A Kind of Madness Read online

  ‘What? Oh, for God’s sake don’t be so stupid. I can’t sleep with you. I don’t want to.’

  Elspeth froze. No, of course, he didn’t want to. Just like Peter hadn’t wanted to. She wasn’t desirable enough, attractive enough.

  She said as much to him, sitting up in bed, her chin firming proudly, completely oblivious to the fact that a watery moon had broken through the clouds and was shedding a faint silver light into the room so that her body was illuminated in its translucent gleam, her breasts pale and full and tipped with small, hard nipples.

  ‘Elspeth,’ Carter groaned despairingly.

  ‘No, please don’t make me go,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Carter, let me stay. I don’t want to be on my own. Not tonight.’

  ‘If you stay I’ll make love to you,’ Carter warned her savagely.

  ‘I want you to,’ Elspeth told him shakily. ‘In fact I think I’ve wanted to ever since—ever since you kissed me down by the stream.’

  ‘This is madness—complete madness,’ she heard him saying thickly, but it didn’t stop him from leaning towards her, and slowly, so slowly that it was more of an adoration than a mere caress, he ran his hands up over her body, from the curve of her hips to the softness of her breasts, pausing briefly there, while her breath locked in her throat and her heart pounded with sledgehammer beats and then his hands moved on, cupping the rounded ball of each shoulder. He leaned forward and kissed her, a questioning, delicate kiss that did little more than brush the softness of her lips, but she trembled so violently under it that both of them stilled.

  ‘You really want this?’ Carter demanded against her lips.

  She couldn’t speak. Could only nod her head, her eyes huge and brilliant, her body achingly aware that, with his, it could learn pleasures so intense that they would never be forgotten.

  He kissed her again, his mouth hard, the kiss brief, and then again and again, until their mouths fused in hot, eager need and this time when his hands touched her body it was with the sure, knowledgeable touch of a lover, stroking, enticing, exciting, making her gasp beneath his mouth and arch under his hands as they kneeled body to body in the moonlight.

  Her own hands, more skilled, more knowing, more wanton than she had ever dreamed they could be, stroked him, told him how much they delighted in the pleasure of this intimacy with him.

  When he buried his mouth in the soft curve of her throat, she arched eagerly against him, her breasts pressed flat against his chest, her nipples sensitised by the quickening movements of his body.

  When he laid her down on the bed, she gazed at him in wondering delight, aching to be able to find the words to tell him how he made her feel.

  But it seemed that words were unnecessary and that her trembling flesh silently conveyed to him its pleasure in his touch by responding quiveringly to the exquisite sensations aroused first by his hands and then by his mouth.

  When his tongue-tip traced the aureole of her breast she shuddered wildly and clung to him, gasping his name, her whole body tensing in spasms of white-hot pleasure when he responded to her need by opening his mouth over her tight, hard nipple and then by suckling on it with increasing urgency.

  Elspeth had never dreamed herself capable of such wild abandonment, of such fevered, aching need, of such instinctive, overwhelming sensuality, as she opened her body to him, and wrapped herself around him, her mouth trembling, burning where it touched his skin, eager to absorb the taste and texture of him. Gone were the restraints of the past. This was where she wanted to be—where she needed to be.

  She felt no self-consciousness, no guilt, no hesitation…only an overwhelming knowledge of the rightness of what she was doing.

  It was as great a pleasure to touch Carter, to stroke and taste him, to feel his body shudder with reciprocal desire when she did so, as it was to have him touching her. It was like having a banquet of delights spread out in front of her, she thought dizzily, nuzzling his throat and then his shoulder, exploring the indentation of his spine and then the hard, flat plane of his buttocks, her body thrilling with awareness of the aroused heat and weight of him against her.

  ‘Elspeth, you don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ he told her thickly in between kisses.

  ‘I know what you’re doing to me,’ she whispered shakily, watching his eyes go dark as his hand stroked her body and felt its betraying tremble. He was touching her so gently, so intimately, so pleasurably that there was nothing she could do other than give herself up to the voluptuous, velvet darkness of that pleasure, unable to stop him even when she felt the mind-destroying lap of his tongue against the most intimate part of her body and knew shockingly that there was nothing she wanted more than to return the intimacy of that caress, unless it was the fully aroused heat of him deep within her body, easing that tormenting ache that the soft stroke of his tongue was deliberately arousing.

  She told him so, unaware of the jumbled litany of praise and pleas that left her lips, knowing only that his arousal, his desire were suddenly tumultuously urgent and that he, like her, seemed to know instinctively that her quivering body needed to feel him deep within its softness.

  The sensation of him being there, the careful tenderness with which he controlled his body’s powerful surge, the way in which he held her, gentled her and held back his own pleasure while he shepherded hers, filled her with such emotion, such joy—such love, she recognised, her mind and flesh suddenly free of any kind of self-deceit—that she opened herself willingly and eagerly to him, and the passage of his flesh within her own was so acutely pleasurable that she met each thrust with trembling eagerness, letting the forces inside her gather and coalesce until they couldn’t be contained any longer.

  She cried out in the first white heat of shattering release, felt herself fall through space into the safety of Carter’s arms as the initial sharp dazzle of pleasure left her boneless and fluid.

  She could hear Carter breathing heavily, feel his body trembling slightly in the aftermath of his own release. He was still holding her, stroking her damp skin, whispering soft words to her that she was too exhausted to hear.

  All at once she felt hugely tired, so physically relaxed that it was impossible to move, impossible to do anything other than turn into the warmth of Carter’s body, nuzzle his throat appreciatively and then fall deeply asleep as she snuggled deeper into his embrace.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘I’VE brought you a cup of tea.’

  Elspeth shuddered wildly as she recognised Carter’s voice. Her head was pounding, her mouth felt sour and dry, her stomach was churning nauseously, but worst of all the sound of Carter’s voice had brought an effortless and total recall of the events of the previous night.

  The fact that she was now in her parents’ bed and not her own did not provide any reassurance that she had simply dreamed the whole appalling incident. For one thing, she doubted that her imagination was that good. For another, every time she moved there were unfamiliar aches and tensions within her body which she was quite sure had nothing to do with the pounding in her head or the nausea in her stomach.

  Tea. It was the last thing she wanted. No, Carter’s presence in her bedroom reminding her of what she had done—that was the last thing she wanted.

  She wished there were some way she could block out forever her all too vivid memories of the way she had seduced—there really was no other word for it—Carter. A faint moan escaped involuntarily from her tight throat. She opened her eyes just in time to see Carter hurriedly putting down the cup and advancing towards the bed.

  Foolishly, in view of what had happened, she clutched hold of the bedclothes as though in terror of having them ripped from her, shrinking back under them, while Carter came to an abrupt halt, his face blenching.

  ‘I’ve got to go and check on the greenhouses, see if there’s been any more damage.’

  She nodded her head, her throat too tight to allow her to speak. She wished he would go and leave her if not in peace, then at least in priv
acy to digest the unappetising memories of her wanton behaviour.

  It was the drink, of course. There could be no other explanation, and everyone knew that strong alcohol could have the strangest effect on those not used to drinking it. Which was why, of course, sensible mothers advised their teenage daughters to treat it with great caution.

  Carter seemed strangely reluctant to leave her room. He had walked over to the window and was standing staring out of it. This morning he was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. He turned round abruptly and where the collar lay open she saw a small dark mark, like a bruise, just above his collarbone. She stared at it like someone transfixed, her colour coming and going.

  Had she done that? Vague, unnerving images filtered through her aching brain. She remembered clutching on to Carter’s arms, digging her nails into his hard muscles, telling him in frantic whispers how much she had wanted to touch and taste him.

  A small whimper of protest bubbled in her throat. Numbly she pulled the beclothes over her head.

  She heard Carter sigh, a small, explosive sound. Of what? Anger? Irritation? Amusement? After all, he hadn’t stopped her, had he? Oh, no, he had let her go right ahead and make a complete fool of herself. And he could have stopped her…couldn’t he? He could have refused. Refused to what? Allow her to arouse him? Would she have wanted that? Would she have been feeling any better this morning if she were confronting the knowledge that he had rejected her? At least last night had proved to her that she was capable of arousing a man to desire, that not all men were as cold as Peter. But to have made love with a man—no, she corrected herself sharply, not with a man, but to a man—for no other reason than to prove she could arouse him to desire… How truly appalling. But no more appalling surely than to have got drunk and then made sexual advances to a man with whom one was secretly and very desperately in love.

  In love. She, in love with Carter. How ridiculous—how impossible. Anyway, she didn’t believe in falling in love. She was far too mature, far too sensible. Mature—a woman of her age who made love without even stopping to think of taking any kind of precautions against pregnancy or anything else.

  ‘Elspeth,’ she heard Carter saying urgently. ‘We’ve got to talk.’

  Talk. That was the last thing she wanted to do.

  ‘Go away,’ she moaned from beneath the bedclothes. ‘Please, just go away.’

  Perhaps he could hear the hysteria she was only just keeping at bay, or perhaps he was really as appalled by the whole thing as she was herself and eager only to escape, to make it plain to her that last night was an aberration, that it meant nothing. Well, there was no need for him to reinforce that truth to her. She was quite prepared to take the blame, to admit that the whole thing had been her fault. And if he thought that she was the kind of woman who believed that just because he had been her first lover, just because she might be carrying his child, just because she was quite despairingly and hopelessly in love with him, it meant that he owed her anything at all, she would soon show him that she wasn’t.

  She waited until she was sure he was gone before peering over the bedclothes. Outside the sky was a soft grey. The storm was over—her whole life was over, she thought mournfully, getting out of bed and staggering sickly as she felt the full impact of last night’s bottle of elderberry wine. Elderberry wine—what on earth had possessed her? It wasn’t even as though she didn’t know how strong it was.

  In the bathroom, she suppressed a strong desire to be extremely unwell and searched feverishly through her mother’s cabinet for something to subdue the riot in her head and stomach.

  Finding nothing, she made do with cleaning her teeth with enough vigour to make her head ache even further, having a shower, washing her hair, acknowledging that it was too likely that she wouldn’t even be able to keep an aspirin down and making herself a promise that the first thing she was going to do was to drive to the village and buy herself some Alka Seltzer.

  Driving her car down the bumpy lane was a form of self-inflicted torture that made her vow she would never touch another drop of alcohol in her life. She parked her car in the village and climbed out cautiously. The pain in her head had reached catastrophic proportions, and she was only thankful that her poor eyes weren’t forced to endure the bright light of the sun.

  She had almost reached the chemist when someone stopped her, a bright female voice calling her name. She turned round, recognising one of the girls she had been at school with.

  She had two small children in tow and she grinned happily when she saw Elspeth. ‘My goodness, what on earth’s the matter with you?’ she asked anxiously, seeing Elspeth’s white face.

  ‘Hangover,’ Elspeth admitted unwillingly, wincing as Louise laughed.

  ‘You? I don’t believe it. Weren’t you the one who virtuously refused to join in when we all drank that bottle of cider behind the bike sheds?’

  ‘Yes—more’s the pity. If I had done, I’d have had more sense than to get myself in this state.’

  ‘Did—er—Carter join you in this revelry?’ her friend enquired dulcetly.

  Elspeth shot her an acid look. She and Louise had once been close friends, and still kept in touch. She had been Louise’s senior bridesmaid when she’d married Allen, and she was godmother to both her girls.

  ‘Carter?’ she repeated with what she hoped was convincing disinterest.

  ‘Yes. He is staying at your folks’ place, isn’t he? Allen said he was bidding at yesterday’s auction. He got the old Thatchford place, didn’t he, and those fields next to your parents? Which reminds me—did seeing him again stir up any of those wanton teenage yearnings?’ She giggled conspiratorially. ‘Remember how both of us used to drool over him that summer your aunt first brought him here?’

  Elspeth, who had been concentrating solely on the news Louise had just given her, looked at her friend and snapped defensively, ‘You may have drooled—I never did. I disliked him. I always have.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I know that was what you liked to pretend, but we both know the truth. Remember how I caught you writing his name all over the front of your maths rough-book, and drawing hearts all over the place with his initials on them. You were crazy about him. We both were. Remember how we used to wonder what it would be like if he kissed us. My God, when I look at these two and remember what I’ve got to go through I start thinking I ought to lock them up in a nunnery. How’s Peter, by the way? You two set a date yet?’

  ‘No—nor are we going to,’ Elspeth told her shortly, ignoring her friend’s surprise and pressing her hand to her aching head.

  ‘Look, why don’t you come back with me and have a cup of coffee?’

  She wanted to refuse but Louise refused to let her, and there was something rather comforting about letting Louise bully her affectionately, treating her almost in the same way as she did her two small daughters.

  And besides, if she went home with Louise it would mean that she needn’t face Carter—at least not yet.

  She spent an hour with Louise and her family, at the end of which the Alka Seltzer Louise had given her had started to take effect. She felt decidedly better, and having resolutely refused to acknowledge Louise’s teasing comments about her teenage crush on Carter, she realised now that even if she had deliberately forgotten it and even denied it, Louise was quite right. She had had the most mammoth crush on Carter, had indeed dreamed and drooled over him and had even, she blushed to recall, written his name all over her maths book.

  You might be able to deceive yourself, she reflected grimly, as she drove home, but you certainly couldn’t deceive an old friend, especially not one who had shared your growing years with you.

  But she had more urgent things to dwell on than her own folly. Louise’s revelation that Carter had bought those fields had really jolted her. She had managed to push to the back of her mind Peter’s allegations against him, but now suddenly she was forced to confront them.

  She drove slowly down the lane and then into the yard.


  As she did so the back door opened and Carter erupted into the yard. He looked furiously angry, so angry in fact that for a moment she almost decided not to get out of the car. And then she reminded herself that this was her home—well, at least her parents’ home—that Carter was the intruder, and that, even worse, he was deliberately setting out to ruin her parents, and that gave her the strength to push open her door and get out.

  She had scarcely put one foot on the ground before Carter suddenly grabbed hold of her and virtually yanked her out of her car. He was almost shaking her as he demanded to know where she had been, and yet oddly instead of feeling frightened she experienced a strange, dizzying sense of exhilaration.

  ‘Just where the hell have you been?’ he was demanding as he shook her. ‘If you think I’m going to let you walk out on me and back to him after last night—’

  ‘I didn’t walk anywhere,’ Elspeth interrupted him. ‘I drove to the village to buy some Alka Seltzer.’

  ‘You drove—in your condition? Are you mad? Don’t you realise you could still be over the limit? My God, have you no sense?’

  For a moment Elspeth was too stunned to speak, and then she fired back bitterly, ‘I might not have any sense, but at least I have some morals. At least I’m not trying to destroy someone—at least I’m not trying to steal from them. How could you buy those fields when you know my parents need them? Peter was right—you’ve been out to cheat my parents all along. You bought those fields so that you can put them out of business.’

  Ridiculously she was suddenly close to tears, unbearably hating knowing that after all Peter had been right. It didn’t stop her loving Carter—nothing could do that, she recognised dismally. Carter stared at her, his mouth thinning.

  ‘Are you crazy? I don’t believe I’m hearing any of this. I bought those fields, not for myself, but for your parents—on their behalf, in fact. My God, how could you suspect…? And to think that last night I actually thought you were finally beginning to realise. But it’s all Peter with you, isn’t it? Nothing else—no one else exists,’ he demanded bitterly. ‘Well, I don’t know what kind of rules you live by, Elspeth, but the ones I live by don’t include one-night stands. When I make love to a woman, even when she’s doing the asking,’ he added mercilessly, ‘it’s because I’ve already made some kind of emotional commitment to her, because I want far more from her than the brief pleasure of her body. OK, so now you’re going to tell me that it only happened because you’ve lost Peter, that you were using me as a substitute for him, but let me tell you this: no woman makes love to a man the way you did to me without feeling something, and you knew damn well it wasn’t Peter you were holding in your arms last night. You knew damn well it wasn’t Peter you wanted to kiss and hold you. It wasn’t Peter’s body you wanted—’