The Perfect Lover

by Penny Jordan

  'Saul...' he interrupted her savagely. 'Yes. I know. You've already told me that...remember...?'

  Louise blanched as she realised just what he meant. The alcoholic fog clouding her brain was beginning >to clear with unwelcome speed. She looked at his mouth. Had she actually...? She could see a small swollen bruise marking his bottom lip, where she had... Quickly she looked away. - 'I don't feel well. I...I want to go to bed...'

  'Why? So that you can fantasise over your precious Saul?' he derided unkindly.

  Louise closed her eyes. She could feel another wave of dizziness surging over her. She tried to stand up and the dizziness increased. She could feel herself starting to black out. She tried to fight it, and then stopped. What was the point? What was the point in anything in a life that didn't have Saul in it.

  Defeatedly she let herself slide down into the darkness.

  When she woke up she was lying, still dressed, in bed, and Katie was sitting on a chair next to it, watching her. Her room had been tidied up and the air smelled fresh with polish and coffee. It was light outside, she recognised.

  'What are you doing here?' she asked her sister groggily. Her throat felt sore and her head ached dreadfully.

  'Professor Simmonds came looking for me. He said you weren't very well,' Katie told her carefully, avoiding looking directly at her.

  Professor Simmonds. Louise closed her eyes, her body starting to shake as she remembered what she had done. With appalling clarity and total recall, behind her closed eyelids she could not only see the expression on Gareth Simmonds' face, she could even more demeaningly actually feel every sensation she had felt when she had...when she had...

  Groaning, she rolled over, burying her face in her pillow.

  'What is it? Aren't you feeling well? Do you want to be sick?' Katie asked anxiously.

  'I... I... What did Professor Simmonds say to you about...about me?' she demanded frantically.

  'Er...nothing... Well...he just said that you weren't well,' Katie told her, adding hurriedly, 'There's some kind of bug going round. Loads of people have gone down with it. He did say that if you wanted to go home immediately, without spending those few days sorting yourself out, starting the job of catching up...

  'No. No, I can't.' Louise panicked. 'Saul...'

  'Saul has taken Tullah down to see his parents,' Katie explained quietly.

  'I don't want to go home,' she told her twin angrily, stopping to frown as she saw the way that Katie was avoiding meeting her eyes as she fidgeted with the pile of books she had just straightened.

  'What is it? What have you done?' she demanded, with that intuition which was so strong between them, knowing immediately that there was something Katie was hiding from her, something she didn't want her to know.

  Immediately Katie flushed.

  'Tell me...' Louise ordered bossily. 'Tell me, Katie...'

  'Uh...Professor Simmonds, when he came to look for me to tell me that you weren't very well, he said...he asked me about Saul...'

  'He what? And what did you tell him?' Louise demanded, her eyes blazing furiously with temper and dread.

  'I...I tried not to tell him, Lou,' Katie told her, begging her, 'Please try to understand... He was... I thought, from the way he was talking about Saul, that you must have told him—that you had said …'

  'What did you tell him, Katie?' Louise demanded inexorably, ignoring her twin's attempts to sideline her.

  'I told him what Saul meant to you... I told him... I told him that you love Saul, but that he...' Katie stopped and looked away from her.

  'I'm sorry, Lou, but he was so insistent, and I...' She shook her head. 'He said you were ill, and I was just so worried about you that—'

  'You told him about my emotions for Saul, matters personal to me. You betrayed me...' Louise cut her off in a flat, toneless voice that hurt Katie far, far more than if her sister had lost her temper and shouted and stormed at her.

  'I thought he knew... He seemed to know. It was only afterwards that I realised...guessed... Lou, where are you going?' Katie demanded anxiously as Louise pushed her way past her and headed for her door.

  But Louise didn't answer her. At least not directly, waiting until she had opened the door and was on the point of leaving before turning to Katie and telling her emotionlessly, 'When I come back, I don't want to find you here. Do you understand?'

  It was the most serious falling-out they had had in all their lives.

  Louise didn't turn back to look at her twin. She couldn't have seen her even if she had; her eyes were too blurred with tears.

  How could Katie have betrayed her like that? How could she have told someone else something so personal about her? Anyone else, never mind Gareth Simmonds.

  Gareth Simmonds. For a moment Louise was tempted to march round to her tutor's rooms and tell him just what she thought of him, but already the cool, fresh outdoor air was making her shiver, as her head spun with a weakening mixture of nauseating emotion and lack of food.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ABRUPTLY shaking her head to dispel her thoughts, Louise came back to the present. Her coffee had grown cold while she had been lost in her painful thoughts of the past and she would have to make a fresh cup. As she refilled the kettle and waited for it to boil she picked up one of the collection of smooth polished stones which decorated the open shelves, holding it cupped in her palm and smoothing her fingertips over its cool surface.

  It had been a gift to her from her brother Joss. It was one of his most special stones, he had told her solemnly when he had given it to her, and holding it and stroking it would make her feel calm.

  He had found it on one of his regular walks with Great-Aunt Ruth, with whom he shared an affinity for the countryside.

  Louise smiled ruefully now as she closed her fingers around its comforting strength. It had galled her a little at the time, even though she had refused to acknowledge it, that someone as young as Joss had been so easily able to identify that part of her personality which she herself least liked.

  The turbulence of her own nature offended her pride. She liked to think of herself as someone who was totally in control of herself, and her reactions. Perhaps because she needed to feel that they were under her control, because that was the only way she could reassure herself that the way she had behaved under the influence of her intense adolescent crush on Saul and the things she had done would never, ever happen again.

  Joss. Her smile deepened as she thought affectionately of her brother. He had all the virtues that Max, the eldest of them, lacked. She had never met anyone as well rounded, as complete within themselves, as her younger brother. Even as a young child he had exhibited an extraordinary degree not just of sensitivity and awareness of the emotions of those around him, but also a compassion and a wisdom which Louise had always secretly rather envied.

  As she replaced the stone her eye was caught by the small print that hung on the wall close to the shelves. It was a sketch of the Tuscany countryside which she had drawn herself while on holiday there with her family. That had been the summer— Biting her lip, she turned away abruptly.

  After she and Katie had made up their quarrel over what she, Louise, had seen as Katie's betrayal of her in telling Gareth Simmonds about her crush on Saul, that should have been the end of the matter—and of Gareth Simmonds' involvement in her personal life. But it hadn't been.

  Briefly Louise closed her eyes. She had never been back to Tuscany since that summer, although she had spent time in other parts of Italy. Her parents thought it was because she had outgrown the simple pleasures of the family holidays they had spent there, in the large rambling villa which they rented every summer just outside the small, unpretentious little village where they, as regular summer visitors, were on first- name terms with all the inhabitants. But her refusal to return had nothing to do with thinking herself too sophisticated and grown-up for the company o£ her family.

  Tuscany... Even now she could smell the warm, rich scent of the earth,
feel the warmth of the sun.

  By the time they had arrived at the villa that summer she and Katie had been talking again—just—and by a common but unspoken agreement nothing had been said or shown by either of them to their parents, nor the other members of the family holidaying together, to reveal that they had ever fallen out.

  If, for the first time since their birth, apart from their choice of university courses, they were opting to do things separately, spend more time apart, then it had been put down to the fact that they were growing up and wanting to become individuals.

  While Katie had stayed close to the villa, spending hours in the kitchen with Maria—the second cousin of the family who owned the villa, and who spent her widowhood looking after the villa's visitors—going with her to shop at the local markets and indulging her passion for cooking, Louise had set off in an ancient borrowed Fiat with her sketchpad to explore the neighbourhood.

  It had perhaps been inevitable that the Fiat, unloved by the family who owned it and, perhaps more importantly, also unserviced by them, should have decided to stage a protest in the form of refusing to start one hot dusty afternoon, when Louise had returned to it having spent the morning sketching a small shrine she had seen at the roadside.

  .. Recognising defeat when the Fiat had stubbornly refused to start after several attempts, Louise had looked up and down the empty road along which only one single, solitary car had passed that morning.

  There was nothing else for it. She would have to walk to the red-roofed villa she could see set in the midst of an ancient grove of poplars lower down the hill.

  The walk had taken her longer than she had anticipated, the road winding its way steadily downwards. The villa's wrought-iron gates had been closed, but she'd been able to see a car parked in the driveway. As she'd opened the gates she'd realised that the car had British plates which was a relief, although the thought of appealing to an Italian family for help hadn't particularly worried her. She was fluent in the language after so many holidays spent there.

  She'd been perspiring stickily from her walk, and ruefully conscious of her dusty bare legs and sunburned nose as she'd approached the villa.

  When no one had answered her knock on the villa's front door she'd walked a little warily round the side of the house, and then stopped.

  In front of her had been a sparkling, simple-shaped swimming pool, surrounded by an elegant paved area set out with sun loungers and decorated with huge tubs of cascading flowers.

  Someone was using the pool, cutting through the water with an impressively fast crawl, brown arms neatly cleaving the water.

  As she'd studied the seal-dark male head turned away from her an odd sensation had gathered in the pit of Louise's stomach, tiny quivers of unmistakable female appreciation running like quicksilver along her veins.

  Irritated with herself, she'd turned away, her face suddenly warm with a heat that had nothing to do with the sun. The swimmer had obviously seen her, she'd recognised, because she could hear him heaving himself out of the water.

  Warily she'd turned to face him, hoping her expression wouldn't betray what she had just been feeling.

  'Louise! What...?'

  Through the shock of recognising Gareth Simmonds' voice, two startling but totally unrelated facts hit Louise. The first was that he had instantly and immediately recognised who she was, even though he could quite easily have been confused as to which twin she might actually be. The second was that now, confronted with him, advancing towards her and sending droplets of pool water showering to the floor, and wearing a pair of black swimming shorts which she was breath-gulpingly sure ought only to have ever been on sale with a stern warning of the effect they might have on a vulnerable female, she knew that odd earlier frisson of awareness had not been a mere trick of her imagination. Dizzily she discovered that she was focusing on the exact point where the dark wet arrowing of body hair disappeared beneath the waistband of his shorts.

  'My car's broken down. It won't start,' she told him breathlessly. 'I didn't...'

  Quickly she fought to get control of herself, demanding aggressively, 'What are you doing here...?'

  The look he gave her made her glower even more ferociously at him.

  'What's wrong?' he asked her dryly. 'There isn't, so -far as I know, any law that says holidaying professors aren't allowed to inhabit the same turf as their students. And I could, of course, ask you the same question. As it happens, my family own this villa.

  They bought it about ten years ago, when they were holidaying here and fell in love with the area. Normally the whole family would be here, but unfortunately this year...'

  'The whole family?' Louise questioned him, unable to stop herself.

  'Mmm... I do have one, you know.'

  'But they aren't here now...?'

  'No,' he agreed.

  'Have you got a large family?' Louise asked him, without knowing why she had done so. After all, why should she care?

  'Mmm...sort of... I've got three sisters, all older than me and all married with children; they, along with my parents, normally descend on the villa for at least a month during the school holidays, but this year my eldest sister and her husband have taken their three children to New Zealand to see her husband's family.

  My second sister and her husband and two boys are sailing with friends off the Greek Islands and my youngest sister and her husband, who, like my father, is a surgeon—there's a tradition of going into medicine in the family, and in fact I've rather broken with that tradition in electing to go into teaching rather than following my father and sisters into medicine—have gone with my parents to India. My mother is involved with UNICEF in a fund-raising capacity, and they've gone to see some of the work that's being done with the money they've raised.'

  He spread out his hands in a dismissive gesture and told her dryly, 'So there you have it, a short, potted history of the Simmonds family. Oh, and I forgot, there's also my grandmother, who is very much in the tradition of a grand matriarch—though not exactly in the Italian style. My grandmother's forte lay in bringing up her three sons single-handedly after she was widowed, and in feeding their appetite for education rather than pasta—she's a Scot, so that's perhaps where that comes from.'

  As he spoke he was reaching for a towel from one of the sun loungers, and briskly began to rub himself dry.

  He had a surprisingly muscular-looking body for a university professor. Louise could have sworn that beneath his tutorial 'uniform' of soft Tattersall check shirt and well-worn cord trousers lay a body as misshapen as the old-fashioned knitted cardigans favoured by many of his older colleagues, but quite obviously she had been wrong.

  He had stopped speaking briefly, and as she turned her head towards him she drew in a small, surprised gulp of air. He was rubbing his wet hair dry with the towel, his stance revealing the hard firmness of his belly and the strength of his upper arms.

  Louise had no idea how long he'd been in Tuscany, but it had certainly been long enough to give his skin an undeniably warm golden tan.

  'You're not feeling faint or anything, are you?'

  His sharp frowning question made Louise's face burn, and she hurriedly averted her gaze from his body. What was the matter with her? She had grown up in the middle of a large, closely knit extended family unit, where the sight of the male body at every stage of its development, from babyhood right through adolescence, young manhood to middle age and beyond, had been so commonplace that until she had formed her crush on Saul she had been openly derisive of other girls' embarrassed and curious interest in the unclothed male form.

  And yet here she was, breathing too shallowly and too fast, with a face that felt too hot and a potently explosive sensation low down in her body threatening her composure to the extent that she was having difficulty forming even the most basic coherent thought—and just because she had seen Gareth Simmonds wearing a pair of swimming shorts!

  'Look, let's go inside, where it's cooler, and you can tell me exactly
where your car is and I—'

  'No. No, I'm all right,' Louise started to protest, but it was too late. He was already walking purposefully towards the open doorway to the house, leaving her with no alternative but to follow him inside.

  If she had doubted that he might be telling the truth about his family, the number of photographs that crowded the flat surfaces of the heavy solid wooden furniture in the comfortably sized sitting room would soon have put her right. Even without studying them too closely Louise could immediately see the resemblance to him in the happy, affectionately close groups of people featured in the photographs. Her mother's small sitting room and her aunt Ruth's elegant small drawing room were similarly adorned with photographs of her own family, but that knowledge did nothing to alleviate the sense of anxious wariness that had gripped her ever since she had realised just whose territory she had unwittingly strayed into.

  'The kitchen's this way,' Louise heard Gareth informing her as he led the way to the rear of the villa and the large, traditional farmhouse-style Tuscan kitchen.

  'Sit down,' he instructed her firmly, pulling a chair out from the table and then beginning to frown as she hesitated. To get to the chair she would have to move closer to him—too close to him, Louise recognised. He really had the most sexy and masculine-looking arms. The kind of arms you could just imagine locking tightly around you and holding you...the kind of arms...

  'Louise.'

  The sharp way he said her name penetrated the totally alien fog of shockingly unexpected feminine arousal that had momentarily swamped her.

  What on earth was happening to her? It must be the heat or something, Louise decided hastily, still refusing to sit down as she repeated huskily that she was perfectly all right.

  'If I could ring my father and explain to him about the car...' she told him.

  'It might be easier if I took a look at the car first,' Gareth Simmonds argued, and Louise's face flamed, not with embarrassed confusion at her own inexplicable awareness of him this time, but with quick anger that he should dare to imply that she had not properly diagnosed the problem with the car herself.