Burning with Passion

by Emma Darcy

  Unfortunately there wasn’t time to pursue the answers. They heard the elevator doors open and close. David called out, ‘We’re in Caitlin’s office, Jenny. Please come in.’

  She did. Caitlin realised that Jenny had opted for defiance in her own defence. She bristled like a porcupine. Her eyes flashed fire. Caitlin felt like burying her head in her hands. Defiance wouldn’t get Jenny anywhere with David Hartley.

  ‘Please sit down, Jenny,’ he said, and brought her a chair. He did sound kindly disposed towards her, almost avuncular.

  Jenny sat down. She folded her hands together in her lap, but did not lower her eyes. They followed every movement David made with punctilious care.

  ‘You must feel very confused, Jenny,’ David said quietly.

  ‘Not one bit.’

  ‘The reason I had a rule against the involvement of two of my employees in a relationship together,’ David went on as if unaware of the acid in Jenny’s voice, ‘was to avoid the pain that so often follows office affairs.’

  Jenny’s face turned a rich scarlet. ‘I’m not involved in any office affair,’ she said stoutly.

  ‘Of course not,’ David replied, smoothing over the umbrage in Jenny’s voice. ‘It must therefore have been very confusing to you, and to others, when it appeared that I was breaking my own rule because of my...involvement...with Caitlin.’

  Caitlin had to bite down on her tongue. She had not realised that David was about to plunge in and discuss their private concerns with anyone else at all. Why was he making a public confession of something that was intimate, personal and private? There were so many changes going on this morning, her head was starting to whirl.

  ‘It was obvious to everyone,’ Jenny replied tartly.

  ‘I’m sure it was,’ David replied succinctly, ‘and therefore confusing.’

  ‘It didn’t confuse me,’ Jenny replied. ‘It’s what you expect from a man. They say one thing and do another.’

  It was all too true, Caitlin thought. More than once she had reflected in the same way about the matter herself. Jenny might not be feeling confused, Caitlin thought, but she herself felt quite an urgent need to get several matters clarified.

  ‘Caitlin and I were different,’ David went on.

  ‘Everyone thinks they’re different,’ Jenny pointed out with some asperity.

  ‘Too true,’ David said softly. ‘And you thought you were different too, didn’t you, Jenny?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Jenny asked suspiciously.

  ‘You had a lover,’ David said. ‘Someone else who was employed here.’

  That was news to Caitlin. Who could it be? One of the salesmen? One of the factory hands?

  ‘I’m afraid your lover is never going to marry you,’ David said, his voice reflecting caring and concern. ‘If he promised you that, Jenny, you’re going to be very bitterly disappointed.’

  ‘How can you possibly say that?’ Jenny asked belligerently.

  ‘Because he’s already married.’

  ‘He’s not!’ Jenny cried in vehement denial.

  ‘Did you ever ring him at home?’ David asked.

  ‘No. Of course not. He’s got a very sick mother. She can’t be disturbed.’

  David winced. ‘Is that the reason he gave you?’ he said, slowly shaking his head.

  ‘That is the reason.’ Jenny’s hands started moving restlessly, fingers interweaving, scraping over knuckles. ‘It has to be,’ she declared.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Jenny,’ David said. ‘I happen to be quite involved with the people who work for me. I like to know their backgrounds, what their aims and ambitions are, what little ways I might be able to find to help, at different times.’ He rose to his feet, walked towards Jenny, tried to soothe and console. ‘Paul Jordan has a wife and three children, Jenny. He was using you.’

  Caitlin’s mind flipped back to yesterday. She’d never liked Paul Jordan. He had certainly been aware of the St Valentine’s Day gift when she arrived at work. Jenny had known, too. But it had been Paul Jordan who had played it up, making the comment about wishing her many lovers. The jigsaw started to fall into place in her mind.

  ‘Yesterday, when you came into my office to look at the roses, you saw my letter of resignation on the desk, didn’t you, Jenny?’ she softly pressed.

  ‘Why...why, yes,’ she said defeatedly. She started to cry.

  Caitlin had to ask one more question. ‘And when Paul Jordan came back late in the afternoon you told him what you’d seen?’

  Jenny nodded her head, too distressed now to speak any further.

  Caitlin caught David’s eyes.

  ‘It had to be so,’ he said quietly. ‘It was the only thing that made sense.’

  Jenny did not wait to be dismissed. She rose from the chair and blundered out of the office, sobbing as though her heart was broken. Caitlin followed her to the door and saw her running down the corridor to the ladies’ room. There was nothing she could do to help. Jenny wasn’t the first or the last woman to love foolishly, but that knowledge didn’t ease the deep private pain of it.

  Yesterday Caitlin had thought her own love for David Hartley was foolish. Maybe it still was, although David was certainly not married with three children. And the parameters of their affair were now changing, so fast that Caitlin had completely lost her bearings.

  She turned back to David, thinking of the sensitivity he had just displayed. It made him more attractive than ever. ‘What are you going to do about Jenny?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably nothing,’ he answered. ‘She was a pawn. She’s been hurt enough. I don’t think there’s any need to do any more than what she’s already done to herself.’

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘Paul Jordan,’ he said, his voice hardening, and Caitlin knew the result for him would not be the same as it was for Jenny.

  The salesman was summoned.

  The conversation was short.

  ‘You’re finished here,’ David said tersely to him. ‘I have it in my power to break you financially and professionally. You have broken the duty of fidelity that you owe to this company. If you want to associate with scum like Crawley, then you’re welcome. Remember this, though. Until the Statute of Limitations runs out in seven years, I hold your fate in my hands. That’s near enough to twenty-five thousand days and I hope every one of those days you’ll reflect on that.’

  Jordan left a broken man.

  Cold, hard and ruthless. That was what his competitors thought, Caitlin reflected. ‘Are you going to take any further action against him?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said David. ‘To a man like Jordan, what he is about to go through is punishment enough.’

  It also restricted the punishment to the man who deserved it. His wife and three children would not be innocent victims of his perfidy, provided, of course, Jordan could talk his way into another job. Caitlin admired David’s restraint. In the circumstances, he could have been forgiven if he had taken a merciless course. People who saw him as cold, hard and ruthless were wrong.

  ‘Where does that leave us?’ Caitlin asked.

  ‘As soon as Jeremy Anderson gets here, and I can brief him and hand the reins over,’ he smiled at Caitlin, ‘it leaves us with time on our hands to do the little essentials of life.’

  The smile was enough to scramble her brains and send a surge of warmth through Caitlin, but she determinedly collected enough wits to find out what she needed to know. ‘Spell that out specifically, David,’ she said, trying her utmost to sound firm and in control of herself.

  ‘I thought we’d already agreed.’ The smile turned into what could only be called a wickedly tantalising grin. ‘We have to buy a horse. And a nice little property to put it on.’

  Caitlin took a deep breath, held it for a few moments before she released it. In a way nothing had changed. It was the same as when she’d first started working for him. When David started to move, it was always with breathtaking speed.

  He wasn’t pr
omising her anything except a horse, she warned herself. If she went along with him, she would be dancing with the devil again.

  But she couldn’t help it.

  She loved David Hartley and she had to give that love a chance to lead somewhere good.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘WHY can’t you decide?’ David was showing increasing signs of restlessness as he drove the Ferrari along the tortuous country roads.

  ‘It’s impossible to find a replacement for a horse like Dobbin on the spur of the moment,’ Caitlin replied logically.

  ‘We’ve looked at ponies. That took two days,’ David reminded her. ‘We looked at Galloways. That took the most part of one day. We’ve looked at Arabian horses and racing thoroughbreds.’

  ‘I had Dobbin for thirteen years,’ Caitlin said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Do you think it will take that long to find an adequate replacement?’ David sounded quite distraught.

  ‘I won’t know until I find one,’ Caitlin said reasonably.

  ‘It’s very hard,’ David muttered.

  It wasn’t that he was bored, Caitlin assured herself. What David found ‘hard’ was her insistence that there be no physical intimacy between them for at least one week. His stress level was rising with each succeeding day...six of them since they had last made love on the morning of St Valentine’s Day.

  Caitlin found it rather difficult, too. Still, she was not going to let on to David how much she missed and wanted that intimacy with him. In the last few days they had done a lot of talking. This not only helped to ward off the desire for more physical needs, it had given Caitlin a far more rounded and filled-in picture of David’s life.

  She now knew he was an only child. After many miscarriages his father had insisted that his mother give up trying for more children. He couldn’t bear her to go through any more pain.

  His father had made and sold quality furniture. Owing to the influx of cheaper mass produced furniture, his father’s business had been on the verge of bankruptcy by the time David went to university to do an engineering degree. David had suggested revolutionising the business along the lines he later developed himself. His father had invested heavily in the change, but before it could begin to be profitable he had been killed in an industrial accident.

  David had stepped in to rescue the situation. It was his responsibility to make the business viable. He not only owed it to his father, but his mother had to be provided for. That was all he would say upon the subject of his mother, but he had talked quite freely about the difficulties he’d faced and overcome along the road to his present success.

  The more he revealed of himself, the closer Caitlin felt to him. She didn’t want to resume an affair with him. Surely this idea of buying her a horse, as well as a property to put it on, meant more than that. Yet not once had he broached the subject of their future together in any concrete detail.

  He had not asked her home with him to meet his mother. In that area, all forward progress was stalled.

  ‘What are you thinking, Caitlin?’ he asked.

  ‘These are the times that test women’s souls.’

  ‘And other things besides,’ David reminded her.

  ‘It’s not easy for me,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Nor me,’ he semi-growled.

  She knew what he was thinking.

  What was happening between them was at Caitlin’s insistence. It was all her fault. As soon as she changed her mind over artificial restraints on touching and feeling, life could return to normal. That was what David thought.

  What David didn’t know was that Caitlin wasn’t going to change her mind. She remembered very clearly what had happened between them just after six o’clock on the morning of February the fourteenth. She didn’t want David to ever lose that recollection, either. If Caitlin needed to be held, kissed and cuddled, then held, kissed and cuddled she was going to be.

  Nevertheless, she was less and less sure that enforced restraint would achieve this desirable end. She struggled against the temptation he stirred inside her from merely a heated flash of his eyes.

  ‘This is a procedural check,’ she told him, ‘on steadfastness, stick-at-ability, commitment, endurance, caring,...’

  ‘There are other things I would rather do,’ David said, sounding a little testy, ‘to demonstrate endurance, commitment, caring, stick-at-ability...’

  ‘You must see more in me than physical union,’ Caitlin interrupted archly. ‘After all, you promised me a list. A long list. You gave me to believe that I had a large number of attributes that you found quite attractive apart from...’

  ‘So true,’ David asserted, but without optimum vigour. ‘You must be aware, though, that you have a chemical reaction on me that makes my biology burn. I’m burning now,’ he protested. ‘I’m burning all the time. My biology is being incinerated. And I’m a reasonably young man. At this rate, I estimate there won’t be anything left of me by the year...’

  ‘Here’s an interesting place,’ Caitlin said in order to divert his attention from his burning.

  David slowed the Ferrari down. He turned into the driveway.

  ‘Featherstone,’ she said. ‘Nice name. Clydesdale stud. We’d better go and have a look, David.’

  David needed all the distraction she could give him.

  ‘What do we want with a Clydesdale stud?’ he grunted.

  ‘Satisfied curiosity,’ she replied.

  ‘Have I told you how beautiful you look today?’ David asked.

  ‘Eleven times,’ Caitlin soothed.

  ‘Maybe if you dressed yourself in something more ill-becoming,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t feel quite so teased, tantalised and severely tested.’

  They were both wearing jeans, ordinary plain blue jeans. She had teamed hers with an embroidered peasant blouse which was quite pretty, but it hardly rated as the height of sexiness.

  ‘Do you want me to look like a scarecrow?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure what we’re achieving with all this restraint,’ David muttered.

  The echo of her own doubts was disturbing. ‘You’re satisfying me,’ Caitlin told him.

  ‘Not the way I’d choose.’

  With a little spurt on the accelerator that told Caitlin quite a lot about his frustration level, he drove the Ferrari up to the front door. Caitlin had no difficulty in interpreting that David’s patience was wearing thin. She sighed. Maybe there was nothing more to achieve.

  Yet there was no doubt that David’s attitude to her had changed dramatically since that fateful morning nearly a week ago. Given time, perhaps, anything was possible.

  To David’s credit, he was affability itself when Mr Featherstone came to greet them. David explained they were interested in acquiring a horse, at this stage they were interested in Clydesdales, and Mr Featherstone led them down to the yards to show them his stallions and mares.

  Caitlin had always thought Clydesdales were magnificent horses, certainly the most handsome of the draught breeds. They were descended from the great war horses that heavily armoured knights had ridden into battle. For centuries this tallest and heaviest and strongest group of horses had supplied the power for jobs that tractors and trucks did today, pulling ploughs, hauling freight, drawing carriages. They were still used on farms and for show purposes where modern technology was eschewed.

  On Farm Day, at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, where her father had always shown his Galloways, Caitlin had loved the grand parade, invariably led by a splendid team of Clydesdales pulling a huge wagon. Great skill and horsemanship were demanded to drive a top team of twelve. It was a disappearing art form.

  Caitlin had never been close to them before, nowhere near as close as she was today. They were big horses, dauntingly big, fascinatingly big.

  ‘That’s Danny Boy,’ Mr Featherstone pointed out with pride. ‘He’s got a big future. Only two years old and Supreme Champion at the last show.’

  He was beautiful. A bay with a white patch on his stomac
h. He stood a majestic seventeen and a half hands high, going on eighteen, Caitlin estimated. He would continue to grow for another three years. He was as solid as the earth he stood on. Proud, majestic. A royal blood line. Above all else was the sheer power of the animal, for centuries harnessed to the well-being and advancement of civilisation.

  The flowing white hair below the knee and the hock—feathers they were called—gave him such a smart appearance. Caitlin fell in love with him at first sight.

  Mr Featherstone led on towards a yard which held some roans. Caitlin did not follow. David stayed beside her.

  ‘Best piece of equine engineering I’ve seen,’ David commented admiringly, nodding towards Danny Boy. ‘From a scientific viewpoint, if you multiply the sine of the angle by the power co-efficient, the proportions of mass to...’

  ‘He’s perfect!’ Caitlin breathed.

  ‘What on earth for?’ David could not have been more surprised.

  Caitlin walked up to Danny Boy, and started to stroke his muzzle. He was docile to her touch. ‘He suits me,’ she said.

  ‘What are you going to do with him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would you ride him?’

  Caitlin ran her eye over his girth, the strength of his hind-quarters, along his back. She shook her head. ‘No way. I don’t like heights.’

  Mr Featherstone came back to collect them. ‘Danny Boy’s not for sale,’ he informed them.

  ‘Is that so?’ said David.

  ‘That’s so,’ said the Clydesdale man, as sturdy as his horses.

  ‘Well, let me see if I can change your mind,’ David mused purposefully, warming to the task in hand.

  A tingle ran down Caitlin’s spine. David never knew when to let go once he set his mind on something. He probably didn’t understand how owners felt about champion horses. Caitlin did. Her father would never sell Pride of Scotland, his champion Galloway stallion. Not, at least, without the purchaser paying in blood through every pore.