The calf was penned into a stall with her mother, and Chelsea marvelled at the tiny huge-eyed creature as she watched it suckle greedily.
‘Everything obviously went all right, then,’ she observed as he walked her back to the car.
‘It was touch and go for a while, but in the end it wasn’t as bad as we feared—which reminds me, I’ve still got to make my apologies to Val. Could you drop me off in the village? The Range Rover’s down there having new tyres fitted ready for the snow they’re forecasting. I can pick it up and make my apologies at the same time.’
Chelsea had to suppress a small grin as she watched Tom folding his large frame into the small front seat of the car.
She was a competent driver and was pleased to see that Tom had no obvious bias against female drivers. It took them a little over thirty minutes to reach the village. Tom directed her to park in a quiet side street off the main road and several yards from the garage.
‘Why down here?’ she asked him, puzzled, glancing through the back window towards the main road. ‘I could have dropped you off outside the garage.’
‘I know, but if you had I wouldn’t have been able to do this,’ Tom said softly.
His kiss took her by surprise. The pressure of his mouth was warm and firm with no hint of the steel male dominance she had experienced with Slade. Refusing to admit even to herself that pleasurable though the brief embrace had been it in no way stirred her blood as Slade’s had done, Chelsea murmured protestingly in Tom’s arms.
A dark car flashed past and he released her reluctantly. ‘I’m afraid the setting’s not as romantic as it would have been last night,’ he apologised ruefully. ‘I’ll give you a ring later in the week. Perhaps we can arrange to go out together?’
As she watched him stride down the street Chelsea sighed. She liked Tom very much, but she had the feeling that he was rushing her, and it made her wary. After Darren she had vowed that no man would ever get close enough to her emotionally to treat her as he had done—and yet here she was breaking that vow twice over. Shivering a little, she re-started the car and drove slowly back towards the Dower House.
She parked the car carefully in front of the house and then let herself in with the key Mrs Rudge had given her. The first thing she saw was a note on the hall table from the housekeeper saying that she had gone down to the village to do the flowers for the church.
Chelsea knew that Mrs Rudge was one of a small group of ladies responsible for decorating the small Norman church in the village, and normally on these occasions the housekeeper was absent for several hours, spending the evening with a friend who collected her in her car and then brought her back again.
She would just make herself a light omelette for her supper, she decided, making her way upstairs. She felt tired and was unwilling to admit that she was finding it hard to deal with the physical presence of Slade Ashford in the same house. Like water constantly dropping on a stone, his acerbic comments and mocking glances were wearing away her self-possession, making it harder and harder for her to assume a mask of indifference towards him.
Even without the added complication of what had happened at Melchester she would have found him difficult to ignore, she admitted wearily, but at least without it she would not have been forced to bear his gritty determination to exact what he considered to be his rightful dues. In fact she doubted that he would have spared her more than a passing glance. Men like Slade Ashford were used to having women fall over themselves to get to him, she thought bitterly; she doubted that he had ever in his whole life needed to do the chasing, and she was pretty sure that in normal circumstances the coldly indifferent attitude she wore like a protective armour against men of his type would have kept him at a distance—she had very little illusions and had always suspected that to men of his type the fruit which remained elusively out of reach at the top of the tree did not merit the effort involved in obtaining it when exactly the same fruit could be picked up off the ground quite freely.
She had no one but herself to blame for the fact that he was pursuing her; albeit for the most uncomplimentary of reasons, but the only thing she could do now was to make it abundantly clear to him that he aroused in her nothing but distaste and dislike.
Not given to self-delusion, she paused with one foot on the uppermost stair, a wry grimace pulling at the corners of her mouth as she asked herself inwardly how exactly she hoped to achieve that after last night’s performance!
And it was no use trying to pretend that she had not responded to him, or that he had not recognised her response; he had made it only too plain that he had.
What was the matter with her, she asked herself despairingly; was she destined always to fall into the same trap? Was she mentally programmed to respond only to the type of man common sense warned her to avoid, or was it simply that at heart she was still every bit as foolishly vulnerable as her own niece?
Pushing aside the thought, she opened her bedroom door, and then stood frozen to the spot as she saw the man leaning indolently against the casement window.
‘What are you doing in my room?’ she demanded in freezing accents, her coat following her bag on to a chair as she walked determinedly towards him. Two yards away she came to an abrupt halt as she suddenly saw the yellow gleam of warning in his eyes.
‘Slade…’
‘Cut the outraged virtue,’ he told her softly. ‘It won’t work.’
‘Slade, I don’t know what you’re doing in here…’ Anger had given way to fear, but she was determined not to give in to it. The suffocating silence seemed to smother her ability to think. All she was conscious of was Slade’s reined in anger, glittering wolfishly in the unblinking eyes which tracked her every betraying movement.
‘You know full well why I’m here,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t like being led on and dropped flat; I don’t like what you did to me in Melchester one little bit, and if you think I’m going to stand by and watch you do exactly the same thing to Tom Little, you can damned well think again! And before you say a word, I saw the two of you in the village.’
‘You… but…’
‘You didn’t see me?’ He laughed harshly. ‘I’m hardly surprised—you had other things on your mind. I wouldn’t have thought a country boy like Tom up to your weight, or is it amusing you to play the innocent butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth bit for him? Perhaps I ought to broaden his education a little, tell him what you’re really like.’
‘You couldn’t!’ Even to her own ears her voice sounded high and unnatural, but Chelsea refused to back down. ‘You don’t know what I’m really like,’ she told him.
‘Like hell!’ Slade responded brutally, thrusting his shoulders away from the window and advancing on her. ‘I know how you feel in a man’s arms, how you melt against him… How you cheat… Well, you’re not cheating on me, Chelsea!’
‘I’m not trying to,’ Chelsea told him bitterly. ‘Look, I realise this might come as an outsize blow to your hugely inflated male ego, but it just
so happens that you simply don’t turn me on, and that’s…’
‘Liar.’ He said it softly, his eyes glittering over her pale face, the word snarled past lips which suddenly looked hard and bitter. ‘And I’ll prove it to you if you like.’
She tried to move, but it was like being caught up in a dream, her whole body heavily weighted making escape impossible.
Overriding everything else was acute disbelief that merely seeing Tom kissing her had aroused this terrible anger in Slade. Some advice she had once read in a book about trying to keep calm in the face of aggression came back to her and she forced herself to keep resolutely still, flinching only when Slade’s fingers bit painfully into her frail shoulderbones.
‘Well?’
‘It’s perfectly possible for any experienced male to arouse a purely sexual response in a woman,’ Chelsea told him icily.
‘So you admit that I can arouse you?’
She hadn’t admitted anything of the kind, but his fingers were moving disturbingly against her skin, anger giving way to a desire heightened by the emotionally charged atmosphere of the small room. A strangely lethargic sensation spread downwards from his caressing fingers; totally alien desire that knotted her stomach muscles into aching hunger. Panicking at the speed with which all her dearly held principles seemed to slide effortlessly away from her every time she came into close physical contact with Slade, Chelsea reached for the only weapon at hand.
‘I admit it was amusing to let you think you could,’ she drawled, trembling inwardly. ‘Men seem to think that all they have to do is merely smile and mouth a few meaningless compliments and a girl is only too happy to go to bed with them.’
‘When in reality what they really desire is more tangible evidence of admiration than mere compliments, is that it?’ Slade’s voice grated, somewhere above her ear. Fear flared inside her, but it was too late to back down now. ‘So that’s it!’ She could sense the rage boiling up inside him. ‘Lure your victim on and then drop him cold, first making sure that he’ll get ample opportunity to see what he’s missed out on, is that how it works? Is that why you ran out on me? Because you knew you were coming up here and that we’d be bound to meet again? Okay.’ He shrugged before Chelsea could summon her appalled wits and deny his allegations. ‘That’s fine by me; I’m not averse to paying for my pleasure, it helps to tidy up a lot of messy ends and makes sure that you aren’t left with any unwanted emotional involvements. So, what will it cost me to enjoy your delectable sexy body, Chelsea? A diamond necklace? A fur? An expensive holiday? I wouldn’t be so crude as to suggest money. You see, I do appreciate the finer points of such negotiations…’