Desperate Measures

by Sara Craven

  She lay very still, staring across the room in the darkness, waiting tensely, a wave of mingled terror and half-ashamed excitement invading her body as he paused outside her door.

  And if it opened, if he came to her, what would she say? What would she do?

  For a long screaming moment the questions beat at her mind, and she could not find an answer. Then, at last, she heard him move away, and his own door open and close, and slowly she released her pent-up breath, and allowed her body to relax from its taut coil.

  She had escaped again, it seemed, but not from him. It was from herself, she acknowledged wincingly, as she turned on to her stomach and buried her burning face in the pillow.

  Dear God, she thought, I’m going to have to be so careful …

  She slept fitfully, and woke early. She dressed and went quietly downstairs, carrying her sandals, so as not to wake Alain. She made herself some black coffee, and then went straight to the studio.

  The previous day’s work seemed just as unpromising as she’d remembered. She rearranged the table yet again, then fetched a chair and a knife from the kitchen.

  She wanted the whole thing to look less static—to appear as if someone had been working at the table, preparing vegetables, but had pushed back the chair and got up for some reason.

  She stepped back, nodding, then set up her easel and prepared her palette. She began to work frantically, almost throwing the paint on to the canvas, trying to rid herself of the tensions and uncertainties inside her.

  This was the life she had chosen, after all, and she had to make the best of it. She was turning her back on the role of Madame de Courcy, which she had filled so awkwardly, and unsuccessfully, and she had to learn to paint well enough to earn her own living, which was only what she’d always intended. Only Gavin’s illness had intervened, with all its disastrous consequences.

  Philippa sighed soundlessly. One day, she might even be able to put it all behind her—forget there had ever been a time when she had been Alain’s wife. Their strange marriage had only lasted a few months, after all. It wasn’t a lifetime she had to recover from.

  And she’d taken the first steps on the road to recovery, when she’d left him.

  He shouldn’t have followed her, talking of honeymoons—babies. It was cynical—despicable, when he knew—none better—that they would never share a real marriage. When he didn’t love her.

  She found herself wondering what it would have been like if she and Alain had just met—if she’d been here painting, and his car had broken down, and they’d been thrown together somehow.

  She halted that train of thought abruptly. If they’d been strangers in passing, Alain would have walked by without a second glance. She was the last woman in the world he would have chosen as his wife. She might have acquired a surface gloss, but underneath she was still the same colourless little nonentity he’d registered with such shock at their first meeting in Lowden Square. Not just plain either, she admitted wretchedly, but sexually frigid as well.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que tu as? Are you all right?’

  She was so startled at Alain’s unheralded arrival in the studio that she almost yelped.

  ‘Do you have to creep up on me like that?’ she demanded crossly.

  ‘I made a normal entrance,’ he said levelly. ‘But you were thinking so deeply that you were oblivious to everything else.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her face warmed slightly, and she was thankful he could have no idea of the tenor of her thoughts.

  ‘I’ve brought you some soup.’ He put the tray he was holding down on the table. ‘You had no breakfast, and you cannot work without eating.’

  ‘I’m not working very much at all at the moment.’ Philippa’s nose twitched involuntarily as the rich aroma of the vegetable broth reached her.

  ‘Isn’t it going well?’ Alain came to stand beside her, surveying the canvas with raised brows.

  ‘As a class exercise it would pass—just,’ she said. Or as therapy, she added silently. ‘But there’s nothing of me—none of the things I want to express in it. As usual, it’s—lacking.’

  ‘I think you are too hard on yourself,’ Alain said, after a pause. ‘Eat your soup, and you’ll feel better. Hunger makes one depressed.’

  He walked back to the table and picked up the knife. ‘So this is where it went. I’ve been searching for it.’

  She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, as she focused on him properly, she said with a heart-thudding stab of excitement, ‘Alain, would you stay there for a moment—like that?’

  He glanced round, brows raised. ‘Pourquoi?’ he began, then started to laugh as he saw her reach for her sketching block. ‘Ah, no, you can’t be serious.’

  ‘Never more so.’ Her voice was urgent. ‘Just stand there—and don’t move, please.’

  She knew now why the picture wasn’t working. Because Alain was missing from it. Because she’d tried to exclude him from it physically—tried to suggest, instead, his personality and vitality without his actual presence.

  As soon as she had seen him standing by the table, that had dawned on her with the utmost clarity.

  But then, she realised, from the moment she’d seen him in Lowden Square, she had wanted to paint him. It was one of the first things that had occurred to her. And this might be her one and only chance to do it.

  She covered sheet after sheet of her block with sketches, gulping down the cooling soup in between at his insistence, making him adopt new positions, sometimes on his feet, sometimes sitting. He was clearly amused, and certainly puzzled, but he complied anyway.

  ‘I demand to be allowed to buy this masterpiece when it is finished,’ he said, as he sliced with wry obedience into a tomato. ‘I refuse to allow my colleagues and employees at De Courcy to see me publicly in this domestic role.’

  ‘Don’t fuss—and turn your head, just a fraction. That’s perfect. Now, hold it.’

  He sighed. ‘Anything you say, mon amour. You’re quite crazy, do you know that?’

  Perhaps I am, Philippa thought unsteadily, but suddenly I’m alive too, and this is going to work. I know it is.

  All the time, even in Paris, Alain had been in her head, coming between her and the image she was trying to create in paint. She’d tried to resist him, to banish him from her imagination. But now she knew that she had to paint him, to make him the focal point of this painting at least.

  And maybe in this way, she could exorcise him forever.

  She worked with a kind of desperation, blocking in the new composition, with Alain seated, his dark face intent on his mundane task, as she had seen him only the night before.

  Time went by, and she didn’t notice its passage until he said, at last, ‘Ma chère, quite apart from this cramp, which I’m trying to endure for the sake of art, unless I move soon, we will have no dinner.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘You should have regular breaks. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t apologise. I’m sure that suffering is good for me.’ He rose to his feet, stretching, and Philippa sank her teeth into her lower lip as she watched the effortless grace of the movement.

  She said, faltering a little, ‘Would you sit for me again tomorrow—please?’

  He gave her a frankly questioning look, then shrugged. ‘If that is what you wish.’

  Oh, it is, she thought. It is. It may be madness, but it’s what I want more than anything else in the world.

  She stood, staring at the easel, after he had gone downstairs. It was too early to say whether the painting would be good or bad, but it would be something for her to keep out of the wreck of their marriage. Something to remember him by.

  Her stomach constricted painfully. Something to torment herself with through an eternity of loneliness, as well, she thought stonily, and began to clean her brushes.

  There was beef in red wine for dinner that night. They conversed politely, like strangers, over the meal. Afterwards, Philippa cleared the table and washed up.

>   When she turned back to the table, Alain had poured himself some more wine, and was frowning over a chessboard he had unearthed from somewhere.

  He said, ‘Will you join me?’

  ‘For the wine or the chess?’

  He shrugged. ‘Either—or both.’

  Philippa drew a chair up to the table, accepting the glass of wine he offered her.

  ‘I didn’t know you played chess,’ she began, then stopped abruptly. It seemed that everything she said to him was designed to draw attention to their total estrangement, and yet that wasn’t what she intended at all.

  ‘I enjoy solving the problems the game poses,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Unlike those of ordinary life, they have an order—a pattern.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said stiltedly. ‘I used to play a great deal with Gavin.’

  He slanted a smile at her. ‘I hope he taught you well.’

  ‘Well enough,’ Philippa returned, a shade tartly. ‘I think I can give most people a run for their money. You may not be as good as you think.’

  ‘Fighting talk!’ Alain sounded amused. ‘Shall we, then, make the game more competitive by introducing a small bet?’

  Philippa frowned. ‘What kind of bet?’ she asked suspiciously. She touched one of the fists he extended to her, and found to her annoyance that she had chosen black.

  ‘Nothing too extreme,’ he said lightly. ‘If I lose,’ he paused, ‘I’ll continue to prepare the meals while I remain here.’

  She eyed him. ‘And if you win?’

  ‘One kiss—freely given.’ His hand hovered over the board, waiting to make the first move. The green eyes glittered a challenge. ‘Is it a deal? Or haven’t you enough confidence in your game?’

  ‘I have every confidence in myself.’ Philippa lifted her chin. ‘I think you’re going to be very tired of cooking before you return to Paris.’

  Alain shrugged. ‘We’ll see.’ He moved his king’s pawn up to the fourth row, and Philippa did the same. ‘Tell me, do you plan to bring your father here when he is finally discharged from the clinic?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. We were always very happy here.’

  ‘And you think you can recapture those past times?’ His attention was fixed on the board. He moved his queen to the bishop’s position in the third row.

  ‘Why not?’ Philippa moved her own queen’s pawn to the third row.

  Alain shrugged again. ‘Because I do not think it’s possible to turn back the clock,’ he said flatly. ‘If it was, then I would too.’

  ‘Resuming your life as a bachelor, no doubt,’ Philippa said with something of a snap.

  ‘Exactly.’ Alain placed his king’s bishop in front of the queen’s bishop in the fourth row.

  She had not expected him to agree so readily, and stiffened indignantly, her hand hovering over her queen’s knight.

  ‘Well, you’ll soon be free again,’ she said coolly. ‘Or would you have preferred never to have been married to me at all?’

  ‘I would have much preferred it, ma chère.’ His tone was almost casual. ‘It was hardly a marriage, after all.’

  Philippa sat up very straight. ‘Then why did you come chasing after me?’ she demanded, moving the knight into the fourth row.

  ‘Because, however unacceptable it had become, we still had a bargain,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I kept my side of it.’

  ‘You really think so?’ He sounded politely amazed.

  ‘It was you—your fault. You spoiled everything by breaking your word.’ That sounded like a childish whinge, she realised with vexation.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said mockingly. ‘I was a brute to you, wasn’t I, chérie—making you sleep in the same bed with me, forcing you to do those disgusting things. But I was fool enough to think, you see, that maybe we could make our marriage more than some—clause in a contract. You’d have preferred me to obtain your signature in triplicate, perhaps, before I touched you.’

  Philippa drew a shaky breath. ‘I would have preferred you not to touch me at all.’

  ‘As you made plain each time I ventured to do so,’ said Alain, too courteously.

  ‘I hope you don’t expect me to apologise for disappointing you?’ she flared.

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps we should concede that we disappointed each other.’

  ‘That’s a concession indeed.’ Philippa bit her lip. ‘Aren’t you afraid of denting your image as the great lover?’ She gave a strident little laugh. ‘No, of course not—how stupid of me! You have the Baronne to bolster your ego in that direction, of course.’

  ‘Ah,’ Alain said softly, ‘my beautiful Marie-Laure. Shall I tell you about her, ma chère? Every last detail?’

  Her face flamed. ‘No,’ she said, between her teeth. ‘That’s quite unnecessary, thank you.’

  ‘You seem so obsessed by her that I thought you might find it interesting.’ He gave her a level look, then glanced down at the chessboard, his brows raised. ‘After all, you’ve been totally frank with me about your Fabrice, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s quite different, and you know it.’

  ‘Do I?’ The green eyes glittered at her.

  ‘Yes.’ Philippa pushed her chair back, and rose. ‘I don’t want to hear about Marie-Laure or any of your women, Alain. Can’t you understand that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But there are also some things that you need to understand about me, Philippa.’

  ‘I know all that I need to know,’ she said angrily. ‘I was just like one of those pawns, wasn’t I?’ She gestured angrily at the board. ‘Something you could use in your chess game against your uncle, and then discard when it was convenient. Only a pawn isn’t supposed to say “check” to the king, is it? Which is just what I did when I left you. And that’s what you can’t forgive. That’s why you’re here, tormenting me like this. Well, the game’s over now, and so is our marriage. And there’s nothing you can do about it,’ she added recklessly.

  ‘Isn’t there?’ His smile was silky. ‘Well, there is still something left to be won, mignonne. And I like to win. So …’ he picked up his queen. He said softly, ‘White queen to black knight two, mon amour. And—checkmate.’

  Philippa drew a sharp breath, her attention totally diverted back to the board in front of them. ‘But that’s not right,’ she began. ‘You can’t have …’

  ‘Fool’s mate, chérie. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.’

  Oh, yes, she’d heard of it. Avoiding this commonest of traps for the inexperienced was one of the first things Gavin had taught her. And she’d walked straight into it.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she wailed. ‘Oh, I don’t believe it!’

  But the board was there in front of her, mute evidence of Alain’s swift and humiliating victory.

  ‘Chess requires concentration, ma belle. Do you want your revenge on me? Shall we play another game—for another bet, of course.’

  ‘No thanks,’ she said curtly. ‘One defeat like that is more than enough.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Anyway, I’m rather tired. I think I’ll go to my room.’

  ‘In a moment,’ Alain said gently. ‘After I’ve collected my winnings.’

  Philippa bit her lip. In retrospect, it had been foolhardy to agree to any kind of wager, but she’d been so sure she could win, or at least take him to stalemate, that it hadn’t seemed really risky. But now …

  She swallowed. ‘We didn’t exactly establish the circumstances,’ she began awkwardly. ‘I’d be prepared to—kiss you goodbye when you leave.’

  ‘I’m overwhelmed,’ he said sardonically. ‘But I think a debt of honour should be settled as soon as possible, don’t you?’

  He pushed his chair back, and got to his feet.

  Philippa rose too. She said shakily, ‘Alain, wait! I—I didn’t think you meant it.’

  ‘How very unwise of you, ma belle.’ He came to her side, and his hands descended on her shoulders. Her whole body stiffened in resistance, and this reaction was not lost on him.

  H
e said quietly, ‘And to fight me, Philippa, would be even more unwise. It’s only a kiss, after all.’

  His face seemed to swim in front of her suddenly, and she closed her eyes. Only a kiss, she repeated silently. Only a kiss. But, dear God, when was the last time she’d known the painful pleasure of his mouth on hers? It had been such a long time—such an eternity …

  His lips were cool and very gentle. They caressed hers with a featherlight touch that enticed and promised.

  It isn’t fair. The words formed and dissolved in her mind. She would have preferred insistence—even a certain amount of force, something she could resent. Not this—silken seduction. Fool’s mate, she thought dizzily, and she was the greatest fool of all.

  His hands slid from her shoulders down to her waist, drawing her closer. The kiss deepened, and as her lips parted helplessly under the beguiling pressure, she felt the first sweet, erotic stab of his tongue against hers.

  Excitement stirred, catching the breath in her throat. She tried to say ‘No,’ but all that emerged was a little strained sigh.

  Alain lifted a hand, twisting it into her hair, letting the soft strands twine round his fingers. He pulled her head back, making her lie across his arm, supporting her at the waist. He kissed her again, slowly and hotly this time, then let his lips travel down over the long, exposed line of her throat to the opening of her shirt. As his mouth brushed burningly over her vulnerable skin, a shiver of pure weakness trembled through her body.

  His teeth tugged at the flimsy shirt buttons, freeing them with almost negligent ease, baring her to the waist.

  His mouth closed on her pointed breast, and she cried out sharply. The tug of his lips on her flesh, the stroke of his tongue across her hardening nipple, was a fierce and painful delight. She wanted it to stop. She wanted it to go on forever.

  She found herself remembering, with total, shaming recall, just how Alain’s body felt, sheathed inside her own.

  His hand moved down her body, shaping the curve of her hip, tracing the flat plane of her stomach, the leisurely quest deliberately tantalising. His fingers seemed to linger everywhere, except where she most desired his caress. And he knew it.