The Marriage Demand

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Nash demanded as she turned on her heel and hurried blindly towards the kitchen door.

  ‘My room. I’m tired and I want to go to bed,’ Faith told him shakily. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours, Nash. I’m not answerable to you. You don’t have any control over me.’

  There was the smallest pause before he responded, his voice silken with a menace that made the tiny hairs lift on the back of Faith’s neck.

  ‘No? Oh, I think you’ll find that you are very much answerable to me, Faith, and that I have a great deal of control over you. If, for instance, I were to tell Robert what you had just done…’

  ‘If?’ Faith couldn’t manage to keep the note of soft pleading out of her voice as she turned round to confront him.

  ‘I thought you wanted to go to bed,’ Nash taunted her smoothly.

  He was enjoying this, Faith recognised. Well, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of pleading with him…begging him…

  ‘I do,’ she agreed fiercely, turning her back on him, walking determinedly towards the door and opening it.

  As he watched her departing back Nash finally let out the pent-up breath he had been holding.

  Where the hell had she learned to kiss like that…and who with…?

  No other woman had ever kissed him like that, as if he was their life, their soul, their one desire. Their soul mate for this life and every life to come, their world…their everything. She had kissed him as though she had waited out an eternity for him…as though she had been starving for him…as though she loved him and only him.

  A woman like Faith was a living, breathing mortal danger to a man when she kissed him like that. A woman like Faith…

  Angrily Nash tried to dismiss her from his thoughts. Hadn’t what she had done to his godfather taught him anything? Of course it had! What was she trying to do? Offer him sex to prevent him from telling Ferndown about her?

  Alongside his anger and contempt Nash could feel the sharp savage heat that burned through his body. How could he possibly want her, given all that he knew about her? He had never merely wanted a woman for sex. Never. And he didn’t want Faith—not really. It was just his mind playing tricks on him. Some bizarre and treacherous effect of seeing her here at Hatton and reactivating memories of the past. A past when he had wanted her.

  How many men had there been in her life since then? How many men had experienced the dangerous witchery of her? If that kiss she had given him was anything to go by…no wonder Ferndown was so besotted with her!

  But he had come here to finally put the past to rest, Nash reminded himself savagely—not to reactivate it.

  Upstairs in her room Faith sank down onto her bed, wrapping her arms protectively around her body as she rocked herself helplessly to and fro.

  Why, why, why had she allowed it to happen? Why had she betrayed everything that she held most dear? Why had she allowed herself to forget reality, and, most important of all, why had she become so bemused, so intoxicated, so entranced and so lost in Nash’s kiss? She had given in to his hands a powerful weapon for him to use against her, and given it to him as carelessly and recklessly as she had once given him her heart and her love.

  She should never have come back here—would never have come back here if she had guessed for one moment that Nash was going to be here.

  Ten years ago he had told her that he would never forgive her for his godfather’s death, but she had never dreamed that he would pursue her for vengeance in the way he was now doing.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Nash looked at the remains of his virtually uneaten meal. Grimly he got up and took the plate over to the pedal bin, removing the food before rinsing the plate and stacking it in the dishwasher.

  Salmon had always been one of his godfather’s favourite foods. Towards the end of his life it had become increasingly difficult for him to feed himself—a legacy of his stroke—and Nash could remember visiting him on his birthday and finding him close to tears of anger and pride as he had stared at the salmon on his plate.

  In the end Nash had fed him himself, dismissing his nurse. It had been the least he could do. Philip had been like the grandfather Nash had never had, his home a refuge to Nash during his schooldays when his own parents had been out of the country. His father had been a foreign correspondent with a national newspaper and his mother a photographer. They, like Philip, were dead now, killed in an uprising in one of the countries they had been reporting from.

  Philip had adored Faith, once confiding in Nash that she was the granddaughter he would have loved to have had. He had shown that love for her in his will, which he had altered with Nash’s own knowledge and approval only days before he had been attacked. He had made a provision in it for a sum to be set aside from his estate to pay for Faith’s further education; Nash knew that had he lived it would have been Philip’s intention to finance Faith through a degree.

  All three of them had shared a compelling interest in architecture; in fact it had been Nash’s own love of interesting buildings which had led to him acquiring his first property whilst he was still at Oxford. He had bought a small row of terraced houses with the money he had inherited from his parents’ estate, back then more because he had been amused by their innovative and attractive early Edwardian design than because he had wanted to make money from them by letting them—that had come later.

  At least Faith had not lied to Philip about her desire to become an architect. Nash frowned as he remembered how determinedly his godfather had battled with the after-effects of his stroke to make sure Nash knew he wanted his will to stand. People had assumed, because Philip lived in a large house, that he was a wealthy man.

  Nash’s frown deepened. It was nearly midnight. Time he was in bed.

  It had taken Faith a long time to finally get off to sleep, her body tense, her mind racing. And now a dog fox, padding across the gardens, paused and lifted his head, baying to the moon. In her sleep Faith trembled, tormented by the darkness of her dreams, their grip on her so intense that when the fox’s cry first woke her she actually thought that she was still fifteen, and was relieved to find herself here in her bed at Hatton, not in her room at the home.

  The home!

  As she sat up in the bed Faith clasped her hands round her knees and stared morosely towards the window. She had hated the home so much. Or rather she had hated the things she had experienced whilst she was living there.

  Her mother’s recovery had been progressing much more slowly than anyone had envisaged, and in September, when the new school year had begun, Faith had had to move back into the home from Hatton and attend school with the other girls.

  The school her age group had attended had been in the local town—they’d travelled there and back every day by bus—and, as Faith had quickly discovered, girls from the home were considered troublemakers by the staff at school.

  When her teachers had discovered that Faith genuinely wanted to work and learn she had earned their approbation and admiration—and the increased enmity of the home’s dominating gang of girl bullies.

  No one had been more astonished than Faith when, after weeks of tormenting and deriding her, one of the gang had approached her and invited her to join them on a Saturday morning shopping trip into town. Naïvely eager to accept the olive branch she was being offered, Faith had accepted. She’d had no money of her own to spend, but had been happy to take one of the other girl’s goods and money to the checkout to pay for them.

  It had only been once they were back outside in the street that Faith had discovered their real purpose in befriending her. They had started to shriek with laughter and jeer at her, boasting that they had used her as a decoy whilst they had been shoplifting.

  Faith had been horrified, pleading with them to take the stolen goods back—make-up, in the main—which had only made them worse.

  ‘Pay for it? Why should we when we can get it for free?’ she had been told.

  And as Faith ha
d looked unhappily at them she had suddenly been uncomfortably aware of the narrow-eyed attention she was getting from the girl who was the leader of the small group.

  Slightly older than the others, with—if the home’s gossip was to be believed—a family background of theft, she had marched over to Faith, taking a handful of her hair and tugging it viciously as she’d warned her, ‘Don’t even think of snitching on us, Miss Posh, ’cos if you do…’

  She had stopped whilst Faith had gritted her teeth against the pain. Her eyes had been beginning to water, but she’d been determined not to let the other girl see how much she was hurting her.

  ‘’Cos if you do,’ the older girl had continued, giving Faith’s hair an even more vicious tug, ‘we’ll just tell them that it was all your idea in the first place. Bet that old geezer up at the big house is filthy rich, isn’t he? Bet that place is loaded down with stuff. How many tellys has he got?’

  Faith had shaken her head and responded honestly, ‘I don’t know.’

  Philip hadn’t watched a lot of television, preferring to read.

  ‘Keep much money up there, does he?’ her tormentor had demanded. ‘I bet he does. And don’t tell me you haven’t looked or been tempted to take a few quid, Miss Goody-two-shoes,’ she had sneered.

  ‘No,’ Faith had protested, grateful that the arrival of their bus meant that the other girl had been forced to let her go.

  ‘Just remember,’ she had hissed as they got on the bus, ‘try telling on us and you’ll be for it, good and proper…’

  Completely wide awake now, and fully back in the present, Faith hugged her knees.

  Her conscience had troubled her very badly over the fact that she had not told anyone in authority about the shoplifting. It hadn’t been fear that had stopped her—or at least not any fear of being physically hurt. It had been more her fear of betraying the youthful code of not ‘telling tales’ that had kept her silent. There had been a moment when she had been tempted to confide in one person, though, she acknowledged.

  Closing her eyes, she expelled her breath shakily.

  The following weekend she had been invited over to Hatton, and Nash had picked her up.

  ‘What’s wrong, Shrimp?’ he had asked her, in that teasing manner he’d sometimes adopted towards her which had made her itch to tell him that she was almost grown up, certainly grown up enough to know that she loved him.

  ‘It’s…’ she had begun hesitantly, but just as she had struggled to find the words to tell him what had happened she’d realised that his attention had been distracted away from her by a stunningly beautiful brunette walking on the other side of the road.

  Bringing his car to a halt, Nash had wound down the window and called out a greeting to the other woman.

  The smile she had given him had confirmed Faith’s view that Nash was just the most gorgeously hunky, sexy man there was, and when the brunette had crossed the road to indulge in some sophisticated banter with Nash, Faith had subsided into her seat, feeling forlorn and unwanted.

  It had only been as Nash had finally driven away that she’d realised, despite the girl’s open hints, Nash had not made any definite plans to take her out, and in the soaring surge of relief and joy that knowledge had brought, the dilemma she had been about to seek his advice on had been pushed to one side.

  There had been many occasions in the decade since then when Faith had wondered just how different her life might have been if she had told him.

  Just for a second silent tears glistened betrayingly in her eyes, but very quickly and determinedly she blinked them away. She had stopped crying over Nash Connaught a long, long time ago—hadn’t she?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘END of laburnum tunnel, nymph with water pot’.

  As she wrote down her description of the statue she was standing in front of Faith sighed a little ruefully. This morning, when she had initially embarked on her self-imposed task, she hadn’t realised just how many pieces of statuary and ornament the garden possessed, nor how much being in it was going to affect her and awaken more memories she had thought long ago safely buried.

  But was it being in the garden that had awakened them or was it Nash? Nash and that insane, inexplicable response she had allowed him to steal from her last night?

  Stop thinking about it, Faith warned herself fiercely. Stop thinking about him!

  It was, after all, Philip who had first introduced her to the beauty of Hatton’s gardens, and Nash had come walking towards them down the laburnum tunnel, the brief darts of sunlight that had pierced its summer-green canopy splashing splodges of lighter colour on the tee shirt he had been wearing—a tee shirt which she remembered far too vividly had openly revealed the smooth tanned column of his throat and the muscular strength of his forearms.

  Just watching him then had made her go faint with love and longing. That had been the occasion, she remembered—how could she possibly ever forget?—when Philip had suggested that Nash should take her to Oxford for dinner.

  Faith had been speechless with embarrassment and excitement, scarcely daring to breathe as she had prayed that Nash would agreed.

  ‘Do you like Italian food?’ he had asked her.

  Faith suspected she would have agreed to like any kind of food so long as she could eat it in his company, and now, recalling the incident, she could vividly see in her memory an image of Nash’s face, and the quizzical amusement she had not really recognised then when she had breathed her fervent assent.

  Oh, yes, Nash had known exactly how she had felt about him. But then she hadn’t made any attempt to hide her feelings…her love…had she?

  Nash had driven her to Oxford in his bright red sports car, and if he had felt resentful about the way his godfather had manipulated him into taking her out, there had been nothing in his manner towards her to betray it.

  They had been having a good summer weather-wise. The evening had been soft and balmy, Oxford’s streets busy with visitors while the colleges were empty of students for the long summer holiday. Nash had parked the car close to his own college, and Faith had studied both it and the other wonderful buildings they had walked past on their way to the restaurant with awed eyes. So much of the country’s history had its roots in the early lives of those who had studied here: artists, writers, statesmen and women.

  The Italian restaurant had been situated in a pretty courtyard off a narrow lane, and the patrone, a jocular middle-aged Italian, had shown them to a table which had afforded them a prime view of the other diners whilst giving them their own privacy.

  It had been the first time she had eaten proper Italian food, the first time she had even been to a restaurant really, and Nash had laughed teasingly at her as she had struggled with her ribbons of pasta before moving closer to her and demonstrating the correct way to eat it.

  Watching him twirl the pasta onto his fork had been one thing—trying to imitate him had been something else, and in the end…

  Helplessly Faith closed her eyes. All too quickly and easily she was fifteen again, seated next to Nash in the restaurant. She could smell the fresh clean scent of his hair…his body…She knew it was Nash’s scent because she had sneaked into his bathroom one afternoon when he hadn’t been there just so that she could breathe in the special smell she always associated with him. She had even dampened a piece of cotton wool and put some of his shower gel onto it, secreting it beneath her own pillow so that when she went to bed the last thing she smelt at night and the first thing she smelt in the morning was Nash.

  ‘No, not like that.’ He had smiled when he’d seen the way she was fumbling to copy him, adding, ‘Here, let me show you.’

  And then, unbelievably, his hand had been over hers as she’d held the fork and he’d moved her hand.

  ‘Think you’ve got it now?’ he’d asked her several dizzyingly blissful seconds later. ‘Or do I have to feed you?’ he had teased.

  At fifteen she had been far too young and innocent to respond sexually to such a questi
on—and anyway she had known that Nash had not intended it to be a sensual invitation for him to feed her as a lover—but she had not been too young to experience a sudden clutching, piercing sensation deep down inside her body, and neither had she been old enough to stop herself from gazing adoringly into Nash’s eyes, her heart and feelings in her own.

  No doubt that had been the reason he had very firmly removed his hand from hers and moved his chair back to its original position, saying crisply, ‘Perhaps you should have ordered something it would be easier for you to eat.’

  But not even that remark had had the power to quench her euphoric joy, Faith remembered.

  The subtle adult nuances of Nash’s manner towards her, which had been lost on her at fifteen, deep in the throes of the passionate intensity of a love she was longing to have returned, were revealed to her in sharp painful clarity now as she reran her mental recording of that time past her now adult awareness.

  What she had seen as a uniquely romantic evening shared by two people who were destined to love one another had no doubt to Nash simply been the execution of a duty.

  It had been growing dark later, when they had walked back to the car side by side, with Faith as close to Nash’s side as she had dared. Nash himself had somehow or other managed to keep a few inches of space between their bodies, but then they had had to cross a very busy intersection, where the traffic lights, for some reason, hadn’t been working, and Nash had reached out and taken her hand.

  To share such a physical intimacy with him twice in one evening had put Faith on such a high plateau of intense emotion that she hadn’t been able to imagine she could possibly feel any happier—unless, of course, Nash had fulfilled her wildest dreams and actually kissed her.

  Her wildest dreams?

  The reality of Nash’s kiss had been more like her worst nightmare, Faith thought bitterly now as she headed for the elegant Italian garden, with its box hedges and formal fishpond.