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by Jane Arbor

  'I sensed that she had been jealous of you all along.'

  'Magda thought you were going to marry her.'

  He shook his head. 'Not now, if she ever did. Your Magda von Boden is a wise, wise woman, and Ilse was equally acute to danger.'

  'Danger?' queried Juliet.

  'That what has happened for you and me might be going to happen. As it has, hasn't it, sweetheart?' he pleaded. Tell me again. Show me '

  There was so much more to say, to tell, to ask. But there would be time for that. Now they shared the primitive urge implanted by insatiable-Nature—the need to touch and to look, their desirous bodies yearning to be generous of passion; his dominant, demanding, hers vibrant with response. While they clung together the eloquence of their embrace was its own love-language. They had no need of speech, and when at last they drew apart, all their mental barriers were down, destroyed by their new understanding that though the needs and motives and reactions of each might differ they would always be resolved in the total handfast oneness of their mating.

  Juliet giggled shyly, 'You were going to show me the house.'

  'Then come along.' He led her through the rubble to the rudiments of an entrance. 'The front door. Don't trip over the mat. This spacious rectangle—the salon; this lesser square, the dining-room. This—a summer breakfast-room opening on to what will be our garden. Note the tasteful rockwork.' Kitchen and

  "usual offices" ' He cocked a mischievous blue eye. 'Just as well perhaps that there's no first floor as yet, hm?'

  '"As well"?'

  'Because if there were a master bedroom, who can tell how I might be tempted? I should carry you bodily across the threshold and '

  She played along. 'I'd always understood you did that at the front door?'

  'I shall create a precedent by doing it at both,' he claimed. 'When are you going to marry me?'

  'You can't carry a bride across a threshold, let alone two, until you've got a threshold to carry her across,' she pointed out.

  'True. But in this case the order has to be—bride first, threshold second. So when?'

  They sat side by side on a slab of coping stone, talking, teasing and making plans.

  Karl said, 'Magda sent me to you this morning, more or less on pain of execution if I didn't come back engaged to you.'

  Juliet laughed happily. 'I believe she has always wanted to sell you to me.'

  'But you weren't buying?'

  'I was—if I'd had that much treasure to spend, but I hadn't. You weren't for me, I was sure.'

  Later she ventured, 'The School—I'd like it to go on.'

  'Meaning you want to carry it on?'

  'If you agree. If you'd let me.'

  'Ah.' Karl made of his frown a thunderous menace. 'I should need notice of that question. Notice—and a timetable of when I can spare you duly drawn up,' he threatened.

  Juliet took his hand, turned it palm upward and dropped a kiss there. 'I hope you'll never really want to spare me,' she murmured.

  'Never, dearest heart—from now till infinity,' he said.

  About this author

  Jane Arbor was the pseudonym used by Eileen Norah Owbridge, a British writer of 57 romances for Mills & Boon from 1948 to 1985.

  She started out with medical romances set in England but later branched out to other types of romances in many exotic settings in Europe and around the world.