Phantom Lover Page 14

  ‘Oh, yes.’ His eyes sank to her parted lips. ‘That night when you flirted into my bedroom in your silky, see-through nightshirt...’

  ‘I didn’t flirt...and it wasn’t see-through,’ she said weakly, leaning further and further back as his mouth leisurely approached. He was going to kiss her and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it—unless she got up and left the room, of course...

  ‘Enticed, then...and that’s funny, because when I’m alone at night, tossing and turning in my lovely bed, I’m haunted by this vivid memory of your breasts in my hands and my mouth—’

  ‘Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?’ Honor interrupted tremulously, stunned by the image of him lying in his bed on the other side of the wall, aching for her as she had lain aching for him.

  ‘Is it working?’ He brushed his mouth against hers at last.

  ‘No,’ she sighed, her whole body going boneless as his mouth brushed again, and settled...

  ‘Hard-hearted witch...’ He tasted strongly of whisky, and Honor was quickly over the legal limit, struggling to remember all the reasons why she shouldn’t be making it easy for him.

  ‘Adam...the car—your dinner—’ she said, arching her throat under his marauding mouth.

  ‘Damn them all,’ he rumbled. ‘This is more important. I’d rather be doing this right now than anything in the world...’ He pushed her deeper into the cushions, aligning his body over hers, as he slid one side of her blouse down and nuzzled her bare shoulder. ‘Why don’t we go somewhere where we can be alone?’

  ‘We are alone.’

  ‘Not enough. I mean really alone. This is one aspect of my love-life where I definitely don’t need any assistance. I think I remember all the right moves...’

  He certainly did, Honor thought hazily, loving the warmth and weight of him, the beat of his heart setting a new rhythm for her blood. What a pity he didn’t remember the right words to go with them.

  ‘What do you expect from me, Adam?’ she whispered pleadingly.

  He kissed the corner of her mouth and stroked the tip of his tongue briefly into the silky crevice. ‘You have to ask?’ His amusement shimmered with masculine awareness.

  ‘Yes,’ she said threadily. ‘I think I do.’

  His expression of heavy-lidded sensuality changed subtly as he shifted sideways, raising himself on one elbow, his hand moving with slow deliberation from her waist to just below her breasts where it spanned her ribcage. The anticipation of his touch was almost unbearable as he murmured, ‘You do?’

  She nodded, barely, as his mouth lowered to graze the upper curve of her breast, exposed by the sideways slide of her black top.

  ‘Are you sure about that, darling?’ His breath crept under the neckline in a moist and secret caress and she shut her eyes as she felt her breasts tauten. He knew she was sensitive there. He knew all her secrets...except one.

  She shivered and found that she couldn’t answer. Why did he have to ask? He must know the reassurance she needed. Why couldn’t he just lie, and allow them both the luxury of pretending to believe it?

  ‘Honor?’

  She opened her eyes and could have wept. An expression of gritty determination was layered over the silky hot, sensual need that had been flaring out of control moments ago. For the first time she hated him for his magnificent strength of character.

  ‘I’m selfish,’ he said huskily. ‘And greedy. I don’t want to lose a friend to gain a lover. I want both.’ He rolled off the couch to stand up in one fluid motion, pulling her with him and holding her hard against him for a single, searing instant before thrusting her away.

  ‘You asked what do I expect from you? The answer is nothing but what you’re prepared to give,’ he said, safe behind the barrier of his tightly leashed control. ‘So how about giving me some honesty? For instance—why don’t you tell me how it made you feel to open a letter and find out that I was suddenly headlong in love with you? Shocked? Disgusted? Amused? And tell me how you felt when you finally realised that I thought you were somebody else. Not what you did—what you felt!’

  She had put her feelings for him into words once and it had all gone horribly wrong. She had learned a bitter lesson from her mistake.

  ‘I felt—amused,’ she said with cracked defiance, opening her eyes as wide as possible, so that they stung with the effort, and even managing a little trill of a laugh. ‘It was so much like a French farce: turgid over-emotionalism and mislaid messages and mistaken identities, ridiculous entrances and exits. To have taken it seriously would have been plain stupid!’

  ‘So you find it all rather amusing?’ His voice sounded thick with uncertainty and she nearly relented. But then she remembered how little he had told her about his feelings.

  She lifted her head. ‘Yes.’

  His eyes were pale with a savage triumph. ‘Then why are you crying?’

  Her hand flew to her cheek and she was aghast to find it was true. This fresh self-betrayal by her body was the last straw.

  ‘Because I hate you, that’s why!’ she screamed hysterically, vainly trying to wipe away the humiliating evidence only to find she was using the handkerchief he had given her. She flung it at his head and rushed past him to fling open the door.

  Standing on the other side, her hand raised to knock timidly, was Sara, neatly dressed for dinner in one of her aunt’s sedate choices.

  ‘Oh!’ Honor was still trying to stem the ceaseless tide. She knew she must look red-nosed and swollen-eyed and hideous. That must be why Sara was screwing up her face. She cast an agonised look over her shoulder at Adam and in that instant Sara gave a little sobbing gasp.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Like a rocket the girl was gone, sturdy legs pumping as she pounded up the stairs. Honor was riveted in shock as Adam brushed roughly past her.

  She caught his arm, instinctively driven to try to help. ‘Adam—’

  He turned on her abruptly. ‘Let me go to her. For God’s sake, haven’t you already done enough damage tonight?’

  His accusation was so unfair it took her breath away. It wasn’t her fault that Sara might have overheard their argument, even though it was Honor who had been doing the shouting. Whatever else he thought about her, he must know she wouldn’t deliberately involve a child in an adult conflict.

  It was a miserable dinner. Neither Adam nor Sara appeared and Joy had obviously decided the time was ripe to practise her assertiveness on Tania. She announced over the cold soup that she had enrolled in Indian-cooking classes run by the wife of a local accountant who commuted to work in the city. She only had to wait a bare instant for the expected response.

  ‘At your age?’ Tania frowned her doubting disapproval. ‘You’d probably only get in the way of the other students. And think of all that standing. Why don’t you go down to the hobby shop at Evansdale if you want something to do? They have some lovely tapestry canvases for sale.’

  ‘I don’t like sewing. I prefer cooking.’ Joy had marshalled her logic expertly. ‘And Adam agrees that I’m quite well enough to do as much of it as I like. Rhonda told me she’d be glad to be back to her old eight-to-four routine again.’

  ‘I don’t know why you want to learn to cook curries; you know I don’t like spicy foods—’

  ‘But you’re here so rarely for dinner these days, my dear. And Indian cooking isn’t only curries. There’s a vast array of regional dishes—’

  And so it went on, back and forth, while Honor’s attention remained tuned to the silent upper floors.

  At last, when she could stand it no longer, she excused herself and took her cup of coffee up to her office but after half an hour of trying to proofread the annual report of a local community service organisation she gave up in disgust. Proofreading required strict concentration and meticulous attention to detail and she just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Once or twice she heard a heavy tread along the hall but her desk was at the wrong angle to catch anything more than a brief glimpse of movement past t
he half-open door. No one sought her out. Even Monty had abandoned her for the pleasures of roaming his new domain, having established complete domination of the existing local feline population with his usual brawling finesse.

  Finally she could stand the suspense no longer.

  Her feet carried her past Adam’s firmly closed bedroom door, from behind which came the faint sound of the FM Concert Programme to which his radio was permanently tuned, to the one that bore a ceramic rosebud plaque with ‘Sara’ inexpertly engraved on it, product of a school art-class project, Honor had been proudly informed.

  With a nervous look along the hall Honor pressed her ear to the wood above the plaque. Prying, lying, eavesdropping...what miserable depths would she sink to next?

  When she heard no murmur of voices within and knew it was safe to assume that Adam was elsewhere, she knocked softly.

  A very subdued Sara was sitting at her dressing-table staring glumly into the mirror. The dress she had been wearing had been exchanged for the racy-looking, parachute-silk tracksuit that Honor had impulsively bought for her one day, when a tour with Adam had happened to end up next door to a childrenswear factory-shop.

  ‘Daddy said I have to apologise.’ The girl sighed, moving over to sit cross-legged on the rose-coloured bedspread. ‘I was just practising.’

  ‘I think that sort of thing is better not practised,’ Honor told her wryly, feeling some of her tension relax. The tracksuit was a good sign. ‘Spontaneity is usually best if you want to sound sincere. Anyway, I should be the one saying I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you downstairs. Your father and I were—uh—talking and I lost my temper.’

  ‘You said you hated him. He made you cry,’ Sara pointed out flatly.

  ‘That was temper talking and he didn’t make me cry, I managed that all by myself,’ Honor admitted. ‘I get emotional sometimes.’

  ‘PMT,’ Sara nodded sagely. ‘I don’t have to worry about that yet.’

  She grinned suddenly, her slightly pink eyes creasing up the way her father’s did when he was going to deliver a particularly stunning piece of mockery. ‘I just get PT—Pre-adolescent Tension.’

  Honor had to swallow a laugh, feeling they were in severe danger of losing track of the conversation. ‘What did your dad think you had to apologise about?’ she said hurriedly.

  ‘Oh, w-e-l-l...’ Sara drew in a long, deep breath as she put off the evil moment. She picked up one of her pillows and hugged it to her flat chest. Her chin took on a square, pugnacious aspect. ‘It was me!’

  ‘You who?’ responded Honor blankly. Luckily Sara didn’t respond with her usual swiftness to the verbal absurdity.

  ‘Who sent you those letters that Dad wrote. You know, the mushy ones.’ She watched Honor’s face sag, her body following as she sank down on the bed beside the incredible child.

  ‘Dad said you’d be upset. I didn’t do it to hurt anyone— ’

  ‘I know you didn’t,’ responded Honor automatically, still trying to adjust to the idea of a pint-sized Machiavelli instead of an elderly one.

  ‘It was just that I didn’t want Dad to marry Aunt Tania.’

  ‘Marry her?’ Honor felt sick at the idea. ‘Whatever made you think he was going to?’

  Sara hugged her cushion tighter and said defensively, ‘You don’t know what it was like. After we moved in here she was always hanging around Dad, sucking up to him, making stupid sheep’s-eyes at him and telling him how much she needed him. It was gross!

  ‘Not that he’s dumb or anything but Dad’s at a dangerous age, you know. He’ll be forty in a few years and I thought he might marry Aunt Tania in a panic about getting old and decrepit and his manhood withering away...’ Sara described her father’s imagined decline with vivid enthusiasm.

  ‘You see, since Mum died he’s spent most of his spare time doing things with me—he’s afraid I’ll get emotionally deprived or something. I mean, at least I go to parties and stuff with my friends but Dad would rather read a book or listen to music for fun, so what chance is there for him to meet anyone else? Aunt Tania tries to hog all his attention. She even nagged him into taking her to the business things that his secretary used to be his hostess for, and called them dates. Yuk!

  ‘I suppose she was OK when she was just my aunt and we didn’t see her that often but I couldn’t hack her as a stepmother. She’s always wanting to change me, and Dad too, and sometimes he lets her get away with things because he couldn’t be bothered arguing with her.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Then I remembered about you. Whenever a letter arrived with your handwriting on it Dad would get a big grin on his face, even if he was tired and grouchy. He read the good bits out to me sometimes and I thought that you sounded really funny. Clever, too, not like Aunt Tania who doesn’t get half of his jokes! Dad said you were just pen-friends and I thought that meant you lived too far away but I snooped around one day and found out your address. I thought he might be afraid of meeting you in case you didn’t like him in person or that he knew you were real shy or something. He had this newspaper photograph of you, too, in his top drawer—well, it wasn’t you, was it? I guess it was your sister—in this white glittery dress at the Valentine’s Ball and you—she looked really happy and smiley and much more beautiful than Aunt Tania.

  ‘So when I was playing up in the attic one day and found those old letters of Dad’s I thought you might ask to meet him if you found out what a terrific, sexy guy he could be. He’s real romantic, don’t you think, to be able to write awesome letters like that...?’ She sighed mistily and paused for an unusual moment of silent contemplation. ‘So I picked some that didn’t have any dates or anything on them and were all just, you know, the hot stuff...’ She grimaced. ‘I guess it was pretty rotten of me, huh? Like Dad taking my ultra-secret diary and letting someone else read it—that’s what he said.

  ‘Anyway, in the end it all went much easier than I thought because since he’s been here Dad always leaves his personal letters on the hall table for Rhonda to post on her way home from work and all the mail he has redirected from his post-office box gets left there, too. Only nothing seemed to happen for ages and Aunt Tania started hinting to me that wouldn’t it be nice to have a mother to share things with, so then I was desperate and got myself suspended so that Dad wouldn’t be alone around here with her so much—you know, in case she got him in a weak moment...’ She looked at Honor sheepishly. ‘Only you arrived on the same day, and...’

  ‘And I wasn’t the beautiful fairy princess you were expecting,’ Honor finished her sentence ruefully.

  ‘No, but you turned out to be OK,’ Sara said offhandedly magnanimous. ‘You sure put Aunt Tania’s nose out of joint!’ She discarded her pillow and flopped across the bed with a frown. ‘Except I didn’t really help, did I? Because none of it was real. Dad said you can’t make people love each other, however many tricks you play on them. In the end it’s up to them.

  ‘But I want you to know, Honor, that I never read any of the letters you sent back—at least, not after I looked at the first one to make sure you weren’t terminally grossed-out or anything,’ she corrected herself earnestly. ‘I didn’t even open the envelopes. I didn’t really know what to do with them so I just put them straight in the cardboard box I sellotaped under my chest of drawers—where I keep my diary. Aunt Tania snoops too, you see. Dad says as a family we have no respect for privacy.’

  ‘Perhaps you might see your way clear to letting me have them back, then,’ said Honor gravely.

  ‘Oh, sure. But you’ll have to ask Dad. He took them after we had our talk. I have to go back to school on Monday and stay in my room for— Hey, Honor, where are you going?’

  * * *

  Like his daughter, Adam was lying on his back on his bed, with one significant difference: he was surrounded by carelessly torn-open envelopes and numerous lined sheets of delicate blue writing paper. He was reading intently. Good God, she had even perfumed the things with a sprinkle of dried flowers fro
m her garden!

  ‘How dare you? You thieving, rotten, unconscionable pig! Give those back to me!’ she gasped as she burst into the room and launched herself without hesitation across him, grabbing madly at the pieces of paper that swished and swirled around them in a sea of giant blue confetti, stuffing pages down the neck of her blouse as fast as she could, trying to avoid Adam’s laughing attempts to retrieve them.

  ‘What’s the matter, Honor? You’re so serious,’ he taunted when she swore bitterly at the discovery that her black top wouldn’t accept any more stuffing without bursting its buttons. ‘Isn’t this funny? Isn’t this a farce?’ He caught her around the waist, her chest crackling furiously as he pulled her down and declared in a furious hiss, ‘Don’t ever lie to me like that again! My God, I was right when I said you were gullible, wasn’t I? A reckless, hot-headed, gullible romantic! You fell for it like a ton of bricks. Didn’t it occur to you to check up on me first? That writing things like this to a man you’d never met was a bloody dangerous thing to do? What if I had turned out to be some psychotic sex maniac looking for my next victim?’

  ‘You might yet!’ she spat back, flushed with fury and embarrassment and the strange, shocking novelty of having a hundred and fifty pounds of angry male thrust vibrating beneath her.

  ‘You’re going to have ample opportunity to find out!’ he vowed, the yellow fire in his eyes melting into a savage satisfaction as she continued to scrabble and squirm desperately for the few remaining sheets that weren’t crushed under his body. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you, darling. It’s too late. I’ve been reading them for the last half-hour and I have a photographic memory for print. I’m word-perfect already...care to test me?’

  ‘You—’

  Her lips were sealed by a calloused finger. ‘Now calm down and I’ll help you to collect them up. What’s done is done, Honor. Now there’s nothing left for you to hide. Learn to live with it.’ His deceptively calm voice lowered to a silken murmur that shook her from the boughs of her anger. ‘My belated thanks for the lovely compliments, by the way. No one has ever written to me in quite such uninhibited terms before...’