He said quietly, as if speaking to himself, ‘I did not—intend that.’
Hands shaking, Cory dragged her sweater back into a semblance of decency.
She said, in a voice she barely recognised, ‘It was really my fault. You got—caught up in an overspill of emotion, that’s all.’
‘No,’ he said harshly. ‘It was entirely mutual. Have the honesty to admit it.’
There was a tense silence. Cory looked down at the flag-stones. ‘Are you—sorry it happened?’
‘No—but I should not have allowed it, just the same.’ He sounded weary, and a little angry. ‘We had better go.’
She was still trembling as they walked back to the car. Her lips felt tender—swollen—and she touched them with a tentative finger.
‘Did I hurt you?’ He noticed, of course.
‘No,’ she said.
But it was a lie.
Because in those brief rapturous moments in Rome’s arms she had given him the power to hurt her for all eternity.
And eternity, she realised painfully, might already have begun.
THE clouds had returned with a vengeance, and the North Sea was a sullen grey as they drove up the coast road.
There was silence inside the car, but not the companionable sort, born of long familiarity. The enclosed atmosphere simmered with tension, and some other element less easy to define.
Cory sat huddled into the passenger seat, staring rigidly at the white-flecked waves emptying themselves on to the banks of shingle.
She did not dare look at Rome, who was concentrating almost savagely on his driving.
The advance and retreat of the sea was like a symbol of her own life, she thought, pain twisting inside her. One moment she was being carried along on an inexorable tide of passion. The next she was abandoned, stranded. Left clinging to some inner emotional wreckage. And she wasn’t sure how much more she could take.
Any student of body language, she thought, would take one look at her and say ‘defensive’. But they didn’t know the half of it. The faint lingering dampness of her camisole against her skin was an unwanted but potent reminder of the subtle plunder his lips had inflicted.
Her entire being was one aching throb of unsatisfied longing.
While being shut with him in this confined space was nothing less than torture.
She sat up with sudden determination.
‘Could you stop the car, please?—I’d like to go for a walk—clear my head.’ She shot a swift, sideways glance at his set, remote profile. ‘If that’s all right,’ she added.
‘Of course,’ he said coolly. ‘It’s a good idea.’ He paused. ‘Something we both need, perhaps.’
The wind was freshening, blowing in unpleasant gusts from the sea, and Cory took off the scarf knotted at her neck and struggled to tie it over her hair instead.
‘May I help?’ Rome came round the car to her side.
‘No.’ Her mouth was suddenly dry, her heart pounding as she thought of his fingers touching her hair, brushing against her throat. ‘No, I can manage. Thank you.’
He shrugged on the russet jacket, his eyes hard. ‘As you wish.’
He set off and she followed, picking her way across the sliding shingle, filling her lungs with the cold salt-laden air as she battled with the wind.
Apart from clusters of sea birds hunched at the edge of the sea, and a couple exercising a small dog in the distance, they had the long stretch of beach to themselves.
Rome strode ahead, apparently impervious to the chill of the wind, or the increasing dampness in the air, and Cory found she was struggling to keep up with him.
Hey, she wanted to shout. This is my environment, not yours. How dare you be so at home here, when I feel alienated of—a stranger…?
At the top of the shingle bank, the elderly hulk of a fishing boat had been left to end its days, and Rome paused in the shelter of its remaining timbers, shading his eyes as he stared out to sea, watching the progress of a solitary oil tanker on the horizon.
As she joined him breathlessly, he gave her an unsmiling glance. ‘How are the cobwebs?’
‘They didn’t survive the first minute.’ She leaned against the bow of the boat, steadying her flurried breathing and attempting to rearrange her scarf.
Rome resumed his scrutiny of the tanker, his expression unreadable. Silence hung between them.
Eventually, Cory cleared her throat. She said, ‘I think I owe you an apology.’
‘For what happened between us earlier?’ Rome shook his head. ‘We must share any blame for that.’
‘I didn’t mean—the kiss.’ And what a polite euphemism that was, she thought wryly, for all that had really gone on.
‘What, then?’ His mouth was hard and set.
She said steadily, ‘For bursting into tears all over you. I’m not usually such a wimp—I hope. It was just such a shock. The village looked just the same, so I’d convinced myself that Blundham House would, too. That it would still be there waiting for me, caught in some time warp, and that all I had to do was show up.’ She shook her head. ‘Stupid, or what?’
‘Unrealistic, perhaps. But I encouraged that by bringing you here. I should not have done so. I just—needed to get out of London, and I thought you did, too.’ He was still staring at the horizon, and his voice was bitter with self-accusation. ‘This whole day was a bad mistake.’
Hurt twisted inside her. She said quietly, ‘Rome—we both lost our heads for a while. But it’s no big deal, and it certainly isn’t irretrievable.’
His laugh was brief and humourless. ‘You don’t think so?’ He turned to look at her. ‘Cory, you can’t be that naïve. You must see it has changed everything.’
She tried to look into his eyes, but they were hooded, unfathomable.
She forced a smile. ‘Perhaps I’m due for a change.’
‘That,’ he said, ‘would be unwise.’
‘Then maybe I’m just tired of being sensible,’ she threw back. ‘But if you’re not—I can learn to live with it.’
His mouth tightened. ‘Dio, I wish it were that simple.’
Cory leaned her shoulder against the boat, needing its support suddenly.
She said huskily, ‘Rome—is there some—some reason why we shouldn’t be—together?’
She’d meant to say ‘someone else’, but found she couldn’t speak the words aloud.
He said bleakly, ‘Any number of reasons, mia cara. Do you wish me to list them for you?’
No, she thought with swift anguish. Because one of them could be another woman’s name. And more than she could bear.
That damned scarf was slipping again. She untied it, thrusting it into the pocket of her raincoat, glad to conceal the fact that her hands were shaking.
She said in a low voice, ‘And what if I said I didn’t care? That I want to forget the past and live just for the present?’ She bit her lip. ‘And let the future take care of itself.’
There was a tingling silence. Cory could almost feel the tension emanating from