The sheer eccentric chaos would get to him after a while. After, she suspected, a very short while. That, and the boredom of small village life, where eating out at a decent restaurant involved a forty-five minute trek into the nearest large town and the main topics of conversation were not stocks and shares but roses, ma¬nure and the weather.
In the darkness of her bedroom, she smirked to her¬self.
She was revolving in her head what other aspects of village life would get up his nose when there was a brief knock on the door, then it was pushed open, and, outlined against the light from the corridor, was Franco. A dark, well-built silhouette wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a tee shirt which he had borrowed from her father.
She realised that she wasn't surprised to see him. She had more than half expected it. Was that why she had abandoned her favored night gear of skimpy vest and little shorts and opted for the one flannelette nightie she possessed?
He had retreated to his bedroom at a little after ten-¬thirty with the docility of a lamb, having trapped her into walking up the stairs with him but unable to pre¬vent her from scampering back downstairs before they could make it to the isolated confines of his bedroom. His last words had been Later, my darling, which had barely made her steps falter.
The threatening little syllables had obviously been lodged somewhere in the forefront of her brain, though, because her eyes barely flickered now when she saw him.
Without saying a word, she switched on her bedside lamp and watched in silence as he pushed himself away from the doorframe and sauntered into the bed¬room, carefully closing the door behind him. He had obviously waited until he assumed her parents to be asleep. Their bedroom was well within earshot of raised voices.
A little shiver of awareness slithered through her as he sat on the side of her bed, depressing the mattress with his weight. That, she thought gloomily, was the snake in the grass. It didn't matter how much she rea¬soned things out on a logical basis, how much she told herself that it would be a huge relief when he aban¬doned her as an object of revenge for walking out on him and, even worse, walking out on him when she was carrying his baby, she still felt an electric thrill whenever he was around. In fact, the past few weeks seemed to have been lived in cotton wool, and now that he was in the house and threatening to get under her skin she felt truly alive again.
Of course, that didn't mean that she really wanted him around, she reasoned to herself, screwing up her life for all the wrong reasons.
"I know you're going to shout at me," she began defensively, "and there's no point. It might make you feel better but it won't change anything." Despite the fact that she had semi-rehearsed these lines, she still failed to sound firm and convincing. In fact, she was only a hair's breadth away from subsiding into a ner¬vous stutter.
Shout at you? Wake your parents up after they've been so welcoming and hospitable? Perish the thought." He smiled at her and she shivered.
"Thank you," she said, looking away, "for not..."
"Exposing their shy, unassuming daughter for the inveterate liar that she is?"
"I'm not an inveterate liar," Ruth said mutinously. "No? Well, it doesn't matter now. What matters is how we intend to deal with all of this."
We could have talked about it in the morning. There was no need for you to come here tonight." As a form of protest, it sounded pretty unconvincing to her ears, considering he'd now been sitting on her bed for a good ten minutes.
"Oh, but you're my wife. I can do whatever I please with you!"
Ruth reddened and drew her knees up to her chest under the quilt, dragging it up, then she hugged her legs and rested her chin on her knees. "You know that's not true," she said in a faltering voice.
His eyes caught hers and her pulse began to beat with a quickened, steady pace.
"Well, we'll leave that for the moment, shall we?" Another one of those smiles that made her nervous system go into overdrive. "Let's talk about the im¬mediate future."
"You can't possibly stay here for weeks on end," Ruth said, with a question in her voice.
"Why not?"
"Because you've got things to do in London."
"Yes, well, as it transpires, I've got things to do here as well."
Her grey eyes glinted in the mellow light and, in¬voluntarily, his eyes dropped to the slender column of her neck and the slight body bulked out by the quilt. She was wearing a thick nightgown. Nothing like she used to wear in bed with him.
To his lasting amusement, she had always refused to sleep naked, blaming it on her upbringing, but her nightclothes had never been of the granny variety. Baggy boxer shorts and loose white vests that always showed the twin peaks of her breasts, pushing against the cotton like pointed buds, begging to be touched. His eyes shot back to her face and he frowned.
"Would you ever have told me?" he asked quietly. "Or would you happily have allowed my child to be born into this world without ever knowing the identify of its father?"
Ruth felt her mouth go dry. "I hadn't really thought about it," she whispered truthfully.
"You hadn't really thought about anything, had you?" He knew that he was beating this to death, but he couldn't help himself. She had been quite happy to go it alone! In fact, he thought darkly, she had prob¬ably been enjoying her independence before he showed up on the scene, while he, on the other hand, man of the world, eligible bachelor infamous Houdini when it carne to the opposite sex, had spent weeks torn apart by her absence from his life.
"I thought I was doing the right thing."
"The right thing? Surely, as a vicar's daughter, you must know that the last thing you were doing was the right thing!" He could feel himself on the verge of exploding and was obliged to surreptitiously take a few deep breaths to regain some self-control.
Think of the nightgown, he told himself with grim satisfaction. She was wearing, what could only be called the ultimate man deterrent. Because, he decided, because just in case he showed up, which she had half expected him to, judging from her lack of outrage, she didn't want to be clad in anything remotely sexy. Because the thought of sex and him still did something for her. Still, he decided, turned her on.
"All right, then, the best thing."
"For whom? The best thing for whom?" He watched as her fingers plucked nervously at the quilt cover and she licked her lips. Then she straightened her legs, revealing the true depth of her sexless nightwear in all its splendid spinster aunt glory.
It had all the hallmarks of sexlessness. A ruffled neckline, a few little pearl buttons down the front, long sleeves. Probably reached to her ankles as well, he thought, staring at her face yet, mysteriously, still managing to see the swell of her breasts under the unrevealing cloth. He felt himself harden and adjusted his sitting position accordingly.
"For... everyone..."
Tomorrow..." he said, getting up and strolling across to the window, out of which he proceeded to stare before turning to face her tense figure on the bed. Her hands, demurely linked on her lap, fidgeted con¬tinually. Tomorrow I intend to go to London to sort out one or two things. I'll probably be there a couple of days, then I'll be back. With clothes. And while I'm gone you'll have to do a little bit of furniture replacement." He moved across to the bed, where he proceeded to tower over her prone form, his fingers fractionally tucked into the elasticized waistband of the boxer shorts.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean," Franco said on a long¬suffering sigh. This sleeping arrangement isn't going to work. For starters, what are your parents going to think? That your besotted husband, fresh back from those war zones, is content to sleep in a separate room from his coy, young wife?" He looked at her with hooded eyes. "No." He shook his head. "As your hus¬band, I have one or two rights..."