Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

please,’ she begged. ‘I want—’

      ‘I know what you want!’ he declared passionately. ‘And if you deny it I’ll know you’re lying because it’s there in your eyes, as clear as can be! And it’s what I want too, Lola. More than anything else in the world right now. You. You. Only you. I’ve wanted you since the first time I set eyes on you, when nothing else in that room existed except you. I want you so much I can’t think straight.’

      It was an admission not of weakness but of vulnerability—at least where Lola was concerned—and it affected her more profoundly than anything else so far.

      She could hardly believe that she—she—with her too generous curves and her hair which never looked tidy—apparently had the power to inspire the kind of passion in Geraint Howell-Williams which had given his face such a look of such unbearable tension that Lola went positively weak at the knees just looking at it.

      Nervously, she wound a strand of glossy hair round and round her finger in a way she hadn’t done for years. ‘I just don’t know what to say,’ she told him honestly.

      ‘Don’t you?’ he queried softly.

      ‘No. I don’t seem sure about anything any more.’ She stared at him in confusion, thinking, somewhat belatedly, that he could at least have phrased his desire for her more eloquently than that strained, rather clipped ‘I want you so much I can’t think straight’. ‘Geraint,’ she demanded suddenly, ‘what would normally happen now?’

      ‘Normally?’ His voice was soft, with an undertone of danger. ‘I’m not sure that I understand you.’

      ‘I mean, if it was someone else you had said that to—about wanting them—what would they do?’ she persisted stubbornly as reaction set in like a cold chill. ‘What’s the form for this type of occasion?’

      ‘The form?’ he echoed softly.

      ‘Stop repeating everything I say!’ stormed Lola.

      ‘Then why don’t you say exactly what you mean?’

      ‘You know what I mean! I want to know what your other women do! Do they start necking here, in the hall, and allow you to make love to them on the floor? Or do they slip upstairs for their much needed shower, and then you join them, and . . . and . . .?’ Her voice tailed off miserably.

      He had begun to laugh at her use of the word ‘necking’, but her bleak little voice seemed to sober him right up. ‘There are no set rules, Lola,’ he told her quietly. ‘I don’t have a textbook which I consult . every time I deal with a woman.

      ‘As for what would happen next—what would you say if I told you that I had no idea? That the situation is quite new to me? That I have never made a habit of the very public displays of desire you and I seem to have been indulging in—or at least not for more years than I care to remember?’

      She turned a bewildered face up to him, and surprised a look of something akin to pain in his stormy grey eyes.

      ‘Come here,’ he said softly, holding his hand out to her. And when she took it trustingly, like a child, she saw his eyes darken again—not with the passion of earlier, but with that same odd, indescribable type of pain.

      Did he want to confide to her the reason that lay behind that haunted look? Some urgent inner prompting caused Lola to whisper his name, but so softly that he did not hear it—or if he did he chose not to answer—and, still holding her hand, he moved towards one of the double doors which led into the sitting room.

      It was a vast room, dominated by soft blues and green, filled with light from the mighty bay window and scented with a glass bowl of narcissi which Lola had placed there yesterday, just before she had left for Rome.

      Once inside, he sat her gently down on the sofa, and Lola was half expecting him to join her, but to her surprise—and, she was forced to admit, her disappointment—he did no such thing. He went to stand at the window, to watch the yellow patches of daffodils as they swayed with fragile and tattered grace in the March wind.

      He stood there in silence for a moment, and when he spoke his voice sounded harsh. ‘What do you think you’ll do with this house?’ he demanded suddenly.

      Without stopping to wonder why he had asked, Lola gave voice to the thoughts which had been bubbling away in her head for weeks now. ‘I think I’m probably going to sell up,’ she said slowly.

      He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh?’

      ‘It’s too big for one person, especially one who leads the kind of life that I do.’

      ‘And what will you do? Buy something smaller?’

      ‘Much smaller,’ Lola agreed. ‘And whatever money is left after I’ve given some to my mum can go to charity.’

      He turned around. ‘You’re giving the money away?’ he asked carefully.

      ‘Yes,’ Lola nodded. ‘To Dream-makers. I think that’s what Peter would have liked me to do with it, really.’

      He looked at her. ‘Are you really this good and this sweet, Lola Hennessy? Or just too good to be true?’

      She smiled at the question which had almost been a compliment. ‘You’ll have to judge that for yourself, won’t you, Geraint?’

      ‘Yes. I guess I will.’ And he turned to stare pensively out of the window once more.

      He was so still, Lola thought suddenly, and so silent, too, his stance proud and magnificently arrogant, the set of his shoulders slightly forbidding. She remembered what he had said about forbidden passion, how his eyes had glittered some secret message at her, and how she had shivered in spite of herself.

      How little she knew about him, Lola acknowledged. About his past, or even his present—and she certainly had no idea what was going on in his mind right now.

      And yet. . . Lola frowned. Did she really care? She had known the pilot—or thought that she had—and he had turned out to be a two-timing swine. The fundamental question was whether or not she could trust Geraint not to hurt her, and something beyond logic or reason—something buried away deep in her heart—told her that she could.

      As she watched, his posture seemed to alter fractionally—she saw his shoulders and the big muscles of his forearms bunch up beneath the thin cream silk of his jumper and she found herself hungrily wondering what it would be like to be contained within those arms. To be naked within those naked arms. . .

      He turned abruptly and something in her wistful face must have angered him, or infuriated him, or something—because his own darkened and his eyes blazed with some strange, pale fire which seemed to drive a shaft of longing right through Lola’s heart as she looked at him.

      ‘I’m going now,’ he told her harshly, and Lola’s mouth flew open in surprise. It was the last thing in the world she’d expected him to say.

      ‘G-going?’

      ‘That’s right,’ he affirmed grimly.

      Lola gazed at him in bemusement. ‘But why?’

      ‘Because. . .’ He shook his head with barely concealed impatience. ‘I can’t stay. Not now, Lola—not when. . .’

      Lola noted the incredible tension which had etched deep lines of strain on his face and suddenly she thought she understood, or at least partly, though she did not yet know the reason for his astonishing about-face.

      She knew that his proposed departure should bring her a degree of comfort, indicating as it did that he must in some small way respect her, and yet just the thought of him going absolutely appalled her.

      Clumsily, with limbs which seemed suddenly weighted down with lead, Lola rose to her feet, painfully aware of the lurching disappointment in her chest.

      ‘Of course,’ she said stiffly, but she knew, with an unarguable certainty, that if he walked out of