‘Oh, down, I think,’ he said softly. ‘Then we can finish up upstairs.’
There was nothing in his eyes other than a certain flat hardness, but Kate was convinced she had not imagined the taunting hint of sexual innuendo behind his words. He was deliberately trying to ruffle her, she realised. No doubt his pride was suffering because she had been the first to say that there was no future for them. Obviously he had wanted to be the one to say that to her.
She showed him round the ground floor of the house, gritting her teeth every time she felt him brush past her, or stand close to her. She was so sensitive to him that it almost hurt to breathe. She wanted to hate and resent him, but her weak, traitorous body yearned for him to hold and caress it.
He followed her upstairs, waiting while she opened each bedroom door, a malicious smile darkening his eyes as she stood on one side on the landing in an attitude of frozen rigidity.
‘Not going to come in with me, Kate?’ he asked, when he walked into the room where they had made love. ‘Why not, I wonder? Are you frightened that—’
It was too much for her. Trembling violently, she interrupted him, ‘I’m not in the least frightened of you, Dominic!’
He turned his head and she caught the glint of pure mockery in his eyes as he drawled, ‘Of course not, I never thought for one moment that you were. Why should you be? You shouldn’t anticipate, Kate. What I was going to say was, are you perhaps frightened of what being in this bedroom with me might do to that icy self-control you’ve wrapped yourself in?’
Some instinct for self-protection made her retaliate sharply, her body tensing as she said coolly, ‘Now you’re leaping to conclusions, Dominic.’
He swung round, pinning her with narrowed eyes. Fear touched her like someone touching an exposed nerve, making her jump and then start shaking inwardly.
‘Meaning?’ he demanded softly.
She couldn’t speak. Her tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of her mouth. He was coming towards her, advancing with almost menacing intent, and although she longed to turn and run she simply could not move.
‘Kate?’
The total unexpectedness of Martin Allwood’s voice in the hall below shocked her out of her fear. Both she and Dominic stared towards the stairs. They had been so engrossed in their mutual battling that neither of them had heard him arrive.
‘So…’ She saw Dominic’s eyes harden and flinched beneath the contempt in them. ‘He won’t make you happy, Kate,’ he told her harshly. ‘He simply isn’t man enough for you.’
‘While you, I suppose, are!’ she managed to hiss back in a furious whisper as Martin came upstairs.
‘My secretary told me she’d sent someone round to see the house.’ He did a double-take as he saw Dominic, and then frowned.
‘Kate has just about finished showing me round,’ Dominic told him smoothly, instantly regaining control of himself, the savagery he had shown her completely gone, Kate noted shakenly. His glance encompassed them both, but it was Martin he spoke to as he said urbanely, ‘I’m very interested in the property, but perhaps we might discuss it in your office, Allwood.’
The miraculous speed with which Martin’s manner towards him changed totally amazed Kate. Before she knew what was happening both Dominic and Martin were leaving—together.
It wasn’t because Dominic had gone that she felt so bereft, Kate told herself forlornly as she went back to the kitchen and her flowers. It was simply… With a brief gesture of disgust she pushed the flowers away. What was the point of lying to herself? She loved him, she knew she did, and that was why she had been fighting so hard against any involvement with him. But she was already involved on the very deepest level that there was. She shivered suddenly, rubbing the gooseflesh prickling her arms. What did it matter how she felt about Dominic, he cared nothing for her?
Was he serious about buying the house? She thought about how she would feel having him as her closest neighbour, and her whole body shook. Suddenly she had to get out of the house, to escape from the place where she had been most intimate with him.
She would go down to the cottage; that held no memories of Dominic at all. She had made a start on cleaning it, but there was still a lot left to do.
She worked well into the evening, giving the largest bedroom, which she had decided would be her own, a thorough cleaning. The old-fashioned high mahogany bed which had been her grandparents’ she rather liked and had decided to keep. The room faced north, and was decorated in a depressing browny-orange. When she had finished cleaning the paintwork Kate sat back on her heels and studied it, mentally substituting the old-fashioned wallpaper with something more in keeping…something traditional, perhaps tiny pink rosebuds on a white background. She could have a soft pink carpet and heavily starched old-fashioned white cotton bedlinen lavishly trimmed with lace. There was a rocking chair in one of the rooms that could be re-polished. She had already stripped the bed on her previous visit, and now on an impulse she hurried into one of the other rooms where a bedding chest contained the bedlinen which had once been her grandmother’s. Her father had been the type of person who never threw anything out. One of her mother’s many grievances about him had been that he forced her to live with his parents’ old-fashioned cast-off furniture, but now it, and the linen that went with it, was coming back into fashion again.
Amazingly as Kate opened the chest the scent of lavender filled the air, and she wondered wryly if her father had actually ever opened the chest.
She took out clean white sheets and carried them into the other room, spreading one on the bed and then standing back to judge the effect, but it was impossible to gain an impression of exactly how the room would look redecorated. It was a large bed, meant to hold two people, not one, and unnervingly as she stared at it, she could almost see Dominic’s lean tanned body tangled in the white sheets, his dark head on the pillow.
Stop it…stop it! she warned herself angrily, tensing as she heard a car. She went to the window, stunned to see Dominic getting out of the parked BMW.
For a moment she was almost tempted to hide…to pretend that she was not there. She frowned… How had he known where to find her…and more important, why had he wanted to find her?
By the time she had got downstairs she thought she had come up with the answer. Opening the door to him, she said curtly, ‘If it’s about the house, then please discuss it with my estate agent…’
She was about to close the door again when he wrested it from her and stepped determinedly inside.
‘It isn’t about the house,’ he told her bluntly.
For a moment a wild hope flared inside her, but there was nothing even remotely lover-like in the way he was looking at her. Quenching her disappointment, she looked at him.