'Don't you listen?' He looked as if he was about to grab her and shake her and she stepped back apprehensively. 'Didn't you hear me tell you not to go into the cool unless I was here?'
'You told me not to take Lorna into the pool unless you were here,' she retorted defensively. 'You didn't say anything about me not going in alone.'
'I would have thought your own common sense would have told you,' he said witheringly. 'If you'd collapsed again ...' He took a deep breath and his voice was not quite steady. 'It doesn't bear thinking about.'
Bethan gazed up at him, her eyes wide and questioning. Did he care about what happened to her? It was a heady thought but she dismissed it at once. Of
course he didn't, at least no more than he would care about the welfare of anyone staying under his roof. She could just imagine the figure she must cut, her skinniness revealed by her unflattering bathing-suit, unattractive, no longer even young, and now disfigured too. It was then she realised in a moment of illogical panic that Fraser was standing between her and her shirt and towel still lying on the lounger.
'I'm sorry. I suppose it was very thoughtless of me.' She bowed her head, trying to think how she could edge round him to reach her towel without turning her back on him, little realising her hair, still dripping and plastered to her head, had parted along the lines of her scalp wounds.
She heard his harshly indrawn breath even as she felt his hands touch her head. 'Oh God! And you worked four hours in the vineyard with injuries like these! In the name of heaven, Bethan, why didn't you tell me?'
But she couldn't answer him because his hands had fallen to her shoulders and then slid round her back as he pulled her against him. She just had time to remember how often he had held her protectively like this in the past, comforting her when she'd been hurt, and then she felt his caressing hands still, his body stiffen, and knew he had felt the puckered skin of her disfigured back.
She tried to pull away, but although his hands were gentle there was no escaping their hold as slowly he turned her round. His face was grey beneath his tan, his eyes appalled when he finally turned her back to face him again.
'Is this why you swam alone, because you didn't want anyone to see?' His harshly spoken question confirmed what she already knew, that he found her scars repulsive. It brought her chin up defensively and bright flags of colour to her cheeks.
'Why not? It's hardly a sight I would wish to inflict on anyone. Now, if you'd let me get my towel ..
Something flashed in his grey eyes that might have been anger or might have been something else she couldn't define before he released her, and she could feel those eyes burning into her scarred back as she walked away from him. Only he hadn't stayed by the pool. As she reached for her towel he took it from her, draping it gently round her.
'You don't have to feel self-conscious about it here, Bethan,' he said quietly, and she bent her head, suddenly feeling ashamed of her oversensitivity.
`No. It's stupid to mind if people find me repulsive when I know I was the lucky one. At least I'm still alive. The friend I was with was killed.'
She saw his hands clench. 'Don't talk ridiculous! Your scars make me feel—angry for what you've been through, guilty even, to have had things so easy when you—but repulsive ... oh no. Anything but!'
His vehemence surprised her into looking up at him to catch a strange, almost fiercely possessive look on his face. His next question was equally surprising. 'Your friend who was killed, it was a man friend?'
He seemed oddly intent on peopling her last few years with men, Bethan thought. It wasn't the first time he had brought the subject up, but before he'd been blunt enough to refer to them as lovers. She found it ludicrous that he should believe her to be irresistible to other men when he had found her totally resistible himself. And in this instance she found his question in bad taste.
'Betty-Lou was a nurse,' she said quietly, and had the satisfaction of seeing a faint redness creep over his cheekbones. 'American. We were on our way to her fiancé's apartment—Mike was a doctor on the team— for a farewell party when the shell-blast hit us. They were both leaving Lebanon the following day, going back to America to get married. Only there was no wedding, only Betty-Lou's funeral.' A tear trickled down her cheek at the appalling snuffing out of such a life.
As if he couldn't help himself, Fraser reached out and squeezed her shoulders lightly. 'I'm sorry. Life does hand out some dirty deals sometimes.'
She knew he was attempting to offer comfort but could find none. 'Helped along by the human race. Man's inhumanity to man. I've seen enough of that these last few years.' There was bitter disillusion in her voice, in the twist of her soft mouth. 'And it was particularly unfair that Betty-Lou had to be the one to die when she had so much to live for.'
'You make it sound as if you wish you'd been the one to die,' he accused harshly. 'You can't mean that.'
'Why not?' She lifted haunted eyes to his face. 'There would have been a certain poetic justice about it.'
His expression repudiated what she was saying. 'But you're still young. You've got so much to live for too, especially now you don't have to go on working for the relief agency. The money your stepfather left you,' he reminded her when she looked at him blankly.
'What difference does that make to me working for the agency?' she demanded.
'All the difference in the world, I should think.' He shook her in an oddly gentle exasperation. 'Bethan, don't you want to make a life of your own? A home, husband, family?'
spasm of intense pain flickered across her face. There was only one man she had ever wanted to share her life with and that was the man raking so carelessly at her feelings now. A man who had never wanted to share that dream, who had shown her in the cruellest way possible that he had no time for her.
She was back in the twilit garden at Merrifields, running across the lawn with wings on her heels because although Fraser had brought Lisa Farraday along to the party, Ishbel had just told her he wanted to see her—Bethan--in the summerhouse. It was more of a folly really, surrounded by rampant rhododendrons, the stonework beginning to crumble, and it was empty
when she reached it so she sat down on the padded cushion of the wide stone seat to wait. She waited a long time—or it seemed very long in her impatience—and she was beginning to wonder if Ishbel had been playing a joke when she heard footsteps. She couldn't see clearly in the half-light as he stepped through the open doorway but her senses recognised him at once, springing tinglingly alive.
'Fraser ...' She stood up and moved towards him. He had kissed her only a few days ago and she desperately wanted him to kiss her again. And he must want to, mustn't he, if he had asked her to meet him here in this secluded spot far away from the high jinks of . The knowledge gave her confidence and she wound her arms round his neck, pulling his mouth down to her own. The initiative was only hers for a few seconds and then he was growling low in his throat, his arms tightening crushingly round her as he deepened the kiss, parting her lips, plundering her moist sweetness until her head swam and a deep ache started in the pit of her stomach, making her legs weak.
His mouth left hers to trace a trail of fire across her cheek to her ear as his fingers twined in her long, fiery hair to draw her head back and leave the column of her throat. exposed to his questing mouth. The bootlace strap of her dress slipped and she heard the raggedness of his breathing as his head plunged lower, his mouth exploring the naked globe of her breast, his tongue and teeth teasing the rosebud peak until she gasped with pleasure, her body arching against him in involuntary female entreaty.
Never had a man touched her so intimately before, but she felt no shame, not even shyness, and although the sensations he was arousing in her were entirely new, they were entirely natural, as if her body had been made for this man's lovemaking alone. She had loved him for so long, her first, her only love, a love that had once been content just to know he existed, content with a
smile, a few teasing words, a friendly
touch. But now it was a love that demanded so much more, a woman's love for a man. The first time he had kissed her he had lit a fire that wouldn't be quenched, even when he inexplicably reverted to treating her like a child again.
Now he had both firm young breasts free of their constricting covering of pale green chiffon and the touch of his strong hands, the expression on his face as he looked at her nakedness brought the blood surging hotly through her veins. He wasn't seeing her as a child now, but as a woman. And he wouldn't have left the party, wouldn't have asked her to meet him here if he didn't love her too. She pulled his head down to her breasts with a fierce joy.
He groaned, burying his face against the smooth, silky swell, then gathering her up he carried her to the wide padded seat, his weight crushing her as he lay against her, leaving her in no doubt as to his desire for her. Her hands slid inside his shirt, exploring the hair-roughened chest, the taut muscles of his shoulders and back, seeming to know instinctively how to please him. And please him she did, for he shuddered against her, his own caresses becoming more urgent, more demanding.
Lost to everything but the incandescent flame he lit inside her, the overwhelming need to be one with him, to know the fulfilment of their love, she moved against him, begging, 'Love me, Fraser. Oh, darling, please love me ...'
Bethan hugged the towel even closer round her, the memory of how abjectly she had begged for his love as searingly humiliating now as it had been then. For he had refused her. One moment he had seemed to be on fire for her and the next he had thrust himself away from her, his appalled, 'Oh, God, I must be mad!' like the stab of a stiletto in her heart.
'Is this why you got me out here to the summerhouse, to offer yourself to me?' He stood over her, his voice accusing, and she could only stare up at him in
SHBEL'S PARTY
hurt bewilderment, too stunned to remind him he had asked her to meet him here, and what to Bethan had seemed so right, so natural, so—inevitable, was suddenly cheap and sordid because she had been mistaken. Fraser didn't love her. Oh, he had wanted her momentarily, perhaps as any man might be tempted by what she had offered, but he didn't feel about her the way she felt about him, and the knowledge brought an involuntary gasp of anguish.
'Beth, you're very young ' His voice was suddenly
more gentle but he couldn't know his reference to her youth only added salt to the wound he had inflicted, and anyway at that moment Lisa Farraday's imperative tones calling 'Fraser? Fraser, where are you?' not far away had his head jerking up, whatever he had been going to say forgotten.
'For God's sake cover yourself up, Beth,' he said harshly, and strode to the door.
And as Bethan scrabbled at the straps of her dress to cover her breasts she heard Lisa Farraday say, 'Darling, I thought you'd need rescuing by now.'
She didn't catch the words of Fraser's low-voiced reply but she heard their shared laughter, and every inch of her skin burned with humiliation while something seemed to die inside her.
Perhaps it wasn't so surprising that she had gone off the rails that night and got drunk. Not that it excused the appalling thing she had done. It was a pity that scene in the summerhouse with Fraser couldn't have been wiped off her memory as the rest of that awful night had been, but her own wanton behaviour and Fraser's rejection of it had been branded on her consciousness so deeply it had been the only thing she had remembered the following day when she had woken up in hospital to find a policeman sitting by her bedside.
And now the man who had so callously smashed her girlish dreams was asking if she had never thought of
I
settling down with a husband and family. What would he say, she wondered, if she told him that he was the only husband she had ever wanted, his children the only children she wanted to bear? He would be terribly embarrassed, of course, and she would never dream of telling him. What had been out of her reach ten years ago was even more unattainable now.
She shrugged with pretended indifference. 'Plain girls like me have to set their sights on other aims,' she said flatly, the touch of bitterness more revealing than she knew when she added, 'I learned that at a very early age.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
'FISHING for compliments, Bethan?' Fraser derided, yet his eyes narrowed because she sounded as if she really believed that. 'You were never plain in your life! Good Lord, you must see that every time you look in your mirror.' His voice roughened. 'Don't tell me there haven't been men in plenty to tell you so.'
Her wide green eyes searched his face for signs of the mockery she knew must be there. She could find none but still shook her head in flat rejection of his assertion. Oh, some of her male colleagues had made tentative advances during the last ten years, but then they had shared some pretty lonely assignments and when the choice of female companionship was so limited she had never been foolish enough to read anything into it beyond simple friendship. And friendship was all she had been able to accept from them. Only one man had ever had the power to stir her, and he hadn't found her attractive enough to return her feelings.
And why should he? she asked herself. If her own mother hadn't been able to love her, why should she have expected it of Fraser? Only Charles Latimer had ever found anything in her to love, and in spite of all the suffering she had caused him, his love still stretched out beyond the grave. But if Fraser believed Charles's love—in the form of his legacy—would free her from the burden of guilt she carried, he couldn't be more wrong.
'You're very flattering, but my attractions, real or imaginary, are neither here nor there.' She lifted her chin, looking at him levelly, and the hint of steel beneath her extreme fragility had never been more apparent. 'The fact is, my life is no longer my own. I
forfeited the right to pursue my own happiness when I killed that child.'
She saw the shock in his face, watched it with a kind of curious detachment. 'But, Bethan, that was ten years ago!' he protested. 'You can't still be punishing yourself for a few moments' irresponsibility that happened when you were little more than a child yourself.'
She wondered at his shocked dismay, considering his own silent condemnation of her at the time and his open contempt for her since he had discovered her living in his aunt's home. But his condemnation couldn't be any greater than her condemnation of herself. 'A few moments was all it took, and that little girl is still dead,' she said flatly. 'You surely don't think that's something I could just walk away from ... forget?'
Fraser made a forceful, negating gesture with his hand, but she could see from the expression on his face that was what he had thought. 'Forget? Well, perhaps not, but surely after all this time you could begin to forgive yourself?' He sounded angry and she couldn't imagine why. What could it possibly matter to him?
She shook her head. 'You make it sound so easy, but how can you possibly know what it's like to be responsible for the death of another human being?' She turned away from him, still huddled in the towel, to stare unseeingly across the drowsing garden. 'Oh, there have been times when I've almost been able to forget,' she said softly, thinking aloud, 'when I've been too bone-weary to think of anything but the next job to be done. Times of personal danger, times of sheer bloody frustration when I've had to watch babies suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition die because they've given up, too apathetic to put up a fight. But since I've been back in England she's often been on my mind, the little girl I killed.' Her throat ached with regret. 'Perhaps because for the first time since it
happened I've had time to think. She would have been eighteen now, a young woman, perhaps falling in love, looking forward to being married, having a family of her own ...' Her voice broke on a choked sob. 'So how can I ever forgive myself? And how can I ever expect to enjoy the things I deprived her of?'
His hands on her shoulders were unexpectedly gentle as he turned her round to face him. 'Bethan
She looked up at him with huge, haunted eyes. For just a few minutes she had forgotten his presence and felt shocked and bewilde
red at how much of herself she had revealed, unable to forget that the last time she had exposed her deepest feelings to him, he had turned away from her, laughed at her.
'I'm sorry.' She lowered her head as embarrassed colour stained her cheeks. 'I don't know what got into me. I've never spoken about it to anyone before. Ironic that I should unburden . myself now, to you of all people.'
Hip hands tightened their grip convulsively as he pulled her against him. 'Why do you say that? Me of all people?' There was a note in his voice that she might have believed was pain if she hadn't known she had no power to hurt him. 'There was a time, Bethan, when I was the first person you would have confided in.'
But that had been a long time ago, before she had discovered he was sharing the joke of her unrequited love for him with his current girlfriend. She stiffened and tried to pull away from his hold as she said, 'Yes, you were very patient, but I'm no longer an importunate child, and I have no excuse for inflicting my cares on someone who could have no possible interest in them.'
'How can you say that?' He refused to let her go, shaking her with a restrained violence.
Only when an uncertain voice said, 'Fraser ...?' did his hands fall to his sides as his indrawn breath hissed in exasperation. Following the direction of his eyes,
Bethan was dismayed to see Siriol standing watching them from the shadow of the summerhouse, her face stricken.
She had no idea how long the other girl had been there but there was no mistaking the fact that Siriol was putting an entirely wrong construction on the apparently intimate scene she had witnessed. Leaping in to retrieve the situation Bethan forced a smile to her face as she moved away from Fraser. 'I'm afraid your fiancé's cross with me. He's been ticking me off for swimming alone in the pool.' It wasn't entirely a lie because that was how this confrontation with Fraser had begun, and if it had been downright untruth it would have been worth it to see Siriol's uncertainty evaporate, her pretty face lighten. 'And now if you'll excuse me,' she went on, 'it's time I went to see if Lorna's woken yet.'
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