Sommersgate House (42 page)

“What you
need, Jewel, is to marry Douglas.”

“
What?
” Julia
gasped.

“
Listen
to me, darling,” Charlie demanded urgently before Julia could get a
word in edgewise, “you may never get Douglas to love you; he just
isn’t built like that. I don’t know why but he isn’t. I have to
tell you, though, what you have from him is more than I’ve ever
seen him give
anyone
.”

Julia palpably
felt these words go through her and was holding the phone to her
ear like she intended to graft it there.

She searched
desperately for excuses to defend her heart against the words it
wanted to hear. “Charlie, I can’t settle for that. And anyway love
turns to –”

“No, Jewel,
not always, in fact, mostly never. You’ve had tremendously bad
luck. I know you had some tough experiences but no matter what
Douglas is, and he’s a lot of things,” she noted with her usual
bluntness, “he isn’t the type of man who would hurt you.”

“
How do
you know?” Julia was thinking about the accident Douglas had
ordered Sean to have, the gunshot wound he never explained, the two
years when he’d disappeared. She remembered his words,
“Because I need
something warm and soft and alive beside me tonight. Something that
smells good and feels good. After what I’ve seen…”

He had
secrets, dark ones.

She had no
idea what he was capable of and she figured Charlie didn’t
either.

“Because he’d
never hurt Tammy and to hurt you would hurt Tammy. He had great
respect for Gavin too.”

Oh God. She
had a point there.

“Charlie –”
Julia tried to interject.

“
Honestly, Jewel, don’t you understand from what you’ve just
told me that even not having it all with Douglas is a damn sight
better than
anything
you’d
get from anyone else?”

Julia was
struck silent at Charlie’s stunning proclamation. And before she
let the truth of it edge into her mind, she shut it out
completely.

“Think about
it,” Charlie urged. “I’ll call you later,” and she hung up.

Miserable,
Julia spent (hiding, she knew), the whole day in her rooms. She
kept her mind obsessively busy by wrapping presents and making
unnecessary lists and when the children came home, they rushed in
to say hello and out again because Douglas was taking them
horseback riding.

She wasn’t
alone in the room, she knew. The Mistress was there with her,
freezing her ankles, trying to tell her something Julia couldn’t
understand, probably didn’t want to understand. Julia did her best
to ignore her and she finally went away.

Much later,
when the sun was setting, to her amazement, Julia saw The Master,
clear as day, pacing, agitated, back and forth in front of Julia’s
windows.

Julia shut the
curtains.

When she
became used to the impossibility of living with two ghosts, she did
not know and she didn’t have the energy to worry about it.

It was
Veronika’s shift at the house and Julia let her go early. She made
a big vat of Texas chilli for dinner, spending the entire time she
cooked mentally preparing for any upcoming confrontation with
Douglas at supper.

The children
screamed in, still jazzed from a day of physical activity and she
met them in the hallway. She was wiping her hands on a dishtowel as
the kids started to scatter this way and that. Out of the corner of
her eye, she saw Douglas saunter in but didn’t acknowledge him.

“Everyone get
cleaned up. Dinner is in half an hour,” she announced.

The kids raced
up the stairs and Julia turned to see Douglas standing in the
hallway watching her, his arms crossed on his chest and his feet
planted apart.

He looked
exactly what he was, lord of the manor, master of all he surveyed.
With that sexy scar on his lip and that even sexier glint in his
eye, instead of looking like a man who was born to it, he looked
like a man who had seized it.

This thrilled
her, annoyed her and scared the living daylights out of her all at
the same time.

He wore
a soft suede jacket the colour of clay and a forest green
turtleneck over faded blue jeans and boots. Slap a cowboy hat on
his head and he was the
GQ
version of the damned Marlboro Man.

“Dinner is in
half an hour,” she repeated tersely.

“I heard you,”
he replied.

She walked
away, hoping that he wouldn’t follow her.

He didn’t.

Then she
hoped for the disappointment that came from him
not
following her would go away.

It didn’t
either.

* * * * *

“
And he
sits the best horse
ever,
” Lizzie
enthused with the fervour of a zealot.

Everyone
was sitting around the huge dining room table eating dinner. Even
though Julia loved chilli, she found she wasn’t hungry. This was
probably because she was
extremely
aware that Douglas was sitting to her left side. Every time
she looked at his hands, she thought of what they could do to her
body. Every time she looked at his face, her eyes dropped to his
lips and then she thought about what
they
could do (and, as if he could read her mind, those lips
twitched at the corners which then made her want to crash the
nearest, undoubtedly priceless vase over his head).

Since
their return that afternoon, she had gone from worrying about what
Douglas would do next to worrying about what
she
would do if she was pregnant. Then she started to
get angry about what Sean had likely done. Now, she was frustrated
at Lizzie who seemed to want to convince Julia that Douglas was, at
any moment, going to walk calmly outside and fly, such were his
superhuman powers.

“He’s going to
teach me to play polo,” Willie said through a mouthful of
chilli.

Et tu, Willie?
Julia thought, her eyes rolling to the ceiling.

“I’m gonna
play polo too!” Ruby shouted, not wanting to be left out.

“Do you know
how to ride, Julia?” Douglas asked, his deep baritone rumbling over
her like a caress.

She ignored
the caress and answered the question. “No.”

“You do too!”
Lizzie accused. “We all went riding at Pokagon State Park.”

Julia watched
the girl closely to see if there would be any negative response to
a verbally acknowledged memory that involved her parents. None of
the children seemed to notice and she allowed her quick bout of
tenseness to subside.

Julia swept a
glance passed Douglas who was looking at her with what appeared, to
her stunned disbelief, to be smugness.

She turned her
attention to her chilli, pretending to go about the business of
actually eating it when she’d only been able to manage two
mouthfuls and she stirred it around.

“Lizzie-babe,
I hardly think some cowboy getting me up on a two hundred year old
horse by pushing me up with a shove on my behind and then riding it
docilely in a line with ten other people for half an hour
constitutes as ‘knowing how to ride’.”

“Yeah, that
was funny. Even in the line, you nearly fell off,” Willie added
then turned to inform Douglas, “She didn’t take her hands off the
pommel the entire time. The cowboy guy eventually had to ride
beside her the whole way.”

Another glance
showed that Douglas no longer looked smug, he looked annoyed.

Willie, now a
veritable font of information, told Douglas, “And she walked around
for the rest of the day like she had a tree between her legs.”

Julia gritted
her teeth.

Douglas
grinned.

“What’s for
pudding?” Ruby screeched and Julia could have kissed her youngest
niece for changing the subject even if Julia wasn’t certain she’d
ever stop the ringing in her ears.

“All right,
everyone,” Julia ordered, “plates rinsed and in the washer.”

She managed
dessert without too much of an effort and Douglas thankfully
disappeared for the rest of the evening, leaving her to take care
of the kids and then hurry to her own room in an attempt to avoid
him.

Even though it
was early, she prepared for bed. In a gesture toward
confidence-building, she pulled on her favourite nightie, a short,
spaghetti-strapped, strawberry-coloured cotton wisp of material
with little embroidered peach flowers and peach lace around the hem
and neckline.

She tried to
read but all she could do was think.

So she quit
reading and turned off the light and tried to sleep.

Still, all she
could do was think.

She wasn’t
falling in love with Douglas Ashton.

Julia was in
love with him.

In fact, there
was a very good possibility she’d been in love with him for fifteen
years.

She probably
even married Sean because he reminded her of Douglas (she decided
it was a good idea to blame Douglas for her first marriage fiasco,
it helped her stay focused).

She was in
love with Douglas and forced to live with him for, at least, the
next twelve years of her life. What on earth she had done to
deserve this dastardly end, she did not know. And, if the last two
months were anything to go by, she didn’t think she would make it
for another two months let alone more than a decade.

If he didn’t
leave her alone, she wouldn’t be able to resist him.

And
she
had
to resist
him. No matter what Charlie said, Lizzie wanted or even Mrs. K
apparently hoped for, she had long since vowed to herself she was
never going to let another man like Douglas into her heart. He
wasn’t Sean, she knew, and he wasn’t her father either.

But he wasn’t
Gavin.

Gavin had
loved his wife with a powerful distraction that was unlike anything
Julia had ever seen and definitely nothing she’d ever known. When
he married Tamsin and he said his vows, he nearly shouted the roof
off the Cathedral, he was so proud to say them. Any other man would
have looked the fool, but not Gav, and Julia knew every woman’s
heart in that church melted because that’s what happened to her
own.

Julia wanted a
man like that and if she couldn’t have it (which she knew she
couldn’t), then she wanted no man at all.

She was
self-sufficient and capable and didn’t mind being alone.

But she was
tired of her loneliness, tired of fending for herself, tired of not
having anyone to talk to her about her day or help her if the car
had a flat tire.

She wanted to
be cared for and protected; she admitted to herself this was
true.

But she wanted
it with devotion and in the meantime (which would be for always)
she knew she could take care of herself.

She had no
other choice.

It was easy
for Charlie to tell her to settle, she had Oliver and he blatantly
worshipped the ground Charlie walked on. He might do it sometimes
with exasperation at her crazy antics, but he did it and would do
it, for all time.

Julia
was a game to Douglas, he made that perfectly clear. He’d had
dozens, maybe scores, it could even be
hundreds
of women for all she knew. She was just one in the
long queue and, more than likely, not the last one.

Once he’d
conquered her, he’d move on.

That was what
she feared, that was what she would have to avoid, that was why she
could not let him win. Because she knew that if she let him see
what was in her heart and he couldn’t reciprocate it, then she
would be lost. He would go on with his life and she would be left
picking up the pieces. Again. By herself. She doubted he’d be
cruel, but was thoughtless indifference any less unkind than
outright abuse?

She finally
fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed of Douglas, one of those vivid
dreams, so realistic it was almost like it could actually be
happening. Now, with the intimate knowledge of what it was like to
be with Douglas, the dream was all the more intense.

He was behind
her, his hard body pressed the length of her. His mouth was at the
back of her neck then behind her ear then he was nipping her
earlobe with his straight, white teeth. His hands were all over
her, hot and strong, one stroking tantalisingly at the underside of
her breast while the other one slid underneath her to wrap around
and cup her between her legs. A finger idly stroked her there,
deliciously teasing.

She pressed
back into him; she had no need to protect herself from a dream. She
wiggled her behind into his groin and heard a low groan which
caused a shudder to pass through her and a flush of heat to spiral
from her stomach downwards where a glorious ache had begun.

The hand
between her legs changed position, coming up to cup a breast while
his free hand pressed into her underwear, his knee forced itself
between her legs from behind just enough to part them and give him
better access.

Then his
finger slid inside her.

Her head
tilted back and she whimpered low while lush sensations shot out
across her body from between her legs. At the same time the pad of
his thumb stroked across her nipple and his finger disappeared from
between her legs, only to come back as two, filling her more
completely. His thumb found just the perfect spot between her legs
and she started to move, nestling her bottom into his lap at the
same time pressing into his fingers. Her hand found his arm,
sliding down, holding his and feeling it while he tormented
her.

The minute her
hand found his, his body moved slightly, his mouth came to her ear
and she heard him say in a husky voice, “Julia.”