Force of Feeling

by Penny Jordan

  And as for dreaming about Guy French… Well, that was just her mind’s way of dealing with the anger and resentment she felt against him, she rationalised. That was all.

  So why the odd sensation in the pit of her stomach? Why the shaky, quivering feeling of unease that tightened her skin and made her feel acutely vulnerable? These were feelings that an impressionable teenager might experience, but hardly applicable to a grown woman of twenty-six. And besides…besides, she was not in the least attracted to Guy—far from it.

  Attracted to him? She froze, staring into the darkness, her body tense and still. Where had that thought come from? She shuddered slightly, trying to hold at bay the sick, nervy feeling invading her senses.

  She must be sickening for something, she told herself; these odd feelings she kept having, this feeling of vulnerability, they were so unlike anything she was used to feeling. It was because she was upset about her book. Yes, that was the answer; she was upset about her book, and Guy French was exacerbating the situation. If only he had not decided to come down here, she wished cravenly. She didn’t want him here. He unnerved and unsettled her. She wanted him to go away and leave her in peace, and most of all she wanted him to stop looking at her with that infuriating blend of sadness and compassion.

  CHAPTER THREE

  INEVITABLY, perhaps, after her disturbed night, Campion overslept. When she eventually woke up, it was to the sound of heavy rain outside, whipped against the windows by a buffeting wind.

  Her bedroom was gloriously warm and she wriggled her toes blissfully, the comfort of the room and its contrast to the weather outside taking her back to her childhood. She snuggled deeper into the bed and closed her eyes.

  ‘I thought you came here to work.’

  The drawling male voice destroyed her pleasure, and made her sit up in bed with a frown.

  Guy was standing beside the bed, holding a tray. The delicious aroma of freshly made coffee tantalised her senses. There was toast as well, crisply golden and melting with butter.

  ‘I hope you’ve brought some sensible clothes with you,’ Guy remarked as he settled the tray on the small chest beside the bed. ‘Helena isn’t exactly geared up for anything other than brief summer living here.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Campion demanded. ‘The house is centrally heated. It’s beautifully warm in here. If you’re finding it uncomfortable in any way, perhaps you ought to go back to London.’

  He gave her a wry look.

  ‘No way. And for your information, the cottage is centrally heated only because I drove down to the village this morning and begged and borrowed a couple of bags of boiler fuel. Luckily, I’ve managed to get a supplier to deliver some more this afternoon.’ He grimaced in disgust. ‘Trust a woman to have a solid fuel heating system installed, and then forget to order any fuel for it.’

  Campion bit her lip and glanced involuntarily at the window. Outside, rain pelted against the glass. If Guy hadn’t been here, she would have woken up to a cold, damp atmosphere, and somehow she doubted that she would have had the self-confidence to march down to the village and acquire the necessary fuel. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything, other than a grudging, ‘No one asked you to come here.’

  There was a long, unnerving silence, during which Guy looked steadily at her, before saying in a quietly even voice, ‘Didn’t they? I rather thought I’d heard a cry for help.’

  Colour stung her face as Campion glared at him. He had said nearly the same thing last night, and if he thought for one moment that she had actually expected him to follow her down here…

  ‘Not from me, you didn’t,’ she told him angrily. ‘If you must know, I came here to get away from you…’

  ‘Really?’ How dangerous his voice sounded when it took on that silky quality! Dangerous was not a word she would ever have applied to Guy before; in fact, she had rather disparagingly considered him to be something of a lightweight. But somehow, down here, alone with him, seeing him dressed in rugged jeans and casual shirts, she was beginning to view him in a different light. He should have looked odd out of his immaculate suits and shirts, but he didn’t. In fact, he looked very much at home in them.

  ‘Odd. I distinctively remember you telling me you came here to work…’

  ‘To work and to get away from your interference with that work,’ Campion countered aggressively after a minute pause. ‘And if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to get up and get on with that work.’

  The dark eyebrows rose, and she could have sworn there was almost something vaguely reminiscent of a courtly but mocking bow in the way he moved his arm.

  ‘By my guest,’ he offered, picking a piece of toast off the plate, and leaning back against the wall, ignoring her.

  There was just no way she was going to get out of bed with him standing there, eating her toast, Campion decided grimly.

  She had no doubt that he was simply amusing himself at her expense, pretending not to know how much she detested being forced into such intimacy with him.

  She moved angrily, her hair swirling into tousled curls. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Guy tense, and then, to her surprise, he said abruptly, ‘I’d better go and check on the boiler.’

  He’d gone without even finishing his toast, she realised a few seconds later, as she stared at the door he had closed after him.

  An odd feeling crept over her, a sense of loss, combined with a far more familiar feeling of acute self-disgust. Under the bedclothes, her body started to shake and she closed her eyes tightly, trying to ward off her own thoughts.

  She knew quite well what had brought that look to Guy’s eyes, why he had been so anxious to get out of the room. He had looked at her and had been repulsed by her, just as Craig had been, as every man who looked at her must be, she admitted bleakly.

  What was the point in letting herself be hurt by it? Surely, by now, she was used to the truth? Surely she had taught herself to accept that men found her undesirable, that it was revulsion rather than arousal they experienced when they looked at her?

  Craig had made it clear enough all those years ago. The only way he had been able to make love to her, he had said, had been by closing his eyes and pretending she was someone else, and even then… Even then it had only been the thought of her parents’ wealth that had enabled him to go through with it.

  Even now, those words still had the power to wound her, to scour her soul and destroy her self-confidence. It was no use telling herself she was a successful writer, that she had a good and fulfilling life, that many, many people would envy her; all she had to do was to remember Craig’s words, to recall how Guy had just looked at her, and she was that same sick, shaking teenager whose eyes had been so cruelly opened to exactly how unattractive she actually was.

  Was it any wonder she couldn’t give her heroine the confidence to go out and choose her own lover, that she couldn’t flesh out the sensual, physical side of Lynsey’s nature? There, she had admitted it. She swallowed hard. She had admitted that Guy was right, and that she couldn’t finish the book.

  Panic filled her as she fought to deny her own thoughts. It wasn’t true. She would finish it… There must be another way, and she would find it.

  Suddenly she remembered her dream. In her dream, she had felt Lynsey’s emotions: her anger, her desperation, her resentment towards the man who had stopped her from going to her cousin. If she could just hold on to those memories… If she could just get them down on paper… Suddenly her doubts were subdued, her mind busy trying to work out how best she could use the avenue opened up to her by her dream.

  She washed and dressed hurriedly, pulling out of her bag her clean underwear, and then frowning. No clean bra… She must have left it in her flat on the bed, and the rest of her underwear was in the case in the boot of her car. She eyed the one she had been wearing the previous day with distaste.

  On the bed were the jeans, sweater and shirt she was planning to wear. The shirt was fine wool, and the sweater
a warm, bulky one. If Guy hadn’t been here, she wouldn’t even have hesitated about not wearing a bra. What difference did his being here make? Surely she wasn’t afraid that the sight of her braless but thickly covered body was going to send him into a fury of lust?

  No, of course she wasn’t, but what if he should notice and think that perhaps she… She licked her top lip nervously. She had learned to be so careful about not conveying the wrong impression, about not allowing men to think that she was at all interested in them. She didn’t want the humiliation of being rejected a second time, and so she had learned that it was best to cultivate an appearance that made it plain that she didn’t consider herself to be a sexual woman.

  She was wasting time when she ought to be working, she reminded herself. Guy was hardly likely to notice that she wasn’t wearing one, not particularly important article of underwear, and even if he did… Even if he did, the thought of a woman like her daring to imagine she might physically attract him was so ludicrous that it would never even cross his mind.

  Having reassured herself, she dressed quickly, and then pinned up her hair.

  The scent of frying bacon greeted her as she walked into the kitchen. Guy was standing in front of the cooker, deftly manoeuvring an array of pans.

  He must have sharp ears, she acknowledged as he turned and smiled at her.

  ‘Just in time. How do you like your eggs?

  ‘I don’t,’ Campion told him shortly.

  His eyebrows rose in the way that was becoming very familiar.

  ‘Nonsense! You need a decent breakfast inside you if you’re going to work.’ His eyes narrowed slightly, and she realised he was looking at her hair. She itched to raise her hand to ensure that it was all tidily tucked away, and had to fight not to make the betraying gesture.

  ‘What happened to the curls?’ he asked softly, looking at her in such a way that she could feel her skin start to burn.

  Ignoring him, she turned towards the door that led into the cottage’s sitting-room. Off it was the small study that had once been an outhouse, and which Helena had had converted into a very efficient work-room for those of her writers who took advantage of her standing offer to use the cottage as a bolt hole.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To work. That’s what I came up here for—remember?’ she asked dangerously.

  ‘Not before you’ve had something to eat.’

  Campion found that she was literally grinding her teeth.

  It was all too tempting to make some childish riposte such as ‘Make me,’ but she had the uncomfortable feeling that he would take the greatest delight in doing exactly that, and so, instead, she walked across the floor and sat down reluctantly at the table.

  ‘That’s better. Even brain cells needs feeding… and stimulating,’ he added softly.

  Campion stared at him, her breath suddenly trapped deep in her lungs. A most curious sensation invaded her, a feeling of weakness edged with excitement. And then she tore her gaze away, and the feeling subsided.

  ‘For someone who didn’t want any breakfast, you’ve managed to demolish a surprising amount of food.’

  She should have expected a taunt like that, Campion told herself bitterly as she drank the last of her coffee. To her own surprise, she had been hungry. It was a luxury to have her breakfast prepared for her—to have any meal prepared for her, come to think of it.

  ‘I have a perfectly normal appetite,’ she told him frigidly. ‘Unlike the women you date, I’m not obsessed by my weight,’ she added scathingly.

  It was a shot in the dark, but she suspected from all that she had been told that the glamorous women he normally dated were hardly the types to sit down to a full cooked breakfast. A vitamin cocktail and a glass of Perrier was probably their style.

  ‘No, you’re not obsessed by your weight,’ Guy agreed steadily, but the look in his eyes made her feel acutely uncomfortable. She felt as though he had looked right into her mind and seen things there that she would much rather he had not seen.

  She offered to do the washing up, as much to escape from his too-close scrutiny as anything else. He had discarded the sweater he’d had on earlier, and she could see the fine, dark hairs curling in the open neckline of his shirt. She swallowed nervously, wondering why she was reacting so stupidly.

  ‘I’ll wash up. You’ll want to bring in the rest of your things.’ For some reason, his remark annoyed her.

  ‘Oh, I’ll do that later,’ she told him carelessly. ‘Right now, I want to start work.’ She turned her back on him and opened the door.

  The small study had a radiator and was blissfully warm. She was just about to close the door and get to work when Guy suddenly appeared in the doorway, and casually reached down to unplug the machine.

  Campion stared at him, her eyes revealing her baffled anger.

  ‘What on earth are you doing? I want to start work.’

  ‘Not yet,’ he told her calmly. ‘First, we have to analyse properly where you’re going wrong.’

  For a moment, she was lost for words. She took a deep breath, holding on to her anger with difficulty, and said through clenched teeth, ‘I thought you’d already done that.’

  ‘Yes, I have, but you don’t seem to agree. So, before you so much as put another word on paper, I think we should both be clear on exactly what alterations are required.’

  We? It was her book, her work, her characters. Campion felt ready to explode, so great was the resentment building up inside her, but she had taught herself long ago to control her feelings and to keep them hidden from others, and so all she could do was to glare at him and curl her fingers tightly into her palms.

  ‘Like a cup of coffee before we start?’

  ‘No, thanks, I think I’ve already got enough adrenalin pumping round my veins right now,’ Campion told him freezingly.

  ‘Well, if you’ll bear with me for a second, I’ll make myself one, and then we can settle down to work.’

  Did nothing ever faze him? Campion wondered bitterly, watching him walk away. Was that smooth, laconic manner never ruffled by irritation or anger? He projected an image of being totally in control of his life, and now he was trying to take control of hers, and she didn’t like it.

  She was still fuming when he came back, carrying a steaming mug of coffee.

  ‘I thought you said it was a secretary I needed, not someone to stand over me and monitor every single word I write,’ she demanded, glowering at him.

  The study was only small, and she hated the sensation of having him so close to her. The desk was pushed into a corner, and she had a wall to one side of her and Guy to the other. She could smell the scent of his skin, tangy with the soap he had used to wash. His hair still held the fresh coldness of the outdoors and looked slightly damp.

  ‘My suggestion that you take on a secretary was simply made to relieve you of the pressure of trying to finish the book on time. I must admit that then I envisaged that you would submit your rewrites to me in the normal way; when I learned from Mabel that you’d decided to disappear, I realised that slightly more drastic measures were called for.’

  ‘I did not decide to disappear,’ Campion contradicted acidly. ‘I’ve already told you I came here to work, and I can do that work far better without you hanging over my shoulder. I’d get the alterations finished much faster if you would leave me alone and go back to London.’

  ‘Would you?’ His eyebrows lifted. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’ He opened a briefcase he had put down beside the desk, and extracted a copy of her manuscript.

  ‘Right…Chapter four, when Lynsey first realises that her feelings for her cousin have become those of a woman and not those of a child. You say she loves him, but there is no real sense of any awareness from the reader’s point of view of her own sexuality. If you like, she’s like a robot reading the words off an autocue. So, what do you plan to do to make the reader aware of Lynsey’s burgeoning womanhood?’

  Campion felt her skin start to burn with
a mixture of rage and confusion. Panic hit her. She tried desperately to blot out Guy and the emotions that were filling the small room, clogging her thought processes, and instead imagine that she was her heroine: a headstrong, spoilt girl of sixteen, who was just beginning to realise the power of her femininity, but somehow, no matter how much she tried to concentrate, no sense of any awareness of being in touch with Lynsey’s feelings would come. She might have been trying to imagine the feelings of an alien being from another planet!

  Frantically, she tried to think back, to remember how she had felt at that age, but she had been shy and different. Frustratedly, she realised that she had created as her heroine the kind of girl/woman she had once ached to be, and that, for once, not even her powerful imagination was strong enough to give her an insight into how that girl might have felt.

  ‘Come on, Campion. The girl’s in love, as much with the idea of being in love as with anything else. She’s seen how her cousin reacts to her. What would she do?’

  ‘Why should she do anything?’ Campion countered huskily. ‘She’s only sixteen… She would wait for Francis to approach her.’

  ‘No, she’s not that kind; he’s the weaker of the two, you say so yourself later in the book. Think, Campion, she’s been indulged all her life; she’s self-confident, fearless, and most of all curious…I suggest that she would try to engineer a meeting between herself and Francis where they could be alone and she could test her new-found power.’