Normally she loved her job, loved the challenges it brought, loved the people she met, the sense of self-worth and achievement she got from using the skills she had learned. She was proud of what she had achieved, all the more so perhaps because of the way Charlie had so unwittingly drawn a contrast between her achievements and those of his father.
She remembered how she had laughed when her parents had tried to tell her that one day she might regret having given up the opportunity to go to university. How could she, she had demanded fiercely, when doing so would mean she would be parted from James?
She also remembered how later, when they were alone, James had whispered to her that he wished she were a little older; that he was not really surprised at her parents’ attitude. But then she had reached up and put her arms around him, kissing him in the way he had taught her, and with a small groan he had taken hold of her, kissing her back, pushing her down against the cushions of the settee.
He had made love to her properly for the first time that night, and Win had been shocked and distressed to learn that sex was not necessarily instantly blissful.
James had blamed himself, assuring her that next time things would be different…better. She had been doubtful, still upset by what she had seen as her inability to fully please him, but he had been right. The next time it had been better—better than better, blissfully, satisfyingly better—Quickly she suppressed her truant thoughts.
Tom’s hotel was several miles outside the town. It was midsummer and the grass verges alongside the road were bright with orange poppies. Fitful sunshine dappled the fields, clouds casting racing shadows over the distant hills.
Feeling the tension gripping her muscles, knowing how reluctant she felt to go home and face Charlie’s stubborn accusing face, on an impulse Win turned off the main road and pulled into a quiet lane, where she stopped her car and wound down the window. Her head ached slightly from the pressures of her day, or from the fear caused by the news of James’s return.
She leaned back against the seat head-rest, closing her eyes and letting her thoughts drift, a luxury she seldom had time for these days, an indulgence she felt she ought to have put behind her anyway. Daydreams were for adolescents, not adult women. As a girl she had often been accused of being a daydreamer.
She smiled painfully to herself. As she had told Heather this morning, until she met James, her life had been a very protected one indeed—over-protected in many ways.
She had been coming out of a shop the first time she met him, and had literally walked straight into him, going over on her ankle and yelping with the unexpected pain. All thoughts of that pain had been driven right out of her mind, though, when he had crouched down at her side and taken hold of her ankle, running his fingers thoroughly and clinically over it, asking her anxiously how she felt. But she had been in too much of a state of delirious shock to respond.
He was the most physically compelling man she had ever seen: tall, with thick dark brown hair and tanned skin. The hands that held her ankle were long-fingered, the nails clean and neatly cut. He was wearing a heavy-duty workmanlike watch and his leather blouson jacket had a softness about it that despite its battered appearance made her want to run her fingertips over it in appreciation of its butter-soft sensuality.
When she didn’t speak, he looked gravely at her. His eyes, she discovered, were pure gold like a tiger’s. Her breath caught in her throat, the most powerful emotional and physical sensation she had ever experienced in her life gripping her, and she knew instantly that she was in love.
In a daze she allowed him to pick up the shopping she had dropped and to guide her to his car. He would take her home, he told her, and she, knowing that if he had told her he was taking her to the moon she would have simply gone with him, nodded and allowed him to take her by the arm and guide her through the other shoppers to the car park.
As he drove, she learned that he had just returned home after completing his Master’s at Harvard, and that he intended to start up his own business in computer software, but that in the meantime he had taken a job locally because he wanted to take some time out to be with his parents before he did so.
He asked her her name and she told him, breathlessly, blushing a little as he repeated it thoughtfully.
‘Winter—unusual.’
‘I was born on the day of the winter solstice,’ she told him awkwardly. Her unusual name had always embarrassed her, and she preferred to be called the more conventional Win.
‘Winter by name, but not by nature,’ he had said then. ‘Not with that warm colouring.’ And as he spoke he leaned forward and touched her hair. She had worn it loose in those days, falling thickly below her shoulders and kept off her face with an Alice band. She’d thought the style childish and longed for something shorter and more sophisticated, but her brothers had derided her, telling her she was far too young to pretend to be sophisticated, and out of habit she had deferred to them.
By some quirk of fate that summer they were all away from home. Gareth, the eldest, was in New Zealand getting to know his fiancée’s family, the twins, Simon and Philip, were backpacking in the States, and Jonathan, who was in his last year at university, had gone on an archaeological dig with some fellow students, and so for once Win was without her protective guard dogs.
Initially her parents were quite happy for her to see James. He was older, mature…sensible, aware of her innocence and youth—or so her mother later told her they had believed.
Win might have been innocent, but she was also in love, and she had made no attempt to hide her feelings from James. The first time he’d kissed her she had clung fervently to him, winding her arms around him, opening her mouth experimentally beneath his and then feeling her heart thunder in excitement as his grip on her tightened and she felt the hot eager thrust of his tongue inside her mouth.
Afterwards she watched him with luminous dazed eyes that betrayed the effect he had had on her. Beneath her thin cotton T-shirt her breasts ached and pulsed, the nipples hard, pushing out the fine cloth. James touched one lightly with his fingertip, gently rimming it, dark colour surging up under his skin as he told her thickly, ‘Next time I shall kiss you there, and then you’ll really know what getting excited’s all about.’
She had been so desperately in love with him, so completely without any defence against her own feelings, or against the sudden powerful surge of her own sexuality. And there was no escaping from the truth. It was the discovery of that sexuality as much as what she had believed was her love for James that had carried her so passionately into such an intense relationship with him.
She had wanted him so much that quite simply everything else had ceased to be of any importance, and because she had no past experience to guide her she had naïvely assumed that because she wanted him she must love him.
No one had ever allowed her to discover that the sexual urge could be just as powerful in women as it was in men. Just thinking about James made her body ache in ways she had never before even known existed. Of course she loved him, she cried passionately when her mother tried to suggest that it might just be a crush; that being in love was not the same as loving someone; that she was too young to think of committing her life to someone she had only known a matter of a handful of months.
She was over eighteen, and her parents could not stop them from marrying, she had pointed out defiantly.
What about university? her parents had countered. What about her future?
James was her future, she had told them.
Even James himself suggested tentatively that it might be better if they were to wait, but she immediately burst into tears, accusing him of not wanting her. He had taken hold of her to comfort her, and within seconds she was clinging eagerly to him.
It had been after the first time they had made love and she had confessed to him that, despite her promise to do so, she had still not asked her doctor