The setting was perfect for a relaxed and intimate dinner for two with Harry coming and going discreetly to serve the various courses of the superb meal which had been prepared for them, but Megan could not recall afterwards what she had eaten, or if she had eaten at all. She was much too aware of that wall of tension which had built up between Chad and herself. It was there beneath the surface of the platitudes they had exchanged all evening, like a strong and dangerous undercurrent, and it set her nerves on edge.
Harry served them their coffee and left, and it was then that Chad broached the subject of his recent bout of malaria. 'I was still too weak to come to you before you left Izilwane,' he said, 'but you could have come to me. Why didn't you, Megan?'
'I wanted to,' she confessed with her usual honesty as she sustained his probing glance across the candlelit table.
'What stopped you?'
'We weren't exactly on the best of terms before your bout of malaria, and afterwards…' She faltered and lowered her gaze nervously to fiddle with the teaspoon in her saucer. 'Well, I wasn't sure that I'd be welcome,' she added truthfully.
'You took it upon yourself to nurse me through thirty-six hours of fever and heaven knows what else, and you weren't sure you'd be welcome?' There was an explosive little silence, then Chad laughed harshly. 'Oh, come now, Megan, you surely don't expect me to believe that, do you?'
'You didn't want me there in the first place,' she reminded him with a forced calmness, 'and I couldn't think of any reason why you would want me there afterwards.'
'It would have given me the opportunity to thank you instead of having to wait until now to do so.'
Megan looked up into those steel-grey eyes observing her so intently, and looked away again with a measure of distaste. She did not want gratitude from Chad! She wanted…!
'You don't have to thank me,' she said coldly, reining in her thoughts and raising her cup to her lips to gulp down the last mouthful of coffee.
'It's common courtesy to thank someone for services rendered.'
That hint of laughter in his voice snapped the level of her tolerance. She could take so much, and no more!
'Is that the reason I've been treated to this rare honour of dining with you in your home this evening?' she demanded with that icy sarcasm which was so totally alien to her nature, and looked up to see the amusement draining from his pale eyes to leave them cold and disapproving.
'I assumed that you might have had your fill of the city racket after ten days in Johannesburg, and, since I'm not partial to crowded restaurants, my home seemed to be the most suitable place for a quiet dinner and a private chat.'
Megan winced inwardly. His voice had been strangely calm and devoid of anger, but every word had had the effect of a stinging rap over the knuckles, and she leaned back in her chair with a rueful smile on her lips.
'I'm sorry.'
'It was an understandable error,' he conceded gravely, and the tension seemed to ease between them when they lingered at the table over a second cup of coffee.
Megan was beginning to feel pleasantly relaxed when they finally returned to the living-room where the fire had been lit in the stone fireplace. The room had warmed up considerably, and she did not object when Chad took her hand to draw her down on to the bench beside him.
'Did I make any shocking revelations while I was non compos mentis?' he questioned her unexpectedly, but Megan was instantly on her guard.
'You rambled on a bit about women all being the same, and that they were not to be trusted,' she answered him cautiously, staring down at the rich cream of the carpet beneath her feet.
'That sounds familiar,' he laughed shortly. 'Did I perhaps expound on anything else worth repeating?'
'No,' she lied. 'Not that I can recall.'
She looked up then to see the smile fade from his eyes to leave in its place a strange glitter that quickened the rhythm of her pulses. The tension piled high between them once again, but this time Megan recognised it for what it was. It was a simple case of wariness. They had been circling each other mentally all evening, but the time had come for one of them to make the first move.
'Where is this leading us, Megan?'
That was ingenious. Chad was inviting her to take the first step, but, probably for the first time in his life, he was exercising caution, and she had to admire him for it.
'I don't know what you mean,' she replied, pleading ignorance to give herself more time, but Chad foiled her evasive tactics when he slid his arm along the back of the bench behind her shoulders and tipped her face up to his with his free hand.
'It can't stop here, and we both know it. From the very beginning we've sparked off something in each other which refuses to be denied, so it has to lead somewhere.'
His compelling glance held hers, his eyes challenging and probing while his thumb gently traced the curve of her lower lip. There was a trembling deep inside her, a need which she could no longer ignore, and she rose jerkily to her feet, knowing it would be senseless to go on pretending that she did not know what he was talking about.
'I don't know if I want it to lead anywhere,' she confessed when she held her hands out to the log fire crackling in the grate and felt the heat of it against her cold palms.
'I don't blame you for feeling that way, Megan.' The gravity in that smooth, velvety voice was unfamiliar on the ears, and her body tensed as she felt him come up behind her. 'I've behaved like a cad, but you've had me running round in uncomfortable circles in an attempt to reach some sort of understanding with you, and I don't happen to like it.'
Chad was standing so close to her that she could feel the heat of his body against her back. If she moved just a fraction, their bodies would touch, and there was nothing she wanted more than to feel the strength of his arms about her, but she dared not dwell on that enticing thought.
'I can't accept the moral code by which you live, and you can't accept mine.' She gestured expressively with her hands and caught her quivering lip between her teeth to steady it. 'I don't think that's a very sound basis on which to build a relationship.'
'I have to agree with you on that score, but I can't shake off the feeling that there's something between us which deserves to be explored.'
'Oh, Chad!' she sighed helplessly, his words finding an echo in her hungry heart.
'You feel it too, don't you?' His hands were warm and heavy on her shoulders as he turned her to face him. 'Don't you, Megan?'
'Yes,' she whispered resignedly. 'Yes, I do.'
His taut features relaxed visibly, making her realise how important her answer had been to him, and a melting warmth erupted inside her. He was, for that brief moment, stripped of his usual arrogance, and his uncertainty touched her as nothing had ever done before.
'If I give you my word that I shan't rush you into anything you don't want, do you think we could explore it together?'
Megan answered his question with one of her own. 'Have you considered the possibility that this could lead to something which might leave us both hurt and disillusioned?'
'That's a risk we'll have to take.' His hands tightened on her shoulders with an urgency that matched the burning intensity of his eyes. 'Are you willing to take that chance with me?'
The clock on the mantelshelf ticked away the seconds while Megan sought the answer within herself. She was allowing herself to be coaxed along a path which could only lead to pain, but she could not turn her back on it.
'Yes, Chad,' Megan heard herself answering him firmly and resolutely despite all her misgivings. 'I'm willing to take that chance with you.'
A muscle leapt in his jaw, and one hand slipped into her honey-gold hair at the base of her skull while the other shifted down her back to draw her into the hard curve of his body. His warm lips brushed against her forehead, her eyelids and her cheeks before they finally came to rest on her mouth. He teased her lips with feather-light kisses, exploring and savouring until Megan thought she would go mad with the desire for more.
; Her hands clenched against his wide chest, her fingers curling into the expensive sweater to convey a silent, eager message of their own, and Chad's restraint deserted him. He ravaged her parted lips with a fierce hunger that made her senses reel, and her sanity was questionable when his hands gripped her buttocks firmly to draw her closer to his aroused body. Megan wanted him to touch her; she wanted to feel her body come alive beneath the touch of his hands, and she wanted it so badly that she trembled violently in the grip of that aching warmth surging into her loins.
'You don't know what you're doing to me!' he muttered thickly, releasing her abruptly to put on his leather jacket.
'I'm sorry,' she whispered, feeling lost and cold without his arms about her, and he rounded on her with a look of unconcealed frustration on his face.
'Don't apologise,' he said, reaching for her hand and raising it to his lips. 'It isn't your fault that I happen to want you with the impatience of an adolescent in search of his first sexual conquest,' he growled into her palm.
I want you, too, she could have said, and it was true, but she wanted more than a brief physical encounter with Chad. She wanted what he could never give her, and it was this knowledge that put such a stringent guard on her tongue.
'It's time I took you back to your hotel,' he said abruptly, releasing her hand, and when she glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf she was surprised to see that it was almost eleven o'clock.
Chad helped her into her coat in the hall, and they drove back to the hotel in comparative silence, but this time the silence was not fraught with the tension which had been there between them earlier that evening.
'What time will you be leaving in the morning?' he questioned her as they stood in the lift which was taking them up to the fourth floor of the hotel.
'I'm hoping to leave immediately after breakfast.' She glanced up at him and studied his stern profile curiously. 'How long do you think you'll be staying in Johannesburg?'
'I have a couple of meetings lined up, but I should be leaving after lunch on Friday.'
His glance captured hers, and the warm smile curving his sensuous mouth heightened the reality of what had transpired between them. He wanted her—he had said so. She could see it in his eyes even now, but he was in complete control of his emotions. And that was more than she could say for herself, Megan realised when she recalled her uninhibited response to his kisses.
'Are you going straight through to Izilwane, or will you be spending the weekend with your parents in Louisville?'
Megan wrenched her gaze from his when she heard the lift doors slide open. 'I'll be in Louisville with my parents,' she said, stepping out of the lift ahead of him, and the hard, erratic beat of her heart was threatening to suffocate her as he accompanied her down the carpeted passage to her room. 'I have a mountain of sketches to do, and my studio at home is the best place to work,' she explained.
Chad took her key from her and unlocked her bedroom door, but he made no attempt to go in. 'I'll come and see you as soon as I can,' he said, smiling faintly as he tipped up her face and kissed her lightly on the lips. 'Goodnight, and drive carefully.'
Megan watched him walk away from her with those long, lithe strides, and she was tempted to call him back, but she bit down hard on her tongue to quell the impulse as she entered her room and locked the door firmly behind her. Chad had promised not to rush her into something which she did not want, but she suspected his need was as strong as her own, and she was no longer sure that her rigid principles would survive as a safety barrier if it were put to the test.
It was a shattering thought, and it left her heated with embarrassment and something else which she was determined to ignore. 'What you need, my girl, is a cold, sobering shower,' she told herself, and, acting on her own advice, she stripped down to her skin and stepped beneath the jet of cold water in the shower cubicle.
Megan drove away from Johannesburg with an uncommon reluctance on Thursday morning. The northbound road took her past Pretoria towards Warmbaths, a town which was noted for its hot springs. Biela Bela, the water that boils on its own, the Twanas had called the hot springs long before it had been exploited for its therapeutic value.
She broke the long journey home to stop in Potgietersrus with its tree-lined streets and beautiful subtropical gardens. She lingered long enough to have a cup of tea and a sandwich at a roadside restaurant for travellers on the outskirts of the town, and then she drove on to Louisville, which lay beyond the Soutpansberg mountains.
The winding road on the mountain pass sliced through pine plantations and, inevitably, there were trucks transporting lumber from the various camps in the area. It made the final stretch of Megan's journey exhausting in the oppressive afternoon heat, and when she arrived in Louisville her parents' home felt like a cool oasis in a scorching desert.
She was relaxing in the living-room with her mother, sipping a long, cool drink and assimilating everything that had happened during the past twenty-four hours, when the telephone rang in the hall. Vivien got up to answer it, and put her head around the door a moment later.
'It's for you, Megan,' she said, and Megan put her glass down on the table beside her chair when she rose to take the call.
There was an odd look on Vivien's face as she brushed past Megan to return to her chair in the living-room, and Megan's smooth brow creased in a slight frown when she lifted the receiver to her ear.
'Hello? Megan O'Brien speaking.'
'I'm in the middle of a board meeting, Megan, but I wanted to make sure you'd arrived home safely.'
Megan's heart leapt at the sound of Chad's deep, velvety voice, and she leaned dizzily against the wall beside the telephone table. 'I arrived half an hour ago.'
'You must be tired.'
'I am,' she confessed, finding his concern oddly touching.
'I shan't keep you, then,' he ended their brief conversation abruptly. 'See you soon.'
Megan returned to the living-room and curled up comfortably on her chair before she picked up her glass to gulp down a mouthful of her iced drink. Her mother was working on a tapestry, the needle flashing as it disappeared into the material and reappeared in rapid succession, and Megan observed her in silence until she felt compelled to say something in order to break the oddly strained silence between them.
'That was Chad.'
'I know,' her mother replied without looking up from her tapestry, and Megan encountered a faint stab of uneasiness that made her shift uncomfortably in her chair.
'He called to make sure that I'd arrived home safely,' she heard herself explaining.
'That was thoughtful of him.' Vivien looked up from her tapestry for the first time, her dark gaze gently probing. 'I heard that he left yesterday to attend a board meeting in Johannesburg, and I gather he contacted you.'
'I had dinner with him last night,' Megan confessed, but she withheld the fact that the venue had been at Chad's home.
'I suppose that was Chad's way of showing his gratitude for the long hours you nursed him,' her mother filed her actions neatly into an acceptable category.
'Yes, I suppose it was,' Megan agreed, deciding it would be wiser not to say more, and she went up to her room a few minutes later for a shower and a change of clothing before dinner.
The conversation at the dinner table that evening was as lively and enthusiastic as always, and Peter and Vivien O'Brien listened attentively while Megan related everything that had happened during her stay in the city. Chad was never mentioned, and Megan preferred to keep it that way.
The small cottage in the grounds of her parents' home was an ideal place to work on the illustrations she had been commissioned to do. She had long ago transformed the cottage into a studio and workshop for herself, and she started working in earnest on Friday morning, making preliminary sketches within the framework of the story, which had been written for children.
It was an exciting and absorbing task, but at odd moments she found herself thinking about Chad instead of working. The
re's something between us which deserves to be explored, he had said, and she had finally agreed to something which her logical mind warned could only bring her heartache, but, loving him as much as she did, it was a chance she had to take.
But she did not want to think about Chad. She had work to do, and she would never get it done if she allowed this intrusion on her thoughts.
Megan worked steadily throughout that day, and she was up again before breakfast on Saturday morning. By twelve-thirty that day she had started working on the first small painting in oils of little children playing in a field carpeted with white, yellow, and orange namaqualand daisies. It was a bright, cheerful scene, and it was starting to come alive beneath the skilful strokes of her brushes when she was distracted by the sound of someone entering the cottage.
She looked up and her heart lurched joyously in her breast when she saw Chad walking into the studio. He stopped a few paces away from her and, hooking his thumbs into the snakeskin belt hugging his grey slacks to his lean hips, he observed her with a faintly mocking smile curving his sensuous mouth.
Megan's heartbeats subsided to a nervous fluttering against her ribs when a disturbing thought occurred to her. What was Chad's presence going to convey to her mother?
'Surprised to see me?' he asked, a flicker of amusement in his eyes, and she wondered for one frantic second if he had read her thoughts.
'I—I didn't expect you to—to come here,' she stammered foolishly, lowering her gaze to the blue open-necked shirt which seemed to span too tightly across his wide shoulders.
'Your mother has invited me to stay to lunch, and that's in…' he glanced at the gold watch strapped to his strong, lean wrist '… ten minutes.'
Megan looked away, hiding her surprise behind a sudden burst of activity, and dipped her brushes in a jar of turpentine, stirring them vigorously before she wiped the fine bristles on an old cloth which she used solely for that purpose.
'That looks cute,' remarked Chad as he came up behind her to study the unfinished painting on the easel, and the faint odour of his masculine cologne mingled with the smell of paint and turps, stirring her senses.
Bridge to Nowhere Page 11
