Susie (20 page)

Then Giles remembered the bluebell wood that sloped down to the sea about half a mile from the castle.

He found Susie sitting on the springy grass at the top of the cliff. She was sitting with her feet stretched out in front of her and looking down at her hands.

He went up quietly and sat down beside her.

She turned and looked into his eyes. He stared at the pain and bewilderment there, and then his heart began to quicken. For all her distress, he felt that Susie was really looking at him for the first time.

Giles was about to ask her if he could shoot her horse, and in the same breath he was about to accuse her of having an affair with Jimmy.

But he took a deep breath and put a companionable arm around her shoulders.

“Mary and Jimmy have gone,” he said at last.

“You will miss Mary,” said Susie in a small voice.

“And you will miss Jimmy,” said Giles.

Susie blushed painfully. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps it will be pleasant to have the place to ourselves for a change.”

Giles felt instinctively that the time had come to make one last effort.

“I only flirted with Mary to make you jealous, Susie. And I suppose that’s why you flirted with Jimmy?”

“Oh, yes,” lied Susie thankfully. “Yes, that must have been it.”

He pulled her head gently back until it rested on his shoulder and began to stroke her hair. The long bitter winter might never have existed.

Susie was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for Giles—for being so gentle, for letting her save face. Giles was so much more worldly and sophisticated than she that surely he must have guessed at her mad fiasco with Jimmy. Susie would have been very surprised indeed had she known that he hadn’t the faintest idea of what had actually happened and would have been in quite a vicious rage had he known that she had declared her love for another man.

He bent his fair head and dropped a kiss on her nose, and she stared up into those strangely tilted eyes. Susie all of a sudden wanted to make up to him for all her snubs and days of neglect. She twisted and wound her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. His lips burned and clung to hers, and he felt the answering passion in her body with a dawning surprise. This time, he was determined not to frighten her, so he contented himself with kissing her passionately on the mouth, over and over again.

Susie’s body began to feel hot, and she was aching and trembling with a sort of terrible sweetness, and suddenly kissing was not enough.

She shyly unbuttoned Giles’s shirt and kissed his chest, and for Giles, all the world went mad. “Let’s move out of sight,” he gasped when he could.

It may seem impossible to make love to an elegantly dressed young lady on a sloping cliff in the middle of a lot of bluebells, but Giles managed superbly. For Susie, the love-making that had begun as a way of making amends ended in ecstasy as she answered all his passion with new-minted passions of her own, oblivious of sharp pebbles digging into her back and blissfully unaware that all her multiple layers of clothing were now spread far and wide among the bluebells.

The sun had long set over the sea by the time they made their slow and exhausted way back to the castle, dreamily hanging on to one another.

As they approached the castle walls a great, hulking black shape detached itself from the deeper blackness of the walls and loomed over them.

Susie gave a little scream and then laughed. “Oh, it’s only poor old Dobbin. Dear, dear precious. I shall find you some sugar as soon as I get home. Did poor Dobbin miss me?”

The silly horse bent his head and nuzzled her hand.

A full moon rose over the castle and shone down on Susie’s face as she looked up at Giles.

“Don’t you just
adore
Dobbin?” she asked.

Giles looked down at her radiant face and into her eyes, which were alight with love and remembered pleasure.

“Oh, yes,” he lied stoutly. “Splendid beast!”

Love is a wonderful thing.