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Davina winced again.
‘If Carey’s closes, over two hundred people will lose their jobs, and there are no other jobs for them to go to.’
‘Giles can get another job,’ Lucy told her stubbornly. ‘Giles isn’t free to throw his career chances away for Carey’s, Davina. Giles is my husband.’
‘I know that.’ Davina couldn’t look at her. She could see how angry Lucy was, how upset, but there was more than anger in her eyes; there was pain, as well as vulnerability. Davina wasn’t used to seeing Lucy vulnerable, and doing so now made her ache a little inside.
She had always envied Lucy slightly, envied her insouciance, her self-confidence, her brilliant, glowing sensuality, her way of living life to its fullest, and most of all, if she was honest, she had envied Lucy the love that existed between her and Giles. Not because she had wanted Giles for herself, never that … No, what she had envied Lucy was the state of being loved, of being wanted, needed, of being the centre of someone’s world.
Once she had known a little of what that was like, once and very, very briefly, but what she had known had merely been a shadow of the brilliance of the love that Lucy and Giles had seemed to share.
What had happened to them? What had happened to that love? She could understand why Lucy was resentful and angry that Giles was staying on at Carey’s, but surely she must know that it was Giles’s very nature to stick loyally to those to whom he believed he owed that loyalty?
‘I was wondering if you fancied a day in Chester, shopping?’ Davina asked her, trying to change the subject to something less painful.
‘Shopping? While Carey’s goes bankrupt and people lose their jobs?’ Lucy demanded gibingly.
Davina flushed, with irritation, not guilt. Lucy was being deliberately difficult … childish almost. For the first time Davina realised that there was still a lot of the child about Lucy, and that it was this combination of a child’s faroucheness and a woman’s sexuality that made her so powerfully appealing.
She tried again.
‘Lucy, I’m sorry if you’re angry because Giles has decided to stay on a little longer at Carey’s.’
‘So it was Giles’s decision, was it?’ Lucy demanded tauntingly.
Davina heard the bitterness in her voice and her own heart suddenly felt unbearably heavy. It had been wrong of her to persuade Giles to stay, but what alternative had she had? If he left, the company would collapse. There was literally no one else who could take over. She tried to explain as much to Lucy, but Lucy did not want to listen.
‘Giles isn’t doing this for Carey’s, Davina,’ Lucy interrupted her angrily at one point. ‘He’s doing it for you. You know it and I know it. Even Gregory knew it.’
Davina couldn’t hide her shock. It was reflected in her eyes, in the way her body tensed, her colour fluctuating as she demanded huskily, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, come on, Davina. Giles must have told you about the arguments he and Gregory had about the way Gregory was running the company. Giles didn’t approve of the way Gregory was playing with the firm’s money. He was concerned for your future … your security. He even threatened Gregory that he would tell you what was going on. If Gregory had lived he would have sacked Giles, and Giles knew it. Do you honestly think Giles did any of that because of Carey’s? It isn’t Carey’s Giles cares about, Davina. It’s you.’
‘No … no, that isn’t true,’ Davina denied, but she felt like Judas, not only denying Giles, but also denying Lucy the right to express her bitterness and pain.
When she left it was with the feeling that all she had done was to make things worse. The last thing she would do would be to have an affair with another woman’s husband, especially when that woman was a friend; surely Lucy knew that? She liked Giles, of course she did. And yes, she was flattered … comforted even by his obvious concern for her, but that was as far as it went.
Except that she had used Giles’s concern for her to persuade him to stay on at Carey’s. Except that, in being concerned for her, Giles was very obviously hurting Lucy. And hurting other people was the very last thing Davina wanted to be responsible for.
From an upstairs window Lucy watched Davina drive away. She ought to hate Davina, but she couldn’t. She felt too afraid. What would she do if Giles did leave her? She loved him, she had always loved him and she always would, but so much had changed between them, and she knew that she herself was sometimes guilty of almost deliberately trying to drive him away, but she hurt so much inside. The pain was unbearable, eating into her, driving her into a frenzy of despair so that she had to lash out at someone, and that someone was inevitably Giles.
No, she couldn’t blame him if he left her for Davina. Davina was older than her but she was still young enough to give him children … sons.
The scene beyond the window blurred as her eyes filled with tears. Sons. Men needed them … craved them. They were always more important to them than daughters. Lucy had learned that when she was six years old. The day her mother told her that her father had left them to go and live with someone else.
Lucy hadn’t understood at first when her mother had told her that she wasn’t her father’s only child. That she had half-brothers, two of them, five years younger than Lucy. Twins … two boys … two sons. How could one daughter ever be important enough to a man to hold him against competition like that?
‘When is Daddy coming home?’ she had asked her mother over and over again until at last she had turned on her and screamed,
‘Never! Do you understand? Never. He doesn’t want us any more. He doesn’t want you. He has other children now … two sons, and they’re more important to him than you and I could ever be.’
Lucy had been afraid then; afraid because she knew that somehow being a girl meant that she would never, ever be loved as much as if she had been a boy.
She was a rebellious child, difficult, her mother said. Her teachers complained about her wilfulness and blamed it on her red hair. Lucy didn’t care. When she was naughty people couldn’t ignore her. When she was naughty she was almost as important as if she had been a boy.
Tall for her age, thin and gawky, she was almost fifteen when suddenly, overnight almost, she was transformed from an ugly duckling of an overgrown schoolgirl into a stunningly sensual young woman.
Suddenly she had a figure, breasts, a waist, hips. Suddenly her legs, so thin and coltish, were enviably long and slender. Suddenly her eyes seemed to develop a mysterious slant, her mouth a soft pout. Suddenly Lucy discovered the power of her sexuality, and equally suddenly boys discovered her.
Now things were different. Now Lucy discovered that one look from her bewitching eyes, one toss of her red curls, one tantalising pout was enough to have every boy in the neighbourhood at her feet.
Suddenly she had something that others wanted, and because of it she was valued … loved … or so it seemed to the emotionally starved child who still lived inside the quickly developing body of the new Lucy.
For a while Lucy was happy. People … boys … wanted her and said they loved her, and then three months before her seventeenth birthday her mother announced that she was remarrying. The man she was marrying did not, it seemed, want a seventeen-year-old stepdaughter, and it had been decided that Lucy would go to live with an aunt of her mother’s in London.
Lucy told everyone at school that London was ‘quite definitely the place to be’, and she even pretended that she had actually persuaded her mother to let her go and live with her great-aunt.
Lucy had become very good at pretending, like when the boys who said they loved her fumbled clumsily with her clothing, their hands hot and sweaty on her body. She pretended to herself that she enjoyed what they were doing; that she liked the way they touched her … wanted her, when in fact what she really felt inside was very afraid and very alone. She would never admit that to anyone, though. Not to anyone.
At eighteen Lucy left school and then drifted casually from job to job. Jobs were plentiful in London and Lucy was too busy enjoying herself to think about things as dull and boring as the future.
She was no longer living with her great-aunt. Now she shared a flat with three other girls; and not always the same three other girls. Life was casual, careless; Lucy was popular and sought-after. By the time she was twenty-one she had been engaged three times and had turned down several other proposals.
But deep down inside, despite her popularity, Lucy was afraid … afraid that somehow she was not worthy of being loved, afraid that when men said they loved her they did not mean it. Her father had said he loved her but it had not been true. He had left her. And so had her mother.
Lucy was determined that if there was any more leaving to be done she would be the one to do it, and she did.
She had turned from a pretty girl into a stunningly beautiful and sensual young woman. Men were fascinated by her. She was more cautious now, though, more wary; less inclined to give anything of herself. She had learned that men valued best that which was the hardest to obtain. Lucy took care to make sure that she was very hard to obtain. Impossibly hard, in most cases.
And then she met Giles.
She was working for an upmarket London PR firm. Giles worked for a recruitment agency which was headhunting for a new advertising director for the company.
He came in one afternoon to see Lucy’s boss. And then he returned, the next day and the next, for the rest of the week in fact, until he finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.
He wasn’t Lucy’s type at all, too shy, too quiet, but he continued to besiege her until finally, out of a mixture of exasperation and amusement, she went out with him.
It was only after her fifth date with him that Lucy admitted to herself that, while he might not be her type, she was enjoying the way he treated her, the way he spoiled and pampered her. Not in the financial sense—Lucy wasn’t particularly impressed by money as money, although she had a love of rich things that made her sensually materialistic. No, it was the way Giles bathed her in his obvious love for her, the way he surrounded her with it, wrapped her in it; the way when they were out together he so patently never even thought of looking at anyone else.
Lucy was a beautiful young woman but her upbringing, her insecurities and the type of men she had dated before had taught her that, while she might be valued and wanted for her physical appearance, her escorts were constantly and sometimes not even very tactfully checking to make sure that she, their date, was the most attractive woman in the room; that the other men were aware who she was with, that they were envying them because she was with them.
With Giles there was none of that, and yet it was plain that he was totally bemused, totally head over heels in love with her. Lucy, starved all her life of such unquestioning love, responded to it.
The sharply clever manner she adopted with other men softened when she was with Giles. When they were together she started to shed the outer of her many layers of protective cynicism. When he kissed her and she felt his body tremble, instead of inwardly mocking him for his weakness she found that she wanted to cling to him and hold him.
She had assumed from his manner towards her that Giles would be a tentative, hesitant lover, but when he stumblingly invited her to spend a long weekend with him she discovered otherwise.
He did not, as others had, take her to an expensive, prestigious hotel where he could show her off during the day to the other envious male guests, and where at night he could make love to her in the anonymous surroundings of their hotel bedroom.
Instead Lucy discovered that he had rented what he hesitantly described as ‘a cottage’, though not some rough, ill-equipped and damp affair as she had dreaded. No, he had displayed far greater sensitivity than that, and what intrigued and tantalised her even more was that he had also displayed how keenly aware he was of what pleased her. Because the cottage was, in fact, a small country house, not very far from Bath, since, as he told her hesitantly when they arrived, he had thought she might like to visit Bath while they were staying in the area.
‘I believe there are some very good shops,’ he told her, clearing his throat a little uncertainly and looking hesitantly at her in the half-light of the evening.
Shops! Lucy smiled to herself. Giles was far more perceptive than she had realised. There was nothing she enjoyed more than shopping. She remembered for the first time with a faint touch of self-dislike the occasions in the past when she had subtly manoeuvred a previous unwilling escort into taking her shopping, and when she had normally also managed to inveigle him into buying her something.
Her machinations had never bothered her in the past, so why did she feel this unexpected dislike at the thought of cynically coaxing Giles into buying her something? She dismissed the thought, wondering if the ‘cottage’ would be as presentable inside as it was out.
It was set in its own large gardens, and, from what she could see of them in the dusk, they were softly pretty with flowers, climbing roses and clematis, a perfect complement for the softly washed pink-tinged front of the house.
She wasn’t disappointed.
Inside, the house smelled of polish and fresh flowers, which were everywhere, and in her favourite colours as well, she observed as she walked silently through the downstairs rooms and the hall, with its polished floor and rugs, its circular polished table with the huge display of delphiniums, and larkspurs in their lavender-blues and lilacs spiked with white.
The sitting-room was large and elegantly furnished, off-white settees with mounds of cushions, sofa tables with displays of flowers, this time in creams and soft pinks, huge overblown roses that looked as though they had come straight from some country garden.
She touched the petals of one of them. It was still slightly damp, as though it had actually just been picked.
A log fire, a real one, burned in the hearth, the faint smell of seasoned logs mingling with the scent of the roses.
Behind her she heard Giles saying roughly, ‘They reminded me of you, of the colour and texture of your skin, of the way you smell,’ and then he was holding her, burying his mouth in the nape of her neck and then the side of her throat, and she realised that he had actually chosen the flowers himself.
Something inside her, some hard, tight part of her which had never been breached, swelled and ached with the emotion she had locked away inside it. Astoundingly she felt her eyes prick with tears and her heart … her heart, not just her body, ache with feeling.
Giles was pressed up hard against her back. She could feel him trembling, knew how much he wanted her, and yet he still released her, apologising rawly, ‘I’m sorry. That was crass of me.’
Lucy looked at him. One of her flatmates had commented on how attractive he was, how solid and male-looking. She herself hadn’t really been aware of it before, but now suddenly she was.
Angry with herself and for some reason a little afraid, she reacted instinctively, adopting her normal manner of protective cynicism, shrugging as she flicked the petals of one of the roses with her polished fingertips and commenting, ‘Well, there certainly isn’t any need to rush, is there? I mean, we’ve got the whole long weekend. Four whole days.’
The look in Giles’s eyes stunned her.
‘A lifetime wouldn’t be enough for me, Lucy,’ he told her hoarsely.
After that, to be allowed to go upstairs on her own while he unpacked the car threw her a little.
The house had five bedrooms, two with their own bathrooms. She chose the smaller of these, oddly drawn by its softly pretty country décor. The ceiling sloped down to a pair of dormer windows, and it had been papered with a pretty cottagey paper. The bed was high and old-fashioned, with proper bedding instead of a duvet. The floor was carpeted in such a pale peach carpet that it made the whole room seem full of warmth and light.
The bathroom off the bedroom was simple and functional. The sanitary-ware was white and old-fashioned, the bath huge with enormous brass taps. As a concession to modern-day living, a wall of neat cupboards had been installed with, Lucy was pleased to see, mirrors set above them and decent lighting. The floor was polished and sealed, a proper door on the shower instead of the plastic curtain they had in the flat.
She heard Giles coming upstairs and opened the bedroom door.
‘I haven’t booked dinner anywhere for us this evening,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d feel like doing.’
It was obvious what he felt like doing, Lucy reflected to herself. She was torn between irritation and a sudden and sharply unexpected frisson of tension, of nervousness almost. Her, nervous … and of Giles? Impossible.
‘Well, what I feel like doing right now is having a shower,’ she told him coolly. ‘And what I shan’t feel like doing afterwards is …’ She hesitated deliberately, watching him, waiting for him to become either angry or hectoring, but instead he simply looked steadily back at her. ‘I’m hungry,’ she told him pettishly, suddenly unsure of herself, and afraid because of it. ‘And I certainly don’t intend to play the little woman and start cooking.’
She reached out, took her case from him, and then retreated, closing the bedroom door on him. She waited for several minutes, wondering what he would do, and then she heard him going back downstairs.
As she stripped off her clothes and showered she wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or disappointed that he had taken her dismissal so calmly. Most of the men she knew would have been demanding their pound of flesh by now and no mistake.
She eyed herself in the mirrors as she stepped out of the shower. She had a good body; her breasts were perhaps a little fuller than fashion dictated, but her waist was enviably narrow, her legs long and slender, her bone-structure that of an expensive, fragile racehorse. Her skin gleamed with health and with the scented moisturiser she was fanatical about using. She had the beginnings of a soft peachy tan.
There was a hectic flush along her cheekbones and her eyes looked huge, as though she had been on drugs, she recognised tensely. She dried her hair and then took her time dressing and reapplying her make-up.
There was no sign of Giles. The house was so quiet that she even wondered if he had perhaps gone and left her, but when she went to the window and looked out she could just about make out the outline of the car in the darkness.
She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She had been through this often enough before to know what it was all about, she reminded herself as she walked downstairs.
So why was she feeling so nervous … so on edge?
She had almost reached the bottom step when the kitchen door opened and Giles appeared. He had changed too, and his hair was damp as though he had showered. He must, she realised on a small spurt of shock, have used one of the other rooms.
‘Supper’s ready,’ he told her.
Supper was ready. Lucy stared at him. What had he done? Certainly he could not have sent out for a takeaway, not here.
‘I thought we’d eat in the sitting-room,’ he added a little uncertainly.
Lucy nodded, for once lost for words.
An hour later, greedily eating the last of her chocolate mousse, she admitted to herself that she was impressed.
The food, which, Giles had told her shyly, he had brought with him in a hamper from London, had been wildly delicious and, she suspected, wildly expensive. There had been champagne, pink champagne, which she knew others looked down on, but which she loved.
They had started the meal with tiny wild strawberries, and then there had been delicious cold salmon served with delicately flavoured salads, a sorbet laced with something alcoholic, and then proper, darkly bitter chocolate mousse, and she had greedily eaten both hers and Giles’s.
It had been food chosen not for a man but for a woman, and again she was confused by Giles’s sensitivity in so accurately gauging her tastes.
Now, curled up on the settee while Giles removed the remains of their meal, she felt relaxed and replete. She felt, she recognised on a sudden startled stab of awareness, happy.
The scented candles Giles had lit while they ate still burned, filled the room with their fragrance, warm and musky. She breathed it in sensuously.
She was wearing a simple shift dress, simple in design, that was. It had been perilously expensive, so soft and fragile that all she was able to wear underneath it was a tiny pair of briefs.
Now as she moved into a more comfortable position on the settee she was aware of the sudden sharp peaking of her nipples, and the slow unfolding ache of desire inside her.
When Giles came back she smiled languorously at him, her eyes narrowed and mysterious. He came across to her, leaning over her. His hand cupped her face. It felt good against her skin, cool and firm. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, tentatively, hesitantly almost. She let her lips part, rubbing the tip of his thumb with her tongue, her eyes closing sensuously, but there was nothing calculated or deliberate about the gesture, she was genuinely aroused, and as she arched up towards Giles she heard him mutter thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lucy …’
He had never kissed her so fiercely before, so hungrily. She heard him telling her unsteadily that she tasted of chocolate, but then she teased him with her tongue and he stopped saying anything.
She had never, she realised breathlessly later, wanted to make love so much with any man. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to be rid of her clothes and for Giles to be rid of his. She could feel how aroused he was and that knowledge excited her.
She tugged impatiently at the buttons on his shirt, spreading her hands flat against his chest, licking and nuzzling his bare throat and then his chest, laughing softly as she heard him groan and felt the sweat springing up on his skin.
He fumbled with the zip on her dress the first time he tried to unfasten it, but instead of irritating her his hesitancy only seemed to sharpen the excitement coiling inside her. When he finally unfastened it and the dress slid to a silky heap at her feet, leaving her body virtually naked, gilded by the light of the candles, its sheen enhanced by the soft cream backdrop of the settee, the dark arousal of her nipples as perfect as the deepest of the velvet-petalled roses, Giles didn’t touch her. He simply looked at her.
Men had looked at Lucy before, but none of them had ever looked at her like this, as though they were beholding a miracle, a vision; none of them had ever looked at her with heaven in his eyes.
