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She spread her arms extravagantly and then concentrated her attention on the vehicle. ‘This is new, isn’t it?’ she commented admiringly. ‘What is it? An Aston Martin?’
‘No. A Jensen,’ stated Robert flatly, stowing her cases in the boot. ‘Get in. It’s not locked.’
Shrugging, Sophie opened the long door and climbed into the low passenger seat with its curved back and headrest. The instrument panel fascinated her and she was examining the various controls when Robert opened his door and levered his length in beside her. Immediately all else lost significance and she wondered what he would do if she attempted to kiss him again. It was a tantalising proposition and she turned sideways in her seat to look at him.
‘You’d better fasten the safety strap,’ he observed curtly, apparently unmoved by her scrutiny, and with an exclamation she swung round and did as she was told. She quelled the urge to make some insolent retort and looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, she said:
‘This is a super car, isn’t it? I wish I could drive.’
‘I expect your father will arrange for you to take lessons now that you’ve finished school,’ he remarked coolly, inserting the ignition key and starting the powerful engine. He opened his window and looked out, reversing expertly out of the parking space. ‘Congratulations, by the way. I hear you did well in your finals.’
Sophie pressed her lips together. ‘Thanks!’
The sarcasm in her tone must have got through to him, because he frowned and said: ‘Now what’s the matter? I wasn’t being patronising. I think you’ve got a good chance of making Oxford, don’t you?’
Sophie sniffed. ‘I don’t want to talk about school and examinations! I’ve just left all that behind!’ She moved restlessly and then turned to look at him appealingly. ‘How are you, Robert? How long have you been home? And how long are you staying this time?’
Robert concentrated on negotiating the busy late afternoon traffic, but when they reached a quieter thoroughfare, he replied: ‘I’m well. And actually, I’ve been in England a couple of months. I’m working in North Wales at the moment. We’re swinging a rail link out across the Sound to the Isle of Cymtraeth.’
‘You are?’ Sophie’s eyes were wide. ‘That’s marvellous! You must get home practically every weekend.’
Robert’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘Not every weekend, Sophie,’ he amended dryly. ‘I do have other calls on my time.’
Sophie wriggled into a more comfortable position, watching him surreptitiously. He was so cool and aloof. She couldn’t get near to him, mentally at least, and her physical attempt hadn’t met with much success either.
‘How is everyone?’ she asked, determinedly trying to ignore his detachment. ‘Are Daddy and Mummy okay? And Simon?’ She forced a smile. ‘I had a letter from Simon only last week.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Why did you never write to me, Robert? I thought you would.’
Robert ignored her last question and said: ‘The parents are fine, and Simon seems quite content to remain at Conwynneth school for the rest of his life.’
‘Why not? He’s happy there,’ commented Sophie thoughtfully. ‘He’s not restless. Not like you!’
Robert swung past a lumbering wagon. ‘Is that what I am?’
‘Among other things,’ she retorted sourly. ‘Well, aren’t you? You weren’t content to stay in Hereford, were you? I’m sure Simmonds didn’t want to lose you.’
Robert shrugged. ‘I was offered a better job with more money and the chance to see something of the world before I was too old to enjoy it. I don’t see anything particularly restless in that. No doubt you’ll feel the same.’
‘I shan’t!’
‘How do you know?’
Sophie stared through the car windows. They were leaving the outskirts of the town behind, climbing into the hills. In spite of the darkening skies the countryside opening up before them was green and beautiful, splashed here and there with the dark clutches of forest which had provided cover for fugitives since the days of the Conqueror. The Welsh Marches! Sophie savoured the words. She might have been born in London, but this was her home, her heritage.
‘I’m not the—adventurous type,’ she answered him at last. ‘I’m basically a home-lover.’ She examined her fingernails. ‘Of course, if I were to get married, and—and my husband’s work took him overseas …’
There was a pregnant pause, and then Robert said abruptly: ‘As a matter of fact, Sophie——’
But he got no further. An ominous rumble of thunder echoed and re-echoed round the hills and he was instantly aware of her stiffening and of the shudder which ran through her.
‘You’re nervous of storms, aren’t you?’ he asked quietly. ‘Don’t be alarmed. You’re perfectly safe in the car.’
‘I know it. I’m sorry.’ Sophie tried to act naturally even though storms had always terrified her. ‘Please go on. What were you going to say?’
Robert glanced sideways at her and there was a curious expression twisting his lips. Then he shook his head and said something entirely unexpected: ‘Who were those soldiers at the station?’
Sophie gasped. ‘No one I knew. I had to stand all the way from Paddington. They shared the same cubbyhole, that’s all.’ A smile came through. ‘They insisted on carrying my cases. I can’t imagine why. Can you?’
Robert’s expression softened slightly. ‘Stop fishing,’ he ordered dryly. Then, as a huge globule of rain splashed against the windscreen: ‘Well, like it or not, here it comes!’
Within seconds they were engulfed in a torrential downpour that even the efficient wipers found difficult to cope with. Lightning streaked across the sky with a brilliance that artificially illuminated the brooding hills, and a deafening crash of thunder seemed almost completely overhead. Sophie’s palms were moist, clasped together in her lap, and she was trying desperately not to give in to the terror which filled her. But suddenly, Robert pulled the car off the road on to a grassy lay-by and releasing his safety belt switched off the engine.
‘It’s pointless going on in this,’ he explained in answer to the silent appeal in her eyes. ‘We’d have to crawl, and it won’t last long. It’s only a summer storm. You should be used to them by now.’
Sophie drew a deep breath. ‘I know. I’m a fool.’ She trembled as she pressed the release catch of her safety belt and turned sideways in her seat towards him, drawing her legs up under her. His profile was unyielding and yet she had to suppress an almost irresistible impulse to stroke her fingers down his cheek. ‘Well, at least it gives us time to talk,’ she said rather breathlessly. ‘You can tell me what you were going to say.’
‘Yes.’ Robert leant forward and picked up a pack of Benson and Hedges, putting a cigarette between his lips almost absently. He flicked his lighter, applied the flame to the tip of the cigarette and leaned back in his seat, inhaling deeply.
After a few moments he turned to look at her, his gaze travelling over her intently. Then he took his cigarette out of his mouth and studied the glowing shreds of tobacco with equal intensity. Another rumble of thunder sent the adrenalin rushing through Sophie’s veins. Robert’s attitude didn’t help. She was aware of the tautness in the atmosphere, and wondered that it was that was hardening his jawline. She looked down at her knees and saw that her twisting movements had loosened two buttons on her blouse which, like all her school clothes, was getting too small for her. With burning cheeks her fingers sped to fasten the offending buttons, but her hands trembled so much that they fumbled over the task. A rising sense of emotionalism brought the tears to the backs of her eyes. What was the matter with her? What was the matter with him? What had happened to that affinity between them?
With a curt exclamation, Robert had grown tired of watching her unsteady ineptitude, and putting his cigarette between his lips he pushed her fingers aside and tackled the buttons himself.
But before he had the time to fasten them it seemed that everything exploded around them. A shaft of lightning struck a tree only a few yards ahead, splitting its trunk without apparent effort. Overhead the thunder was an ear-rending volume of noise, and the violence of the torrent which fell in a great curtain obscuring all but their most immediate surroundings was drowned as the heavens resounded menacingly.
Sophie trembled uncontrollably and with an oath Robert pulled her towards him, putting his arms around her and pressing her close to his hard warm body.
‘Calm down,’ he exlaimed, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and pressing it out in the ashtray. ‘Everything’s going to be all right. Believe me!’
‘I’m sorry, Robert,’ she whispered huskily, her cheek against the rough texture of his shirt. ‘But I hate storms. I’m not pretending. Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry,’ he retorted in exasperated tones, drawing back to look down at her. ‘Here, let me fasten those damn buttons.’
She looked up at him as his fingers busied themselves near her midriff and almost against his will her eyes encountered his. He stared down at her for a long disturbing moment and then she covered his hands with hers, stilling their activity, holding them closely against her.
‘Sophie!’ he protested thickly, trying to pull away, but she held his gaze and reaching up, put her mouth to his. For several agonising moments he resisted, and then his fingers slid beneath her blouse, closing on the firm flesh, propelling her against him with almost desperate urgency. He was trembling now, she could feel it, and his mouth moved on hers, parting her lips, seeking to penetrate the moist sweetness within. Sophie was oblivious to the storm. Her arms were around his neck, touching the smooth skin of his shoulders beneath his shirt, tangling themselves in the thick darkness of the hair on his nape. This was what she had dreamed about—this was where she had longed to be all those months when she had been working at her studies, taking exams, pretending to enjoy the social round of school life. There had been boys there—it was a mixed school. But Sophie’s relationships with boys had remained purely platonic and none of them had aroused the slightest interest in her. Yet she only had to see Robert, to touch him, to feel an aching, melting weakness inside her …
At last he pushed her away from him, breathing heavily, reaching for his cigarettes and lighting one with none of the precision he had exhibited earlier. He inhaled deeply and then, resting his head back, he said: ‘Oh, God!’ in self-derisory tones.
Sophie ran a hand up to her throat and pulled off the tie which seemed so incongruous after what had just occurred. She folded it and thrust it into the pocket of her blazer. Then she fastened her blouse and tucked it back into her skirt before looking at him again.
‘Robert——’ she began, but he shook his head.
‘Don’t say anything,’ he commanded, drawing on the cigarette again. ‘Don’t say anything. Just give me a minute to think straight.’ He exhaled unsteadily. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have allowed your father to persuade me to come and meet you.’
‘To—persuade—you?’ Sophie stared at him. ‘Did you need much—persuasion?’
She sounded hurt and he shook his head impatiently now. ‘No—no, I suppose not. God, Sophie—you’re my sister——’
‘Stepsister,’ she corrected him tautly.
‘All right, all right, my stepsister.’ Robert raked a hand through his hair, staring out at the unceasing curtain of rain. ‘Even so, you know this is—ridiculous!’
‘Ridiculous?’ Sophie felt unsure of her ground. For a few moments she had been confident that everything was going to be all right, but now … ‘Why is it ridiculous?’
‘Don’t be naïve, Sophie!’ He drew savagely on his cigarette. ‘Look, let’s get this into perspective, shall we? You—that is, the last time we—were together was that Christmas a couple of years ago when I’d had—too much to drink——’
‘That’s not true!’
‘It is true, Sophie. What other reason could there be for—for what happened?’
‘And just now?’
‘Yes. Just now.’ He ran the back of his hand across his damp forehead. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come. I knew—or at least, I guessed what kind of an emotional scene you’d have built up of that incident between us.’
‘Incident?’
‘Yes, incident, Sophie. For heaven’s sake, what do you expect me to call it? You can have no notion of my feelings after—after touching you. I was sick—really sick to my stomach, do you know that? There was I, a supposedly mature and sensible man of twenty-eight, kissing a kid of sixteen——’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she denied, a little desperately.
‘Yes, it was. Just like that.’ He raised his eyes heavenward. ‘I despised myself utterly.’
‘Do you despise yourself now?’
He turned his head to look at her. ‘What do you think?’
Sophie moved her shoulders helplessly, feeling the hot prick of tears behind her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to think.’
‘Don’t you?’ Robert seemed to be enjoying taunting her. ‘My God, Sophie, do you know what you just did?’ He uttered a mirthless laugh. ‘You’re a beautiful girl. That’s no excuse, I know, but it does help.’
‘Does it?’
‘Oh, stop it,’ he muttered, straightening to squash out his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘You know what you did as well as I do. You’re fully aware why those two Army kids offered to carry your cases. I never realised before what a menace you might be.’
‘Stop trying to hurt me.’
‘Why should I? You don’t seem to care who you hurt, do you? Oh, lord, Sophie, stop looking so tragic!’ He was gradually recovering his sense of humour. ‘All right, I apologise for what happened. I guess it was my fault.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘All right, if you don’t want an apology I won’t make one. I’m sorry. I was forgetting what a permissive society we live in!’
Her fingers stung across his cheek and she sat in horror staring at the marks of her fingers appearing against the tanned flesh. She caught her breath. ‘Oh, Robert,’ she exclaimed, starting to cry. ‘I’m sorry …’
Robert took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. ‘It’s all right, Sophie,’ he said steadily. ‘Look, I think we’d better start all over again, hmm?’ He paused. ‘You’ve got rid of all that pent-up emotionalism and I’ve given myself a—well, we won’t go into that. Perhaps your father was right. Perhaps it was as well to come and meet you after all. Get all this foolishness out of your system right at the beginning——’
‘My father?’ Sophie dried her eyes with the sleeve of her blazer. ‘What does my father know about this? What do you mean?’
Robert sighed. ‘Naturally I told him what had happened.’
‘You—didn’t!’
‘Why not? Good God, Sophie, how many more times do I have to tell you? I was sick of myself. I had to give some reason for not coming back to Penn Warren while you were there.’
‘But—but—there was that job in the Far East …’
‘There was no job. At least, not for a couple of months anyway. Sophie, I had to tell him. I was ashamed …’
‘Ashamed?’ Sophie moved her head from side to side. This couldn’t be happening—not after—not after the way he had kissed her … ‘Oh,. Robert, I’ll never forgive you!’
‘I’m not asking for your forgiveness! Hell, I’m just trying to show you the way things really are. I don’t want you to go on imagining that what happened that Christmas—well, that it was anything more than a fleeting impulse——’
‘It was!’ she cried.
Robert shook his head resignedly. ‘No, Sophie.’ He sighed. ‘I thought you were more mature. I was your first—experience, but you certainly weren’t mine! And that’s all it was, Sophie—an experience.’
‘Not for me,’ she declared chokingly. ‘Oh, I don’t know how you can say such things after—after what just happened.’
‘Oh, God, Sophie! I’m only human. You invited what just happened, you know you did. I’m not proud of it, but how was I to know——’ He broke off and made an impatient gesture. ‘I wanted to comfort you, Sophie—because of the storm. I’ve comforted you before—remember? As I recall it, you once came to my bed in the middle of the night because of a storm. You were about eight years old at the time. You were petrified. I let you stay with me, I put my arms about you—just as I did just now. What happened afterwards was not of my instigation.’
‘You’re hateful!’ she exclaimed in a muffled voice, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms round her drawn-up legs. ‘I—I never thought you could be so—so cruel, Robert.’
Robert raked his hair back again with a vehemence that spoke of his frustration. He glared out at the storm and made a sound of relief that at last the rain was easing and watery rays of sun were casting spears of rainbow colour across the lake that lay below them in the valley. He leant forward and turned the ignition, breathing a sigh of satisfaction as the powerful engine leapt to instant life. Glancing through the rearview mirror, he drove off the grassy verge and on to the rain-soaked road, controlling the skidding of tyres caked with mud.
‘You’d better tidy yourself,’ he commented briefly, as they began the descent into the valley. Conwynneth lay in a fold of the hills and already it was possible to see the grey roofs of the cottages that edged the village green. ‘Or do you want to have to explain what’s been happening?’
Sophie pushed her feet to the floor and fumbled in her pocket for her tie. As she slotted it under the collar of her blouse and fastened it carelessly, her lips were pressed tightly together. She guessed that Robert saw her expression as mutinous. He was not to know that had she not pressed her lips together they would have trembled violently. She felt sick and shaken, and totally unprepared for the confrontation with the family which was to come. All her hopes and fantasies about Robert had been shattered during the last half hour and the last thing she wanted was to have to make any unnecessary explanations. What she really wanted to do was to crawl away somewhere and hide until her wounds had healed a little.
CHAPTER TWO (#u1b133f23-1451-5722-8cc4-30bd9e8f91a9)
PENN WARREN was a rambling old house which stood on the outskirts of the village. The Kembles had modernised it to the extent of adding decent plumbing and an efficient central heating system, but much of its atmosphere remained in the oak panelling and wide stone fireplaces. As the boys grew up they constantly seemed to be giving themselves crippling blows on low beams, and yet, for all that, none of them would have had it any different.
To Sophie, it spelled the days of her childhood and adolescence. Long summer days swimming or fishing with the boys, playing cricket or tennis in the huge, partially overgrown garden of the house, autumn with its fires and roasted chestnuts, winter when the snow coated the trees outside and they had all sat round a glowing peat fire drinking mugs of mulled ale. She had always been happy there, and it was doubly hard for her to accept that that happiness had depended so completely on her love for Robert.
She awoke on the morning after her return from school with an unfamiliar feeling of depression causing a dull little ache behind her eyes. She lay for a few minutes wondering what had caused it, and then recollection of the events of the day before came back to her and she rolled on to her stomach, burying her face in the pillow. Oh, God, she thought desperately, what am I going to do?
It had been almost dinner time when she arrived the night before. To her relief, her father was out on a call, and only Laura and Simon had been there to greet her. She thought of Simon with affection. He had been so reassuringly normal—so delighted to see her—so good-natured and kind and sweet. He had made things much easier for her, and although at times she had caught him watching her with a rather anxious expression in his eyes, she didn’t think her stepmother had noticed anything amiss in her relationship with Robert. By the time her father came home after delivering Mrs. Jones’ fourth, the meal was over and Sophie’s initial nervousness controlled. Robert had gone out straight after dinner. He had made some excuse about promising to go over to the Hall to see John Meredith, the son of the largest local landowner, who had been at university with him, and no one had demurred. Indeed, if Sophie had not been so wrapped up in her own misery she might have noticed that both her stepmother and Simon relaxed more fully once Robert had left them. Instead, she made a great effort to talk gaily about her last few weeks at school, and she was almost sure she had convinced them that she had no greater problem on her mind than whether or not to apply for university entrance before Christmas.
Now she pushed herself up on her elbows and peered at the Noddy clock ticking away on her bedside table. The clock had been a seventh birthday present from the boys and in spite of its incongruity in her teenage bedroom she had never wanted to change it.
She blinked. It couldn’t be half past ten already, could it? Although as she had lain awake for hours listening for the sound of Robert’s car and even after his return had been unable to get to sleep for ages, it was possible that she had overslept. But why had no one awakened her? She hunched her shoulders. And why should she want them to anyway? It was better to be asleep and oblivious of what had happened.
However, she could not stay in bed all day. Besides, she owed it to her parents to pull herself together and act normally. After all, nothing had really changed, that was the amazing thing. Just because her illusions had been shattered did not alter the situation. So far as Robert was concerned, she was still the little sister he had always regarded her.
She forced her mind away from this train of thought. Right now it was almost impossible to accept that never, at any time, had he regarded her in any other light. She would have to accept it, of course, but for the present her most sensible course of action would be to try and behave to him as she had always done. Their relationship had been such a deep and satisfying thing. Surely that had not been destroyed too? Who knows, maybe at some future date he might become attracted to her …
With a determination she had not known she possessed, Sophie bathed and put on her underwear and was rummaging through her wardrobe for her jeans when there was a knock at the door.
‘Who is it?’ she called a little breathlessly, and then expelled her breath more steadily as her stepmother’s head appeared.
