Chapter Seven
James halted just inside Valerie’s room.
The setting sun was giving its last blast through her window. Valerie, her decency preserved by only one white sheet, looked hot, irritable and desperately uncomfortable. He went to the blinds and turned the slats.
A metal contraption skewered Valerie’s right hip and one leg was in traction. The tide of bruising that rose from beneath the strapping on her ribs to her shoulder was streaking jammy red. The crescents beneath her eyes were purple and her poor broken nose looked as if it been put in the oven and risen unevenly.
Her expression was baleful when she answered his greeting but then, in hospital, there were no bottles of red wine to ignite her flashing smile.
The room, however well-equipped and pretty, smelled stale. He opened a small window.
Valerie already had a visitor. Diane was perched on a royal blue chair studying Valerie, a tiny frown curling her brow, hair a pale stream down her back. One elbow rested on her knee and he spent several seconds appreciating the way that her square neckline framed what lay beneath. Resolutely, he averted his eyes, determined not to be caught looking — again — like a teenager. But it was lucky that there were no Thought Police around.
He fixed his gaze on Diane’s face so that he was smiling at the correct part of her when she turned to look at him. After a grave moment, as if perfectly able to read his thoughts, she let the corners of her lips curl up.
Valerie ran her fingers through her hair so that it stood up in crests. ‘You already know Gareth’s wife, I understand.’
James shucked off his jacket. ‘How are you, Diane? Tamzin turned up for her fitting, I hear?’
‘Why wouldn’t she?’ Valerie interrupted.
‘Because she regularly fails to carry out planned activities?’ suggested James.
Valerie made a face. ‘You blow normal teenage behaviour out of all proportion. She’s just a girl.’
James considered letting it go. But, on the other hand, the reluctance of both his wife and his daughter to face up to the realities of the condition of the other was constant grit in his eye. ‘It’s not teenage behaviour in Tamzin. She’s clinically depressed.’ He resisted the pleasurable pedantry of pointing out that Tamzin was twenty and not, therefore, a teenager.
Valerie dismissed him by turning to Diane. ‘So Gareth is improving?’
Diane nodded. ‘Still a mess, but less of a mess.’
‘They won’t let me see him.’ Valerie plucked at the sheet.
James felt his eyebrows lift. ‘Seems logistically difficult.’
‘We can always rely on you to state the obvious, darling!’
Diane rose. ‘I’ll tell Gareth that you’ve been showing sisterly concern, shall I? He’s been asking after you, too.’
Valerie blew out her breath in a frustrated sigh. Then she grinned and for a moment James caught a glimpse of the sexy, pretty woman he’d married, when every glimpse of her happy face had been a pleasure. ‘You’re nice. It was good of you to come and introduce yourself. I’ve often wondered about the mysterious sister-in-law. You’re not at all as I imagined.’
Diane moved towards the door, her long black skirt flipping around her calves in a series of handkerchiefs. ‘Well, as you see — quite ordinary.’ With a last smile she melted from the room.
James didn’t realise he was going to follow her until he found himself outside the door. ‘Can we talk?’ he suggested. ‘How about a drink — in an hour, say?’
She considered him, blue eyes curious. ‘OK. I can hang around.’
Back inside the room he found Valerie had laid down her prickles, now that he was the only company left to her. ‘My dear brother is playing silly buggers, James, isn’t he? That woman’s as normal as any of us.’
* * *
After a dutiful forty minutes with his wife, James found Diane waiting on a bench in the gardens, watching the dancing shadow of a rose bush, hair flipping in the breeze. Overblown roses had exploded in a lemon-and-pink confetti of petals around her feet, landing on the thin straps around her arching insteps. At least this time when she looked up, he was only staring at her feet. ‘You’re early.’
‘Valerie’s tired. I missed lunch and I’m starving. I hope you want to eat or don’t mind watching me. I’ve had no time for anything since breakfast. Work was a nightmare of end-to-end meetings.’
‘I could eat.’
He drove them to a large pub, one that was part of a national chain. He flipped off his seat belt in the car park but she remained motionless, her eyes running over the stitched leather car interior. ‘This is a nice car.’
He patted the steering wheel. ‘I love it. Expensive, but worth it.’
She turned to him with that long, assessing gaze. ‘I can see it’s pretty and shiny but I’m hopeless with cars. Is it a Mercedes?’ She indicated the circular badge in the centre of the steering wheel.
‘That’s right. Mercedes E 55 AMG. Double spoke alloys, sports exhaust—’
‘Is it fast?’
‘Nought to sixty in 4.7 seconds.’
She made a face like a question.
He grinned. ‘Fast, yes.’
Following a line of stitching along the dash with her fingertip, she glanced at his jacket. ‘You like leather, don’t you?’
Something funny happened to James’s voice. ‘Yes,’ he croaked. And couldn’t think of a single other thing to say.
Inside, the pub boasted pink-painted woodwork and exposed-brickwork walls. Framed sepia photos of bridges and barges and the River Nene hung between brass bugles, copper warming pans and corn dollies. Consulting the slightly sticky menu decorated with photographs of the food, James opted for the lamb steak and chips with onion rings and salad. Diane chose a beefsteak sandwich.
He ordered at the bar, returning with shandy for himself and pink grapefruit juice for her. ‘So,’ he began, taking the wheel-back chair opposite hers, ‘what made you introduce yourself to Valerie?’
She shrugged. He had to fight to keep his gaze away from that square neckline. ‘She’s my sister-in-law, apparently, lying injured just along the corridor from Gareth. I’m sure it would be rude to ignore her. And I’d have to be made of concrete not to be curious, especially if what you say about the accident is true. She could’ve made me a widow.’
‘And now you’ve met her?’
She sipped her drink. ‘Yes. Now I’ve met her.’
He frowned. ‘Now you’ve met her, what do you think?’
Another shrug.
He studied her narrowly. Nine out of ten women would exhibit huge curiosity about an instant sister-in-law. Valerie had certainly been agog about Diane and the screen of lies Gareth had erected between his wife and the family.
Her eyes flickered to his. ‘She and Gareth seem very fond of each other.’ The pale brows shifted very slightly. ‘To an . . . unusual degree.’
James laughed. ‘Whatever Valerie’s foibles, I’m certain an unhealthy affection for her half-brother isn’t among them.’
Her expression didn’t change. ‘But they enquire after each other like over-anxious lovers.’
The food arrived, plates in the hands and balanced casually on the forearms of a pretty, blonde girl who looked about nineteen.
James used his fingers to pop the first scalding chip into his mouth. ‘In my view,’ he said, when the swallowed chip lay like an ember in his gullet, ‘it’s about acceptance. I try and police her drinking, whereas Gareth actually enjoys her being her flawed self. Hence, he ended up aboard a helicopter she was piloting when she’d been on the pop.’
Diane was cutting her sandwich into tiny triangles. ‘I’ve no idea what it’s like to fly in a helicopter.’
‘It’s not much like being on a big airliner or even a small plane. The damned thing always feels as if it wants to crash, dancing about in thin air. Especially when it takes off, it’s as if you’re one of those plastic ducks at the funfair and some kid has just hooked you up in the air. It’s flying for show-offs, so Valerie loved it. Her favourite, the newest chopper that the flying club owned — that’s the one she crashed.’
‘Do you think she’ll go back to piloting helicopters, when she’s fit?’
‘If she can survive the Civil Aviation Authority enquiry into the crash and pass the medicals, I don’t doubt it. But the CAA is deadly serious about air safety and regulation. They make the rules and pilots follow them — you can see where the conflict’s going to lie between them and Valerie.’
‘How will it affect her if she can’t fly? Does she fly away on business, for instance?’ A tiny frown pulled at her brow.
He laughed. ‘Nothing so functional. Valerie flies for fun. She does meet friends at the Fenland Airport for lunch or whizzes us off to Silverstone for the Grand Prix, occasionally. But, generally, she flies because she likes flying.’
Diane sipped her drink. ‘I can see why Gareth’s fascinated by such a flamboyant display of wealth. With her he could be Gareth-with-money, whereas he had to remain Gareth-without-money with me in order to avoid the sharing of it.’
Tucking into his lamb, James cocked his head. ‘Why wouldn’t Gareth want to share his money with you?’
She abandoned the sandwich, stretched — interestingly, he thought — and sighed. ‘We’ve never had enough money. And my parents didn’t want me to marry him, a boy from a council estate.’ She laughed, but her eyes were angry as she balled her napkin and flipped it into the middle of the table. ‘They said he’d never be able to give me what I was used to — they were right. But I didn’t think it mattered.
‘As well as giving me a clothes account my parents had bought me a brand new Mini Cooper, green, with white rally stripes. I loved it. After I got married we sold it and bought a cheap Ford Escort van and did some decorating with what was left over. I think Gareth hated the car as a symbol of what he couldn’t provide.
‘“Don’t come running to us,” my parents used to say. “You’ve made your bed. If we helped you out financially we’d be playing into his hands.”’ She sipped her drink.
‘And they were right about us never having enough money, but it was almost as if Gareth manipulated things so that we wouldn’t. He always “had” to help his family. First his mum, then his brothers, forever leaving us just that bit short. I don’t know if he was punishing me for my parents’ snobbery or if he thought that if we were perennially broke my parents would relent and help us.’
‘He had to help his brothers? Even when they were grown men?’
‘Still does. He’s always sorted out everything for them with the result that they became adults who were bad with money, spending it the instant it landed in their hands. They award themselves a reasonable standard of living — Sky TV, cars, computers, things we don’t feel we can afford — but they’re always a payment or two short at the end of the month. That’s when they come to Gareth.’
He couldn’t suppress the question that was burning his lips. ‘And did Gareth see you as a conduit to your parents’ money?’
Her eyes were bleak. ‘I’ve spent so many years denying it —’ She sighed. ‘But, yes, of course. I think that was why his love seemed angry — which was exciting for a long time but eventually crumbled under pressure. He was waiting for my parents to break. But they never did. Gareth blamed me for having all that financial potential and never realising it.’
James turned back to his meal, using the serrated knife to slice the steak into small pieces but not eating much of it. It wasn’t very good. Veins of gristle ran end to end. Suddenly he wished he hadn’t brought Diane here, where the dining was cheerfully cheap; where there were no tablecloths and the cutlery came wrapped in thin, blue-chequered paper napkins. It was all right, but all right was only all right. He would never have dreamt of bringing Valerie here, or Tamzin, Natalia or Alice.
As a director of Furness Durwent he received a big beaming salary, bonuses, dividends and profit sharing. Investments added to his income. Valerie had a private income from the chain of department stores that had eventually swallowed up Myers . All three of his daughters were beneficiaries of grandparental trusts.
His family were used to plenty: plenty of money, clothes, a lovely house, new cars; they were used to being pleasantly and materially spoilt.
He wished that he could return Diane to that kind of comfort.
Certainly, he could’ve taken her to a nicer restaurant — her clothes were slightly crazy but always good. She would’ve enjoyed a decent restaurant and he would have enjoyed her enjoyment. And they would have lingered longer over a meal that wasn’t bashed out in the kitchen of a chain of pubs. It would have been good for both of them to lay down their respective burdens for a while.
‘And did you blame Gareth?’ he heard himself ask.
Thoughtfully, she shook her head. ‘No, I never did. For being an ordinary man? It’s hardly a crime, is it?’
‘You must’ve loved him, to marry him?’
She smiled suddenly and he wished he could capture it, like a photo, capture the light in her eyes and the lazy way she turned up the corners of her fine mouth.
‘Yes. I think I loved him. He was what Bryony would called “ so cool” with his scooter and Parka. He stopped to help me when I had a flat tyre at the side of the road, me gazing at the jack, mystified. By the time he’d changed the wheel, I was in love. Gareth was quite—’ She drew in a long breath. ‘He was quite different then. Assured, capable, friendly, sexy, good-looking. He only had to smile and I’d melt. Of course, I quickly realised he had issues. He was all attitude and grievances, very us and them . It took me a while to realise that I would never be anything else but them .’
James’s meal was only half-eaten but he was getting a bad taste in his mouth. He laid down his knife and fork. ‘Surely that’s not why he “forgot” to tell you about Harold and Valerie? And about the money?’
Her eyes managed a tiny twinkle. ‘I’m afraid that was good old-fashioned tit for tat. My parents left everything to my brother, Freddy, when they died. I refused to allow him to make half over to me.’
James tried, but failed, to conceive of a grudge so black and bitter that it continued past the grave. Of parents who’d let their child and grandchild live in straightened circumstances while they rested on their fat bank account, a husband who’d condemn his wife to unnecessary adversity out of spite. It went against his nature. At various times his family had given him to understand that he was managing, controlling, overprotective and/or an obsessive provider, but if any one of them were to be listening to Diane, they might even begin to feel grateful. He was always there for his own, even though it was a long time since Valerie had deserved it. ‘Has money . . . been a big problem?’
She laughed, but he saw that her eyes shimmered. ‘If you mean the lack of it, then desperately! And Bryony was ill so much that I was always rushing to the village shop for cough medicine and paracetamol stuff. The doctor used to put as much as he could on prescription for her but just getting to him — in Holbeach — was almost impossible, sometimes. Her asthma meant I couldn’t hold down a full-time job. Hence the sewing.’
After coffee — as if to make up for the almost uneaten sandwich, she drank two cappuccinos, each with double sprinkles — they walked out to the car park. The air was soft with rain and the dusk smelled pleasantly fresh.
Inside the car, Diane patted the leather dash. ‘So it’s really fast?’
‘Very fast,’ he agreed, as he steered towards the exit of the pub car park.
‘And it’s an expensive car?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘I’ve never been driven really fast in an expensive car.’ She turned and grinned, her eyes gleaming in the umbrellas of light cast by the enormous car park lampposts.
He tried to withstand the temptation. He was a responsible adult. There were one-eyed monsters on every verge around Peterborough and he’d only just copped three points on his licence from one of the little bastards.
But he heard his voice say, ‘Would you like to?’ as the car purred up the service road and back onto the dual carriageway.
And before she could answer he thrust his foot down on the accelerator and the seat delivered a punch to his back as the car launched itself at the road ahead.
‘Whoohoo!’ She grabbed her seat.
James drove faster, surging along the dual carriageway from Paston Parkway to Perkins Parkway, weaving, overtaking taillights that were like red stars on either side until he hit a clear patch of road and he could really open up, enjoying Diane’s yelps and whoops as she rocked in her seat and he let the car do what it was made to.
Her laughter bubbled around them. ‘I hope you don’t get stopped!’
‘So do I.’ One wary eye on his mirrors in case a flashing blue light materialised out of the dusk, he braked dangerously hard to pass a camera. But this was fun . And the woman beside him seemed to be having fun, too, clinging on and squeaking with delight at every swerve.
She gasped as he let the back end drift out. ‘Wow, James!’ He liked the way his name sounded on her tongue.
Eventually, he slowed.
The car slid sedately onto a slip road, past McDonalds and the cluster of car showrooms around the cinema, around a couple of roundabouts and into the Farcet Fen lane, safely reined in to thirty as they approached Farcet village. The main road through the village, busy during the day, was quiet now. Over speed bumps, they passed the school and friendly family homes in red brick and pebbledash. Just as the village became the countryside again he rolled the car to a stop in a lay-by beside the wall and railings of a small cemetery. The light had faded into the long deep twilight of a clear summer evening. No moon or stars yet, just infinite indigo sky.
Diane unfastened her belt and turned in her seat, breathlessly. ‘That was great. Thanks for the ride.’
‘My pleasure. We all need to kick back, sometimes. I do, anyway. That was irresponsible — but overdue.’
Her look was sympathetic. ‘I suppose Valerie’s drinking must be a strain. For the whole family.’
Usually, he blanked remarks like that, but Diane’s husband had nearly lost his life as a direct result of Valerie mixing liquor with a helicopter. And he realised that he wanted to talk about it. It might be a relief to open up. Not to have to be the strong one. He sighed. ‘Harold doesn’t seem aware. The girls don’t know the extent of it. Or, at least, I don’t think so, although Natalia and Alice occasionally make remarks about boozing. Valerie drinks. It’s part of her life. She drinks . Not just sometimes, not just socially — she drinks steadily. We have furious rows about her driving anyone else, especially the girls. She insists that she rarely drinks before six and rarely drives after. She’s only rated to fly in daylight, too, so it’s quite simple so far as she’s concerned: only drink in the evening . . . on good days. On good days, most evenings she drinks a bottle or two of wine. I rage about her still being over the limit in the morning but she dismisses it as “fussing”.
‘But sometimes she has bad days. On a bad day she manages a bottle of vodka, mixing it into orange juice or coffee, any time of day.
‘I freak out and she treats me as a huge joke, won’t discuss the problem because she hasn’t got a problem, she says. Apparently, I’m a spoilsport. I take a few drinks much too seriously. I should lighten up.’
‘But it certainly sounds like she’s got a problem,’ Diane observed. She hesitated. ‘Does she have . . . you know — have help?’
He drew in a breath so deep that it dug a pain in his chest as her question chewed his conscience. ‘Wouldn’t hear of it. I suppose I ought to be going to one of these groups that support the family of a drinker. But then —’ He blinked out of the window at the black shadows in the hedgerow. ‘It would be an immense waste of time. She’s headstrong and drinking has made that worse. I read that the decision to stop drinking has to come from the drinker and I let that excuse me from taking any initiative. The truth is that you can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped, especially if they sneer at you for trying.
‘And sometime I wonder if I’m the cause. Everything. Maybe it’s me? Have I driven her to drink? But, if so, why didn’t she leave?’ And why haven’t I?
In the confines of the car he could smell Diane’s personal scent, warm and clean. He breathed it in. Soothing. Everything about her soothed him.
‘So, to turn your earlier question back on yourself — you must’ve loved her, to marry her?’
He turned in his seat. ‘I probably did love her but I was nowhere near wanting to marry. She was my girlfriend and I was happy with that. But suddenly she confessed that she was pregnant, with all the tears and fears and the interminable brave conversations about abortion that went with a surprise baby. I hated the idea of abortion. I knew that if we got married, she’d keep the baby. Natalia. It was the right thing to do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, simply.
‘What was done was done and soon and we were OK when the girls were babies. We were too focused on them to get on each other’s nerves. But Natalia and Alice have grown up and moved out.’ His shoulders tensed. ‘And Tamzin and Valerie have a strange relationship. Close, but unhealthily tolerant. Blind to each other’s problems, each effectively endorses the other’s self-destructive behaviour.’
It felt quite natural to sit in the fast-growing dark confessing his problems to this unusual woman who seemed always to be so composed and pragmatic. He found himself wondering what his life would have been like if he’d shared it with a woman who didn’t fall into banshee mode whenever . . . well, whenever she damned well felt like it. Imagine living in a home that was peaceful, with a woman who was restful instead of rocking the house with screams and bellows.
In the twilight, he could make out the curve of Diane’s cheek and the straightness of her nose, the shift in the pattern on the fabric of her top as it folded around the contours of her breasts. And he was becoming aware of a need. The kind of need that a man might feel when tucked away with a woman he’d noticed from the instant he glanced across a waiting area and saw her staring at a policeman, a polite smile of astonished disbelief on her lips. If ‘noticing’ meant a clunk in his chest and eyes that refused to look away.
The need began to grow. He felt his breathing quicken.
‘We’ve got more of a habit than a marriage,’ he said, deliberately, trying to push her into a reaction. ‘We share a bed but it’s a big bed with a lot of space available. I’ve forgotten what meeting in the middle of all that space feels like. It’s been a long time since we . . . met in the middle.’ He waited, looking for signals.
But, no. No empathetic tuts or feminine clucks, no sympathetic hand on his arm. ‘Difficult,’ she agreed, neutrally, instead.
Irritation reared like a tormented bear inside him. He was spilling his guts about the situations he had to juggle every day and she called it ‘difficult’! ‘I’ll tell you what’s “difficult”,’ he snapped, goaded. ‘Being alone with a woman like you and having to behave!’ He froze as he realised that his thoughts had made it, uncensored, to his voice.
She shifted, minutely.
The silence magnified his words. They rang around inside his head. This, surely, would earn him a blast of indignation and fury. He braced himself for an icy, ‘I think you’d better take me back to my car!’
But Diane seemed more curious than explosive. ‘Why don’t you want to behave?’ She even sounded as if she might be smiling in the dark at his effrontery.
Having been honest to the point of lunacy, he felt obliged to crash on. ‘Because my problems usually absorb all my energy but I’ve realised that I’m more interested in you than in my problems and I can’t remember the last time I felt like that. I want to step off the world — my world — and into bed with you.’
She didn’t react at all.
The silence drew out. She was utterly still, staring into the evening.
He sighed. He’d better apologise. Reassure her that he really was reasonably safe and that these uncharacteristic sentences would soon stop popping out. He’d got used to missing sex because he was the kind of man who expected to feel guilt about cheating on his wife. Fidelity was just another habit.
But instead of uttering an apology, his mouth seemed to want him to lean across and brush his lips gently across her temple. When she stiffened but didn’t draw away, he let his mouth drift lower, feeling first the tingling brush of her eyebrow on his lips and then the soft flutteriness of her eyelashes. Her smooth cheekbone, her jaw. His mind churned with what the hell he was doing driving a woman off to dark lanes and propositioning her. It must be the stress. An urge for release.
Oh yeahhhhh . . . He almost groaned aloud at the idea of finding release with her.
She was still.
And then he was kissing her mouth, his tongue stroking the supple softness of hers until, slowly, she responded, making his heart bump around with the pleasure of her proximity, her warmth. His hand wandered onto her upper arm, the back of his thumb brushing the side of her breast. And his palm moved in to investigate. He felt her jump. Tense. I’ve passed her boundaries . . . he expected her to yank away with aghast demands to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He held his breath. But his hand continued to cup the delicious heaviness of her breast with a kind of helpless magnetism.
Then he felt her relax and her arms slide slowly about his neck, making him pull her against him as hard as he could, the stupid centre consol digging into his lower ribs and preventing him from feeling her body properly against his as he kissed and kissed her, shuddering, wanting her so much it sucked the air from his lungs.
‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ she whispered. ‘But I like your car.’
It took fully ten seconds for him to credit the evidence of his ears, wishing he could see the expression in her clear blue eyes. Ten seconds of listening to his blood pounding in his ears. ‘Here?’ It seemed a long, long time since he’d had sex in a car. It was a long time. He glanced at the steering wheel, the bulky consol, the automatic gear shift. His heart flailed about in the astounding knowledge that she seemed to want him, too. ‘Let’s go somewhere a lot more comfortable. With a bed.’
Instantly, she shook her head. ‘A hotel, without baggage and a prior booking? Running the gauntlet of desk clerks trying to hide their titters? Between here and there I’ll get cold feet.’
Personally, he felt the clerks could go to hell; hiding titters was in their job description. But he desperately didn’t want her to get cold feet because, right now, she was so hot, plastered against him so that he could feel every beat of her heart. Even so, her words made him admit, reluctantly, ‘If you’re not sure perhaps we ought not—’
‘It’s been a long time since Gareth and I . . . met in the middle , too. And I don’t think I’ve ever had sex in a car,’ she mused.
He groaned, willingly disconnecting with reality, tightening his arms so that her breasts pushed against him in a way that killed his last gentlemanly inclination. ‘It’ll be easier in the back — No, hang on, not here.’ Limbs like rubber, he started up the car, pulled out into the road then backed up, swinging past the end of the cemetery wall and into a grassy track that ran beside it. Back, back and back, until they were fifty yards from the road.
In gallant mode, he raced around the car to open her door but, typically, by the time he got there she’d opened the door perfectly well for herself and was sliding into the back seat, leaving him to run a fruitless circuit of the vehicle, through the grass and nettles like an idiot, to reach the other door and fall in beside her.
The back seat was cold and the heat they’d begun to generate hadn’t made the switch of venue.
With a nervous movement, she flicked back her hair.
Her hair was beautiful. He put out his hand to touch, stroke, slowly, from the crown of her head, feeling the silk slide beneath his palm until he reached the nape of her neck and could gather it into his fist and pull her gently, experimentally, to see if she’d come to his kiss. He watched her eyes close and her lips part as, slowly, tentatively, she did.
And then desire was a hot explosion and he heard her whimper as he kissed her too hard, threading his hands underneath her to drag her onto his lap, thrusting against her, running his hands over her bare legs and pulling her dainty sandals from her feet, touching each toe with his fingertips, breathing hard. The world outside the car spun away. He wished the seats in front weren’t such an unaccommodating barrier, that the roof of the car wasn’t bearing down, or the width of the car would allow him to lie her down and savour every inch of her body. And that it wasn’t nearly dark. He wished he had all the space and light he wanted to undress her slowly and explore everything delicious that he had in his hands.
But it wasn’t going to be like that. Not this time. He could wriggle off only some of her clothing because they were, after all, in a public place in their purple velvet evening and he couldn’t discount the damage potential of someone walking up the track. But, on the other hand, he wanted her too much to call a halt.
He tried not to hurry. He desperately wanted to enjoy the moment, threading his fingers in her sinuous hair while he fed from the softness of her mouth and she clutched fistfuls of his shirt and got breathless. He examined the patterns of her spine and loved the softness of the nape of her neck. But his hands were programmed with their own course and in no time he was establishing that her pretty red buttons sprang open quite co-operatively, and that her breasts were cool and mobile and wonderful in his hands. He stroked her until her composure broke and she began to use her entire body to stroke him back.
Her sweet mouth inflamed him almost as much as hauling out her knickers from beneath her skirt. He went half-mad when she let her head fall back so that he could nibble at her throat, loved her erratic breathing, her clutching fingers.
‘Don’t stop,’ she whispered.
‘No longer possible,’ he gasped.
He had forgotten how it felt to want somebody so desperately that he ached, arched, gasped, groaned, reached, lifted, slid . . . there .
* * *
Sex had never satisfied him more.
Every limb heavy. Alive. Satiated. Replete. Complete. His heart slowing into a languorous, after-sex rhythm.
Her skirt was still gathered around her waist. His legs were uncomfortably confined both from her wonderful hot weight and from lack of space. If they’d gone to a hotel they would be stretched out together beneath the sheets, now, revelling in naked afterglow. He’d be able to feel the softness of her stomach and the firmness of her hips pressed against him, warmth against warmth, flesh against flesh. But he could put up with what he had.
At least, as hemmed in as they were, every inch of her was hot against every inch of him. ‘Fucking hell,’ he breathed. He meant to say: that was fantastic, that was wonderful, you were incredible . But all that made it out was, ‘Fucking hell. Fucking hell .’
‘Mm.’ Her cheek squashed against his shoulder, her breath warm on the side of his neck.
He stroked her back, admiring the milky gleam of her skin in the glimmer of the moon, kissing the top of her head, tangling his fingers in her hair, hardly able to believe what had just happened.
She sighed. ‘I suppose I ought to go back for my car.’ She didn’t move.
‘Of course. I’ll take you.’ Neither did he.
‘In a minute.’
‘Yes. Soon.’
She yawned without lifting her face from the pillow of his shoulder and her hair tickled his chin. Then she shivered. Feeling around in the darkness, he located his jacket and slid it around her shoulders.
She straightened, to snuggle into it, humming with pleasure. Her hair spilled around her shoulders and her breasts. ‘You do like leather.’
Appreciation rumbled in his throat. ‘I sure as hell like you in it. You look like my favourite fantasy.’
She wriggled and stretched. ‘It feels lovely. The lining’s probably pure silk.’
He stroked her hair over one shoulder. ‘That’s how you feel. Silk. Or satin. Your skin . . .’ He sucked in his breath as his hands found their way inside the jacket. Her hair spilled over the leather and over the whiteness of her flesh.
It was some time before he took her back for her car.