The Trusting Game

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m getting carried away with my own enthusiasm,’ he apologised, giving her a rueful smile. ‘That’s the worst of being a convert to your own beliefs.’

  ‘It sounds almost idyllic,’ Christa told him coolly. ‘But man cannot live by self-esteem alone.’

  ‘Maybe not, but he certainly can’t live without it,’ Daniel shot back. ‘That’s been proved over and over again by any number of studies. Take away a human being’s self-esteem and you turn life into what is merely existence.’

  ‘You make it sound as though boosting people’s self-esteem is some kind of instant “cure-all” for all their ills,’ Christa told him.

  She made her comment mockingly sarcastic, but to her surprise, instead of retaliating to her taunt, Daniel merely said quietly, ‘In many ways I believe it is.

  ‘When I was fifteen my father was made redundant; three months later he killed himself. He was forty-three and he couldn’t bear the shame of losing his job. The fact that we loved him, that he was a valued and valuable part of our local community, the fact that we needed him, simply wasn’t enough.’

  Christa swallowed hard in shocked silence. His simple words, devoid of rhetoric and theatrical fervour, had touched her deeply.

  Perhaps because of the loss of her own parents, she was sharply aware of all that he was not saying.

  Tears blurred her eyes; she wanted to reach out and touch him, to tell him that she understood.

  ‘Perhaps because of his death financial and professional success have never held much appeal for me. And the thing was that after his death we discovered some shares he had bought several years earlier. He had always enjoyed “gambling” in a very small way on the stock market. A takeover resulted in those shares increasing dramatically in value.

  ‘So dramatically, in fact, that my father would never have needed to worry about money again.

  ‘The money I used to buy this estate came from those shares. It seemed a fitting way to use it.’

  Christa swallowed again. He seemed so genuine, so…everything she had always wanted a man…her man to be.

  And yet, at the same time, he was engaged in a business which she knew from experience attracted men who were adept at deceit, men who were little more than an upmarket, polished version of confidence tricksters.

  Her instincts, her femininity, wanted her to reach out towards him, to believe in him, but her knowledge, her experience, warned her not to do so.

  Which one of them was right?

  Why not keep an open mind? her heart whispered recklessly. Why not allow him to prove himself to you one way or the other? After all, isn’t that what you’re here for? Isn’t it only fair to have an open mind, to suspend your prejudice against his type? To…to what? To allow herself to fall in love with him and risk being hurt…destroyed as her friend had been?

  No. No…there was no way she was going to fall into that trap, however plausible, however genuine, however desirable he might seem.

  No way at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHRISTA struggled sleepily to sit up in bed. What time was it? Her eyes widened slightly as she looked at her watch. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept so deeply—or for so long. A circumstance which, no doubt, Daniel would state was one of the recuperative effects he claimed for his remote habitat.

  Christa had other ideas and she wondered, a little darkly, just what exactly had been in that bedtime mug of cocoa he had insisted on making for her. Cocoa! She had stopped drinking that when she left home to go to university.

  The house felt quiet and still…and empty…

  Frowning, she swung her feet out of bed, reaching for her robe. Last night, Daniel had said that they would spend the morning going over the details of her course.

  ‘Obviously it will vary in some ways from those we normally run.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Christa had agreed drily. ‘After all, the people you usually deal with are already converts, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Daniel had contradicted her, adding firmly, ‘And besides, they aren’t here to be converted but to be helped to recognise the signs of stress and to learn how to deal with them and how to integrate well with the rest of the human race and their colleagues in particular.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of taking up the diplomatic services as a career?’ Christa had muttered sardonically under her breath, but not quietly enough, it seemed, because he had given her a disconcertingly level look and told her,

  ‘Not really; I don’t have the patience for it, or the subtlety.’

  Christa had been tempted to argue with him, but was deterred by the huge yawn that had unexpectedly and embarrassingly overtaken her.

  ‘You’re tired,’ Daniel had commented, getting up from his chair, adding wryly, ‘Or perhaps I’m boring you.’

  Did he really intend her to answer that question? Christa wondered grimly. He must surely already know that ‘boring’ was the last thing that any sane member of her sex was likely to find him.

  Where was he now? Somehow, without knowing how she knew it, she sensed that he wasn’t in the house.

  She padded over to the window, pulling back the curtains and blinking in the unexpected shock of the brightness of the morning light. The sky was a sharp, clear blue, the sunlight pale and very bright.

  As she blinked in its glare she wasn’t sure, at first, if the white dazzle she could see capping the range of mountains that surrounded them was caused by the sunlight or if in fact it was actually snow.

  She blinked again, clearing her vision, her jaw dropping slightly as she recognised that it was indeed snow. Uncomfortably she remembered her scornful words to Daniel the previous day.

  Snow in October?

  ‘Wales is another country,’ he had warned her, and now, abruptly, this mountainous, semi-barren region did seem very alien and even slightly intimidating. She had heard on the news, had read of climbers being lost in snowdrifts and blizzards in the Scottish and Welsh mountains at times of the year when the mere idea of snow in other parts of the country seemed laughable.

  In a city environment, in the more heavily populated areas of the country, it was easy to forget that these mountains existed.

  ‘I promise you that by the time you leave here you will see yourself and everyone, everything around you, in a different light,’ Daniel had promised her, quietly, last night.

  ‘How?’ she had challenged him scathingly.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he had told her.

  She shivered slightly, as though she could actually feel the icy chill of those snow-clad peaks, even though she was actually standing in the centrally heated protection of a warm bedroom.

  Was it possible that the process of change had begun already in her reaction to the sight of the mountains, her awareness of her own unexpected awe of them…?

  Don’t be ridiculous, she chided herself fiercely. All right, so it had been a shock to see those snow-covered peaks, but what a ridiculous idea to feel that her position had somehow been undermined, her stance threatened.

  Daniel was hardly personally responsible for the snow, was he?

  When she left Wales, it wouldn’t be with her views changed, but rather with them reinforced. When she returned home it would be to confirm what she already believed. Daniel might appear genuine and sincere in his beliefs, he might even actually believe in them himself, but he wouldn’t be able to convince her. While his ‘converts’ faithfully played out the roles he had taught them, others, shrewder, less easily persuadable, would take advantage of them to advance their own interests; that was a fact of human nature.

  But if Daniel was right, if people could learn to focus themselves, to draw their sense of self-worth from a far less materialistic and competitive source, then…

  Impossible, she told herself quickly—other than in an ideal world peopled by ideal human beings.

  She tensed as a sound outside caught her attention, frowning as she strained to listen. It sounded a
s though someone was working out there. Daniel? Working at what? Wasn’t she supposed to be his work?

  If this was his way of trying to convert her—simply ignoring her—then…Or was he perhaps having second thoughts? Perhaps he had begun to recognise that she was no easy pushover…Had he even begun to give up?

  Quickly selecting clean clothes, she hurried into the bathroom. If she could get him to admit that he had been wrong then she could leave here, go back to her real life, now, before…

  Before what? Before she started to forget why she was here and began to focus instead, not on reality, but on fantasy, to close her eyes and allow herself to be seduced by her body’s female response to Daniel’s subtly potent maleness?

  Ridiculous! As though she of all people would be stupid enough to do any such thing.

  Downstairs the kitchen was empty—and scrupulously neat and tidy; there was a note on the table addressed to her. She read it quickly, trying to quell the sudden quickened pace of her heartbeat as she studied Daniel’s firm handwriting.

  ‘Looked in on you at seven, but decided to let you go on sleeping. Help yourself to breakfast.’

  He had looked in on her.

  Christa swallowed uncomfortably, her body suddenly very hot. It disturbed her to think of him looking at her when she was asleep and oblivious to his presence, vulnerable. Her face grew even hotter as she remembered the way her nightshirt had of coming unfastened and sliding off her shoulder.

  He had had no right to come into her bedroom, she decided crossly, and when she saw him she would tell him so.

  She made herself some coffee, too on edge to want anything to eat, curiosity drawing her outside once she had finished it to make her way across the yard in the direction of the noise she had heard earlier.

  It was colder outside than she had expected; the fine wool of the designer trouser suit she had bought as a piece of shameful self-indulgence wasn’t thick enough to protect her legs from the sharp wind, and she regretted leaving the house without her jacket when she felt the gooseflesh lifting her chilled skin beneath the thin cloth on her body.

  She was just about to turn round and go back inside for her jacket when a noise behind her stopped her.

  Her heart suddenly started to beat faster with nervous apprehension as she recognised the sound of hooves on the cobbles of the farmyard and, sure enough, when she turned round there was Clarence, standing between her and the house, watching her with a malevolent expression.

  Christa felt her stomach lurch with fear. As a child she had visited her grandmother who had kept a goat. Christa had been taken by her mother to see the young kids, all white-haired and silky-soft to touch, but the nanny for some reason had objected to their presence and had charged them.

  Neither Christa’s mother nor her grandmother had been particularly perturbed, but to Christa it had been a terrifying experience and one she had never totally forgotten.

  She had felt a brief resurgence of that fear yesterday, but viewing Clarence from the dual safety of the Land Rover and Daniel’s protective bulk was a very different thing from being alone in the farmyard with him, knowing both that he stood between her and safety and that he could outrun her if she gave in to her fear and fled.

  It was almost as though he knew how she felt, Christa acknowledged nervously, as his attention was momentarily diverted from her trousers.

  ‘One bite out of these and you’re dead,’ she warned him threateningly, but she could have sworn that he was laughing at her, recognising her complete inability to do anything to protect either her trousers or herself.

  He took a step towards her, and then another.

  Christa could feel her heart racing, her mouth going dry.

  ‘Shoo,’ she told him shakily. ‘Shoo…go away…go away…’

  Her voice sounded weak and thready, as ineffectual against the animal’s malignant supremacy as her words. Was this really her—the same woman who had stood her ground and won the day against the most subtle and skilled bargainers of the Indian subcontinent?

  Somewhere on the periphery of her awareness she was vaguely conscious of the fact that the rhythmic tapping of metal against stone had stopped, but she was too afraid of the animal in front of her to recognise what the cessation of noise really meant, so that Daniel’s warm and obviously amused, ‘Ah, you’re up, good…I was just thinking it was time I took a break for lunch,’ came as a complete surprise.

  At any other time Christa would have responded instantly and angrily to his teasing, pointing out that if he did indeed have lunch at ten o’clock in the morning he was a very unusual person, but the shock of hearing his voice, combined with her fear, caused her instead to spin round wildly, her fear of the goat momentarily superseded by the humiliation of having Daniel witness her predicament.

  Almost as though he had been waiting for it to happen, for her concentration to waver, their eye-contact broken, Clarence took advantage of the opportunity she had given him, charging towards her with Machiavellian glee.

  Christa heard the rushing sound of his charge and swung back round, her defensive awareness of Daniel’s watchful amusement forgotten, drowned by the sheer tide of shocked fear that overwhelmed her. Her eyes dilating with terror, she reacted instinctively, turning round to run, to escape; only her thin city shoes were not designed for muddy cobbles, and the small part of her brain that could still function rationally was already telling her that no mere human being on two legs could ever hope to outrun a gleefully malevolent animal on four.

  Her heart pounding with suffocating dread, she was once again that small girl at her grandmother’s, knowing that there was no escape, that…

  Her heart gave one final terrified bound as the ground suddenly fell away beneath her, only it wasn’t the wet muddy cobbles she found herself lying against, with Clarence breathing hotly over her prone body, but the solid, safe, comforting warmth of another human body and a pair of strong protective human—male—arms holding her tight.

  Human…male…Daniel.

  Christa opened the eyes she had squeezed tightly shut in panic.

  Daniel! Daniel was holding her. Daniel’s arms were wrapped firmly around her body, Daniel’s hand sliding into her hair as he gently pressed her face into the warm curve of his throat, Daniel’s voice, warm and alive, trembling slightly with what might just have been a hint of teasing laughter as he said softly against her ear, ‘Hey, come on, it’s all right. It’s only Clarence, that’s all.’

  That’s all!

  Indignantly Christa lifted her head and looked at him. ‘He was going to attack me,’ she told him shakily, biting down hard on her lip as she remembered how frightened she had been.

  Her whole body started to tremble and go weak; she felt cold all over and slightly nauseous, the tears she had held back earlier betrayingly flooding her eyes.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she told Daniel angrily, ‘you think it’s funny, but…’

  Proudly she struggled to fight free of the arm he still had wrapped around her, even though she was acutely conscious of the fact that Clarence was still here, albeit now keeping a polite and almost benign distance from them.

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s funny,’ Daniel contradicted her. His voice, like the touch of his hand against her face, held something—a quality, an emotion—that made her hold her breath, afraid of either recognising or acknowledging it.

  ‘Let me go,’ she demanded, but her voice sounded thready and weak, lacking conviction.

  ‘In a minute, when I’ve got you safely back inside. There really isn’t any need for you to be afraid of Clarence, you know,’ Daniel told her as he turned her round and started to guide her back towards the house.

  ‘He attacked me,’ Christa told him.

  ‘He’s a bully; he could sense your fear and made use of it as all bullies do. But it wasn’t just Clarence who frightened you, was it?’ he guessed astutely as he opened the back door for her.

  ‘No,’ Christa admitted curtly. ‘The
re was…my grandmother had a goat and I was terrified of it. She used to laugh at me, tell me not to be silly, say that life would hold many more things for me to be afraid of than a bad-tempered nanny goat. She despised weakness in people. She was a very strong woman.’

  She frowned as she saw the way Daniel was looking at her.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked him uncertainly. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘I was just thinking about the child you must have been…’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ Christa cautioned him sharply. ‘I’m not a child any more, I’m a woman, and—’

  ‘I know…’

  Something in the soft, subtle undertone to the words made her look at him, her whole body suddenly enveloped in a sharp sense of awareness, of knowing.

  ‘Very, very much a woman,’ Daniel told her quietly.

  ‘No.’

  Her denial was automatic, but so weakly ineffectual that Christa wasn’t at all surprised when he ignored it, reaching out to take hold of her, his hands spanning her waist and then moving caressingly up over her back and then down again to her hips, a look of such intense sensual pleasure in his eyes that it shocked her into immobility.

  If any other man had experienced such intense pleasure just touching her he had certainly never let her know it, never let her see how much the shape of her body, the warmth of her skin beneath his fingertips pleased him.

  She knew that Daniel was going to kiss her, knew it and did nothing at all to stop him, and nothing at all either to control the tiny quiver that ran betrayingly through her body.

  All her senses focused on what she knew was going to happen, on the slow, long-drawn-out build of anticipation, the careful touch of Daniel’s hands as he cupped her face, his fingertips tracing its shape, leaving hot trails of fire against her skin; she could see the sharp lift of his chest as though he was having trouble drawing the air to breathe, see the intense concentration in his eyes as they darkened with desire. Desire for her.