* * *
While Oliver made several journeys up and down the stairs with his possessions, Charlotte worked diligently on some paperwork she had brought home with her, determined to keep out of his way and not to embarrass either herself or him by trying to put their relationship on anything other than a business footing.
When he had finished, he rapped briefly on the sitting-room door and then came in.
‘That’s finished. I was wondering if you’d like to go out for a drink somewhere…to celebrate our joint appointment this afternoon.’
Charlotte felt her heart leap, but almost immediately she shook her head. ‘No, thank you,’ she told him dampeningly.
He was just being polite, she told herself, trying to ignore the possibility of a more sinister purpose in his invitation. She was almost sure that Vanessa was wrong…almost sure. His offer of a drink was simply a polite gesture, which she was pretty sure he expected her to refuse.
Certainly he didn’t look particularly disappointed when she did.
‘Well, perhaps another time,’ was all he said, and then he cheerfully excused himself, going back upstairs, leaving her to wish that she weren’t the sort of person she was and that she had the kind of self-confidence so evident in women like Vanessa. That she was the kind of woman who knew that no man would ever ask her out simply out of compassion or good manners, but because he was attracted to her and found her desirable.
The thought of Oliver finding her desirable sent such a charge of sensation through her that her body tensed against it. How was it possible for him to make her feel like this? Desire…it was something she had comfortably assumed would never dominate her life. She had thought that, if she didn’t inspire sensual need in men, than at least she had the advantage of being free from experiencing it herself, but now she was discovering that all her comfortable and safe beliefs about herself were being swept aside…that she could indeed experience desire, and that it was a sharp, raking, painful sensation which made her body ache restlessly and her mind fill with such wanton mental images that she could feel the heat they generated crawling up under her skin.
It was a relief when she was finally able to go to bed, but sleep didn’t come easily. She was far too conscious of Oliver sleeping so close to her.
So close physically, maybe, but so very far away emotionally and mentally.
She had to get a grip on herself before it was too late, she warned herself. But too late for what? She wasn’t merely in love with Oliver Tennant—she loved him, which was infinitely worse. She sat bolt upright in bed as the truth burst upon her—irrefutable and inescapable. She loved him!
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE moment she opened her eyes, Charlotte was aware of a heavy sense of despair. Outside her bedroom window the sun was shining, but inside her heart everything was shadowed and dulled by the pain of knowing that she loved Oliver.
Oliver… Instinctively she glanced at her bedside clock. The house was silent, so presumably he had already left. It was extraordinary that, even knowing the folly of her emotions, even knowing that she was safer when he was absent, that every second spent in his company increased the intensity of her feelings, and the danger that she might somehow betray them, she should still feel this total sense of desolation in the knowledge that he wasn’t there.
She shivered under the bedclothes, not because she was cold, but because of the feelings prickling her skin.
God knew, she didn’t want to feel like this—had never imagined she could feel like this—and, if anyone other than herself should discover what she did feel, she thought she would die from the humiliation of it.
Restlessly she pushed back the bedclothes and got up. Her father’s old rooms had their own bathroom which had been installed when he had become too ill to walk very far.
Her bathroom was a couple of doors down the corridor; knowing she had the house to herself, she didn’t hesitate to open her bedroom door and walk on to the landing wearing the faded soft cotton pyjama jacket which was her preferred nightwear. She had several of them, all of them washed to a similar state of faded softness. Frilly nightdresses were not for her, and when she had returned from London she had eschewed the chain-store-bought nightshirts she had worn then in favour of the discarded top halves of pyjamas she suspected had originally belonged to her father, and which she had found abandoned in one of the house’s many chests of drawers.
Now, absently noticing how thin the cotton was wearing, she acknowledged ruefully that she would soon have to replace them, but with what? She had grown accustomed to the softness of a quality of cotton no longer cheaply available.