Charade In Winter. Anne Mather

and she realised the amount of alcohol he had consumed throughout the evening was responsible for the slight glazing of his eyes.

      ‘I—no.’ She stilled the involuntary movement of her hand towards her throat again. And when he persisted on looking at her, she added: ‘I don’t think so.’

      ‘Your husband isn’t likely to come lusting for my blood?’

      ‘Of course not.’ She silently damned the revealing colour that entered her cheeks.

      ‘Good.’ With an economy of movement, he was on his feet and facing her, only a stride away. ‘I should hate to have to contend with the kind of publicity that would generate.’

      ‘You won’t,’ she assured him tautly, wishing she was not so conscious of his nearness.

      ‘You must have married out of the schoolroom,’ he observed insistently, and she saw his eyes move to the quickening rise and fall of her breasts.

      ‘Not—not quite,’ she stammered, feeling exposed, and with an indifferent shrug he moved away from her, leaving her weak and shaken by emotion.

      ‘Goodnight then, Mrs Thornton.’ He was opening the door for her, and she passed him with a mumbled salutation, crossing the hall to the stairs on legs which had never felt so uncertain.

      She hadn’t expected to feel relieved to reach the isolation of her room, but she did. She closed her sitting room door and leaned back against it wearily, aware of feeling more exhausted than circumstances warranted. Then she expelled her breath on a sigh and straightening, walked through the lamplit apartment to her bedroom.

      Someone had turned down her bed in her absence, and her nightgown had been draped carefully across the sheet. She wondered whether Myra had done it, and thinking of the other girl reminded her of the way she had looked at Oliver Morgan. However retarded her mental condition, physically she was a woman, and it was as a woman she had looked at her master. But how did he see her? She was not an unattractive girl, and he was a man with the same needs as any other man. And yet he had told Alix that he preferred to pay for his pleasures. Did he pay Myra?

      She shuddered at the inclination of her thoughts, and tightening her lips, began to undress. But before she put on her nightgown, she ran her hands down over her breasts, her palms covering the hardening nipples. She felt strangely disturbed by the knowledge that a man like Oliver Morgan could arouse her in this way, and she stared at her reflection with unconcealed dislike. She had never felt this sense of discovery about herself before, and it was galling to find it coming between her and her work.

      With a grimace of annoyance she reached for her nightgown, and allowed its filmy folds to fall about her ankles. Then she went into the bathroom to wash and clean her teeth, determinedly putting all thoughts of Oliver Morgan out of her mind. She was tired. Things would look different in the morning.

      But once she was in bed, between sheets which she discovered were made of silk, it was not so easy to get to sleep. She had peeped through her curtains before getting into bed, and the mist outside seemed to be pressing against the window panes, imprisoning her in this isolated oasis of civilisation. Last night, sleeping in her own bed in her flat in London, she had had no notion of the complications she would find at Darkwater Hall, and there was something rather frightening in the remoteness of that thought…