The Friendship Barrier Read online

  Waves of pleasure beat fiercely through her body, making her want to arch and cling, to cry out with pleasure and to beg for more; as she arched her body closer to Jake’s Stephanie dislodged the glass Mrs Kettering had left on the table beside the bed. The sound it made as it crashed to the floor broke through the half-hypnotic trance Jake’s touch had evoked and reality flooded in.

  ‘Jake!’ At first, her horrified protest had no effect. His mouth had released hers in favour of the satiny skin of her throat and, as Stephanie tensed beneath him, his lips moved downward until they were tasting the creamy sweetness of her breast.

  A shocked gasp stifled in her throat as her body responded against her will to the delicate touch of his tongue as it explored the deep rose-pink aureole of flesh that crowned her breast, and then, when she started to shiver with a reaction compounded of sexual excitement and self-revulsion, Jake lifted his head to study her flushed face and fever-bright eyes.

  With her eyes accustomed to the moonlight, Stephanie could see the dark arrowing of hair matting his chest, and remembered how she had stroked her fingertips through it, before kissing the moist male skin. What on earth had possessed her?

  ‘Jake, please, you must leave,’ she told him, her voice husky with pain and self-contempt. ‘I don’t know what happened, but…’

  ‘Don’t you, Stephanie?’ he was already on his feet, tucking the shirt back inside his jeans, his voice dry and cold. ‘Would you like me to tell you?’

  He must have seen her flinch because he laughed sardonically. ‘You wanted me, Stephanie,’ he told her. ‘You looked at me and wanted to know what I would be like as a lover. You looked at my mouth as though you couldn’t wait to find out how it would feel against your skin.’

  ‘No…’ Her denial was a tortured moan. ‘No… I was concussed… I didn’t know what I was doing… ’

  ‘You mean that frightened child who controls you didn’t know what she was doing,’ Jake interrupted coolly. ‘The woman in you knew exactly what she was doing.’

  ‘Jake, please… I know you must be missing Susy, but I won’t… I won’t be used as a substitute. I…’

  ‘You know nothing, Stephanie,’ Jake told her, as he moved away from the bed, fastening his shirt, ‘nothing at all, because you won’t let yourself know, and before you start allocating the blame, remember you were the one who invited me. I merely responded as any male would to such a blatant female invitation.’

  Although she turned away from him, Stephanie was acutely aware of the exact moment he left her room and, in spite of knowing that she should be relieved that he had gone, part of her wanted him to stay; part of her wanted him next to her, his arms round her, his heart beating reassuringly beneath her cheek, his hands and mouth caressing her body…

  Trembling, she tried to compose herself to sleep. She had always thought that when and if she ever experienced physical desire it would only be because she was in love. Never, ever, had she imagined experiencing those feelings for Jake. Because she had always known that it would be dangerous to love Jake, an inner voice told her; Jake was not a man who gave anything of himself easily, and so she had opted for friendship, knowing that she would never have his love. Was that it? Of course not. Not until he had started making her aware of himself had she ever thought of Jake in any remotely sexual way. Had she? Unwillingly, Stephanie remembered their initial interview, and how she had felt, how she had responded against her will to the magnetic maleness of him, but all that had gone after she had been attacked, and it had never come back… Until now. She loved him? Oh, but she couldn’t! She had seen what happened to the women who loved him; he grew bored with them.

  Like a bolt of lightning, the truth struck her. She had fallen for Jake almost on sight but, after the attack, shock and self-preservation had combined to make her turn Jake from a potentially dangerous threat into a safe ‘friend’. Could Jake himself have known this? He couldn’t know that she had been foolish enough to fall in love with him, otherwise he would never have made love to her as he had, Stephanie reassured herself. No, Jake had probably made love to her in some misguided attempt to break down the barriers she had raised against his sex. He would never deliberately hurt her by playing on her feelings for him, she was sure of that. No, he didn’t know she loved him. How could he? She hadn’t known herself until tonight, and he must not know. He must never know. Somehow, when she next met him, it must be as the cool, efficient secretary she had always been and not the woman who had turned to melting compliance in his arms.

  CHAPTER SIX

  STEPHANIE was already awake the following morning when the doctor arrived. He was shown up to her room by Mrs Kettering and Stephanie forced down her aching feeling of disappointment because she wasn’t Jake as she responded to her concerned enquiries.

  ‘Well now, let’s have a look at you,’ the doctor said cheerfully. Stephanie remained patiently still whilst he completed his examination.

  ‘Nothing much wrong there,’ he announced, once he had finished, ‘slight temperature, but that could be anything; certainly there aren’t any signs of concussion this morning. Sleep well last night, did you?’ He had his finger over Stephanie’s pulse and she knew he must have registered the hurried acceleration although he made no comment when she responded lightly, ‘Yes, quite well.’

  ‘Umm. No after-effects from the pills I left? No muzziness, or drowsiness? Some people sometimes complain that they affect them that way.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Stephanie responded quietly, wondering if any of his patients had ever complained that they left them completely without inhibitions because that was what had happened to her. Last night, her fear of sexual contact had simply melted away and, for the first time in her adult life, she had experienced the full force of a sexual magnetism so intense that she simply had not been able to resist it. But it wasn’t simply sexual magnetism that had taken her into Jake’s arms; she had wanted to be there with a fierce need whose roots lay within herself.

  ‘Stay in bed this morning and rest,’ the doctor advised as he stood up.

  ‘I’m here to work,’ Stephanie protested.

  ‘And you’ll work all the better for resting this morning. That was a nasty tumble you took and, although nothing’s broken, it will be quite some time before your body’s recovered from the shock.’

  Stephanie suspected that he might have been right if her body hadn’t had another and even more potent shock to contend with.

  Once they had gone, she made her way to her bathroom, wincing as her bruised muscles protested. When she had bathed and dried herself, she opened the door to discover that Mrs Kettering was just on the point of entering her room, carrying a large tray.

  ‘I’ve brought you your breakfast,’ she told Stephanie with a smile, ‘and Dr Jenson says I’m to make sure you don’t get up until after lunch.’

  ‘I’m causing you an awful lot of extra work,’ Stephanie apologised, ‘and Jake must be furious. I know he had a great deal to get through this weekend.’

  ‘Now, don’t start worrying about that. It’s no extra work at all to bring a tray upstairs and, as for Jake, he’s gone out.’

  It was one thing to tell herself last night that she must not allow Jake to guess how she felt about him. It was quite another this morning to deal with the misery she felt on learning that he had gone out without coming to see her. But why should he? He must be as eager to forget what had happened last night as she was, and perhaps, by going out, he was trying to tell her that the incident was closed.

  A morning in bed with nothing to do but analyse her thoughts and emotions was scarcely the best medicine for her newly discovered complaint, Stephanie thought wryly. For one thing, it made her remember small incidents that had slipped to the back of her mind but which she was now remembering with unwanted clarity. There had been the way Jake had pulled away from her on several occasions recently, whenever she had touched him accidentally. Because she was the one who normally avoided the slightest physical con
tact she had not given his actions a great deal of thought, but now she did. In the early days of their friendship, Jake had often touched her in a friendly way, until he realised how much she hated it, but he had never before actually avoided physical contact with her. What was she to make of that?

  She started to tremble violently as one explanation presented itself to her, and she was shivering fitfully when Mrs Kettering came in with a cup of coffee.

  ‘Cold?’ the older woman exclaimed with some concern. ‘I’ll get Harry to come and light your fire for you.’

  ‘No… no, I’m fine really,’ Stephanie responded. ‘Just someone walking over my grave.’

  No, not her grave, she thought dismally when Mrs Kettering had gone, but the grave of her friendship with Jake. There had been changes in him that she had been too blind to see; the friendship she had treasured so much had started to die a long time ago, but she had refused to see it; had refused to acknowledge that Jake was growing weary of the role she had given him. In the distance, Stephanie heard a phone ring, and then silence as someone answered it. Half an hour later, when Mrs Kettering returned for her cup, she said worriedly, ‘There’s been a phone call for Jake from New York, a Miss Waldron. She wanted to know where he was, but I couldn’t tell her.’

  ‘Did she say she’d ring back?’ Stephanie asked, trying to ignore the white-hot knives of jealousy slicing through her nerves.

  ‘No, she wants him to ring her. Left a number. I’ve written it down on the pad in the library. Me and Harry have been saying for some time that we’d like to see him settled down—this house is crying out for a family to bring it to life, but I doubt that Mile End would see much of him if he marries that one. A regular high flyer she is and no mistake.’

  ‘Have you ever met her?’ Stephanie asked, trying to sound unconcerned, but in reality filled with a bitterly intense jealousy. Had Jake ever brought Susy here? Perhaps made love to her in the privacy of the large, masculine bedroom she had only been in once when Jake had asked her to bring some papers up from the library.

  ‘No, but what I’ve read about her’s enough,’ Mrs Kettering said darkly. ‘You’re looking pale,’ she added with concern as she looked at Stephanie. ‘Perhaps you ought to stay in bed for the rest of the day. No sense in getting up and exhausting yourself for no purpose. Jake said he didn’t know when he’d get back.’

  ‘No, I’m getting up after lunch,’ Stephanie told her, not knowing whether to feel glad or sorry that Jake might not be there. On the one hand, she felt a fierce longing to see him again; a longing so intense that she didn’t know how she was going to stop herself from reaching out to touch him, and yet, on the other, she felt a revulsion against looking at him, and seeing in his eyes the cold rejection she was sure there would be there.

  In the end, she spent the afternoon finishing the dictation Jake had given her the day before and tidying out the files he kept at Mile End. It was growing dusk when Mrs Kettering came in to protest that she had done enough.

  ‘Jake said not to make any plans for dinner, so it looks as if he won’t be coming back,’ she added. ‘I dare say he feels guilty,’ she added, startling a betraying gasp from Stephanie’s half-parted lips. ‘After all,’ Mrs Kettering continued, ‘if you hadn’t gone riding with him, you wouldn’t have had your accident, would you?’

  ‘Oh, that wasn’t Jake’s fault,’ Stephanie assured her, hoping that the housekeeper hadn’t noticed her swift change of colour or the betraying tremble of her body. For a moment, she had thought Mrs Kettering had known about last night. Her own guilty conscience at work, Stephanie thought wryly. ‘If Jake isn’t coming back for dinner, I think I’ll have an early night.’

  ‘A good idea,’ Mrs Kettering approved. ‘Now what would you like to eat?’

  Mile End was a lovely house, but very lonely without Jake, Stephanie admitted when she eventually prepared for bed. It was only ten o’clock, but her bruised body was quite glad of the comfort of her warm bed. Where was Jake? And who was he with? Downstairs she heard the phone ring and wondered if it was Susy, and if the other woman shared her gnawing jealousy at his absence.

  It was with a resolve to face Jake as though nothing had happened that Stephanie went downstairs the following morning. He was already in the breakfast room dressed casually in black cords and a black cotton shirt open at the throat, when she walked in. The morning sun showed lines of tiredness and strain on his face that she hadn’t noticed before, a certain grimness to his mouth that caught at her heart. When he saw her, he raised his eyebrows and drawled, ‘Do you think you’re well enough to be down here?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ Stephanie responded with a crispness which she hoped deceived him better than it did her. ‘After all, I was working yesterday afternoon. Did Mrs Kettering tell you that Susy called?’

  ‘She did mention it, yes. Stephanie, I want to talk to you about the other night.’

  She had been on the point of reaching for the coffee pot and her body tensed, her hand arrested in its movement.

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ she managed at last. ‘I realise that… that you were probably missing Susy, and that I was there, and that’s all there is to say about it.’

  He was silent for so long that Stephanie had to look at him. His eyes, narrowed faintly against the sun, appraised her tense features, giving nothing away about his own feelings. ‘Very well,’ he said at last, ‘if that’s the way you want to play it. By the way,’ he added, ‘dinner this evening will be a formal “do”. You did bring a dress, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Stephanie had to look away as she remembered the way he had held up the camiknickers that went with her new evening dress, his fingers caressing the satin as though they enjoyed the tactile experience.

  ‘Are you sure you feel up to working today?’ His concern was patently only that of an employer and Stephanie felt an irrational pulsation of anger. It wasn’t his fault that, instead of his cool enquiry, she would rather have had the warmth of his arms around her and the heat of his kisses to melt away the residual ache in her bones.

  ‘Perfectly,’ she told him, buttering a slice of toast. ‘What time do you want to start? There must be quite a backlog with losing yesterday.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re human at all,’ he drawled, getting up and standing over her. ‘The perfect, efficient secretary, programmed to make all the right responses, that’s you isn’t it, Stephanie?’

  The words were meant to hurt and they did, leaving her frantically trying to suppress her tears as he walked out of the breakfast room and left her alone.

  When she eventually joined him in the library, he made no reference to his behaviour. Several bulky files were on his desk and, as soon as Stephanie was sitting down, he started to dictate. The day was cold again, but a fire flickered warmly in the old-fashioned hearth, throwing shadows across Jake’s face that gave it an oddly gaunt expression. He must be losing weight, Stephanie thought, frowning slightly as she noticed the waistband of his jeans was loose, and then a heavy tide of colour swept up under her skin as she remembered how she had touched and kissed him, and her whole body trembled with feverish need to repeat the experience.

  ‘Stephanie? Stephanie, are you all right…?’

  Half-dazed by the power of her emotions, Stephanie realised that Jake had come round the desk to stand beside her, and that he was bending towards her, his hand on the back of her chair. ‘Look, if you’re not feeling up to this…’ His presence; the musky, male scent of his body and her own powerfully aroused emotions combined to bemuse her. There was nothing wrong with her that his kisses couldn’t cure, Stephanie knew, and yet she made no attempt to reassure him.

  ‘Stephanie, damn you, what’s wrong?’ His hand left the back of her chair to circle her throat, his thumb tilting her jaw so that he looked down into her eyes.

  ‘Do you feel faint? Are you in pain? Stephanie, for God’s sake.’ The growled imprecation reached through the fog of desire engulfing her, her body
responding to its roughly masculine tones. Nervously, Stephanie touched her tongue to her lips, dimly hearing the taut sound that echoed from Jake’s throat in response, and then, just as he bent towards her, the phone started to ring.

  In the handful of seconds it took Stephanie to jolt back into an awareness of reality, Jake had left her side and was picking up the receiver, his eyebrows drawn together in a heavy frown, his eyes glittering over her face and body as he held the phone. And then, suddenly, his expression changed. He swung away from her, his voice warm with open pleasure as he said huskily, ‘Susy, you know I’m always pleased to hear from you, but hang on just a minute.’

  His hand covered the receiver, and he turned back to Stephanie. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to take this call in private.’

  Somehow she managed to get out of the library, her entire body a mass of aching pain. She couldn’t comprehend that only seconds ago she had felt so vitally attuned to Jake that her mouth had already been anticipating his kiss. Why couldn’t she accept that she was simply a substitute for Susy, and that any desire he might feel for her sprang only from the fact that he was missing the other girl?

  She waited for half an hour before going back into the library. When she did so, Jake was seated behind his desk. He looked up and glanced coolly at her as she walked in and sat down, her pencil poised above her pad.

  ‘Ready?’