‘I just want you to make sense,’ she told him.
‘How can I make sense to you when I can’t even make sense to myself?’ he muttered. He stood up, stared out towards the sea, then sat back down, closer to her this time. ‘You’re hardly the type of woman I’ve been attracted to in the past,’ he said roughly, and she went red with hurt anger.
‘I know; you’ve already aired your thoughts on the subject!’
‘You grew up in the lap of luxury. You’ve never known want or need or driving ambition. You’ve had life cushioned for you.’
‘That was not my fault! I never asked to be brought into this world with a silver spoon in my mouth!’
‘Oh, sure, you’re a beautiful woman,’ he went on, ignoring her. ‘I can imagine that hundreds of men—boys, dammit, if that Thompson character is anything to go by—must have been enslaved by you.’
‘Oh, thousands!’ she snapped, knowing that she shouldn’t let herself be rattled by what he was saying, or what he had said before in the past.
‘But I thought I would be supremely immune to your brand of charm.’ He looked at her then, and there was a savage fire in his eyes that sent a spark of flame leaping through her. She didn’t dare say anything. It was as if time stood still, as if the earth had stopped revolving on its axis.
‘I was wrong,’ he said, catching her chin in his hand as though he was afraid that she might look away. ‘When you started working for me I found myself stealing looks at you, and I told myself that it was because I needed to keep an eye on you, needed to see for myself whether you really lived up to the potential you’d displayed at that interview, but after a while I had to face the truth. I wanted to look at you because I was attracted to you. More every day.’
‘You were?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You never showed it,’ she whispered.
‘I didn’t want to admit it to myself, never mind admit it to you. I was engaged to a woman I thought was on my wavelength, then you walked into my life and suddenly nothing made sense any more. I kept telling myself that you weren’t my kind of woman, but I was bewitched by you, Francesca.
‘When I came round to your flat that night with the champagne it had nothing to do with being thoughtful. I just needed to see you, and then… God, when you invited me into your bed, when you undressed for me you were the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on.’ His face darkened at the memory and she felt a stab of pleasure course through her.
‘You walked away,’ she reminded him.
‘I had to. You’d had too much to drink, but also I just needed to think, to try and sort out what the hell was happening to me. It was blessed relief when Imogen got herself involved with the Thompson fellow.’
She raised her hand and brushed his face with her fingers, and he caught her hand in his, opening it so that he could kiss her palm.
‘I came back to you, and when I did I knew that I had to have you. I wanted you like I had never wanted anyone in my life before. I wanted to feel you against me; I wanted to possess you, body and mind. And just for an instant I thought that I had, but then everything started going wrong. I went abroad, and while I was there you started sounding cooler and cooler down the telephone, and it was driving me crazy.’
‘I had no choice,’ Francesca said quietly, even though there was a burning happiness inside her that made her want to grin and shout and laugh. ‘I found out that I was pregnant. I also started thinking that the only reason you’d made love to me was because the woman you really wanted was no longer available.’
‘How could you think that?’ he asked. ‘How could that even occur to you when it’s you I love?’
Of course, she had guessed what he was saying in that roundabout, tortured fashion of his, but now his admission that he loved her spread through her like a fever, and she smiled and briefly closed her eyes.
‘My darling,’ she whispered, looking at him, her eyes bright. ‘My darling Oliver. And I thought that I was suffering alone. Why do you think I started pulling back from you? Because I loved you; because I couldn’t bear the thought that you would never return the feeling.’
He leaned forward and kissed her, his mouth hard and hungry, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, laughing as they rolled onto the sand. She traced the outline of his spine with her fingers and he groaned.
‘You sent me to hell,’ he murmured. ‘I got back to a woman I thought I could tempt into my trap, only to find that she’d recognised the bait and was now running off in the opposite direction. When I realised that you were pregnant I also realised that the baby was my passport back to you. I made sure that you were married to me before you had time to think too hard about it, and I know that I used every legitimate trick in the book to get what I wanted.’
‘Apology accepted,’ she said happily, and he raised his feverish eyes to hers.
‘Who’s apologising? Tell me, Francesca; tell me that you love me. Say it over and over again. It’s your punishment for putting me through what I’ve been through.’
‘I love you, Oliver Kemp,’ she murmured obligingly, and she moaned as he pushed his hand under the opening of her dress to fondle the swell of her breasts.
‘You don’t know how I’ve longed to hear you say that. When you threw that accusation at me—that I’d hired Helen to take over from you behind your back—I could sense jealousy, and, God, how I wanted you to admit it, to tell me that you were madly jealous, because I would have been able to read what I wanted to in that.’
‘I was jealous,’ Francesca confessed. It seemed such a long time ago. ‘I hated her when she said that she’d got my job.’
‘Helen Scott will have to watch her step very carefully in the future,’ he said grimly, then his features relaxed into a smile. ‘Although she’ll get her own due reward when my wife meets me at work to join me for lunch.’
‘She’ll hate that,’ Francesca answered, but she felt so happy that it was impossible to harbour any bad feeling towards anyone.
‘You can’t imagine what I felt when I thought that you might lose the baby,’ he said softly into her ear, ‘when you told me that without the baby there was no need for a marriage.’
‘You agreed!’
‘Pride made me agree, but before the words were even out I knew that I couldn’t let you go.’
She laughed with delight and he nudged her head back, kissing her neck, tugging open the remaining buttons on her dress so that he could expose an aching breast. His tongue flicked out and he licked the hard outline of her nipple, and she whimpered, wanting more.
‘You’re so different,’ he said, looking up at her, and she smiled at him—a dreamy, contented little smile; a smile that no longer struggled to hide the love beneath it. ‘The more I saw you, the more I got to know you, and the more I saw every one of those differences as a revelation. I had no idea how grey my life had been until you came along; then it was like having a blast of sun in a dark, shuttered place. To start with I tried to ignore it, then I was suspicious, but eventually I couldn’t hide from the truth. Life without you is meaningless.’
‘Good.’ She sighed as his hand caressed her leg, her stomach, her breasts.
How could she ever have thought that she would never be happy? How could she have seen herself in a tunnel without end? They said that the darkest hour was always just before the dawn, but she would never have believed that.
She looked at the tender, masculine face so close to hers, and knew that from this perfect moment on the life that was growing inside her would be born into love and happiness. The way it should be.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1104-9
TO TAME A PROUD HEART
First North American Publication 2000.
Copyright © 1996 by Cathy Williams.
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