From her mother’s expression she saw that her shaft had struck home. If Flint Jansen pumped her mother again he’d probably get what he wanted easily enough—he was that sort of man—but with any luck, from now on Natalie wouldn’t spill out unasked-for details.
It had been a strange day. As Aura curled up in her cramped room and closed her eyes against the glare of the streetlight that managed to find her face every night through the gap between the blind and the window-frame, she tried to woo sleep with an incantation that never failed.
In two weeks’ time she would be married to Paul, darling, gentle, kind, understanding Paul, and she would be able to relax and live the serene, happy life she had always longed for.
Of course there would be troubles, but they’d be able to overcome them together. Her mother, for one. Natalie would always demand the constant attention she considered her due. But when they were married, Aura’s first loyalty would be to Paul. Dearest Paul. She intended to make him so happy, as happy as he would make her.
Two weeks. A fortnight. Only fourteen more days.
Firmly banishing Flint Jansen’s fiercely chiselled face from her mind, she turned her head and drifted off to sleep.
She woke the next morning slightly headachey and as edgy as a cat whose fur had been stroked the wrong way. The clear sky of the night before had been transmuted into a dank, overhanging pall of heavy cloud; rain hushed persistently against the window panes.
Listening to the early traffic swish by on the road outside, she wondered why she felt as though she had spent all night in a smoky room. It couldn’t be the weather. It had rained for most of the autumn, so she was quite reconciled to a wet wedding day.
And everything was under control. Mentally she went through the list. The caterer knew to ignore any instructions her mother gave; her wedding-dress was made in the simple, flowing lines that suited both her figure and the informal occasion, not the elaborate and unsuitable costume Natalie had suggested. And the florist had no illusions about the sort of flowers she wanted.
A wedding, even one as small as theirs, was like a juggernaut, caught up in its own momentum, rolling serenely on towards an inevitable conclusion. The simile made her smile, and stretch languidly. This wedding was going to be perfect, from the hymns to the best man—
Flint Jansen.
Like the outburst of a nova the memory of the previous evening lit up her mind, and with a shame that sickened her she recalled the dream that had woken her halfway through the night. Explicit, sensual, only too vivid, they had lain tangled together in a bed swathed with white netting. Through the wide windows came the soft sounds of the sea. Scents that hinted at the tropics floated on the heated, drowsy air.
She tried to convince herself that the other man in that wide bed had been Paul, but it was Flint’s bronzed, harsh-featured face that had been above hers, Flint’s hard mouth that had kissed her with such passion and such bold eroticism, Flint who had touched her in ways Paul never had.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, burying her face into her hot pillow.
Somehow Flint Jansen had slid right through her defences and taken over that most unmanageable part of her mind, the hidden area that manufactured dreams and symbols, the secret source of the imagination. Such a betrayal had never happened to her before.
Perhaps that vengeful little daydream on the way home from One Tree Hill had given her inner self permission to fantasise? Had the strength of her anger carried over into her unconscious and been transmuted for some reason into the passion she hadn’t yet known?
In the end, after mulling over the whole wretched business for far too long, she was forced to accept that for some reason she was physically attracted to Flint.
Of course it had nothing to do with love, it was a mere matter of chemicals. Aura might be relatively unsophisticated, but she knew that such an explosion of the senses usually died as quickly as it flamed into being. She had seen what happened to those of her friends who believed it to be love. They had found that within a horrifyingly short time, when desire was sated, they were left with nothing but the dross of a failed affair.
Jessica Stratton, her best friend and bridesmaid, had tripped into such a pit only a year ago. Recalling the subsequent disillusionment, Aura sat up, shivering in the cold dampness of her room, and reached for her dressing-gown.
‘I don’t even like him,’ Jessica had wailed. ‘I thought it was the greatest romance since Romeo and Juliet, I thought he was wonderful, and then I woke up beside him one morning and saw a boorish, sports-mad yob with hairy toes and a bad case of egotism. He wasn’t even a good lover; he did it by numbers! What on earth did I see in him?’
‘Chemistry,’ Aura had told her pertly, secretly rather proud that she had never fallen prey to it.
Clearly pride went before a fall. Because when she looked at Flint Jansen funny things happened to her legs and her spine, and her insides melted into a strangeness that was shot through with exhilaration and eagerness.
Paul’s touch was warmth, and love, and happiness. What she felt when Flint looked at her was a heated sexual excitement, the basic lust of a woman for the most potent man around.
Her soft, full mouth firmed in distaste as she shrugged into her robe and tied it. Appetite, that was all it was, a primeval pull at the senses, a straight biological urge that had nothing to do with love or trust. She-animals felt its force, and mated with the strongest male because of it.
In spite of his striking, unhandsome face and unyielding expression, Flint was a very sexy man, edged with an aura of danger that some women found smoulderingly sensual. However, she was immune to what he offered.
Uncomfortable and disturbing although her reaction to Flint was, she could deal with it. All she had to do was remember that it would pass. She would not exchange the pure gold of her feeling for Paul, the affection and companionship, the fact that she respected and admired and loved him, for all the enticing tinsel and gloss of sexual desire, however it blazed in the moonlight.
Braced by common sense, Aura showered and cleaned her teeth in the tiny, dingy bathroom, then made coffee and took her mother the glass of mineral water and slice of lemon that was her first meal of the day. When that was done she sat down to her toast in the dining end of the sitting-room.
Almost immediately the telephone rang. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ Paul said. ‘Everything all right for tonight?’
‘So far, so good.’ Aura smiled at the gloomy day outside. ‘I’ve no doubt there’ll be more crises today, but at the moment I’m on top of everything.’
She could hear his smile. ‘Good. How did you get on with Flint last night?’
So unnerved was Aura by her dreams that she immediately wondered whether somehow he knew…
No, of course he couldn’t!
‘Fine,’ she said automatically. ‘It was rather touching, really. He took me to the top of One Tree Hill and tried to satisfy himself that I have your best interests at heart.’
There was a moment of silence before Paul said in an amused voice, ‘Did he, indeed? And do you think you convinced him? Or did you tell him to mind his own business?’
Aura laughed softly. ‘You know me too well. To be honest, I don’t really care what he thinks. If I convince you, that’s all I worry about. And I’ve got a long time to do that; at least sixty years.’
With immense tenderness he said, ‘Darling, I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
‘Not as much as you’re going to,’ he said quietly, almost as though he was making a vow. Before she could answer he said, ‘Enough of this! I can’t spend all morning dallying with you, I’ve got work to do. It’s this afternoon you’re going to do the flowers, isn’t it, so you’ll be here when the