PENNY JORDAN - Stranger From The Past

How could he stand there like that, challenging her shock at seeing him, when he must know? She shivered suddenly, sending a small shower of water droplets from her damp hair on to her bare shoulders.

She watched as Gareth homed in on her tiny betraying shudder, grey eyes narrowing as he focused on her.

Her mouth felt unbearably dry. She had to fight an overpowering impulse to flick her tongue over her dry lips to moisten them. As though he knew somehow what she was feeling, he looked at her mouth.

‘You know, you hardly look a day older than you did at fifteen.’

The flat hard words jolted through her, hurting her.

What was he trying to say? That, to him, she was as sexually unappealing now as she had been then? Well she hardly needed him to tell her that.

The arrogance of the man! Did he really think…? Resolutely ignoring that sharply painful frisson of sensation she had experienced earlier, that brief moment of self-awareness when she had realised that, somehow, some part of her was still physically capable of reacting to him, she responded curtly, ‘Really? It must be the poor light in here.’

No doubt he was comparing her make-up-less, shiny face to the soignée elegance of his woman friend’s sophistication. Well she didn’t care what he thought of her, she told herself recklessly. He wasn’t the only man in the world, and his opinion wasn’t important to her any more. He could think what he wished of her.

‘What is it you want, Gareth?’ she demanded, refusing to give in to the weakening sensations beginning to spread through her body.

He was standing much, much too close to her. She could smell the cold crisp scent of the night on his skin and clothes. If she touched his face it would feel cool, the bones hard beneath his skin, and if he touched her…

She swallowed nervously, her eyes darkening betrayingly as they mirrored her confusion and apprehension.

As she grappled mentally with the appalling unwantedness of what she was feeling, she heard Gareth saying drily, ‘Now that might be construed as a very leading question, or an extremely naïve one, only I don’t think naïveté is quite your style any more, is it?’

She stared at him, unable to comprehend the implications of his soft-voiced words. In another man she might have judged them sexually provocative, but, coming from Gareth…

His manner towards her held a mixture of contempt, disdain, and a quality which was almost a controlled anger, and none of that added up to the kind of response to her which might have led to his making a sexually provocative remark.

She looked past him at the closed front door, reflecting grimly that ten years ago she would have given her very soul for this degree of intimacy with him, whereas now…whereas now all she wanted him to do was to go and leave her alone. His presence here in her hallway was too overpowering…too…too emotionally dangerous, so much so that she could almost feel the air between them crackling with hostility and anger.

And yet why on earth should he be hostile towards her? Surely not because Thomas had left her the Dresden?

Gareth had never been avaricious. Thomas had been a wealthy man, but she knew that Gareth had always insisted on making his own way through life. When he was at university he had taken holiday jobs, refusing to allow Thomas to increase his allowance, determined to stand on his own two feet.

So why should Gareth be hostile towards her? From the moment she had overheard that conversation, had realised that he knew of her feelings for him and deplored them, she had avoided him, refusing to return to the Cedars until she’d known he wouldn’t be there. A year’s sabbatical after he had finished university and then the fact that he had opted to work in America meant that in the two years before he had left university and taken up his post in Boston she had barely seen him at all, so surely he could hardly still be angry with her because at fifteen she had dared to fall in love with him? Nor, logically, could his anger come from a misplaced belief that just because he was spending a few days back in town she was going to start mooning over him the way she had done as a teenager. She had surely already proved to him that she knew quite well that her feelings were not reciprocated, and that the last thing she wanted was to open herself up to any further humiliation and pain.

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