‘I’m sure Miranda would be delighted to see them,’ she could hear her father saying heartily at her side. ‘Wouldn’t you, Mirry?’
Wouldn’t she what? she wondered muzzily, somehow or other managing to force herself to respond with a brief inclination of her head and a rather wobbly smile.
‘I’m delighted that you were able to join us tonight, Ben!’ Miranda heard her father exclaiming. ‘They’re a good crowd at the club.’
Behind her father’s back, Miranda grimaced slightly to herself and then flushed wildly as something made her look up and she saw that Ben Frobisher was watching her.
‘And you, Miranda,’ he enquired politely, ‘do you play golf?’
Her father answered for her, chuckling.
‘Not Mirry. She doesn’t have the patience. She plays tennis, though…’
‘Tennis. It’s becoming very fashionable at the moment.’
For some reason the musing comment delivered in Ben Frobisher’s very male voice made her stiffen and look defensively at him. She had the feeling that his comment had been slightly barbed… slightly derogatory.
‘I’ve been playing ever since I left school,’ she told him challengingly, adding pointedly just in case he hadn’t got the message, ‘long before it became fashionable.’
As they walked out to the car, Miranda tried to quell her mixed feelings of irritation and embarrassment and then reflected how very different reality was from her daydreams. In them she had perceived Ben Frobisher as a highly desirable stranger, who also desired her; in reality… In reality he quite plainly did nothing of the kind, and there was an abrasion between them, a covert hostility that was making her feel both uncomfortable and defensive.
It was all because she had made that stupid unguarded comment about the house, of course. And the only reason she had said that had been that she didn’t want to admit to him that he had been right and that she had been escaping from something and someone, namely Ralph Charlesworth and his pursuit of her. Well, it was too late now to wish she had not acted so impulsively. Much too late. But how could she have guessed who he was? She had imagined that the then unknown Ben Frobisher would be a much smaller man, hunch-shouldered and probably bespectacled, as befitted someone who spent long hours staring at a computer screen working out complex programs.
This man looked as though he had spent more time outdoors than in, although she ought to have been warned by the unmistakable intelligence and shrewdness in those grey eyes.
‘I thought we’d all travel together in my car,’ her father suggested, and before she could argue and insist on taking her own car Miranda discovered that Ben Frobisher was politely holding open one of the rear doors of her father’s BMW for her and that she had no option but to get in. When he went round the other side of the car and got in beside her, she could literally feel her muscles tensing.
Not against him, she recognised miserably, but against herself, against her own involuntary reaction to him.
Hell, she swore crossly to herself. This was the last thing she needed… an inconvenient and definitely unwanted sexual reaction to a man whom she had now made up her mind she did not like.
All right, so maybe it wasn’t his fault that she had made such a fool of herself, but somehow, illogically, her emotions refused to accept this. There had been no reason for him to mention what she had said about the house in front of her father and Helen, had there? It was bad enough that he knew how tactless she had been, and as for looking at his precious plans… She tensed again as she realised belatedly that she had already accepted his offer. That would teach her to let her mind wander and not to concentrate on what was going on around her! With good reason had her teachers rebuked her for daydreaming.
Teachers? She wasn’t a schoolgirl now, she was a woman… an independent career woman. An independent career woman who willfully daydreamed about unknown men? She chewed unhappily on her bottom lip, angry with herself as well as with the man sitting silently beside her.
The evening was going to be a total and utter disaster, she knew it.
As her father drove them towards the golf club, she told herself that it served her right and that this was what came of allowing herself to weave idiotic daydreams around a man she didn’t really know.
Had she known who he was when they met… She frowned to herself as she stared out into the darkness of the surrounding landscape.
Would his physical impact on her have been lessened if she had known who he was? She wasn’t a young girl any more, after all; a person’s personality, their beliefs, their sense of humour, their views of life and love—it was important that all these should mesh with and complement her own, and anyone who could employ someone like Ralph Charlesworth to undertake the renovation of a graceful old house like the one Ben Frobisher had bought could not possibly have the same outlook on life as herself. Which was probably just as well. After all, he had not shown any reciprocal awareness of her interest in her—quite the reverse—so the sensible, indeed, the essential thing for her to do was to forget the disruptive physical effect that the first unexpected meeting had had on her and to concentrate instead on the reality of the man he was actually proving to be.
A very sensible and mature decision to come to; so why, at the same time as she was congratulating herself on this sensible mature outlook, was she also angrily wishing that she had dressed with a little more élan, a little more sophistication; that she had perhaps made the effort to take herself off to Bath and buy herself a new dress?
A new dress for the golf club dance—and when she had promised herself that this year she intended to save up and treat herself to a holiday in Hong Kong and the Far East? What on earth was happening to her?
Nothing, she told herself firmly, answering her own question; nothing whatsoever was happening to her, and nothing was going to happen to her.
Even so, when the lights of the club-house came into view she found herself wishing that the evening was already over and that she was safely tucked up in her cosy cottage bedroom.
Something about Ben Frobisher made her feel acutely unsure of herself; acutely aware of him as a man, and of her own reactions to that maleness.
She moved uncomfortably in her seat. She didn’t like this unwanted awareness of him, this sudden and totally unexpected schism in what she had believed her sexuality to be: controlled, tamed and of no real force in her life, and not what she had experienced on first seeing him.
She had gone through all the usual sexually experimental stages in her teens, but had never been promiscuous, either by inclination or peer pressure. After all, when you lived in a small town in which your father was something of a prominent figure, you felt almost honour-bound not to indulge in a variety of involvements and affairs.
In this part of the world respectability was still considered to be important and a virtue. Couples might live together, but in most cases they eventually married.
Since in the years when her peers were settling down and marrying she had had no wish to follow suit, she had chosen to remain celibate rather than indulge in a series of relationships. Rather happily celibate, if she was honest, and when she contemplated the thought of any kind of intimacy with men like Ralph Charlesworth it was revulsion that made her body shudder, not desire.
No, she had never considered herself a highly sexually motivated person, and she didn’t now, which made her illogical reaction to Ben Frobisher all the more unnerving.
Had she actually, really, this afternoon, fantasised about how it would be to have him kissing her?
She did shudder now, horrified to remember just how easily and intensely she had been able to imagine what it would feel like to be taken in his arms and—
‘I’ll drive up to the door so that you can get out, and then I’ll park the car,’ her father was saying, thankfully forcing her to concentrate on the present and the blessedly mundane activity of getting out of the car.
The golf club and its course had been donated to the t
own in the twenties by a wealthy and benevolent local resident, who had hired an architect to design the club-house after the style of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s designs for small country houses, so that it was vaguely Tudoresque in style. As the three of them went inside to wait for her father while he parked the car, Miranda acknowledged the greetings of several of her father’s cronies, registering as she did so the speculative, curious looks she was getting from their wives. No need to ask herself why; the answer was standing right beside her, all six-feet-odd of manhood of him.
Why, she seethed inwardly, were there still in this day and age women who still believed that no member of their own sex could be complete without a man in her life? It was all nonsense, just the same as suggesting that no woman could be complete without having had a child. Her thoughts floundered to an uncomfortable halt as she recalled her own vulnerability in that particular direction. But then, it was not as though she considered herself incomplete without a child, it was just… just—
‘Aunt Helen… not long now until the wedding, is it?’
Miranda tensed as she heard the soft hesitant voice of Susan Charlesworth, and she knew even before she had heard Ben acknowledging briefly, ‘Charlesworth,’ that Ralph was with her. She had almost been able to feel his presence from the atavistic reaction of her body, from the way the tiny hairs on her skin had risen in physical protest at his nearness.
It galled her unbearably sensing that Ralph was fully aware of her aversion to him and that for some reason this only caused him to increase his pursuit of her.
She didn’t know how on earth poor Susan could tolerate him. In her shoes… but, then, thankfully she would never have allowed herself to be trapped in that kind of situation, married to a man who was flagrantly and frequently unfaithful, who treated her so contemptuously and inconsiderately, who humiliated her in public and, Miranda suspected, in private as well.