Game Of Love

Natasha had never particularly cared for the dean’s wife, although she had never attracted her criticism in the same way as Emma. That was the trouble about living in a small place where you had spent all your life. You knew everyone, and everyone knew you and felt free to air their opinions and views of your behaviour—even when you were long past the age when such views were welcome or necessary.

‘Anyway, isn’t that the dress Emma wore when she and Richard became engaged? I told her then it was most unsuitable.’

‘Which is why she passed it on to me,’ Natasha told her evenly. Much as she herself might sometimes disapprove of Emma’s behaviour, she was not going to aid and abet Mrs Templecombe in criticising her cousin.

‘Well, I must say I’m surprised to see you wearing it.’

‘I’m a career woman, Mrs Templecombe, and setting up my own business doesn’t allow me either the time or the money to waste on clothes shopping. To tell the truth I was grateful to Emma for offering to lend it to me.’

A lie if ever there was one, but Richard’s mother seemed to accept it at face-value.

‘Yes. I must say it was rather adventurous of you to open your own shop, and selling ecclesiastical fabrics to the general public.’

Her face suggested that what Natasha was doing was somehow or other in rather poor taste, making Natasha itch to say rebelliously that the cloth wasn’t sanctified, but instead she contented herself with murmuring, ‘Well, they’re very much in vogue at the moment, and are being snapped up by people with a taste for traditional fabrics who can’t afford to buy the original antiques.’

‘Ah, there you are, Lucille. Such a pity there isn’t time to show you round the gardens before dinner. I particularly wanted to show off the new section of the double border. We’ve planted up part of it with a mixture of old-fashioned shrub roses, underplanted with campanula and a very pretty mallow.’

Smiling gratefully at her aunt, Natasha adroitly excused herself, marvelling on the unsuitability of some people’s names as she walked away. Surely only the most doting of parents could have chosen to name Richard’s mother Lucille. Her second name was Elsie, which she much preferred and which everyone apart from Emma’s mother was wise enough to use.

If her aunt and mother were nothing else, they were certainly marvellous and inspired cooks, Natasha admitted when the main courses had been removed from the table and the sweet course brought in.

Another bone of contention between the ecclesiastical fraternity and her own family was the large pool of temporary domestic assistance her mother and aunt could call upon from the wives and daughters of some of the factory’s employees, who would cheerfully and happily help out on the domestic scene when necessary. This willingness to do such work stemmed as much from her aunt’s and mother’s treatment of those who supplied such help as from the generous wages paid by her father, both women being keen believers in the motto ‘Do unto others…’

It was a constant source of friction at the deanery and elsewhere in the cathedral close that they, who were frequently called upon to involve themselves in all manner of entertaining, were hard put to it to get so much as a regular cleaner, but then, with Mrs Templecombe to set the tone for the whole of the cathedral close, it was not perhaps surprising that they would find it difficult to hold on to their domestic help.

His mother, as Richard cheerfully admitted, had been born into the wrong century and adhered to an out-of-date and sometimes offensive policy of ‘us and them’.

As it was a warm evening, once the meal was over the guests were free to wander through the drawing-room’s french windows, on to the terrace overlooking the gardens. Natasha escaped there, avoiding the fulsome compliments of her coterie of elderly admirers, and the fierce glares of their wives.

Really, she reflected, as she stood breathing in the scented night air, she had had no idea that being a siren involved such hard work. It was just as well she had no ambitions in that direction.

In the distance, the cathedral bells tolled the hour. The bells were one of the first things she missed when she was away from home. Her little house inside the city was almost in the shadow of the bell tower, and she had grown used to timing her telephone calls to avoid clashing with their sonorous reminder of the passing hour.

However, much as she loved the cathedral, much as she enjoyed the pomp and ceremony of its religious feast days, much as she adored the richness of its fabrics and embroideries, if she ever got married she would want a simple ceremony: a simple, plain church, flowers from her aunt’s garden, a few special friends and only her very closest family.

She didn’t envy Emma her big wedding in the least, and she certainly did not envy her all the palaver that went with it. What she did envy her in a small corner of her mind was having found someone she loved and who loved her in return. Sighing to herself, Natasha wondered if she was ever going to totally grow out of what she now considered to be a silly, immature yearning for that kind of oneness with another human being.

She had lived long enough now to recognise that marriage was a far from idyllic state, one that should only be entered into after a long, cool period of appraisal and consideration, and preferably only if one had developed nerves of steel and was devoid of all imagination; and yet, even though she knew all this, there were still nights like tonight when the soft, perfumed air of the garden led her into all manner of impossible yearnings…

She slipped off her shoes and walked to the edge of the terrace away from the haunting scent of the roses climbing on the wall, and it was while she was standing there, looking out across the shadowed garden, that she heard a familiar voice exclaiming, ‘Emma, darling, there you are!’ and felt a pair of male hands on her shoulders.

Immediately she turned round, saying wryly, ‘Sorry, Richard, I’m afraid it’s not Emma, but Natasha.’

‘Tasha? Good heavens!’

At another time, the disbelief in his voice would have amused her, but now for some reason it merely served to underline her own aloneness.

‘For a moment I thought…You and Emma normally look so different. I’d never have mistaken the two of you. I… You look so different…’

Richard faltered into the kind of silent eloquence of a man who had confidently flung himself off the top of the highest diving-board, only to discover that the pool below him was empty of water, but Natasha took pity on him and said drily, ‘Luckily for you, I’m prepared to take that as a compliment, even if it was a rather back-handed one. I think you’ll find Emma’s in the drawing-room talking to your mother.’

‘Tasha, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…’

‘I know you didn’t,’ she agreed wryly, and then added severely, ‘Just don’t do it again.’

‘I suppose I’m so much in love with Emma that I can’t think of anyone else. I saw you out here wearing her dress—Why are you wearing it, by the way?’ he asked awkwardly. ‘I mean, it isn’t your sort of thing at all, is it?’

‘Oh, isn’t it?’ she asked quizzically, watching him flush uncomfortably, irritated without knowing why that he should automatically assume that she didn’t have either the ability or the desire to be seen as a sensual woman.

In fact, she was so engrossed in the shock of discovering that she could feel such illogical irritation that she didn’t realise they weren’t alone until he looked abruptly away from her and said eagerly, ‘Luke, come and meet Emma’s cousin, Natasha. Natasha, I’d like to introduce you to my, or rather my father’s cousin, Luke.’

Without knowing why, as she turned round Natasha felt both vulnerable and nervous.

The man walking along the terrace towards her had the familiar Templecombe features of a tall, athletic frame, good bone-structure and a shock of dark hair, but in him some rogue genes had added features which neither Richard nor his father possessed, she recognised uneasily.

Whereas the most common expression on the faces of Richard and his father was one of benign, almost unworldly kindness, on this man’s face was an expression of hard cynicism; his eyes, unlike Richard’s, weren’t brown, but a light, pale colour which seemed to reflect the light, masking his expression. He was taller than Richard, and broader, somehow suggesting that beneath his suit his body was packed with powerful muscles and that it had been used in far more vigorous and dangerous ways than playing a round of golf. Natasha, who had never in her life experienced the slightest curiosity or arousal at the thought of the nude male body, suddenly found herself wondering helplessly if the dark hair she could glimpse so disturbingly beneath the crisp whiteness of his shirt cuff grew as vigorously and as masculinely on other parts of his body, and if so what it would be like to feel its crispness beneath her fingertips.

She stiffened as though her body had received a jolt of electricity, and heard him saying evenly and without any inflexion in his voice at all, which somehow made it worse, ‘Emma’s cousin. Ah, yes, I thought I recognised the dress.’

‘Yes, so did I. In fact I thought for a moment that Tasha was Emma.’

‘Really?’

Natasha watched, fascinated, as the dark eyebrows rose indicating polite disinterest, and then said hurriedly, ‘I think we’d better go in. Emma will be wondering—’

‘If you’ve borrowed her fiancé as well as her dress,’ the cynical voice suggested, causing Natasha to grit her teeth and force back the sharp retort springing to her lips. He might move in the kind of circles where people swapped lovers as easily as they changed clothes, but if he thought that he could come here and insult her by suggesting…But what was the point in quarrelling with him? As a painter he might be worthy of her admiration, she thought angrily as she stalked past both men, realising too late that she had not retrieved her shoes, but as a man…

‘Won’t you need these?’

Seething, she turned round to discover that he was holding her shoes. Damn the man; he must have eyes like a hawk. Of course, as a painter he would be used to monitoring every tiny detail. Her heart started to jump erratically as he came towards her. His wrist and hand were tanned a rich brown, and as she put out her own hand to retrieve her shoes she noticed how pale and somehow delicate her own skin looked against his, how fragile her wrist-bones—so fragile that, if he were to curl his fingers around her wrist, he could break it as easily as he might snap a twig.

She gulped and swallowed, furious with herself for her idiotic flight of fantasy, almost snatching the shoes from him with an ungracious mutter of thanks.

Richard, keen to find Emma, had already gone inside, and she wished that his cousin would follow suit, she decided resentfully as she put the shoes on the terrace and then started to step into them.

As she slipped on the first one, the heel wobbled alarmingly and she kicked the other shoe over. Cursing the uneven paving of the terrace, she started to bend down to pick it up and then tensed as Luke Templecombe said coolly, ‘Allow me.’ He was already holding the shoe and there was nothing she could do other than grit her teeth and stoically concede defeat as he suggested mockingly, ‘I think it would be much simpler if you put your hand on my shoulder to steady yourself. The ground here is very uneven—hardly suitable for this kind of footgear, but then when ever did a woman consider suitability of prime importance when choosing what to wear?’

Natasha opened her mouth to deny his unfair comment, and then closed it again, her whole body going into shock as she felt his fingers close round her ankle.

‘Silk stockings,’ she heard him murmur, and then, unbelievably, his hand travelled up her leg, resting briefly on her knee before travelling expertly along her thigh, stopping on a level with the hem of her skirt.

For almost thirty seconds Natasha was too mortified to speak, to do anything other than tremble in furious indignation. When her parlysed vocal cords were working again, to her intense chagrin all she could manage was a very mundane and choked, ‘How dare you? What do you think you’re doing?’

‘I thought I was accepting the none too subtle invitation I was being given,’ he told her laconically. ‘No woman who wears black silk stockings and that kind of dress is doing so because she doesn’t want to be looked at and touched.’

Natasha was furious.

‘How dare you?’ she repeated, almost stammering in her rage. ‘I suppose you’re the kind of man who believes that women are never raped—that when they say no, they always mean yes. For your information, I am wearing this dress and these stockings, not for the disgusting reasons you have just suggested, but because—’