A Kind of Madness

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Your case—I brought that in for you last night. It’s in the hall. I realised when I saw it in your car, when I was doing my last round to check on the greenhouses, that you’d most likely need it this morning.’

  A brief but telling look at her borrowed nightdress immediately made her uncomfortably aware of her nudity beneath it.

  This was getting ridiculous, she told herself. She must stop over-reacting to the man in this totally inappropriate way. Just because, for half an hour or so yesterday, she had formed the totally incorrect impression that he had been trying to pursue her, that was no reason for her to be physically aware of him in a way that was so totally unfamiliar and so completely out of place that she felt burningly humiliated by it.

  And that feeling was intensified by the realisation that, in her anxiety to retrieve her case from the car, she must have virtually walked past it in the hall without seeing it.

  All her emotions, her humiliation, her anger, her feeling of helpless fury rolled into a hot, tight ball that lodged painfully in her chest, and for the first time in her adult life she experienced a strong desire not only to vocally tell her tormentor what she thought of him, but also to either throw something or burst into tears.

  The knowledge that Peter, had he known how she was feeling, would have reacted with both horror and distaste did nothing to ease her feelings. Peter hated emotional displays of any kind.

  Knowing that if she didn’t put some distance between Carter and herself immediately she might well give in to the temptation to say or do something she knew she was bound to regret later, she turned on her heel and stalked furiously back to the house. Or at least she tried to stalk. It was rather difficult when wearing a borrowed nightgown that flapped round her bare feet, and with two dogs gambolling joyously at her ankles, and in the sudden and horrifying knowledge that, with the sun shining fully on her, the thin cotton of her mother’s nightdress had more than likely become completely see-through, thus affording Carter ample opportunity to see the outline of her naked body.

  When she got inside she discovered that she was trembling, her hands balled into two tight fists, tension a physical band gripping her forehead. Why, when she could deal with any amount of difficult situations at work, was she suddenly falling apart, and all because of one impossible, scheming man?

  In the kitchen, Jasper the parrot caught sight of her, and cackled hideously, screeching in a leering voice, ‘Hold on to your knickers, girl!’

  It was the last straw. Something seemed to snap inside her and, before she knew what she was doing, she was advancing on the parrot to say menacingly, ‘For your information, I’m not wearing any, and if you don’t keep quiet I’ll wring that scrawny neck of yours, and bake you in a pie, you…you chauvinist.’

  It was only when she heard stifled laughter behind her that she realised Carter had followed her in. As her head snapped round, two dark patches of colour staining her cheekbones, he turned his laughter into a hurried cough.

  ‘Er—I wouldn’t do that, you know. Your mother’s very fond of Jasper.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Elspeth gritted, glowering at both man and bird.

  Having found her suitcase in the hall, she took it upstairs, showered and dressed, trying to restore herself to her normal confident, businesslike self by putting on a crisp cream shirt and a formal navy pin-striped suit. The suit was new, and Peter, when she had shown it to him, had remarked cautiously that he felt the skirt was a little on the short side. He had warned her against wearing it when they had visited his parents. His mother apparently considered any woman who wore a skirt that ended anywhere less than a good two inches below the knee to be unladylike in the extreme.

  Elspeth remembered that she had been very irritated by Peter’s comment, and had even been tempted to tell him that his mother’s views were not written in tablets of stone. In fact, she had received a surprising number of compliments from her male colleagues when she’d first worn the suit. Not that she was flattered by such things. She left that kind of weakness to the male sex, who everyone knew were hopelessly vain. But even so, it would have been rather nice if Peter had remarked on how well the skirt suited her slim hips and legs, and even nicer if he had given those same legs the kind of long, lingering and very appreciative look she had inadvertently caught one of the young men at work giving her. Which was ridiculous, of course. She had long ago recognised that there was far more to a stable male-female relationship than mere physical admiration. She and Peter were two of a kind—everyone said so. So why did she suddenly find the thought of being two of a kind with Peter oddly depressing?

  There was one thing for sure, and that was that Peter would not approve of her living under the same roof as Carter. Not that he would for one moment suspect her of doing anything wrong. No—of course not. That would be unthinkable. But Peter’s mother certainly wouldn’t approve. Periodically she came up to London, ‘surprise visits’ made so she said on the spur of the moment, but Elspeth had the distinct impression that they were more in the nature of a trap designed to ensure that she and Peter were still living separately.

  Peter’s mother did not approve of couples living together before they were married. Men were weak in these matters, she had once told Elspeth. Invariably it was up to the woman to ensure that a man’s respect for her was such that he would not even dream of asking her to move into his home.

  Elspeth approved of respect existing between the sexes, but sometimes she reflected rebelliously that her idea of respect did not accord with Peter’s mother’s. Sometimes—dared she admit it—there were even moments when she actually wished that Peter would suggest that they spend the night together.

  That these wild, rebellious thoughts always seemed to occur just after she had paid a visit to her parents and witnessed their still obvious happiness together often made her reflect that Peter was perhaps right when he claimed that her parents were a bad influence on her. She knew he strongly disapproved of their, to him, over-casual approach to life.

  When she had suggested that it seemed to work for them as they were very happy together—one only had to listen to them, see them…to Elspeth it always seemed as though her parents’ lives were full of warmth and laughter—Peter rarely laughed, and nor, she realised, did she—Peter had been so affronted that she should argue with him that she had dropped the subject.

  Reminding herself that it was Carter about whom she should be thinking and not Peter, she blew her hair into its neat, stylish bob, applied her usual discreet make-up and almost-no-colour lipstick and then headed for the kitchen.

  Outside the door, she paused and took a deep breath. Armoured now in all trappings of her business self, she would surely be able to wrest command of the situation from Carter, and make it plain to him that she was not going to tolerate his presence in the house. She was sorely tempted to tell him that her parents had made a mistake and that she could manage the smallholding without his help, but, almost scrupulously honest with herself, she was reluctant to do so. After all, what did she really know about running such a business? It was her parents’ livelihood, and if anything should go wrong…

  Taking another deep breath, she opened the kitchen door.

  Carter was just pouring coffee into two mugs. He looked up as she walked in and said casually, ‘Good, I was just going to come up and tell you that breakfast is ready.’ He checked and frowned. ‘I hadn’t realised you were going out this morning.’

  ‘Going out?’ Elspeth glowered at him. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she told him aggressively, ‘but you are.’

  He put down the coffee-jug, and ignoring the last provocative piece of speech said incredulously, ‘You aren’t planning to wear that outfit here, are you? I should have thought jeans—’

  ‘What I choose to wear has nothing whatsoever to do with you,’ she told him crisply.

  ‘All right, no need to lose your temper. Especially not before breakfast—it will ruin your digestion. Come and sit down. Everything’s read
y. Your mother told me how you like your porridge.’

  Porridge? Elspeth’s jaw dropped. ‘I loathe porridge,’ she told him grittily, ‘and I never…ever eat breakfast.’

  ‘Well, you should. Your mother’s right, you are too thin. At least, parts of you are,’ he added musingly, and humiliatingly, as she was tormented by a vivid and unwanted mental picture of just how much he must have seen of the voluptuous curves of her breasts out there in the yard, a hot wave of colour crawled betrayingly up over her body, spreading until even her face burned with the intensity of it.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she told him when she had recovered.

  ‘Do you? Well, come and sit down, then. I want my breakfast, even if you don’t want yours.’

  He was holding out a chair for her, and rather than argue with him she sat down in it and watched in revulsion as he tucked into one of the two bowls of porridge on the table.

  Why on earth had her mother told him she liked the stuff? She knew it revolted her. Why had her mother been discussing her at all?

  ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’ he invited.

  Adopting her most brisk and businesslike air, she told him, ‘I want you to find somewhere else to live. At least while my parents are away. You must see the sort of gossip and speculation it will give rise to if we both stay here. I suppose my parents left in such a rush that it never occurred to them how potentially embarrassing your being here might be to me.’

  ‘embarrassing?’ he checked her. ‘How?’

  Elspeth glared at him. Surely she didn’t have to spell it out for him? ‘You are a single man… I am an—a virtually engaged woman.’

  ‘Oh, you mean your—“almost” fiancé might object. Doesn’t he trust you, then?’

  ‘Trust me? Of course he does,’ Elspeth retorted, incensed. ‘Peter knows I would never…’

  ‘Never what?’ Carter asked her helpfully, suddenly abandoning his porridge to look directly at her, so directly, in fact, that the amber stare of his eyes seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on her, making her forget every word she had been about to say. They were gold, she recognised in bemusement, a pure, clear gold. Instead she broke into a flustered and almost incoherent flurry of words, which seemed to plunge her deeper and deeper into a morass of confused admissions and accusations.

  ‘I see,’ Carter said softly when she had finally stumbled into silence. ‘It isn’t that this “almost” fiancé of yours would imagine for one moment that living under the same roof as me might incline you into any kind of moral decline, but you are afraid that his parents wouldn’t feel the same way. What kind of man is he?’ he asked her almost gently. ‘Whose opinion of you matters the most to him—his own or his mother’s? Come to think of it,’ he added, narrowing his eyes as he looked at her, ‘why on earth are the two of you not actually engaged, or better still married? Believe me, if I’d found the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I wouldn’t take the chance of her getting away from me by leaving her free to find someone else. In fact, I’d fill her life and her thoughts and her bed so completely that she wouldn’t want to find someone else.’

  Elspeth gaped at him. ‘If you’re suggesting that I want to find someone else,’ she accused recklessly, ‘then let me tell you that you’re wrong. I’m perfectly content with Peter.’

  ‘Content.’ The dark eyebrows climbed steeply. ‘Contentment, my dear Elspeth, is for old age, not youth. No wonder this “almost” fiancé of yours doesn’t mind your taking off and leaving him for weeks on end. If contentment is the best way you can describe your relationship…’

  ‘I suppose if you were almost engaged you wouldn’t even let the poor girl go away without you,’ Elspeth challenged back. ‘If there’s one thing I cannot stand it’s possessive men.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not possessive. When you’re in a secure relationship founded on mutual love, you don’t need to be. I was merely pointing out that, to the outside observer, your relationship seems to lack a little passion. Still, if you’re content—’

  ‘I am,’ Elspeth retorted, suddenly realising how far she had been side-tracked off the main issue. ‘However, it isn’t my relationship with Peter I want to discuss. It’s the fact that it’s impossible for us both to live here under the same roof.’

  She waited, while he drank some coffee and chewed a piece of toast—maddening creature, he was deliberately trying to irritate her. Her stomach suddenly rumbled, contradicting her statement that she wasn’t hungry. Chagrined, she bit her lip. What was the matter with her anyway? She never normally ate breakfast. But then she never normally lost her temper, she never normally discussed her relationship with Peter with strangers, and she certainly never normally virtually exposed her completely nude body to unknown men.

  When he had finished he studied her, and then said blandly, ‘So you’ll be going back to London, then?’

  Her breath hissed out in outraged fury. ‘No, I shall not,’ she told him. ‘You are the one who will be leaving. You must see the impossibility of your staying on here.’

  ‘No, quite frankly I don’t,’ he told her almost sharply, suddenly dropping his casual, almost careless attitude, and staring at her across the table in a way which was almost intimidating. ‘And if you don’t mind my saying so I think your objections are positively Victorian, not to say almost paranoid. You can hardly really suppose in this day and age, and given the fact that your parents know that the pair of us will be staying here, and that you’re virtually engaged, that anyone, apart from dear Peter’s mother, is going to give the fact that we’re both staying here the slightest thought?’

  ‘So you won’t leave?’ Elspeth asked him flatly.

  ‘No. I promised your parents I’d keep an eye on things while they were away, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. If you want to stay, then fine. If you don’t…’ As he shrugged powerful shoulders, it occurred to Elspeth that he might be deliberately trying to get her to leave, giving him a clear field to create whatever difficulties he wished for her parents’ business.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ she told him, tilting her chin and glaring at him.

  The look he gave her was decidedly odd—almost triumphant in some way, as though she had reacted exactly as he wanted her to, and yet that was impossible… He couldn’t want her to stay any more than she wanted him to do so.

  ‘Good, I’ve got a couple of auctions to attend in the next two weeks and, while I could have arranged cover for myself, it will be much better if you’re here to take over just in case I don’t make it back for any of the evening watering or deliveries.’

  His casual assumption that she would fall in with his plans and allow him to dictate what she did further inflamed her temper, but she decided that she wasn’t going to allow him to provoke her. She was sure that he would enjoy doing so, no doubt hoping that she would take umbrage at his attitude and leave.

  Instead she asked as casually as she could, ‘These auctions—I take it they’re for land and property locally? Mum said that you were hoping to set up a similar operation to theirs.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. There’s more than enough business for both of us.’

  He seemed to be reading her mind, Elspeth reflected, but she suspected he was lying. There couldn’t be that many local restaurants wanting organically grown produce.

  ‘So it’s agreed, then. We’re both staying, and if you have any problems with Peter’s mother you can always refer her to me. I promise I’ll swear to her that you never so much as touched me, and that your behaviour was impeccable throughout your entire stay.’

  Speechless with rage, Elspeth contented heself with turning her back on him and pretending she hadn’t heard. It might amuse him to make fun of her, and of course he would find her attitude amusing. No doubt he thought nothing of going to bed with whatever woman took his fancy. He looked that type—the kind of man who could never understand the needs and motivations of her kind of woman. It was just as well she was immune to the attrac
tions of the male physique and good looks. The fact that he was very virile and very handsome meant nothing to her; it was a person’s nature that was important. Take Peter, for instance—he certainly wasn’t handsome, nor as revoltingly male as Carter, but his personality, his nature, his love for her— She stopped suddenly, realising uncomfortably that Peter’s personality was sometimes overshadowed by his mother’s upbringing, that his nature could on occasions be a little sharp and unfeeling, and as for loving her… Well, Peter believed that emotional and physical love between two people were treacherous foundations on which to build a stable marriage. Even so…

  Even so…what? she asked herself a little bleakly, unaware that Carter had got up until he announced, ‘John should have arrived by now. I promised I’d give him a hand breaking up the soil on the paddock. If you fancy a walk later on we’ll be there until lunchtime.’

  With a casual nod, he walked over to the door and opened it, leaving her alone and feeling oddly forlorn.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OF COURSE, she wasn’t going to go down to the paddock, Elspeth assured herself firmly, half an hour later, her things unpacked, the breakfast dishes washed, her body suddenly and inexplicably filled with a restless energy that took her across the kitchen to stand in front of the window and then back again to the door.

  There were plenty of things she could do to keep herself occupied up here at the house.

  Such as?

  She valiantly tried to ignore the tempting inner voice that whispered that outside the sun was shining and that it would do no harm to just quietly and quickly take a walk outside. After all, it made sense for her to discreetly check on what her parents’ two part-time employees’ routine was. She had no need to go too close to the paddock. And wasn’t it about this time in the morning that her mother normally went out to open up the greenhouses when it was warm?