Trust In Summer Madness

‘Is it?’ he derided. ‘Then why didn’t you want your father told that Bethany was out with him?’

She sighed, chewing on her inner lip. ‘He wouldn’t understand—’

‘Neither do I! God, when I think of the way he was touching you! I could have hit him in that moment,’ Chris growled.

She had known that, but if he had Jarrett would have hit him back, and he wouldn’t have pulled his punches either. Jarrett was a physical man in every way, and he would have derived enjoyment from hitting Chris.

‘I didn’t like it either—’

‘Didn’t you?’ he ground out. ‘You didn’t exactly look as if you were fighting him off when I came back to see what was delaying you!’

‘We were in a public restaurant,’ she flushed. ‘I didn’t want to make a scene. As for my father being told about Bethany—he doesn’t like Jarrett, he never did. It would upset him to know Bethany was out with him.’

‘And you think it didn’t upset me to see King touching you?’ Chris asked bitterly.

‘I can see it did,’ she soothed, her hand on his arm. ‘But I didn’t choose to have him touch me.’

‘What did he want?’

‘To talk to me—’

‘Talk!’ he derided harshly. ‘It looked to me as if talking were the last thing he had on his mind. The man was eating you with his eyes! Tell me about him, Sian, tell me about the two of you, why you broke up.’

She turned away. ‘We just weren’t suited.’

‘He doesn’t give that impression,’ Chris said dryly. ‘In fact, he seemed to imply you were very suited, in some ways,’ he looked at her searchingly.

She closed her eyes, flashes of vivid memory going in and out of her mind—she and Jarrett swimming in the river together, making love afterwards on a blanket beneath the willow tree, its weeping branches affording them a privacy that hid them from the outside world. After that first magical time together they had spent a lot of summer afternoons in the same way, never tiring of each other, never quite sated as they longed for the next time they could be alone together to make love.

‘You were lovers!’ Chris rasped at her silence.

She raised her lashes. ‘I told you there’d been someone else—’

‘But not him!’ Chris groaned.

The flecks of green in her hazel eyes were more noticeable as her anger rose at the disgust in his face. ‘Why shouldn’t it have been him? I was going to marry him!’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Circumstances,’ she revealed tautly.

Chris’s eyes narrowed to stormy blue pools. ‘The woman Nina Marshall,’ he demanded to know.

Sian moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, looking down at her clasped hands. ‘Yes. He went to America, I decided not to go with him.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Chris—’

‘Just tell me, Sian,’ he sighed his impatience. ‘Don’t I have a right to know about you and him?’

‘I—I suppose so.’ She swallowed hard, sitting down, knowing it wouldn’t be easy to relive the memories. ‘I was nineteen when I met Jarrett. Oh, I’d seen him about town, but he was a little too old for me, a little out of my league, so we’d never actually spoken. He ran a branch of his uncle’s business here, had a steady girl-friend called—called Nina,’ she revealed painfully. ‘He and I met one day, quite by accident, at Mrs Day’s.’ Her expression was far away, vividly remembering that first meeting with Jarrett, the jolt of awareness that had seemed to shoot through both of them the moment their eyes met. ‘He—he had some men doing some work at her house, an extension, I think. And I—I’d taken some apples round from the orchard here. He was there talking to his men, we began to talk, and—’

‘And so he dropped his girl-friend and started going out with you,’ Chris derided.

Sian flushed. ‘Not exactly. He told me things had been cooling between him and Nina for some time, meeting me just ended it sooner than it would have done. That’s what he said,’ she insisted at Chris’s contemptuous expression.

‘The man would have said anything to get you!’

‘Perhaps,’ she avoided his glance. ‘But at the time I believed him. We spent an idyllic summer together, and after two months he asked me to marry him. I accepted,’ she continued softly. ‘We’d already started planning the wedding when his uncle invited him out to run the American business.’

‘You didn’t want to go?’

She gave him a sharp look. ‘He was going to be my husband, of course I would have gone.’

‘But he went to America without you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because by that time he was back with Nina,’ she said shrilly.

‘What happened to her?’ Chris frowned. ‘He seems to be very much on his own now.’

He seemed to be, but the magazine article implied differently; Arlette was now the woman in his life. ‘Nina Marshall lives in London now, with her husband,’ she told Chris dully.

‘So she wasn’t stupid enough to marry him either.’

Sian stiffened. ‘I believe it was Jarrett’s decision not to marry.’

‘He seems to make a habit of it!’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t dispute what was fact, she knew just how selfish Jarrett could be.

‘Do you still love him?’ Chris had calmed down a little now and was more his gentle self.

‘No,’ she answered with certainty. ‘My love for him died a long time ago.’

Chris came over to put his arms about her, drawing her into the comfort of his arms. ‘Do you still love me?’ he asked teasingly.

She gave him a warm smile. ‘You know I do.’

He rested his forehead against hers; he was only a couple of inches taller than her. ‘I love you too. I just found it strange being confronted with your last fiancé.’

‘You make it sound as if I’ve had hundreds!’ she derided. ‘And as Jarrett said, we were never officially engaged. I doubt he ever meant to go through with marrying me, even if he and Nina hadn’t—well, if they hadn’t got back together.’ She rested against Chris’s shoulder. ‘I was young, and naïve, and easily impressed by his maturity and experience. A bit like hundreds of other girls of that age. You don’t realise until it’s too late that you were just another conquest, a conquest to be made in any way possible, even with an offer of marriage.’

She spoke quietly, bitterly, aware that she wasn’t telling the whole truth, not to Chris or herself. Jarrett’s offer of marriage had been genuine, as had been his love for her; he couldn’t possibly have pretended the way he trembled with the emotion, he was usually a man of strength and determination. But she hadn’t been enough for him, and he had ultimately returned to the more sophisticated Nina. Finding out that the other woman still featured very much in his life had been a humiliating and painful experience, one she had never forgotten.