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‘It’s rather small, I’m afraid,’ he apologised. ‘But we’ve put some of the boys in the larger rooms, sharing.’
Small? Kelly gulped. It was palatial! She had spent the last fifteen years sharing a shoe-box of a room with a sister whose idea of tidying up was to chuck all the mess into an already overflowing cupboard! ‘It’s lovely,’ she told him, wandering over to the window. ‘And oh—’ her gaze was suddenly arrested by the tantalising glitter of sunlight on water in the distance ‘—is that a lake I can see?’
‘Mmm.’ He came to stand beside her. ‘We have black swans nesting there. Very rare and very beautiful. I’ll show you later if you like.’
‘I’d like that very much.’
He smiled.
She was suddenly very conscious of just how tall he was, how broad his shoulders; aware too of the powerful thrust of his thighs, similarly clad in denim more faded than her own jeans. She wasn’t used to being alone in bedrooms with strange men, she thought, her heart beating hard, but he seemed unconcerned by his surroundings. But then, why should he not be? He was a medical student, and about twenty-four, she guessed. He would not look twice at a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl.
All the same, she felt that it was probably wise to establish a more formal footing.
‘Which medical school are you at?’ she enquired politely.
‘St Jude’s. I’m in my final year. How about you?’
‘Another year of A-levels, then I’m hoping to get a place at St Christopher’s.’
He frowned. ‘So you’re—how old?’
‘Seventeen— just!’ she smiled, disconcerted to see an expression of disquiet pass over his features. ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
He shook his head. ‘I somehow thought that you were older than that. Most of the students here are just about to go up to medical school. Some are even in their first year. You must be very good to be here.’ The grey eyes were questioning.
Kelly smiled, not falling into the trap of false modesty, knowing her own worth and ability as a student. ‘You’ll have to be the judge of that,’ she answered coolly.
Their eyes met, his giving a brief but unmistakably appreciative flash, and she found that she could not look away, that his face seemed to be at the centre of her whole universe right at that moment. She became aware of other things too, things that up until now she had only read about in biology textbooks: the sudden drying of her mouth and the hammering of her heart. The tightening of her breasts, as though they had become heavy and engorged with blood. And the sudden rucking of her nipples—exquisite and painful and highly disturbing.
Kelly wasn’t stupid. She had grown up in a neighbourhood where girls experimented sexually with boys from as early an age as fourteen, and up until now she had always been disapproving and highly critical of such behaviour. Now, for the first time in her life, she acknowledged the dangerous and potent power of sexual attraction.
She turned away, wondering if he had seen the betraying signs of that attraction in her body. ‘I’d better unpack,’ she said awkwardly. ‘Thanks for showing me to my room ...’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
He paused for a moment before answering. ‘It’s Randall,’ he told her. ‘And yours?’
‘Kelly. Kelly Hartley.’
‘Because your eyes are Kelly-green?’ he hazarded.
She shook her head and laughed. ‘My mother says I was named after Grace Kelly, but my father disagrees. He says it was Ned Kelly—the bandit!’
He laughed too, then stayed her with a light touch of his hand on her forearm as she moved towards the tatty suitcase which looked ridiculously out of place amidst the restrained elegance of the room. ‘Don’t unpack now—there’ll be plenty of time for that later. It’s such a glorious day. Why don’t you let me show you something of the countryside? We could have lunch somewhere. That’s if you’d like to?’
She would like to very much, although the sensible, studious Kelly could think of all kinds of reasons why she shouldn’t go gallivanting off to lunch with someone she had barely met. But something in the soft silver-grey of his eyes was proving to be impossibly enticing. He was not the first man to have asked her out, but he was the first one she had ever said yes to.
She grinned. ‘I’d love to. Do I need to change?’
He shook his head. ‘You look fantastic. Do you have a ribbon or something?’
Kelly nodded. ‘Why?’
‘Bring it, you’ll need it.’
The reason why was a small, gleaming scarlet sports car which was garaged in an area he called the ‘old stables’. Kelly’s eyes widened. Brought up with frugality as her middle name, she said the first thing which came into her head.
‘How on earth can you afford a car like this as a student?’
He seemed surprised by her frankness. ‘It was a twenty-first birthday present,’ he told her as he opened the car door for her. ‘From my parents.’
‘Generous parents,’ commented Kelly wryly, as she climbed into the car.
He moved into the seat next to her, and turned the ignition key. ‘Oh, they’re certainly generous,’ he said, in a voice which sounded strangely bitter. ‘That’s to say, they find it very easy to buy things.’
She stole a glance at him. ‘What’s wrong with them buying things?’
The silver-grey eyes were direct; disburbing. He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t make up for them never having been there, I suppose.’
‘Doesn’t it? I have exactly the opposite problem with my parents,’ answered Kelly, giving a rueful little smile, wondering if anyone was ever contented with their lot.
‘Then I guess we’ll just have to comfort one another, won’t we?’ he said, his voice soft, mocking, having the power to increase her pulse-rate just with its deep, velvety caress.
Suddenly shy, Kelly quickly gathered her thick red hair up in the black velvet ribbon, afraid he might notice that she was blushing like crazy.
He turned on the ignition, and the little car roared off down the drive, spitting out pieces of gravel in its wake, and Kelly sat back in the seat to enjoy the drive.
It was one of those afternoons which stayed in the memory forever—the most perfect afternoon of Kelly’s life. He drove her to a country pub for lunch where they ate crusty bread and great slabs of farmhouse cheese, washed down with local beer. After that, they walked. And talked. They didn’t seem to stop talking. She told him all about the tiny terraced house she had grown up in, about the shared bedroom and the thin walls where the neighbours’ arguments were broadcast so loudly that they might have been in the same room. She told him of her burning ambition to be a surgeon, and his eyes had narrowed.
‘It’s tough enough, anyway,’ he observed. ‘Even tougher for a woman.’
‘I know,’ she said passionately. ‘And I don’t care! I’m going to defeat all the odds, you wait and see!’
He had smiled then, his eyes soft. ‘I can’t wait,’ he murmured.
She blushed again, realising that she had been monopolising the conversation; he was so incredibly easy to talk to. ‘Now tell me about you,’ she urged him.
‘What, everything?’ he teased.
‘Absolutely everything!’
And Randall painted a picture of his own world, so very different from hers. Kelly’s heart turned over when he described being sent away to boarding school at the tender age of eight.
‘Cold showers and cross-country runs,’ he said, and shuddered theatrically.
‘Did you really hate it?’ she asked sympathetically.
‘I loathed it,’ he said with feeling, then grinned. ‘Don’t look so tragic, Kelly—it was a long time ago,’ and he took her hand in his. She didn’t object; her head was spinning, as though he had intoxicated her just with his presence.
The afternoon flew by and it was almost six when they arrived back at the house. There were several cars parked in front of the house, and a woman, small and matronly, stood on the steps, talking to a group of people, most slightly older than Kelly, and whom she assumed were other medical students.
When the little sports car came to a halt, the woman came hurrying over to them, barely looking at Kelly, her face reproving. ‘There you are, my lord!’ she exclaimed. ‘Everyone’s been looking for you. Five medical students and no one knows where to put them.’
Kelly stiffened. Lord!
‘Calm down, Mary,’ he drawled in a voice born to giving orders, and Kelly watched while the older woman softened under the sheer potency of all that charm. ‘I’ll sort it out. Mary—I’d like you to meet Kelly Hartley. Kelly—this is Mary. She lives here and provides food to die for.’
But Kelly knew instantly from his proprietorial tone that Mary ‘lived’ here purely in the capacity of staff. She felt somehow betrayed. They had shared intimacies, swopped secrets—and yet he had left out something as fundamental as the fact that he was a member of the flaming aristocracy! Her cheeks were hot with anger, but she managed to keep her voice relatively calm. ‘Thank you very much for lunch,’ she said crisply. ‘I’ll leave you to it—you’re obviously terribly busy.’
‘Kelly—’ he began, but Kelly had jumped out of the car and run past the staring group and upstairs to her room before he could say anything more, or stop her.
And when the peremptory knock came on her door about half an hour later, she was not surprised, though she was tempted not to answer it.
She pulled the door open to find Randall leaning with languid grace against the door-frame, his grey eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you angry?’ he asked calmly.
‘Why do you think?’
‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me that you were a lord?’ she demanded.
‘Oh, that,’ he said casually.
‘Yes, that!’ she retorted. ‘I suppose that you actually own this house too?’
He shrugged. ‘Guilty as charged. Although on a technical point, I won’t actually own it until my father dies.’
‘Damn you and your technical point!’ she fired back. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He came inside, closed the door firmly behind him and took her by the shoulders. ‘Because I didn’t want you to know. Not then.’
Kelly’s eyes widened. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Because people can be intimidated by the title, and I suspected that you might be one of them.’
She took a step back. ‘Why, of all the most patronising—’
‘And because sometimes the baggage which comes with all that stuff,’ he interrupted coolly, ‘just gets in the way of what really matters ... you know?’
She shook her head, angry and confused. ‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do,’ he said softly, and bent his head to kiss her. ‘Of course you do.’
After that Kelly spent every moment she could with him, and for the first time in her life found it difficult to concentrate on her studies. He had put her in his tutorial group, and she really had to make an effort not to run her gaze dreamily over every glorious inch of his body, and to listen instead to his lectures, which she wasn’t at all surprised to discover were absolutely brilliant.
Randall was the undisputed star of the course, and it was pretty obvious that every girl fancied him like mad, but he seemed to have eyes only for Kelly. At the end of each day’s session he would take her off somewhere in his little sports car and they would walk for miles, arriving back only just in time for dinner.
‘Should you be leaving them alone like this?’ Kelly asked him, as the little sports car came to a halt and she tried to drag the brush through her tangled hair.
He smiled. ‘Relax. There’s plenty for them to do—I’m not playing nanny to them. Now come here and kiss me before we go inside.’
Kelly was quite certain that she was in love with him. But it was more than just the completely overwhelming physical attraction she had been aware of from the very beginning, because he gave her a great sense of her own worth for her intellect, as well as a woman.
Thoughts of him disturbed her nights, and she tossed restlessly as she relived how his amazing grey eyes would darken with passion every time he took her into his arms. She suspected that she would willingly have gone to bed with him, except that he behaved with a restraint which she found admirable, given that even with her total inexperience she recognised just how much he wanted her.
And then came that last evening.
First there was dinner, cooked as usual by Mary, and then someone had laughingly suggested charades. So they all filed into the room which was known as the red library, but after a time Randall took her by the hand and led her quietly from the room. She didn’t know whether anyone noticed that they had left, and, aware that she was leaving the following day, she no longer cared. Silently she went up the staircase with him, her heart beating like a wild thing when he led her straight to her bedroom and closed the door quietly behind them.
He stared at her for a long, long moment. ‘I’m going to miss you, Kelly,’ he said softly. ‘Very, very much.’
She could have drowned in the intensity of that silver-grey stare. ‘Are you?’ she whispered.
‘More than you could ever imagine.’ He took her into his arms, his face dark and unreadable, the light from the moon emphasising the aristocratic cheekbones, the sculptured perfection of his mouth. He bent his face so that it was very close to hers. ‘And I want to see you again—you know that, don’t you?’
Kelly nodded silently, shaken by the fervour in his voice, which matched some spark deep in her soul. She wound her arms around his neck, and her body seemed to melt into the hard sinews of his, her unspoken surrender apparent in the kiss she returned so sweetly.
He gave a low moan as he ran his hands through the thick, silken texture of her hair, then let them fall to her waist, to gather her in even closer, so that they were moulded together and she never wanted to let him go. Never, never, never.
Her breasts tingled as he stroked them over the cotton of the simple white dress she wore, and she gave a little sigh, her eyes closing as she felt the warm river of desire flood her veins with sweet potency.
Still kissing her, he slid the zip of her dress down and she let her arms drop to her sides so that it glided down over her hips and pooled on the ground around her feet. He raised his head then, his eyes narrowed as they studied her. Her breasts were so small that she wore no bra, and she was clad only in the smallest pair of bikini briefs, her body silvered by the pale light of the moon, the thick waves of her hair tumbling down over her small, high breasts. Suffused with love and longing for him, Kelly felt exultant as she saw the expression on his face as his gaze slowly covered every inch of her, filled with an elemental and very feminine fire as she revelled in the power of her body, that she could inspire that look of ardour on his face.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he told her. His voice sounded unsteady, almost slurred with desire, as he started to unbutton his shirt, letting it fall to the ground as carelessly as her dress had done.
‘So are you,’ she whispered, and she heard him give a low laugh as his hand moved to the belt of his trousers.
Kelly felt shy at her first sight of his arousal, almost dazed and daunted by her ability to do that to him, but her shyness evaporated as he slid her tiny bikini pants down over her thighs, then, naked, pulled her down on to the bed with him and began to kiss her over and over again.
It felt so good. It felt so right. She was drowning in delight, each touch and each kiss making the pleasure escalate until she could hardly bear it any more, almost going out of her mind when his hand moved over the flatness of her belly, to teasingly stroke tiny provocative circles there. She began to move restlessly, and he gave another low laugh as his hand slid down between her thighs to tantalise her even further so that she made an instinctive little pleading sound at the back of her throat.
‘Do you want me?’ he whispered huskily.
‘Oh, yes,’ she shuddered ecstatically as he stroked her skilfully.
‘Really want me?’
‘Yes!’ Oh, God, yes—more than she had ever wanted anything in her entire life.
He moved to lie on top of her. She was ready for him, gloriously and deliriously ready for him; ripe and hot and moist. She pressed her lips to his shoulders, eager for him to fill her, thrilling as he gently parted her legs, when a stark and elemental fear pierced through the mists of her desire with frightening clarity, as the dreaded phrase of her childhood came back to mock at her.
‘That girl’s in trouble.’
In trouble ...
Kelly remembered Jo Grant at school, only fifteen, but now prematurely aged as she pushed the pram up the hill every morning.
‘Randall,’ she whispered urgently.
He lifted his head from her breast, his voice thick with passion. ‘What?’
