Violet only realised that she had been holding her breath when she sagged against the closed bathroom door. Her breathing was thick and uneven. After days of standoff, she had felt those lazy eyes on her naked body and nearly collapsed. What did he want to talk to her about? She had heard the slam of the bedroom door, but she gave it a little while before poking her head out and establishing that the bedroom was empty.
She wanted to put that recollection of him sitting in that chair, looking at her as she blithely discarded the towel, to the back of her mind. Actually, she wanted to eradicate it completely, but it kept recurring as she got dressed and met the assembled party in the Long Room.
What had he thought of her? Had the reality of a body that wasn’t stick-thin repulsed him? She had returned to her uniform of baggy clothes, a shapeless dress over which she had thrown a thick cardigan. The thought of drawing any more attention to herself made her feel sick. At least there would be more than just the four of them for the meal out. Eleanor had invited some of her friends. Damien’s attention would be blessedly diluted. But, even amidst the upbeat conversation and the laughter, she was keenly aware of his eyes sliding over to her every so often. The conversation finally turned to Eleanor’s treatment, which was due to start the following day.
‘No one can tell me exactly how I’ll be affected,’ she confessed to one of her friends who had undergone a similar situation and was full of upbeat advice. ‘Apparently, everyone reacts differently...but it’ll be wonderful knowing that I’ll have Dominic and Damien by my side...’ She looked steadily at Damien. ‘You will be staying on for a short while, won’t you, darling?’
Damien smiled and gave an elegant, rueful and playfully resigned shrug. ‘My office is up and running. It’ll make a nice change looking through the window and not being treated to a splendid London view of office blocks...’
He did it so well, Violet thought, returning to her food. He was charm personified. Everyone was chuckling. There was general laughter when he launched into a wry anecdote about some of the urban myths surrounding a couple of the office blocks in the square mile.
When the laughter had died down, Eleanor turned to Violet. ‘You must hate me for keeping Damien all the way down here in this part of the world...’ she murmured.
Violet flushed. She hated those instances when she had felt horribly as though she was doing more than just play acting for a good reason, when she felt corralled into a corner from which she had no choice but to baldly lie.
‘Oh, I shall be busy...you know...the new term starts soon and it’s always hectic...’ she offered vaguely.
‘But you will come down on the weekends, won’t you, my dear? You’ve been such a source of strength...’
‘Well...sure, although...er...Damien mentioned something about having office stuff to do in London...in the coming weekends...’
‘Did I?’ Damien looked at her with a perplexed expression. ‘I’ve been known to go to the office occasionally on a weekend, but...’ he raised both hands in a gesture of amused surrender while keeping his eyes firmly pinned to Violet’s flushed face ‘...even a diehard workaholic like myself knows when to draw the line...so I’ll be down here unless something exceptional happens in London that requires my presence...’
‘So that means that you’ll be with us this weekend, my dear?’ Eleanor was looking keenly at Violet’s flushed face. ‘I shall probably need some help around the house and it’s so much nicer having someone around who knows us all rather than getting staff in. I do know you’ll be busy at school...so please say if you’d rather not come...perfectly understandable...’
Violet felt the weight of expectation from everyone around the table and she sneaked a pleading glance at Damien, who returned her stare with an infuriatingly bland expression. ‘I...’ she stammered. ‘I’m sure I should be able to...get away for the weekend...given the circumstances...’ She smiled weakly. Even to her own ears, it was hardly the sound of excited enthusiasm but Eleanor was smiling broadly and reached over to pat her on her hand.
‘Perfect! I shall probably be in a horizontal position most of the time but it should give you and Damien a really terrific opportunity to explore the village and the surroundings. I mean, you’ve hardly been out on your own since you got here and I may be an old lady but I’m not so old that I can’t remember what it’s like to be a couple of love birds...!’
Everyone laughed. Dominic said something salacious. Violet cringed.
She barely registered the remainder of the evening. She drank slightly more than was usual for her. By the time they eventually made it back to the house, it was after ten-thirty and her few glasses of wine had gone to her head.
‘You need water,’ Damien said, leading her towards the kitchen once Eleanor and Dominic had disappeared. ‘And paracetamol...you drank too much.’
‘Don’t you dare lecture me on how much I drank, Damien!’ She yanked her arm free of his supportive hand, stumbled, straightened and stopped to glare at him. ‘How could you?’
Damien wondered whether she was aware that she was slurring her words. Ever so slightly. She had also, somewhere along the line, hurriedly done up her cardigan but misaligned the buttons and her hair was all over the place as she had insisted on opening her car window for a spot of fresh air.
‘You’re going to have to sit down if you’re going to accuse me of something.’ He led her towards a kitchen chair, sat her down and fetched her a glass of water and some tablets. ‘Now...’ he positioned his chair squarely to face her and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs and staring at her with earnest concentration ‘...you were about to start an argument...’
Violet was mesmerised by his eyes. He hadn’t shaved for the day and there was a dark shadow that promised stubble in the morning. She wanted to reach out and touch it. The temptation was so strong that she had to sit on her hand to suppress it.
‘So tell me what I’m guilty of,’ Damien prompted, ‘but only when you’ve finished looking at me. I wouldn’t want to rush that...’
Violet reddened and immediately looked away. ‘So now I’m going to be coming here at the weekend,’ she said in a rush. The feel of his eyes on her and the faint woody smell of his aftershave were doing disastrous things to her equilibrium, cutting a swathe straight through the cool detachment she had managed to maintain over the course of the past few days. After his reciprocal coldness, this sudden attention was as dramatic on her nerves as an open flame next to dry tinder.
‘I do recall you agreeing to something of the sort.’ Damien was enjoying her attention. Enjoying the way her eyes skittered away from his face but then were compulsively drawn back to stare at him. He realised how much he had disliked her coolness towards him. They might have found themselves sharing the same space for very dubious reasons, but proximity and their need to pretend had invested a certain edge to what they had. A little wine had now made her lower her defences and he liked that. A lot. He leaned a little closer, as though he didn’t want to miss a single word of what she was saying.
‘Are you telling me that you didn’t mean it?’ he asked in a vaguely startled voice, as though this angle had only now popped into his head. ‘Perhaps I misconstrued the relationship you have with my mother. You two seemed to be getting along like a house on fire...’
‘That doesn’t have anything...to do with...anything...’ Violet said incoherently. ‘I like your mother very much. That’s why I...why it’s such a mistake...’
‘Honestly not following you at all...’
‘I was only supposed to be here until the end of the week...’
‘You were. And you’re free to go once your week here is over.’ He sat back, angling his body to one side so that he could extend his legs. He linked his hands behind his head. ‘You have a life happening back in London. Of course, I know that I could keep you hanging on, doing what I ask of you, because you would do pretty much anything to save your sister’s skin, but...’ He stood up and walked, loose-limbed, to fetch himself a bottle of water, which he drank in one go while he continued to stare at her.
‘But?’ Violet was still having trouble peeling her eyes away from him.
‘But that could prove a never-ending situation. So once we’re back in London, feel free to jump ship. I’ll sign a guarantee that your sister won’t be prosecuted. She will be free as a bird to roam the Spanish coastline doing whatever takes her fancy. And you can return to your life.’
‘And what would you tell your mother?’ Faced with the prospect of returning to her life, Violet was now assailed by a host of treacherous misgivings that this much-prized life, the one she had insisted was there, waiting to be lived, was not quite the glittering treasure she had fondly described. She didn’t quite get it, but there had been a strange excitement to being in Damien’s company. When she was around him, even when, as had been the case over the past few days, she was keeping her distance, she was still always so aware of him. It was as if her waking moments had been injected with some sort of life-enhancing serum.