A Time To Dream

Today her long dark hair was tied back off her face and plaited, making her look much younger than her twenty-four years.

Twenty-four. Paul had laughed at her when she had turned down his suggestion that they spend the weekend together. She couldn’t possibly still be a virgin, he had mocked her. Not at her age and with her background.

That had hurt her; as though somehow the fact that she had no family to support and protect her meant that she must somehow be promiscuous. She had immediately denied such a suggestion, ignoring the unkind way he was laughing at her.

As a child she had loved reading; had found in her books an escape from the loneliness of her life, and perhaps it was because she had absorbed so many fairy-tales that she had clung so tenaciously during her late teens to the fantasy that one day she would meet someone; that they would fall in love and that not until that happened would she have any desire for the kind of sexual intimacy that seemed so casually taken for granted by others.

Perhaps Paul was right and she was being naı¨ve and idiotic; perhaps it was true that the majority of men would deplore and mock her inexperience; perhaps it was also true that at her age she ought to finally be abandoning her ridiculous notions of falling in love and living happily ever after.

Certainly, now that her eyes had been opened to Paul’s true character, she would not want to change places with Sarah.

Very carefully she cut the next strip of wallpaper, equally carefully rolling it up and placing it in the water-filled tray.

It had been Louise who had suggested that she tried her hand at doing some of her own decorating, taking Melanie home with her to show her what she and Simon had achieved in their own elegant detached house.

Some ten years her senior, Louise was proving to be a good friend, the first real friend she had ever had. She and Simon had been very kind to her and they were the only people she had ever admitted into her life and her trust.

Quite why, when she was eighteen years old, she had decided to take a course of driving lessons and ultimately her driving test she had never really known, but now she was thoroughly glad she had done so. Although Melanie was reluctant at first to touch any of her savings, Louise and Simon had firmly told her that when living in such an isolated area a car was an absolute necessity, and then when she had seen the fire-engine red VW Beetle she had fallen so immediately in love with it that Louise had chided her teasingly about being a salesman’s dream.

She did not intend to touch a penny of her inheritance—she had other plans for that!

Wealth, luxuries, life in what was popularly termed ‘the fast lane’—these had no appeal whatsoever for Melanie, but what she had always secretly hankered for was a home of her own, preferably in a country setting.

Of course in her daydreams this home was peopled with the family she had never had, but perhaps that was why she had given in so easily to Louise’s urgings that she move into the cottage if only for a little while.

Perhaps there had also been another reason; perhaps she had hoped that in living in the cottage she might somehow discover more about her unknown benefactor.

Melanie didn’t know very much about men, as the lamentable way in which she had almost fallen for Paul’s deceit had shown. She had no idea why a man, a total stranger, should choose to make her the beneficiary of his will. The solicitors had suggested that perhaps there was a blood connection, but she had shaken her head, knowing already that she had no blood relatives whatsoever.

Perhaps, then, he had known her parents. Again she had shaken her head, forced to admit that she had no idea whether or not this might have been the case, but privately she doubted it. If he had, surely he would have come forward to make himself known to her while he was still alive.

Apart from his cousin, it seemed that John Burrows had had no other family. He had lived in the area all his life and so had his family before him, although in the latter years of his life he had apparently become something of a recluse.

Carefully Melanie mounted the ladder again, gingerly carrying the second piece of wallpaper.

This proved harder to stick on to the wall than the first piece. Even harder was trying to align the edges of the two pieces so that the random pattern matched. The damp paper tore, causing her to make a small verbal protest at her own lack of skill as she hastily tried to stop the paper ripping even further.

Perhaps if she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on what she was doing it would not have been such a shock when the bedroom door opened abruptly and a totally unfamiliar male voice called out cheerfully, ‘Sorry to barge in like this. I tried ringing the bell but couldn’t get any response and, since your back door was open…’

Automatically Melanie let go of the sticky paper and turned round, forgetting her precarious position on top of the ladder.

The man’s reactions were fast. As the ladder started to topple and she with it, he seemed to virtually leap forward across the room, grabbing her around the waist and swinging her free of the heavy ladders just as they crashed down on to the floor.

It must be the shock of both his totally unexpected appearance and nearly having a painful fall that was making her feel so weak, she decided shakily, unable to do a thing other than simply cling to the hard muscles of his arms while he held her firmly suspended quite some distance from the floor, his black-lashed grey eyes subjecting her to a very thorough and slow appraisal.

As the colour rose up under her skin, her body language betraying immediately that she was both unused to and not entirely comfortable with such intimacy, his expression changed, a tiny frown appearing between his dark eyebrows as he studied her again.

What was it about her that was bringing that almost irritated frown to those otherwise rather carefully blank grey eyes? Melanie wondered when she found the courage to shyly look into them.

He was still holding on to her, as effortlessly as though she were a small child, she realised rather indignantly as she struggled uncomfortably within his grasp, trying to remind him that he was still holding her some dozen or more inches off the floor.

When this gave no response, she demanded rather breathlessly, ‘Could you please put me down?’

He had stopped looking at her, thankfully, and seemed to be studying the wall behind her with a rather arrested and bemused look on his face. The wall she had just been papering, she realised defensively; but now he looked at her again, and her whole body seemed to receive a shocking jolt of sensation that made her feel literally as though her bones had turned to fluid and that if he put her down now she would simply dissolve into a small heap at his feet.

The trouble was that she wasn’t used to being so physically close to a man; and certainly not a man like this one. He might not be handsome in the way that Paul had been. Paul, with his blond good looks, his carefully groomed hair, his hard, compelling bone-structure and his equally hard muscles; but this man had something about him, something which she dimly recognised was far more potent and dangerously male than Paul’s rather effeminate and weak good looks.

‘Not yet, I think,’ the stranger told her easily. ‘First I demand my forfeit…’

‘Your forfeit…’ Melanie was unaware of saying the words aloud in a stupefied almost drugged voice until he smiled at her. She had often read of smiles being described as wolfish, but this was the first time she had ever seen one. It made her skin go cold and then hot, and a tiny, forbidden pulse of excitement beat into life deep within her body; a sensation so unfamiliar and shocking that she could only stare at him with her bewilderment openly betrayed in her eyes.

His own narrowed fractionally, their blankness suddenly sharpening into an expression that made her heart jump frantically, but thankfully he seemed to mistake the cause of her shock because he explained patiently as though speaking to a child, ‘Yes, the forfeit you owe me for so speedily saving you from misfortune. That’s the way it goes in all the best fairy-tales, isn’t it?’

Her heart jumped again. She averted her head, but couldn’t resist giving him a nervous sideways look. She licked her lips anxiously. He had said that almost as though he knew her; as though he knew of her childhood absorption and belief in such things.

But she wasn’t a child any more. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman, and he was a strange man who had no right to walk into her home even if she had misguidedly left the back door open.

However, before she could say as much he was speaking again, his voice soft, mesmeric almost. ‘You have such a warm, irresistible mouth that there’s really only one forfeit I can ask you for, isn’t there? A mouth like yours was surely fashioned deliberately to entice a man’s kisses.’

Her head was whirling. What on earth was happening to her? Things like this simply did not take place. Men such as this one simply did not walk into her life and demand forfeits from her…kisses…And as for what he had said about her mouth…

Unconsciously she traced its shape with her tongue tip, her eyes unwittingly darkening in reaction to the potency of what he had whispered to her, her naı¨vety and lack of experience so openly obvious that for a moment he hesitated.

What if his assumptions should be wrong? She looked so fragile…so lost…so vulnerable somehow; and then he reminded himself that he could not afford to make mistakes or allowances; that he had come here for one express purpose; that he…He tensed as she focused on him, her eyes so dark that they looked almost purple, so dilated that…

He felt his own heartbeat quicken, his body tensing in reaction to the scent and the warmth of her…the womanliness…Because she was a woman, despite the fragility of her body and the innocence in her eyes.

He lowered his head, sternly reminding himself why he was doing this.

Held fast in his arms, Melanie quivered nervously. He was going to kiss her; she knew it. She also knew she ought to stop him, but how could she? What was her puny strength against the hard bulk of his body?

The grey glance still held her own, inducing an almost trance-like state of stillness within her body.

She felt the warmth of his breath caress her cheek, and a rush of goose-pimples raced down her body.

She quivered once as his mouth touched hers, her body stiffening as her mind summoned all its feminine defences, desperately sensing an enemy more dangerous than any it had yet known, but her body was deaf to all the warnings of her brain.

He kissed her slowly and lingeringly, bemusing her so thoroughly that she wasn’t even aware of him gradually lowering her so that her feet could once more touch the floor, thus freeing his hands to cup her face and her arms to instinctively and betrayingly creep round his neck, her heart pounding suffocatingly, as his tongue tip stroked her trembling lips. The hand cupping her jaw held her still beneath his sensual assault, while its partner slid down her back, firmly moulding her against body.

Paul had kissed her. Several times and very passionately, or so she had thought, and there had been other kisses before that, but none like this; and for all the fact that there was none of the urgency, the greed of Paul’s kisses in this man’s almost detached possession of her mouth, she was still aware of a reaction within herself that was far, far more intense and dangerous that any emotion Paul had ever made her feel.

In fact, when he eventually started to release her mouth, her lips actually seemed to cling to his. And she knew that he was aware of it too because he made a sound beneath his breath which might have been irritation or which might have been amusement.

Thankfully whatever it was it brought her sharply back to reality in time to remove her arms from around his neck before he had to forcibly do it for her. However, when he stepped back from her, to her consternation she discovered that her body seemed to actively miss the hard pressure of his.

While she was still trying to come to terms with what had happened he stepped past her to examine her wallpapering, commenting almost brusquely, ‘You know, these ladders aren’t really safe. Some lightweight aluminium ones would be far better. Think what could have happened if you had fallen and I hadn’t been here to catch you.’

If he hadn’t been there she wouldn’t have fallen off the ladders in the first place, Melanie told herself sturdily. Now that he wasn’t touching her any more she was rapidly returning to sanity, to the awareness that he was a stranger who had invaded the privacy of her home, uninvited, and that, for all that her feminine awareness of him urged her to think differently, he could be dangerous.