Unspoken Desire

Rebecca remembered how her sensitive, newly emerging awareness had reacted to that very maleness of him; how a fierce thrill of pleasure had run through her as he sat down beside her on the window-seat. His first words to her, though, quickly dashed her foolish hopes.

He had come, he told her gently, to find out if something was wrong; if perhaps there was a problem at school. The knowledge that he so obviously still considered her to be a schoolgirl, a child, had been so bitterly painful that she had found it impossible to respond to anything he said, retreating further and further into her own protective shell, putting between them what she now recognised had been the beginning of a distance which neither of them had ever broached.

After that, with growing maturity, and aware of how potentially embarrassing for all concerned it would be if her feelings for him were ever to become public knowledge, she had made a point of avoiding him whenever she stayed at Aysgarth, spending more time in Rory’s company than she did in Frazer’s—and apparently so effectively convincing him that he was nothing more to her than merely an older and rather boring cousin that, when Rory had claimed she was the one with whom he was breaking his marriage vows, Frazer had had no difficulty whatsoever in believing him, which of course was exactly what she and Rory had wanted. So why afterwards had she felt that savage backlash of agonising pain that he should so easily have accepted their deceit? What had she expected him to do? Deny their claims and in doing so say passionately that he knew that she, Rebecca, could not possibly be involved with anyone else, because she loved him…and moreover that that love was returned?