Past Loving

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Or a certain medical administrator?’ Robert suggested cynically.

  Uncomfortably aware of Elaine’s speculative look, Holly shook her head and told them, ‘Neither, as it happens. Paul rang this afternoon. He’s hoping to get back soon.’

  As she had hoped, the introduction of her brother’s name changed the focus of the conversation, Elaine announcing once again that she hoped that Paul had not forgotten his obligations to the launch of the new perfume.

  ‘No, he’ll be back well in time for that,’ Holly assured her. They had all finished eating now and she ached to be free of the tension of Robert’s presence. She didn’t know which was worse, sitting here next to him, dreading doing or saying something which might focus his attention on her, or sitting here listening to Elaine flirting with him.

  ‘I don’t want to rush you, Elaine,’ she said now. ‘But you did say you were booked on an early train in the morning...’

  ‘Yes, I know. There are still some things we need to discuss, but we can do that back at the hotel, if you don’t mind.’

  Shaking her head, Holly started to push back her chair but almost immediately Robert stopped her.

  ‘We still haven’t fixed a date for you to come and look over the garden,’ he reminded her. ‘I was wondering if you might be free on Saturday?’

  She ached to be able to refuse but she had never been the least adept at lying and so, instead of inventing some fictitious engagement which would have enabled her to reject his suggestion, she found that she was saying uncertainly, ‘I really think it might be best if, as Angela suggested, you approached the professionals—’

  ‘Oh, no, Holly,’ Elaine interrupted her, telling Robert, ‘You mustn’t listen to her. She really is far too modest; her garden at the farm is wonderful.’

  Her heart sinking, Holly acknowledged that there really was no way she could escape now without being openly aggressive and offensive.

  Forcing a wan smile, she responded unenthusiastically, ‘Well, if you’re sure...’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Robert confirmed, getting up to stand beside her and help her out of her chair before performing the same polite office for Elaine.

  Later, as Holly drove Elaine back to her hotel, the latter commented, ‘That Robert really is something, isn’t he? I didn’t think men like him existed any more...masculine, sexy, successful—and single. Mm...I’d even bet that he’s fantastic in bed as well—the kind of man who enjoys giving a woman pleasure.’

  Holly couldn’t help it. She could feel first her face and then her body starting to burn, and was thankful that the dark interior of the car prevented Elaine from seeing her.

  ‘No comment?’ Elaine questioned her, surprising her.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Should there be?’

  ‘Perhaps not, but I couldn’t help noticing that, for all my determined and over-the-top efforts to flirt with him, you were the one he was interested in.’

  ‘No!’ The panic in the denial reached even her own ears, warning her that she was over-reacting. ‘That is, I’m sure you’re wrong. I’ve known him forever. He and Paul were schoolfriends.’

  ‘So, that doesn’t stop him fancying you, does it?’

  ‘You’re imagining things,’ Holly told her flatly.

  ‘If you say so,’ Elaine concurred cheerfully, changing back to demand, ‘Who’s this medical administrator, by the way?’

  By the time Holly had explained her relationship with John, they had reached the hotel.

  It was another two hours before they had gone through all the points Elaine had wanted to raise.

  Tired, Holly left her and made her way back to the car. If only they hadn’t bumped into Robert tonight and if only she had not been stupid enough to agree to look over his garden. Had it been anyone but Robert who had asked for her help, she would have been interested as well as flattered. The restoration of old gardens was a subject which fascinated her.

  She had no idea why Robert was being so insistent about her viewing the garden. After all, he could hardly want her company, and as for her opinions... So what was he doing? What was his purpose in insisting on seeing her?

  ‘He fancies you,’ Elaine had teased her. If only she knew just how wrong she was. Smothering a bitter smile, Holly turned into her own drive. When she got in she was going straight to bed, she promised herself, and in the morning she was most definitely not going to oversleep.

  Neither was she going to waste her time in pointless dreams and memories of how it had felt to be held in Robert’s arms; to lie against him, skin to skin, to touch and caress him with all the awkward shyness and ardour of a young girl with her first lover, to pour out on him all her yearning adoration and love.

  She was trembling when she went inside, locking the door with unsteady fingers and then leaning on it while tears burned under her tightly closed eyelids. What was she doing to herself? Had she no sense, no pride? Oh, God, why did he have to come back and disrupt her life like this?

  CHAPTER SIX

  FOR the rest of the week, Holly tried to put Saturday and her agreement to look over Robert’s gardens out of her mind. It should have been easy; her workload had increased while Paul was away and the launch of the new perfume range was putting added pressure on her, but somehow Robert still managed to creep into her thoughts, his presence there taking her unawares, making her tense her body as though in physical rejection of his mental image.

  On Friday evening, she could not settle to anything, her glance constantly drawn to the telephone in her sitting-room.

  She was overwhelmingly tempted to telephone Robert and tell him that she had changed her mind, but what if he insisted on making another date? There was, after all, no way she could let down her guard and tell him openly and honestly that she could not afford to allow her vulnerable senses any kind of contact with him.

  There was a pile of books on the coffee-table—gardening books which she had extracted from her collection with the purpose of refreshing her memory on the type of gardens which would originally have been laid out around a house such as the Hall.

  Had the inhabitants been wealthy enough, there would have been sophisticated walkways, arbours and formal beds surrounded by immaculate hedges or walls—gardens where the ladies of the house could walk in peace and privacy. There might even have been an early variation of a tennis court, and there would certainly have been a well-established kitchen garden.

  It was only later that such formality had given way to the parkland of the Georgian and Regency eras. For the Stuarts and their courtiers the Dutch had been a strong source of inspiration, and Holly had a very expensive book which Paul had bought her the previous Christmas with some beautiful illustrations taken from paintings depicting these formal Dutch gardens with their topiary and formal beds, their long, straight canals and symmetrically shaped pools. She picked up the book, opening it, frowning over it, trying to force herself to concentrate on it. Beside her she had a notepad and a pen, supposedly to jot down anything which she thought might be useful, but so far all she had written was, ‘Hall Garden’.

  At eleven o’clock, she acknowledged defeat and went to bed. It was only one day, a few short hours and then, like a nasty dose of medicine, it would be over, and she would be safe, she comforted herself as she lay in bed. And after all, what was there to fear? She knew the dangers—knew them and would be on her guard against them, wouldn’t she?

  * * *

  SHE WOKE UP EARLY with the warning signs of a tension headache building up behind her eyes. Outside the sun was shining and the blue sky held all the promise of a warm sunny day.

  She dressed accordingly, donning jeans and a T-shirt, catching her hair up on top of her head in a pony-tail so that it would be out of the way, leaving her skin free of anything other than some protective moisturiser and a touch of lip-gloss to protect her lips.

  No way was Robert going to be allowed to think that she cared enough about his opinion to don flattering clothes and make-up for
him.

  Downstairs she made some coffee and had her cereal. The papers had arrived along with the post, and while she opened her mail she read quickly through the headlines.

  She was just wrapping some of her reference books in protective cling-film, prior to taking them out to the car, when she heard a vehicle drawing up outside.

  Frowning, she went to the sitting-room window. A large Range Rover was parked outside. Her frown deepened. She knew of no one owning such a vehicle who was likely to visit her at this time of the morning.

  But before she could turn away to go and open the door she saw Robert alighting from the vehicle. He stopped, catching sight of her standing there. Like her, he was dressed in worn jeans, a checked shirt tucked in at the waist, the sleeves rolled back to reveal his forearms.

  He looked for all the world as though he had spent his entire life living here in the country, she reflected, as he smiled at her and waved. Her heart was hammering heavily against her ribs, the tension in her muscles making her head pound.

  When she unlocked the front door and released the safety-chain, her fingers felt cold and stiff.

  ‘Hi. I thought I’d come round and pick you up, save you driving over...’

  He was inside the house now, sniffing appreciatively as he commented, ‘Mm...freshly brewed coffee. It smells wonderful.’

  Holly compressed her lips.

  ‘I was just finishing my breakfast,’ she told him curtly. She wasn’t going to offer him any coffee. She wasn’t going to do or say anything that would encourage him to think—to think what? That she still wanted him, still ached for him...still loved him?

  As she turned her back on him, leaving him standing in the hall, she hurried into the kitchen, but, to her shock, instead of staying where he was he followed her, glancing assessingly round the room and then saying admiringly, ‘Now this is how a kitchen should look. Who planned and designed it for you?’

  ‘No one,’ Holly told him stiffly. ‘I did it myself.’

  There was a small pause and then he said softly, ‘Yes, of course, I should have guessed, shouldn’t I? You always did believe that the kitchen was the heart of a home. I remember how you used to tell me that when you got married you wanted a big kitchen with the kind of table the whole family could sit round. I seem to remember in those days that you wanted four children...’

  Holly could feel the wave of burning scarlet moving up over her body in a painful, stinging tide.

  ‘We all tend to have unrealistic and idealistic dreams when we’re that age,’ she managed to retort as she turned her back on him.

  ‘Idealistic maybe...but surely not unrealistic. You haven’t married—but then these days a woman doesn’t need a husband to be a mother, does she?’

  Keeping her back to him, Holly reached for her coffee-mug, but her hand was trembling so much that some of the hot liquid jerked out over the rim, splashing down on to her jeans.

  Instantly Robert was at her side, exclaiming over the accident, demanding to know if she was hurt. Frantically trying to keep some distance between them, Holly scrubbed at the small damp patch on her jeans, shaking her head, her throat too constricted with tension for her to be able to speak.

  ‘Here, you’d better let me do that,’ Robert told her, taking the cloth she had snatched up from her hand, adding, ‘You’re trembling like a leaf. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. It was just the shock,’ Holly lied. It was true that she was shocked, but that shock hadn’t been caused by the unexpected heat of the hot coffee against her skin. No, Robert was the one who was causing her to tremble so badly. She ached for him to move away from her, panic surging over her as he pressed the cloth to her damp jeans.

  ‘It’s all right...I can manage,’ she told him, pulling quickly away from him. ‘I’ll have to go and change my jeans, though.’

  ‘Any chance of some of that coffee while I’m waiting?’ he asked her.

  What could she say? He could see for himself that the filter-jug was half full. To refuse would not just be churlish, it would be bad-mannered as well.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she told him in a stilted voice. ‘I shan’t be long.’

  Upstairs, she wrenched off her jeans, briefly examining the small scarlet patch on her thigh. The scald was only minor, nothing at all really, and if the truth were known she could feel the imprint of Robert’s fingers against her skin where he had held her as he mopped up the coffee far more intensely than she could feel any burning sensation from the liquid.

  It only took her seconds to collect a clean pair of jeans, but to put them on took much longer, principally because she was still trembling violently, her senses relaying to her over and over again all the unwanted information they had gathered in those few seconds while Robert had bent over her. She could still smell the scent of his skin, feel the faint roughness of the pads of his fingertips, and if she closed her eyes she could even hear the sound of his breathing and see the familiar outline of his jaw, remembering how eagerly a lifetime ago she had pressed her immature and inexperienced lips to it, tasting his skin, shocked by his response at the time as she thrilled to the knowledge that her touch excited him. How easily and how treacherously her lips could recall the slightly rough sensation of his skin, the sensual pleasure of that delicate friction against the sensitivity of her mouth; the way he had moved, so that she could explore the lean column of his throat, the way his hands had tightened around her waist as he pulled her closer to him, so close in fact that she could feel the hard throb of his body.

  She was trembling so much now that she could barely fasten her jeans, her fingers almost numb with shocked reaction to her erotic thoughts—thoughts she had no right to have, thoughts she did not want to have. She swallowed a hysterical sob of frightened anger. Why did he have to come back? Why couldn’t he have stayed safely away and, once having returned, why did he have to seek her out like this...tormenting her...reminding her? Yes, it was true that once she had shyly and innocently confided to him her dreams: dreams of a husband, a lover, and the life she would live with him, a life which had included children, a life which would have allowed her to give full rein to her yearning to recreate for those children the same family atmosphere and security she herself had known. Was that so very wrong? She had, after all, been young...and immature, perhaps, for her age. Was it her fault that she had believed he loved her, that she had confused sexual desire with emotional need...that she had believed that their futures lay together?

  Holly stared blindly out of her bedroom window, wishing he had not reminded her of those dreams, wishing he had not so cruelly pointed out to her that, while she might have realised her dream of a home that was comfortable and welcoming, she did not have the husband she had longed for, nor the children he would have given her. And yet she was content...more than content, and she had learned enough now to know that a woman could have a fulfilled and very happy life without a man in it. When she looked at other people’s relationships she saw that they were often flawed, that they were not perfection. And besides, she could have married, had she chosen to do so. The fact was that she had never been able to bring herself to take the risk of falling in love a second time—and without love...without love there was no point in marrying. At least not to her...

  She had considered her life fulfilled and happy, and yet with those few brief words Robert had somehow made it seem as though she had been forced to accept second best—as though she had had to settle for less than her ideal. And yet that was not the case.

  All right, so it was true that her life had taken a very different direction from that she had envisaged at eighteen, but could she honestly say now that even if she had married, even if she had had children that she would not have wanted and needed more, that there would not have come a time when intellectually, when perhaps selfishly, she would have needed to achieve something for herself, something outside her home and family, something which belonged to her and her alone?

  The sound
of the kitchen door opening made her tense.

  ‘Holly, are you OK?’

  Robert was standing in the hall. If he came upstairs looking for her... Hurriedly she finished dressing, calling out to him, ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ as she opened her bedroom door and hurried along the landing.

  As she turned the corner of the stairs she saw that he was standing at the bottom, one hand on the newel post as he looked upwards. For a moment she faltered. He looked so very masculine, so heart-shakingly familiar. It would be the easiest thing in the world to run down to him, to fling herself into his arms, to tell him how she missed him, to beg him to hold her and never let her go.

  Horrified, she averted her face from him, praying that he would move out of the way before she reached the bottom stair, and yet when he did the surge of disappointment that swept her taunted her, mercilessly revealing her own weakness.

  ‘I’ve just got some books to collect,’ she told him as she hurried past him.

  When she returned with them he was still standing in the hall.

  ‘I’ve emptied the coffee-filter and washed up,’ he told her.

  She gave him a startled look. She hadn’t imagined a man in his position would have given a thought to such mundane domestic trivia.

  Once they were outside he took the books from her, unlocking the passenger door of the Range Rover and helping her inside, before opening the back door and depositing the books on the rear seat.

  He had always been a good driver, skilled but aware of the deficiencies of others and the hazards that could occur. Once she had loved nothing better than to sit beside him in the old sports car he had rebuilt, but now she discovered that she was keeping herself as far away from him as she could, concentrating on the view outside her window as though it were completely unfamiliar to her instead of something she saw every day.

  They were almost halfway to the Hall, when he shocked her by asking, ‘Why have you never married, Holly?’

  How could he of all people dare to ask her that? Did he really not know what he had done to her? How much he had hurt her? Was he really trying to pretend that he hadn’t known that when she’d talked of marriage what she had wanted had been marriage to him...?