Elizabeth Power was born in Bristol, where she still lives with her husband in a three hundred-year-old cottage. A keen reader, as a teenager she had already made up her mind to be a novelist, although it wasn’t until around thirty that she took up writing seriously. Her love of nature and animals is reflected in a leaning towards vegetarianism. Good food and wine come high on her list of priorities, and what better way to sample these delights than by just having to take another trip to some new exotic resort. Oh, and of course to find a location for the next book…!

Reclaiming
His Wife

The Ruthles

Mariage Bid

Back in Her

Husband’s Bed

The Prodigal Wife

by

Elizabeth Power

Melanie Milburne

Susan Fox

www.millandboon.co.uk

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THE RUTHLESS MARRIAGE BID

by

Elizabeth Power

For Alan – as always

CHAPTER ONE

HE WAS standing at the kerbside waiting to cross the road. It was him! Taylor thought chaotically, battling through the gathering dusk and the sheer volume of rush-hour traffic to catch another glimpse of that proud, dark head, of the striking height and self-assured stance that were unmistakably his.

She heard the rear door of the taxi slam behind her, heard Craig issuing instructions through the driver’s window. But her mind and body were in turmoil, and as the taxi shot forward she swivelled round on her seat, scanning with blood-pumping anticipation, the busy street through the rear window.

The man was nowhere to be seen.

So she had just imagined him there, or been totally mistaken, she realised. As always.

Nervous tension dissipated beneath the familiar disappointment, the desolation that spread through her veins, as chilling as the late-winter afternoon. Beneath the thick grey overcoat she shivered, and was only warmed by the murmur of the infant waking in his car seat beside her, as the little starfish hand curled tightly around the finger that she readily proffered.

‘You’re a scamp,’ she cooed at the appealingly chubby face beaming up at her from its knitted blue bonnet, but her finely drawn features, framed by a bob of gleaming brown, were etched with obvious tension.

She had been so sure it was him. She had even neglected to wave to Craig, she berated herself, still trying to shrug off the unsettling aftermath of mixed emotions fifteen minutes later when the taxi dropped her in the lamp-lit suburbs.

Still clutching her purse, with the baby seat suspended from her other hand, she started walking towards one of the high, Victorian villas.

A shadow fell across her path, large and ominous, and she gasped, dropping her purse, fear for the child she carried tightening her fingers around the handle of the little chair as the tall dark figure loomed from out of the shadows.

‘Jared!’

‘Hello, Taylor.’ With one fluid movement, he stooped to pick up her purse, the long, dark overcoat he hadn’t bothered to fasten spreading to remind her of a raven swooping to its prey, the hair that waved over his collar gleaming ebony beneath the streetlamp.

‘So it was you.’ Jared Steele. A leader in enterprises covering everything from finance to the highest technology. Thirty-eight years old, now, she calculated—twelve years older than she was. Rich, powerful and, as she had found out to her cost, unscrupulous.

Too stunned to thank him, her fingers closed around the rectangle of black leather he had retrieved for her. Her hands were shaking and she had to swallow to try and moisten her uncomfortably dry throat. ‘Outside the studios. Crossing the road…’ But he hadn’t used the crossing. He must have flagged down a taxi… ‘You followed me!’ she breathed, annoyance surfacing with the over-riding excitement that made her pulses race, her legs go weak, which owed more to coming face to face with him like this than her first, initial dread of being mugged.

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer and following his gaze to the little baby seat, she realised suddenly what was going through his mind.

‘You’ve been busy since I saw you last.’

Of course. What other conclusion could he have drawn?

‘When was that?’ she enquired pointedly, ignoring his hard unspoken question. In the eighteen months since that last bitter row he had never come looking for her. She wondered why he had decided to now.

He shrugged and, ignoring her in turn, said, ‘I must confess this was the last thing I expected.’ His mouth appeared chiselled out of granite as he dropped another glance to the sleeping infant. Those deep-set eyes were shielded by his dark and enviably long lashes, eyes that could reduce one to pulp with just one withering look, Taylor remembered, or evoke the most thrilling and dangerous thoughts in any woman under eighty. ‘After all your protestations about having babies. What was it? An accident?’ His voice, which had always had the power to arouse her with its smoky sexuality held a derisive edge and his breath rose in a warm cloud on the frosty air. ‘We both know maternity wasn’t on your agenda. Or perhaps it was just me you weren’t partial to, not having children. That’s one conclusion my ego’s going to have to deal with, isn’t it, Taylor?’

‘Why?’ His comments stabbed at her, opening old and painful wounds. ‘Because I was so obviously instrumental in losing yours!’

His head seemed to jerk back as though she had laid a whip across his face. But if he was recoiling from such frank and blatant words, she thought, pushing angrily past him, perhaps he would know what it was like—how it had felt—when he had used them—and so mercilessly—on her.

‘I must congratulate you. You’ve done well for yourself. Make-up artist—and with a top production company.’ His voice lacked praise, his remarks only serving to let her know that it was no accident—this meeting; that he had actually been checking up on her. ‘But then you always were ambitious, weren’t you?’ he said.

A little shiver ran through her from his chilling tone because, of course, they had argued about that too.

‘And lover boy outside the studios.’ He was right behind her, his deep voice insistent, taunting. ‘Might I hazard a guess that he’d be the child’s father?’

So he had seen her with Craig; noticed that affectionate kiss the man had given her as he had handed her into the taxi. Some deep emotional pain stopped her from immediately putting him straight.

‘How terribly astute of you,’ she breathed, hurting from the memory of the scarring rows that her miscarriage, if not wholly initiating, had only succeeded in exacerbating.

‘Is he living here with you?’ A toss of his chin indicated the three-storey house as he drew level with her along the short driveway.

‘If you mean are we sleeping under the same roof…’ Taylor forced herself to stay calm, keep her clear, mellow voice low as she reached the front door, put her key in the lock ‘… the answer’s “yes.”’

She didn’t get to turn the key, her small gasp of shock the only emotion she allowed herself to show, as hard fingers on her wrist pulled her to face him. Under the stern glare of the security light his angular features looked grim and bloodless.

‘Didn’t it seem to matter to you that you’re still married?’ Eyes, as dark as night, seemed to pierce the depths of hers, boring into her from a mask of anger and disbelief. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you to ask me for a divorce?’

Almost as tall as he was in her high-heeled boots, she could feel the warmth of his breath on her forehead, feel his anger beating against her like ravaging fire. But his nearness alone seemed to be stripping her of her self-possession, without the heat of his accusations that had she been in his shoes, she had to agree, she would have richly deserved. His accusations, however, only fuelled her own anger. Besides, Josh was growing fretful, sensing the insecurity of the situation, and forcibly she pulled herself free, saying, ‘Why? I seem to remember you had no qualms about having a mistress and a wife!’ She opened the front door now, flicked on a switch just inside.

Light spilled out, illuminating the wide Victorian hallway. It was cluttered with toys, boxes and coats and a baby buggy.

‘Are you going to ask me in?’

For an answer she simply left the door open behind her, her shoulders stiffening beneath the stylish coat when she heard him close it, muting the growl of a car in the suburban road.

Without glancing back, she took the post she had picked up into the long, narrow kitchen, doing her best not to trip over the two yowling Siamese cats that had suddenly besieged her, vying for her attention, brown tails lightly flaying her calves.

Carefully, she set Josh down on the small sofa at one end of the narrow room, tossing aside a cushion, a shopping bag, a pile of folded garments, in need of ironing.

‘Very domesticated.’

The deep drawl from behind her had her turning sharply.

Jared was standing in the doorway, looking, as his name suggested, like a man of steel. But with his hands rammed deep into his pockets, long legs planted firmly apart, he was too fine a male specimen for Taylor’s eyes not to be drawn to the impeccable cut of the dark suit he wore under the long coat. With unsparing cruelty her gaze was dragged over the wide shoulders and the hard lean lines of his waist and hips and, as he stood there surveying the chaos of the cluttered kitchen with marked disdain curling his mouth, all she could think of was how it had felt to sink her nails into that broad, bare back while she had sobbed out his name…

The memory rocked her, threatening her equilibrium and, moving across to the fridge, in a less than steady voice she asked, ‘Why did you want to see me?’

He came in then, every footstep measured, slow, precise.

‘I don’t think that takes too much working out.’

Wary green eyes clashed with darkest brown, her perfectly straight nose and softly tapered chin lifting as she opened the fridge, took out a tin of cat food. What was she supposed to deduce from that? Had the mysterious Alicia decided she had had enough of playing nursemaid to a husband she didn’t love? Was she finally giving him up to be with Jared?

Pain cut deep, but she gritted her teeth.

The cats were going mad, particularly Thai, the male Siamese who was making his demands known now by clawing at her coat and yowling vociferously. On top of that, Josh had started to make his presence felt with small whimpers from the sofa, depriving her of the luxury of any self-pity.

Dumping the opened can of food down on the worktop, Taylor slid off her coat. Then wished she hadn’t when she noticed the way Jared’s gaze skimmed over her, taking in the willowy lines of her body beneath her cream polo-necked sweater and the full, bottle-green skirt that fell in soft folds over the spiked-heeled black boots.

‘You’ve got thinner,’ he observed, making no attempt to hide his blatant appraisal of her figure.

An insidious tension crept through her as she tossed her coat down on one of the high stools near the breakfast bar that Craig had made during one of his more adventurous DIY moments. Opening a drawer, she rummaged for a spoon, reached for the partially used can of cat food.

‘I hardly think my weight’s an issue here.’ She stooped to scoop the contents into the two bowls on the floor beside the breakfast bar. Two ravenous heads dived into them before she had even finished.

‘I think it’s very much an issue.’ Those dark eyes were still assessing her, raking over her flushed features and the chic hair, now unintentionally tousled, as she straightened from her task. ‘But then you were never much more than a reed at the best of times, were you?’ he said, with an almost bored glance towards the cats who were putting on a show of not having eaten in weeks.

‘If you say so.’

Josh’s demands had replaced the cats’ with his sudden persistent crying, and Taylor swung away to free him from the confines of his seat. His little face was red and crumpled. ‘He needs feeding—and changing,’ she noted as she lifted him up, her tone suddenly weary, the shock of this unexpected meeting with the man she had longed, yet half dreaded, to see again, taking its toll on her nerves.

‘And you look as though you could do with some help.’

He was there beside her, too big, too awesome and far, far too close.

‘I’m perfectly capable,’ she returned with her voice cracking, and moved quickly away from him, wondering what he was thinking as he watched her carrying Josh across the kitchen. That the baby’s hair, so close to hers, was almost the same rich brown? That Josh’s wispy curls must have been inherited from his father since hers was so thick and sleek?

‘As capable of wringing a man’s heart?’

Taking the baby bottle out of the fridge, she met those dark eyes with a guarded question in her own. ‘What?’

‘How long was it, Taylor?’

‘How long was what?’ She slammed the fridge closed. Outside, in the hallway, she caught the sudden, unexpected sound of the front door being opened.

‘How long before you jumped into another man’s bed after leaving mine?’

Something flared in her eyes, locking her jaw tight. ‘How dare you even ask that when—’

She bit back her words, her body stiffening from the footsteps moving along the hall, tension warring with anger inside of her. He had come here assuming the worst about her, and through a crazy desire to lash out at him she hadn’t put him straight. Now she was torn between wishing she had and relishing his being taken down a peg when he realised that he had made a total fool of himself.

‘Hello, Tay…’ The young woman who had just come in stopped dead, her greeting curtailed by the sight of the tall man standing there in the kitchen.

‘Jared! Jared Steele!’ A year or two older than Taylor, Charity Lucas had a sparkling smile that seemed as wide now as her mane of short shaggy auburn hair. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Charity?’ Jared’s greeting was cordial, yet laced with puzzlement.

Though she was inches shorter than Taylor and totally dwarfed by Jared, Charity’s ebullient personality seemed nonetheless to instantly fill the room. ‘Do you two know each other?’ Her words were strung with surprise as she looked from one to the other.

‘You could say that.’ Jared’s tone was dry. ‘And I could be forgiven for asking you the same thing?’

Charity laughed. ‘Taylor rents from us. Upstairs. I’m her landlady.’ She held out her arms to the baby who, ever since she had come in, had been making little noises of recognition and was now straining towards her. ‘How’s he been?’

‘Fine.’ Handing Josh over to the other woman, Taylor couldn’t look at Jared, but she could sense clarity dawning on that sharp brain. ‘Craig told me to tell you he’d be late tonight.’

She was too aware of Jared listening to every word, as conscious, no doubt, of her tense discomfort as he was of the other woman hugging and kissing the happy, gurgling Josh.

‘I can do that now.’ Taylor was disappointed when Charity readily took the baby bottle from her. She would have preferred to deal with the feed herself, desperate, at that moment, for something to do. ‘You didn’t tell me you knew Jared.’

Not sure what to do with her hands, now that she had nothing to hold, Taylor uttered an awkward little laugh, reaching for her coat. ‘No.’ She wondered how Charity knew him, but was too disconcerted to ask.

‘Hardly a reflection on you, Charity.’ Moving towards them with that lithe grace of his, on the surface Jared oozed irresistible charm. ‘It seems she decided to keep us both in the dark,’ he breathed with the flash of a smile. His eyes, though, pierced like rods of steel. There was a flush lying along his cheekbones that hinted at some fervent emotion, but one that vied with something like satisfaction that said he had the upper hand and was enjoying every minute of it.

‘In what capacity do you two know each other?’ Charity asked, balancing Josh on a curvy hip while she started to warm his bottle, adding laughingly, ‘Or is that rather an indelicate question?’

Dark head tilted, Jared’s eyes met Taylor’s in penetrating enquiry. It was strange, she thought swallowing, how he had made all the wrong assumptions, and she was the one left feeling like a fool.

Her small breasts lifted as she caught her breath, wondering what to say. She hadn’t told Charity she was married and she didn’t want to spring the truth on her friend like this. And whether Jared was surprisingly sensitive to that fact, she wasn’t sure, but swiftly he was answering, ‘Let’s just say we go back quite a way.’

‘Really?’ Bustling around the worktop, Charity sent an enquiring glance at each of them over her shoulder, bouncing Josh on her arm as he suddenly started crying again. But then obviously sensing that she was treading on uneven ground, quickly she went on, ‘Jared’s a friend and business associate of Dad’s. I met him first when I came home one hols from university and he was staying with them, and in those days I must admit to having had a glorious crush on him.’ The contentment and security in her marriage gave Charity the freedom to declare it so openly, Taylor realised, although the hint of colour in the woman’s cheeks assured her that where Jared Steele was concerned, even the most fulfilled of women weren’t entirely immune. ‘Will you let me make him some tea? Or are you keen to have him all to yourself? Take him upstairs?’

Exchanging glances with Jared, Taylor clung to her coat as though to a protective shield.

‘Well?’ she asked, hoping he wouldn’t accept Charity’s offer, yet wanting to delay the inevitability of being alone with him again.

‘I think,’ he said, dropping a glance at Thai who, having wolfed down his meal, suddenly shot out of the room as if he’d been startled by some unseen horror, ‘tea would be very nice—some other time. But right now Taylor and I do have things to discuss.’

Do we? she thought, watching the smaller, more subdued Asia delicately picking at her food, and feeling something like cold desolation trickling through her. Surely there could be only one thing he would want to discuss after the tumultuous peaks and troughs that had been their marriage?

‘I’ll look in before I leave,’ he promised Charity, before Taylor guided him back into the hall and up the stairs leading to the top floor.

‘So the cats aren’t yours. The baby isn’t yours. And your lover’s somebody else’s!’ he comprehended as soon as he was in her flat. There was a marked silence about the place after all the domesticity downstairs.

‘I never said anyone was my lover! Unlike you, I do have some respect for other people’s marriages!’ she flung at him, tense from the effort of trying to stay in control.

The hard masculine face was etched with some harsh emotion and anger darkened his eyes to slits of jet, but he said nothing.

‘I work with Craig,’ Taylor continued then, ‘and he took Josh to the studios today because Charity’s mother had a fall and needed her there. You saw us together and just assumed what you wanted to. Like you were so quick to assume that Josh was mine!’ she accused, tossing her coat over the back of one of a pair of matching sofas which, though in immaculate order, she had managed to pick up cheaply at a clearance auction.

‘A natural deduction, in the circumstances,’ Jared muttered, ‘as I think you’ll agree.’ He was standing in the middle of the impeccably furnished room, looking around him, and even its generous proportions couldn’t detract from his magnificence, or that air of innate authority that was as much a part of him as his shadow. ‘I should have known better, shouldn’t I? Somehow that delightfully homely scene downstairs didn’t quite gel with my memory of the girl I knew.’ His gaze was still raking over her carefully chosen belongings; over the sparse but tasteful ornaments and co-ordinating pictures, the flawless rugs and sofas and the low-level bookcases with their immaculate veneer. ‘Now this is more like it,’ he breathed heavily, making her wonder what he was thinking because, after the domestic chaos to which he had just referred below, the flat only seemed to emphasise the ordered isolation of her own existence. ‘This is much more in keeping with the Taylor Steele I knew. Or is it back to Taylor Adams now?’ He didn’t need to ask if she was using her maiden name. If she hadn’t been, then Charity might have guessed the truth. ‘Why didn’t you tell her you were married?’ he demanded with some unfathomable emotion burning like dark fire in his eyes.

She shrugged. ‘The question never came up.’

As she made to move past him, hard fingers closed around her upper arm. ‘It just did.’

He looked so angry that beneath the pale sweater, Taylor shivered. ‘I don’t know.’ Disconcerted, she pulled herself out of his grasp.

In truth, she hadn’t told her friend and landlady—or indeed anyone who didn’t need to know—that she had been married—and certainly not that her marriage had broken up. She didn’t like the sense of personal failure it implied.

She went across to the window, drew the heavy curtains before turning back to him. ‘You said we had things to discuss.’

‘We most certainly have.’

Tension coiled in her stomach. ‘Like what?’

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then in that deep authoritative way of his he advised, ‘Sit down, Taylor.’

An ache seemed to start somewhere in the middle of her chest as she did as he suggested, dropping down onto one of the sofas. It was her flat, yet even here he was the one giving the orders, the one in control, she acknowledged grudgingly, when he remained firmly on his feet.

‘I know we made a hash of our marriage. And I can see you’ve picked yourself up…’ he sent another glance around the room ‘… sorted your life out quite admirably. It almost makes a man feel… superfluous, especially when all the funds paid into your account were returned in full.’

‘What did you think I’d do, Jared? Take it all with undying gratitude? Did you think I wouldn’t be able to manage on my own?’

‘I didn’t think anything. I didn’t want you to have to— manage, as you put it—or to experience any unnecessary difficulty. Not when I could make life easier for you, even if you weren’t living under my roof any more.’

‘Well… as you can see…’ a small gesture indicated the modest comfort of the flat ‘… I’m not exactly living in squalor or abject poverty.’ Returning her gaze to his, she wished she hadn’t when the dark penetration of his eyes sent a weakening torrent of emotion through her. Quietly, through lips that seemed not to want to move, she murmured, ‘Why have you come?’

The broad, masculine chest lifted and stilled as though it were an effort for him to say what he had come to say. Behind him, the large mirror over the Victorian fireplace reflected wide shoulders that were as rigid as iron.

‘I don’t know about you but… well this state of affairs… It’s hardly very satisfactory, is it? I mean… you living here… while I…’ He glanced away from her, his teeth clenched, as though the state of affairs, as he had called it, fuelled his anger. ‘Being separated, yet not being free either. I think we should change things,’ he rasped.

The composure Taylor prided herself on had deserted her somewhere between coming up here and when he had told her to sit down, and now her words left her on a low croak. ‘Change things?’

Again there was hesitation in Jared’s usually arrogant manner. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ he stated with an air of finality. ‘I certainly don’t think it an ideal situation. And I’m sure you can’t think so. This may come as a surprise to you, but I miss the domestic scene. Call me crazy if you like but I’m keen to throw myself right back there into matrimonial bliss—have a second stab at it—but as you can appreciate, I can’t do it without your co-operation.’

What was he saying? That he wanted them to try again? Surprise, shock and an emotion to which she wanted to give no credence surged through her. Was he saying he had missed her? That he still wanted her?

Well of course he did, an inner little voice told her cruelly after the initial shock of his statement began to wear off. Hadn’t he had the best of both worlds while they had been together?

Slamming the lid on a well of anguished memories, she asked tentatively, ‘Are you implying we should get back together?’ But then the ambiguity of his statement suddenly struck her, making her tag on, ‘Or are you asking me for a divorce?’ She was relieved that no emotion crept into her voice, giving away how much he still affected her and, sparing herself the humiliation of a possible rejection, quickly she added, ‘Because if you are, I don’t intend standing in your way.’

Was it relief or surprise, she wondered, that brought him down onto the opposite sofa? That furrowed his brow and kept his voice low and husky when he spoke again? ‘I hadn’t realised you’d agree to one so readily.’

Taylor drew in a breath that was almost too painful to expel. And to think she could so easily have misunderstood!

She gave a careless movement of her shoulder. ‘Why not? We’re living separate lives. You said so yourself.’ So he wanted to get married again. Have a second stab at it, as he had so casually and unthinkingly called it. ‘Who is she?’ she asked caustically. ‘The wonderful Alicia?’

‘What?’ His eyes had narrowed into slits.

‘This woman you’re prepared to sacrifice your freedom to for a second time?’

He was still looking at her as though he were trying to fathom out why she was asking. Or, from the grimness of his mouth, perhaps he thought she had no right to question him on the subject—no right at all.

‘Or have you found someone else?’ Jumping up, bitterly she couldn’t help flinging down at him, ‘Someone else willing to give you the children I couldn’t—no, wouldn’t— agree to?’

Frighteningly swift, Jared was on his feet. ‘You haven’t a clue what you’re saying,’ he rasped in a harshly chiding tone. ‘I was hoping by now you would have grown up a little and come to your senses! You’re still governed by that jealous nature and a far too vivid imagination. As for children—that isn’t important.’

‘No?’ Her thick hair moved sleekly as she tilted her head, her green eyes dark and injured. ‘Funny! It seemed of paramount importance when you were married to me!’

She gave a small cry as he suddenly reached out, dragging her against him, the hands gripping her upper arms, hard and bruising.

‘I still am. Married to you,’ he breathed, his strong white teeth clamping together, his jaw, with that marked cleft at its centre, locked in anger and some other, more primal emotion that excited as much as it unnerved her.

His closeness could have been her undoing. The strength of those arms that held her but a few centimetres from his body, his familiar, elusive scent and the latent power of his sexuality all combined to make her head swim with the longing to throw her arms around him, tilt her lips in shameless invitation to his. But common sense prevailed and beneath the burn of his gaze she taunted in a whisper and with a control she was far from feeling, ‘Do you want both of us, Jared?’

His features were almost feral, nostrils flaring, his eyes glittering with something that for a few heady seconds had Taylor panicking, fearing that he was going to take the decision away from her and plunge them both into a moment’s savage passion of the kind that had ruled them both during the final days of their marriage. A passion that now they would only both regret.

But then suddenly, and with a heavy lifting of his chest, as if it had taken every ounce of will-power he possessed, he released her.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he muttered breathlessly, and a few seconds later she heard his footsteps thundering down over the stairs.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOUR husband!’ Charity breathed, having called to ask if Taylor could spare a carton of milk later that evening. ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me? No, don’t answer that,’ she added quickly, palms upwards in negation of any explanation that might be forthcoming. ‘It’s none of my business and you have a right to keep it to yourself.’

With anyone else, Taylor thought, it might have been a prompt for more information, but she knew that with Charity that wasn’t the case. Just as she knew that the request for milk wasn’t a ploy to question her about Jared. Taylor had offered the information voluntarily and with little prompting. Besides, with a family and two cats to feed, Charity was always running out of milk.

‘I’m just not too proud of carrying around the stigma of a broken marriage,’ Taylor admitted, reaching into the fridge for the small, unopened carton.

‘Oh, Taylor! It’s hardly a stigma these days.’

‘Well, a failure then.’

Charity treated her to one of her caring smiles. ‘Not even that. It’s because you do everything so perfectly. Always look good. Manage a career and—’ she sent a glance around the modestly fitted but pristine kitchen ‘—somehow keep your home spick and span. Thanks.’ She took the carton Taylor handed her, giving it a shake as she said wryly, ‘Never running out of basic necessities. Sometimes you’ve got to realise that you’re human too. It’s all right not to succeed in everything.’

Was that how Charity—and possibly other people—saw her? Taylor wondered, shocked. As a kind of superwoman? The proverbial perfectionist?

Closing the fridge, she gave her a friend a half-hearted smile. She wasn’t sure she liked being viewed like that at all.

‘Are you going to at least let me in on how long you’ve known him?’ the other woman ventured.

She owed Charity that at least, Taylor decided, having deceived her over her marital status even if it were only by omission, although she had gone as far as to tell both Charity and Craig that she had had a relationship that hadn’t worked out.

‘It was four and a half years ago,’ Taylor told her, opening the dishwasher to unload it, releasing a sudden cloud of steam. ‘I was working in a small provincial theatre as assistant to the set designer. I think Jared knew the leading lady of the play we were putting on at the time. His mother had been an actress and I suppose he knew people through her. Anyway, the theatre was in extreme financial difficulty and was scheduled for closure at the end of that season.’ Carefully she stacked several small plates in the cupboard above the worktop. ‘It had been a theatre for ninety years and was going to mean a great loss to the community. I found out later that Jared financed it, prevented it from closing down.

‘One of the cast threw a party and that was the first time I saw him. All he did was look at me across the room…’ And she had been lost for ever, a helpless, willing slave to his enthralling sexuality.

She stared wistfully down at her hand as though seeing something more than the little warm glass she had used for her fruit juice that morning.

At twenty-one she had been a virgin, green and untutored in the mysteries of love and passion, wary after the unsettled nature of her parents’ marriage.

There had been a few hard years before then, unhappy years when, after losing the father she had adored, she had gone to live with her mother and step-father. Almost immediately, however, she had been made to feel like an interloper. Her mother had made a new life for herself that didn’t take account of looking after a lonely, spirited teenager. As soon as she had been old enough, Taylor had left home, working hard to put herself through art college. Before she was even nineteen, her mother emigrated to Australia and, all alone in the world, Taylor had studied single-mindedly, shrugging off all advances by the opposite sex, except the most innocent and undemanding of dates.

Jared, though, had become her lover almost from the start. By that time her career was already under way. Not that it would have mattered, she reflected poignantly, forgetting for a few moments that Charity was there, because the passions that had ravaged them had been too great for denial or restraint.

Within a month she had moved out of her bedsit into his luxury penthouse apartment. And two months after that, just after her twenty-second birthday, they were married on a Hawaiian beach, pledging their vows to the soughing breezes and the song of an azure ocean.

She had invited her mother to attend, sending two airline tickets and a hotel booking with the simple invitation, which had been politely declined. Even that, however, hadn’t detracted from the magic of her wedding day.

It had been a partnership made in heaven—or so she had thought—until the party Jared had thrown a few weeks afterwards to celebrate their marriage, to introduce his friends and business associates to his new wife.

With few friends of her own, Taylor had invited just one or two people with whom she had been working at the theatre and, still basking in the warmth of being Jared’s new bride, was enjoying herself enormously at that party. It was only when, somewhat overwhelmed by all their congratulations and good wishes, she had wandered out onto the balcony that surrounded the penthouse that she had heard the two women talking.

One voice she instantly recognised as that of the leading lady of the play that had just finished running, the other belonged to an older woman she hadn’t met until that night.

Obscured by a screen of metal lacework supporting a thick and prolific vine, Taylor had stopped, hesitant to venture further, suddenly aware of the nature of the women’s conversation.

‘It’s been so quick,’ the familiar voice was saying. ‘I’d never have labelled Jared as the impulsive type. But you could have knocked me down with a feather when he came back from Hawaii married. I mean, after… What was the name of that woman he was seeing in Philadelphia? Alicia?’ And after a murmur of uncertainty, ‘Oh, I know it was an impossible situation,’ that same voice continued, ‘but well… he was so involved.’

‘A woman with a disabled husband she’s never going to leave doesn’t exactly make for a settled future,’ the older woman responded, ‘and I suppose Jared couldn’t wait around forever. He’s a full-blooded male. He needs a wife—children—and when all is said and done, well… she’s a lovely little thing.’

‘Hardly little!’ the leading lady contradicted with emphasis. ‘She almost matches him in height—certainly in those heels!’

‘Yes, but she’s so much younger than he is, that’s what I meant,’ the other woman elaborated. ‘This… Alicia, I believe, was much nearer his age. Still, he’s certainly picked one young enough and ripe enough to have his babies. She looks as though she’ll conceive every time he sneezes! And what with being so willowy and vulnerable looking—no wonder he couldn’t resist her! She must bring out the protective instinct in him!’

They both laughed, a muted sound drifting out across the dark waters of the Thames and the fairy-lit city.

Unable to face them, numbly Taylor had retreated inside.

When she had challenged Jared later about his being involved with a married woman, his reply had been surprisingly curt.

‘Who have you been talking to?’ he had wanted to know, flinging open the door to the wardrobe.

‘It was just something I overheard,’ she said.

He had sworn under his breath when she repeated her question.

‘She was separated from her husband when I met her. He had a car accident and she went back to him. That’s all there was to it,’ he said.

But it wasn’t, Taylor thought, seeing in that strong face—absorbed as he unfastened a cuff-link—an unmistakable tension that spoke volumes.

‘Did you want to marry her?’ she had asked tentatively, to which he responded only with, ‘I married you.’

‘Did you love her?’ She hadn’t intended to ask him so directly, nor had he been expecting her to, she reflected, forever afterwards hearing those hard and angry words he had lobbed back at her.

‘Yes I loved her. Are you satisfied? I had an affair. It’s something I’m not proud of, but it happened. Now let’s forget it,’ he had seethed through gritted teeth, before storming out of the bedroom.

Which was easier said than done, Taylor thought now, because she had tried. Nevertheless, the doubts and anxieties had seeded themselves in her mind, causing unnecessary tensions between them, sprouting up with renewed vigour every time he went away. The situation wasn’t helped when sometimes, answering the phone, she heard the line go dead at the other end, or when someone ringing from his office innocently asked her if she knew when his flight would be in from Philadelphia. He had told her he was going to New York, and that, she knew, was the truth, but he hadn’t mentioned going on to Philadelphia. So why had he kept it from her? she had asked herself, too aware that Philadelphia was where this Alicia lived. Why, unless he had had some very strong reason to feel guilty about it?

Unsure of him, plagued by long-buried insecurities, she had thrown herself wholeheartedly into her job, her mind made up about one thing.

She would never have children. Never entertain bringing babies into a marriage that wasn’t one hundred per cent secure.

When Jared had suggested starting a family, she had told him she wanted to wait—that she wasn’t that bothered about having children at all. Keen for an heir to succeed him in the company he had built single-handed, it was then, after several attempts on his part to change her mind had failed, that he had accused her of being interested only in her career.

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ she had flung at him, remembering all too painfully that conversation on the balcony, adding that if he had just got married to have children, then he should have married someone who would have happily provided him with them.

Angrily then, he had tossed back, ‘I thought I had!’

So that was it, she had thought, broodingly, watching as he poured himself a Scotch and soda in the apartment’s luxurious sitting room, challenging him with, ‘Is that the only reason for our marriage?’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ he had said coldly.

But the doubts and resentments had festered and grown. After that, whenever he broached the subject, she would simply clam up.

She couldn’t—wouldn’t! she’d assured herself, agree to have what might possibly turn out to be a tug-of-war child, not when she was so convinced that at any moment he might leave her for the woman he really loved.

When she had accidentally conceived, fears for her child’s future had made her anxious and uncommunicative, something to which Jared had been acutely sensitive, even if not to the reason why.

‘Perhaps this is what this marriage needs,’ he had stressed one evening, a couple of months into her pregnancy.

‘What?’ she had challenged. ‘Something to keep me in my place while you go off anytime and anywhere you please?’ Already battling with irresolvable insecurities, it hadn’t helped when he had told her in no uncertain terms to grow up.

With their relationship already floundering, he had flown off to the States for a conference with several of his American company’s hi-tech whiz-kids a couple of days afterwards, during which time Taylor had started to miscarry. When he returned ten days later, her pregnancy was over.

‘Well, that’s exactly what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ he said when, still numb and wretched with grief she told him she had lost the baby. He had looked, she’d thought—wondering if he had had a particularly gruelling conference— bleak-eyed, yet frighteningly grim.

Illogically blaming herself for losing her baby, wanting to hurt herself as well as to hurt Jared, not thinking straight, she had thrown back, ‘Oh, sure! I arranged for it to happen! Well, you were having such a good time with your mistress, weren’t you? Why not!’

His eyes were glittering with such intense anger she wondered now what had prevented him from actually hitting her as he had snarled back, ‘At least she wouldn’t sacrifice a child for her precious job!’ There was such an edge of steel to his voice that she knew that whatever feeling he might have had for her, until then, she had killed with that last rash retort.

It was, however, to Taylor, an admission that he was still involved with the other woman, and one that had propelled her into leaving. The very next morning after he had left for his office, she had scribbled him a note, laid her wedding ring on top of it and fled, and she hadn’t seen him again until today.

‘Mmm,’ Charity murmured expressively, jolting Taylor out of her painful retrospection.

‘Mmm, what?’ she pressed, agitated, quickly stowing away the glass she was still holding.

‘Just “Mmm,”’ the woman responded, as Taylor turned round again. She could feel her friend’s perceptive gaze resting on her flushed cheeks.

Craig was home and from the floor below she could hear water running in the pipes, caught the strains of one of his country CDs playing. Safe, homely Craig who liked nothing better than to be with his family, to put up a shelf and play the odd game of golf when his job as lighting technician allowed.

‘I suppose a man like Jared could be quite overwhelming to be married to,’ Charity expressed as though picking up on Taylor’s thoughts. ‘Forceful. Possessive. Exciting. I know I said I had a crush on him but if he had asked me out, I’d have been scared to death! I mean all that dynamism and vitality! And the sophistication that makes the hard-headedness behind it all so scary and… I don’t know… I don’t suppose I should say it to you but, well… thrilling!’

Charity’s eyes were bright from the teenage fantasies she must have woven over what was after all an acquaintance of her parents while she studied Taylor sagaciously, looking no doubt for some flicker of agreement in her friend. But all Taylor said dryly was, ‘And with a temper to match,’ because of course Jared Steele was all of those things.

‘Ah-ah,’ Charity breathed. ‘I wondered why he came down those stairs like a bolt of lightning without calling in on his way out as he promised.’

In one of the rooms below, Josh had suddenly started to cry.

‘He’s just the sort of man I would have picked for you, Taylor.’ Charity was already moving towards the door. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’

Taylor gave an outwardly nonchalant shrug. ‘We had our differences.’

‘With no chance that the two of you will ever get back together?’ Charity looked hopeful, but Taylor shook her head.

‘No,’ she answered, her lowered lashes concealing the pain in her eyes as she thought of their bitter arguments, remembered the conversation she had had with Jared earlier. ‘No,’ she said again, more adamantly this time. ‘No chance at all.’

Taylor was putting the finishing touches to the face of the young actress who was last on the set that morning. It was for a televised play and the outside shooting had been completed two weeks ago. Now it was just a matter of finishing the studio shots and, taking a break, several members of the cast and production team who had wandered into Makeup were sitting around, chatting and drinking coffee.

‘… didn’t think when I arranged to pick them up at lunchtime that they’ll be defrosted by the time I get them home.’

One of the production assistants was bemoaning her stupidity over some desserts she had bought for dinner. Concentrating on blending blusher across the young actress’s cheeks, Taylor wasn’t really listening until she heard her own name mentioned.

‘Just give them to Taylor to hold for the afternoon,’ Paul Salisbury was advising dryly. ‘That should keep them frozen.’

Tall and blond, Paul was a brilliant photographer who believed his prowess with women was all due to his good looks and his success with a camera. With Taylor, however, he had had his grand opinion of himself sadly shattered, she realised, when she had refused to go out with him—or with any man, she had determined bitterly, even if she weren’t still married—which was why, she decided, Paul had been sniping at her ever since.

‘I’ll have you know, Taylor is a very warm and sensitive person,’ Craig Lucas, mug in hand, perched on the edge of a table, lobbed back.

Dear unassuming Craig, Taylor thought, sharing a smile with the man with twinkling brown eyes, whose tawny head was bent slightly forward—as though he were uncomfortable with his long lean frame, she had often thought— grateful for the unnecessary but caring way he had leaped to her defence.

He was, however, looking towards the door, just as everyone else was and, glancing curiously over her shoulder, Taylor stifled a small shocked gasp.

‘How—how did you get in here?’ she stammered, her pulses quickening under the dark brooding gaze of the man who had just come through the doorway. Security was stringent and no one could get in without a pass.

‘I told them who I was and that I wanted to see you,’ Jared answered casually.

And that would have been enough, with that daunting air of authority and that core-hard confidence, Taylor thought grudgingly, to overcome the hardest obstacles.

She saw the withering glance he directed at Craig and wondered if he had heard the technician’s complimentary remarks about her; heard what Paul had said. She couldn’t help noticing though how the long dark coat and immaculate dark suit seemed to give Jared an edge over the younger men, over the rest of the production team and over her, dressed as she was, like they all were, in casual sweaters and jeans.

As if on an unspoken order, the others were already trooping out.

‘There,’ Taylor said, having made a great show of ignoring him by brushing powder from the girl’s cheeks and standing back at last to examine her work. ‘Now go out there and do your best.’

Getting to her feet, the actress scarcely glanced at her reflection, concentrating only on sending Jared a blatantly inviting smile before leaving them to join the others.

Disconcerted at being alone with him, Taylor began tidying her cosmetics, discarding used tissues, fastening lids on jars.

‘I take it you came here to discuss… what we were talking about the other day.’ Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘divorce’. It hurt enough to realise that he hadn’t wasted any time in getting back to her. But that was pride, she told herself. Nothing more. ‘If that’s the case…’ she was tossing brushes into a tall plastic holder ‘… I hardly think we can talk here.’

‘Exactly,’ that deep voice agreed. ‘Which is why I’ve booked lunch for us both in a quiet little restaurant I know, so if you’d like to get your coat, we can be on our way.’

‘Now wait a minute!’ Slamming down a pot of cleansing cream in front of the brightly lit mirror, Taylor faced him with her arms folded, supported by the shelf below the bank of mirrors that stretched along one wall. ‘Aren’t you rather jumping the gun just a bit? What makes you think I can just drop everything and follow you like some obedient little pet dog?’

‘Your receptionist—or whoever it was I spoke to when I telephoned earlier. She said you were doing your last job of the morning and that you’d probably be finished within half an hour.’

‘Oh, did she?’ Swinging back to her task, Taylor opened a drawer, dropped a few items into it and slammed it closed again. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you, Jared. I still can’t come with you.’ There was a defiant air to her fine features as she delivered with just a shade of smugness, ‘I’ve got a dental appointment first thing this afternoon.’

‘Which is also why I booked a restaurant no more than ten minutes from the dental practice.’

‘You…’ Leaning back against the shelf again, Taylor wrapped her arms around herself in a subconsciously protective gesture, the bright lights behind her making her hair gleam like liquid silk as she shook her head. ‘I don’t believe you’re for real,’ she whispered, flabbergasted, feeling her privacy being sorely invaded. ‘What rights have you got to go checking up on me? Are you hoping to find some besotted lover so you can sue me for adultery rather than admit to it yourself?’

A nerve seemed to jerk in his jaw, but he made no comment in response to her little outburst.

‘It was more a case of serendipity than purposely checking up on you,’ he said phlegmatically instead. ‘When I phoned here they said that if I wanted to catch you I’d have to do so quickly as you had a dental appointment at two. I then deduced that you were probably using the same practice as when we were living together, so I simply rang and asked if my wife had arrived yet and when they told me when you were expected, I knew I’d guessed correctly.’

He had also assumed—and correctly—that for convenience she would still be using her married name at the dental practice. Silently she had to compliment him on his ingenuity, but his calculated determination unsettled her.

‘And if I needed to find someone besotted…’ Coolly he reached over her shoulder, causing her to catch her breath from his unsettling nearness as he flicked the switch that turned off the lights around the mirror. ‘I don’t think I’d need look much further than these studios, Taylor, do you?’

The meal was a tense, uneasy affair. At least where she was concerned, Taylor decided, which was why she had ordered only a piece of crisp bread with a light topping which she would still have had difficulty swallowing if it hadn’t been for the mineral water she had ordered with it.

Jared, however, seemed perfectly relaxed as he tucked into his steak sandwich with a second cup of coffee. She supposed under normal circumstances she would have complimented him upon his choice of restaurant. Totally informal, it was small but airy, the tables well spaced, the efficient service apparent as soon as they stepped inside, when a waiter had swiftly and discreetly borne their coats away.

‘No wonder you’re so thin.’ His dark glittering irises surveyed her with unmasked disapproval across the table. ‘Charity’s cats eat more than you do and they’re like waifs. How long have you lived with Charity?’ he was demanding before she could respond to his comments about her weight.

‘I’m not living with them,’ she stated pointedly.

‘Don’t split hairs,’ he said, sounding impatient. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

Taylor inhaled deeply. He was right. It was pointless deliberately antagonising him. It was just that he hadn’t even skirted the subject he had brought her out here to discuss and her anticipation had become a tight knot in her stomach.

‘Just over a year,’ she told him then. ‘Within a week or two of my being engaged by the studios. With Josh on the way, Craig and Charity decided it would be practical financially to let the top floor. I was looking for a flat. And that was it. I couldn’t have found anywhere better if I’d tried. Charity’s such a lovely person it wasn’t difficult striking up an instant friendship with her, and Craig’s so easygoing, it’s never been a problem working with him all day and seeing him socially as well. He’s been a marvellous friend to me too.’

‘Well, bully for Craig,’ he drawled.

His meal finished, he was sitting with one elbow resting on the back of his chair, so that a good deal of white shirt was exposed beneath his open jacket.

Disconcertedly, Taylor dragged her gaze from the dark shadow of his body hair, clearly visible through the fine cotton, aware of a different kind of tension invading her now.

‘You’re determined not to like him, aren’t you?’ she accused, wondering for a few fleeting moments if his motive sprang from jealousy. But, no, she decided, dismissing the thought before it had scarcely taken shape. Jared Steele was the type of man who evoked that emotion in others, not experienced himself. And, anyway, he was in love with someone else. He had always loved someone else… ‘I thought Charity was a friend of yours,’ she challenged when he ignored her last question.

‘She is. Or rather, her parents are.’

‘Well, then,’ Taylor uttered, with an unconscious lifting of her chin. ‘Don’t you think they—and she—might take exception to your insinuations that I’m having an affair with her husband? Because she’s my friend too—and I do!’

A faint smile played around the hard masculine mouth. He didn’t look at all perturbed.

‘You’ve grown more confident,’ he remarked.

His soft observation was unexpected and disarming and quickly she lifted her glass, took a last draught of the cool water.

‘What did you expect?’ she challenged, setting her glass down on the pale cloth. ‘Even the most naïve of us grow up—if we’re forced to. And boy! Was I naïve!’

He acknowledged this only with a subtle lifting of a dark eyebrow.

‘As I recall, you also didn’t always make friends so easily. Or perhaps it was just that you didn’t try.’

No, she thought. She always had been a bit of a loner, too shy and self-conscious for her own good. Even at school she had preferred to read or sketch rather than join in with the more communal pursuits of her peers. Perhaps that was just how she was. Or perhaps it sprang from a reluctance to get too close to anyone…

‘We all change—for better or worse,’ she said without thinking, and felt a sudden sharp emotion stab her.

She saw a furrow crease the high, intellectual forehead, met those far too perceptive eyes and looked quickly away.

‘So what were you doing for the first six months after you ran away? I did contact your mother but she couldn’t give me any information, and with no friends to pump—or relatives in this country—it proved to be an impossible task trying to find you.’

Had he looked for her? The knowledge brought a treacherous colour to her cheeks.

‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’ she murmured. After all, whatever his reason for trying to find her then, it didn’t alter the fact that now he had found her, it was with only one purpose in mind. Which suited her fine! she convinced herself, in spite of the dull ache under her ribs.

He sat forward then, resting his elbows on the table, his chin on his clasped fingers.

‘Humour me,’ he breathed.

So she did, telling him how she had moved north for a while, taking a short, intensive art course to further the basic grounding she had received at college. It was difficult though, keeping her voice steady, trying not to notice how strongly chiselled his face was, how his long lashes seemed to emphasise the darkness of his eyes and how his cruel mouth—a mouth that had once worked magic on her sensitive flesh—firmed now first with something like disapproval then with what…? Admiration? she wondered. Surely not!

‘I saw an opening for a make-up artist down here in London, grabbed it and moved back. So there you have it. My wild and exciting life in its most uncensored form.’

A contemplative smile touched his lips. ‘Can there be anything more wild and exciting than what we had, Taylor?’

The smoky quality of his voice played across her frayed nerves, working its own magic on her senses. Before her mind’s eye rose the image of his hard and superb physique, of his naked limbs entwined with hers, of strong, dark body hair grazing her softness.

No, she thought. Whatever else their marriage had lacked, it certainly hadn’t lacked sensuality.

That he still wanted her was obvious, in the most primitive sense at least. She could see it in those dark, dilated pupils, in the flaring of those proud nostrils that spoke of the huge hunting male catching the scent of a mate. She closed her eyes against it now, knowing that he would recognise an answering and involuntary response in her if for one moment she let her guard down, and with the instinct of self-preservation she forced herself to remember why he had come. Shakily she whispered, ‘If you try to press a settlement on me, I’d like you to know, I won’t accept it.’

When she looked at him again his heavy eyelids had come down over his eyes, cloaking any traces of desire. Grimness compressed his lips now and there was an unfathomable edge to his voice as he said, ‘We’ll talk about that later. In the meantime…’ he dropped a glance to the gold wristwatch peeping out from his immaculate cuff ‘… I think you’d better get yourself sorted out for your dental appointment.’

He had left the car in a nearby Pay and Display car park, a newer model of the type of low-slung saloon he had always driven.

The wind was biting as they crossed the tarmac towards it.

‘I thought spring was coming,’ Taylor remarked, struggling to keep her coat from being wrenched open by the tugging wind. She felt low and dispirited, seeing the turn in the weather as a reflection of how her life had suddenly changed over the past week.

On the surface, nothing was different. She and Jared were still living apart. She still had her job. Her interests. Her friends. But seeing him again had revived memories she didn’t want to think about; feelings she didn’t want to feel. Oh, if only he had stayed away! If only things could have stayed the same and she could have gone on with her life thinking…

Thinking what? That one day he might come and tell her that he missed her? Loved her?

‘What’s wrong, Taylor?’

Of course, he had always been able to pick up on her mood, even if sometimes he had misinterpreted—and grossly—exactly what she was feeling.

‘I was only thinking…’ Suddenly her stomach muscles were knotting painfully again. ‘What has today achieved, Jared? I mean, we haven’t talked about anything we couldn’t have said on the phone.’

He stopped abruptly, the speed of his action as he swung to face her making her recoil.

‘What do you want me to say? Here are the blasted papers? Sign them. Thank you and goodbye!’ His coat was flapping open, but he didn’t seem to notice. Obviously he didn’t feel the cold as she did, she thought, although his face looked taut, the skin stretched almost to transparency over his cheekbones, as though he weren’t totally unaffected by the ravaging wind. ‘Well, this might surprise you, Taylor, but that isn’t why I insisted on seeing you today. It isn’t my intention to sue for a divorce.’ And then, after the briefest hesitation: ‘I think we should get back together,’ he said.

CHAPTER THREE

SHE looked at him quickly, her eyes dark and disbelieving, her heart beating so fast she felt faint.

‘Why?’ she whispered, that one syllable strung with all the pain and suspicion she had endured throughout her short marriage.

‘Because I think it’s what we both want,’ he answered.

‘And what about…your mistress?’ It was a soft accusation over the sound of a van pulling out of the car park. ‘What will she have to say about it?’

‘There isn’t any…mistress, as you call it. I told you—it was over between Alicia and me before we were ever married. But you refused to believe me.’

‘Because of the way you were—the way you looked!— every time her name was mentioned.’

‘That was in your mind.’

‘Was it?’ She regarded him obliquely, green eyes tortured and accusing. ‘And I suppose those late-night phone calls from her were all in my mind!’

His skin seemed to blanch, and if that wasn’t an admission of guilt, what was? she thought bitterly, seeing the disbelief in his eyes, the tightening line of his mouth.

‘Did she… speak to you?’ Caution marked his words and his slanted appraisal of her.

‘No, she obviously didn’t expect me to be there! Just like I didn’t expect you to be in Philadelphia with her when you said you were going to New York!’

‘I was in New York,’ he stated bluntly, having no difficulty remembering the time to which she had referred. ‘I had an unscheduled stopover in Philadelphia to visit a sick client who couldn’t get to the main meeting. I didn’t think it was worth mentioning—particularly as I knew what graphic pictures that imaginative little brain of yours could come up with. OK. Maybe I wasn’t being entirely open with you…’

‘Not open with me! That’s an understatement!’ she breathed, still raw from the memory of his deception.

‘Taylor…’

As he took a step towards her she shrank back, shaking her head. ‘No,’ she murmured, denying him the right to hurt her for a second time, denying them both a second chance, though it was excruciating when all she longed to do was accede to his suggestion, throw herself like the helpless fool she had been back into his arms.

‘And that’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘With not even a backward glance?’ Some emotion she could have mistaken for pain had she not known him better clouded those beautiful eyes. He shook his head. ‘Without any regret? Surely, I would have thought that even you—’

He broke off, hearing the sound that had also caught Taylor’s attention. It was the pitiable crying of a small child.

She couldn’t have been more than three or four, Taylor realised, horrified, as the little girl wandered out from between two parked cars. Bundled up in a small pink anorak, she was looking lost and terribly frightened.

‘What is it?’ Taylor called, hurrying over to her, glad of the diversion from a conversation that could only have caused her more grief. Stooping down, she caught the child’s sobbed, barely coherent response. It was obvious that the little girl had lost her mother.

‘She can’t be very far away,’ Taylor gently reassured her, unprepared, as she stood up to look around for a likely candidate, for the tiny hand that instantly reached up to clasp hers.

How vulnerable they were, she agonised, assailed by a sudden deluge of emotions that were suffocating—almost overwhelming. And how trusting!

Tense lines scored her face and it was all she could do to keep it averted, not to let her feelings show as Jared joined them.

‘What’s all this? What’s all the fuss about?’ The tone he used with the child was gentle and consoling. Anguished, Taylor tried not to remember how much he had wanted children of his own.

A young woman, looking very fraught, was hurrying from the direction of the nearby Pay and Display machine.

‘I told you not to run off!’

Reaching them, grabbing the errant child by the arm, she smiled apologetically at Taylor and Jared. But it was Jared for whom she spared a second glance before thanking them both profusely and pulling the now merely whimpering child back to her car.

‘Are you all right?’ Reaching Jared’s saloon, Taylor could feel those shrewd eyes studying her across the gleaming black roof.

‘Am I all right?’ She still couldn’t face him head on, risk his seeing the emotion that still misted her eyes. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

His mouth moved in a rather speculative way. ‘You look…upset,’ he remarked.

The car alarm system bleeped as he disengaged it. His eyes were still resting on her as he opened the driver’s door.

‘Why should I be upset? It’s this infernal wind,’ she prevaricated with her chin lifting in an unconscious gesture of defence against his probing. ‘It’s making my eyes water.’

Scepticism showed in the arching of an eyebrow, but Taylor was glad when he let it go at that.

What was he thinking? she wondered, sitting beside him in silence while he drove the short journey to her dentist. Was he wondering perhaps if she was remembering their marriage—her accidental and short, ill-fated pregnancy? If she was harbouring any regrets about losing her baby? Or even—from the cruel insinuations he had made at the time—any remorse?

Her chest ached from the misery of those memories, from recalling those bitter rows and the insecurities, brought on by the suspicions of his disloyalty, which vetoed any suggestion of their getting back together. Fortunately, however, he didn’t seem to be pressing the point about trying again.

‘I’ll wait for you,’ he said suddenly, bringing her back to the present with a jolt to realise that he was pulling up outside the dental practice.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ she said in a flat voice, keen to get away from him. Seeing him again like this wasn’t doing her any good at all. ‘The station’s just around the corner and it’ll be easier and quicker for me to take the tube back to the studios.’

Fortunately he acknowledged this with a slight tilt of his head.

‘In that case I’ll call round next week.’

Why? she wanted to throw at him bitterly. Why are you doing this to me? But she held herself in check and was relieved at least to be able to tell him, ‘You can’t. I’m away on location next week.’ The crew were filming a short documentary drama just outside of Edinburgh. ‘After that I’m taking a week’s leave.’

Jared switched off the engine as though he needed total silence to digest this information.

So that told you! Taylor thought, not caring if she had messed up his carefully calculated plans.

‘Where are you going?’

She hadn’t planned to go anywhere. She had been hoping for a quiet time at home, baking, shopping and generally relaxing until her next pending assignment that promised to take her away again, abroad, for the best part of three weeks. But the last thing she wanted was to tell him that and so pulling a face she said, ‘Who knows? I’m taking it as it comes. Right now I’m thinking it might be a good idea to stay in Scotland.’

‘That’s where you’re filming, I take it?’ It didn’t require an answer. ‘OK.’ He exhaled heavily and, sounding suddenly bored, ‘I’ll see you when you get back. It’s possible I’ll be away myself the week after next. By the way, while you’re up that way you could look into the Borrowdale house,’ he went on to suggest rather wearily. ‘I let it to the odd friend now and again but no one’s using it at the moment. There are a few things of yours there, though—some you might consider to be of a sentimental nature. If you’ve no intention of going back there, you might prefer to have them with you,’ he concluded, the cool delivery of his statement and his obvious acceptance that it was over between them sending a swift dart of pain down through her heart.

The house in Cumbria had been his late grandmother’s and they had spent several long blissful weekends there between their return from Hawaii and that fateful party that had ruined all her illusions about her marriage.

‘Give me a ring if you decide to…’ with a hand as steady as his voice he was taking a card out of his wallet ‘… and I can arrange to have the place aired and heated for you.’

She looked at the small white card he handed her. As though she were one of his business associates, she thought achingly. It listed his office, email and fax numbers, which she already knew, plus the number of his new mobile phone.

‘Thanks,’ Taylor said, dropping it quickly into the open side compartment of her handbag because she would only have shown herself up by letting him see how much her own hands were shaking had she tried to undo the zip. ‘If I decide to, I’ll let you know.’

She was out of the car before he could detain her any longer but, as she turned towards the modern dental surgery, the sudden whirr of the passenger side window made her glance back.

‘And Taylor!’ He was leaning across the car’s plush interior, his arm across the back of her vacated seat as she came back to see what it was he wanted. ‘I just thought I ought to let you know. If you’re planning to divorce me,’ he said, ‘then I think it only fair to tell you. I’ll fight it every step of the way.’

The week’s filming was over. Everything had gone smoothly and the crew were preparing to return to London.

Normally Taylor would have accompanied them in one of the company vehicles. She had, however, driven her own small hatchback to Scotland so that, with a week’s leave ahead of her, she could make her way back to London at her own pace.

Now, watching Craig coiling up cables, and Paul loading lenses and other photographic equipment into the back of the wagon, reluctantly she considered Jared’s suggestion about visiting Borrowdale while she was in the north.

It would probably be over a three-hour drive with the odd break, she calculated, depending on the road conditions, and the traffic, but that wasn’t the reason why she wasn’t keen to go. It was because the house held so many memories of a time when she had been so happy with Jared, and going there now would only emphasise how terribly wrong their marriage had gone; represent a finality she wasn’t sure she could face. It would, however, be totally foolish not to go and collect her belongings from the house while she was up this way, she argued with herself. And wouldn’t it be best to get things over and done with as soon as possible rather than prolong the inevitable?

‘I’m glad at least that you’ve decided not to stay in Scotland,’ Craig expressed when, having made up her mind, she told him of her plans. ‘Some pretty heavy weather’s forecast over the next few days. I’d come home as soon as you can.’

He himself couldn’t wait to get back, Taylor realised fondly, if the number of times she had heard him ringing Charity over the past week was anything to go by.

‘I will,’ she promised, having not gone into too much depth about why she was stopping off in Cumbria. The truth of the situation hurt too much for her to share even with Craig.

The light was almost fading when she brought the car uphill from the bleak and lonely valley, and turned into the little lane where Jared’s grandmother’s house stood.

Snow had been threatening for most of the journey south and now the Lakeland sky above the glowering peaks of the mountains was an ominous purple.

Having been on the road since lunchtime, Taylor was happy to leave her car exactly where it was in the lane and brave the minus zero wind-chill factor to the house.

A three gabled, grey stone building with bay windows and a sloping drive, it stood alone above a rambling garden with spectacular views across the valley, and was, she remembered from those previous visits, large enough to feel spacious, while still managing to retain a cosy atmosphere.

She hadn’t bothered telling Jared that she was coming. Speaking to him again would only have unsettled her, she had decided, and the task of clearing the house of her things was going to be painful enough without that. Besides, she still had a key.

Warmth was the first thing that struck her as soon as she let herself in, which, though surprising, was more than welcome after the bitter, late Cumbrian afternoon.

Jared had obviously instructed someone to heat the place, she thought, probably guessing that if she did decide to follow his suggestion and turn up here, she would be too proud to ring him.

A small shiver ran through her as she considered just how well he knew her.

It was a relief to shed her thick grey overcoat and boots, and make herself a sandwich and a cup of tea with some of the basic provisions she had bought on the journey down. Only then, with the aid of sustenance, did she feel able to cope with the task ahead of her.

Everywhere she looked there were memories, but particularly in the country ambience of the sitting room with its comfortable sagging sofa and its rug-strewn, flagstone floor.

There were the pen and ink drawings she had sketched of the fells, on their first visit, and for which Jared had made rustic frames during their stay using his late-grandfather’s tools, then hung them in the recesses either side of the huge stone fireplace. They belonged in this house. How could she take them down? Then there was the vast collection of books—mainly Jared’s—on various shelves around the room—bursting with so many diverse subjects. Like travel and history, the Lakeland poets, psychology. Books on different cultures, religions and philosophies, all which reminded her of how well-read and well- travelled Jared was, of his staunch opinion that everyone had a voice, and deserved to be heard.

It was one of the reasons she had fallen in love with him, she remembered painfully, that depth of understanding and fairness he had always seemed to display towards most things, if not, in the end, towards her. And she had been overawed by his experience and his wealth of knowledge.

Having led what she considered to be a rather mundane existence herself, his hard sophistication garnered from a shrewd determined brain and his twelve years seniority had excited her. How often had she lain on that old battered sofa with her head in his lap while he had talked about so many things and she had listened, rapt? And how willingly and wildly had she, on so many occasions afterwards, succumbed to that other kind of experience, the skilled mastery of his lovemaking?

How could things have gone so badly wrong? she wondered desolately, sliding her finger down the spine of a particularly large tome on world affairs. Because they had always made love. Even when they were breaking up they had still craved each other with a hunger that had bordered on desperation, the heat and bitterness of their rows somehow only seeming to kindle desire.

Perhaps if…

Her thoughts were brought up sharply by a sound outside in the hall. No, not in the hall, she thought. Outside the front door!

The wind was increasing in strength, playing with the metal disc over the keyhole. At least she tried reassuring herself that was all it was, until she realised the front door was being thrust forcibly open.

One of Jared’s tenants!

Remembering he had said he sometimes let the place to friends, for a moment Taylor wondered if, as he hadn’t heard from her, he had gone ahead and let someone else have the house this week. But no, he wouldn’t do that, she thought, certain of it. Not when there was the slimmest chance of her coming here!

The door banged rather loudly, as though someone had kicked it closed, and quickly, snatching up the brass poker from the hearth, Taylor raced out into the hall.

‘Are you going to hit me with that?’ Stopping dead, Jared was grimacing down at the potential weapon Taylor was holding. ‘Or is this some new type of fell-walking aid?’ He was carrying two bags of groceries, balancing one on each arm, and sleet was glistening on his jet-black hair.

‘It’s you.’ Heart still thumping, Taylor’s shoulders sagged with relief.

‘I’m sorry.’ Casually dressed in dark trousers and a black anorak, he was shouldering his way past her. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

Didn’t mean…? Flabbergasted, Taylor demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’

Ignoring her question, he carried the bags into the square, old-fashioned kitchen, dumped them down on the table and started to unpack them.

‘What are you doing?’ Taylor breathed, following, not frightened or shocked any more, just angry. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I spent an awful lot of my childhood in this house,’ he told her. ‘I also happen to own it.’ His long hands were dealing with tins and cartons and packages. ‘I think that gives me the right to come here whenever I get the chance.’

‘Not while I’m here,’ she returned uncompromisingly. Standing in her thin socks, she could feel the cold striking up from the hard stone floor.

‘Really?’ For a moment he stopped what he was doing, while his gaze moved over her jean and sweater-clad slenderness with disconcerting intensity. ‘I can’t think of a better reason to come.’

‘Jared!’ How could he do this to her? A justifiable hurt anger lined her fine features and with it increasing puzzlement. ‘You said you’d be away…’ She remembered him saying that in the car when he had dropped her outside the dental surgery.

‘I am away,’ he said calmly. ‘And put down that poker. You’re making me feel at a distinct disadvantage.’

Him—at a disadvantage! ‘You lied to me,’ she accused, ignoring him.

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Tricked me then.’ Tensely her fingers tightened on the cold brass rod. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because, one,’ he said, as though he needed to emphasise his point, ‘I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to get here or not. And two, if I had said I was coming, you wouldn’t have.’

Resentfully she watched him moving around the kitchen, unable to drag her reluctant gaze from his long lean frame as he reached up to open a wall cupboard. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘And put on some shoes or slippers before you catch your death of cold,’ he advised without looking at her, taking no heed of her little burst of sarcasm.

She stayed right where she was, however, even though her feet were freezing, simply because he had instructed otherwise. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘All right. I wanted to be with you. Is that direct enough for you?’

He turned to face her, his eyes glittering with a cold and feral anger.

For a moment his declaration seemed to tear the breath out of her lungs, as powerfully as the wind was tearing at the eaves and chimneys of the old house.

‘Why?’ she said at length, struggling for composure under the influence of his formidable masculinity. ‘So you can take advantage of my weakness and failure ever to resist you?’

The carrier bags rustled as he screwed them up, opened a drawer and stuffed them inside. He sent a wry, sidelong glance down over his shoulder. ‘Not while you’re holding that poker.’

She slung it down, making a point, drawing herself up to her full height. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’

‘Good!’ He thrust the drawer closed, swung away from it. ‘Because I’m sure as hell afraid of you!’

Taylor eyed him with some surprise, a pained query darkening her eyes. ‘Am I so much of a harridan?’

‘A harridan?’ Coming back across the kitchen, he laughed rather harshly. ‘God! I wish you were. At least I’d know how to deal with that. It wouldn’t be any hardship to me to tame a shrew.’

She shuddered, thinking how lethal his brand of taming might be. What woman would stand a chance against his dark and dangerous sensuality? She might feign to put up a fight against it for a while but, in the end, all but the most indifferent would succumb.

‘Oh, no.’ His breath seemed to shiver through him as he stood there now, contemplating, regarding her. ‘You’re quite the opposite, Taylor. Reticent. Uncommunicative. Almost frighteningly aloof. Like a deep, mysterious lake. I used to think it was an admirable quality. In fact, my dear, I must confess, it turned me on—like hell! But there’s a limit to how much unmelted butter a man can get through, even if it’s the loveliest mouth he’s being tempted by. Tell me, Taylor, are you really as cold as you seem? Or is there a real warm woman in there somewhere trying desperately hard to get out? Begging to be rescued from her own worst enemy—herself!’

Is that how he saw her? As a cold, unfeeling human being? With a heart of ice, as other men had accused her of having? Was that why he had been so ready to believe she could hurt her unborn child? Care for nothing but herself? Her independence? Her job?

Pain clouded her eyes and swiftly her lashes came down to hide it. ‘And you think one night trapping me here with you,’ she uttered, cultivating even more of the apparent coolness he had ridiculed, ‘will loosen all my inhibitions— bring out the real warm woman—’ her tone was bitterly emphatic ‘—you seem so sure is there?’

‘Believe me, a man would have to be a genius and it would take more than one night and a diamond cutter to chip through that glacial shell of yours, Taylor. If it is a shell. And I’m hardly trapping you,’ he reminded her brusquely before she could say anything. ‘You came voluntarily.’

‘And I’ll be leaving voluntarily. First thing in the morning!’ she retorted, swinging away.

‘Of course.’ She heard a cupboard being opened, heard it bang forcefully closed again. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Taylor. You’re beautiful. Talented. Self-sufficient. But where relationships are concerned, it’s what you do best, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ she queried pointedly. Her eyes were dark and questioning as she turned around.

‘Running away.’

Because she had done exactly that. You’ll run away. Because it was inherent in her. You’ll always run away.

Her breath catching in her throat, she brought her cupped hands up to her nose and mouth, her eyes closing for a few moments while she steeled herself against retaliating.

‘Are you all right?’

He’d asked her that in the car park, she remembered, last Friday after that tense, disconcerting lunch she had shared with him.

He was standing right next to her now. Her body was absorbing his dangerous warmth like a soothing balm through her skin and his scent impinged on her nostrils like an intoxicating musk.

‘Taylor?’

When his fingers touched her arm, however, panicking she jerked away.

‘Of course I am! Why shouldn’t I be?’ she protested and, for the sake of her cold feet and her equilibrium, moved away from him, towards the hall.

He had discarded his anorak when he joined her in the sitting room and the thick black casual shirt he was wearing with his dark trousers was unbuttoned at the throat.

Standing, sorting through some books, Taylor glanced up, her senses leaping as her interest fell too willingly on the hint of crisp dark body hair peeping out over the top of his shirt, emphasising the corded strength of his throat.

‘I see you’ve eaten.’ His gaze was resting on the mug and the plate, which contained the remains of her sandwich. ‘Or put up some show of eating.’

Taylor snapped closed the poetry book she had been looking at. A book of love poems. A book he had bought for her to celebrate their being married for two weeks.

There was dark emotion behind the challenge in the green eyes that clashed with his. ‘Did you come here to start criticising my diet?’

‘No.’ His mouth tugged down on one side. ‘But it’s a darned good idea. Somebody needs to.’

‘Why? Worried about me?’ A little hint of sarcasm slipped out, unheeded, unchecked.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, don’t be. I can take care of myself.’

‘Can you?’ His gaze was tugging over the creamy polo-necked sweater she had been wearing when he had first turned up at Charity’s over a week ago, moving down over her small breasts and waistline and the barest suggestion of curved hips beneath her fitted jeans. ‘You could have fooled me.’

Why? she wanted to throw at him. Because I haven’t been able to eat properly since I saw you again? Because I can’t get you out of my mind and because when you’re around you dominate everything I think, say and do?

Instead, taking another book out of the bookcase, turning it over in her hands, she said, ‘When did you get here anyway?’

He slipped his hands into his pockets. ‘This afternoon. I switched on the heating and went into town to stock up on some things while the house was warming up,’ he told her.

Broodingly she watched him cross the room, pick up the plate and the used mug she had left on the side of the hearth.

‘This place always did bring out the best in you, didn’t it, Taylor?’ He gestured with the mug he was dangling from one finger, his mouth moving wryly. ‘Back in London this would have been in the dishwasher before it was even cold.’

She looked up from the book she was making a performance of studying. ‘Meaning?’

‘Your penchant for order is commendable but sometimes it can be bloody infuriating. It would do you good to be slovenly occasionally. Mess up your hair. Rough it for a while.’

She gritted her teeth against what she considered was yet another of his totally unjust analyses of her.

‘Don’t you have business to attend to?’ Pushing back a strand of the expertly cut hair to which he had metaphorically referred, she watched him move over to the door. ‘Something important you’ve left that can’t possibly proceed without you being around?’ It was one of the reasons for their arguments, she remembered; his always having to work late—something that hadn’t helped lessen her suspicions about him having an affair—and his going away so much, especially when he’d had the gall to accuse her of only being interested in her career!

‘No.’ He sounded remarkably decisive. ‘I meant it when I said that I think we should get back together. When two people have what we had, I think it’s no less than stupidity to throw it all away.’

‘What you had you mean,’ she said softly, hurting. Hadn’t he had a mistress—and the luxury of a convenient wife?

He moved back into the room, setting the mug and plate down on the low table that filled the space on the rug between the long comfortable sofa and a deeply cushioned chair.

‘Are you saying you didn’t get anything out of it too? Because, my pretty wife, it wouldn’t be too much punishment to me to have to remind you.’

‘No!’ She took a step back, seeing the steely resolve burning in his eyes, relaxing a little when he stopped, clearly thinking twice about carrying out his threat.

‘I thought you’d accepted my decision,’ she expressed, uncomfortably conscious of the tremor in her voice. ‘I thought that was the reason why I’m here…’ a toss of her chin indicated the books she was holding ‘… doing all this.’ Puzzled green eyes searched those that were as dark and impenetrable as midnight. ‘It was the last thing you said— about me not divorcing you…’

His black brows came together while he inclined his head in the way he always did when something puzzled him, a gesture that was so poignantly familiar to her that she found herself battling with a host of treacherous emotions.

‘I said that there were things of yours here that you might want to have with you. Things I thought you might be missing or might even have forgotten you had. It wasn’t my intention for you to start clearing them out. You accused me of assuming too much, Taylor. Well I’m not the only one who’s been guilty of that. And what I said was, that if you tried to divorce me, I’d fight it all the way, and I will—until you come to your senses and realise that it was only your petty jealousies and suspicions that broke us up in the first place.’

How could he say that?

Taylor gritted her teeth, decided not to challenge that statement. Instead she said in a much steadier voice, ‘So I just jump back into your bed and everything will be all right?’

A nerve tugged in his jaw for a few silent seconds, the only life in a face that might have been chiselled out of rock.

‘If that’s all I thought it would take, we wouldn’t be standing here now,’ he answered her softly, his arrogance, with what his words conjured up, sending a menacing excitement licking through her veins.

He knew her intimately; from every small fantasy to every last sensitive part of her body, and he had recognised that dangerous attraction that still existed between them. OK. Perhaps he hadn’t come here to capitalise on it, she accepted, but he knew, as well as she did, that if he tried to seduce her back into his bed, she wouldn’t stand a chance against his lethal skill and charisma. And if she stayed here, who knew what sort of fool she could wind up making of herself over him—and at what cost to her self-respect?

Pain warred with anger over his audacity and the knowledge that he had, indeed, tricked her. Without a thought for what she wanted. Without a care about how it might affect her in the end!

‘I’m sorry for misconstruing all your motives,’ she uttered tightly. ‘But there’s one thing I’m not leaving either of us under any misconceptions about.’ Nimbly she stooped to scoop up the plate and mug he had put down on the table. ‘I’m still leaving here first thing tomorrow morning.’

CHAPTER FOUR

IT was the silence that woke her. The thick, heavy silence and the light that burned with a peculiar brightness through the chintzy curtains.

Snug in the small double bed in the smaller of the two main bedrooms she had opted to sleep in the previous night, Taylor was reluctant for a moment to give up its warmth.

Suddenly though, as realisation dawned, she was pushing back the duvet and racing over to the window, gasping as she pulled back the curtains.

Everything was white—the garden, the trees and the hillsides, dazzling—like the mountains beyond them—under a crisp heavy fall of virgin snow.

She shivered, wondering why the air felt so icy, and went over to feel the radiator on the opposite wall. It was stone cold.

Fetching her light robe from the bathroom, quickly she slipped it on, pushing her hair into place with agitated fingers.

Jared must have gone to bed without setting the heating to come on, or the thermostat in the hall was too low, she thought, racing downstairs to set the control higher. Either that, or it had come on and gone off again hours ago which meant that Jared wasn’t even up yet. Which was unlike him, she remembered from their marriage, when he had been up at six most days of the week.

As she reached the hall, sounds coming from the sitting room brought her up sharply.

Jared?

She could smell smoke now—wood smoke—and could hear what she instantly distinguished as the crackling of an open fire.

He didn’t see her at first. He had his back to the door and was bending over the fireplace, tossing logs from a wicker basket onto the brightly burning flames, and the sight of him performing that simple, domestic chore tugged unexpectedly at something deep down inside Taylor.

Greedy for the smallest chance to feast her eyes on him, undetected, her hungry gaze tugged unashamedly over his pleasing torso.

He was wearing a dark-blue cable-knit sweater and jeans, which showed off the superbly fit lines of his body. His hair was waving, dark and thick, over the polo neck of his sweater, while the thick wool encased shoulders that could set themselves squarely against anything that promised trouble. His hips were hard and lean, his buttocks tightly muscled, and even through the denim his long legs looked packed with the whipcord strength of a hunter. On his feet he wore a pair of casual black shoes, but it was his hands to which Taylor’s eyes were ultimately drawn; those long sinewy hands that could apply themselves to any manual task, however mundane, seeing it through with the same skilled competence with which they could also caress and arouse a woman…

‘So you’re up.’

He turned round so suddenly that he couldn’t have failed to notice her interest in him and, from the rather sensual amusement tugging at his mouth it was clear he hadn’t.

‘You should have woken me,’ she protested, blushing and tousled in her dressing gown and slippers. She had slept for hours, she realised, having claimed a headache and gone to bed straight after their light dinner last night.

‘Why? Are you going somewhere?’ He was grinning so shamelessly that she wanted to hit him.

With an exasperated glance at him, she hurried over to the window. Unlike her bedroom, the sitting room faced the lane and she could just make out her car, virtually buried beneath a thick mound of snow.

‘Still thinking of leaving, Taylor?’ The deep tones were overlaid with mockery, and she whipped round, eyes daring him to carry his joking any further. It didn’t help having noticed that he had had the foresight to put his own car straight in the garage when he had driven in last night.

‘I suppose you think this is all very funny!’ She moved away from the window, rubbing her arms, shoulders hunched against the cold.

‘Are you going to blame me for this too?’

No, of course she wasn’t. It was his complacency she couldn’t take, which made her reply in a way that sounded childish even to her own ears, ‘You knew I was bent on leaving here this morning.’

‘Then start walking.’ Suddenly he wasn’t amused any more. The alarmingly swift movement that brought him to face her had her recoiling from him. His teeth were clenched between grim lips and his whole face was harsh with anger. Lifting her chin, Taylor caught the strong scent of wood smoke clinging to his sweater, with the underlying freshness of the great outdoors. ‘I’ve got enough problems here without you whingeing and whining like some petulant little schoolgirl.’ He swung back to resume tending to the fire. ‘I can’t help the damned weather, all right! Contrary to what you think I didn’t order it to help me with some Machiavellian scheme to trap someone who’s made it very plain she clearly doesn’t want to be married to me—because if you’re going to be like this for the next two or three days, believe me, it’s not going to be any picnic for me either!’

Two or three days? Mentally Taylor shook that unsettling possibility aside, aware of Jared’s anger in every movement of his body, the way he was suddenly tossing logs onto the fire with more vehemence than before, sending sparks and ash flying up into the huge chimney. She supposed she deserved his anger, in a way.

‘Problems?’ she repeated tentatively to his broad back, wanting to smooth things over between them. ‘What problems? What’s happened?’

He stood up again, one hand on the back pocket of his jeans. A deep sigh lifted the thick cable stitch of his sweater. ‘The snow’s brought the power cables down. There’s no electricity. No heating. That means no hot food or water—except in any way we can improvise ourselves.’

A barely audible, shocked little oath escaped her.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So you see, I didn’t instigate the weather or this situation. Nor do I like it, though I will reiterate what I said last night. I wanted some time with you.’

‘Why?’

‘To sort out our differences.’

‘You think they can be sorted out?’

‘I don’t know, but I sure as hell want to try. I’m not proud of having the label of Failed Marriage stamped on my head either. Isn’t that why you kept your marital status a secret from Charity and Craig?’

Taylor’s back stiffened. How well he knew her! Or was it simply from the realms of his knowledge marked Human Psychology, gleaned from life and the wealth of books he kept in his own extensive library?

‘I saw coming here as an opportunity, that’s all. An opportunity for us to talk—relax—without the pressures of our jobs, life or anything else getting in the way.’

She let out a short brittle laugh because he had given her no say in the matter. Apart from which they had tried before; tried and failed, and it had only resulted in pain, pain that, even until he had stormed into her life again, hadn’t even really begun to ease.

‘And supposing I don’t go along with your optimism— don’t share your idealistic view of what you think our marriage should be? Don’t want to be here?’

A hint of a smile touched his mouth as he looked from her flushed and finely contoured face towards the window and the heavy snowfall that imprisoned them.

‘I hate to say this, darling, but I hardly think you have a choice.’

He was chopping logs when she came back downstairs, having already cleared the path at the back of the house leading from the kitchen to the log store.

He was wearing black rubber boots now, pulled high and tightly over his jeans. His black hair was falling forward as he worked. Wielding the axe against the backdrop of the snow-swept valley and the awesome vastness of the sparkling mountains, he looked like the wild man of the moor, Taylor fancied, feeling the tug of something reckless inside of her as she stepped out into the biting air.

Throwing down the axe, he glanced up and saw her.

‘That’s much more practical,’ he commented laconically with a swift appraisal of her thick dark sweater, warm trousers and sensible shoes before bending again to his task.

He was using a large steel wedge to split the logs he had already chopped, driving it into the wood with a mallet, the strike of metal on metal ringing out across the frozen hillside.

He was working hard—looked hot, Taylor thought, volunteering, ‘Do you want any help?’

He paused from his work, one booted foot resting on the cut ring of a tree trunk he was using as a platform to split the logs, a hand resting on a denim-clad knee.

‘Are you any good with an axe?’

She looked at him uncertainly, then at the implement lying beside him.

Well, she had never done it before, but there was always a first time, she thought, moving to pick it up.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, so that she realised then that he was joking. ‘Go and see if you can rustle up something appetising for breakfast. Bacon, scrambled eggs and blueberry pancakes will do to start.’

‘Ha!’ Her laugh rose on a cloud of warm vapour before she glanced back at him over her shoulder. ‘You wish,’ she told him with a grimace, going back along the cleared path and wondering how she was even going to heat any water let alone anything else.

As it turned out, she found the answer almost immediately in the large black kettle, only kept now for ornamental purposes on the hearth. She supposed it had been used domestically in Jared’s grandmother’s day, in the larger fireplace in the kitchen that now housed the modern equivalent of the old range. Even that needed electricity to operate it, she thought rather despairingly, pulling a face as she picked up the ancient kettle.

Gratefully, however, she took it out into the kitchen, half filled it, then struggled with it into the sitting room, first adding more logs to the fire to make a flat surface for the kettle to stand on, before placing it carefully on top. Only then did she decide it was safe to leave, before grabbing the pale fleece she had unpacked and hung in the hall the previous night and venturing back outside.

‘What will we do if the pipes freeze?’ she called out worriedly to Jared, coming down the path to where he was filling the wicker basket with logs. ‘If we can’t get any water?’ While filling the kettle it had suddenly struck her how much worse things could get.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, seeing her concern. ‘There’s next to no chance of that happening. With these Lakeland winters no one risks being without the necessary insulation. They’re far more diligent about such things up here than we are in the south. The place was already well protected when my grandmother was alive but then just before she died I persuaded her to let me get a major reinsulating job done. Grandmother was stubborn—fiercely independent and quite unmovable in most things—but I was determined she’d let me do that much, though I must admit, she did put up quite a fight.’

Taylor smiled, catching the fond note in his voice, regretting that she had never met the kind-looking grey-haired woman who had died the year before she had met Jared and whose photograph stood in a little silver frame on the tall oak chest in the room she was occupying. It was taken with Jared’s grandfather, almost on the spot where Taylor was standing. She had a feeling that it was Jared who had taken it.

‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you?’ she remarked, slipping her hands into the pockets of her fleece to keep them warm. His grandfather too, she thought, remembering how he had said that when his own father had died just before his second birthday, his grandparents had opted to look after him when their daughter-in-law had insisted on pursuing her acting career.

For an answer he simply went on tossing logs into the basket.

‘Were you close to your mother?’ It surprised her to realise that, despite having lived with him for more than eighteen months, there was still a lot about him she had failed to discover.

‘Not as close as I would have liked.’

‘Did she visit very often?’

‘No.’ The log he threw made a dull ‘chick’ as it landed on top of the others, alarming a little brown dunnock that had been foraging around with scant hope of finding a staple meal of insects, worms or seeds beneath the heavy covering of snow. Watching it hop unobtrusively beneath a winter jasmine which was bravely sporting its bright yellow flowers against the boundary wall, Taylor made a mental note to put down some scraps. ‘She didn’t like Cumbria,’ Jared was enlarging then. ‘She liked bright lights and city life.’

‘Does she still live in New York?’

He stopped what he was doing, and stood, stern-mouthed, looking out across the snow-laden hedge to the silent valley.

‘No,’ he said at length. ‘She died. A couple of months ago.’

‘She…’ Taylor stared at his dark, tousled hair as he stooped to finish loading the last few logs into the basket. ‘How?’ she whispered, shocked.

‘She had a crippling illness that came on gradually over the past fifteen months or so,’ he surprised her by saying. ‘I spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards to the States. If I hadn’t, I would have come looking for you a long time ago,’ he interjected grimly, without looking at her, which explained why she hadn’t seen or heard from him for so long, Taylor realised, her heart going out to him over what must have been an extremely difficult time. ‘I tried to spend as much time with her as I could during her last months and I suppose we became closer than we had ever been throughout our lives. After all, she did her best for me—gave me everything,’ he said, with something of the strain he must have suffered showing briefly in that hard, handsome face. ‘But I would have traded it all for some of her time.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Taylor whispered, catching that note of deep regret—the loss—for what might have been—in that last, softly uttered statement.

She had only met the woman once. It was shortly after their wedding when they had come back from Hawaii. A fading actress who had never really achieved star status, Calista Steele had been in London with an equally fading male counterpart and had called to see them at Jared’s penthouse flat.

Tall and elegant, with a swathe of grey streaking her thick black hair, the woman had nevertheless possessed the same awesome detachment as her son. And while there had seemed to be a deep respect for each other, between mother and son, Taylor had noticed no real display of obvious affection in their relationship.

‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ she repeated emphatically.

‘When?’ His voice, as he swung the basket up into his arms, was harshly cynical. ‘Yesterday? Last week? Or at the time?’

‘Well…’ Taylor gave a quick bewildered shake of her head. She couldn’t believe something like that could have happened to him and she hadn’t even known about it. ‘At the time of course.’

‘I didn’t feel I needed to involve you when you’d made it quite plain you no longer wanted any part in my life— even if I had known where you were.’ He was all muscle and fitness striding ahead of her down the path, those brawny shoulders effectively blocking her out.

‘You thought I wouldn’t care because I couldn’t live up to what you wanted me to be?’

‘And what was that?’ he threw back over his shoulder.

‘A dutiful wife and mother.’ She hadn’t intended to get back on this subject but his low opinion of her hurt more than she could have imagined possible. ‘Ready to turn a blind eye to any other woman you wanted in your life. Effectively second best!’

He stopped, turning so abruptly that she almost collided with the wicker basket. The cold anger in his eyes chilled her more than the bitterly cold day.

‘Is that what you thought you were?’

‘Wasn’t I?’

‘What you thought I wanted? An obedient little mouse and bed partner? Someone I could manipulate and bend easily to my will? What respect do you think I would have had for you—for myself—if I’d thought that was all you— and I—were worthy of? Credit me with some ethics, Taylor, because we did have something, only you were too damn blinkered to see it!’

Feeling unjustly chastened, she retorted heatedly, ‘Too besotted, you mean, not to see what was going on!’

‘What was going on, dearest, was all inside your head. Oh, I admit Alicia tried to ring me a few times, but that didn’t mean I was still seeing her. As I told you before, it was your petty jealousies and suspicions that killed our marriage—nothing else!’

‘That isn’t true!’

‘Isn’t it?’

Those inky eyes seemed to be penetrating right through to her soul and his features were as bleak suddenly as the ice-packed fells across the valley.

Of course, he was probably still mourning his mother, Taylor thought, chastising herself for not having immediately realised that. Regrettably she wished she had kept her mouth shut.

‘Believe it if you want to,’ she said wearily, tired of continually fighting with him. She was relieved when he turned and carried on down the path.

With her eyes on his broad back she considered what he had said about her doubts and suspicions all being in her head. Were they? she wondered wretchedly. Certainly he had done nothing to allay her fears and insecurities. So what was he saying? That it had all been her fault? Their rows? Her refusal even to entertain having his children?

When he had been flaying her with his hurtful insinuations about terminating their unborn child—accusing her of wanting nothing but her precious job, had he, she wondered suddenly, somehow been comparing her with his mother?

‘Come inside,’ he commanded gently, as though sensitive to her change of mood and, with unerring courtesy, stood aside to let her pass.

The kettle was singing on the fire as they came back inside the house. The sound was comforting, helping to lift Taylor’s downcast spirits.

‘I’m afraid I can’t conjure up anything more than plain bread and rock-hard butter,’ she murmured, hearing him come into the kitchen just as she was lifting the lid off the butter dish. At least they had plenty of the basic foods, she thought with some sense of relief, since Jared had doubled up on some of the provisions she had brought last night.

‘Is that so,’ he said, not sounding at all perturbed. ‘Then you go and make the tea—’ he was thrusting a teapot into her hands ‘—and I’ll see to whatever has to be done here.’

Taylor was only too glad to. Standing in a cold kitchen, making holes in fresh bread with unspreadable butter wasn’t her idea of fun, she thought, adding cups, saucers and a jug of milk to a tray with the teapot, before carrying them through into the welcoming warmth of the sitting room.

She had just made the tea and was sitting on the rug in front of the fire when he strode in carrying another tray.

‘Crumpets!’ she breathed delightedly, her face aglow as he set them down on the low table she had dragged nearer the fire. They looked plump and soft. Hungrily she watched him spear one with a toasting fork.

‘Always look further than only at what at first appears to be apparent,’ he advised, and she knew he wasn’t just talking about the crumpets. ‘We used to do this on winter nights just for the sheer hell of it.’

We. ‘You and your grandparents,’ Taylor supplied, surprised that he had never confided even that small piece of information to her before.

His mouth compressed in wry contemplation as he stood there, turning the fork expertly before the flame. The crumpet was beginning to brown and it smelled yeasty and delicious as it cooked. ‘They were good days. Especially when my grandfather was alive.’

‘They must have been.’ Taylor sat back from pouring tea into the two cups she had set down on the hearth, drawing her legs up under her. It was easy to visualise how things must have been, the domestic, happy family scene. It was something she had not known. Not in the same secure, taken-for-granted way…

‘Ouch!’ he said, shaking his hand, bringing her attention to the fact that, in turning the crumpet, Jared had just burnt his finger.

‘Hot?’ she taunted laughingly.

‘Not so you’d notice.’

She looked up into his strong abstracted features, flushed from the heat of the fire. He hadn’t shaved, either because of an uncharged razor or because he had had more important things to do. But in his country clothes, with that dark stubble shading his jaw, he looked at ease, relaxed and totally at home.

Often, in his high-powered world, sporting his clean-cut executive image she had tried to imagine him as a child and hadn’t been able to. Now, away from the pressures of the fast lane in which he functioned, here amidst the rugged country where he seemed to belong, she could see him as a gangling youth, obstinate, determined, a free spirit. She could visualize him sitting here with his grandparents on winter nights, and, during the summer, fishing for minnows in the tumbling becks, running barefoot, wild as the moorland and the fells.

Her eyes still trained on his formidably handsome features, almost involuntarily Taylor murmured, ‘This place brings out the best in you, too.’

His cruel mouth slackened broodingly as he gazed down on her, those black eyes holding hers with such dark power that she couldn’t look away. Sitting there on the rug she felt like a slender flower beneath the shadow of a great tree whose daunting presence was capable of blocking out the sunlight from her life, or giving her the strength to grow and thrive from its protection.

With their eyes linked, Taylor felt the stark desire that seemed to flow from the very root of him, filling her with a mutual need that rose like a dark and dangerous sap through her veins. Her breath came shallowly as her pulse rate quickened, and her throat ached so that she had to swallow to ease its dryness.

Light flared in his face at the same instant as Taylor smelled the smoke, became aware that the crumpet he was toasting had caught fire.

‘Look what you’re doing!’ she gasped with a shaky little laugh, catching the oath he uttered before he swiftly pushed the charcoaled offering, still flaming, onto a plate.

‘You’ll never make Chef of the Year like this!’ she laughed, more easily now, relieved that the emotion-charged moment was past.

‘Perhaps Chef of the Year doesn’t have the world’s sexiest siren to distract him,’ he chastised, defending himself as he speared another crumpet with the fork.

Putting a lump of butter on the blackened pikelet, careful not to burn her hands, Taylor watched the gold butter melt instantly across its surface, filling the holes. The way he could melt her resistance—fill her—she thought shamefully, and didn’t say anything because it was safer that way.

Breakfast was delicious, she decided, watching Jared chomp his way through at least a plateful of his own efforts, while Taylor surprised herself by eating at least three of the crumpets. She had brought some honey with her from Edinburgh and while Jared had refused it, she had indulged herself, spreading it thickly over each warm buttered mound.

‘That’s better,’ Jared commented when she put her plate down on the hearth, having finished every last crumb. ‘That’s the most I’ve seen you eat since we’ve been together.’

Lounging beside him on the rug, Taylor tensed.

‘We aren’t back together,’ she reminded him swiftly. She had made no such agreement, nor was she ready to.

‘Of course not.’ He flashed her a smile that didn’t quite warm his eyes. ‘I was speaking figuratively.’

She shrugged. ‘Well, don’t presume, Jared. I haven’t said I’m coming back to you.’

‘Taylor,’ he exhaled, the way he addressed her alone assuring her he wasn’t exactly very pleased. ‘The last thing I would ever do with you is presume.’

Feeling strangely chastised, Taylor looked down at her greasy fingers. A small trail of honey clung to the third finger of her left hand, she noticed, with her little finger splayed.

‘No,’ she uttered, her breath coming rapidly when Jared grabbed her hand and she saw the purpose in his face, realised his intention.

‘Stop me,’ he whispered, and it was a deeply sensual challenge.

CHAPTER FIVE

LIKE a rabbit mesmerised by a fox, Taylor watched him watching her even as he dipped his head and his mouth closed over her honeyed finger.

There was desire in his eyes, more potent and deadly than that which she had seen burning in them earlier.

‘Jared…’ She closed her eyes against the raw need she saw in him, against the ache of a new kind of hunger in herself that only this man could assuage. The suckling warmth of his mouth brought with it images of the pleasurable nights she had shared in his bed, the provocative action of his tongue encircling her finger calling forth more erotic imagery, of pleasing him, of his pleasuring her in the most intimate and earth-shattering ways so that remembering produced a deep sensual throb in her lower body.

She opened her eyes. He was still watching her, his proud dark face flushed now from more than the heat of the fire.

‘You used to taste like this all over. Remember, Taylor? You gave me honey every time I took you to bed. Like a queen bee paralysing me with her sweetness until I could do nothing but surrender to your hold over me—and still I could never get enough of you.’

His voice trembled with the depth of his desire. If he had been trying to turn her on, he had succeeded, but only at the expense of his own self-possession. Without even looking at him she could tell he was aroused, and she found herself craving the demands of his rock-hard body. He would be big and ready to take her. Helplessly, she realised, she wanted him to do just that. Push her back against the rug and come down heavily on top of her, give her no choice but to submit to him so that she could drown in the ecstasy of his driving passion, sate this unbelievable need of him and not feel afterwards that she had relinquished her pride or determination to be free.

With every gram of her will, she dragged herself back from the brink of stupidity to say shakily, ‘But you didn’t love me.’

For a moment his fingers tightened around her slim hand.

‘Didn’t I?’ His lips had moved to play erotically over the perfumed flesh of her wrist, and yet the eyes that continued to hold hers were intensely probing, assessing, and as unfathomable as the darkest night.

‘Let me go.’

Surprisingly, he complied at once.

‘I’d better get some more logs in,’ he said heavily, getting to his feet, as though he were totally unaffected by what had just happened between them.

But he had been. And severely, Taylor thought, watching him scoop up the wicker basket and carry it back across the room.

Even so, it felt like another put-down. Like he had been testing her, she decided bitterly, her spirits lowering like the sudden drop in the room temperature as he went through the kitchen and opened the back door, letting in the biting air from outside.

They spent the rest of the day treading carefully around each other, treating each other with polite caution as though each was reluctant to delve too deeply into what the other might be thinking or feeling.

The first thing they did after Taylor had found enough scraps to feed the birds was to search the house for candles, finding the half-burned remains of one, still in its holder, in the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

‘That isn’t going to last an evening!’ Taylor groaned despairingly, then found a whole boxful while she was looking in the electricity meter cupboard under the stairs.

‘So you won’t have to worry about being left in the dark with me after all,’ Jared commented dryly when she rushed eagerly back to the kitchen to acquaint him with her find.

Taylor didn’t respond, sensing that there was more than one meaning behind that outwardly innocuous remark but, apart from that, the day continued on an otherwise even course.

Wrapped up in warm layers, scarves and gloves, together they scraped the snow from the drive that sloped upwards alongside the house, making a clear path to the lane. Then Taylor beat the soft snow from the bonnet and roof of her car, opened the electrically operated door to the adjoining garage that was a later addition to the house, and climbed into her car with the intention of putting it away.

Unfortunately the little hatchback refused to comply immediately; coughing and spluttering each time she turned the ignition key.

‘Problems?’

Jared was beside her open door, big and capable, ready to lend a hand.

‘It’s just cold,’ she said, silently urging it to start, which, fortunately, it did after a bit of gentle coaxing with the ignition.

‘The drive’s treacherous. I’d leave it right where it is,’ he advised grimly.

‘No, I’d prefer to put it away.’ She didn’t like the thought of her car—her key to self-sufficiency—being left out in such extreme conditions.

‘Then perhaps you’d better let me do it,’ he suggested, looking every bit like taking over. ‘I intended to put it away last night but I’m afraid seeing you swept all my good intentions out of the window.’

‘I can manage,’ Taylor assured him firmly, deciding to ignore his comment as she pulled the door closed, shutting him out.

If he could do it, why couldn’t she? she thought, conscientiously steering the car towards the open garage.

Having never negotiated the drive before, however, she hadn’t reckoned on the unexpected swing to the left at the top of the incline, or the sheet of ice just outside the garage door.

Pressing her foot down on the accelerator, needing a few more revs to accommodate the slope, she had almost levelled up when the back wheels started to spin alarmingly.

Feeling the car starting to slide, she braked instinctively, but too hard, she realised too late, and with a sinking heart felt the back wheels pull away from her as the car skidded with an ominous scraping into the steel frame of the garage door.

‘Oh…!’ She swallowed the small invective, uncertain as to what hurt most as Jared rushed up to survey the damage, her loss of face or what she might have done to her car.

‘I’m afraid you’ve put a hell of a crease in the front wing,’ he called over his shoulder before moving back to open her door. ‘Good try,’ he breathed in a way that left her unsure as to whether he was praising her efforts or being sarcastic. ‘But you’d better let me take it from here.’

This time Taylor didn’t argue. If she had she could only have wound up making an even bigger fool of herself, she decided, and she was feeling bad enough as it was.

With banked resentment that she knew was totally unjustified, she watched him put the car into reverse gear, pull back and set it easily on a straight course into the garage, bringing it to a halt beside the dark gleaming lines of his own saloon.

Shoulders hunched, she was waiting on the drive as he used the remote control switch to close the garage doors— a feature that certainly hadn’t been there in his grandmother’s time, she was certain—and as he strode back down to her she gripped her upper arms as though to fend off more than the freezing air.

‘There you are. All safe and sound where nothing can touch it,’ he said dryly and now she knew he was mocking her. ‘Does it hurt so much to let me help you?’ he enquired, walking beside her back down the drive. She wasn’t looking at him but she could feel his eyes resting on her with a regard that was as ruthless and penetrating as the icy wind. ‘Is it just me you want to prove your independence to? Or are you the same with every other man?’

‘So I pranged my car.’ The sparkling hillsides were almost painful to her eyes and she dragged her dazzled gaze away, tossing over her shoulder, ‘Do you have to make such an issue of it?’

There was a side gate in the low hedge that separated the drive from the garden. He reached around her, opening it with a sharp click of the latch.

‘One day, Taylor, you might realise—to use an old cliché…’ he held the gate open as she preceded him through ‘…that no man—or woman—is an island. We all need each other.’

She didn’t answer, mainly because passing so close to him she was all too aware of his long, lean body—of his dark and dangerous persona—dangerous to her at any rate, she decided, sticking out her chin, fighting against the truth of his words.

Perhaps he was right, she thought, hearing the gate close behind them. But needing someone too much left you exposed and vulnerable, didn’t it? Hadn’t she learnt that lesson long ago, with the bitter betrayal of that first and fundamental trust?

They had sandwiches for lunch with the tinned salmon Jared had bought in town, then they boiled more water to wash up and were glad to get back into the warm sitting room where Jared heaped more wood on to the fire, and where, for the rest of the afternoon, they talked and read. Taylor couldn’t remember afterwards exactly what they talked about. Current affairs. The state of the nation. Global warming.

It was easy not to be too worried about global warming, she thought, when the temperature was ten degrees below outside and you were wondering whether the candles were going to last out until the power was restored. But the discussion was stimulating nevertheless, like their discussions in the early days always had been, and it was all right if they kept to safe, impersonal subjects. She could go along with that.

When dusk fell they lit a couple of the candles and drew the curtains to shut out the winter’s night.

They cooked potatoes for supper on the open fire, listening to them sizzle, inhaling their increasingly delicious aroma as they cooked. Then they cut wedges of crumbling cheese and buttered the soft white flesh of the halved potatoes, watching them run golden with black flecks from the melted butter and the crisp, disintegrating layers of the charcoaled skins.

Jared produced a red wine that was too cold at first but which grew warmer standing, uncorked, on the hearth.

‘The snow ploughs were out in the valley.’ Glass in hand, he had just dropped down to join her in front of the fire, having finished his meal on the settee. She had been too snug to move from the rug, and now she wished she had.

‘I know.’ She had seen them, way down on the flat white plane that formed the very mouth of Borrowdale, or at least seen the work that they were doing, watched over by the harsh faces of the imposing fells.

‘It could be days before they get to us up here.’

She looked at him quickly. Her eyes were dark and guarded.

‘What are you thinking?’ In the flickering candlelight his mouth took on a sardonic curve. ‘That it couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it?’

She shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. ‘You’re so scheming, Jared, it wouldn’t have surprised me if you had.’

He had shaved finally, earlier in the day, but now that dark shadow was appearing again around his mouth and jaw so that in the subdued and dancing light his features took on an almost formidable attraction, as menacing as the cruel heights of the scree-scarred fells.

‘Believe me. Improvising round a camp-fire wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,’ he told her, pushing a charred log back into the flames with the poker and a scintillating spray of sparks.

‘What exactly did you plan?’

Pursing his lips, he set the glass he had just drained down on the hearth beside her. ‘To wine and dine you in the best hotels Cumbria has to offer. For you to enjoy your holiday.’

Taylor cocked her head to one side, her eyes still wary. ‘Why? To try to tempt me into coming back to you?’

He shrugged. ‘Let’s just say for old times’ sake if you prefer.’

For old times’ sake…

Broodingly her gaze roamed over the mason-cut stone of the fire surround, lifting to the old clock ticking peacefully away in the centre of the mantelpiece. Beside it, on either side, antique figurines and plates bore testimony to a gentler age—a slower, less materialistic world. Like those framed drawings she had penned and he had hung in the recesses bore testimony to a happier time, Taylor thought with a sudden wave of nostalgia for those days washing over her with such unexpected force that determinedly she uttered, trying to stay afloat, ‘No, not for old times’ sake. Anyway, we were always fighting.’

‘Not always,’ he said softly.

She couldn’t look at him, knowing she would see in his eyes the same fervent emotion that thickened his voice. But, try though she did, she couldn’t stamp out the memories of her own traitorous desires. They sprung out at her, sensual and erotic, from the darkest corners of her mind, of wild, uninhibited nights when, scored by his verbal lashings she had turned away from him in bed, only to be dragged unceremoniously into his arms where hurt, anger and pain had turned to lust as dark and desperate as their rows had been. Because how could it have been anything but lust—on either of their parts—when it had been born out of such bitter words and scarring accusations? she wondered, shamed now even to think how wantonly she had abandoned herself to him.

‘That’s all in the past,’ she said and got quickly to her feet. Warmed by wine and the fire she felt a little bit woozy. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ she told him, collecting up some of the dishes to take them outside.

‘Don’t jump down my throat when I suggest this, but why don’t you share my room?’ he said. ‘It’s not warm by any means but the fire’s heated the chimney-breast and at least it’s taken the chill off the air. Your room was like an icebox when I went in there this afternoon.’

His offer was tempting. So was the desire to give in to the pangs of wanting that just being with him had stirred in her ever since he had ploughed back into her life. But pride, or common sense, or whatever it was prevailed and she said primly, ‘No thanks. I’ll be perfectly all right where I am.’

‘Suit yourself,’ he said noncommittally and, picking up the bottle, poured a little more wine into his glass, his movements measured and steady, Taylor noted, as though he couldn’t have cared one way or the other.

He was right about the bedroom though, she realised a little later after cleaning her teeth by candlelight in the equally cold bathroom. It was positively freezing!

She could see her breath on the air in the flickering yellow light as she hurriedly undressed and pulled on her short and less than substantial tunic of a nightdress.

Pale lemon, with a deep V-neck, cap sleeves and cutaway sides that left much of her thighs bare, it was something she had packed for a centrally heated bedroom, not the toe-nipping jaws of near Arctic conditions!

Blowing out the candle, she scrambled quickly into bed and, pulling the heavy duvet up around her, curled up into a tight ball. She lay like that for a long time with her teeth chattering, hoping to get warm, until her feet grew so numb she was forced to move to try rubbing them together. The bottom of the bed was freezing and her feet were like two blocks of ice!

Sometime later she heard Jared come up to bed. Always one to sleep with her bedroom door open, Taylor watched the flickering light of the candle he carried sending eerie shadows across her bedroom walls. Then he went into his own room and closed the door, plunging her into darkness once more.

‘Pig,’ she murmured under her breath, knowing he wouldn’t be shivering like she was. He scarcely felt the cold beneath all that sinewy muscle and he could easily have offered to have taken her room when he had informed her of how cold it was. Instead of which he had expected that she would lightly take herself off to bed with him!

Restlessly she turned over, tugging the duvet grudgingly around her. She heard Jared moving about in the room across the landing; water running in the en suite, then the sound of the big bed creaking as he got in.

She didn’t know how long she lay there awake and shivering, certainly long after he had fallen asleep, she was sure. At one point, jumping out, she groped around in the darkness and the wardrobe for her grey overcoat and threw that down on the bed. She had to warm up soon, she thought, or she’d die of hypothermia!

More than once, worn down by circumstances and the strain of the past two days, she felt sleep start to claim her, only to find herself awake a few moments later, still shivering with the cold.

Wanting to use the bathroom, she lay there for some time, growing more and more awake while she tried to summon up the courage to get out of bed. Eventually, telling herself things weren’t going to get any better no matter how long she lay there, she scrambled out and raced to the bathroom, darting back only to misjudge in the darkness the exact length of the ottoman that stood at the foot of the bed.

Stubbing her toe on one corner, she stumbled against it with an almighty clunk and then, hopping painfully, managed to grope her way along the duvet and dived back into bed, shuddering not only from the cold, now, but also from her numb and bruised toe.

Facing the window, with her eyelids screwed tightly shut against all the discomfort, she wasn’t aware of anything else until she heard Jared ask deeply from the doorway, ‘What is it? What the devil’s going on? Are you all right?’

‘No.’ Her teeth were chattering so much she could barely speak. ‘I can’t stop shivering,’ she admitted, past caring now.

‘You little fool.’ A few swift strides brought him across the room.

Without wasting any time he was ripping back the duvet.

‘Come here,’ he growled, sliding in beside her, and with that he was pulling her into his arms.

CHAPTER SIX

HIS body was hard and warm as he turned her into him, its merciful heat enveloping her, seeping through into every last shivering cell.

If he had been wearing a T-shirt when he had come in, then he must have pulled it off to give her the maximum benefit of his body temperature, Taylor thought with a violent shudder, crushed against the crisp dark hair that furred the deep contours of his chest.

He was wearing shorts in some soft, stretchy fabric that left no mystery about his potent manhood, and she could feel the roughness of his hair-covered legs as they entwined with the smooth cool silk of hers.

‘That better?’ he asked hoarsely.

It was. She couldn’t tell him how much, and all she could do was groan her gratitude from within his powerful embrace.

His broad back felt like warm velvet beneath her clinging fingers, and she could feel the play of powerful muscle beneath the smooth skin. He smelt good too, of cedar and a familiar underlying musk that had her nostrils dilating, greedy for as much of his warm scent as they could hold.

‘You shouldn’t have got that cold.’ His tone was lightly abrasive. ‘You should have come in and told me.’

‘You were asleep,’ she argued by means of a feeble excuse. Already she was feeling better. His body was like a furnace and the bed was becoming nicely warm at last.

‘No, I wasn’t.’

Wasn’t he? Against the warm satin of his shoulder, her brow puckered. Why not? What had kept him awake? ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’

She felt the deep wall of his chest expand slightly. ‘Evidently not,’ he scolded, releasing a curiously ragged breath.

A small satisfied sigh escaped Taylor. She had stopped shivering at last. In fact, she was virtually glowing now.

‘Warmer?’ His voice was a lilting caress against her hair.

She murmured an affirmation, and suddenly realised that it wasn’t just his proximity that was warming her blood. Inside her something stirred, something born out of hunger and denial that her body recognised, and to which it was responding, seemingly with a will of its own.

From somewhere in the depths of her consciousness a little voice was struggling to be heard, but her ears were deaf to its futile warning.

She caught the shuddering breath that Jared drew and at the same time became aware of her own shallow breathing, knew that he had to have noticed it too.

Way down in the centre of her abdomen she felt the deep throb of desire, felt its molten message pierce her loins, her aching flesh, the tightening aureoles of her small breasts.

Pulled by something beyond her own volition, she moved restlessly against him, her legs unconsciously massaging the coarse length of his, her body thrilling to the full exciting knowledge of his arousal.

‘Taylor…’ It sounded like a growl, or a hopeless plea, she wasn’t sure which. She only knew that whatever she was feeling, he was feeling it too.

She could almost touch the leashed power of his aggressive virility, the tight-wire tension that packed every nerve and sinew of his body.

For a fraction of a second, her self-preservation shrieked at her to draw back, but it was already too late.

As he groaned, then pushed her on to her back, her senses were already leaping to meet their own destruction and when his mouth came down over hers she arched towards him with a stifled cry, lost in a conflagration of her own need.

Oh, dear heaven! How had she lived without this!

The stubble of his jaw was abrasive on her skin, rough and unbearably arousing, while their mouths blended, breathless and devouring, demanding a deeper knowledge of the other that each knew could only be reached in the most elemental way.

Shudders racked her body as his hard hands slid under the soft fabric of her tunic, seeking, claiming, kneading the slender curves of her eager hips. His massaging fingers moved to splay across the small span of her waist, and Taylor caught her breath as they slid along her ribcage to trace, with tantalising skill, the outer edges of her breasts.

He was and always had been a consummate lover, knowing exactly when to make her wait and when to grant her pleasure. But now she sucked in a breath, moving convulsively against him. How could he deny her when she wanted him so much!

‘Oh God…’ he breathed as though she strained his self-control, and slid his hands over her breasts now as reverently as if he were fondling priceless treasures.

‘Jared…’ It was a small sobbed sound, torn from her as he slid down and pushed back her tunic so that his mouth could close over one breast, his fingers caressing and moulding and teasing the other into throbbing tumescence before his mouth claimed that one too, drawing it into its erotically suckling warmth, sending an agony of exquisite pleasure down through her lower body.

Her fingers were luxuriating in the thickness of his hair, both hands eagerly caressing him, reacquainting themselves with the curve of his head, the coarser hair that formed his sideburns, the hard, exciting structure of his cheek and jaw.

Little murmurs of pleasure escaped her as his lips and hands rediscovered her, spasms bringing her straining against him—this man of whom she could never have enough—inviting, accepting him as sole licensee of her body.

She could feel the fullness of his arousal pressing against her beneath the soft shorts and she wanted to be rid of the barrier, wanted him inside of her, guiding her, controlling her, taking her with him to some other place, some other part of the universe that no one else could share.

She grappled with his waistband, slid her hand beneath it and felt the tightening flesh of a firm buttock. But then he reached down and helped her, pulling the garment free, then tugged her tunic over her head so that they were lying naked together.

The air in the room was like ice on her sensitised body, but that didn’t matter any more. Heat seared her as he came back down to her, causing her to gasp from the electrifying sensation of his warm nakedness.

This was where she belonged! This was where she had always belonged, she told herself feverishly, with no thought for tomorrow. In this man’s arms. In his bed. Giving as much as he demanded of her. And taking too. Taking in turn.

With his lower body pressed against hers, tantalising her with the promise of unbearable pleasure, he lay propped up on his elbows, hesitating, as though gripped by a moment’s doubt, like an undeserving soul unsure whether to take or turn away from the unexpected gift of heaven.

In the darkness, desperately Taylor’s eyes sought his.

Was he harbouring second thoughts? He couldn’t be. She was his and there was nothing she could do about it except take him into her, she reasoned blindly, thrusting her pelvis towards his.

As if that one action had snapped his self-control, he was pushing hard into her, the sudden and rapturous reality of his filling her drawing guttural sobs from her throat.

She was moving with him, joining him in a rhythm that was theirs and had only ever been theirs alone. She felt him sink deeper into her and she moved to accommodate him, winding her legs around him and gripping him hard, locking him to her in a dizzying, primeval rhapsody of the senses.

He groaned, robbed of his powers to do anything but lose himself to the generously offered gift of her femininity. But she had already begun to climax from the powerful thrusts of his body, and she felt the moist warmth of his flowing into her, first as an aphrodisiac, increasing her pleasure, then as a soothing balm after the fierce and throbbing contractions of her own body.

The next thing she knew it was morning. Sunlight was streaming in through a chink in the curtains and Jared’s side of the bed was empty.

The cold struck home as she slipped an arm out of the bed, and she quickly retracted it, reminded all too shockingly that she was naked.

Shame stung her more than the icy temperature in the room. Why had she let him? Let herself? she wondered despairingly. Why, whenever he was around, could she never constrain herself? Retain any self-control? She gritted her teeth, angry with herself. How could she have behaved so recklessly, when nothing had been resolved between them, and the only reason for his coming here had been to seduce her back into his bed—into his life—regardless of what she wanted? Of what was best for her?

Even now, lying here with regret and shame as her bed partners, her swollen breasts were tingling from the memory of his kneading hands, the sensual throb at the core of her femininity from just thinking about him assuring her that if he came in now her body would open to him again as a flower opens to the sun, welcoming him into her; that she could only ever be whole and fully alive with this man as her lover.

She got up quickly, slung on her dressing gown and darted into the bathroom, ignoring the biting chill while she forced herself to wash in the bitterly cold water.

Downstairs, dressed in a black polo-necked sweater, thick shirt and jeans, she had started washing the dishes from the previous night with water from the kettle she had found already singing on the fire when the back door opened with a blast of cold air and Jared stood there, kicking snow off his boots.

‘Morning,’ he greeted her somewhat cautiously, coming in.

‘Morning,’ Taylor returned quietly, with half a glance over her shoulder, unable to look at him, not only because she felt too ashamed, but also because, if she had, she knew exactly what she would have seen. A dark, unshaven Jared sporting that brutish man-of-the-fells image in his thick country clothes and padded body warmer, and she was having enough difficulty keeping her anxiety over the previous night reined in, without letting him see how potently she was affected by him as well.

‘The power’s still off, as you’ve probably gathered.’ He was opening a cupboard, putting something away. ‘And there’s no sign of a thaw.’

Taylor swirled hot suds around a plate with the washing-up brush. ‘No.’ The residue of last night’s feast had set hard on the china, refusing to be erased. Like their lovemaking, she thought, keeping her head down and scrubbing hard.

‘At least we haven’t had any fresh snowfall.’

‘Haven’t we?’ She sounded disenchanted but she couldn’t help it.

After a marked hesitation, he said, ‘Did you put the kettle back on to boil?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, wondering why he appeared so coldly matter-of-fact. Was he recriminating himself for what had happened last night? Was he regretting it too?

Behind her the cupboard door banged. ‘Did you sleep well?’

Taylor scrubbed at the caked potato more violently. ‘Yes.’

‘No more problems with being cold?’

Was he kidding?

‘No,’ she said tautly, her actions mirroring her agitation. Well, how else was she expected to feel? Last night they had both behaved recklessly and he wasn’t even mentioning it, which made the whole thing even more disconcerting.

‘For heaven’s sake, save your energy,’ he said, suddenly sounding impatient, ‘and leave that blasted plate to soak.’

She dropped it abruptly. It made a dull clunk as it hit the bottom of the sink.

‘What’s wrong?’ He was opening the cutlery drawer, making its contents rattle as he rammed it closed again. His voice wasn’t too gentle. ‘Worried you might be pregnant?’

She winced, because of course the thought had crossed her mind but it wasn’t just that. She hadn’t agreed to go back with him because, as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. He would still love Alicia, no matter how much he convinced himself he couldn’t have her—that it was over. It was another man’s wife he really wanted to be the woman at his side. But last night, just as in the past, when he made love to her, she couldn’t think straight; tried to make herself believe that she meant more to him than just a substitute for someone else. Last night had been no exception because he had made love to her as though his heart and mind were free for him to do so—unreservedly and uninhibitedly—and she had let him, practically instigating it, while knowing that sooner rather than later they would become just another statistic in the eternal line of broken marriages, because she could never go back to him to be what she had been to him before, just a convenient little stand-in for somebody else.

And now, of course, because of her foolish and utterly thoughtless behaviour, there was the worry, as he’d said, that she could be pregnant…

‘It shouldn’t have happened,’ she demurred, staring at the cup she was washing without even seeing it.

‘That’s obvious,’ he said brusquely, behind her.

‘I don’t want to be pregnant,’ she protested, fighting the idea, her deep buried fears surfacing above everything else.

‘No,’ he breathed heavily in acceptance. ‘You made your opinions and objections clear enough while we were living together. I should have known better. I could easily have used something. But then neither of us was in the mood for rational thinking, were we? Well, what’s done is done, Taylor. We can’t put the clock back. And if you are carrying my child, I’m sure you’ll work something out where it doesn’t inconvenience you too much.’

‘Like I did the last time?’ She spun round to face him with the washing-up brush in her hand, soapsuds flying everywhere. Her teeth were clenched from the pain of remembering, her green eyes over-bright with bitter emotion. ‘Isn’t that what you accused me of? Getting rid of our unborn child?’

‘No!’ He was dragging a hand across his cheek, wiping away suds from where she had splashed him. Soapy water ran down the dark shiny front of his body warmer. ‘I never said that.’

‘No? Only that losing our baby was exactly what I wanted!’

With his wide shoulders held rigid, jaw locked tight, there was a bleak look about him as though remembering pained him too.

‘It was a… natural… assumption…’ he said, picking his words carefully ‘… in view of the way you were… the way you seemed to have no time for…’ He broke off on a heavily drawn breath. ‘For heaven’s sake, Taylor! Do I have to spell it out?’

No, he didn’t, she thought, turning around again, her brush toying absently with the winking bubbles in the bowl.

Throughout her short marriage, she had shied away from any contact with babies, refusing to show any interest in them; wanting one so desperately she couldn’t bear to inflame the need. Jared had scorned her lack of maternal instinct, but he had been unaware of her fears, taking her attitude as a total disregard—if not distaste—for children and motherhood, which was why he had been so derisive when he had seen her with Josh.

Her pregnancy had been the result of an impassioned row, a making up during which, just as the previous night, neither had had the will nor the inclination to consider protection. She remembered the first tentative excitement she had experienced—the joy even—when she had first suspected that she was going to have a baby; then, when it was confirmed, the fear. She became withdrawn and introverted. Moody, too, she accepted with a mental grimace. So it probably wasn’t that surprising that he had picked up on those vibes; why he thought she was no less than relieved when he came home from that ten-day conference and she told him that she had miscarried.

Numbly, she shook her head. No, he didn’t have to spell it out.

‘Don’t feel so bad about it, Taylor,’ he advised in a suddenly silken voice and she realised he was talking about last night. ‘Neither of us could have prevented it, and the way we are whenever we’re around each other… well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.’

‘Why? Because you were determined it would?’

He laughed softly behind her. ‘Hopeful, dearest, but not exactly determined.’

‘OK. So you got what you wanted.’

‘What I wanted?’ he breathed with harsh emphasis and, before she could sidestep, he was reaching out and pulling her back against the whipcord strength of his body. ‘What I wanted,’ he repeated, his words softly mocking now because his arms were already crossed over her breasts, and his hands were massaging the small mounds through her clinging sweater. ‘I think, my love, if I took you upstairs now, you’d be begging me again as helplessly as you were begging me last night.’ The reminder stung, scorching her cheeks with bright colour. ‘You want me as much as I want you—no matter how much your pride and crazy determination tell you otherwise. OK. Perhaps you were right once when you accused me of marrying you on the rebound. Maybe I didn’t show you enough love or appreciate you as much as I should have done. Possibly I neglected to do all the little things you needed me to do for you to feel wanted—perhaps I was away too much. Oh, I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t still in contact with Alicia when I met you. God knows, I was!’ His deep voice seemed to rumble with an intensity of emotion and, recognising it, Taylor closed her eyes against it, against the longing to be able to move him to such a degree. ‘When I saw you at that party, you were like the promise of summer after a long, long winter, with your youth, your sexy mystique and your surprising innocence. You showed me something new, something different, something to hope for. And you excited me more than any woman I’d ever met.’

She wanted to keep her mind on what he was saying, hold on to her composure, but she couldn’t because of what he was doing to her. Even through the layers of her clothes her breasts were responding to his sensuous massage, his sweet provocation stimulating the more intimate and secret pathways of her body.

‘Give us this chance, Taylor.’

His lips against her ear whispered their trembling message, his teeth nipping the sensitive area now just above the neck of her sweater, so treacherously feather-light that she gave a small groan and dropped her head back against him.

‘What you’re suffering—what we’re both suffering from,’ he breathed, ‘is chronic frustration from being cooped up here together. It’s not surprising I’m going out of my mind with wanting you—with what I want to do to you. Especially when—deny it as you may, Taylor—you want it too.’

His breath came warmly across her ear, arousing her, bringing her hand up to the nape of his neck so that he wouldn’t stop, because, dear Heaven! she wanted him to do all those things he had spoken of, take her upstairs and make her his again, so that she could make him hers, and only hers…

‘No, Taylor,’ he said gently, reading all the signals. ‘That won’t do either of us any good right now.’ With amazing control he was removing her arm from around his neck, leaving her feeling oddly bereft and disappointed as his hands slid away from her. ‘Right now—for both our sanities’ sakes—I think you should concentrate on breakfast, while I finish off what I was doing outside. And then, my dearest, I’m yours for the rest of the day, during which you and I are going to get down to some really serious fun.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘A TOBOGGAN!’

Taylor stared disbelievingly at the sleek, well-made contraption Jared had dragged around to the front of the house and thought back to his disturbing words in the kitchen earlier about having fun. ‘You’re never going to get two of us on that thing!’ And when she could see that that was his intention, ‘You’re crazy!’ she laughed.

From the other side of the narrow slatted frame, Jared gave a casual shrug. ‘Possibly,’ he conceded with a wry compression of lips, but she sensed a hidden depth of meaning in the way he said it.

‘Where did you get it?’ It was obvious he had dug the sledge out of the old shed. But then something rang a bell with her, even as he started to remind her. Just large enough to take two adults, at a push, he had constructed it himself under the keen eye of his grandfather when he had been a mere youngster. Its cleverly constructed design, though, with the painstaking curvature at its front, showed how good he was with his hands and what a talented, caring craftsman he might have been if he hadn’t chosen to make his living with his brilliant intellect instead.

Like him she had already donned a thick anorak, woollen hat and gloves and scouted around for some wellingtons from a previous visit when he had suggested she get ready for a walk.

Now the green eyes she lifted to his were shining with anticipation and excitement. ‘Well? Are you going to take me for a ride?’

So he did, laughing at her eagerness as they came out of the lane and trudged, with the sledge trailing behind them, up the frozen, steeply rising ground.

From the top of a long sweep of snow-blanched terrain he stopped, and Taylor turned to look about her.

They had come a long way, much further than she had expected. She couldn’t see the house now, only the smoke drifting up from its chimney above a belt of trees. Now and again she caught the faintest traces of its sweet woody scent on the air. Below it, on the flat pastures of the valley, sheep huddled together, feeding on silage and hay, fat woollen bundles, heavily pregnant with lambs, or with their young already braving the unexpected freeze-up at their mothers’ sides. A tractor was moving away from them, out of range of her hearing, and yet if she listened she could almost imagine she could hear the throb of its engine on the absolute stillness of the air.

Perhaps that was why the travel brochures and magazines referred to this valley as the loveliest in England, Taylor appreciated, allowing her eyes the luxury of a full breathtaking survey.

Grey and white stone houses—clustered in hamlets— crouched beside open fields and seasonally stark woodands, a tranquil haven within the deep yawning mouth of the mountains. She could see the meandering river glinting in the sun, disappearing now beneath one of the many small stone bridges that were a feature of the area, appearing again between twisting, wooded banks, joining the dark oval of Derwent Water on its south side with Bassenthwaite Lake to the north. The low stone boundary walls of the outer fields, she noticed, stretched to the very foothills of the mountains, while beyond, at the head of the valley, the dramatic assembly of craggy peaks dominated the whole scene, austere, magnificent and awesome.

Like him, Taylor decided as her gaze came back to where Jared was stooping, doing something to the toboggan. Behind him their own mountainside glared down at them, its face cruel and inclement, giving no quarter to the unwary hiker.

He would know every curve and bend of these hillsides, she thought, with a marked degree of respect for him; know which ones to traverse and which to avoid. And it surprised her to realise that she didn’t doubt for one second that she would be safe with him. That in spite of all that had happened, between them, she would trust him with her very life if she had to.

A small frisson ran through her just from the sight of his bent head in the dark wool hat, from watching him securing the tow-ropes and thinking about what those capable gloved hands could do to her.

Suddenly then he stood up, caught her looking at him through the dark glasses he had recommended they both should wear and colour stained her cheeks, already pink with the cold.

‘OK.’ With sighed resignation she dropped a swift glance to the sledge, before meeting those shielded dark eyes again. ‘Thrill me,’ she purred huskily, slipping her hands into her pockets.

It was the worst thing she could have said, of course. Or the best, she thought, depending on which way she wanted to look at it, because if he had been intending to break her in gently to the experience of tobogganing then, after that rather foolhardy challenge, all his reservations went by the wayside.

‘I’ll make you scream,’ he promised excitingly, as she clambered onto the wooden slats in front of him, and he proceeded to do just that, laughing at her shrieks as he nudged them off the top of the slope to bring them flying down the hillside at a startling pace.

Faster and faster they seemed to go, gathering momentum as they descended so that she wondered if they would ever be able to stop.

‘I can’t believe this! How can you do this to me?’ she screamed above the rush of steel over the ice, shrieking even more loudly as the toboggan hit a bump, then another, so that she bounced back against him, laughing hysterically.

It was a tight squeeze sitting there between his legs with her own legs drawn up in front of her, and with her hands gripping the sides of the sledge as if her life depended on it, although she had no worries on that score.

Caught between Jared’s hard thighs and those powerful arms clutching the ropes, she was vibrantly aware of his strength and the solid padding of his body both ready to protect her if she did take a tumble.

All around them free-roaming sheep with brightly painted rumps stared after them as they sailed past, and Taylor laughed at their bemused faces, catching their tremulous chorus of bleats through the rush of the cold clean air.

‘You rotten…!’ Swearing amicably, she was still laughing as they ploughed into a deep drift and came to a sudden halt, sending white flakes flying everywhere. ‘You made it bump deliberately!’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did,’ she argued. ‘You singled them out just to pay me back.’

‘So what if I did? You asked for it,’ he reminded her wickedly, arguing back. Like children, she thought. Without a care in the world.

‘I could have come off.’

‘No you couldn’t.’ His thighs tightened on either side of her, emphasising his point. ‘Only if I did,’ he murmured silkily, ‘and the worst you could have experienced would have been a roll in the snow.’

His murmured approval of the idea suddenly made Taylor disturbingly conscious of the powerful legs entrapping her, of the strong arm around her middle and the warmth of his breath fanning her cold cheek when she sent him a challenging glance over her shoulder.

‘OK.’ He lifted his hands, palms outwards in acceptance. ‘So you don’t share the same view.’

He was laughing down at her, the glare of the sun, with the brilliance of the snow bouncing off his dark glasses, accentuating every line and curve of his magnificent bone structure, the hard-etched jaw and forehead, that proud straight nose, the gleaming whiteness of his teeth.

He was different here, she thought. Different from the hard-headed, hard-working and often disdainful entrepreneur who had had far too little time for her back in London and who, when he had found time to be with her, had scared her witless with his brilliance and his power over her mind and body. But here she hadn’t even seen him using his mobile phone.

Here he was fun to be with—was taking time to relax— and for the first time she was seeing a new and exciting playfulness in him that unsettled as much as it pleased her. She wasn’t ready just to shelve all her fears and her anxieties and go back to him, and she was worried that this sudden absolute interest in her—his decision to give her all his undivided attention—was just a ploy to get her back; that, once there, their marriage would revert to being the same insecure and tumultuous farce that it had been before.

‘No,’ she assured him firmly, negating his suggestion— however flippant—of any further intimacy between them, even though her body throbbed and her breath came quickly through her lungs just from thinking about it. ‘It just complicates things,’ she said.

For a moment those hard thighs gripping hers tightened inexorably. Another glance over her shoulder revealed how the bright sun made a hard, cruel feature of his mouth.

What was he thinking? she wondered hectically, scanning the sudden, stark rigidity of his face. But then almost at once his features relaxed, as did his hold on her.

‘Come on,’ he rasped, springing to his feet a second after she did. ‘Let’s get this thing back up the hill.’

After that the morning resumed most of its earlier conviviality for which Taylor was relieved. She didn’t want to be forced to look too closely at her feelings for him. She wanted to enjoy these moments together without any pressure from him.

There was tension in her laughter now though as she travelled, clinging to his long legs, down the crisp cold hill, even when she fell off in an unharmed, shrieking heap with him, and emerged from her fall, pelting him with snow. There was also circumspection in the way he touched her, as though he were avoiding any reoccurrence of what had transpired between them the previous night.

They were lovers who had just crossed a threshold and become what they knew they should be. What they really were. Estranged partners, she thought painfully, dusting snow off her anorak and track suit bottoms. Strangers, shackled together merely by bad weather and by that keen astuteness of Jared’s in knowing that she would come.

She straightened suddenly, a hand shielding her eyes— in spite of her sunglasses—as her ears registered the continuously mournful bleating some distance away.

‘What is it?’ Jared was beside her, brushing snow from his shoulder. His shielded gaze followed hers to the stream winding down towards the valley, its swollen silver waters tumbling between craggy banks.

‘I don’t know. A lamb in distress. It keeps calling but there’s nothing answering,’ Taylor said, concerned.

‘Probably been a bit too adventurous and like most kids preferred to ignore sound parental advice,’ Jared murmured dryly, but Taylor was only half listening.

She could see it now, down by the beck, its small cloven feet slipping over icy stones, its black-hooded face lifting with each cry that came piercingly on the air.

‘There it is!’ she said, pointing to the spot between two overhanging trees where the river-bank curved steeply.

‘It’s been born too early for all this savage weather,’ Jared commented sympathetically.

‘It’s all alone.’ Taylor’s face was puckered with worry. ‘We should rescue it.’

‘No, we shouldn’t,’ he contradicted her, and as she made to move past him, ‘Leave it,’ he advised with a restraining hand on her arm. ‘They have voice-boxes like radar,’ he assured her. ‘Its mother will find it. Every ewe is instinctively tuned to the call of its young.’

From behind their dark lenses, wounded and sceptical eyes flew accusingly to his.

‘She’ll come back for him,’ he promised.

‘But supposing she doesn’t?’ With all her strength she was pushing him aside, leaving him staggering backwards.

‘Taylor! Taylor, don’t be stupid! For pity’s sake! It’s treacherous down there!’

Drawn by the animal’s cries, she took no heed of Jared’s angry warning, stumbling over steep and slippery ground, her only thought, somehow to help the distressed creature.

Teetering down the bank towards the beck, she managed to stop herself by grasping frantically at the overhanging branch of a tree just before her sliding feet almost plunged her into the water.

‘Heck.’ It was a small gasp of relief at having saved herself from Jared’s scorn rather than an icy soaking. She wasn’t sure which would have stung most, but she could guess.

Taking a dim view of her sudden crashing into its sphere, the lamb, however, had leaped further up the bank, bleating now with fear and indignation.

From a few metres away, it stood shaking on its spindly legs, little face turned towards her, bleating pitifully.

‘Come on. I won’t hurt you.’ Finding a safe footing at last, stooping to make herself appear less threatening, Taylor murmured soft little coaxing phrases above the tumbling of the stream. ‘Come on, little sheep. Don’t be afraid.’

It looked frightened and cold—and was probably very hungry too, she thought, her heart going out to it standing there, lost and defenceless, with its little legs half buried in a drift of snow.

And suddenly she could feel its fear; feel the cold that numbed her own feet and the cruel wind penetrating her bones as though she weren’t protected by her gloves, thick socks and anorak because memory was stripping her of those defences, stripping back the years so that she was five years old again, shivering, vulnerable and afraid.

She didn’t hear Jared shout, catching only the stronger-voiced vibrato of the ewe that was standing, viewing Taylor suspiciously from above the river-bank, bleating her impatience with her errant offspring.

Recognising its mother, the lamb leaped into the air as if on wires, making short work now of the slippery slope. There was a joyous cacophony of bleats before the small hooded face nudged under it mother’s thick coat, tail wagging from the warm comfort of her milk.

In only a few seconds, though, the ewe was pulling away from the small questing mouth, urging her lamb to safety and more familiar ground.

Jared was right, Taylor thought with a cold emotion shuddering through her, staring after the bright disappearing rump of the ewe with her skittish, reunited lamb. Even an animal came back for its young.

‘What the hell did you think you were doing dashing—’ Strong arms were turning her roughly, the deep male voice breaking off as those shaded eyes tugged questioningly over her finely drawn features.

‘What is it?’ he asked urgently. ‘What’s wrong, Taylor?’ He was reaching up to remove her glasses, using his other hand to make her look at him when she tried to turn away. With infinite tenderness his thumb moved across the pale, drawn lines of her face, over the sadness of her downturned mouth. ‘What is it?’ he whispered, concerned.

His touch and the tone of his voice were so gentle and so moving after his anger of a few moments ago that she pressed her eyelids closed against the sensations that were running riot in her, struggling to bring her emotions under control.

‘Just me getting too sentimental over an animal,’ she exhaled heavily, opening her eyes.

Above the dark glasses, she saw the black brows come together, noticed his interest shift to the retreating ewe and her lamb before returning to Taylor again, and now the furrow deepened between his eyes.

‘Tell me,’ he commanded quietly, unconvinced, drawing a soft leather finger down the curve of her cheek.

For a moment, recognising the depth of understanding— of tenderness—in him, she wanted to open up, share her innermost fears, feeling them being drawn from her by those shielded, searching eyes. But instead came the shocking recognition of just how much she still loved him—that she had never stopped loving him! That she could so easily believe him when he said his affair with Alicia was over with, before they were married, because she wanted to— so much! Which would mean, if that were the case, that it had all been her fault that her marriage had failed, wouldn’t it? she thought suddenly, because she hadn’t trusted him enough. Because she couldn’t hold on to anything…

You’ll always run away.

‘Take me home,’ she uttered quickly on a series of violent shivers. ‘For heaven’s sake, let’s go back. I’m freezing.’

They had potatoes on the fire again for lunch with ham and pickles, and a huge helping of fresh fruit to follow.

Now, having fallen asleep on the settee, relaxed by the fire and the unaccustomed amount of exercise she had taken that morning, Taylor woke to the jangle of brass rings and realised that Jared was closing the heavy curtains. On the mantelpiece, she noted, he had already lit the candles. She could smell the wax, and noticed that one was burning rather erratically where there wasn’t much of it left.

‘Awake at last.’ His voice was warm, indulgent.

Taylor sat up, putting her feet on the floor.

‘What time is it?’ she wanted to know, her hand stifling a yawn.

‘What does it matter?’ Jared came around the settee, looking down at her from his advantageous position. ‘We aren’t going anywhere.’

A small thread of excitement needled its way rapidly through her, jabbing alive feelings that were hot and sensual, piercing others with poignant regret.

No, she was snowbound here in a private world with this man who could make her blood sing with the potency of his sexuality; who could make her respond to his will because she was so crazy about him, and who had asked her to give them a chance. But if she did and they started afresh, together, then the pressures would be on her again…

‘I must have fallen asleep,’ she said, stating the obvious.

‘That comes from taking too much exercise you’re not used to. Both this morning—’ He broke off, that sensual compression of his lips finishing the sentence. And last night.

She turned away from those penetrating eyes and was glad when he went over and started stoking up the fire.

Surreptitiously, she watched the play of muscle beneath the thick check shirt he was wearing as he stooped to toss the last of the logs from the wicker basket into the flames. There was a book lying open, face down, on the easy chair opposite her. A book about the English Civil War, she noted, remembering his penchant for English history. So he had been reading while she slept, she realised, the thought of the rather homely scene giving a sudden violent tug on her heartstrings.

‘I wish the power would come back on.’ Distractedly she ran a hand through her dishevelled hair. He had made her run for a large part of the way home, forcing her blood to pump through her after he had seen her shivering down by the beck and now she felt decidedly grubby. ‘I’d give anything for a bath.’ Even if she could have managed to heat sufficient water on the fire to give her a bare amount to bathe in, there was no way, she decided, that she could face the temperature of the cold, unheated bathroom. Not while there were still subzero temperatures outside!

His countenance was grim as he picked up the log basket to refill it and went out, saying nothing. He probably felt the same way, unless he was taking cold showers—which she wouldn’t have put past him, Taylor decided with a grimace, until she remembered that even that was an impossibility without any electricity. Nevertheless, she wished she had kept her mouth shut, hoping she hadn’t sounded as though she had been complaining unnecessarily when he was doing his best to make them both comfortable.

Resigned to her discomfort, she got up and started clearing the dishes left over from lunchtime, filled the kettle for more water to wash them and with a small shudder went back to the warm sitting room where the logs Jared had heaped on the fire were already glowing red, giving off extra heat.

Roll on the thaw, Taylor thought wryly, placing the kettle across the two little walls of bricks that Jared had found in the shed and ingeniously erected in the grate for that very purpose before lighting the fire that morning. He had made the whole experience of being snowed in easier than it would have been had she simply been here on her own, she reflected with reluctant honesty. OK, she would probably have coped, though a little less efficiently since she lacked his degree of physical strength for chopping logs and suchlike, but she had to admit that Jared had somehow managed to make it fun. Even so, it was still harder work than she was used to, and it certainly made her appreciate how difficult life must have been for the ordinary people a century or so earlier, but that didn’t stop her longing to get back to normality. Just to be able to feel clean again, she thought, if for no other reason, because a thaw would mean going home—returning to her safe, self-sufficient existence, and as much as she knew that the sooner that happened and she could get away from Jared, the better it would be for her, some crazy, aching part of her—the part that loved him—didn’t want this time with him ever to end.

She had just finished lighting a candle on the mantelpiece, replacing the one that had finally burned itself out, when a thud against the door jamb had her turning quickly.

Wearing the anorak he had casually thrown on to go outside, Jared was manoeuvring a large oval tin bath through the doorway.

‘I don’t believe this!’ Taylor laughed incredulously.

Seeing him trying to kick the rug aside with his booted foot, Taylor rushed to help him, dragging the table to one side and folding the rug clear of the space between the chair and the sofa so that he could set the hollow oval tub down in front of the fire.

‘There you are.’ He ran his hand around the tub’s interior, brushing out some foreign objects. ‘Every modern convenience.’

Still amazed, Taylor stared down at it. ‘How are we going to heat enough water to fill that?’

‘As your forebears did, darling. With one kettleful after another. Bath night, I believe, was every Friday or Saturday night.’

‘In front of the fire.’ Right now it sounded like pure luxury. In front of him.

Disconcerted, she uttered, ‘Did your grandparents use this? Did you?’ Try though she did, she couldn’t imagine him living quite so rustically.

He laughed, and said, confirming it, ‘Good heavens no! I didn’t. There was always the bathroom—certainly in my time. I’m not sure this was ever used. It did, however, come in useful for mixing potting compost and keeping goldfish outside in during the summer months.’

‘You’re joking!’ Horrified green eyes lifted from the ancient metal to meet those that were deep-set, dark and definitely laughing at her. ‘Thanks,’ she chided dryly, secretly amused.

Having to wait for each kettleful of water, it took some time to fill the bath to a practical level—until Jared found a large cauldron in the old pantry and started heating the water in that instead.

With the bath almost ready and steaming invitingly, Taylor went to fetch some of the toiletries she had brought with her; soap from the bathroom and, still in its paper bag, the bottle of fragrant bath foam she had purchased when she and Craig and another member of the crew had gone on a shopping expedition in Edinburgh a few days before.

She was glad Jared was upstairs, moving around in the master bedroom when she came back down because, intimate though they had been during their marriage and then shockingly—her cheeks burned as she thought about it— the previous night, she felt absurdly self-conscious in the present circumstances about undressing in front of him.

She quickly discarded her clothes and, sweeping her hair up and securing it with a large clasp she had brought down with her, she stepped nimbly into the water.

With her shoulders supported by one end of the bath and her long legs draped over the other, she was luxuriating with her eyes closed—breasts barely covered—in the scented bubbles when he strode back in.

She wasn’t sure if he had sat down or if he had gone back out of the room because she couldn’t hear him moving around and she felt too relaxed to open her eyes and look. There was no sound but the crackling of logs on the fire, the soft pup-pup of bubbles dispersing in the foam and a strange kind of fizzing she was straining her ears to identify.

Something cool and smooth skimmed her leg, and she gasped, drawing it up sharply, her eyes flying open to the realisation of Jared standing there above her, that it was the cool base of a crystal glass flute he had been trailing along her leg.

‘Champagne?’ she beamed, surprised.

‘I never travel without it.’

He had changed, she noticed, into a soft black shirt and black corduroys, an image, which, with his black hair and those glittering black eyes rocked her with its sexual impact.

‘You’re decadent,’ she accused in a voice that faltered, reaching up and taking the glass from him.

‘If you mean in the sense of being self-indulgent, then I can only admit to being entirely guilty of that,’ he accepted. ‘But if you mean in the sense that I’m morally corrupt, then no man could apologise for dispensing with his highest principles around you, Taylor.’

What did he mean by that exactly?

Guardedly, with loose strands curling damply against her face, she watched him retrieve his own glass from the mantelpiece then, with one easy stretch of his body, pick up the book he had been reading earlier and cross to the settee.

Was he, she wondered, in some way alluding to last night? Was he, like her, and in spite of everything he had said, somehow regretting what had happened?

Refusing to think about that, she savoured the champagne, considering, as she twisted the slim stem of the glass how ridiculous it seemed sipping the most expensive wine from what looked like incredibly valuable crystal while lying in a battered tin tub!

‘Why the Madonna smile?’

That deep voice sliced through her reverie, bringing her head round.

He was sitting with his book lying open on the palm of his hand, one long leg lying across the other, those thoughtful eyes watching her as a Roman emperor would have watched his naked and favourite slave girl, as though she amused and entertained him.

‘What were you thinking of?’

Head tilting, Taylor surveyed the leaping fire through the carved perfection of the crystal, noting the way the one filled and impregnated every last fine sculpted contour of the other.

‘Incongruities,’ she murmured, taking another sip.

‘Such as?’

‘This.’ She held up her glass. ‘And this.’ A toss of her chin indicated the bathtub. ‘You and I.’

‘You and—’ She couldn’t look at him sitting there with the book, still open, but transferred to his lap now. His left arm was stretched across the back of the settee. ‘What are you saying? That we’re that much of a mismatch? Out of harmony with one another? Incompatible?’ When she didn’t answer, but just went on sipping her champagne, he said, ‘There is one way, my love, where you and I certainly aren’t incompatible, and if you’re determined to make that sort of rash remark then I’ll just have to—’

She was both relieved—and surprised—when the phone on the little round table beside the settee started to ring. Just how they got on in bed was something of which she certainly didn’t need reminding!

It was a business call, she deduced almost immediately, discarding her glass on the other low table she just managed to reach behind her, before lying back and listening to the deep sensuality of his voice.

‘No, it’s switched off,’ he was saying, obviously referring to his mobile phone. ‘No, I shan’t be dealing with it. I’ve left Steve Shaunessy in charge.’

His second in command. A big Irishman, Taylor remembered from the days when she had played hostess to Jared’s business colleagues and their wives. Steve was clever, astute. Trustworthy. She hadn’t forgotten, either, the sympathy she had seen in the man’s eyes when he had looked at her sometimes, and had been sure that he was thinking what she had guessed they must all have been thinking—everyone who knew, that was—that she was only a young and callow substitute who Jared had married in place of someone else.

‘Get Steve to deal with it,’ he went on, with no mention that he was on leave, with whom, or how long he intended to be away, which only emphasised that, as head of a thriving company, he was answerable to no one.

He was speaking to a woman—probably his secretary— Taylor decided, simply from that certain tone he always used with the opposite sex. Just like everything else about him, his voice had the most profound effect on women. And Taylor Adams was no exception, she thought, resenting the way that, even now, when her spirits had plummeted just from remembering how she had felt during their marriage, when she had felt betrayed and second best, those deep tones were arousing her, grazing over her senses the way his shirt would graze her naked body, or his chest hair rasp against the sudden aching tightness of her breasts…

‘No. Don’t call me here again.’

Catching that impatient, dismissive note in his voice, mentally she shook herself out of her dangerous reverie before the phone clattered back onto its rest.

‘Enjoying yourself?’

She tensed, hearing his book snap closed.

‘It’s heaven,’ she lied, staring up at the rather jaded emulsion of the ceiling, trying not to sound as though something had been wrenched out of her gut just from imagining him with another woman, pretending to herself that she didn’t care, so that with even more feigned brightness she was adding, ‘The Victorians certainly had some things right.’

He made a cynical sound down his nostrils. ‘Yes—if you had servants to lug in all the water—fill the darn thing for you.’

He had a point there, she thought, silently sympathising with their plight.

A light movement of her shoulder disturbed the water, revealing the proud taut curvature of her breasts. ‘I could go along with that.’

He gave a soft, almost humourless chuckle. ‘As a Victorian? I don’t think so. Times were pretty harsh—especially for a woman. I’m afraid your talents as a make-up artist, dearest, would probably never have seen the light of day. In fact your hopes of any sort of a career would almost certainly have had to be shelved in favour of housekeeping. And you would have had all my children, Taylor, and liked it, with very little say in the matter.’

Damp tendrils framed her face as she studied him through the dark fringes of her lashes. Was he deliberately trying to provoke her into a response?

‘There was always abstinence,’ she reminded him pointedly, just in case he was, and saw one thick eyebrow arch in silent scepticism. ‘Or would you,’ she challenged, feeling antagonistic without any substantial reason, ‘have exercised your legal right and beaten me if I’d said no?’

He seemed to consider this with some amusement for a moment. ‘That would have been my prerogative.’ His gaze, sliding over the caramel silk of her hair was suddenly burning with a dark intensity, conveying an overtly sensual message that matched the fevered heat beneath her skin. With slow and candid appreciation those febrile eyes roamed over the defiant tilt of her pointed chin, touching on her wet shoulders before coming to rest on her small and gleaming breasts. ‘I don’t think though,’ he breathed, his voice suddenly low and husky, ‘that any flaying of that tender flesh would ever have been necessary. I don’t think there ever was or will be a time when either of us could have said—or could say—no. Which is why you’re a fool if you imagine you can deny either of us, Taylor. Nature has a way of mocking us—and all the more for our efforts to contradict her, darling.’

As it had when she had got pregnant?

Unwillingly her mind skittered back to that time. Usually she would have been horrified at the thought of conceiving an unwanted child, at using no protection, but she had let him that night, too ensnared by the bitter-sweet aftermath of their quarrel to retain any measure of common sense. Getting pregnant was the last thing she had wanted, but Nature had had other ideas, opening her womb to his seed and forcing her—despite her worries, her resistance and the threat of breaking up—or perhaps, as he had suggested, because of all of those things—to accept that her body had selected this man as its mate and master, and that her genes would be melded with his, no matter what the cost.

Hurting, angry with herself, with him, and with the forces of nature—or whatever had destined that she should be marooned here with him—she pushed herself up out of the water and grabbed the big fluffy towel from the arm of the chair just within her reach, foam cascading down over her glistening nakedness.

Keeping her back to him, quickly she proceeded to dry herself, her slim shoulders tense from the uncomfortable knowledge that he was watching her. She could sense his dark, almost tangible gaze travelling down over each vertebrae of her slender back to her tapering waist and tight neat bottom.

‘My robe?’ Unable to see it anywhere as she finished drying herself, she thrust her feet into a pair of open-toed mules and, with the damp towel draped around her, made a move towards the door, realising she must have left it upstairs.

‘No you don’t.’ Jared’s hard command stalled her. He was already getting to his feet. ‘You’ll catch your death of cold.’

He was back within a couple of minutes, striding over to warm the garment in front of the fire.

‘Here.’

Discarding the towel, wishing he wasn’t so close, Taylor slipped her arms into the robe he was holding out for her. The sleeves were still cold, but the body of it was nicely warm and she gave a delicious little shudder as she pulled it around her. However, on reaching for the belt, her fingers almost entwined with his and quickly she withdrew them, standing stock-still as his arms looped under hers so that he could tie the sash around her tiny waist.

He was looking over her shoulder, concentrating on what he was doing, while Taylor could hardly trust herself to breathe. She could hear his slow and steady breathing, feel its warmth against her hair, could envisage the thickness of those heavy lashes veiling his eyes. He smelled nice too, she noted, not daring to inhale too deeply that potent and very masculine scent that was all his own. But when a slight turn of her head brought her cheek into shocking contact with the rough texture of his jaw, something inside her snapped and all the resolve in the world couldn’t hold back the sound that escaped her like a soft purr, or stop her from sinking back against him.

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