Not even from the safe distance of the years and the knowledge that separated her from it. But it was too late to hold back the memories, too late to stem the rushing tide sweeping down over her.
Please, no, she protested silently, but she knew it was no use. She had already allowed herself to remember too much, and she would now have to endure what she herself had set in motion. Her body trembling, she closed her eyes and gave in.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I JUST can’t believe this wonderful weather that we’re having, and the forecasters are predicting that the heatwave is going to last at least another week…’
As Sam turned his head to look at her Abbie realised, with indignation, that he was laughing at her. He had picked her up from her parents’ house half an hour ago, as arranged, firmly refusing to tell her where they were going as he placed her case in the boot of his car.
It had given her a funny little feeling inside to see her case nestling next to his, her heart giving a fierce, excited skip.
‘What are you so nervous about?’ Sam was asking her now.
‘I’m not nervous,’ Abbie denied untruthfully.
‘Oh, yes, you are,’ he told her softly. ‘You always talk about the weather when you’re nervous…’
‘No, I do not,’ Abbie protested, and then she looked at him and her heart melted, along with her nerves and her last-minute doubts about what she was doing.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ Sam told her gently, the laughter disappearing from his eyes to be replaced by an emotion that made her head pound dizzily. ‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do…’
‘But I do want to,’ Abbie told him, and then blushed hotly and tried valiantly to hold his eyes as he looked straight into hers, praying that he wouldn’t further tease her by demanding, You want to what? He didn’t, but the look he was giving her was far more toe-curlingly explicit than any words could ever have been.
She still couldn’t quite believe that he wanted her so much…that he was, as he’d told her himself, falling dangerously and completely in love with her.
Once during the journey, when she turned to look at him, her eyes widening as she saw the way his hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel, he told her huskily, begged, ‘Please don’t keep on looking at me like that. If you do I’m going to have to stop the car and take you in my arms and kiss the hell out of you, and once I start to do that…’
Abbie could feel her whole body, her face, starting to burn with the heat of what she was feeling. She could sense, see how dangerously close to losing control he was, and along with her instinctive sense of awe and virginal fear she also experienced a sharp thrill of feminine power and pleasure in the knowledge that she could have such an effect on him.
‘The first time we make love I want it to be perfect for you, on a bed heaped high with the softest down and feather pillows, in a room that smells of roses and summer. I want to watch the sunlight on your body, high up in a turret, somewhere where we can be completely alone, just us and the sounds of nature and the living, breathing universe around us reaching us through narrow-latticed paned windows.
‘Way, way below us there’ll be a river, wide and slow-moving, the water soft and clear, and in the pool that it forms we’ll swim together under a moonlit sky, and then we’ll make love again on the grassy bank, still warm from the day’s sunshine.
‘The moonlight will turn your body to lissom silver. I’ll follow its path with my hands and my lips. Your body will welcome mine with a sweet mixture of semi-pagan innocence and knowing that is in all women, a gift, but most especially in yours. Your skin will feel as cool as silk and only the hunting owl and the night sky will hear us when we cry out the unbearable ecstasy of our mutual need.’
‘Stop it…stop it…’ Abbie whispered shakily. Her whole body was on fire with arousal and desire for him, and she had a mad urgent impulse to beg him to stop the car and make love to her there and then.
There was a tight, aching need deep within her body, a pulsing that brought a hot flush of colour to her skin. How much further was the hotel he was taking her to? How much longer before…?
‘Are you hungry? Would you like to stop somewhere for a drink and something to eat?’ Sam asked her ten minutes later.
The prosaic question after the sensual seduction of his earlier words caught Abbie off guard. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Surely he knew, must know, that the only sustenance she needed was him; the only appetite she had was for him.
Such wild and wanton thoughts were still unfamiliar enough to her to make her catch her breath and shyly avoid looking directly at him.
The road they were on had started to climb now; the countryside around them was changing. They were, Abbie recognised, driving through the Welsh borders, a wild, almost pagan part of the countryside she had secretly always thought incredibly romantic.
Here in this land once called the Welsh Marches, which still bore the visible scars of its medieval history in its ancient castles, it wasn’t hard to mentally picture the armoured knights who had once patrolled these borders, to imagine one could still hear the faint clash of steel upon steel, the mingled cries of the injured and the victorious, to imagine as one drove past the derelict and sightless arrow slits of the castles that one had almost caught a glimpse of a pale, feminine wimpoled face watching anxiously from above.
‘This is one of those places where the past feels very, very close, isn’t it?’ Sam’s quiet comment, so closely echoing her own thoughts, made her shiveringly aware of how easily he could attune himself to her, of how much they seemed to share above and beyond the urgency of their sexual desire for one another.
She was still too young to fall in love helplessly and for ever, to commit herself to one man, one relationship for life and beyond, but she suspected that that was exactly what was going to happen to her.
It was not too late for her to change her mind, to call a halt to what was happening, she comforted herself; there was still time.
‘Almost there now,’ Sam told her.
The hotel was a fairy tale thing set in an almost magically perfect wooded valley, a cream stone, early Edwardian folly mansion designed as perfectly and as irresistibly as a Walt Disney castle straight out of Sleeping Beauty. A breathtaking jewel of a building, with its pale cream turrets and lichen-green tiled and scalloped roofs, set against a stunning backdrop of gently sloping protective hillsides clothed in softer green trees, surrounded by immaculately cared for lawns and flowerbeds dropping away to the river which ran through the bottom of the valley.
They had had to drive across a bridge over it to get to the main gates of the hotel and then up a sweeping cream stone drive. The hotel itself was hidden from view until the very last minute, Abbie’s only sightings of it the tantalising glimpses she had caught of it as the road into the valley had spiralled down from the surrounding hills.
‘It…It’s…’ She looked at Sam as he brought the car to a halt in the discreetly concealed car park to the rear of the hotel, which had obviously at some stage been a private home.
As she glanced towards the delicate turrets Abbie remembered how he had described making love to her. Then she had thought he was simply using his imagination.
