by Rosalie Ash
‘My sisters! Who both seem to think you’re God’s gift to creation, incidentally.’
‘I don’t think you’re a spoilt brat,’ he said, ‘However misguided you’ve been, in not telling me about Archie, you’ve coped as a single mother, running a growing business, and you’ve built a safe secure world for Archie. That makes you strong and courageous. I’m proud of you.’
Slightly wrong-footed by this unexpected declaration of support, she blinked at him.
‘Well, thank you. But don’t tell me you’ve never stopped wanting me. If you want someone you don't forget their existence for nearly two years!'
'But it's true,' he said quietly, a muscle working in his cheek. 'You've got to believe me.'
'I don't understand!'
'No, I'm not sure I do. There's no rational explanation for the effect you have on me.'
'You’re talking in riddles!' she raked tendrils of hair back from her face furiously. 'You say you actually cared for me, when we slept together that night, and yet you were so deliberately cruel to me! And for two whole years you never contacted me!'
With an anguished groan Matt hunched forward, his elbows on his thighs, head in hands. She stared at his rigid shoulders, but fear, pride, bitterness kept her silent and motionless.
'OK, here goes,' he said finally, dropping his hands from his face, and easing back his broad shoulders slightly. 'I've told you, I'm not good at explaining my feelings. But I'll try. I looked at you, that day we first met, and you made a strong impact on me. I don't know what it was. What is it about someone else that draws you to them? Maybe it was the way you looked at me, with those tawny-almond eyes…'
‘Maybe it was the way I flashed my boobs at you?’ she suggested coolly.
He half smiled, spread his hands in a flat, despairing gesture.
'That could never have been a bad thing,’ he grinned briefly, ‘But I’m being serious, Victoria. All I know is, I wanted you. And that frightened me. It still does. When I see someone I want that much I have this violent gut-reaction to block them out. I just want to fight the feeling any way I can.'
She sat rigid, listening but not understanding. Her hands were clenched tightly in her lap.
'So I put up some fairly heavy-duty barricades,' he went on with a trace of self-mockery in his eyes. 'But somehow you managed to get through. I told myself you were much too young. Virtually a child . . .'
'I was nearly nineteen.'
'Yes, and you were Jessica's little sister, how could I seduce you under her roof? But you were looking at me as if I were blind, or half-witted or something! That was the hardest part of all. You wanted me, and you didn't even try to hide it. You were so vulnerable, innocent, sweet and generous, all the things I least wanted and least deserved. I just wanted to hit out, belittle you, devalue the whole thing.'
He shook his head wearily, his face drawn. 'When you came into my room that night, trying to explain how you felt, I finally snapped. I'll admit I took what you were offering for the wrong reasons. I thought if did, I'd somehow defuse the tension. Sex can be a very mechanical thing. I thought it might break the spell.' His mouth twisted in pain. 'Instead, I felt as if I'd jumped over a cliff into the dark.'
She closed her eyes tightly, then, and images of that night with Matt came swirling into her mind, mingling with the bitter ecstasy she had just experienced once more. The tenderness, the sheer, indescribable beauty of giving herself to Matt that first time, and the cruel slap in the face of his reaction afterwards. Her head was spinning. She was numbed by what Matt was trying to tell her. If his words were true, then he, too, had felt some of the magic of that weekend, he had sensed a deeper meaning to it all, shared something, just a fraction perhaps, of what she had experienced. It was a heady, potent possibility.
But if he had felt even a fraction of her consuming passion, he couldn't have left that night, and stayed away all that time, made no effort to contact her at all. It just wasn't possible.
'New York seemed the perfect escape route,' he went on in a hunted voice, as if he was driving himself to continue. 'But I couldn't get you out of my mind. I painted a picture of you.' He gave a mirthless laugh, and she nodded slowly.
'Yes, I saw it at Jessica's.'
'I thought it might exorcise the ghosts. I'd transfer you to oil-paint and canvas and then get rid of you. Sell you, stick you in a cupboard, anything to get you out of my mind and give me some uninterrupted sleep at night!'
She met his eyes then, for the first time, staring at him curiously.
'And did you put me in a cupboard?'
'Yes. It didn't work.' There was wry self-mockery in his voice again.
'Maybe you should have persevered with the therapy.'
'Maybe.' Matt raked back his hair, and drew a deep breath. 'I tried quite a few others. Immersing myself in work, climbing and skiing at weekends.'
'Lots of other women?'
The lidded eyes glittered. 'No, no other women,' he said quietly. 'I made the acquaintance of several. But I didn’t take any of them to bed.'
'Ascetic as a monk,' she mocked faintly. 'I'd have thought the mechanical act of sex would have been just the thing to take your mind off things.'
'Yes, I thought so too. But after what I experienced with you, I found I felt differently about sex, 'Matt said in a low, taut voice.
'How romantic!' she taunted, and he swung round to grip her shoulders, making her heart thump unevenly again.
'Don't do that!' he grated urgently. 'Knowing how much I've hurt you is bad enough. Seeing how much you've changed is even harder to bear. When we first met you were romantic, impulsive, you had that fresh innocence that was like a breath of pure oxygen.’
'And now I'm defensive and cynical? Quite true. But what do you expect, Matt?'
'I realise that I should have emailed, or phoned, or come back and told you how I felt. I didn't. I could have handled the whole thing better. I accept that. But so could you! And by the time I knew what I really wanted I was so deeply embroiled in that mess over Sam Kent I didn't even have time to think straight. And then I chose to resign, change the whole structure of my career. By that time messages, texts, emails, letters, phone calls—they would all have been worthless in trying to renew contact with you. I waited until I was back in England. I rang Jessica, and sounded her out. For all I knew you might have met someone else, got married even. Then Jessica laid into me about abandoning the mother of my baby son.’
There was a silence, then he said softly, ‘You cannot imagine how I felt then.'
Avoiding his eyes, she stared at the tapestry pattern on the hotel bedspread. 'So you're saying Archie wasn't the only reason you looked me up again?' she asked finally, aware of an irritating tremble in her voice.
'I've just told you the truth, Victoria,' said Matt. 'I knew nothing about Archie until after I came back to find you. But finding out about him made me very angry. I realise you were under no legal obligation to tell me about the baby, but morally… Jesus, Vic, you should have told me! I had to take off on a long, hard hike up the steepest mountain I could find, and kick the hell out of several rocks for an entire weekend, before I even trusted myself to meet you. I was so angry with you, and with myself, and with the wasted months when I could have been with you, and with my baby son.'
She stared intently into space. She realised she was counting the pink and green flowers in the wallpaper border, interwoven in a twisted, heraldic design. Her sense of numbness grew, a sense of unreality, as if they were talking about two people completely unrelated to themselves.
'When we met again, you were so cool and distant, and different…all the things I'd been planning to say and do seemed impossible,' Matt was saying. 'I admit I'm useless at emotional scenes. They make me want to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction!'
'So what exactly do you want of me now?' she asked at last, turning a detached gaze on him.
'I want us to be together. I want you and Archie and me to be a family. I
want my son to know his father and his mother.’
'But what makes you think we could give Archie a secure family?' she persisted. 'I mean, from what you've just told me about your feelings, it's not exactly a glowing character reference for a stable family man, is it?'
The harsh face twisted into a wry smile.
'I can't answer that. All I know is, I want to be with you. And with my son.'
'Yes, but barring sex, which I've just decided is a very poor basis for making decisions, what else do we have in common?'
He expelled his breath in a long, weary sigh, and stood up, pulling her slowly up to face him.
'Victoria….sex might not be up to much as far as other people are concerned, but between you and me… ' The look in his eyes made her shiver with fresh panic and she steeled herself against him with every ounce of willpower she had left. 'Don't pretend there isn't magic, Victoria. And all we've had is one experience, nearly two years ago. We won't count that hasty, rushed episode just now—that hardly did justice to the way I feel about you. You've no idea how much better it could be…' He had moved a fraction closer, his lips brushed against her cheek, and his hands slid up into her hair. 'I want to make love to you very, very slowly…' he breathed against her ear, and with a slight strangled sob she found the impetus to push him violently away from her.
'Don't do that!' she said glacially. 'I can't think straight when you do that.'
‘Don't think, then. Just feel,' he murmured, a glitter of wry humour in his eyes.
'I want you to tell me what you think we have in common!' she demanded fiercely, clutching her arms around herself protectively. 'How do you see a relationship between us working? A father who gains his son's love, then walks away whenever responsibilities prove too demanding, or a father who just can’t handle love and emotion because he’s never known it himself? A father who puts up barriers instead of reaching out and loving, because that’s the way he’s been programmed to behave? Don’t you think that could be far worse than no father at all?'
There was a lengthy silence.
In her heart, Victoria was wincing in anguish. Her stomach was knotted with pent up anger and emotion. That had been cruel, she told herself, appalled. What she had just said was cruel and hurtful. But pride kept her from taking it back. Pride and a defensive desire to punish him for all the pain he’d caused her.
Matt's voice sounded cooler, more distant when he at last spoke again.
'You're quite right. We should be practical and level-headed about this.' The grey eyes narrowed thoughtfully, 'We need a marriage contract, like the Elizabethans.'
‘Marriage? I'm not sure marriage could ever work for me. I’m not sure you and I could ever be happy together.'
Matt looked bleaker.
'At least hear me out, Victoria! Apart from providing the missing parent for Archie, I could inject capital into Roundwell, take some of the work-load off you, hire more staff to help run things. We could divide our time between Warwickshire and London. We could split our time between the farm and city. I've got a place in Lombardy, near Lake Garda. We could go there when I teach you and Archie to ski…’
'You have got it all worked out!' she mocked coolly.
Matt shrugged. 'I've had nearly two years to think about it,' he pointed out with justice. 'As far as common interests go, I've been working on an outline for a book recently, on the art treasures of the world. It would be for charity. We could choose together where the royalties went. I thought maybe you'd like to help me with it—with your love of history and my knowledge of antiques we might prove a good team.' He hesitated a moment, and then smiled slightly, some of his icy control disappearing. 'And then, let's see, you could maybe sign an undertaking to accompany me moor-walking in Cornwall, I’ve got a cottage down at Port Gaverne, and promise to eat the vegetarian meals I cook for you, and I could undertake to come swimming and dancing with you, and take you to see Shakespeare, and buy you Italian meals, and boxes of chocolates…'
'Please, stop it!' she broke in, covering her ears with her hands, feeling a mixture of hysteria and despair. 'I can't take all this in. I can't think. I can't even tell you what I feel right now.'
'Victoria.' His deep voice was suddenly a caress, with a vibration which touched a dangerous chord deep inside her. 'Please, sweetheart, if I can forgive you for keeping Archie a secret, say you forgive me for being hopelessly uptight and repressed. Say you forgive me. Let’s try to put things right between us.'
She pressed her hands to her eyes, overwhelmed by conflicting feelings. She was shivering with tension, as if every nerve in her body was suddenly under attack.
'That's just it,' she whispered painfully. 'That's the worst thing. That’s the terrifying thing. I honestly don't know if we ever can.'
'Don't say that.' Matt's voice was low. There was a slight break in it which made her jerk up her head and stare at him in anguish. A muscle was working spasmodically in his lean cheek, and the silver eyes were suspiciously brilliant beneath the lowered lids. She felt as if she were splintering into a thousand fragments.
'Sweetheart, let me take you back to bed again, now,' he said huskily, the words barely audible in the hush of the room. 'Let me make love to you again, and show you what I really feel for you.'
'No!' However much it hurt now, she couldn’t face all the heartache again, of letting herself love him and losing him all over again, 'Matt, I loved you so much. You'll never know how much. It was so instant, so overwhelming, there was nothing I could do about it. I felt as if we were supposed to be together, as if I'd known you before, somehow. For six months after you went to New York I hoped you’d ring me, I waited and waited. I was so sure you'd realise you'd been wrong, and find you couldn't live without me after all…'
'I did,' he said gently, his face tense and bleak as he stared at her.
'But it's too late!' She dragged in a ragged breath, 'When you didn't come back, I knew I had to stop thinking about you, stop loving you. I had to make myself stop caring! If I hadn't, I could never have carried on with my life.’ Her throat was dry, and she swallowed jerkily, feeling a rush of resolve, ‘And that was how I gradually came to realise that what I felt for you before wasn’t love at all. It was just a…a girlish crush. Puppy love. How could I have fallen in love with you, in the space of a weekend? Ridiculous. No-one believes in love at first sight!’
‘Victoria.’
‘I had to make myself stop loving you. And now, I don’t love you any more, Matt.'
She turned away from him abruptly. She couldn’t keep going while she was looking at him.
‘I don’t love you, and I don’t want us to be together. So please, just go.’ Hearing herself saying the words made her stomach contract in agony, made her go cold inside. She felt as if she could never be warm again.
After what seemed an eternity she heard the door open and close with a muted slam, and she realised he had really gone.
She swung round and stared around the empty bedroom, then sank back down on to the bed, completely enervated. She couldn't think. Her brain felt deadened. She had no idea how much time elapsed before she stiffly began to pack her case, and checked out of the hotel. All she knew was this awful cold, sinking emptiness inside, and a pain in her heart worse than she had ever felt in her life, and the pressing need to get home, back to Archie and the timeless security of Roundwell.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jessica opened the door in a cherry-red dressing-gown when Victoria arrived on her doorstep early next morning.
With one glance at her white face and stricken expression, Jessica caught Victoria’s hands and pulled her quickly into the warmth of the hall.
'What are you doing here so early! What's wrong?'
'Everything's wrong,' said Victoria wearily, meeting Jessica's eyes, 'I've really messed things up this time.'
Tears threatened to choke her. She’d started to shiver uncontrollably.
'How did you get so cold? What have you been doing?'
'Sitting in the car.’ she confessed, with a short laugh. I wanted time to think. I parked up on the Burton Hills.'
'All night?’
She nodded, vaguely registering her sister’s despairing expression.
Jessica was extracting her from the black coat, propelling her into an armchair, lighting the gas-log fire, and calling to Mira to bring tea. 'Thank goodness it didn't freeze last night, that's all. You could have died of hypothermia, you total idiot!'
'You’re right. I am a total idiot. And everything is a mess,' she said at last, still shivering, 'I told Matt to go away ... I told him I didn't love him.'
She stopped abruptly, pressing her fingers to her mouth, grappling for control, and then in a garbled rush the whole disastrous confrontation came pouring out, in bitter, jerky sentences. There was a silence when she’d finished.
