A Scandalous Engagement

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Okay,’ he said, with a ring of pure enjoyment in his voice, ‘I’m just about to close the door to the bathroom now. As soon as you hear it click, you’re safe to move.’ She heard the subdued laughter and knew that, whatever he was thinking about her, it certainly didn’t involve adjectives such as ‘cool’, ‘sophisticated’ or ‘worldly wise’.

  As soon as she heard the door shut she was galvanised into action. She stripped off, flinging her clothes into the bottom of the wardrobe in an undignified heap, and stuck on her nightie with the speed of light. Then she quickly removed a couple of cushions from the chair, loosely covered them with the top sheet and provided him with one pillow. It was no ideal. There was nothing for him to cover himself with, which meant that he would have to endure an uncomfortably cold sleep, and the makeshift bed was roughly long enough to accommodate a pygmy. His problem, she thought, deciding that removal of make-up and brushing of teeth would have to be abandoned for tonight. He’d got them into this; he would just have to suffer the leg-cramping consequences.

  She pulled the duvet up to her chin, switched off the side light and feigned sleep. In fact she was on the point of drifting off when the bathroom door was flung open, and she held her breath, waiting for his reaction to her bed creation. Having initially closed her eyes, she hesitantly opened them to find him still half naked but with drawstring pyjama bottoms on. He was standing in the doorway, and the light framed him so that the shadows playing on the angles of his lithe body made him appear even more powerfully masculine. He was scrutinising the bundle of bedding as though it was something alien that had dropped in from outer space.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ he asked, without bothering to move towards it.

  ‘Your sleeping quarters for the night.’ Jade yawned widely. Conversation, the gesture said, is now terminated. She rolled onto her side and closed her eyes. She would have preferred to see him well and truly ensconced in his little bed, but on the whole it would be better if she just ignored him completely and let him get on with it. She only released her breath when the bathroom light was switched off, leaving the room in total inky blackness, and she heard him move softly across the room.

  Any relief was short-lived.

  She heard the sound of bedding, all right, but it was not the sound of bedding being wrapped around six foot two inches of male; it was the sound of bedding hitting her bed. The sheet brushed against her arm and the pillow landed inches from her face, sending her shooting up into a sitting position. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, and made out his shadowy hulk following in the wake of the pillow and the sheet. The bed depressed as he climbed in and she clutched the side to stop herself from rolling into contact with him. He prodded the pillow a couple of times, lay down, and she found her voice. At last.

  ‘You were supposed to be sleeping on the floor!’ she stuttered in dismay.

  ‘Is that what the pillow was doing on the ground!’

  ‘There was a sheet as well,’ Jade said through gritted teeth, ‘and a couple of cushions.’

  ‘In that case, sorry. I have no intention of sleeping on the ground. Go right ahead if you want to, but I wouldn’t advise it. When the heating goes off a thin sheet won’t go very far to keep the cold out, and I don’t particularly want your chattering teeth to rouse me from my beauty sleep.’

  With a disgruntled expelling of breath, Jade rolled over onto her other side, making sure that she was safely coccooned. She lay there, her body rigid, attuned to every noise in the room. She could hear the soft swirling of the snow outside. She could also hear his breathing, not quite rhythmic enough to indicate a relaxed state before deep slumber. She knew that there was no way she would get to sleep until she was sure that he was, if she managed to sleep at all.

  ‘Tom and Rose liked you.’ His deep, disembodied voice sent a rush of panic through her. This was an abnormal situation, she thought desperately, and reacting in an abnormal manner was just going to make matters worse. She closed her eyes and made deep, regular breathing noises. When he asked whether she was asleep, she breathed a bit more conspicuously, and in the ensuing silence was almost on the verge of thinking that her ploy had succeeded when she felt his hand slide to her waist.

  ‘I thought you were still awake,’ he said, when she spun around to face him. Bad move. Her face was now inches away from his, and although it was dark in the room it wasn’t dark enough to conceal the glitter in his eyes. His hand was still on her waist, and rather than involve herself in an undercover tussle to get rid of it, she left it where it was. When he began to gently caress her side through the tee shirt, she could feel her treacherous body jerk into life. The slow, steady flame, which she now realised had been there for ever, sprang into ferocious life, flooding her with savage heat that pulsed from the core of her being and spread outwards, so that her breasts began to ache and her nipples pushed against the thin jersey.

  ‘Wh…what do you think you’re doing…?’ she whispered.

  ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he whispered back, except, she thought, whereas her whisper had sounded dry and croaky, his was a velvety, sexy murmur that sent her pulses racing. ‘I’m touching you, Jade,’ he expanded, as if her brain wasn’t receiving the message loud and clear.

  ‘You can’t.’ Since this was not mirrored by any corresponding withdrawal, his stroking hand remained precisely where it was.

  ‘I won’t if you don’t want me to, but you do. You want me to touch you, every part of you, as much as I want it. Shall I tell you exactly what we both want? To explore each other’s bodies. I want to touch you here and…here…’ The roving hand moved inexorably down to her legs, then up her thigh underneath the tee shirt, where her bare skin ignited into searing, exciting heat. ‘And here…’ She moaned as his fingers skilfully skirted the edge of her knickers, not seeking to explore but filling her with as much burning need as if they had. Her body needed this, craved it. Her breathing was coming and going in little gasps.

  ‘I’m turning you on, aren’t I? Just watching you turns me on, do you know that? I thought I’d gone past the point of fantasising, but ever since I laid eyes on you I’ve been fantasising like an adolescent with his first crush.’ The soft murmur of his voice was drawing her deeper and deeper into a vortex of yearning that left her weak and helpless.

  Tentatively, she placed the flat of her hand on his chest and felt his indrawn breath. When her hand went lower, to touch his stiff arousal, she felt a sudden surge of heady, erotic power. He was hard and throbbing for her. With a groan, he pushed her onto her back, dislodging the duvet in the process. He caressed her through her tee shirt, massaging her breasts, filling his hands with them, teasing her aching nipples into hard, sensitive protuberances. She wanted him to suckle them so much that it almost physically hurt.

  Under his hands, with his mouth wetly laying claim to the white column of her neck, she writhed and twisted.

  Her legs parted and she touched herself down there, unable to stand the waiting, and he covered her hand with his, following her movements, then he pushed her hand away and his fingers slid against her wetness. And for a second she very nearly succumbed. She wanted to so badly. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. Her moan of despair so closely resembled a moan of passion that for a split instant he continued to rub her velvety smoothness.

  It was only when she curled back that he drew away in surprise.

  ‘I can’t.’ She tried to keep her voice steady but it was impossible.

  ‘You mean you won’t, don’t you?’ His voice was thick with emotion, and she listened to the coolness seeping in with a sinking heart. ‘I have more respect for women who say no from the start, Jade. Teasing isn’t a feminine ploy I’m into.’ The coolness was descending into contempt.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said shakily. ‘I want to…but I…I can’t.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘WHAT do you mean…you can’t?’ He drew back from her and leaned across the
bed to switch on the bedside light. She watched the ripple of his muscles tightening as he inclined his body. Her nerves, which had mysteriously been in suspended animation, clanked into gear, and she could feel perspiration breaking out over her, cooling her down.

  ‘Please switch the light off,’ she pleaded. She didn’t want to see his face. She didn’t want to see his emotions flitting across it. First curiosity, then interest, then the inevitable pulling away as he recognised that he was dealing with someone whose emotional baggage was best left untouched. However complex Curtis Greene was, his attitude to sex would be straightforward. Sex, for him, was fun, and having to deal with someone like her, someone with a story to tell, would not qualify as a fun time. Fun girls didn’t weep and cry and pull away. Fun girls laughed and offered nothing beyond simple enjoyment of the moment.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Because.’

  He shrugged and turned the light off, and blessed darkness settled over the room again. She could breathe. He was keeping to his side of the bed now, lazily resting on one elbow. Jade lay flat on her back and stared up at the ceiling.

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said, when she showed no inclination to break the silence.

  Jade looked across to him and folded her arms on the duvet, across her chest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Are you angry with me?’

  ‘Does it make any difference?’

  ‘You are angry with me.’

  ‘Just say what you have to say, Jade.’

  Oh, God. Was that boredom in his voice? Did he think that she was going to make up a string of lies because basically she had exercised her woman’s prerogative to say no at the last minute? Did he think that she was that kind of girl? She wondered what kind of girl she was, and realised that she no longer knew. She had been in mourning for over two years, and now, when she should tentatively be feeling her way towards a relationship, she had jumped straight into bed with a man with whom a relationship was out of the question. It made no sense, and even before everything had happened she had always been a sensible girl.

  ‘I have a problem…’ she began. Once upon a time, she should have started. Once upon a time, there were two happy little girls. Her hands were beginning to feel clammy. This was the first time that she was ever going to talk about this, about how she felt, about how her life had been eaten away, leaving her incapable of facing the future. ‘I’ve been in counselling.’

  ‘Is it drugs?’

  ‘No, of course it’s not drugs! The only drugs I’ve ever taken have been paracetamol for the occasional headache.’ She laughed, and felt a little better for it. ‘I…I wish I knew where to begin…’ She sighed and thought of her sister, a rapid mental recall that spanned all the years of her childhood and adolescence, into her twenties. ‘I had a twin…Caroline…’ Just saying the name out loud brought a lump to her throat.

  ‘Take your time,’ he said gently, and she threw him a watery smile, not sure whether he could make it out clearly or not.

  ‘We were very close…’

  ‘Were?’

  ‘She died a little over two years ago…’ She waited for him to interrupt with some polite lip service to sympathy, and when he didn’t say anything she drew in a deep breath. ‘We were very close. Incredibly close. We were brought up single-handedly by our mum, and when we were seventeen Mum died and we were left to fend for ourselves.’

  She smiled to herself as she remembered how their mother’s death had brought their very different personalities into stark relief. Jade, always the more responsible of the two, had assumed the mantle of authority and Caroline had automatically turned to her for support. In the space of a few months they had developed into a clear older and younger sister relationship, even though they’d been the same age. She had been the one to make sure that there was a meal in the evening, that the washing got done, that the schoolwork got done, and even when she had carried on studying and Caroline had quit school to get a job she had still continued to run the household alongside her own work.

  ‘I take it from your tone of voice that you were the one to do most of the fending?’ he said shrewdly. He stroked the side of her face, rubbing the pad of his thumb against her cheekbone, and instead of retreating into her defensiveness she found that she enjoyed the fleeting touch.

  ‘It worked well for the both of us,’ Jade said matter-of-factly.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Things were going very nicely for a while,’ Jade said. Her face felt damp but she wasn’t quite sure why. She didn’t think that she had been crying, but she supposed she must have been. Crying in a quiet, leaky kind of way, the sort of crying that can go on for a lifetime. ‘Years, in fact. I finished my A levels, then I started doing an art course at university. Caroline’s job was going well, although she was always one to party away the rungs on the career ladder. She liked going out. She was beautiful, beautiful and sexy, and she liked the attention that her looks brought her.

  ‘I can remember boys calling for her when we were thirteen and I still thought that boys were irritating little creatures who got in the way of study. Caroline’s idea of study was to open textbooks about two weeks before an exam and then try to force-feed the information into her brain. I can ever remember her going to sleep with a maths book underneath her pillow because someone had told her that she would absorb the information better that way!’ She laughed, and hiccoughed, and when he handed her a handkerchief, produced from where she had no idea, she took it and dabbed her face.

  This wasn’t as hard as she had thought it was going to be. She had thought that she might not be able to get past the first mention of her sister’s name, but now, in full flow, she found that reliving the memories was not as painful as anticipated.

  ‘And where did you fit in to this scenario?’ he asked softly. Her eyes had long acclimatised to the darkness. She could make out the softened angles of his face and the sympathetic expression in his eyes.

  ‘I enjoyed my sister’s antics from the sidelines. It probably sounds weird, but just watching the array of men she brought home was enough to leave me feeling exhausted.’

  ‘You must have had your own array as well…’

  Jade shook her head. ‘Far from it. I was hell-bent on finishing my art course. Men were something I sort of assumed would crop up when I had more time on my hands. There were one or two boyfriends, of course, but nothing…you know, out of the ordinary.’ The words were coming out of her so fluently that she could hardly believe that it was she talking. Opening up to another human being had never felt so easy.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary…’ he half murmured.

  No, she thought, not like you. The simplicity of the realisation shocked her into sudden silence. Curtis Greene was an extraordinary man who had done something extraordinary to her.

  ‘Carry on with your story,’ he said softly. ‘Finish the tale you began.’

  ‘So that your curiosity can be satisfied?’

  She saw him frown. ‘Is that why you think I’m listening? Because I’m curious? Do you think that once my curiosity is sated I’ll roll over to my side of the bed and go to sleep?’

  ‘I remember you saying that you liked the challenge of a mystery.’

  ‘Stop it, Jade.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Trying to run away and hide behind words. Stop trying to turn me into a bastard to protect yourself.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she protested heatedly, thinking that he had hit the nail on the head. ‘Okay. I’ll finish. I want to anyway. I owe it to you.’

  ‘You don’t owe me anything. You don’t owe me any explanations for your behaviour. If you want to talk about this, then do it because you want to, not because you think you should.’

  ‘Caroline started getting…these attacks of breathlessness. She’d be fine, then suddenly she’d have to sit down. At first we both thought that it was because she’d been burning the candle at both end
s. But it didn’t get any better, even after she’d stopped some of her partying and started trying to get a few good nights’ sleep. So…so she went to the doctor.’

  Jade lay back. She could feel her fingers gripping into the flesh of her upper arms and she forced herself to keep her voice neutral.

  ‘They did a lot of tests on her and finally they broke the news. She had a congenital heart defect. Not one of those that kill without warning, but it wasn’t curable. She still had time left, but not much. And after that everything changed. The life went out of her, even though she tried to keep up a brave face. I quit my art course. I had very nearly reached the end of it, but I felt that I should start earning money, just to make the remainder of her life easier. We went on a couple of holidays and I spent all that time with her, building up to the inevitable. Except when the inevitable came, it found me as unprepared as if I’d never known it was going to happen.’

  She turned her head to look at him. ‘I fell apart. Not a great big falling apart. More a steady unravelling from all the seams. I moved to London, got a job, but basically my life had stopped. I couldn’t face doing anything, seeing anyone. All I could think was that if it had happened to her, then it should have happened to me as well. We were twins. How could our bodies have had such a crucial difference between them?’

  She looked at him pleadingly, willing for him to give her some kind of meaningful answer. He looked as though he had taken a body blow and was literally unable to speak. When he finally did, his voice was rough and unsteady.

  ‘Nothing I can say can make sense of what you’ve just told me,’ he said. ‘How can it? If we could work out the reasons behind all the brutal, unfair things that happen in life, then we’d hold the key to the universe in our hands. All we can do is work with what we’ve been dealt. All I can tell you is that I’m sorry.’