The Trusting Game (Presents Plus) Page 8

  But she had to resist. She had to.

  Her tortured, ‘No,’ burned her throat, her voice so low that she didn’t think Daniel could possibly have heard it. But he had, and he was responding to it, slowly…reluctantly releasing her, his mouth twisting slightly as he watched her.

  There was no way she could hide from him the fact that he had aroused her…that she had wanted him, Christa acknowledged. She was trembling so much that she could barely stand; her mouth felt swollen, bruised, too exposed to the air, when what it really wanted was renewed contact with Daniel’s; when all she wanted…

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel told her gruffly. ‘I didn’t intend that to happen. It wasn’t planned…It was just…’ He gave a small shake of his head, his voice dropping even lower as he told her, ‘Things got rather out of control.’

  He looked and sounded like a man who had received a deeply disturbing shock, Christa recognised, the look he gave her not only acknowledging what had happened but also appealing to her for understanding.

  Emotionally as well as physically he seemed to be saying that he wanted to reach out to her…

  Instantly Christa started to panic again—this time a different kind of panic from the one she had felt earlier. This panic went deeper and had its roots in mistrust, not just of him, but of herself as well.

  He was lying to her, deceiving her, manipulating her. She would be a fool even to think of letting herself trust him. She didn’t want to trust him, because once she did…He wasn’t the kind of man she wanted to give her heart to…to commit herself to.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ Daniel was saying, his voice still slightly rough, as though he hadn’t quite got himself back under control, ‘how something as potentially harmless as a kiss can turn out to be so lethal? No wonder they call it sexual chemistry,’ he commented in a self-derisory voice. ‘That was a pretty explosive thing that happened to us…?’

  Immediately Christa tensed. ‘Us? There is no “us”,’ she told him fiercely. ‘What happened was a mistake…’

  ‘Our bodies didn’t seem to think so,’ Daniel interrupted her grimly. ‘Far from it…’

  ‘I…I was thinking about someone else,’ Christa lied angrily. What was he trying to do to her? Force her to admit…? ‘I’m not a complete fool, you know,’ she told him frostily, in a last desperate attempt to reject what had happened…what she had felt. ‘I’m well aware that there is a certain sort of teacher, usually a male, who sees it as a perk of the job to sexually dominate and enslave his pupils. Normally he’s the type of man who isn’t capable of sustaining a relationship with a woman who is his equal—his ego simply can’t take it,’ she added for good measure, her head lifting as she forced herself to look Daniel in the eyes.

  What she saw there made her wish that she hadn’t. She had never seen him looking so angry; anger to her was something that people expressed by raising their voices, making a lot of noise, using aggressive body language. But Daniel was doing none of those things.

  But he was still very, very angry. She had never seen such coldness in another human being’s eyes, never realised that simply the hardening of a normally warmly smiling male mouth could change a man’s expression, that the cold, controlled focus of his silent fury could make tiny shivers of apprehension run down her spine.

  ‘If you really think that that’s true,’ he told her quietly at last, ‘then I’ve made an even greater error of judgement than you.’

  Without giving her any chance to reply, he turned and walked over to the door.

  Christa held her breath, half expecting him to stop, to turn round, to smile at her and coax her, to soften her criticism, to suggest that they discuss it as he had done on every previous occasion when she had made an angry, defensive remark to him.

  But he didn’t. He simply opened the door and walked through it, leaving her technically victorious in that he was the one who had walked away. But she didn’t feel victorious—anything but; she felt mean and small and petty, and, which was worse, she felt as though somehow she had lost something very important. Something. Or someone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FROM her sheltered seat in the pretty, old-fashioned garden outside the farmhouse, Christa would watch Daniel working on his self-imposed task of rebuilding the dangerously unstable dry-stone wall which separated the garden from the farmland.

  At first she had felt amazement and, if she was honest, even a faint sense of derision that a man of Daniel’s intelligence and professional qualifications could claim to find satisfaction in such a pedestrian task. She had even said as much, but he had simply shaken his head and told her that she was wrong, that the work he was doing required skills at which he was still a mere amateur, and that there was something equally satisfying, albeit in a different way, in rebuilding the wall as there was in helping people to widen their perceptions of what life was all about and to find fulfilment outside the narrow confines of professional prestige and money imposed by modern society.

  It was three days now since he had walked out of the study, leaving her on her own; three days in which he had been unfailingly polite and pleasant to her, and unfailingly distant and remote.

  Leader, teacher, mentor, guru—give it whichever name you wished to choose—his attitude towards her was very strictly proper and professional. It seemed laughable now that she had ever even thought he had, never mind accused him of having, the kind of ego that needed the doting adoration of a hopelessly besotted pupil. Rather, now, he gave the impression that any attempt on her part to breach the professional distance he had created between them would be met with a courteous but very firm rejection—very firm rejection. Just as she would have rejected him if he had tried to introduce any kind of personal or sexual note into their relationship-wouldn’t she?

  She moved restlessly in her seat, uncomfortably conscious of the small, hesitant ache inside her body—an ache which had nothing whatsoever to do with the hard surface of her wooden seat or her position on it.

  As she moved, she grimaced faintly as she saw the dirty mark on her trousers. Having a wardrobe which comprised only clothes in various shades of cream, camel, honey and white might, in her normal life, have been a decision which reflected not only good sense and good taste, as well as subtly displaying an almost formidably strong will, but those colours were not exactly practical for her present lifestyle!

  She doubted, for instance, that the sand-washed silk shirt she was wearing now would wash anything like as easily or well as the workmanlike check shirt Daniel had on, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who looked good in clothes borrowed from a man’s wardrobe. She wasn’t tall enough, for one thing, and for another her body was too femininely curved.

  Much too femininely curved, she decided as the breeze suddenly flattened her shirt against her body, outlining her breasts.

  She needn’t have worried, though; another surreptitious glance in Daniel’s direction showed that he was totally engrossed in what he was doing. He wasn’t even facing in her direction, she acknowledged. The breeze which had flattened her shirt was tousling the thick darkness of his hair, so thick that even when it was ruffled by the wind she couldn’t see his scalp. Beneath his shirt she could see the movement of his muscles as he reached out to lift another stone. Unwillingly she continued to watch him, fascinated against her will by the sheer maleness of his body, its power and strength, all the more subtly arousing for not being openly or deliberately on display.

  Odd how that same flexing of male muscles by, say, a body-builder or gym bimbo, for instance, would have been a complete turn-off, whereas watching Daniel work…

  Hurriedly she averted her gaze, her face flushing slightly. Her mouth had gone betrayingly dry and beneath her clothes she was discomfortingly aware of her body’s awareness of him.

  What was the matter with her? She had seen equally good-looking men before…dozens of them, in Milan for instance, at the biannual textile and fabric fashion fairs, and on her travels where the golden-skinned, dar
keyed good looks of some of the young men came close to classical perfection.

  There was no way that Daniel was good-looking in that sense. His face was too masculine, too blunt, his jaw far too hard, his mouth far too firm…And his eyes were completely the wrong colour. Whoever heard of a man with such splinteringly clear and all-seeing eyes giving a woman the kind of long, languishing looks that stroked feather-light touches of erotic arousal over her senses? No…if she had really wanted to start having such irritating and unwanted sensual yearnings over a man there were far more suitable applicants for the post whom she could have chosen.

  She frowned, trying to concentrate on the book in front of her which Daniel had given her to read. Its author’s aims and views might well be very praiseworthy, but they were also impossibly idealistic in her view, and she had said as much to Daniel already.

  ‘You know what your problem is, don’t you?’ he had countered. ‘You cling to being a cynic because you’re afraid of letting go of what, for you, has become a form of security blanket. You daren’t allow yourself to trust or believe just in case you’re disappointed or hurt, and so you erect a protective wall between yourself and other people.’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ Christa had agreed. ‘But at least that way I’m safe…’

  ‘Safe from what?’ Daniel had probed.

  ‘Safe from everything that happens to you when you’re too gullible,’ she had told him harshly.

  ‘What things?’ Daniel had asked her, but she had shaken her head, not wanting to continue what proved to be such a painful topic of conversation.

  Sometimes, she felt she would never really get over her guilt at being as easily taken in by Piers as had Laura.

  If she hadn’t listened to him when he had told her that Laura was suffering from depression, that she was constantly accusing him of being unfaithful to her, imagining that there was another woman in his life when nothing could be further from the truth…if she had believed Laura instead and helped, perhaps her friend would have been alive today.

  But it had been easier to believe Piers, good-looking, smooth-talking, deceitful Piers, rather than listen to Laura.

  ‘Have you ever been too gullible, Christa?’ he had pressed quietly.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she had told him angrily.

  ‘So gullible and hurt that the pain has never really gone away; that it has made you determined never to trust anyone else again,’ he guessed intuitively. Far too intuitively for Christa, who suddenly couldn’t wait to get away from him.

  ‘Who was he?’ he had asked her quietly as she started to pick up her papers so that she could leave. ‘A lover? Your first lover…’

  ‘No. He was not my lover,’ Christa had told him fiercely. ‘He was my best friend’s husband. He was a liar and a cheat and he broke her heart and drove her to her death. He…’

  She had stopped and shaken her head, appalled at the way she was revealing so much of her life…herself to him. He had a knack of making her do that, a subtle charisma which somehow compelled her into behaviour which was surely totally alien for her.

  Releasing the imprisoning side of her personality, he had called it. Freeing her to be wholly herself. But she was already herself…All the self she wanted to be.

  Remembering this discussion now, Christa hunched her arms defensively around her knees and looked away from where Daniel was working towards the house. It was an attractive house, well proportioned and sturdily built, and something about it reminded her, in some odd way, of the house she had shared with her parents.

  As a very young teenager she had yearned to grow up and marry, to have a large family—to replace the love and security she had lost with her parents’ death.

  Only a very young girl could believe in that kind of fairy-tale. Husbands did not always continue to love their wives, nor children their parents. She was far better off as she was…

  ‘It’s almost time for lunch.’

  Lost in her own thoughts, Christa hadn’t heard Daniel’s approach, and now her body betrayed her with its shocked reaction to his proximity, her muscles tensing so fiercely that their swift contraction actually made her start to tremble.

  Daniel was standing far too close to her not to be aware of what was happening to her. She could feel her face starting to overheat and quickly turned her head away from him.

  ‘You’re shivering. You should be wearing something warmer.’

  He thought she was cold. She closed her eyes in brief relief, her tension easing.

  ‘And more serviceable.’

  Before she could stop him he had leaned towards her, his thumb touching the grubby mark on her trousers.

  Instinctively she jerked away, unable to bear her body’s reaction to his touch. Her thigh felt as though it was on fire where his thumb had rested lightly against it, and the heat from that spot seemed to throb and spread all the way over her body until it reached the most sensitive core of her being, flooding her with an aching longing so intense that she could feel her eyes starting to burn with the tears of its pain.

  If Daniel were to touch her now, to hold her, to…

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see the way his mouth had hardened, and her ache of longing was replaced by an equally painful sense of desolation.

  ‘We’re going to have to start walking soon. They’ve forecast snow for the end of next week.’

  ‘Walking?’ Christa repeated in confusion, his comment so far away from her own thoughts and feelings that it was almost as though he had spoken in a foreign language.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated, frowning at her. ‘The brochure and prospectus both explained that a very important part of our course involves a series of carefully structured mountain walks, culminating in a final walk where people form pairs and then have to make their way to a specific point with only one another to rely on.’

  Now he did have Christa’s attention.

  ‘You mean you abandon them in those mountains? Isn’t that dangerous…?’

  ‘It would be if that were what we did,’ Daniel agreed drily, ‘but in point of fact their progress is monitored and carefully watched to make sure that they come to no harm. The purpose of the exercise isn’t to frighten them but to build a sense of trust, an acknowledgement of the need to be able to trust and rely on others, to share with them.’

  Christa shivered. ‘But what happens if something goes wrong? If one of them gets hurt, has a fall and becomes totally reliant on his or her partner?’

  ‘That wouldn’t happen. But if it did, then the relationship they had built, the mutual sense of trust and responsibility, would ensure that the person left behind would know that his or her partner would get help.

  ‘I could never trust anyone so much,’ Christa told him fiercely. ‘Never.’

  She glanced towards the mountains, thinking how terrified she would be if she were lost and alone up there, and possibly injured and unable to move into the bargain. There was no way she would be able to trust someone else to get help for her. No way at all. She would rather risk further injury by crawling on her hands and knees if she had to, by helping herself, relying on herself.

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that your fear of trusting anyone might have its roots in the death of your parents?’

  The quiet question froze her body into rejecting immobility, her anger so intense that she was almost stammering as she threw her response back at him, demanding, ‘Why should it? It wasn’t their fault that they were killed, and besides, I had my great-aunt to turn to. She gave me a home…love…’

  ‘But she wasn’t your parents,’ Daniel enforced quietly, ‘and a child doesn’t always reason as logically as an adult. As an adult you know that your parents’ death was an accident outside their control. As a child, as well as a sense of loss and fear, you could also have experienced anger against them for leaving you.’

  ‘No,’ Christa denied quickly. Too quickly, she knew. How had he guessed, known about those dark feelings of bitte
rness and resentment she had fought so hard to suppress in the months after her parents’ deaths, when she had sometimes felt she almost hated them for leaving her alone?

  ‘And what about you?’ she challenged, fighting to suppress her unwanted memories. ‘According to your reasoning, you should have felt guilt at your father’s death…’

  Even in the heat of her anger she couldn’t bring herself to be cruel enough to use the word ‘suicide’, not to look at him as she delivered her blow.

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to reply, and then, when he did, his answer shocked her into silence.

  ‘Yes,’ he told her, ‘yes. I did…And sometimes still do. Accepting those feelings, learning to live with them instead of fighting to deny them, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and the most frightening. To give up the self-inflicted punishment of those feelings, to give up making excuses to myself for all the things I didn’t do because of them, was very, very hard.

  ‘Negative emotions can be just as addictive, just as dangerous as any other kind of drug.

  ‘Think about it,’ he told her as he started to move away from her.

  Christa stood up angrily, determined to refute what he had just said, and then cried out in startled pain as the wind blew dust into her eyes, causing her to blink and automatically start to rub her streaming eye.

  Daniel had turned round the moment he heard her cry, hurrying quickly back to her.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing…Just something in my eye,’ Christa told him.

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘No.’

  She started to move back from him, her brain already anticipating the havoc his proximity would cause to her senses, but it was already too late because he had closed the distance between them, one hand cupping her face and the other turning it slightly into the light.