by India Grey
‘I guess I’d be lying if I pretended I only played for his benefit,’ she whispered apologetically.
He frowned. ‘You miss it?’
‘Of course. It’s been my life for as long as I can remember. It’s like losing a part of myself.’ Suddenly she realised what she was saying, and stopped just in time. ‘Oh…’ she breathed in relief. ‘He’s asleep…’ Gently she took the bottle from Orlando. ‘You put him down. I’ll be outside.’
She left quickly, before he could argue. Waiting on the landing, she listened intently, praying that Felix wouldn’t choose this moment to do one of his amazing instant wake-ups.
He didn’t. A few moments later Orlando came out and pulled the door half shut. As he turned round Rachel saw with a shiver that the barriers were back in place. His face was perfectly blank. She stepped forward.
‘You see? You did it. You did it brilliantly. You fulfilled your side of the promise, and so now I have to fulfil mine.’ She was trying hard, so very, very hard, to keep the break from her voice. ‘You’ve shown me that you’ll love him and look after him, so now I have to do as I promised and go quietly.’
‘No. No.’
He took a step towards her, pulling her into his arms with something like desperation. He heard her cry out in sorrow and longing in the instant before his mouth found hers, and he felt her need as forcefully as he felt his own. It was agonising, impossible to endure, when the prospect of release was so within reach—like withholding drugs from an addict; he knew it was for his own good, but, God, he didn’t care any more. At some point this evening he had gone way, way beyond caring about what might happen to him in the future, or about anything that he had been or felt in the past.
Everything was simple. He wanted Rachel. He wanted the firelight and the candleglow and the warmth and her vibrant, blazing hair. He was tired of endless darkness and cold.
‘Orlando—’ She tore her mouth from his, and he felt her hands push his face from hers, holding him at arm’s length. ‘I can’t—’
She had been going to say that she couldn’t settle for just one night, but the words died on her swollen lips as she looked into the indescribable green of his eyes and knew that she could. Whatever he was offering, she would take it. If she had to leave him tomorrow it would be better to have something to hold on to, to remember, than nothing.
‘Rachel?’ His voice was sharp, his eyes blazing into hers searchingly, and she had to remind herself that he couldn’t see her, couldn’t read the blatant longing in her face.
‘I can’t help wanting you,’ she said in a hoarse whisper, dropping her gaze from his tortured face and pressing her mouth to the hollow at the base of his throat.
‘I know.’ It was a moan of despair. ‘I’ve tried, but I’m lost…’
‘Then we’re lost together,’ she sobbed, reaching up to pull his mouth back to hers, breathing in the scent of him, feeling the hardness of his stubble-roughened jaw against her palms. They stumbled backwards, and then she felt him grasp her hands, and he was pulling her along the corridor, quickly, urgently, until they both broke into a run.
They turned a corner into the front landing, where there were no lights on, and the inky shadows enveloped them. Rachel’s footsteps slowed uncertainly and Orlando turned, taking both her hands in his strong, sure ones, drawing her forward.
‘You’re afraid of the dark?’
She stopped, her hold on his hands tightening, so he couldn’t help but be pulled back to her. ‘Not when I’m with you,’ she said throatily, standing on tiptoe to reach his ear.
The low note of desire in her voice seemed magnified in the blackness. A second later Orlando was scooping her into his arms and striding down the remainder of the corridor to his room. Kicking open the door, he hesitated just inside the threshold to find her mouth with his, and her hand went up to hold his head, sliding across the hard plane of his cheek until her fingers were entwined in his hair, pressing him deeper into her.
He let her slither from his arms, setting her back on her feet so his hands were free to explore and reveal. The room was velvet black, and they were both sightless; he could feel her hands clumsily seeking the buttons to his shirt, fumbling to work them free. Her own shirt was soft, clinging perfectly to her narrow body, and without hesitation he swept it over her head.
He groaned as his hands found the rose-petal perfection of her skin, dropping his head hungrily to the silken dome of her shoulder, scraping his teeth against it, feeling the powerful shudder of desire that shook her as he trailed his fingers around her ribs to the fastening of her bra. Helplessly she grabbed his shirt in her fist, twisting it, pulling…
‘I can’t…Orlando—take it off.’
He pulled it over his head and she heard the soft sound it made as it landed on the floor at their feet. She took in a shivering gasp. For a moment they stood inches apart, unable to see each other but exquisitely aware. Then Rachel took a small step towards him, so that her nipples skimmed his bare chest. It was all she could do not to cry out in devastating ecstasy as she heard his indrawn breath and felt his head tip backwards.
It was the point of no return. Grasping her shoulders in both hands, he crushed his mouth down on hers, and she felt herself dissolving, disappearing into the chasm of yearning that she’d been tiptoeing around all week. She didn’t know how they made it onto the bed, how the rest of their clothes disappeared, was only aware of the feel of him under her damp thighs, the hardness of his jutting hip bones, the concave sweep of his stomach, ridged with muscle, and beneath that the smooth, hard length of his erection. She was kneeling up, over him, and his hands came up to hold her steady, spanning her ribs, measuring, discovering, moving reverently over her breasts, her collarbone…
He was seeing her, she thought hazily. And that was her last coherent thought as she gripped him with her knees, rising up to take him inside her, and abandoned herself to blissful sensation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IN DREAMS Orlando could always see perfectly again.
Falling into a deep, grateful sleep for the first time in days, with Rachel’s head on his chest, he saw her properly. She was wearing her wedding dress, as she had had when she’d arrived at Easton and got out of the car with her vivid hair blowing around her like a pennant, and as she walked towards him her amber eyes were incandescent with love.
The picture was shattered as the telephone on the bedside table began to ring.
Rachel felt Orlando move beneath her, the sonorous beat of his heart fading from her head as a shriller sound took its place.
The phone.
She felt a dart of alarm. Telephones ringing in the middle of the night were only ever bad news weren’t they? But every inch of her was still blissed out and glowing from Orlando’s touch, and the outside world still seemed a long, long way off. With Orlando she felt safe.
In the darkness she could dimly make out the sweeping arc of his arm, moving over her to pick up the telephone, could feel the flex of his muscular chest beneath her cheek. She found she was smiling as she listened to his husky sleep-drenched voice.
‘Orlando Winterton.’
And then she felt the smile dissolve from her face as he sat up. Moving sideways onto the cold pillow, she heard him swear viciously. She could just make out the muscles moving beneath the skin of his broad back as he thrust a hand into his hair. When he spoke his voice was steely.
‘Hell. How is she?’
Rachel’s heart had begun to thud uncomfortably, and the heavy contentment in her limbs had been replaced with icy pinpricks of dread. She could hear the voice on the other end of the phone, but not make out what it was saying. It sounded ridiculously tiny and innocuous; how bizarre that it could shatter her brief moment of happiness.
‘What do you mean, you can’t tell me?’ Orlando got up angrily. For a moment she caught a brief glimpse of his magnificent body before it melted, ghost-like, into the blackness of the huge room and she was left with nothing to do but li
sten.
‘I know I’m not her next of kin…but I’m the father of her child, for God’s sake!’
So. There was no mistaking to whom he was referring. Or the anxiety in his voice.
Quietly Rachel slipped out of bed and found her way back to her own room. Without Orlando the darkness of the old house frightened her—but not nearly as much as the emptiness inside herself.
‘She’s in hospital. They won’t tell me any more, other than that she’s asking for me. I have to go.’
Rachel nodded wordlessly and, balancing Felix on one arm, collected up the breakfast cups and plates with the other. In the grey light of early morning, Orlando looked utterly shattered, his narrow, slanting eyes shadowed, his face gaunt and pale. How pathetic of her foolish heart to want so desperately to fold him into her arms when all that anguish was for someone else.
Bloody Arabella.
‘I’ve made phone calls. All the Paris flights are booked up until this evening, so I’ve called in some favours with the RAF. We leave from Northolt at eleven.’
Rachel’s head snapped round. ‘We?’
Orlando sighed and pushed a hand through his hair. ‘Sorry. I should have asked. She’ll want to see Felix, so I’d like you to come with me.’
It was a measure, thought Rachel desolately, of her utter enslavement to him that she only could feel relief. How astonishingly humiliating. She was actually glad to be accompanying him to the bedside of the woman he loved, because being left behind without him was too terrible to contemplate.
‘OK.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘I’ll go and get some things together.’
Orlando got up from the table and pushed his chair in with a violent scraping sound that set his teeth on edge. What was one more lie to add to the sprawling web of deception that his life had somehow become? he thought viciously. Arabella hadn’t asked to see her son; she wouldn’t be so selfless. No. Orlando wanted Rachel to come for far less noble reasons.
Because he couldn’t face the journey on his own.
And because he was terrified that if he left her she wouldn’t be there when he got back.
George drove them to the airport in Lord Ashbroke’s old Daimler. Orlando sat in the front, with Rachel in the back, beside Felix in his car seat. As they drove through the high gateposts she turned round and gazed at Easton through the rear window, wondering when she would see it again.
If she would.
And, if so, under what circumstances.
For one difficult, painful, wonderful week she had felt as if it was her house, and she had allowed herself to care for it just as she cared for Felix. She had invested something of herself there as she had pottered about in that bright kitchen and torn her hands on brambles in the old walled garden.
The thought of Arabella returning as mistress of Easton was unbearable.
The only thing that was worse was the thought of her returning as mistress of Orlando.
There was what seemed to Rachel to be an entire uniformed squadron waiting to greet them on the tarmac as they pulled up alongside the small but luxurious plane. Orlando Winterton was certainly somebody, she realised, watching him from under lowered eyelashes as crewman after crewman saluted him. Not a flicker of emotion crossed his face. However, as the engines started and the plane began to gather speed along the runway, she noticed that his knuckles showed bone-white through his skin as his hands gripped the armrests of the cream leather seat.
‘Last night…’ She was looking straight ahead, and so missed the fleeting pained expression that crossed Orlando’s face. ‘Last night when you asked me whether I missed the piano…You knew the answer already, didn’t you? Because that’s how you feel about giving up flying?’
‘Yes.’
It was impossible to explain that feeling. He missed it viscerally. It had been so much a part of who he was, and defined the part of him that had died that day in Andrew Parkes’s office—the heroic, risk-taking, thrill-seeking part.
He closed his eyes briefly, tensing himself for the question that would inevitably follow. Why did you give it up?
But she said simply, softly, ‘I can understand why. It must be an incredible feeling.’
Relief washed through him, but it was tinged with despair. Last night, when he’d kissed her in the corridor outside Felix’s room, he’d crossed a line. That was the moment when he’d accepted that he wanted her…not just at that moment, but for longer. For ever. But he hadn’t even told her the truth about himself yet.
He had to, of course. Soon. But…
God. How ironic. He was afraid. He, who had berated her from the moment they met for her own lack of courage, was frightened. And she had shown, time after time, that she was brave in ways he was only just discovering.
‘It is. There’s nothing like it,’ he said gravely.
But that wasn’t true either. Last night—with her hands in his hair, her mouth on his mouth, her legs around his waist—that had felt like flying, with the light coming up over the horizon and the dew forming rainbow diamonds on his wingtips. Holding her as she’d shuddered and cried out in his arms…that had felt like flying home into a clear pink and gold dawn.
The car that awaited them was long, black and impossibly shiny. It reminded Rachel very much of a hearse—which, given her mounting sense of dread, seemed horribly appropriate.
It was as if for the past week she and Felix and Orlando had lived in a sort of Eden, cut off from the rest of the world at Easton Hall. It had hardly been idyllic…most of the time she had felt lonely, confused and isolated…but it was only now that she realised how much strength and comfort she had gained simply from knowing Orlando was nearby. Looking back, she suddenly saw the days that had passed there as peaceful and sheltered, and the nights when she had played the piano into the listening darkness as magical.
As they inched their way through the Paris traffic she felt totally unprepared to return to reality. The world beyond the tinted glass of the car window seemed loud and aggressive, full of busy, indifferent people and glaring, garish sights and sounds. She sank back into the leather upholstery, closing her eyes and mentally searching for something to counter the assault of unfamiliarity and hostility. It was a trick she had been taught by one of her piano teachers, to calm herself down before a performance. All she had to do was pick an image and concentrate on it very hard, carefully filling in all the sensory details…
Standing holding Felix in the semi-darkness with Orlando. Close to him…looking down at Felix. Reaching out, feeling for Orlando’s hand, her skin brushing his—feeling its warmth, the reassuring heaviness and solidity of his hand, hearing the whisper of skin against skin. Breathing in…slowly, steadily…the smell of warm, babymilk softness…and beneath it, like a haunting, bass note, Orlando’s dry, masculine scent. Lifting his hand, bringing it up to Felix’s head, raising her gaze to Orlando’s face…
He breathing quickened, and she felt her heart-rate double as her mind, too far advanced down that particular track, refused to be called to heel. But then she was aware of other things—of the car slowing, making a sweeping turn, coming to a standstill.
She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to let reality back in.
‘This is the hospital.’
The tableau of the couple with the baby in the darkened room faded, and she slowly opened her eyes.
Orlando was reaching for the door handle. She watched his long, elegant fingers deftly move along the walnut inlay of the door to locate it and, once they’d done so, hesitate. He turned his head back towards her.
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. It’s best that you go on ahead. I’ll send a message to the hotel if she’s up to seeing Felix.’
His eyes seemed very dark, opaque with emotions Rachel didn’t want to think about. Feelings that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the woman he was just about to see. There was a moment…a long, shimmering moment of unspoken possibility…when she wanted to find something to say that
would sum up a fraction of what she was feeling. She didn’t blame him for going to Arabella. She knew out of the two of them the other woman had the greater claim, she had never been led to believe anything else. It was just that she would have liked, in this last few seconds before he opened the door and was swallowed up by the outside world again, to tell him how much it had meant to her, this enchanted time. How very, very much.
He turned his head, so she could see him in profile. She caught the movement of his throat as he swallowed. She bit her lip hard, knowing that if she were to speak the only words that would come out would be I love you.
And then it was too late. He threw open the door and the world came rushing in, with a blast of sleet-edged air and a cacophony of city noise. Rachel watched him get out of the car in one lithe movement, his broad shoulders shielding her from the worst of the damp and cold for a second before he stood aside.
Her mouth opened in horror.
It was like an explosion inside her, spreading quickly outwards as the information was relayed to different parts of her body. There was a split second when it was just her eyes that registered the large poster on the building behind Orlando, advertising a concert that was taking place tomorrow night, and then the rest of her body caught up, going into full shock response as she stared at her own smiling face.
Orlando leaned back into the car—coming between her and Rachel Campion, concert pianist.
‘We need to talk,’ he said gruffly.
Rachel didn’t answer. Her mind was in uproar. Craning her head to look past him, she looked again to see if, in her shock, she had initially missed the part that said the concert was cancelled. Surely Carlos and her agent and the PR people should have publicised the fact that it wasn’t going ahead by now?
‘Rachel, please…’ Orlando’s voice was infinitely weary and seemed to come from a long way away. ‘I’m sorry to bring you all this way and abandon you like this…Look, I promise we’ll talk later.’
‘What? Oh. OK…’
Orlando’s face darkened. She sounded utterly distant, utterly preoccupied. He’d spent the entire journey feeling absolutely eaten up with remorse for his emotional cowardice, steeling himself for this moment. He’d tried to bridge the chasm that he’d created around himself—only to find that she wasn’t remotely interested in crossing it.
