A Kind of Madness Page 7

  As he spoke, almost as though it had heard him, the machine suddenly coughed and spluttered to a halt.

  ‘Excuse me. I’d better go over and give John a hand.’

  Watching as he broke into an easy spring, Elspeth blinked once or twice in the strong sunlight. She did feel rather light-headed, she discovered—perhaps that was the reason she had reacted so oddly to him. Much as she hated to admit that he might have been right, that the sun might be too strong for her, it was a relief to discover that there might after all be a perfectly mundane reason for her odd reaction to him.

  After all, one read about people going mad when they were exposed to too much strong sun.

  That, she reminded herself wryly, was in the desert, not in deepest Cheshire. Still, she clung to the comfort of the explanation Carter had unwittingly offered her, and it was true that she did feel extremely uncomfortable and hot in her suit. She shrugged off the jacket and set out doggedly across the field to where the two men were kneeling over the silent rotavator.

  It seemed unlikely that Carter could do anything to sabotage her parents’ work here in an uncultivated paddock, but it would do no harm just to hang around for a little while and watch what was going on.

  Not for the world did she want to admit that as yet the thought of walking back to the house in her tight skirt, her hot, sticky tights and now her uncomfortably tight shoes was not an appealing one, but, after fifteen minutes of standing in aimless silence while the men worked steadily on trying to repair their piece of machinery, common sense told her that for the moment at least her parents’ business was at no risk.

  Besides, if she stayed much longer Carter might get completely the wrong impression and start to suspect that it was him she had come to see and not the paddock. Which was ridiculous, of course. Nothing could be further from the truth, but just to be on the safe side…

  Giving the two men a cool smile, she broke into their conversation and explained that she was going back to the house.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’Carter apologised, getting up off his haunches and wiping his dirty hands off on his jeans, ‘but we really ought to make a push to get this done before the weather breaks. The farmers’ weather forecast says there’s a thunderstorm on the way for later in the week.’

  A storm—Elspeth shivered. She had always hated storms, not so much because of the thunder—it was the lightning she dreaded. As a very small girl she had once witnessed lightning striking a tree, and the shock of that occurrence had remained with her, buried deeply in her psyche, so that no matter how much she told herself that there was no need for her almost irrational fear, it was something she had never been able to banish.

  Carter frowned as he saw her shiver, but before he could say anything Elspeth started to walk quickly away.

  Not for the world did she want him to think she wanted to linger, to stay in his company. There were any number of things she could do up at the house, starting with getting to grips with her father’s accounts.

  ‘The stile!’ she heard Carter calling after her, but she shook her head, indicating the gate at the opposite end of the field, and called back,

  ‘It’s all right! I’ll use the gate.’

  She would have a longer walk that way, but the last thing she wanted was the experience of being held in Carter’s arms a second time, of feeling that irrational and far too intense awareness of him again… Wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TO Elspeth’s chagrin, she discovered once she was clear of the paddock that she had the beginnings of a stitch in her side. She had always considered herself pretty fit, and privately was inclined to be a little scornful of those of her colleagues who countered the excesses of their lifestyle by strenuous work-outs in fashionable gyms.

  When she came home she unfailingly took the opportunity of indulging in a long, therapeutic walk, but not normally clad in a formal business suit and city pumps, she acknowledged to herself. Crossly she blamed Carter for this particular piece of folly, and therefore it followed that the pain in her side was his fault as well.

  Why had her parents been so foolish as to invite him into their home? They were so naïve at times, so in need of protection. Thank goodness Peter had been so quick to suspect what Carter might be up to.

  Automatically she left the rutted lane to follow an overgrown path that led back to the house. It skirted a small coppice and then ran alongside a pretty stream. The soft gurgle of the water tempted her to stop and stare into one of its shallow pools. As a child she had loved going with her father, when he could spare the time, to look for tiddlers, and for some reason now the old temptation came over her. The water beckoned, exercising its ancient fascination. It looked so tempting and cool, and her poor feet were so hot and sore. Behind her, beyond the hedge which separated the paddock from where she was, she could hear the staccato sound of the rotavator, proof that the men were back at work. There was no one to see her if she gave in to that temptation and removed her skirt, tights and shoes.

  Wriggling her toes, she sighed in the blissful pleasure of being free of her constricting and totally unsuitable garments. If her silk shirt looked rather at odds with the ragamuffin, slender length of her bare legs, well, there was no one to see her. Unexpectedly, a tiny impish smile dimpled her mouth as she contemplated Peter’s reaction to what she was doing. He would have been horrified, and with good reason, she scolded herself, but she still made no attempt to get dressed, instead carefully stepping down into the water, shivering in delicious pleasure as she felt its coldness against her skin, and the smoothness of the pool’s pebbled bottom beneath her feet. As she waded carefully into the pool, she felt the familiar and intoxicating pleasure she had known as a child. Pausing, she tried to remember how long it was since she had last done something like this.

  When she was twelve, perhaps. After that she seemed to remember she had begin to consider herself too grown up for such childish pleasures.

  She sighed again, automatically perching on a large, dry boulder, her chin sunk on one hand as she looked down at the clear water, as though expecting to see there a reflection of her childhood self.

  For a moment, contemplating the past, she had been aware of a faint sense of aloneness, of melancholy, almost—and yet why? She had everything in life that every intelligent woman was supposed to want: a fulfilling career, a good circle of friends, all of whom like herself had high-powered careers, which meant that their friendships were something which invariably had to take a back seat, a relationship with a man who also understood the demands of her career, just as she understood those of his, a future planned along meticulous and orderly lines—so why did she suddenly feel as though she was not getting the optimum satisfaction out of life? Why had she suddenly started looking around her, and seeing in the life she and Peter had chosen for themselves a certain lack of something—something she could not actually define, but which seemed to be epitomised by the sheer joy and enthusiasm which overflowed from her parents’ lives? They had their traumas, their bad times and troubles, but they were so happy, so ready to take the moment and its transient joy and appreciate it. Sometimes when she was with them she felt as though they were the children and she the adult.

  Absently she reached across to the bank and pulled out one of the tall, waving grasses, chewing on it consideringly.

  It was only when she came home that she started thinking like this. Cheshire had a very disruptive effect on her mind. Perhaps because in London she didn’t have time to dwell on things which might be better not dwelt upon. Certainly she did not have time to sit on rocks dangling her feet in six inches of freezing cold water, clad only in her underwear and a very expensive silk shirt. The very thought of Peter’s reaction if she ever evinced any desire to do so brought a wry smile to her lips. It lurked in the depths of her eyes, reluctant and faintly unholy—an urchin’s grin, all secret knowledge and naughtiness—or at least that was how it struck the man watching her.

  Elspeth hadn’t seen C
arter. She was still deeply engrossed in her own thoughts, still defiantly pushing away the one thing she knew she ought to be considering, ignoring it and then returning to probe carefully at its edges.

  Now, here in this peaceful place, she should think calmly and logically about the insanity of her outrageous reaction to Carter. It had been a reaction out of time and character, she had no doubts about that; but she prided herself on her intelligence, and the mere fact that she had experienced such an overwhelming sensual awareness of him pointed unmistakably to the need for further exploration of certain shadowed and vague areas of her relationship with Peter. Why, for instance, had she never felt like that with him? Why had she been almost relieved when she’d first discovered that Peter did not, as he’d put it in his slightly pompous way, think it was a good idea for them to develop the more intimate side of their relationship until such time as they were both properly established in their careers?

  She had accepted his decision so easily at the time, simply telling herself that while they were both under such career pressure neither of them had the time nor energy needed to devote to becoming lovers.

  Why did she now suddenly feel that both she and Peter were hiding behind the convenience of that excuse? What new and irreversible knowledge had she gained so suddenly in those few brief seconds in Carter’s arms to make her so fiercely convinced that there was something essential and basic missing from her relationship with Peter?

  ‘You’re looking very pensive.’

  At the sound of Carter’s voice she almost fell off her boulder, swinging round defensively and glaring at him as she saw him standing less than four yards away, watching her.

  ‘What do you want?’ she demanded, standing up, and then furiously wishing she hadn’t as she saw the way his attention was drawn to her legs.

  ‘I was concerned about you,’ he told her calmly. ‘You looked a bit shaky, and once we’d got the rotavator going I thought I’d better come after you to make sure you’d got back to the house safely.’

  ‘I’m an adult, not a child,’ she told him acerbically. ‘And now, since you can see that I am all right, perhaps you’d be kind enough to go away and leave me alone.’

  She saw that his face had creased into amused laughter as he listened to her. ‘You know, you sound just like you did when you were a teenager. You told me to go away then too. You said that the farm was your home, and that you didn’t want me there…’

  Elspeth flushed crimson. Trust him to have remembered that incident. She remembered it too and knew quite well what had sparked it. She had just been at that very vulnerable age of changing from a child to a woman and back again, sometimes in the space of less than an hour, and she had seen in Carter’s intrusion into their lives someone who was taking her father’s precious spare time so that there was none left for her. And she had resented that bitterly.

  ‘I was jealous of the time my father spent with you,’ she told him flatly, refusing to lie to him.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Surely that couldn’t really be compassion she could hear in his voice? She had made the admission more as a form of self-punishment than anything else, and to hear that soft almost tender note in his voice had startled her.

  ‘I was having problems too. My father and I had been on our own for so long, I wasn’t sure how I felt about his remarrying—’

  Now she really was startled. ‘But you were grown up,’ she broke in.

  ‘At barely twenty-two?’ Carter asked her ruefully. ‘I might have thought I was, but I was very immature in a good many ways. Being here with your folks helped me to get myself sorted out a little bit…helped me to put things in perspective. In fact, that would have been a perfect summer, if it hadn’t been for one very cross and resentful young lady, who stood very much on her dignity against me.’

  He was teasing her, trying to get under her guard, Elspeth warned herself, steeling her senses against the rueful tenderness of his words. ‘I was following my instincts,’ she told him coolly.

  She was becoming increasingly conscious of the coldness of the water, and of the bareness of her legs. Carter was standing right beside her things and, much as she longed to demand that he go away, she knew it would be ridiculous and dangerous for her to protest about the intimacy of their situation.

  Trying to appear careless and unconcerned, she paddled back to the bank, only to find she was as embarrassed and as flustered as her teenage self might have been when Carter remarked softly, ‘Well, one thing certainly hasn’t changed. You’ve still got the best legs I ever remember seeing.’

  For a moment she was too stunned to say anything, to do anything, other than subdue the ridiculous flutter of pleasure that warmed her stomach, and try to combat its insidious effect by saying acidly, ‘That is an extremely sexist remark, and one I do not appreciate. How would you like it if I were to make a similar comment about you—if I were to say, for instance, that I—that I found your arms very sexy?’

  The moment she had uttered this challenge, she wished she had been more cautious. For a moment she thought he was going to burst out laughing, but instead he turned his head away from her, so that all she could see was the unexpected dark burn of anger along his cheekbones.

  ‘You see?’ she told him, trying to sound triumphant. ‘You don’t like it. It makes you angry.’

  ‘Angry?’ he demanded vehemently. ‘You think I’m angry?’

  She could understand why he might try to deny it. No man liked being bested by a woman proving her point. ‘Oh, you can try to pretend now that you aren’t. I saw your face, remember, and you were angry…’

  His mouth thinned and the look he gave her suddenly made her feel as though she were once again fourteen, a child in a world of adults.

  ‘I don’t know what kind of relationship you’ve got with this “almost” fiancé of yours,’he told her roughly, ‘but it certainly hasn’t taught you much about men. And the first and most important lesson you can ever learn is how to tell the difference between anger and arousal. I’ll give you a head start. This is what happens when it’s arousal.’

  He moved so quickly she had no chance to escape. One moment she was still standing ankle-deep in the water, the next she was in his hands, pressed the length of his body as those same hands smoothed over what seemed like every inch of her skin from her shoulders to the tops of her thighs, stunning her so much by the sensations they aroused that she never even thought to move; could in fact only stand there, completely at the mercy of feelings she had never known might exist, blind, deaf and dumb to everything but the message Carter’s touch was relaying to her as he held her against his body and brought his mouth down on hers.

  As she realised what was about to happen some latent sense of self-preservation came to her rescue. She tried to turn her head away, but Carter was too quick for her, cupping her face with one hand while the other gripped her waist. How could it be that the pressure of a man’s hand against her skin could at once be both so tender and so firm? Her movements stilled automatically as though he had spoken directly to her brain. Her lips actually parted in breathless anticipation of his kiss; even the water seemed to slow its flow so that the music it made lulled and hypnotised her.

  There had never been a kiss quite like it… certainly not one she had ever experienced.

  Peter’s kisses were tepid, safe affairs, reinforcing her own belief that, as far as sex was concerned, she was one of those members of the human race whose appetite in that direction was slender rather than hearty. This self-admission had never particularly bothered her; after all, more and more City high-flyers, men as well as women, were now ‘coming out’, so to speak, and admitting that the stressful pressures of their careers left them not just short of time in which to make love, but short of desire as well.

  It was the nineties’ counter-revolution to the sixties, fuelled by the dread of AIDS, and until this moment in time she had never really paused to give her lack of any strong physical desire for Peter m
uch thought, simply accepting it as a facet of a modern relationship. Theirs was a generation overdosing on high career achievement, burned out by stress and helplessly addicted to the narcotic of work.

  Beneath the subtle alchemy of Carter’s mouth, her own softened, her lips clinging, shaping themselves to the silent demands of his.

  She had no thought of breaking away. No thought of doing anything other than hungrily absorbing this startling new pleasure that turned her mind weak and sent her blood singing dizzily along her veins.

  There was no past, no future, no Peter… nothing to remind her of her suspicions over this man, only this elementary, singing pleasure to mystify and dazzle her, to lure her on to her own self-destruction.

  The shock of Carter’s suddenly wrenching himself away from her was a brutal reminder of reality. As she stood, dazed and disbelieving, unable to stop herself from pressing her fingers against her mouth, as if by doing so she could capture the feeling of his against it, she heard him curse under his breath.

  ‘The rotavator’s stopped again.’ He still had his back to her. He was looking towards the paddock, but she knew humiliatingly that he didn’t want to look at her. ‘I’d better go and see what’s happening before John comes in search of me.’

  Not a word about what had happened. But after all what was there to say?

  As she watched him walking away, absently noticing the smooth co-ordination of his body, achingly aware of a sense of tremendous loss and misery, she shivered coldly in the advance wave of a vast sea of guilt, confusion, humiliation and anger.

  How could she have allowed him to kiss her like that? she berated herself as she quickly got dressed, pulling on her things with clumsy, stiff fingers, while her body trembled under the lash of her own destructive self-contempt. She wasn’t a child. It had been up to her to bring a swift and firmly rejecting end to what had been no more than a very obvious piece of chauvinistic male by-play. Carter had wanted to torment her a little, and predictably had chosen a very obvious and male way of doing so. And she was largely to blame for that. If he hadn’t found her paddling in the stream, half undressed, she doubted that it would even have crossed his mind to touch her. After all, he didn’t desire her, not her—the person, the woman. He had simply been briefly aroused by her physical presence. There had been nothing remotely personal in that arousal—she might have been any woman. What she ought to have done was to have let him take his kiss, to have stood cool and remote beneath it, instead of which… Instead of which… She stood still staring into space, a fine shudder of self-loathing rippling through her as she remembered the way she had responded to him, offering him no resistance at all, and even worse… She trembled visibly as she remembered how her body had moulded itself to his, how her lips had softened and clung, how she had sighed and melted, and how, even if he had made no move to do so, had he chosen he might have caressed her far more intimately without her even thinking of stopping him.