The Perfect Lover (6 page)

'Louise.'

The sharp warning note in his voice made her open her eyes and focus dizzily on him.

'No, don't go,' she whispered drunkenly. 'Don't go... I want you to stay with me... I want…'

He started to withdraw from her, and she read the stern message in his eyes. She quickly closed her own eyes and reached up with one hand to cup his face. She lifted her head and opened her mouth against his, using her other hand to take his hand from her hip to her breast.

As she felt the hard male warmth of his palm against her breast her body stiffened, quivering in excited expectation. The deep, tremulous breath she took lifted her breast against his hand. She felt his fingers curve into the shape of her body and his touch become a caress. The pad of his thumb stroked her nipple gently, and a quiver of sensual delight ran through her. This was what she had ached for,
yearned
for. Her tongue-tip stroked his lips, urgently demanding entrance, her breathing quickening in passionate arousal.

She had waited so long to be with him like this. Her teeth tugged pleadingly at his bottom lip as desire flooded through her. She could feel his lips starting to part as he gave in to her feminine aggression.

She had been
so
hungry for him to kiss her like this, she acknowledged dizzily as his mouth started to move over hers. She adjusted her body to get closer to him, and felt him shift his weight to accommodate her. A jolt of sensations rocketed through her, her inhibitions obliterated by the powerful force of the rich wine she had consumed. She felt as though she was floating on a high tide of incredible sensation. Her tongue darted wantonly into his mouth. She
wanted
him to touch her without her clothes, to feel his hands on her bare body. She
wanted
to touch him the same way—to absorb every last essence of him.

This
was what she had been crying out for, starving for.
Dying for!
This, and
him.

Against his mouth she cried his name...

'Saul. Saul... Saul...'

Abruptly Louise found herself being set free,
pushed
away from the intimacy of the male body her own craved so badly. Only his hands still held her, manacling her wrists as he shook her.

'Saul,' she protested.

'Open your eyes, Louise,' she heard a harsh and shockingly familiar male voice demanding bitingly. 'I am
not
your precious Saul, whoever he might be...'

Her tutor! She wasn't... This wasn't Saul at all. It was...

Abruptly she opened her eyes, gagging nauseously on the combination of too much wine, too little food and too much man—much too much man, her body told her as she reeled with shock. It was a lethal combination of strong wine mixed with strong emotion.

'I feel sick,' she wailed piteously.

'Oh, God,' she heard Gareth breathe irately, and then the next thing she knew was that he had picked her up and was half carrying her, half dragging her into her small bathroom, where he pushed her down in front of the lavatory—
and
only just in time, Louise realised as her stomach heaved and she started to retch.

It seemed like a lifetime before her stomach had disgorged its unwanted contents, but logically she knew it could only have been minutes.

Cold and shaking, she stood up, clinging onto the edge of the basin, running the tap and reaching automatically for some mouthwash.

She still felt dizzy, confused, not really sure just what was happening. Clumsily she headed for the bathroom door, only to find herself being taken hold of very firmly and marched into the living room.

'Sit down and eat this,' she heard herself being told, and she was pushed unceremoniously into a chair and handed a plate of hot toast.

'I'm not hungry...' Apathetically she started to turn her head away.

'Eat it,' he ordered. 'My God, what's the
matter
with you? What the hell are you trying to do to yourself...?'

Louise felt her head starting to ache.

'Why don't you go away?' she demanded shakily.

'Not until you've eaten this,' she was told implacably.

Louise looked at the toast. Her stomach started to heave again.

'I don't want it,' she told him stubbornly. 'I just want—'

'Saul...' he interrupted her savagely. 'Yes. I
know.
You've already told me that...remember...?'

Louise blanched as she realised just what he meant. The alcoholic fog clouding her brain was beginning >to clear with unwelcome speed. She looked at his mouth. Had she actually...? She could see a small swollen bruise marking his bottom lip, where she had... Quickly she looked away. - 'I don't feel well. I...I want to go to bed...'

'Why? So that you can fantasise over your precious Saul?' he derided unkindly.

Louise closed her eyes. She could feel another wave of dizziness surging over her. She tried to stand up and the dizziness increased. She could feel herself starting to black out. She tried to fight it, and then stopped. What was the point? What was the point in
anything
in a life that didn't have Saul in it.

Defeatedly she let herself slide down into the darkness.

When she woke up she was lying, still dressed, in bed, and Katie was sitting on a chair next to it, watching her. Her room had been tidied up and the air smelled fresh with polish and coffee. It was light outside, she recognised.

'What are
you
doing here?' she asked her sister groggily. Her throat felt sore and her head ached dreadfully.

'Professor Simmonds came looking for me. He said you weren't very well,' Katie told her carefully, avoiding looking directly at her.

Professor Simmonds. Louise closed her eyes, her body starting to shake as she remembered what she had done. With appalling clarity and total recall, behind her closed eyelids she could not only
see
the expression on Gareth Simmonds' face, she could even more demeaningly actually
feel
every sensation she had felt when she had...when
she
had...

Groaning, she rolled over, burying her face in her pillow.

'What is it? Aren't you feeling well? Do you want to be sick?' Katie asked anxiously.

'I... I... What did Professor Simmonds say to you about...about me?' she demanded frantically.

'Er...nothing... Well...he just said that you weren't well,' Katie told her, adding hurriedly, 'There's some kind of bug going round. Loads of people have gone down with it. He
did
say that if you wanted to go home immediately, without spending those few days sorting yourself out, starting the job of catching up...

'No. No, I can't.' Louise panicked. 'Saul...'

'Saul has taken Tullah down to see his parents,' Katie explained quietly.

'I don't want to go home,' she told her twin angrily, stopping to frown as she saw the way that Katie was avoiding meeting her eyes as she fidgeted with the pile of books she had just straightened.

'What is it? What have you done?' she demanded, with that intuition which was so strong between them, knowing immediately that there was something Katie was hiding from her, something she didn't want her to know.

Immediately Katie flushed.

'Tell me...' Louise ordered bossily. 'Tell me, Katie...'

'Uh...Professor Simmonds, when he came to look for me to tell me that you weren't very well, he said...he asked me about Saul...'

'He
what
? And
what
did you tell him?' Louise demanded, her eyes blazing furiously with temper and dread.

'I...I tried not to tell him, Lou,' Katie told her, begging her, 'Please try to understand... He was... I
thought,
from the way he was talking about Saul, that
you
must have told him—that
you
had said …'

'What
did you tell him, Katie?' Louise demanded inexorably, ignoring her twin's attempts to sideline her.

'I told him what Saul meant to you... I told him... I told him that you love Saul, but that he...' Katie stopped and looked away from her.

'I'm sorry, Lou, but he was so insistent, and I...' She shook her head. 'He said you were ill, and I was just so worried about you that—'

'You told him about my emotions for Saul, matters personal to me.
You betrayed me
...' Louise cut her off in a flat, toneless voice that hurt Katie far, far more than if her sister had lost her temper and shouted and stormed at her.

'I thought he knew... He seemed to know. It was only afterwards that I realised...guessed... Lou, where are you
going?'
Katie demanded anxiously as Louise pushed her way past her and headed for her door.

But Louise didn't answer her. At least not directly, waiting until she had opened the door and was on the point of leaving before turning to Katie and telling her emotionlessly, 'When I come back, I don't want to find you here. Do you understand?'

It was the most serious falling-out they had had in all their lives.

Louise didn't turn back to look at her twin. She couldn't have seen her even if she had; her eyes were too blurred with tears.

How
could
Katie have betrayed her like that? How could she have told someone else something so personal about her?
Anyone
else, never mind Gareth Simmonds.

Gareth Simmonds. For a moment Louise was tempted to march round to her tutor's rooms and tell him just what she thought of him, but already the cool, fresh outdoor air was making her shiver, as her head spun with a weakening mixture of nauseating emotion and lack of food.

A
BRUPTLY
shaking her head to dispel her thoughts, Louise came back to the present. Her coffee had grown cold while she had been lost in her painful thoughts of the past and she would have to make a fresh cup. As she refilled the kettle and waited for it to boil she picked up one of the collection of smooth polished stones which decorated the open shelves, holding it cupped in her palm and smoothing her fingertips over its cool surface.

It had been a gift to her from her brother Joss. It was one of his most special stones, he had told her solemnly when he had given it to her, and holding it and stroking it would make her feel calm.

He had found it on one of his regular walks with Great-Aunt Ruth, with whom he shared an affinity for the countryside.

Louise smiled ruefully now as she closed her fingers around its comforting strength. It had galled her a little at the time, even though she had refused to acknowledge it, that someone as young as Joss had been so easily able to identify that part of her personality which she herself least liked.

The turbulence of her own nature offended her pride. She liked to think of herself as someone who was totally in control of herself,
and
her reactions. Perhaps because she needed to feel that they
were
under her control, because that was the only way she could reassure herself that the way she had behaved under the influence of her intense adolescent crush on Saul and the things she had done would never, ever happen again.

Joss. Her smile deepened as she thought affectionately of her brother. He had all the virtues that Max, the eldest of them, lacked. She had never met anyone as well rounded, as complete within themselves, as her younger brother. Even as a young child he had exhibited an extraordinary degree not just of sensitivity and awareness of the emotions of those around him, but also a compassion and a wisdom which Louise had always secretly rather envied.

As she replaced the stone her eye was caught by the small print that hung on the wall close to the shelves. It was a sketch of the Tuscany countryside which she had drawn herself while on holiday there with her family. That had been the summer— Biting her lip, she turned away abruptly.

After she and Katie had made up their quarrel over what she, Louise, had seen as Katie's betrayal of her in telling Gareth Simmonds about her crush on Saul, that should have been the end of the matter—and of Gareth Simmonds' involvement in her personal life. But it hadn't been.

Briefly Louise closed her eyes. She had never been back to Tuscany since that summer, although she had spent time in other parts of Italy. Her parents thought it was because she had outgrown the simple pleasures of the family holidays they had spent there, in the large rambling villa which they rented every summer just outside the small, unpretentious little village where they, as regular summer visitors, were on first- name terms with all the inhabitants. But her refusal to return had nothing to do with thinking herself too sophisticated and grown-up for the company o£ her family.

Tuscany... Even now she could smell the warm, rich scent of the earth, feel the warmth of the sun.

By the time they had arrived at the villa that summer she and Katie had been talking again—
just
—and by a common but unspoken agreement nothing had been said or shown by either of them to their parents, nor the other members of the family holidaying together, to reveal that they had ever fallen out.

If, for the first time since their birth, apart from their choice of university courses, they were opting to do things separately, spend more time apart, then it had been put down to the fact that they were growing up and wanting to become individuals.

While Katie had stayed close to the villa, spending hours in the kitchen with Maria—the second cousin of the family who owned the villa, and who spent her widowhood looking after the villa's visitors—going with her to shop at the local markets and indulging her passion for cooking, Louise had set off in an ancient borrowed Fiat with her sketchpad to explore the neighbourhood.

It had perhaps been inevitable that the Fiat, unloved by the family who owned it and, perhaps more importantly, also unserviced by them, should have decided to stage a protest in the form of refusing to start one hot dusty afternoon, when Louise had returned to it having spent the morning sketching a small shrine she had seen at the roadside.

.. Recognising defeat when the Fiat had stubbornly refused to start after several attempts, Louise had looked up and down the empty road along which only one single, solitary car had passed that morning.