he swung her up lightly so that she stood in front of him, looking up expectantly into his face. For a moment he frowned. He was very close. She could hear the humming of bees, and the longed-for breeze had just started. Her lips instinctively parted, and her green eyes were huge in her face.
And suddenly, he became very formal. ‘Can you walk?’ he asked courteously.
She felt as though she had snapped out of a dream. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, very shaken, though less by the accident than by the realisation that she had been standing waiting to be kissed by a man who was a total stranger to her. And thank God, she thought, that he had not responded. She tried to move away, but he caught her by the elbow.
‘Let me help you,’ he insisted, in that mocking, accented voice, and slid his arm around her slender waist to walk her back to Judy.
And she allowed him to hold her in that familiar way, relaxing naturally against his strength. The short journey was heaven, but, too soon, they’d arrived. She saw Judy roll over from her prone position, rubbing her eyes, her expression of curiosity showing that she’d seen nothing of the incident. ‘I—tripped,’ Cressida explained, still weak from the effect that this man was having on her.
His hand dropped from her waist. ‘It will cause you pain for no more than a few hours, I think.’ He smiled. And then he looked down at a mute Cressida, cupping her chin between thumb and forefinger. ‘Ciao,’ he said softly, so softly that only she could hear, and then he walked away over the brown grass, the brilliant sunlight glancing off the dark hair.
There was silence for a moment. Judy’s eyes were like saucers.
‘Who was he?’ she demanded. ‘Close-up he’s even more of a hunk!’
It sounded absurd, even to Cressida. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.
‘What do you mean—you don’t know?’ quizzed Judy.
‘Just what I say,’ replied Cressida, a touch querulously. ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life, and all I know is that he tended to my foot.’ Her eye was caught by the linen handkerchief.
‘But did you see the way he was looking at you? Did you give him your phone number?’
‘He didn’t ask,’ said Cressida, trying, and failing, to sound annoyed at the implication that she might give out her phone number to a person she had just met. Because if she were perfectly honest, she would have given it—willingly.
Judy was looking at his retreating back-view just visible in the distance. ‘Well, that’s that, then. London’s a big place—you’ll never see him again.’
And that was what Cressida had thought, too, after a week of spinning ‘What if?’ fantasies.
What if he went there for lunch every day? Would it look too obvious if she went back there? And why should it? she reasoned—for all he knew it might be her regular lunchtime venue. Which might have been all very well in theory, had the weather not broken with a series of alarming thunderstorms which prevented her from re-visiting the park.
What if he worked near the drama school? Along with half a million others, she thought wryly. If he did work near by, she never saw him, even though she spent too much of her meagre grant on frequenting the many swish new sandwich bars in the vicinity, thinking she might spot him.
No, she decided, as she pushed the fine linen handkerchief she had carefully laundered and ironed to the back of her underwear drawer—it had just been a strange, one-off encounter, and she should take comfort from the fact that she had reacted so strongly to him, stranger or not, because hadn’t it worried her for long enough that she had seemed to share none of her peers’ urges for sexual experimentation? Hadn’t there been shrugs and whispered comments because she showed not the slightest inclination to disappear at parties—unlike the other girls, who were seen leaving the room with their current flames, usually in the direction of the bedroom.
A week went by, and, if not exactly forgetting about the man, then at least Cressida had put him out of her mind as she concentrated for the end-of-term production, in which she was playing Cleopatra.
It was a gruelling rehearsal, and she was glad enough to finish, sitting in the cramped dressing-room cleaning her face and trying to decide whether or not to go to her speech coach’s party that night. But she was strangely reluctant. And let’s face it, she thought, as she dragged the brush through her thick red hair—it’ll be the same old faces, the same old jokes. No one will notice if you aren’t there.
A long bath, a cool drink on the plant-filled patio and the flat to herself seemed an infinitely preferable option.
It was a warm, balmy night, with the setting sun gilding the clouds pink as she walked the short distance to the flat. She had been lucky to have hit it off with Judy so well in their first few weeks of term, and had been delighted to be asked to share the flat with her. Judy’s parents were rich. Rich, rich, rich, as she cheerfully admitted herself. And they loved indulging their only daughter—thus the spacious flat in a prestigious area of London. Otherwise, Cressida—with her elderly aunt her only relation in England—would have been living in some grotty little flat, goodness knew where.
Her only bone of contention was that Judy had refused point-blank to accept any rent money. ‘My parents have already paid for it,’ she had pointed out. The only way round this was for Cressida to buy new things for the flat—so that every month a new vase, pretty dishes or colourful scatter cushions were introduced into their home.
Cressida had her bath, and pulled on a filmy wrap patterned in soft shades of green. Her hair dried into a cloud of fragrant dark waves shot with fire. She had just poured herself a glass of weak Pimm’s and added lemon and a sprig of mint when there was a ring at the doorbell.
It must be Judy, she thought, back early and disenchanted by the party, but she opened the door to find the man from the park there, silently watching her, not a flicker of emotion on the implacable olive-skinned face.
She opened her mouth to say all the things which she knew one should say in such circumstances, from, ‘What are you doing here?’ to, ‘How did you find out where I lived?’ But she said none of these, just stood regarding him with the same intense interest as she saw reflected in his own eyes.
There was a mocking look in the quizzical way in which he surveyed her, one dark eyebrow arched, the trace of a smile touching the firm mouth. ‘You knew I would come.’
She looked into those dark velvety eyes and was lost. She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, dry-mouthed, recognising the truth in his words immediately. ‘I knew.’ And, without another word, he had taken her in his arms and begun to kiss her.
Cressida groaned as she turned her head away from the pillow and lay staring at the wall. She had been so young, so naïve. Anyone who had ever doubted the veracity of the phrase ‘she was like putty in his hands’ had only to look at her relationship with Stefano.
She sat up, her hand going to her hair and encountering the thick lacquer which clogged it, her eyes going to the small clock on the rickety bedside table. It was gone seven, and David was due here at eight—and she hadn’t even cleaned her face properly. If she didn’t remove the heavy stage make-up soon, there would be hell to pay with her skin. Her head had begun to throb alarmingly. The last thing she felt like doing was going out to dinner, being forced to make polite conversation—even with someone as charming as David—not when her mind was spinning round like a Ferris
