Passionate Possession

In the garden, overgrown shrubs and brambles almost but not quite concealed several rusting piles of rubbish, items which Eric Barnes claimed had been in the house when he had taken up occupation. The wooden gate fronting the lane was hanging off its hinges and rotting.

Her heart heavy, Lucy drove on. Even without its unpleasant tenant it would have been difficult to sell the cottage. Sell it! It would have been difficult to give it away in its present state, she admitted.

Her hands clenched on the steering-wheel. She tried to force herself to relax. She was fine-boned and slim, but recently friends had begun to comment that she was looking a little too drawn, a little too fragile.

That was the cost of her outward serenity, the fact that inwardly she worried and that that worrying cost her weight she could not afford to lose.

It was almost six o’clock and she realised that her detour had meant that she was going to have to rush to be ready when Tom came to pick her up.

She decided to take a short cut through the new business park.

The mayor had opened it less than a year ago, and she had to admit that it was well designed and laid out, or at least it would be once the newly planted trees started to mature.

Now, on a Saturday afternoon, it was relatively quiet. Most of the units were quite small; this was not a big industrial area, after all, and none of them was above three storeys in height.

One of the largest units was the complex taken up by Niall Cameron for his software company.

She had been a little surprised when Don had first told her about Niall Cameron. ‘Why on earth is he relocating down here?’ she had asked him.

‘Personal reasons,’ Don had told her. She presumed now, after listening to Verity, that those personal reasons must in some way concern the woman with whom he was living. Perhaps, since she was presently working in New York, her work took her abroad a good deal and they were reasonably close to the airport here, and Manchester Airport was expanding rapidly to provide most international flights.

Without being aware of what she was doing, she had slowed down slightly as she had approached the Cameron complex. A brand-new Discovery was parked outside it. Lucy grimaced to herself as she surveyed its gleaming paintwork.

It wouldn’t stay like that for very long if he actually moved into the farm. The lane to the farm was rutted and invariably muddy whenever they had any rain.

She stiffened as she saw a man emerge from the building and walk towards the Discovery. He was tall, bare-headed and in his mid-thirties, his dark hair lifting in the breeze. Those immaculately polished shoes wouldn’t last very long in that state either, she decided sardonically as she watched him. He was dressed in city-smart ‘casual’ clothes—a leather blouson jacket, immaculately pressed trousers, a fine-checked wool shirt—all very smart and all very expensive. Her top lip curled a little.

The right clothes, the right accent…Oh, yes, she could see why Verity was so impressed by him. He had stopped moving and he was, she realised with a small stab of disquiet, watching her. There was no reason why she should not be where she was, but for some reason she immediately panicked, putting the car into gear and almost stalling it as she did so, her face suddenly hot and flushed, her breath coming far too quickly.

She didn’t like him, she decided as she drove jerkily away.

She did not like him one tiny, little bit.

CHAPTER TWO

LATER on that evening as she sat beside Tom, halfheartedly paying attention to the play being unfolded below them on the stage, Lucy allowed herself to admit that her judgement of Niall Cameron was perhaps illogical.

After all, he was not the only man to drive an expensive vehicle, to wear expensive clothes. Nor had she any reason to dislike him simply because he had moved to the area. Was it perhaps Verity’s breathless admiration for him that had jarred against her? It certainly couldn’t be his wealth; despite her own position, Lucy had no desire to be wealthy. Not to have to worry so much about money perhaps, but the luxuries money could buy…no, she had no envy of those.

So why, then? Why had the man aroused such antagonism in her, both before and after she had seen him?

‘Not still worrying about the cottage, are you?’ Tom asked her during the interval.

‘Not really,’ Lucy fibbed. ‘Why?’

‘You just seem rather preoccupied, that’s all.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Lucy assured him, asking, ‘Isn’t it your Sunday for the children tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’ Tom frowned. ‘Josy claims that seeing me upsets them too much. God, hasn’t she made me feel guilty enough already? It was her decision to go for a divorce, not mine.’

Lucy said nothing. She had heard the gossip about the brief illicit affair which had been the forerunner to Tom’s divorce. He was nice enough, but inclined to be rather self-indulgent and a little weak. At the moment he was too full of self-pity to be ready to admit that it was his own adultery which had led to Josy’s decision to divorce him, although Lucy suspected that there had been other problems in the marriage. She was not the kind of person who liked prying into the private lives of her friends.

‘God knows what I’m going to do with them. The kids, I mean. That damned flat is so small.’

Lucy watched him gravely. She suspected that Tom was already getting bored with playing the doting, misunderstood daddy. How long would it be before he found excuses for not seeing his children every week? How long would it be before he lost contact with them altogether? Lucy felt a small spurt of anger against him. His children loved him…needed him, and she did not doubt that he loved them, but she suspected that he loved himself more. She chastised herself for her thoughts. What right did she have to criticise? She had no children…no partner…she knew nothing of the stresses the break-up of a marriage could bring.

Even so, without intending to, she heard herself asking quietly, ‘Is it really too late, Tom, for you and Josy?’

They had been so very much in love when they had married, Tom twenty-six, the same age as she was now, Josy just twenty. Now, five years later, they were divorced, claiming that they no longer loved one another. But they had two small children, whom they both did love. What was wrong with society, Lucy wondered bleakly, that there should be so much confusion and suffering? She remembered clearly the love she had received from her parents, from both of them, and how she had felt when she had lost that love, and she had almost been adult.

‘You don’t approve, do you?’ Tom accused her suddenly, surprising her with his unexpected astuteness.

‘It has nothing to do with me, Tom,’ she told him mildly.

‘No,’ he agreed wryly. ‘But you haven’t answered my question, have you? You know what your trouble is, don’t you, Lucy? You’re out of touch with reality. You live in this rarefied world where everyone does the right thing, where everyone is perfect and behaves properly. My God, is it any wonder that you live there alone?’ he added, savagely shocking her with the vehemence of his words. Words that hurt her, even though she didn’t show it.

‘Wonderful, wonderful Lucy,’ he derided. ‘You’ve never put a foot wrong, have you? You’ll never make a mistake, will you…you’ll never fall in love with a married man…break your marriage vows…? You’d never do anything that isn’t perfectly correct, would you?’

Lucy fought not to show how much his anger had shocked her. Raw emotion of this kind frightened her, making her remember how she had felt when she had first learned of her parents’ death. Since then she had learned to control her emotions, not to show them, and somehow being in the presence of someone who didn’t share that kind of control made her feel nervous and vulnerable.

‘I hope I would never do anything that might hurt someone else,’ she told him gravely.

The look he gave her was bitter.

‘You don’t even begin to know what life’s about, do you?’ he challenged savagely. ‘Do you think I wanted to have an affair? Do you think I planned it?’

He was, Lucy recognised, under enormous emotional strain. She sincerely pitied him, but there was nothing she could do to help him. He might not have planned to be unfaithful, but surely there had been a point when he had known what was going to happen…a stage at which he could have chosen to draw back?

‘What happens if you fall in love with the wrong man, Lucy…a man who loves you in return but who’s committed to someone else…or do you simply think that that would never happen?’ he jeered.

Thankfully the bell for the second half rang before she needed to make any response, but Tom’s words stayed with her, challenging her. She would never allow herself to fall in love with a man who was committed to someone else. It simply could not happen, she knew that, but somehow Tom’s words, his anger, had unsettled her. He had made her sound so…so cold and emotionless, which she wasn’t. Why should she be made to feel like that? To love a man who was hurting someone else, cheating on someone else, a someone else who had every right to his love and his loyalty, to be with her—no, she could never do that. To rob another woman of her lover, children of their father. She knew too well how it felt to suffer that kind of loss.

They were both very quiet as Tom drove her home. When he parked outside the block of flats he apologised abruptly, ‘I’m sorry. It’s just…Well, it’s been one hell of a week. I wanted to see Josy…to talk to her, but she…’ He shrugged, and in the darkness Lucy could see the pain in his eyes. ‘I’m afraid I just took my frustration out on you.’

‘What else are friends for?’ Lucy asked him lightly.

He made no attempt to touch or kiss her, but then she had not expected that he would. They did not have that kind of relationship. Lucy had never encouraged her male friends and acquaintances to be physically affectionate towards her.

Even with her first lover she had remained slightly aloof and distant in public.

She smiled a little as she let herself into her flat.

She had been almost twenty-one when she had rather gravely decided that she could hardly remain a virgin forever. She and Harris had worked together. He had been five years her senior, a rather studious and quiet biochemist. They had got on well together and she had persuaded herself that she was in love with him. They had planned to get engaged, but almost immediately that they became lovers Lucy had realised that what she had mistaken for love was in actual fact merely affection and liking.

He had been a considerate lover, careful and gentle, but she had certainly not experienced with him anything intense enough to make her feel the way she knew other people felt about their men.

They had parted amicably and as friends. He had moved away from the area now and they had not remained in contact. She had no regrets about knowing him and even less about not marrying him.