‘No, Maggie! Not your comments… You said before that I had given you no reason to imagine I saw you as anything other than an adopted sister… That isn’t true.’
His fingers tightened momentarily on her skin.
‘As for my wanting to punish you…’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘If anyone should be punished, it’s me! You see, Maggie, I knew exactly how you felt about me, and sometimes when you looked at me with those huge, hungry eyes of yours, I’d have to fight with myself not to take you in my arms. You were so young…too young. I knew I’d have to give you time to grow up, but once you had…’ He broke off and shook his he
ad.
‘But that was before I realised what a selfish brute I was becoming. It took someone’s rather malicious comment to show me the truth. A woman—who she was it doesn’t matter—an older, rather disappointed woman, I suspect, who pointed out to me one day that women who marry very young are seldom content because they’ve never been allowed to grow up, and that men who marry very young girls have all manner of emotional problems themselves and are often unable to cope when their child-brides turn into adult women. All generalisations, of course, but her comments held enough of the truth to make me sit back and think about what I was doing to you, about what the kind of life you led was doing to you, and I saw that in all fairness you had to have the opportunity to go out and make your own life…to find out if your feelings for me were those of a child or a woman.
‘I lied when I said I was getting engaged, Maggie, but the situation between us was becoming so explosive that it was the only way I could think of to put a distance between us. You were just about to start at college. Your grandfather knew how I felt about you. In fact, he fully approved of the idea of us getting married, but I explained to him that I felt you needed time. But that I knew if I tried to explain to you, you’d probably overrule both my arguments and my common sense. I wanted you so damnably, you see,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘Ached for you…yearned for you…craved for you; I couldn’t trust myself to hold you at arm’s length, once either of us crossed that very narrow chasm between us. But everything blew up in my face when you turned on me. I’d underestimated the intensity of your feelings, not made allowances for your intuitive knowledge of how I felt about you…’
‘You loved me?’ Maggie broke in, stunned by his disclosures. ‘You loved me, and yet…’
She broke off, suddenly seeing the wisdom and common sense of what he had tried to do. At seventeen, she had been far too immature for marriage. She had known far too little of human nature, including her own; the age gap between them would have meant that she would have entered marriage not as an adult but as a child, and that such a marriage would ultimately have foundered, she had little doubt at all.
She was not the girl she had been at seventeen: ready to absorb Marcus’s opinions as her own because they were his, ready to adore and worship.
And yet, even so, she stared at him with hugely shadowed and pained eyes, asking, ‘But why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me go on thinking..?’
‘How could I tell you? I haven’t seen you in ten years. You have always had the option to come to me, Maggie… I have never had that same option. You knew where I was, but you took damn good care to make sure I could never contact you, and because of that I assumed that whatever you had once felt for me had gone and was unregretted…that your life was happy and fulfilled. I waited…’
‘And then one day you decided you were tired of waiting and got engaged to Isobel,’ Maggie supplied wearily for him, but to her surprise he shook her almost fiercely and denied it.
‘No!’
‘No? But…’
‘Let me tell you about Isobel,’ he interrupted her grimly. ‘All her life she’s been spoiled rotten. Until very recently, she had been living in London with someone. They quarrelled and she came home. He followed her up here, but Isobel had decided she wanted to get married. He’s very wealthy, you see, and Isobel had realised she wasn’t getting any younger. He, I suspect, did not share her desire for married life. She attached herself to me…quite without encouragement, I assure you. I only know about her desire to get married because she threw out some pretty broad hints to me that a husband wouldn’t come amiss. She even pointed out to me that with two young sisters to bring up, I could probably do with a wife. Since there was only one woman I had envisaged in that role, I promptly disabused her of any notion she might have of being that wife, or at least I thought I had until I came round in hospital after the accident and discovered that Isobel and I were engaged, and that moreover, almost the whole county knew about it…’
‘So you never asked her to marry you.’
Marcus gave her a grim look and said, ‘Do I really look that much of a fool?’ He paused and then looked directly at her. ‘And then, as though matters weren’t already complicated enough, you came back and soon made it very clear indeed that any dreams I had been cherishing that you might have missed me as much as I had done you were just exactly that. But ten years is a long time to go on loving someone, and those kind of dreams can’t be abandoned at will.’ He gave a rather mirthless smile.
‘Before you arrived I had been searching frantically for a way to get rid of Isobel. The only thing I would come up with was to insist that she would have to take charge of the girls. Selfish as she is, I knew she’d balk at the idea of being tied down to this house and two teenagers. And then you came along and bang went my one means of getting Isobel to break off the engagement, or so I thought. I knew there was no way I could allow Isobel to go on imagining we were going to get married. I decided to be honest with her and tell her the truth. You can imagine the shock I got when she barged into my study and announced that she was going back to Paul and that our engagement was off. She seemed to think for some reason that the news wouldn’t come as all that much of a shock. Something about you seeing her with him and rushing back here to tell tales…’
‘I did see them,’ Maggie agreed. ‘But I wasn’t going to tell you. I couldn’t, you see. I couldn’t bear the thought of being responsible for breaking a second engagement. I could only think of how much you hated me…’
‘Some hatred,’ Marcus broke in drily, and Maggie flushed at the look he gave her.
‘I thought it was sexual frustration because you and Isobel…your accident…’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Dear heaven, you’ll never know how thankful I was for that accident! The thought of making love to Isobel was a total turn-off, and once you’d come back… Just to set the record straight, Isobel and I have never been lovers, but yes, I was frustrated. Frustrated by years of wanting someone I thought I could never have…frustrated by the sight of that someone here in my home and even more alluring and desirable to me in the flesh than she had been in my dreams…frustrated by my need to break through that wall she had built between us…and most of all, frustrated by the instincts that told me that, no matter what you said, there was something still there between us, some spark that, given the chance, I might possibly be able to turn into a flame that would burn as hotly inside you as my love for you burns within me. Was I right, Maggie? Is there a chance?’ he began softly, but she pulled away from him nervously, causing him to check and withdraw, his eyes shockingly bleak before he veiled them from her and looked the other way.
‘You’re not just saying this because…because of this afternoon, are you?’ she blurted out awkwardly. ‘I mean, because you discovered that I hadn’t had any other lovers? That wasn’t just because of how I feel about you, Marcus,’ she told him earnestly, not realising what she was betraying, not seeing the sudden gleam that lightened the sombreness of his eyes. ‘There’s no need to feel you have to…to say that you care about me when you don’t.’
‘No need at all,’ he agreed coolly, and her heart sank. ‘In fact, I should have thought that at your age you’d be pretty glad for someone to come along and…’
He turned round just as she was about to explode with angry indignation, and her breath caught in her throat as she saw the laughter and the love in his eyes.
‘Idiot,’ he told her fondly, pulling her gently towards him, and somehow it seemed quite natural that she should lean her head against him, so that he could hold her comfortably within the curve of his arm.
‘I’m sorry if I was rough with you, though. To be honest, by the time things got to the point where I should perhaps have been questioning the wisdom of what I was doing, I was way past any rational thinking.
‘As it was, I could scarcely believe that after so many years there you were at last, every bit as warm and welcoming as I’d dreamed…all the woman any man could ever want…and certainly all the woman…the only woman I’ve ever wanted. Twelve years is a long time for a man to go without a woman, and…’
‘Twelve years?’ Maggie shot upright in his arms. ‘Marcus…’
‘I love you,’ he told her simply. ‘It had to be either you or no one.’