Starting Over (25 page)

THAT NIGHT
, curled up alone in her bed in a small protective fetal ball, she allowed herself to give in to her feelings. Was there something about her that meant she was destined to forever be alone, to forever be denied the experience of being truly and completely loved?

'MOLLY
, wait...'

Her eyes dark with anxiety, Molly turned to look impatiently at Caspar.

'I have to go,' she repeated.

'I know that,' Caspar acknowledged. 'But how will you get there if your car still isn't ready? Why don't you let me take you?' he suggested before she could say anything.

'Let
you
take me?'

Molly's forehead pleated in a quick defensive frown.

The light-hearted flirtation they had been indulging in had been one thing, but what he was suggesting now was something else.

Gravely she looked at him.

This wasn't any time for her to be indulging in her own emotional needs, especially with a man like Caspar; but he was already walking towards her, already taking control of the situation and her and she, fool that she was, was letting him do it, luxuriating almost in the sensation as he removed from her shoulders the burden of dealing with the practicalities of the situation.

As he took charge, Caspar couldn't help contrasting Molly's behaviour to Olivia's. He couldn't remember the last time Olivia had unquestioningly allowed him to play his male role. These last few years she had seemed to challenge every decision he had made, pouring scorn on them and on him, undermining him to such an extent that it had begun to eat away at the very essence of his maleness. Molly's acceptance of his help made him feel ten feet tall and capable of doing anything and everything she might ask of him.

As he looked at her, her eyes shiny and dark with the tears she was so obviously determined not to shed, he had to fight not to take her in his arms right there and then and comfort her.

IT SEEMED TO
Olivia to be hours before she finally fell asleep to dream despairingly and longingly of being wrapped securely in Caspar's arms whilst he held her and whispered to her that he understood and sympathised with everything that she was feeling. In her dream she told him truthfully that he was the only person she felt secure and safe with, the only person she could be herself with and admit her fears and failings to.

Caspar!

As she felt the tender familiar brush of his mouth on hers, tears seeped from beneath her closed eyelids.

STUBBORNLY
Sara had refused to allow Nick to pick her up for the drive into Pembrokeshire, insisting instead that they made the journey to his cottage separately in their own individual cars; but now as she followed his skilled handling of his large four-wheel-drive vehicle in her own much smaller and less comfortable compact car, all the doubts and fears Sara had fought to keep at bay behind the battlements of her pride began stalking her with a vengeance.

They were in Wales now and through Aberystwyth, following the coast road. It was a wet day with a grey mist rolling in over an even greyer sea, the hypnotic sound of her windscreen wipers failing to do anything to soothe down Sara's oversensitive nerve endings.

She had, as instructed, packed warm practical clothes. When they had met up at their arranged meeting place earlier in the day, Nick had got out of his car and come striding across to her. Dressed in jeans and a casual shirt he had still had the power to make her go weak at the knees—and to suddenly and un-wontedly realise just why she was behaving in such an uncharacteristic and self-destructive way.

'I thought we'd stop for lunch on the other side of Aberystwyth,' he had told her. There's a small town that I think you'll like with a particularly good seafood restaurant.'

And now they had reached that town and Nick was pulling off the road and into the small market square.

Almost numbly Sara followed him, parking her car next to his at the harbour front in the space he had left for her.

Even in the harbour the sea was choppy, the small moored fishing boats bouncing like corks on the heavy swell of the grey foaming water.

Sara was glad of the warmth in the fleece she had pulled on over her jeans and top as she stepped out into the cold damp air, deliberately ignoring the hand Nick put out towards her. She had never felt more on edge and anxious...not even on that supposedly so important first time. Losing her virginity had been nothing when compared with what she was contemplating doing now, a mere basic rite of passage with a boy she remembered with a vague amused fondness and who had been as nervous and uncertain about the actual mechanics of what they were doing as she had been herself. She had been eighteen then, though—a girl—and now she was a woman. Woman enough for a man like Nick Crighton?

She shivered causing Nick to say irritably, 'I don't bite, you know, Sara...' before adding in a lower and far more sensual undertone, 'at least not in public.'

The restaurant he took her to was down a narrow side street between the harbour and the town square.

To reach it they had to walk past the town's charming pastel-washed Georgian houses.

The restaurant was surprisingly busy. Nick explained to her that the town was a favourite retirement area for the middle classes which explained the pre-ponderance of hearty tweed and twin-setted couples at the other tables Sara recognised.

The waiter was waiting to show them to their table and Sara started to remove her fleece.

'Let me,' Nick offered, immediately turning to help her. Sara already had one arm out of her jacket and as she felt Nick's fingers curl round it as he helped her, her body reacted to him immediately, goose bumps lifting on her skin as a hot wave of explicit sensation shot through her. For a moment neither of them moved, their gazes meeting and meshing. The naked hunger she could see in Nick's eyes both shocked and excited her.

'For God's sake, don't look at me like that,' she heard Nick muttering thickly under his breath.

'Like what? I'm not—' Sara immediately denied defensively.

But Nick cut her short telling her rawly, 'Oh, yes, you are. For goodness sake, Sara, I know how much you're enjoying this but I'm not as fireproof as you obviously are. And if you don't stop right now it's going to be as obvious to everyone else here as it must be to you that the only thing I'm hungry for right now, the only thing I want to eat,' he emphasised with sexual explicitness, 'is you.'

Discreetly the maitre d' had stepped back from them whilst he showed some other diners to a table. Sara could feel her whole body burning with a heat that had nothing whatsoever to do with embarrassment.

Shockingly she knew, too, that if Nick were to take hold of her right now and lead her through the restaurant's reception area to where the stairs led to the rooms she had noticed they advertised she wouldn't want to stop him. But instead he was ushering her grimly into the dining room, one hand cupping her elbow as she tried to keep as much physical distance between them as she could—not easy when the spaces between the tables were so narrow, but every time she felt the heat of his body against her own her flesh reacted so explosively that she could feel herself physically trembling.

They both ordered lobster and whilst they waited for their meal to be served Sara studied the other diners. Middle class and middle-aged in the main, they exuded the air of placid calmness that only seemed to underscore the highwire tension of her sexual arousal.

'Do you eat here often?' she asked Nick, trying to bring a measure of calm ordinariness to the situation.

'It's a good stopping off point when I'm travelling back from Cheshire,' Nick responded. 'It's a journey I make fairly frequently.'

'To see your married...friend...?' Sara questioned him immediately.

'My what?' Nick frowned and then realised who she meant. 'Oh, you mean Bobbie.' He smiled whilst Sara seethed with impotent jealousy.

Their food had arrived and Nick waited until the waiter had gone before leaning across the table and telling Sara dulcetly, 'Bobbie is married to Luke Crighton—and very happily married to him I might add.'

'But you were with her at Camden Place,' Sara argued.

'We bumped into one another by accident, she was there with Luke but he was playing golf.'

Sara put down her cutlery, the blood draining from her face. 'You mean you aren't... She isn't...'

'No, I'm not,' Nick confirmed cooly. 'And she most certainly isn't. I can assure you that if I was already in that kind of relationship I wouldn't...'

'You wouldn't what?' Sara challenged him sharply.

She was still trying to come to terms with the shock at discovering that her jealousy, the jealousy which had led her to where she was right now, was apparently totally unfounded. 'You wouldn't want
me.'

'You didn't really think I was involved with Bobbie, did you?' Nick marvelled, ignoring her comment Leaning across the table he told her quietly, 'Well, for your information...' He paused and frowned. He had almost been on the point of admitting to her that she was the first woman he had ever invited back to his home, the first woman he had ever wanted so strongly that he wanted to take her there and be completely and totally alone with her.

'For my information what?' Sara demanded.

Nick's frown deepened. Perhaps he should be honest with her. 'This is the first time I've ever invited a woman to stay at the cottage. How's your lobster?' he asked her, determinedly changing the subject.

WHEN THEY LEFT
the restaurant an hour later it was almost trying to snow, the air much colder and the rain turning to sleet.

Sara shivered inside her fleece, giving a small gasp of dismay as she started to lose her balance as they crossed the now deserted square.

Immediately Nick reached out to steady her. His touch making her skin prickle with heady excitement.

She was beginning to feel very afraid, Sara recognised, not of Nick himself but of the way she felt and her inability to control the strength of her reaction to him.

The discovery that he was not having an affair with Bobbie—or anyone else—seemed to have projected her into an untrammelled surge of sensual longing and responsiveness making her ache for him with an intensity and an immediacy that thoroughly unnerved her.

Now, suddenly, panic hit her.

'I've changed my mind,' she burst out in a tremu-lous voice. 'I...'

'You've what?' Nick demanded, almost jerking her off her feet as he swung her round and anchored her against his body using his own to protect her from the wind-driven sleet as he looked inimically down into her eyes.

'Don't play games with me, Sara,' he warned her.

'Because right now...'

She was trembling from head to foot, unable to tear her gaze from him. Helplessly it slid from his eyes down to his mouth, her heart giving a body-rocking lurch against her ribs.

'Sara...'

She saw his chest rise and fall with the deepness of the breath he took and watched helplessly as he lowered his head, not able, not
wanting,
to escape the inevitability of his mouth covering her own.

Somewhere in the distance she could hear the forlorn cry of the seagulls, the sound as sharply piercing as the ferocity of the pain-cum-pleasure that exploded through her.

She could feel herself trembling, leaning helplessly into Nick, needing his support against the weakness that he himself was causing as their mouths clung and meshed. Her lips were as hungrily greedy for the taste and feel of his as his were for her.

Recklessly she opened her mouth beneath his, inviting, pleading, for an intimacy that shocked her even whilst his answer to it turned her bones to water and made her give a pitiful mew of strangled longing deep in her throat.

They were kissing like teenagers, so hungry for one another that they were oblivious to everything else, she recognised dizzily. And how and when had she wound her arms around his neck like that so that her body was pressed as close to his as it could possibly get?

So close that she was perfectly well aware of the effect she was having on him.

'It's damn near another thirty miles to the cottage,'

she heard him groaning against her mouth between kisses. 'And right now I don't think I can take another thirty seconds of this without...'

He moved, shifting both their bodies, his taking the weight of hers and for one delirious moment Sara actually thought he might touch her intimately. Her breasts ached for him to do so, ached for the touch of his hands, his mouth. She wanted...

The noisy sound of some people emerging from a pub on the other side of the square into the fresh air brought her to her senses and to the mortified realisation of what she was doing—and feeling.

'Are you all right?' she heard Nick asking her as they made their way to their parked cars.

'Of course I'm all right. Why shouldn't I be?' she rejected his concern challengingly.

'Do you really need me to answer that?' Nick returned as he waited for her to unlock her car.

No, of course she didn't, Sara admitted as she waited for him to pull out onto the main road. If she wanted to do so now there was nothing to stop her turning in the opposite direction and changing her mind. Nick couldn't
make
her go with him. Nick
wouldn 't
make her go with him she acknowledged.

But...

But if she didn't, for the rest of her life she would wish...wonder... And for the rest of her life, too, she knew a part of her would always ache for him and for what might have been.

It's just sex, she reminded herself grimly. That's all.

Bitterly she wondered how on earth she could dare to even try to put the words
just
and
sex
together in thinking about what she wanted.

Her handbag lay on the passenger seat and her face pinkened betrayingly as she glanced at it. Inside it were the condoms it had taken all her self-confidence and several abortive attempts to purchase. What were the social niceties of such matters? She really had no idea, but she knew that there was no way she could possibly leave either her health or the conception of an unplanned child to chance.