He was kissing her throat, her shoulders, nibbling at the tender flesh, trailing tormenting kisses down over the upper slopes of her breasts and then the valley between them. Her nipples were stiff, aching for the warmth of his mouth but he seemed determined to ignore them. Stifling a tormented moan, Sophy curled her fingers into his hair, guiding his head to her breast, her body arching up to his mouth in open supplication.
She felt him shudder and for one agonising moment thought she had somehow disgusted him, but even as she tried to pull away his hand cupped her breast, his mouth hot against her skin as he muttered into the creamy flesh, ‘Sophy...Sophy...this time I can’t be gentle.’ And then his mouth was tugging urgently on the coral hardness of her nipple, unleashing a cramping, burning ache low down in her stomach, making her sob his name and drag her nails against his skin as she felt the tiny shudders of pleasure radiate through her body.
There was an odd ringing noise in her head...a distracting sound she did not want to hear, a tormented sound of denial dragged from her throat as Jon abruptly released her.
‘The alarm’s gone off,’ he told her, sitting up slowly. He was breathing so hard she could see the rise and fall of his chest. Sweat clung to his skin. ‘Sophy...?’
Sounds from the next room silenced him. ‘Now obviously isn’t the time to say all that I want to say to you,’ he said wryly. ‘I suspect that any minute now you’re likely to be invaded.’ He reached for his pyjama bottoms pulling them on, his body still openly aroused. ‘As soon as we can we’re going to have to talk.’ He bent briefly and kissed her, just as the door opened and Alex came rushing in.
She stopped abruptly, staring round-eyed at them, demanding curiously, ‘What are you doing in here, Uncle Jon?’
‘I had a nightmare and your uncle spent the night with me,’ Sophy fibbed lightly, giving the little girl a smile.
‘Does that mean that you’ll always be sleeping together now, like real Mummies and Daddies?’ Alex enquired innocently.
Sophy dared not look at Jon. Would he want to sleep with her on a permanent basis...to make their relationship a physical as well as a legal one?
‘You’re not wearing a nightie.’ She had forgotten about that, and blushed guiltily. Jon, standing by the bedroom door was laughing and over Alex’s head her eyes met his.
‘Mummies don’t need them when they sleep with Daddies,’ he told Alex with a grin, sauntering out into the landing.
* * *
OF COURSE IT WAS too much to hope for that Alex would let the subject drop. She was full of it over breakfast, telling David all about it, and Sophy was conscious of a certain slightly adult awareness in David’s expression as he looked at her. ‘Married people should sleep together,’ he told Alex firmly.
Luckily Sophy was able to change the subject before Alex could continue it, reminding the children that they would be having visitors at the weekend.
It was on Friday that Jon’s friends arrived from Nassau, and on Saturday evening they were coming round for dinner. Sophy still wasn’t sure what she was going to serve. She felt very nervous about meeting them although she told herself there was no reason why she should.
An emergency call from one of his clients meant that Jon had to go out immediately after breakfast. His client’s offices were in London and he told Sophy before he left that he might not be back that night. She felt empty and very much alone when he had gone, almost as though a shadow had fallen across her day. If she had doubted that she loved him before, she didn’t do so any longer. It took a considerable effort to rouse herself enough to take the children to school and once she had done she found herself reluctant to go back to the empty house. Instead she drove into Cambridge and spent what was left of the morning glancing through cookery books in the library and trying to plan her dinner party menu.
Something simple, she decided...and something cool. In the end she decided on salmon and cucumber mousse followed by chicken and avocado salad with a cheese board and home-made ice cream to follow. She would have to consult Jon about the wine. Jon...it was ridiculous how even the inward sound of his name had the power to arouse and alarm her. Why should he want her? She had no way of knowing...she could only accept that he did and be thankful for it.
* * *
THE DINING AND DRAWING rooms were not rooms that they normally used as a family, and Sophy grimaced faintly over their unappealing appearance. Jon had given her a completely free hand with the renovation of the house, but the weather had been so hot that she had not been motivated into making any changes. Now, with the dinner party imminent, she wished that she had. There was nothing wrong with the rooms themselves but they were furnished with clumsy, sale-room oddments and badly needed decorating. The only real improvement she could make was to fill them with freshly cut flowers and keep the lighting dim, she decided wryly when she had finished dusting and vacuuming both rooms on Friday morning.
There had been no phone call yet from Jon and while she was missing him dreadfully she was also apprehensive about his return. They needed to talk he had said to her, but what did he intend to say? Now that she had admitted to herself that she loved him, it seemed impossible that she had not known the truth before; that fierce jealousy she had felt when Alex had innocently told her about Louise for instance...she ought to have known then. But she hadn’t wanted to know. She had felt safer simply liking him; safer thinking of him as a non-sexual being. She had never even tried to look beyond the façade he presented to the world, because she had been quite content with that façade.
When he still hadn’t returned by midnight on Friday evening Sophy went to bed. She knew where he was working and had she wanted to do so she could have put a call through to him at any time during the day, but pride had stopped her. In the past it had always been Jon who rang her to tell her when he was due to return, and she was not going to cause either of them embarrassment by being the one to ring him now. She was painfully aware of what both Roy and Andrea had told her; that in the past Jon had been blatantly pursued by her sex and had apparently not liked it. She had enough intelligence to guess that Lorraine’s virulent hatred was more likely to have sprung from Jon’s rejection of her than from the lack of skill in bed which she had accused him of—after all hadn’t she herself had proof positive that the latter simply was not true?
She shivered slightly beneath the duvet, her bed suddenly far too large and empty without Jon in it but she was not going to be like those others. She was not going to pursue and chase him. That was easy enough to say, she thought tiredly as she gave in to the urge to sleep, but it might be far harder than she envisaged to do.
* * *
‘WHEN’S UNCLE JON coming back?’
They were having breakfast in the kitchen—a leisurely, late breakfast as it was Saturday morning, and once it was over Sophy intended to devote the rest of the morning to preparing for the evening’s dinner party.
‘I’m not sure.’ She responded to Alex’s question as calmly as she could. She had been awake since seven o’clock, her ears straining for the sound of the telephone, but so far there had been no call.
Almost as though she had conjured the sound up by wishful thinking, the kitchen phone suddenly shrilled.
‘I’ll get it.’ Alex was out of her chair first, running to pick up the receiver.
‘Uncle Jon...when are you coming back?’ She paused and then held out the receiver to Sophy. ‘He’s leaving now but he wants to speak to you.’
Her hand was shaking slightly as she took the receiver from Alex.
‘Hello, Jon.’ She hoped her voice sounded calmer to him than it did to her.
‘Sorry I couldn’t make it back earlier.’
Was she imagining the constraint she thought she heard?
‘That’s okay. Was the problem more difficult to solve than you expected?’
There was an odd pause and then when Jon did speak his voice was slightly muffled. ‘Yes...yes, you could say that. I should be back by midafternoon.’
After asking her if there had been any urgent telephone calls he hung up. Now that he had rung she felt worse than she had done before. She felt as though a wall had suddenly sprung up between them, as though for some reason Jon was deliberately setting a distance between them.
The preparatory work for the dinner party kept her fingers busy but left her with not enough to occupy her mind, and by the time the mousse was chilling in the fridge and the ice cream was in the freezer, she had managed to convince herself that Jon was bitterly regretting ever having touched her. Everything that Chris had said to her was true. Jon found her just as undesirable as Chris had...
She kept herself busy, polishing the old-fashioned silver cutlery she found in one of the sideboard drawers, carefully washing china and crystal that she had also discovered tucked away in the sideboard cupboards.
She had bought an expensive white-linen tablecloth, deeply trimmed with lace, and Alex who had volunteered to help her with the silver polishing and then with the table, stopped to admire the rich gleam of the green and gold banded dinner service and the sparkle of the heavily cut crystal.
Fresh flowers brightened up the heaviness of the room and decorated the centre of the table. All she really had to do now was to prepare the salads and the chicken.