That Tender Feeling

by Dorothy Vernon

  CHAPTER TEN

  The radio gave it out about the crisis road conditions that stretched the length and breadth of the country. There wasn’t a county that had escaped the arctic blitz. Planes weren’t taking off, many roads were impassable, with a fleet of abandoned cars causing further hazards for those who had to travel.

  Ros rubbed a circle on the windowpane to look out and hardly needed the announcer’s advice to check first if the roads were open before setting off, or better still, stay at home if it were at all possible. The road had disappeared. The boles of trees and the hedgerows had shortened. All she could see was snow, snow and more snow. She didn’t have a big enough shovel to dig her car out, even if she were foolhardy enough to risk it. Neither was it just a personal risk. She couldn’t take the chance of adding to the burden of the emergency services and motoring organizations, which were already taxed to the limit.

  Following her out of the kitchen and into the living room, Cliff said, ‘Looks as if we’re stuck with one another for a while longer. Fate is a very funny lady. You think you are in charge of your own destiny and find out that you are at the mercy of her capricious whim.’

  Cliff had the look of a man who had resigned himself to a situation, only to find that the terms were quite to his liking.

  She crossed to the sofa and sat down. ‘You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?’

  He took the chair opposite, lounging back in comfort, as opposed to her taut, ill-at-ease posture. ‘It does have its lighter side. I’m sorry that you don’t possess a sense of humor to see it.’

  ‘Thank you for your concern, but there’s nothing wrong with my sense of humor. It’s normal and healthy, unlike yours, which seems to have a perverted twist to it. And will you please stop looking at me.’

  ‘I was brought up to believe that it was polite to look at a person while I was talking to them.’

  ‘There’s looking and looking.’

  ‘You don’t like the way I look at you? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be so nice to look at. Did you know that you look sexier when you’re angry?’

  The intensity of his preoccupation with her face drew a slash of harsh color across her cheekbones. But when he left off looking at her face, that was worse, because his dark, wicked eyes slid down her body in slow appraisal, lingering overlong on the rise and fall of her breasts. Indignation was making her breathe more rapidly, and she made a desperate bid to modify that, knowing that he was finding it a major source of amusement. It wasn’t a kind amusement that mocks in a gentle way, its main concern to tempt a person out of ill-humor. It was cold, laying icy fingers of persecution on her stomach.

  Uncrossing the legs that were now the subject of his scrutiny, she jumped up off the sofa. ‘I’ll make some coffee. Could you drink a cup?’

  ‘If you promise not to put arsenic in it,’ he replied.

  ‘Don’t put ideas into my head.’

  The slow smile twisting up his mouth told her that he knew she had sought for an excuse to get away from him for a while to get control over herself.

  There were two escape routes she could take, both of which would take her too close for comfort to where he sat. She chose the one with the wider swing round his chair to get to her target, the door. Keeping her eyes carefully averted from his compelling face, she measured her step and quelled the childish impulse to break into a run. As she drew level with his chair, she risked an under-the-lashes peep out of the corner of her eye. His expression was without expression, indifferent. He wasn’t even looking her way, which made it all the more surprising when, without turning his chin, his arm shot out to hook round her waist and pull her over the arm of his chair and down upon his knee. His hand stayed on her waist. His hold was loose, his fingers spread-eagled. Would they clamp like steel bands if she tried to jump up and attempt to free herself? Tried to . . . attempted to? Answering her own question, she thought that’s all it would amount to, because she would not be allowed to go. Rather than engage in an undignified scuffle, she thought it was as well to remain passive. As passive as she could be when his touch had triggered off tremors in her stomach that were rising to sabotage and confuse her.

  If only she wasn’t so aware of him. Even though he petrified her half out of her mind, he was still the most magnetic charmer she had ever met. The dark enchantment of the spell he cast upon her made her senses swim, and her heart beat faster than was good for it. Its excited beat leaped into her throat as his free hand crossed her breast. He did not touch her there, he never intended to. His aim was to make her think that was his target by shaving perilously close, which he did, even calculating correctly just how far she would strain back. Satan himself lurked in his flashing eyes as his hand continued down and pulled the sleeve of her sweater just clear of her wrist, then brought it nearer to his face to inspect the bruises he had inflicted upon her the day before when he gripped her so tightly.

  ‘You were right. I have put my brand on you.’

  He didn’t have to bruise her flesh to do that. He had put his brand on her the moment they met up again. Even though it was only her body he lusted for, he had reached out and put his name on her heart, and she felt that she would never be free of him again. She might take up with someone else eventually. The desire for masculine company would drive her into another man’s arms, but she would never belong to him as she belonged to Cliff.

  ‘I seem to make a habit of ill using you,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know your own strength.’

  ‘Or your weakness.’ Oh, he knew her weakness all right, the devil. ‘I bruise you without knowing about it.’ Neither were all the bruises on the flesh, and he knew about that as well. ‘First your shoulder and your poor face when I lashed out during that malaria attack I had. Now your wrists.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew about my shoulder. That was concealed from you.’

  ‘I recall an occasion when not one part of you was hidden from my eyes.’

  ‘Don’t, Cliff. I can’t take it.’

  ‘Can’t take what? Remembering how it was? Does it make you want it to be like that between us again?’

  She couldn’t lie. She couldn’t say no, because she did want it to be like it was—only better.

  ‘It’s no good, Cliff.’

  ‘Why are you so stubborn?’

  ‘The same reason that you are.’

  Two dominant personalities had clashed. If she stayed for any length of time, Ros knew only too well whose will would break first. She had to get away at the first possible opportunity.

  ‘Life’s too short, Ros, to stand on principles.’

  ‘But you’re standing on yours, it’s only mine you want to trample down.’

  ‘Only because they’re about twenty years behind the times. Why won’t you own to that?’

  ‘But I do. I hold old-fashioned ideals. There—you’ve heard it from my own lips. It’s a fetish with you, isn’t it, making me admit to things? In this instance—so what! I’m basically an old-fashioned girl. I can no more take lovemaking on its own than I could down neat spirits. In both, I need a modifying element.’

  ‘Back to square one—the price tag on your body. Sex in exchange for a commitment.’

  She flushed at the base level he brought it down to. ‘It might amount to that. But that’s not the angle I look at it from. The other way, with no commitment, no strings of any sort, would put too much of a weight on my conscience.’

  ‘I’m going to have to work on that conscience of yours. It’s an old fuddy-duddy. That, or get to work on you and make you forget it.’

  His face was turned to her slightly averted cheek, which shivered as his breath touched it. His mouth didn’t have far to come to tease the corner of hers, making gentle licking bites that put an intolerable strain on her. He was so clever. That soft persuasion tormented her to want the full passion. How she managed not to give her lips fully to his kiss she would n
ever know. His references to how it had been between them had ignited a flame of excitement within her that she must squash. In wanting it to be like that again, she was her own worst enemy. Her desire was as invidious as a snake and must be struck down before its poison fully penetrated her blood. It would help if she concentrated on the fact that while she thought of it as making love, the term Cliff used was sex—it was nothing more than sexual satisfaction to him. If anything could help her. It was like sinking in quicksand. She wanted to pull out, but she was being sucked down by the turbulence of her own stirred emotions.

  She could never be sure what happened next. Did she turn her head, or did Cliff angle his neck to brush her lips more fully with his, for suddenly her whole mouth was being subjected to a battery of light, unsatisfying kisses that drove her crazy for kisses of depth. Pulses began to beat in various parts of her body that she hadn’t known existed, roused from a lifetime’s dormancy by the wild exhilaration of a sensual hunger she hadn’t known possible until Cliff fed it. And which, for all the fine intentions of her upper mind, at base ground level was not taking kindly to the self-inflicted pain of renunciation.

  Barely had her lips beat out their message to him before the tormenting, coaxing, goading seduction blazed into a passion of accelerating savagery that was brutal delight, a feast to the hunger of her deprivation. His mouth glanced across her cheek in a moment’s respite, his breath as hot as the fire burning within her, and then came back with renewed vigor to work the soft flesh of her lips into a frenzy.

  His hands gathered her body closer, sliding across her shoulders and down her back, seeking under her sweater for softer areas to plunder, his kisses growing more urgent, a greedy, rampageous assault that made her gasp. The yielding weakness that engulfed her horrified her. She struggled in a panicky endeavor to fend off the reaction in her own body, which was defeated when his mouth clamped on hers again in a long drugging kiss. It was all too much for her, the feelings she had tried to suppress broke free of the bounds she had so futilely set out to impose and became the dominant power, subservient only to his superior domination. Her fingers rippled through his hair as the fight drained from her, and her mouth became fiercely alive beneath his.

  Cradling her on one hip, he removed her sweater and then her bra. She lifted her arms, assisting him in this undressing as a child would, but the breasts his fingers ran fiery rings round were those of a woman peaked to desire, for his desire. They hardened under the burning throb of his lips, betraying to him both the pleasure he gave her and the sweet urges pushing her to surrender to the demanding potency of his body. That he ached to possess her was obvious in the tremor that jerked through him, swift, uncontrollable, filling her with tenderness and surprise, she supposed because she hadn’t realized she could move him like that. She had thought endlessly of his strength but had never considered his weakness.

  She enclosed his dark head in the circle of her arms, her own flesh trembling in sensual response to the erotic intimacy of his lips, and the restless fever in the hand following the line of her waist, hip and thigh, until she feared her wildly beating heart would run out of control, just as she had.

  He pulled her round on top of him, crushing her close. She knew she should resist but couldn’t. In the drowning pleasure of the moment, she didn’t know how. She was totally defeated, and victory would have been his if he’d taken it without first gloating over his triumph. It shone in his eyes as he drew his head back a fraction to look at her. The overbearing smugness of the smile on his mouth was more than she could stomach as he crowed: ‘Isn’t this better than cold virtue? How lovely you are. Lovely and warm and mine.’

  This infuriating part was, he didn’t know he was gloating. He was merely soliciting her agreement that it was better to indulge in physical pleasure than deny oneself on the grounds of conscience.

  A quick, bitter rage filled her heart that made it easy for her to free herself of his arms and scramble off his knee, pulling her sweater back on to hide her body from his eyes. He was so surprised, and that was comic and maddening in itself, that he let her go without putting up even a token fight to detain her. He didn’t understand why she suddenly sprang away from him.

  ‘I am not lovely or warm, and I am certainly not yours,’ she denied.

  ‘You were a moment ago—or almost mine.’

  She wanted to lash out at him for being right. She wanted to hit back at him for those moments she had lain in his arms responsive to his lovemaking, for bringing her down to eager, trembling submission. For the passion he had aroused in her. For wanting the body she was doing her best to withhold from him for physical appeasement and for shunning the heart she so desperately wanted to give him. She hated him for being almost his, for the easy conquest he had achieved over her, and for his egotism in knowing that it was in his power to do so. So great was the power he held over her that even in her pain and humiliation she still wanted him. Despite everything, it wouldn’t take much for her to fly back into his arms. And that would be the ultimate degradation.

  ‘I don’t understand you, I don’t understand you at all,’ he ground out savagely. ‘Why did you kiss me like that if you’d no intention of following it through?’

  ‘Following it through? I didn’t realize I was committing myself to anything.’ The word ‘committing’ was the one most suited. It might not have been chosen deliberately, but it served to strengthen her determination and hitch her pride up several notches higher. ‘I’m afraid I’m a novice. I don’t know the rules of the game. But if it’s any consolation, I’m catching on fast. Somewhere in this world is the man for me. I’ll just have to keep turning stones over until I find him. If the joke slip in the Christmas cracker is right and I have to kiss a lot of frogs in the process, it occurred to me that it might be as well for me to keep my hand in.’

  ‘Why you—’

  The end of that sentence blistered her ears as she ran into the kitchen.

  She retired to her room early but didn’t really expect to get much sleep that night. Her thoughts were too angry and confused. Why had she had to get tangled up with someone like Cliff? She remembered the way his kisses set her senses on fire and how marvelous it had been when he touched her, discovering the deeply passionate woman she was, a side of her nature that had surprised her and that she still didn’t know how to cope with. Her thoughts and feelings ran away with her and wouldn’t be suppressed. She felt a gnawing, aching regret that she wasn’t at that moment lying pampered and cherished in Cliff’s arms and hated herself for it.

  She was just in the drifting-off stages of sleep when a knock on her door awakened her, followed by Cliff’s voice calling out to her, ‘Let me in, Ros. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Go away, Cliff, please. No more tonight.’

  She knew what turn the conversation would take, and she’d had enough of the sweet persecution. If he entered her bedroom, she knew what the outcome would be. She had no fight left in her.

  He knocked again. ‘Come on, Ros. Be reasonable.’

  She stuffed her fingers in her ears and hid her head under the bedclothes, and finally he went away.

  He tried to work on her again the following day, but still she wouldn’t give way. The atmosphere inside the cottage was as many degrees below as it was on the snow-bound outside. There was no camaraderie between them. They stopped talking, sharing the same table but eating their meals in frigid silence. On day three, he attempted to talk her round again, without success. Despite her numbness, she felt quite proud of herself.

  It was still day three, but dusk’s shadows were gathering, as he said with weary resignation: ‘You win. All right, I’ll marry you.’

  She looked at him in astonishment. No words would come.

  ‘I want you, Ros. It’s driving me out of my mind. It’s an obsession. I’ve got to have you, it’s as simple as that. You have my solemn oath that as soon as the roads are safe enough for us to venture out, we’ll get the paper work done. I won’t cheat on
you there, but don’t cheat on me now. I can’t take being shut up with you, yet shut out. I keep remembering things, how you were in my arms. I want you back there again. You held out, and it paid off. You can congratulate yourself. I never thought I’d give in and agree to marriage to possess a body I desired. But then, no body has ever turned me on as much as yours does. I want to go to bed with you for a month. I want to sate myself with you, rid myself of this grinding agony. Come to me laughing, Ros, you’ve got your own way.’

  She couldn’t believe her ears. Did he honestly think that would suit her, that she, or any woman with a shred of pride or the tiniest spark of spirit, would accept such a bitter and insulting proposal? Being proposed to by the man you loved was supposed to be the most romantic moment of a girl’s life. Something that special should have been wrapped up in his heart and given in tenderness.

  She was realistic enough to know that passions couldn’t stay indefinitely perched on some high and dazzling peak of excitement. There would be days when other demands took priority. When the children were in too boisterous a mood and her head was splitting with the noise or when they were sick and her heart was aching at the silence. Sometimes she’d want to go for a walk, watch television or read a book, but instead there would be buttons to sew on, the laundering to do, a house to clean. When she simply wanted to relax, it could be that she would be expected to provide him with amusing and loving companionship or play hostess and be witty and sociable to his friends. In exasperation, sadness, worry and stress or in plain old boredom, it would be something to have the tender knowledge of his love locked in her heart. She wanted this moment for those times. The magic of it would always be there to fall back on when things didn’t quite go according to plan.

  She didn’t think she was being unreasonable or asking too much. Cliff professed to know her. If he thought that kind of proposal would suffice, it proved that he didn’t know her at all. And if he couldn’t come up with something better than that, then she didn’t want to know him!