Levelling The Score

‘What on earth made you tell her we were getting married?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Why didn’t you tell her the truth?’

‘I didn’t think she’d believe it. I thought I did quite well on the spur of the moment,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Very well, in fact …’

Jenna wasn’t to be mollified.

‘You know what a gossip she is! It will be all round the village by tonight …’

‘So what? Come on, Jenna,’ he drawled, looking into her shuttered, angry face. ‘It could be worse. I could have let her go on thinking that the pair of us had sneaked down here for a spot of illicit sex, instead of which I did the gentlemanly thing and …’

‘Lied to her! Gave her a totally false impression of our relationship!’ Jenna fumed.

‘What’s wrong? It will never get any further than the village. Your boyfriend isn’t likely to find out, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

‘It isn’t,’ Jenna announced shortly. ‘I just don’t like being involved in any sort of deceitfulness,’ she told him virtuously.

His eyebrows lifted.

‘And of course, lying to me about Susie’s whereabouts in no way constituted any form of deceit?’ he suggested softly.

Jenna wanted to hit him. In fact she was reaching out to do so, when he moved away from her and she became aware that all he was wearing appeared to be a minute pair of briefs.

‘And that’s another thing,’ she told him bitterly. ‘When I went to bed last night, I was lying alone, in my own sleeping-bag.’

‘Mm … You woke me up during the night complaining that you were cold, clinging on to me for dear life. The only way I could shut you up was to zip both bags together.’

Jenna was about to make a heated retort when she had a sudden and extremely disturbing memory of dreaming about snow. She bit down hard on her bottom lip, cursing the tricks that the subconscious mind could play.

‘Look, there’s nothing to get so worked up about. To listen to you anyone would think this is the first time you’ve been to bed with a man.’

He said it so casually that Jenna was stricken into silence. Although he didn’t know it, it was, but there was something so shaming about still being a virgin at twenty-four years of age that she kept it a deep and dark secret.

And the problem was that the longer her virginal state continued, the harder it was going to be to get rid of it.

‘Do you want first go at the bathroom, or shall I go down first and appease Mrs M?’

‘With what?’ Jenna snapped. ‘More lies?’

Even so, she made no objection when he got out of bed, other than to quickly turn her head, averting her eyes from his nearly nude body.

The last time she had seen him wearing so little had been the summer of her adolescent crush, but he had filled out since then, the youth’s body becoming that of a man. Her stomach lurched protestingly as her senses logged the flat hardness of his belly and the tensile, muscular strength of his thighs. He leaned over her, picking up his clothes and she tensed, wishing that he wouldn’t come so close to her. Such man-to-woman intimacy was quite obviously so familiar to him as breathing, while she … while she was rendered as gauche and nervous as a schoolgirl, she mocked herself acidly.

As he moved away from her, she heard him saying laconically, ‘It’s all right, Jenna. I don’t think looking at another man constitutes an act of unfaithfulness.’

Thank God Simon thought she was involved in a sexual relationship with Craig. Otherwise … Otherwise what? Otherwise nothing, she told herself firmly, waiting until she heard him going downstairs before snatching up her own clothes and heading for the bathroom.

It was over an hour before they could escape Mrs Magellan’s determination to provide them with a fitting breakfast, and her questions about the latest news on their families, but at last they were free to go.

Jenna hated the way Simon insisted on accompanying her out to Craig’s car. Quite what Mrs M made of a pair of lovers who arrived at their destination in separate vehicles she had no idea, but no doubt were she to ask, Simon would have a response suitably lacking in truth and reality for her.

‘You’re supposed to be madly in love with me darling—remember?’ he taunted her as she tried to pull away from his constraining hand.

‘Perhaps my lack of conviction springs from the fact that it’s a role I find it quite impossible to visualise myself in,’ Jenna told him tartly.

‘Really! You do surprise me. Can this be the same Jenna who used to follow my every movement with yearning, lovelorn glances?’

Jenna stopped abruptly.

‘Why you …’ She swung around, furious that he should be callous enough to refer to her youthful crush. Her heel caught in a tussock of grass as she moved, and she felt it give way beneath her.

As she fought to regain her balance she saw Simon reaching out towards her. For some reason, she thought that he was going to kiss her, and she was instantly filled with a sense of blind panic, pushing him away.