The Trusting Game

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I can’t leave yet,’ she told him edgily. ‘I’m still working and I haven’t packed…’

  ‘That’s all right. I can wait…’

  Wait…Where? Not here, Christa decided, but he seemed to have other ideas.

  He was studying her collage again.

  ‘Nice…’ he told her. ‘You have an excellent eye for colour, but did you know that your choice of such rich colours, especially the red, denotes a very powerfully driven and ambitious personality?’

  ‘And you, of course, would know about such things,’ Christa agreed derisively. ‘It goes hand in hand…’

  ‘It is one of the subjects I have studied,’ he agreed, apparently not picking up on her contempt. At least not on the surface; whatever else might be fake about him, she was pretty sure that his intelligence was genuine enough. Which meant that he was more than likely suppressing what he really felt…because he wanted to lull her into a state of false security. Well, she would soon make him realise his mistake.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, you know,’ she told him curtly; ‘there’s absolutely no way that spending a month or even six months in the middle of the Welsh countryside is going to change anything about me or my outlook on life. And besides,’ she challenged him, her eyes narrowing watchfully, ‘surely I’m right in thinking that the normal duration of such courses would only be two weeks at the most?’

  He looked, Christa recognised in swift triumph, almost uncomfortable—uncomfortable and rather caught off balance by her question, although he quickly hid it, turning his head slightly away from her so that she couldn’t see his full expression. Was that just discomposure she had seen in his eyes or had there been a hint of anger there as well? she wondered gleefully. If she had managed to get under his skin already, then so much the better. She was not afraid of his anger—she welcomed it. When people lost control of their emotions they betrayed themselves more easily.

  ‘Normally, yes,’ she heard him agreeing, ‘but in your case…’

  ‘You decided to balance the scales in your own favour and give yourself extra time,’ she suggested tauntingly.

  To her surprise he didn’t try to deny her accusation or to defend himself, instead giving her a look that for some unaccountable reason made her pulse start to race frantically and her heart to execute a high-dive.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she repeated quickly, ‘I shan’t change my mind…

  The long, level look he gave her rather surprised her. That he should acknowledge her antagonism was to be expected, but that he should allow her to see that it affected him wasn’t. Men like him were very much into control of their own emotions as well as those of the people around them. She would have expected him to want to give her the impression that he was above acknowledging her dislike, not to react to it with such a very male and challenging gleam in those cool, grey eyes…The kind of gleam that, if she was foolish enough to be vulnerable to his particular brand of male magnetism, could quite easily have made her heart beat just a little faster and her body…

  ‘You sound very sure about that.’

  The gleam was gone now, replaced by a cool, distancing scrutiny. ‘I am,’ Christa confirmed firmly. ‘I know myself very well.’

  ‘Yourself, or the self you allow yourself to be? You do realise how stressful such rigid control of your personality is, don’t you?’

  Christa glared angrily at him.

  ‘And you would know about such things, I take it. Tell me…what exactly did you do before you jumped on the modern bandwagon of the…the quasiprofessional soothsayer and reader of runes?’ Christa demanded insultingly.

  She waited for the storm to break, for the grey eyes to darken and the sensually curved male mouth to utter retaliatory insults, but to her consternation he said simply instead, ‘I lectured in psychology at Oxford. I don’t want to rush you, but it would be a good idea if we could leave pretty soon. I don’t want to get back too much after dark. We haven’t had much wind recently, and if the power supply is low it might mean starting up our subsidiary generator…’

  The speed with which he changed subjects, the apparent calmness in his manner after delivering a statement which had left her feeling as flattened as though she had been mown down by a boulder, left Christa floundering and impotently angry, not just with him but with herself as well.

  A lecturer in psychology…

  ‘It was in the brochure, along with the qualifications of the other members of our staff.’

  The quiet statement brought a surge of humiliated colour to Christa’s skin, despite her attempts to stop it.

  ‘A generator,’ she repeated, determinedly adopting his own tactics. ‘Does that mean you don’t have a proper reliable electricity supply?’

  ‘We aren’t on the national grid, no,’ he agreed. ‘Our electricity is generated by wind machines. We try at the centre to be as environmentally aware and as independent as possible. That includes generating our own electricity, growing our own fruit and vegetables. We even tried supplying our own meat, but that didn’t work out too well.

  ‘The sheep became too tame and no one wanted to send them to market,’ he explained. ‘Same with the hens; none of us could bring ourselves to wring their necks.’

  Mentally, Christa contrasted what he was saying with the lives of some of the people in the villages she had visited in India and Pakistan. There they did not have the luxury of allowing their livestock to become tame pets.

  As though he had read her mind, he said quietly, ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re probably right, but would you have wanted to be the one to sign the death warrant?’

  His perception was beginning to disconcert her.

  ‘It would depend whose name was on it,’ she told him pithily.

  The sound of his laughter surprised and irked her. He was supposed to get offended, angry, to be betrayed by his pride and ego into revealing himself as he really was-not to be tolerantly amused.

  Daniel Geshard was dangerous, Christa acknowledged uneasily. His claim that a month on one of his courses would change her entire outlook on life was one she still scathingly discounted. Her own claim to herself that, knowing who he was, or more importantly what he was, there was not the slightest risk of that initial tug of empathy and attraction she had felt towards him being rekindled—that claim was the truth, wasn’t it?

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Christa tensed against his choice of words—not the impersonal, ‘Is something wrong?’ but the much, much more personal, ‘What’s wrong?’ as though he already knew her so well that it was taken for granted that he knew that something was.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She gave him a cold stare. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she told him bitingly, ‘apart from the fact that you’ve interrupted me in the middle of some important work, practically forced your way into my home, tried to take total control of my life…’

  ‘The decision to accept my offer was yours,’ he pointed out easily. ‘You could always have refused.’

  Liar, Christa wanted to say. He knew damn well she could not have refused it without totally losing face. As she turned her back to walk away from him she heard him saying to her, ‘You’ll need to pack at least three changes of outdoor clothes, plus a warm weatherproof coat. When we get snow…’

  ‘Snow?’ Christa stopped and whirled round. ‘It’s October,’ she objected derisively. ‘We don’t get snow in this country in October…’

  ‘Maybe not, but Wales is a different country and we do get snow, and we’re up in the mountains, high enough to have bad snow as early as September in some years.

  ‘Did you manage to get walking boots, by the way?’ Daniel called after her.

  ‘Walking boots?’

  ‘It was on the list of required clothing,’ he told her.

  And the list had no doubt been with the brochure which she had thrown away, Christa acknowledged hollowly. What else had she omitted to discover through that foolish piece of stiff-necked pride?

/>   ‘No, I did not manage to get walking boots,’ she enunciated grimly. ‘But then I shan’t need them as I shall not be doing any walking.’

  If she had expected him to respond to her challenge by arguing with her she was disappointed…As though she simply hadn’t spoken, he continued easily, ‘Well, don’t worry about it too much. There’s an excellent sports and climbing equipment shop in our local market town. You’ll like visiting it—everyone does. It’s still very much a traditional market town, with a weekly cattle auction. You’ll enjoy it…’

  Christa gave him a withering look.

  ‘I hardly think so,’ she told him dismissively. ‘I’m a city person, I’m afraid…’ It wasn’t really true, but she was beginning to feel not just resentful but, more worryingly, slightly afraid of the way he seemed to be continuously reading her mind, second-guessing her. ‘Watching some bucolic farmers haggling over the sale of a handful of ragged sheep is hardly my idea of pleasure…

  ‘No?’ The dark eyebrows rose. ‘That isn’t what I’ve heard. Apparently they’ve learned to be extremely wary of the English cloth-lady in the factories of India and Pakistan.’

  Christa tensed warily. Where had he learned that?

  ‘Buying cloth is my job…watching other people buying sheep isn’t. Besides, I thought the ethos behind these courses was that one put aside all thoughts of work and learned, instead, to play,’ she commented mockingly.

  ‘Our ethos, as you call it, is to teach people, to help people to live well-balanced and fulfilling lives; to learn to acknowledge and accept that the human psyche has other needs besides the more material ones.’

  ‘Oh, the trauma of the poor stressed-out executive,’ Christa taunted disparagingly. ‘How great his need, how noble the role of the one who eases it for him. There’s a real world peopled by human beings who are starving…dying…’

  ‘Yes, I do know,’ he told her quietly.

  There was a certain note in the quiet male voice which for some reason made Christa flush slightly and look away from him, as though she was the one in error…at fault.

  ‘I cannot alleviate the ills of the starving—would that I could—but I can help people to come to terms with themselves, to learn to live in harmony with others. If all the world lived in such harmony,’ he told her gently, ‘there would be no wars, or famine.

  ‘I’ll wait down here for you, shall I?’ he continued.

  Christa looked at him blankly. His words had caused her to feel such emotion…He baffled and bewildered her, catching her so repeatedly off guard that she felt like a wooden doll on a string which he manipulated.

  Careful, she warned herself as she hurried upstairs, you’re letting him get to you and you mustn’t. Remember what he is, not what he seems to be. He’s a psychologist; he knows how people behave, how they react, and he knows how to project a specific image, how to gain someone’s sympathy and admiration.

  But he would soon learn that she wasn’t so easy to deceive, and before her month in Wales was over he would be bitterly regretting his foolish public claim to be able to change her whole outlook on life. God might have wrought such a transformation in St Paul on the road to Damascus, but Daniel Geshard was a mere human being.

  A mere human being…She paused, just with one foot on the second flight of stairs, her heart suddenly missing a small beat. There was nothing ‘mere’ about the man, and she would do well to hang on grimly to that fact.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘IS THIS it?’ Christa asked in dismay at the ramshackle collection of stone-built, low-roofed buildings beyond the closed farm gate.

  ‘This’ looked more like a small farmhouse surrounded by farm buildings than a study centre. For starters, from the size of the main building she doubted that it could house more than four or five people.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he returned calmly, bringing the Land Rover to a halt in front of the gate.

  Christa had been startled at first when she had seen the Land Rover. Somehow she had expected him to drive something more…more expensive…more imagereinforcing…A four-wheel-drive vehicle, certainly, but a top-of-the-range model, not this battered vehicle which looked as though it was held together with bits of string.

  As he had watched her studying it, Daniel had told her with visible pride that he had rescued and rebuilt the vehicle himself.

  ‘Yes, it looks like it,’ Christa had agreed grimly, and then had felt oddly mean as she saw the pleasure fade from his eyes. Men did have, somewhere within their make-up, that little-boy eagerness and enthusiasm for certain cherished things.

  ‘What do you mean, not exactly?’ she asked him suspiciously as he opened the Land Rover door

  ‘This isn’t the centre,’ he admitted. ‘This is my home…The centre closed down at the end of last month…to give the staff a chance to have a break and to enable the builders to finish work on a new extension.’

  ‘What…you mean you’ve brought me here under totally false pretences?’ Christa flashed. ‘Well, in that case you can just turn this…this collection of rusty metal and string around and take me back again.’

  ‘Impossible, I’m afraid,’ Daniel told her calmly. ‘For one thing, I’m almost out of petrol, and Dai won’t be here with a fresh supply for me until some time tomorrow, and for another…it’s too late, Christa,’ he told her quietly, looking at her, watching her. She recognised a small heart-stopping surge of confused emotion—anger because he had deceived her and relief because he was refusing to let her go?

  ‘You agreed to come here,’ he reminded her, repeating his earlier words to her.

  ‘I agreed to attend a course held at your centre, not to…what do you mean, all the staff are having a break?’ she questioned him uncertainly.

  ‘Just that,’ he told her. ‘But you needn’t be concerned; I’m quite happy to conduct your course personally,’ he assured her. ‘In fact,’ he told her, his voice taking on a disturbing husky timbre, ‘I’m positively looking forward to it…’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Christa snapped. ‘And in fact-What’s that?’ she demanded, her eyes rounding with shock as the Land Rover suddenly rocked startlingly from side to side. In her efforts to counteract the rocking effect she reached out instinctively to brace herself against it, one hand pressed against the doorframe, the other…

  The other, she recognised, was pressed flat against something much more solid and warm than a doorframe. And that something was Daniel’s chest, his heartbeat a steady regular rhythm beneath her hand.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She heard him laughing. ‘It’s only Clarence…he’s come to welcome us home…’

  ‘Clarence…’ Christa stared wildly at him. ‘Clarence,’ she repeated uncertainly. She couldn’t see anyone through the windows of the vehicle.

  ‘He’s a billy goat,’ Daniel told her, ‘who hasn’t yet learned that a head-butt is not always exactly an approved mode of welcome.’ He was laughing at her, Christa recognised indignantly as she saw the small creases fanning out around his eyes and the humour in the upward curl of his mouth. ‘I’m sorry if he frightened you. I should have warned you…’

  ‘I wasn’t frightened,’ Christa denied untruthfully.

  She started to pull away from him and then tensed in shock as one of his hands covered hers, holding it trapped against his chest while his thumb stroked caressingly over the soft skin of her inner wrist.

  She could feel herself starting to tremble slightly; the skin of his hands was slightly rough, as though he spent a good deal of time outside, and the small abrasion of it rubbing against her much softer flesh was causing odd shivers of sensation to quiver through her body.

  ‘Liar,’ she heard Daniel accusing her softly.

  Shaking, she tried to focus on what he was saying to her instead of what was happening inside her.

  ‘Your pulse is fast,’ he told her in explanation. ‘And a fast pulse means…’

  ‘All right, so it was a shock,’ Christa admitted, anxious to bring an end to
what was becoming an increasingly hazardous situation. Fear was one cause of a racing pulse, it was true, but there were others. She bit her lip, chagrined by the knowledge that what her body had idiotically interpreted as a small caress had, in fact, been nothing more than a clinical examination of her pulse-rate.

  ‘Whoops, hang on…’ The sensation of Daniel’s arms suddenly coming round her and holding her wrapped tightly against his chest choked the breath out of her lungs, leaving her totally unable to make any kind of verbal protest as Clarence sent the Land Rover rocking a second time.

  ‘I think he’s getting impatient,’ she heard Daniel saying somewhere above her head.

  She was pressed so firmly against him that to make any comment would have meant risking her lips virtually touching the warm, bare skin of his throat as she tried to speak. In fact, if she opened her mouth at all, it would be almost as though she were doing so in order to kiss him.

  ‘Hey…you’re trembling…it’s all right, Clarence isn’t so fearsome. In fact he’s quite a softie once you get to know him…come on.’

  Thank goodness he had started to release her and turn away from her to open his door before he could realise that the reason for that small, intense shudder had not been anything to do with Clarence at all, wary though she was of the animal.

  What was the matter with her? There was obviously a very large communications gap between her body and her brain; her body was still locked into that first initial meeting between them and the instant attraction she had felt towards him.

  It was time that her brain told it very clearly and firmly just what the real situation now was.

  ‘Come and meet Clarence,’ Daniel invited, holding open the passenger door for her.

  Reluctantly Christa climbed out of the vehicle. It wasn’t just the goat that was making her feel on edge, with his impressive set of formidably sharp-looking horns, but the man standing beside him as well.