hands grasped the yielding flesh of her upper arms, and for a brief moment she was forced to lean against him.
Afterwards, she realised that the incident couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. It was one of those accidents that in retrospect seemed totally avoidable. Only it hadn’t happened that way. Almost as if she was moving in slow motion, Laura was compelled into Jake’s arms, and for a short, but disruptive period she was close against his lean frame.
And, during those nerve-racking seconds, when the world seemed to falter around her, her body came alive to every nerve and emotion she possessed. Her skin felt raw; sensitised; as if someone had peeled away the top layer, and left her weak and open to attack. She had never experienced such a shattering explosion of feeling, and her mind reeled beneath its implications.
She jerked away from him, of course, more violently than she should have done, and one of the plates went flying. But it wasn’t the sound of the china splintering on the tiles that first made her face burn, and then robbed it of all colour. It was the fact that the ball of Jake’s hand brushed her breast as she rebounded, and in the sudden narrowing of his eyes she saw a reflection of her own awareness.
LAURA slept badly, and it wasn’t just the unfamiliar experience of sharing her bed with her daughter. She was hot and restless, and although she longed for it to be morning, she was not looking forward to the day ahead.
Of course, it didn’t help that Julie had appropriated at least two-thirds of the space, and every time Laura moved she was in fear of waking her. Indeed, there were times during the night when Laura half wished she had not been so adamant about the sleeping arrangements. If Julie had been sharing Jake’s bed, she would not have been so conscious of him, occupying the room on the other side of the dividing wall.
As it was, her senses persistently taunted her with that awareness, and images of Jake’s dark, muscled body, relaxed against the cream poplin sheets, were a constant aggravation. It was pathetic, she thought, disgusted by her thoughts. Apart from anything else, he was Julie’s boyfriend, her property—if a man like Jake Lombardi could ever be regarded as any woman’s possession. Somehow she sensed he was unlikely to let that happen. Nevertheless, whatever label she put on it, he was the man her daughter intended to marry, and any attraction she felt towards him was both loathsome and pitiful. For heaven’s sake, she chided herself, he was probably ten years younger than she was, and, even if Julie hadn’t been involved, he simply wasn’t the type of man she attracted.
She was just a middle-aged school-teacher, who had wasted any chance of happiness she might have had by getting herself pregnant, when she should have been old enough to know better. And since then, she had never felt the need for a serious relationship. Over the years, there had been one or two men who had attempted to push a casual association into something more, but Laura had always repelled invaders. Only Mark had stayed the course, and that was primarily because he made no demands on her. She had actually begun to believe that, whatever sexual urges she had once possessed, they were now extinct, and it was disturbing, to say the least, to consider that she might have been wrong.
And what was she basing this conclusion on? she asked herself contemptuously. It wasn’t as if anything momentous had happened to shatter her illusions. How stupid she was to read anything into Jake’s almost knocking her over, and preventing it. It was what anyone would have done in the same circumstances, man or woman, and she was fooling herself if she thought his brief awareness of her had been sexual.
But he had grabbed her, she argued doggedly. He had propelled her into his arms. It didn’t matter that on his part it had been a purely impersonal reaction. She could still feel the grip of his fingers, and the taut corded muscles of his legs…
God! She turned on to her back and gazed blindly up at the ceiling. How old was she? Thirty-eight? She was reacting like a sixteen-year-old. But then, she thought bitterly, her sexual development had been arrested around that age, so what else could she expect?
She was glad Julie had known nothing about it. By the time her daughter came down from her bath, clean, and sweetly smelling of rosebuds, her slender form wrapped in a revealing silk kimono, Laura had swept the floor, and restored the kitchen—and herself—to comparative order. That disruptive moment with Jake might never have been, and she was able to excuse herself on the pretext of being tired, without revealing any of the turmoil that was churning inside her. She left them sharing the sofa in the living-room, where Jake had been sitting since she had insisted on clearing up the broken china herself.
She got up at six o’clock. She had been wide awake since five, and only the knowledge that she would have no excuse for being up any earlier had prevented her from going downstairs as soon as it was light. But six o’clock seemed reasonably acceptable, and as the others hadn’t come to bed until some time after midnight Laura doubted she would disturb anyone.
Drawing the blind in the kitchen, she saw it was a much brighter morning. The sun was sparkling like diamonds on the wet grass, and the birds were setting up a noisy chatter in the trees that formed a barrier between her garden and the lane that led to Grainger’s farm.
The cottage was the second of two that stood at the end of the village, the other being occupied by an elderly widow and her daughter. Laura knew that people thought she was a widow, too, and she had never bothered to correct them. In a place as small as Burnfoot, it was better not to be too non-conformist, and, while being a one-parent family was no novelty these days, people might look differently on someone of Laura’s generation.
After putting the kettle on to boil, she opened the back door and stepped out into the garden. It was fresh, but not chilly, and she pushed her hands into the pockets of her dressing-gown and inhaled the clean air. The bulbs she had planted the previous autumn were beginning to flower, and the bell-shaped heads of purple hyacinths and crimson tulips were thrusting their way between the clumps of wild daffodils. The garden was starting to regain the colour it had lost over the winter months, and Laura guessed that sooner or later she would have to clear the dead leaves, and dispose of the weeds.
It was a prospect she generally looked forward to, but this morning it was hard to summon any enthusiasm for anything. She felt depressed, and out of tune with herself, and, hearing one of Ted Grainger’s heifers bellowing in the top field, she thought the animal epitomised her own sense of frustration. But frustration about what? she asked herself crossly. What did she have to be frustrated about?
The kettle was beginning to boil. She could hear it. It was a comforting sound, and, abandoning her introspection, she turned back towards the house. And that was when she saw him, standing indolently in the open doorway, watching her.
He was dressed—that was the first thing she noticed about him. He was wearing the same black jeans he had been wearing the night before, but he wasn’t wearing a shirt this morning; just a V-necked cream cashmere sweater, that revealed the brown skin of his throat, and a faint trace of dark body hair in the inverted apex of the triangle. Unlike herself, she was sure, he looked relaxed and rested, although his eyes were faintly shadowed, as if he hadn’t slept long enough.
And why not? she thought irritably. She had still been awake when Julie had come to bed, even if she had pretended otherwise, and by her reckoning he could not have had more than five hours. Hardly enough for someone who had driven almost three hundred miles the day before, in heavy traffic, with goodness knew what hangover from the night before that.
Laura was immediately conscious of her own state of undress, and of the fact that she hadn’t even brushed her hair since she’d come downstairs. It was still a tumbled mass about her shoulders, with knotted strands
