Strangely enough, with that thought formulated and accepted, Kirsty felt as though she had suddenly taken a giant-sized step forward into adulthood.
‘You’re looking pensive. Ready to leave?’
She hadn’t heard Drew come up behind her. When he wanted to, he could move with the stealth of a jungle cat, she decided resentfully.
Even though she was tired and longing for the evening to draw to a close, some spark of contrariness made her say stubbornly, ‘No way. Besides, hardly anyone has left yet.’
‘Hardly anyone else had just announced their engagement,’ Drew reminded her, irony underlining the words. ‘They expect us to leave,’ he added pointedly. ‘They expect that as a newly engaged couple we want to be alone.’
‘And whose fault is it that they’re going to be disappointed?’ Kirsty demanded bitterly. ‘Who lied to them, who told them we were engaged when.…’
Her angry protests were stifled beneath the hard pressure of his lips. The hands which had been hanging easily at his sides were now gripping her shoulders, the pressure of his mouth forcing her head backwards, and her lips to part so that she could draw in a gasping breath.
‘How dare you…!’ she started to say when she could speak again, but she wasn’t allowed to do more than frame the first two words before Drew’s lips were brushing softly against her own again, masking the whispered threat he murmured against her skin, as he warned her not to make a scene in front of the others.
‘Then let’s go somewhere where I can make one,’ Kirsty suggested icily, unaware until he agreed that she had played completely into his hands, and that not only were they leaving the party, they were also leaving it together—something she had already made a promise to herself she wasn’t going to allow to happen under any circumstances.
They had to run the gamut of a good deal of ribald comment before they were allowed to escape, and Kirsty’s cheeks were flushed a warm pink by the time they emerged into the cool September night.
The nostalgic scent of woodsmoke and autumn hung on the air, a feeling of indefinable sadness that autumn always brought.
Simon and Helen accompanied them outside.
‘Oh, you came in your car,’ Helen said, frowning, as Kirsty pulled away from Drew and headed for her Mini.
‘Like you, she wasn’t sure if I could make it,’ Drew interrupted smoothly. ‘I don’t suppose you’d give it a good home overnight?’ he added humorously.
‘Of course we would,’ Helen assured him before Kirsty could so much as open her mouth, ‘after all, you’ve barely had an opportunity yet to celebrate your engagement,’ she added with a teasing grin.
‘We’re not.…’ We’re not engaged, was what Kirsty had been about to say, but once again Drew forestalled her. ‘We’re very grateful to you both,’ he interposed easily. ‘Look, darling, my car’s right at the bottom of the drive—one of the misfortunes of arriving late—so why don’t you stay here with Helen and Simon while I go and collect it. I won’t be long.’
Very clever, Kirsty seethed as he walked away. Now she wouldn’t be able to tell him—as she had fully intended—that she was going home alone, even if that meant walking back to her lodgings.
‘Drew’s so very protective, isn’t he?’ Helen mused when he had disappeared. ‘I suppose it stems from his childhood—I’d begun to despair of him ever getting married. He’d seen enough of the trauma inflicted on children by the desertion of their parents ever to risk the same thing happening to his own, he once told me. Again I expect that’s a legacy of the past. He doesn’t talk about it much, of course, but you know how these things become public knowledge in our world, and a man in his position is so open to gossip and adverse comment. It’s hard to imagine him as a vulnerable, lonely child, isn’t it?’
Vulnerable? Lonely? Drew Chalmers? It certainly was! And Kirsty was curious to know what Helen meant about his childhood, but she was hardly in a position to ask. Helen plainly thought she knew all there was to know about Drew, and as his fiancée Kirsty could see that she might.
Only she wasn’t Drew’s fiancée, and she had no idea why he had described her as such, apart from the unpalatable suspicions she had already had.
‘Here he is,’ Helen exclaimed, forcing Kirsty to glance unwillingly at the familiar Porsche.
‘I envy you two in a way,’ were Helen’s last words, as she slipped her arm through her husband’s and Drew opened the passenger door of the car for Kirsty, ‘being at the beginning of it all. Engagements are such a very special time, although some people seem to think they’re outdated nowadays. A pity, I think.’
Thanking her for the party, Kirsty forced herself to smile an agreement she was far from feeling, as Drew put the car in gear and they moved swiftly down the drive.
‘Where are we going?’ she demanded angrily when he turned right instead of left at the end of the drive. ‘I don’t live this way.’
‘I know,’ came the calm retort, ‘but I do, and we have things to talk about, you and I, wouldn’t you say?’
‘If we have whose fault is that?’ Kirsty complained. ‘I’m not the one who announced our engagement!’
‘Calm down. I’ve said we’ll talk about it and so we will. Right now I need all my attention on my driving. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Kirsty,’ he told her softly. ‘I don’t go in for rape, if that’s what’s in your mind. Unless of course it’s not me you’re frightened of but yourself,’ he added shrewdly.
Oh, how dared he! Kirsty fumed inwardly. What did he think she was going to do? Fling herself bodily into his arms, begging for his kisses? Never, never in a million years!
Unwittingly her fingers touched her lips, shocked by the realisation that she could still feel the firm impression of Drew’s mouth against them. She had been kissed before, for goodness’ sake! But never with such devastating effect, she acknowledged inwardly.
Drew negotiated the Porsche through the main street in silence, Kirsty’s glance drawn, against her will, to the lean sureness of his hands as they guided the powerful car. She risked an upwards look at his face, unreadable in the half light, his mouth compressed in what could have been either obstinacy or determination. The thought struck her as it had done before that he was a man to be treated with extreme caution. He should wear a label, she decided resentfully: ‘This man is dangerous.’ But then he did, she acknowledged; it was there in his eyes, in the way he moved and spoke. Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t realise they had taken the main road out of town, until the darkness of the landscape suddenly struck her and she turned to him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he mocked, obviously reading her mind. ‘I’m not abducting you.’ He negotiated a sharp bend and turned off down a narrow lane running between high grassy banks, the drystone walling on top of them picked out by the Porsche’s powerful headlight as it dipped and twisted, following the tortuous route of the road.
Eventually Drew slowed down and turned into a rutted farm track, so bumpy that even the Porsche’s expensive suspension couldn’t prevent Kirsty from bumping into him as the car bounced down the track. She recoiled from the intimate contact with his body immediately. His flesh was as hard and unyielding as his mind, she decided, but hard upon the heels of that thought came the vivid memory of how it had felt against her, and how her own softer body had instinctively accommodated all that male hardness, abandoning itself to it with a sensuality that still had the power to shock her.
‘Are you planning to sit here all night?’
The taunting words sliced through her disturbing thoughts. She hadn’t even realised they had stopped. She reached hesitantly for the door handle, stiffening as Drew reached across her, pushing aside her fumbling fingers, the musky male scent of his skin, mingled with the sharp cleanness of his cologne, reminding her intensely of that other time she had been this close to him. The intensity and complexity of the emotions such memories aroused disturbed her. She was trembling when eventually she managed to stumble from the car. They were parked in a cobbled yard, enclosed on two sides by the dark outline of a building. Behind her Kirsty heard Drew move and then light flooded the yard, and she could see that what had once been a traditional farmyard had been transformed into an attractive cobbled courtyard. Stone urns, now empty, hinted at massed flowers trailing from them during the summer, a richly russet Virginia creeper covered the walls of the farmhouse, illuminated by the lights Drew had switched on.
‘Come on.’
He gripped her elbow, the rough brush of his jacket against the bare flesh of her arms acutely sensitising nerves already jangling with tension, and she jerked away, receiving a long, enigmatic look.
‘I don’t bite,’ Drew goaded softly, ‘so you can stop looking at me with those big, scared eyes.’ He turned as he extracted a key and started to unlock the old-fashioned white-painted door so that she could precede him into the hall.
Kirsty guessed that a good deal of money had been spent on the farmhouse to achieve the mellowed elegance it now possessed. The hall was small and square, with an attractively beamed ceiling and plain matt walls. Several doors and a narrow set of stairs led off it, but Drew ignored these, instead opening an oak door and beckoning to her to follow him.