Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      WHEN Lola awoke, Geraint had gone, and she looked around the room, feeling abandoned, until she saw that the carpet was still littered with some of his discarded clothes, which meant that he had not gone very far.

      She went pink with remembered pleasure as she saw his silk sweater, which he had obviously hurled across the room without thinking. She had rather liked the way that his customary sang-froid seemed to have deserted him when she had lain on the bed silently watching him remove his clothes.

      From the wicked glitter in his grey eyes, Lola had suspected that he intended to disrobe as slowly and seductively as possible, but in the end he had torn his clothes off with an impatience which had touched her heart as well as her body.

      Lola plumped up several pillows and settled back against them, staring out of the window into the star-studded darkness and wondering whether lovemaking just carried on getting better and better like that.

      And if that was the case, then how did people bear the pleasure? How could they lead normal lives knowing that such amazing rapture was theirs for the asking?

      She heard the distant chinking of china, and footsteps approaching, and then Geraint appeared in the doorway carrying a loaded tray, naked save for a pair of faded jeans of which he hadn’t even bothered doing up the top button.

      Lola gulped. With his tar-dark hair all ruffled from where she had been frantically running her hands through it, and the faint sheen which clung to his bare, lightly tanned skin he looked absolutely gorgeous.

      In bed he had been the complete lover—passionate, considerate, imaginative. . . a little bit wild. Lola trembled. Even funny. She loved him; she knew that—it was impossible not to love him. Was there any chance, she wondered, that Geraint could grow to love her too?

      ‘Hello,’ he said softly.

      ‘Hello.’ She smiled happily. ‘You look like a rock star in that get-up!’

      ‘And you look like a naked nymph,’ he murmured.

      ‘Do I?’ she asked him, her smile widening as he approached.

      She had plumped up his pillows too, and now she stared up at him expectantly, her face growing pink with the anticipation of having him naked in her arms again. ‘Aren’t you coming back to bed?’ she asked him, thinking how husky and provocative her voice sounded.

      ‘No. Not just now,’ he answered quickly, his body tensing—as though she had said something vaguely obscene.

      Lola frowned, feeling puzzled. She saw the faintly guarded expression which had crossed his face and wondered what had caused it. What were the rules for after-bed behaviour between two people who did not, she realised with a slowly sinking heart, even know each other terribly well?

      Surely it wasn’t too pushy to ask your lover to come back to bed with you? Especially since they had spent the most uninhibited hours of her life together, and he had positively encouraged her to tell him exactly what she wanted him to do to her—even when half the time she hadn’t even known herself! So was she now suddenly supposed to start playing it cool?

      Lola grimaced. She hated playing games. She suspected that was one of the main reasons why she had dated men so infrequently—because she had a habit of saying what she actually meant. And a lot of men, it seemed, found it difficult to cope with the truth!

      She forced herself to look with interest at the contents of the tray he had placed on the window-seat. ‘What have you brought?’ she asked.

      ‘Tea. Wine. Sandwiches. Cake. And some cold chicken and salad I found in the fridge—take your pick.’

      Lola adopted a resolutely cheerful tone. ‘And what’s that supposed to be? Tea or dinner?’

      ‘Either. We’ve missed both.’

      Lola’s eyes widened. ‘Good grief! What time is it?’

      ‘Getting on for nine.’

      ‘You mean we’ve been . . . I mean—’

      He cut across her discomfiture with a rueful glance. ‘Yes, Lola—we’ve been in bed for almost four hours. Aren’t you hungry?’

      She stared at him miserably. ‘I might be, if you’d only come back to bed—it’s awfully lonely in here.’

      He did not answer immediately, but went abruptly over to the window and stood staring out into the empty night, before drawing the heavy velvet drapes and shutting out the starlight. ‘Why don’t we eat something first?’ he suggested.

      If he hadn’t had such a grim expression ruining a perfectly handsome face, then Lola might have made a joke about the condemned man being given a last meal—because that was exactly what the atmosphere felt like. But she didn’t even dare joke about it.

      She was frightened. Frightened by the cold, distant expression on his face and frightened by the physical distance he was putting between the two of them.

      But Lola knew that she had to take it like a woman. If Geraint was now regretting having made love to her, then nothing she could say or do could possibly change his mind.

      If he had decided, for whatever reason, that she was not the kind of person he wanted to have a relationship with, then she must just accept that—and gracefully, too. So that whenever he remembered her—if he remembered her—he would remember her dignity and calmness and not just the way she had blatantly invited him to make mad, passionate love to her!

      She chewed on her bottom lip anxiously and wondered just how she had had the gall to ask him outright like that!

      ‘What would you like?’ he asked politely, as if he had just met her for the first time.

      Lola bit back the desire to scream, and instead said, very calmly, ‘I’ll have one of those sandwiches, please.’

      ‘Coming up.’ He put the sandwiches on two plates, then handed her one—a beautiful bone-china plate in deep green, overlaid with a delicate lily-of-the-valley design, which Lola had never seen before.

      ‘Where did you find these?’ she queried as she took the plate from him. ‘Or did you go next door to Dominic’s and bring them?’ Even to her own ears the question sounded ridiculous.

      He seemed to change his mind about his sandwich, and put the plate down quickly, as if it were made of hot metal. ‘No, I didn’t go next door. The plates were here,’ he said slowly. ‘In the china cupboard.’

      ‘The china cupboard?’ asked Lola, screwing her nose up in bemusement. ‘Here?’

      He nodded. ‘Along the corridor that runs from the cellar—you know? There’s a doorway just at the back. . .’

      She knew the part of the house to which he was referring—the basement area which looked as though it could be used as the set for a Gothic horror film. She had been in there once—very briefly. It was dark and dingy and it gave her the creeps.

      ‘I never use it,’ Lola said as she eyed the sandwich without enthusiasm, and then something else occurred to her. ‘So how come you know more about my house than I do?’ she demanded half-jokingly.

      There was a silence, but it was not the tranquil hush born of easy companionship. Instead, it was a tense, uneasy silence, made all the more ominous by the bleak, haunted expression on Geraint’s face.

      ‘There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there, Geraint?’ Lola put the plate down on the beside table with a clatter and looked at him, noticing that her voice was suddenly sounding very unsteady.

      There was only a fractional pause this time. ‘Yes, there is,’ he said grimly. ‘And it’s about time you heard it.’

      The fear which was building a bigger barrier between them second by second made her hold