Later, they pulled one another up a wooded slope, leaving the lake behind them as they searched for somewhere to sit and enjoy the spectacular scenery. Long before they found it though, Marcus tumbled Jodie into a grassy hollow that was hidden from view by the green fronds of new fern and the black skeletons of dried heather.
“I thought walking by the lake would be enough, but I was wrong,” he told her, supporting his weight with his hands as he leaned over her.
She smiled up at him, her eyes dark as sloes in the shadow of the ferns. He felt his breath hitch in his throat as he claimed her mouth. This wasn’t how he’d imagined their first time but he wasn’t strong enough to fight it, not when she was so eager and willing and the sun was so warm on his back. With a muttered oath he sat up and pulled his T-shirt over his head.
The touch of Jodie’s fingers as she stroked his shoulders was the final straw. He covered her hands, stilling them. “Only if you’re sure Jodie. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Yes it does,” her voice was soft as she pulled her hands free, sat up, and unbuttoned her polo shirt.
He helped her take it off and then he unhooked her bra, releasing breasts that put his imagination to shame. He didn’t touch her though. Instead he removed the band at the end of her plait and gently unwound her hair until it tumbled down her back in blue-black waves.
“I’ve wanted to do that ever since I first saw you,” he whispered, tangling his fingers in the thick skeins and pulling her towards him. He took his time after that, savoring her lips and the soft curves of her body before lying down and lifting her above him so the thick curtain of her hair screened them both from view. Then he took her nipples into his mouth and kissed them from pink to a moist, beckoning red.
Lost to everything around them they didn’t hear the voices until a small black and white dog burst through the ferns and started barking. Ignoring the angry commands of its owner, it darted at them, trying to nip them with its sharp little teeth.
With a muffled exclamation Marcus struck out at it. A lucky blow sent it yelping back to its master, and moments later they heard laughter as a group of hikers speculated about what sort of animal it had disturbed in the undergrowth.
Lying in one another’s arms, Jodie and Marcus waited in vain for them to go away. When they heard them settling down to eat the sandwiches they were carrying in their rucksacks, Jodie got an attack of the giggles. Smothering the sound against Marcus’ shoulder, she began to hiccup.
With a grin he did the only thing he could think of to stop her. He wrapped his arms around her and started kissing her again, and he carried on kissing her right through the sandwiches and the apples that followed. He didn’t stop until the last sandwich bag had been collected and the dog had been called to heel. He didn’t stop until the voices faded into the distance and they were alone again, but by then it was too late. The sun had gone in, rain clouds were threatening, and Jodie was shivering.
With a wry smile he helped her into her clothes and handed back the hair band he’d stuffed into his pocket. Then he pulled on his own T-shirt while she swiftly pleated her hair into a neat plait.
As they retraced their steps back to the car park he slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Sorry Jodie. I guess making love to you amongst the ferns wasn’t one of my best ideas.”
Snuggling against him for warmth, she gave a soft laugh. “I wouldn’t say that…after all we did discover a very effective cure for hiccups.”
Chapter Twenty
Later, sitting opposite to one another at a table in an ancient waterside inn, they ate local venison and toffee pudding, and laughed at what had so nearly happened to them.
“The headlines wouldn’t have done your career much good,” Jodie teased as she scooped up the last of her dessert.
“Which one? The one that says ‘Composer caught in flagrante in ferns’ or the one that says ‘the musician caught making love to a beautiful woman protested that he couldn’t stop himself because she’s the love of his life.’
“The second one,” Jodie’s voice was barely a whisper as she reached for his hand.
Their fingers clasped, they waited while the waitress cleared the table and took Marcus’ order for some freshly percolated coffee. Once they were alone again he leaned forward and brushed an errant strand of hair away from Jodie’s face. “You do know I mean it, don’t you?”
She nodded, but her eyes were full of pain and she pulled her pulled hand free as the waitress returned. “We needed today Marcus…but that’s all it is…a day. One day and then it’s work again, and Izzie and Luke, and fighting to find enough time to sleep.”
He stirred his coffee thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t be like that if you married me…well the fighting to find enough time to sleep might be if you were sleeping in my bed…but everything else would be better. Izzie and Luke would soon accept their new life, and I would be able to look after you instead of watching you work your fingers to the bone.”
When he looked at her, her eyes were brimming with unshed tears. He took her hand again. “Is that a yes?”
She shook her head. “It’s a no! I love you and I want to keep seeing you, but I can’t marry you. I can’t give up my home and my job at the riding school either. It’s just…it’s not an option.”
“Okay, I accept it’s probably too soon to think about it now, but later, when my house is finished and Luke and I are settled, will you think about it then? I’ll even have a stable built for Buckmaster…and before you shout at me, I’m not trying to buy you. I know you come as a package…you, Izzie and that damned horse!”
“It’s not that. It’s me,” she interrupted him with a shake of her head. “I can’t marry you Marcus. Not now. Not ever.”
“But why?”
“Because I’ll never be able to trust you. My mother trusted people and they all let her down; my father, my stepfather, the man she was living with when she died, me…I let her down too.” The tears had spilled over now. She scrubbed at her face with a crumpled paper napkin and blew her nose. Then she pushed back her chair and went to the restroom.
Marcus had settled the bill by the time she returned and was waiting for her by the open door. He wasn’t looking at the picturesque scene in front of him though. Instead he was trying, unsuccessfully, to curb his anger. As soon as she joined him he pulled her outside and marched her across to the car. Opening the passenger door he waited for her to climb in and then slammed it shut.
“You can’t live your life like that,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “I’m not the men your mother knew and you’re not your mother. You’re strong Jodie, and brave, and determined. Surely you don’t think I would do anything to destroy that. I just want to love you and share my life with you. I didn’t think I’d ever feel this way again, but I do. When Lucia died I lost my faith in the whole of the human race for a while, but I got over it, so why can’t you.”
She hunched away from him, trying to escape from the hurt and anger in his voice, and when she finally answered him she was crying again. “I just can’t. I know I’m being unfair to you and I’m sorry. I do love you and I’ll do anything you want except that. I’ll readjust my work, delegate things, find more time for you…for us…but I won’t give up my job, and I won’t marry you.”
With a muttered exclamation he pulled her towards him and buried his face in her hair. He wanted to be angry with her. He wanted to shake some sense into her, but he couldn’t because he recognized her pain. He’d had enough therapy after his wife’s suicide to know Jodie’s fears were irrational. What he didn’t know was what he could do about them.
He tried again. “Look, I know it’s too soon to think about marriage so I promise not to mention it again if you promise to stop crying. Three times is more than enough for one day.”
She lifted her head and gave him a watery smile. “If you told Izzie how often you’ve seen me cry she wouldn’t believe you. She’s never seen me cry, not once.”
/> He stared at her in disbelief as he remembered the histrionics that had been part and parcel of his marriage to Lucia. “Never?”
She shook her head. “I cried a lot when my mother died but after that something seemed to dry up inside me and I never cried again until I met you.”
“You still haven’t told me exactly how she died.”
“She was driving too fast, late at night, when she plowed into the back of a parked truck. She was killed outright. Izzie could have been too, except she was lying asleep on the back seat so she missed being crushed by the wreckage.”
“But I thought you said she was in a terrible state when you eventually got to her.”
“She was, but it wasn’t physical. She walked away from the crash without a scratch. It was the shock that unhinged her. The shock of waking up in a tangled mass of metal and seeing her mother dying in front of her. It’s why she has such trouble sleeping.”
A car horn blared loudly behind them. Glancing in the mirror Marcus saw the driver of a large black car waiting for his parking space. With an apologetic wave he buckled his seat belt and drove out of the car park. He continued for several miles until he saw a wooded clearing beside a different lake. Indicating, he pulled in and cut the engine; then he turned and looked at Jodie.
“What is it you’re not telling me?”
Panic washed across her face. “How do you know?”
He sighed. “I know because I love you, and I know because you’re an open book. Do you have any idea how expressive your face is? You wouldn’t know how to hide your feelings from me if your life depended on it.”
When she didn’t answer, he squeezed her hand. “It’s not a bad thing Jodie. I love that you don’t hide how you feel about me. I love that you aren’t coy about wanting to sleep with me. What I don’t like though, is your need to hide something from me. If you really feel you can’t trust me then I guess we don’t have a future together after all.”
The silence between them lasted for so long that in the end Marcus got out of the car and walked across the pebbled beach that fringed the lake. The weather had deteriorated into lowering clouds and a wind was whipping up choppy waves. The grayness matched his mood. He turned and began to trudge along the footpath skirting the gloomy stretch of water.
He hadn’t gone very far when Jodie slipped her hand into his. She was out of breath from running and her face was rosy with exertion, but her eyes were dark pools of pain.
“I didn’t mean to shut you out Marcus…it’s just...it’s something I’ve never discussed with anyone before, mainly because there was no one to talk to I guess. My mother’s so-called friends, the ones who fawned all over her when my stepfather was alive and she had lots of money, had all given up on her by the time she died. I had too, and I can’t forgive myself for behaving as I did. If I’d stayed with her instead of taking a job in a training stable several hundred miles away in the hope I could re-establish my dressage career, I might have been able to stop her chasing across the countryside on a fool’s errand.”
He wrapped his arms around her, and waited. He knew all about not being there when someone you loved needed you.
“She was pregnant you see. Pregnant with a baby nobody wanted. She went back to singing after my stepfather died. I think it was that or starve. People had forgotten her by then of course, so she only performed in local clubs and bars while I babysat Izzie, but we were fine…until she met Sean. He told her he was an agent but I don’t think he was, not really. He was just someone who saw an opportunity and sweet-talked her into believing him. He had grand plans for her until she became pregnant.”
“Although he was the baby’s father, as soon as he realized how her pregnancy was going to affect her career, he left. Her crazy late night trip was because someone at the club where she was singing told her they’d seen him and she was trying to find him. I guess she wanted to persuade him to come back to her.”
“So when she died, the baby died too, letting him off scot free?”
“No! That’s the bit I’ve never told anyone. The baby was born at the side of the road. A doctor cut her out of my mother’s dead body and rushed her to the nearest hospital. I don’t know how much Izzie saw because nobody knew she was in the car until the breakdown truck arrived to tow it away and a policeman found her hiding under a blanket on the floor. She was in such a state of shock it was days before she spoke and when she did she refused to say anything about the crash. She still won’t talk about it now.
“What happened to the baby?”
“That’s the thing…I don’t know. Somewhere on this planet I have another sister but I can’t find her. I tried. God knows I tried. But nobody would ever tell me anything.”
The wind blew flurries of rain across the lake as she finished speaking. Feeling her shiver, Marcus turned around so they could retrace their steps. “Come on, you can tell me the rest in the car.”
“There’s not much more to tell. Social Services had the baby fostered and then adopted. They wouldn’t even let me see her, and because I was busy fighting for Izzie I didn’t question their decision. It was only after I’d found a home for both of us that I had the time to think about her, and by then it was too late and she’d vanished from my life.
They reached the car as she finished speaking and as soon as they were inside he pulled her into his arms. He was emotionally drained by everything she’d just told him; unable to fathom how she had retained her capacity to love after being let down so many times. He was beginning to understand, too, why she had a problem with trust, and he wished he could do something about it.
I don’t know what to say Jodie…except that I want you to marry me even more than I did an hour ago.”
When she started to react, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. “No, don’t say anything. That wasn’t a proposal; it was a declaration of intent. One day you’ll marry me Jodie Eriksson but until then I’ll be content with this…and this…and this…”
* * *
By the time they drove into the stable yard Marcus’ and Jodie’s energy levels were at rock bottom. They had shared too many confidences and suffered too many frustrations to want to do more than sit quietly together with a glass of wine. Izzie, however, hadn’t forgotten their promise. She came hurtling out the house before Marcus killed the engine. She was clutching a sheaf of music.
“What kept you? I thought you’d be here when I got back from school.”
He forced a smile. “Hop in. You can be the first one to christen my studio.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Jodie stared out the window as she rinsed the breakfast dishes and wondered what Marcus was doing. She was fed up with late night telephone conversations, especially the ones they’d been having recently, the ones that were a verbal assault on her overheated senses. The ones that kept her awake long after she’d cut the call and turned off her bedside light.
Hearing Izzie moving around upstairs she gave a wry smile. At least someone was happy and fulfilled. Her sister had grown up over the past few months. Ever since she’d finished her exams she had been focused in a way Jodie had never seen before. When she wasn’t immersed in her music she spent hours working with the private therapist Marcus had found for her, and it was all beginning to pay off. Her voice was stronger, her confidence was growing; and in recent weeks, although she still used a night-light, she had also begun to close her bedroom door.
Remembering the uncomfortable end of year meeting she’d had with Izzie’s teacher she sighed. She was fed up with the constant stream of advice she’d received ever since she had agreed to let her leave school. Nobody understood why she’d done it but then they hadn’t seen Izzie perform. Although she was still desperately afraid for the future, she’d known she had no choice the moment her sister climbed onto the small stage in Marcus’ studio and opened her mouth. Reluctantly she’d been forced to accept that Izzie was born to sing in the same way she, herself, had been born to ride.
She
knew Marcus had been surprised by how quickly she had abandoned the long cherished ambition she’d had for Izzie to attend university. What he didn’t understand was that all the knocks she’d received in her own life had taught her to be a realist, and it was this that had helped her to accept that Izzie was going to sing, the same as it had made her stop resisting the overwhelming feelings she had for him.
A blast of music interrupted her thoughts as Izzie plugged her iPod into the state of the art docking station Marcus had given her despite Jodie’s protests. She was used to the constant background noise by now and was surprised by how much it comforted her. It reminded her of one of the best parts of her childhood when she’d listened to recordings of her mother’s music while her grandmother told her stories about the beautiful woman she only knew through photographs.
Now though, it brought her back to the here and now with a start. She glanced at her watch. It was late. Buckmaster would become restless if she didn’t saddle him up soon, and she would be late for her first lesson as well unless she took him out right away.
Pulling on her riding boots and grabbing her fleece she hurried out into the yard. It was already bustling with activity as stable boys and girls prepared the horses for the day. She waved at them as she made her way to Buckmaster’s stable.
He greeted her with a snort of annoyance. She laughed as she offered him a carrot. “I know I’m late Bucky but so would you be if you had as much going on in your head as me.”
* * *
Later, trotting along the lane leading to the bridleway her heart leapt when she saw a huge pantechnicon turning into the driveway leading to Marcus’ house. At last the months of waiting were over. Sensing her change of mood, Buckmaster slowed down. She dug her heels into his flanks.
“He won’t be here yet Bucky and when he does arrive you won’t be seeing much of him, not until Luke is ready to visit us.”
Mending Jodie's Heart (When Paths Meet Book 1) Page 12
