man’s appearance. She might not be beautiful, but she was smart enough, and she wasn’t about to abandon her good sense by letting him get under her skin.

  She glared at the jumper in her hand and then threw it into the bag.

  Weather report or no weather report, she was going to make sure that she travelled with an ample supply of thick clothing.

  The man on the radio had self-confidently assured her that there would be no snow in Scotland, although conditions would be freezing, but weathermen had a talent for getting it wrong.

  At three in the afternoon Adam called to inform her that they would be leaving in an hour and a half.

  ‘Meet me at the airport,’ he said in the quick tone of voice which implied that he had better things to do than converse with her over the phone. ‘Take a taxi and charge it to my company.’

  ‘Yes, my day’s going just fine, thank you for asking,’ Christina said sweetly. ‘Usual sort of problems when one has to postpone commitments, but I won’t bore you with the details. Thank you for asking, though. And yes, I can meet you at the airport for four-thirty. Any specific place, or shall I just aimlessly meander around in the hope that I spot you somewhere?’

  She heard the impatient click of his tongue and grinned wickedly down the line. Poor Adam. Not much time for her now that he had got what he wanted. She wondered whether he was looking at his watch and wishing that this silly woman would get off the line. He always did have a restless streak in him that spared little time for what he considered frivolities.

  Unless, of course, those frivolities concerned getting a woman into bed. Then he had all the time in the world to play his elaborate games of seduction. Or at least that was what she had gleaned from what she had seen of him in the company of women and from what Fiona had told her. Confidentially.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he told her bluntly. ‘I don’t have time to waste chatting. I’ll meet you at the check-in counter.’

  He promptly hung up with that and she glared at the telephone in her hand.

  What manners. He was busy, was he? And what about her? She would have been busy if it weren’t for him. Had he considered that? Fat chance.

  She wondered how many of his lady friends were informed by him that he was busy and couldn’t waste time chatting with them, and decided that she preferred his honesty after all. It was always nice knowing where you stood.

  She dressed warmly for the trip up: jeans, boots, a jumper with another one in her holdall, and a duffel coat which zipped up the front. The entire outfit made her appear ten pounds heavier than she was and she grimaced at the reflection that stared back at her in the mirror.

  There goes one of your few assets, she told the reflection—your figure. No one would guess that you had one under all of this.

  But that really didn’t bother her very much. She had become quite accustomed to her appearance and to the fact that she seldom if ever attracted second glances from members of the opposite sex.

  Her boyfriends had all been men who had got to know her well before becoming interested in her physically, and frankly she would have preferred their friendship to remain on a platonic basis only most of the time. She disliked fighting off prospective suitors who did nothing to send her blood-pressure soaring.

  No one will ever send your blood-pressure soaring, she informed the reflection. She thought about Greg, dashing Greg, who had come the closest to doing something to her blood-pressure. He was the image that she had resolutely shoved to the back of her mind for the past year. Not that she had been in love with him, but she could still taste the ashes in her mouth at his scathing comment when they broke up. Frigid, he had informed her, plain and frigid, a woman who should be grateful to be looked at twice. He had been turned on by her intellect and by the contacts she had had in her job, but, he had told her, stripped of those, she was nothing but a plain Jane without the wherewithal to hold a man’s interest. If she had slept with him, or had introduced him to some useful people, or preferably both, then he might have consented to continue seeing her for a while longer, but in the absence of both these prerequisites she was, he had made it clear, not a very desirable option.

  She tightened her lips and forced herself to push that unpleasant scene back into the shadows of her mind, where it belonged, as a silent warning to her.

  You’re destined to be a career woman, she told herself. Not that she saw anything wrong with that at all.

  She loved what she did, and she considered herself lucky. What had been a teenage hobby had blossomed into a fulfilling profession when, at the age of seventeen, she had entered a photography competition and won a fully paid photography course and some impressive equipment, most of which she still relied on. She enjoyed her work and, if Mr Right didn’t happen to bounce along on his white stallion, then it was hardly the end of the world.

  Her mother would be disappointed, of course. She baked bread, made jam and had a desperately old-fashioned outlook on the role of women in society. But Christina could cope with that.

  No, the closest she imagined she would get to ardour was watching Fiona’s antics from the sidelines.

  She thought of Adam and frowned. Why had his image popped into her head just like that, without warning?

  Because, she told herself, it was time to go. She gathered her belongings together, tried one last time to tune in to some weather news and failed, and edgily sat down to await the arrival of the taxi, which
arrived promptly.

  And Adam, she was heartened to see, was also waiting for her at the check-in counter. He had his back to her, chatting to the woman behind the desk, and she stopped for a few seconds to look at him.

  He really was aggressively male, she thought with detachment. All broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, which made him look as though he spent hours working out. If she remembered correctly, though, he exercised very little.

  Fate had seen fit to endow him with a body that somehow managed to stay perfectly tuned even if he did nothing about it.

  She took a deep breath and walked up to the counter, noticing that the woman to whom he had been chatting, an attractive brunette, impeccably made up and with a hairstyle that looked as though each strand of hair had been individually glued into place, was not quite as warm when her attention was directed towards her as she was when it had been directed towards Adam.

  ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,’ Christina said, turning to Adam with a polite smile.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he replied, ‘but don’t worry about it. I haven’t been bored.’

  Christina glanced at the brunette, now busily attending to some paperwork, and thought, I’ll bet you haven’t been bored. ‘I wasn’t worried about it,’ she said in a saccharin-sweet voice, ‘and I’m sure you haven’t been bored.’

  There was a wicked little smile in his eyes at her tone, even though his face remained serious, and she ignored it.

  ‘Have you checked us in?’

  He nodded and took her by the elbow, an instinctive gesture that made her body tense until she told herself that she was being silly. Again.

  The brunette had looked up and was now pouting regretfully at him. She hoped he had a wonderful flight and an enjoyable stay in Scotland. When next he was around, he must promise to come to her counter; she would take some time off and treat him to a cup of coffee.

  What a pretty sight, Christina thought, looking at the other woman. Was she as amenable towards all her passengers?