Antigua Kiss (9 page)

Taking a tube from the pocket, he handed them to her, and asked,

'Could you put these inside for me somewhere before you lock up?

There's some money in the back pocket which I don't want to leave lying around.'

'Of course.' She took them into the cottage, and spent a few moments checking that the other doors were locked.

What could he mean by a scheme to recover his outlay? They hadn't discussed the future yet, but already she knew in her heart that Ash was right about this being the best place for John to grow up. How could she deny him the chance to live in this wonderful climate where, already, she felt vitality bubbling up inside her like a spring.

Before going into the sea, she and John put on their tee-shirts to protect their backs from the sun. To her surprise, Ash took a bottle from his beach bag and asked her to oil his back for him.

'I shouldn't have thought you were in any danger of burning,' she said.

'I'm not, but anyone who spends a lot of time in sun and salt water needs a rub with oil occasionally. It's the equivalent of leather dressing.'

He bent forward, hands on knees, so that she could reach his shoulders more easily.

Reluctant to touch him, she dribbled a small pool of oil between his shoulder blades, and spread it with the flat of her hand.

He had spoken of leather dressing, and that was what his back felt like—as smooth and supple as her one pair of good kid gloves, with no jelly-like subcutaneous fat such as most people on the beach had, only firm springy muscle and the hardness of bone.

As fast as she could, she spread a film over his back from the nape of his neck almost to the top of his briefs.

'You can go at it harder than that,' he said. 'Try both hands. If it isn't well rubbed in, it doesn't do the job.'

Freshly irritated by his assumption that she wouldn't mind having to touch him, Christie capped the bottle and began to dig her fingers into him as hard as she could. Her nails were shaped to her fingertips, so there was no danger that she would scratch him. But she hoped that such vigorous rubbing would be rather more than he had bargained for. To complete the treatment she used the edges of her hands to perform a series of chopping movements up and down his spine.

'There you are. How was that?' she asked crisply.

Ash straightened, flexing his shoulders. 'Great. You've missed your vocation. You should have been a masseuse.' His eyes were amused.

She felt that he knew she had been disturbed by the warmth of his deeply tanned skin under her palms. Clearly the full force of her fingers had caused him no more discomfort than if John had pummelled his fists against the flat, muscular area surrounding his uncle's navel.

She went into the water full of unease and suppressed anger, but came out with her vexation forgotten in the wonder of their first exploration of the small reef close to the shore.

There was not much of a tide round the island, but the sea did rise and fall, and that afternoon was low water. Some of the rocks were exposed, and there were places among the coral where the bottom was sandy under a shallow depth of water, so that even John could stand up.

'I'll take care that he doesn't graze himself. Don't, either of you, put your hands near any holes in the rocks. Sometimes they're the homes of moray eels, and they're anti-social creatures,' Ash had warned them, before they started.

But the hazards of the reef were more than balanced by the beauty and interest of the corals and brightly coloured fish, none of which seemed at all alarmed by the invasion of their habitat.

'Oh, that was marvellous! Thank you,' was her spontaneous reaction afterwards.

She had not been wearing her flippers, and Ash had towed her and John back to the beach. With them holding on to his hands, using only undulating movements of his big black flippers, he had surged through the water at speed, pulling them with him. His hand had felt cool; as impersonal as the hand of a doctor or dentist. The contact had not reanimated her earlier feelings, and it was with genuine gratitude for an enriching experience that she pushed her mask up, off her face, and expressed her pleasure.

'That's only the beginning. Wait till you've snorkelled the reefs between Green Island and Fanny's Cove on the west coast. They really are something. Why not get in some practice with your flippers? I'll keep an eye on our tiddler.'

Christie did as he suggested, still finding the flippers more hindrance than help, but persevering.

By the time she came out John was perched on a stool at the beach bar, with Ash leaning beside him. She exchanged the wet pink bikini for the dry green suit before strolling over to join them.

Ash had seen her coming and ordered a banana daiquiri which the barman placed on the counter as she climbed on to the high stool on the other side of John.

The little boy finished his drink when her glass was still three-quarters full. His uncle lifted him down and sent him off to play with his bucket and spade under a palm-thatched sunshade until they joined him.

Christie concluded he was making an opportunity to speak to her alone. But when, intensely curious, she prompted him, saying, 'That scheme you mentioned . . .' his response was, 'First I'd like to know more about you.'

'But you already know everything.'

'I know the outlines, not the details.'

'What sort of details?'

Ash looked at her thoughtfully. 'I don't know much about your marriage, except that it was very brief.'

She stiffened. 'I really don't see what bearing my marriage has on anything.'

'Perhaps it hasn't. I'm not sure. There are things about you which puzzle me, Christiana.'

Why did he persist in calling her by her full name, and why did hearing him say it always send a frisson down her spine?

She tried to sound casual. 'For instance?'

'For instance, your agitated reaction to having your hand kissed, and your palpable shyness at appearing before me in a bikini by no means as scanty as some I've seen. If I hadn't known how old you were, and that you'd been married, I'd have thought you were a seventeen-year-old virgin. You're blushing again at this moment,' he added, with a quizzical glint.

'I—I can't help being sh-shy,' she stammered.

'I don't think you are shy, my girl, or not with everyone you meet.

Only with men, and that's odd in a woman of twenty-four who's not so recently widowed that her interest in men is temporarily atrophied.

You can't still be grieving for your husband, or you certainly shouldn't be.'

Christie glanced at the barman. But he was in conversation with a waiter. There was no one to overhear what she and Ash were talking about.

'No, I'm not,' she agreed, in a low tone. 'But if you'd known several widows, I don't think you'd find my attitude unusual. We're often on edge in male company, because most of us have discovered that the world is full of men who think we're ... so starved of sex that they'll be doing us a favour by . . . by...'

Her voice tailed off and she put her lips to the straw, her eyes downcast, her cheeks burning.

'And you're nervous that, if you relax with me, I may be encouraged to make a pass at you?' he enquired.

'I don't know. I shouldn't think so, but one never knows. The fact that you—' She stopped short.

'Yes? Go on,' he prompted.

'The fact that you probably have a woman in your life wouldn't necessarily prevent you from having a shot at me. I—I'm not overrating my attractions. I don't think I'm anything special. It's just the way things are for women in my situation.'

'On the contrary, you're an extremely attractive girl, although you try to disguise the fact. Frankly, I don't think your being a widow has much to do with the number of men who've had a shot at you, to use your own phrase. After all, if you'd never been married, you wouldn't still be a virgin. The good- looking girl of twenty-four who has never had a lover must be non-existent.'

'Possibly.' She wished he would drop the subject. It was bad enough being exposed to his powerful aura of sexuality without having to discuss that aspect of life with him.

'You sound uncertain,' he remarked. 'Is it possible you disapprove of amorous relationships outside marriage?'

'No, I don't disapprove.'

'But you've never indulged in one yourself?'

'If you feel entitled to cross-examine me in this way, the answer is no,'

she said coldly.

'You've presupposed that I have a girl-friend. I think I'm entitled to find out your views on sex, religion and so on. As I pointed out earlier, sharing the responsibility for John places us in a rather special relationship.'

Christie glanced over her shoulder at the small figure busy with his bucket.

'I wish it were a responsibility we could share properly,' she murmured unhappily.

'Perhaps it is,' was Ash's reply. As she turned a questioning face to him, he went on, 'That's where my scheme comes in. No, I can't explain now. I have to go.
Sunbird's
due in at English Harbour early this evening, and I want to be there when she berths. Tomorrow night we'll have dinner at The Admiral's Inn. The management here will lay on a baby-sitter for John. I'll pick you up at half past six. Now, if you wouldn't mind unlocking the cottage for me, I'll change and be on my way.'

THAT night was a restless one for Christie. While John slept soundly in the other bed, she lay on her back with her hands clasped under her head, watching the black silhouette of a palm tree against the moonlit sky, its fronds fluttered by the same trade- wind which was driving a great fleet of clouds across the horizon.

Thinking over her conversation with Ash, she wondered how he would have reacted if she had answered his questions truthfully. But the truth was something she would never confess to anyone, least of all to a man who looked virile enough to bed a whole harem of women.

How could someone like him ever understand someone like her? He would think her unnatural, as indeed she was; and normal people, even if they strove to hide it, were repelled by those who were not. He would think she was flawed through and through, and perhaps he would be right. It was enough to warp anyone's spirit, six months of secret misery. To which, after Mike's death, had been added the even worse guilt of knowing that what everyone else had seen as a tragedy had, for her, been a merciful reprieve from a relationship which had become intolerable.

How much longer could she have borne them, those waking nightmares which had made going upstairs something to be dreaded, and their bedroom not a bower of bliss but a place of disappointment and despair?

Not that he had ever hurt her deliberately. The distress he had inflicted had been unwitting. He would have been horrified to know that what he had thought tremors of pleasure had in fact been shivers of revulsion. She had loved him until their wedding, and from that night on, gradually, hope had died that making love would ever be the rapturous experience she had once anticipated.

Now, years later, and far away from where it had happened, it still sent a shudder through her to remember what it had been like and how, on her first night alone in their white double bed, she had wept, not with grief, but with relief that never again would any man ever have the right to make so-called love to her cringing body.

Inevitably these were memories which would never be completely erased; but they troubled her less and less often, or had until Ash's probing had brought them vividly to mind.

She wondered if her explanation of her nervousness had satisfied him. He was certainly right in thinking she was not shy in the ordinary way; and not, in fact, shy of all his sex. Only of those who showed signs of being interested in her, and there were not many who noticed a woman who took pains to be as unnoticeable as possible.

Ash was the first man who had shown any inclination to flirt with her for a long time. Christie guessed that his deliberate misunderstanding of her question about the Antigua Kiss had been more in order to take a rise out of her than from any strong desire to kiss her hand or to administer the other kisses he had referred to.

Perhaps her reserve was a challenge to him. He might, if he knew the whole truth, find that even more of a challenge. He struck her as the kind of man who had enormous confidence in his prowess as a lover, and who would feel sure that he could succeed where others failed.

Once, wretchedly unhappy at the thought of never having children, she had snatched at the straw that her frigidity might not be incurable.

But as the only way to test the possibility was totally unacceptable to her, she had put the idea out of her head.

She could never again go to bed with a man unless she liked and respected him for his breadth of mind and strength of character, and in that case she couldn't endure the chance—more, the probability—of being repelled by his caresses.

Lying awake in the middle of the night, and wondering sadly how many of the women in the other cottages were sleeping in their husbands' or lovers' arms, Christie knew that only if he took her by force would she ever again be pinioned beneath a man's body. And even the mocking-eyed, confident philanderers like Ash did not take women against their will; although she could imagine that he might have been capable of doing so had he lived in an earlier century when a man might do as he pleased with a woman without necessarily being considered a brute.

In the morning she could not be sure whether it had been a fantasy before she slept, or a dream while she slept: that vision of herself spreadeagled on a bed in the captain's cabin of a privateer, with Ash stripping off the clothes of two hundred years ago, the upper part of his face in shadow but the light from a swinging lantern showing a smile of unmistakable meaning playing round the corners of his well-cut but sensual mouth.

Sitting on the edge of her bed, its fine Sea-Island cotton sheets rumpled by her restlessness, Christie hoped it had been a dream. She didn't like the idea that it might have been a figment of her conscious imagination rather than one produced by her subconscious mind. The subconscious threw up all kinds of weird images which had no relation to life, but fantasies were another matter, a form of wishful thinking.