Past Loving

‘Hello, Robert—’ she began, but before she could continue he interrupted her, demanding,

‘Were you looking for me?’

Looking for him? Now she was thirty, the spell of his unexpected appearance broken as she stared at him with cool irritation, not unmixed with anger at his arrogance. Did he think she was still a silly little girl of eighteen, needlessly running after a man who no longer wanted her?

‘No, I wasn’t,’ she told him. ‘Actually I didn’t realise you were here. I had heard that you’d bought the Hall, of course, but I’m afraid I was just using your lane to take a short cut back to the main road. Something I’ll have to get used to not doing…’

It gave her a sharp sense of pleasure to be able to deny his assumption that she had been looking for him and even more to know that it was the truth.

‘The Hall’s been empty for so long—’ she started to add, but he cut across her comment, telling her,

‘Well, I intend to have gates placed at either end of the lane, which should deter future trespassers, although in your case you could always have planned your journey so that you didn’t need to take a short cut. As it is, one of us is going to have to reverse.’

Meaning that she was going to have to reverse, Holly suspected as she deliberately refused to make any response to his comment about the gates. The Hall had been empty for so long that she wasn’t the only person using the lane as a short cut, and, while she could understand that any new owner would want to maintain his privacy, she felt that Robert’s comment to her had been double-edged, a means of warning her that the lane wasn’t the only thing that was out of bounds as far as she was concerned.

Was he really so arrogant as to imagine that she still cherished the idealistic and stupid daydreams she had held at eighteen? Or was she simply being over-sensitive, over-reacting because of what Patsy had said earlier and because of the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly, of realising that, no matter how many times she had seen his photograph in the papers, it had not prepared her for the reality of him, for the sheer maleness of him, and for all the ways in which her stupefied senses were being bombarded by their awareness of him?

All right, so he was still one hell of a sensually attractive man, she fumed inwardly, and, all right, so a part of her was dismayingly vulnerable to that sensuality, but it was surely a vulnerability which was being heightened by shock—a vulnerability she would soon have under control?

After all, nothing was as great a deterrent to the headiness of physical excitement and awareness as the dulling mundaneness of proximity.

‘I’d better be the one to reverse,’ she heard Robert saying to her. ‘After all, we’re closer to the house than we are to the main road.’

She focused on him, automatically starting to thank him, but he was already turning away from her.

He reversed the large Mercedes with a smooth dexterity which she envied.

For a birthday present last year, Paul had booked her on to an advanced driving course, and, while she felt she had learned a good deal from it, she had finished it feeling inwardly that she lacked many of the assets needed to make a truly good advanced driver. Her worst fault, she knew, was that she was inclined to daydream while at the wheel…as she had been doing just now.

The lane ran outside the main wall of the Hall and gates from the stable yard opened on to it. For the last few years they had remained closed, rotting slowly away, as the Hall remained empty, but today they stood open, and as Robert reversed through them into the stable yard she found herself slowing down so that she could peer curiously towards the house.

It was a long time since she had last been inside it—an unauthorised visit during a village fête held in its grounds when she had been much younger. Then she had been awed and amazed by the size of the rooms, wondering what on earth one very old lady would want with so many. She must have been eight or nine at the time. Paul, of course, had been the instigator of that piece of naughtiness. Robert had gone with them as well and it had been Robert who had rescued her, when she discovered that her legs were too short to make it over the open windowsill through which they had made their illegal entry into the house.

It had been from the secure haven of his arms that she had faced the irritation of Mrs Powers’ housekeeper, who had demanded to know just what they were up to, and it had been Robert who had apologised and smoothed over her anger. She ought to have realised then that a male with such a powerful ability to refocus female emotions would never be content to marry early and settle for a placid domestic life.

After that incident she had worshipped Robert, but since Paul had bluntly told her that neither he nor Robert wanted her interfering in their games she had docilely restrained herself to worshipping him in silence and solitude.

Suddenly realising the construction which Robert might put on the fact that she was virtually sitting still with her car engine idling, she was just about to drive away when he got out of his own car and came towards her.

An absurd flood of self-consciousness made her duck her head, conscious of the burning heat searing her pale skin. She was blushing—something she had believed she had stopped doing a decade ago. She prayed that the soft swing of her hair would conceal her heightened colour from Robert, quickly starting to change gear as she prepared to drive off, but he had now reached her car and had placed a restraining hand on her own window.

‘I had hoped to see Paul, but I understand he’s away on business…’

‘Yes,’ she agreed tersely.

‘Never mind, I’ll have plenty of time to catch up with him once he gets back. When will he be back, by the way?’

‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Mm…well, I’m renting a small cottage locally while I oversee the renovation of this place, so I’m going to be around for the foreseeable future.’

He was leaning on the window as he spoke to her. She could smell the leather of his jacket, the soap tang of his skin. His hands were tanned, the nails clean and trimmed, but not manicured. There was a graze across the back of his hand and a small cut on one finger. She wondered how they had got there…perhaps in defending one of the lovely women he always seemed to be photographed with from the attentions of the papa-razzi? She switched her glance from his hand to her own. Hers too bore the odd scratch. She had been attacked by an over-vigorous climbing rose at the weekend, angrily defending its right to spread itself just as far and fast as it chose. The rose had definitely been the victor of that battle, but she had warned it of stiff pruning to come in the autumn if it insisted on its greedy absorption of territory that was not its to appropriate…

In a garden, order had to be imposed if havoc was not to result.

‘I’ll let Paul know that you’re back,’ she told Robert, still unable to look at him properly.

‘He’ll be married by now, I expect?’

‘No, Paul is the proverbial rolling stone who refuses to gather moss.’ In fact her brother had a more off than on and very volatile relationship with a woman friend who was divorced with two small children and who had told him plainly and bluntly that, while she enjoyed going to bed with him, she had no intentions of prejudicing her children’s security by introducing into their lives a man who was only going to play at being there for them.

‘And you…I hear that you’re still single as well.’

His comment jarred, reminding her of so many things she did not wish to remember.

‘These days women don’t need to marry to lead fulfilled lives, and at thirty—’

‘You’re still young enough not to have to worry too much about the ticking away of your biological clock. I know,’ he agreed, suavely interrupting her. He had shifted his position somehow so that she was increasingly aware of him and his effect upon her senses, and now she turned towards him too quickly, her eyes widening as she realised just how close to her he was, as he leaned down towards her, his eyes only inches from hers as she inadvertently looked straight at him.

‘Strange how things worked out…I’d always imagined you’d marry young, have children—’

‘I don’t see why you should be so surprised,’ she interrupted him shakily. ‘After all, you were the one who told me that I’d be a fool to waste my opportunities, to throw away my chances of success by tying myself down with a husband and children.’

He had said that to her, but they both knew that what he had meant was that he would be a fool if he threw away his chances and tied himself down by marrying her. But he had deliberately chosen to make it sound as though he were thinking of her when in reality his motives had been entirely rooted in his own needs and wants. If he had thought about her at all, he would have made sure that she never got the chance to fall in love with him in the first place and he would certainly never have allowed her to believe that that love was returned, but then, as she had discovered over the years, men were adept at making women believe they were acting in their best interest and for the most altruistic of reasons when in fact they were doing almost exactly the opposite.

‘You’ve changed, Holly.’

She smiled mirthlessly at him, and said lightly, ‘I should think I have, although I prefer to think of it as growth rather than change. I must go, Robert. I’ve got a board meeting this afternoon and I’m already late.’

She realised as she said it that it sounded more like the defiant boasting of a frightened child than the cool, reasoned comment of a woman too protected and safe from the kind of vulnerability she had once known to be remotely affected by a chance meeting with the man who had once been the cause of her greatest unhappiness.

The look Robert gave her seemed to reinforce her own thoughts.

‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll wait,’ he said softly, and it wasn’t a kind comment. ‘Odd how different our perceptions are from reality. You’re every inch the sleek, sophisticated, successful businesswoman now. I wonder, has she completely obliterated the girl I once knew?’

His comment stunned her. She had no idea what had motivated it or why he should be so deliberately cruel as to mention that girl. He must know how much anguish he had caused her…how much pain…how much self-revulsion when eventually she had come through the madness of begging and entreating him not to leave her, of pleading tearfully with him to stay…to love her instead of leaving her.

He had changed too…because the Robert she had known would never have made a comment like that. The Robert she had known—the Robert she had thought she had known, she reminded herself as she looked away from him, fiercely stabbing the car into gear, and gritting her teeth. But that Robert had never really existed.

As she started to move away, Robert stepped back from the car, telling her drily, ‘Next time, remember, set out a bit earlier.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she told him through her gritted teeth. ‘Now that I know you’ve bought this place, wild horses wouldn’t drag me within a mile of it.’

Ten minutes later, when she finally pulled out on to the main road, she was still shaking, still cursing herself for her folly in giving in to her need to make that childish verbal defiance. Why on earth hadn’t she simply remained cool and uncaring, shrugging aside his comment and just driving off without giving in to the need to react to it?

Well, at least she had made her position plain. As far as she was concerned, his presence in the village wasn’t welcome, and she wished he had not chosen to come back. She was glad that it was extremely unlikely that she would have to have any kind of contact with him, although, womanlike, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth a single man could possibly want with such a huge barn of a house.

She was of course late for her board meeting, apologising to the other members when she hurried in.