Hostile engagement (14 page)

But when his hand came to cup her breast, it was pure instinct that had her own hand moving his away, instinct making the last-ditch gesture to stop this before it was too late. Jud's body ·stilled in what she knew afterwards to be a listening stillness, and she was half relieved, half sorry when he made no further move to press home his advantage, but took his hands away from her altogether.

Opening her eyes, Lucy saw he was looking down into her face and she looked away, the intimacy between them making her shy. Then Jud was putting her straps back into place, then pulling her into a sitting position and reaching for her jacket that was all anyhow at the foot of the bed.

`Put your jacket on,' he instructed her quietly, and while Lucy automatically obeyed, too bemused to do anything else-he must have known her resistance was only shyness, only token—yet he had let her off when she had known he had wanted her as she wanted him.

Jud got off the bed as a small sound on the top of the stairs reached Lucy's ears, and hurriedly now she buttoned up her jacket, and was standing too when Mrs Hemming paused at the open doorway on the way to her own room. Lucy saw Mrs Hemming glance at the rumpled cover on the bed.

A
nd?' Mrs Hemming said, and there was a question in her voice.

It's all right,' said Jud, going over to her. 'No harm has

come to Lucy—I just couldn't resist coming in and taking up the advantages of being an engaged man.'

Lucy looked from one to the other; she knew her face was scarlet telling its own tale. Mrs Hemming was giving her a look in return as if asking if she could believe her son.

`We ... we didn't get too carried away,' she said, her voice sounding most peculiar in her own ears. She had no idea how it must sound to the two people watching her.

`I'm sure you didn't,' Mrs Hemming said at last, and Lucy knew she believed her. Then in an old-fashioned way Mrs Hemming added, `I'm sure Jud has too much respect for you for that.'

Respect! Lucy thought when they had both gone. She had acted little short of wanton. She had been beginning to believe from Jud's remark that morning that he no longer thought of her as a hardened female, that he had been beginning to respect her a little, but by her very action of yielding to him, clinging to him, she had shown she was very little different from any other female of his acquaintance, and she knew that apart from his mother and Lottie, and possibly Vera Stanfield and her daughter, he had minuscule respect for any of the female race.

Mrs Hemming's manner was perfectly normal with her when Lucy descended the stairs after fifteen minutes spent in her room trying to pull herself together and pluck up courage to face Mrs Hemming and Jud. He was in the room too, but if Mrs Hemming thought she and Jud were the most unromantic couple she had ever known from the way they acted in public, for the life of her Lucy could not acknowledge his presence.

`All set to go?' he asked.

If he hoped he would force her to look at him then he was in for a disappointment, Lucy thought as she fixed her eyes on a point over his shoulder so Mrs Hemming would think she was looking at him. 'I've left my case in the hall.'

`Jud was just saying he would come up and collect it

when you walked through the door,' Mrs Hemming inserted, and Lucy couldn't have been more relieved that she had beaten him to it. She felt she had nothing she wanted to say to him, but judged that alone once more in her room with her, Jud would lose no time in taunting her with her passionate response to him. As it was, the drive home had to be got through—there would be no Mrs Hemming seated in the back seat this time to make things easy for her.

Since Jud had already said goodbye to Lottie, Lucy went to see her while he took her case out to the car, and when she joined him and his mother on the drive outside, Mrs Hemming turned to her and hugged her warmly causing the sting of tears to hit Lucy's eyes.

' I hope this has been the first of many visits, Lucy,' Mrs Hemming told her sincerely. 'There will always be a welcome here for you, both before and after your marriage.'

What she said in reply Lucy couldn't clearly remember, but she was glad Jud didn't say anything for quite some time once they were on their way; she felt too choked up for one thing, Mrs Hemming's obvious sincerity weighing heavily on her. She knew if Jud said just one word while she was despising herself so much for her part in deceiving his mother, she would instantly have flared up and she and Jud would be at each other's throats.

As Jud drove on,
choosing
a route that took in more of the English countryside in high summer, Lucy's spirits began to get on a more even keel. Her eyes caught the glint of emeralds and diamonds on her finger and she faced the fact squarely that if she had been prepared to give up her most cherished possession, this weekend at Malvern need never have happened. The choice had been hers, and since she had elected to go through with it, all the blame, she reasoned, couldn't be placed at Jud's door—though she would never forgive him for the way he had kissed her; that he had been unforgivable. She wasn't ready yet to face

the thought that Jud had had very little trouble in getting her to respond to him.

`Still hating me like hell?' Jud's voice dropped into the silence she had thought was going to last the rest of the way to Priors Channing. He had given her plenty of time to get her feelings under control, she realised, but she wasn't ready yet to enter a debate on what her feelings for him were--she would probably only earn some more of his stinging sarcasm anyway, she mused, if she gave an affirmative answer to his question.

`Isn't the countryside beautiful at this time of year?' she said tritely, looking out of the window. 'I never knew there were so many shades of green.'

She thought at the very least Jud would have something to say about her ignoring his question, but no, it seemed he was perfectly prepared to go along with her, and answered in kind without any hint of sarcasm in his voice. And suddenly, when she had thought she never wanted to speak to him again, there was an easy flow of conversation going backwards and forwards between them, and after another half an hour had gone by, Lucy forgot her animosity so far as to be ready to talk of her brother whose name she had just mentioned in relation to a meeting of the Young Farmers' Club she had attended with Rupert.

`What work does your brother do?' Jud enquired, his voice showing polite interest.

Lucy wondered if anyone of the people Jud had met since moving into the Hall had conveyed to him that Rupert had never worked at a paid job in his life.

Er—actually, he's only just finished his education,' she told him, loyalty to her brother making her ready to defend Rupert to the very end if Jud thought it about time Rupert showed some intention of getting his hands dirty.

`What's he been studying?' Jud asked quietly, none of the aggression she had been ready for evident.

`Farm and estate management,' Lucy supplied, then be-

cause she couldn't say with any truth anything about jobs Rupert had applied for, she added, 'He's studied awfully hard to learn as much as he could.' That was certainly true. Poor Rupert—she wondered if he would be in when Jud dropped her off at Brook House.

Silence reigned between her and Jud after that, but it was not an uncomfortable silence, and they were nearly at Priors Channing before Jud suddenly asked :

`Feeling better?'

`Better?' she queried.

`You were near to tears when you said goodbye to my mother, weren't you?'

She had been, but hadn't thought he had noticed—he was more observant than she had thought. 'I suppose I was overcome by guilt,' she confessed at last. 'Especially when your mother said there would always be a welcome for me at her home.' She looked across at Jud and saw him nod, as if to say he knew how she felt, while keeping his eyes on the road in front.

`If it's any consolation,' he said, 'when my mother saw your face, flushed from responding to being made love to, it fully convinced her that everything is as it should be between us—she now has no further anxieties about us.'

It was little consolation to Lucy, though she took small comfort that for the moment at any rate, Jud's mother would not be concerned about them, but her face flamed anew at Jud's bald statement of fact that she had responded to him. She, wanted to deny it, but knew any denial would be futile—Jud couldn't help but be aware of how she had reacted to him.

`You knew your mother was coming upstairs, didn't you?' she asked croakily instead.

`I heard a movement at the bottom of the stairs,' Jud admitted.

Lucy went hot and cold at thoughts of the scene Mrs Hemming would have witnessed had Jud's hearing not been

so acute—she knew the sound she herself had heard would not have penetrated had Jud still been kissing her. But now he was clearly telling her that her charms were not sufficient to make him lose his head completely. He hadn't been so far gone that his hearing was deaf to all sound the way hers had been.

'That's why you stopped making—kissing me, wasn't it? My showing you I didn't w-want to go any further had nothing to do with it.'

'That's why I stopped making love to you, Lucy,' Jud said, having no trouble in calling-what they had been doing by its proper name.

'Would you have stopped if you hadn't heard your mother on the stairs? Would you have ignored what I wanted?' It seemed important to her to establish that she had been the one to call a halt.

'I stopped making love to you, Lucy, out of respect for my mother,' Jud said coolly. 'We were in her house after all, and the slow rate she's forced to climb the stairs is a fair indication of her heart condition.'

Lucy had nothing to say to that. She took in what he was saying about his mother's heart trouble—by calling a halt to the passion that had raged between them he had saved Mrs Hemming from seeing something that would have given her a shock she could well do without—but the thing that stuck, stuck and hurt, was what he had said about his respect for his mother, underlining yet again that he had little or no respect for Lucy Carey.

'In that case,' she said stiffly, her delicate chin held firm because suddenly she was feeling decidedly weepy, 'it's just as well I got tired of your experiment and had physically said no to you anyway.'

It appeared Jud was in no mood to argue further with her. He neither agreed nor disagreed with her, and as Lucy stole a look at him, she could see from his remote expression that he was now feeling as fed up about the whole episode

as she was. He wasn't going to rise again to any taunt she could make—he had given her jibe about getting tired of his experiment, scant interest, and that if anything made Lucy feel worse; she felt her remark had been cheap and unworthy of her and knew she had only made it as a face-saver.

The rest of the way to Brook House was completed without another word being said. Lucy didn't care if she never spoke to Jud again and was sure he felt the same way about her.

She saw Rupert's car parked in front of the house, but even the joy she should have felt at seeing it and knowing that at least Rupert wasn't out somewhere with Archie Proctor was missing.

'Rupert's home,' she said more for something to say than anything else as she got out of the car and waited for Jud to extract her case. She wondered if she should ask Jud in and introduce him to her brother, but didn't want to. And then Jud was handing her case over to her, saying without words that he had no intention of entering Brook House.

`Thank you for ...' she began in a stiff little voice.

`Thank me for nothing,' Jud interrupted her harshly, and she was left staring after him as he got into the high-powered Bentley and went without a single glance at her.

Lucy entered through the front door having half expected Rupert to have seen Jud's car and come out to greet them, but there was no sound of movement anywhere in the house. Thinking that alternatively Rupert must have seen them and had nipped into the kitchen to put the kettle on ready to greet her with a cup of tea-he had always been thoughtful in the old days—she dropped her case in the hall and went along to the kitchen, but there was no sign of him there. Strongly suspecting now that he had had a heavy night and was most likely in bed catching up on his sleep, Lucy went back along the hall and pushed open the

sitting room door, to find Rupert sitting slumped down in a chair, his face paler than ever she had seen it.

`Rupert!' she exclaimed, shaking off her own depression at the sight of him. 'What ever's the matter? You look dreadful—are you ill? Shall I . . . ?'

`I'm perfectly well,' Rupert assured her, flicking her a brief look and away again, the light tones she was used to hearing from him sounding dull and dejected.

`Well, you certainly don't look it,' Lucy said candidly, trying not to let him hear her concern for him in her voice now that her initial shock was over.

`I've told you, Lucy, I'm perfectly well—don't fuss,' he said snappishly.

Lucy bit down a snappy retort of her own, facing squarely that she hadn't been in the brightest of moods herself when she'd come in, but the last thing she wanted to do was to nag Rupert into feeling more unhappy than he looked.