Dangerous Nights

‘Spare me the flowery compliments!’ she snapped. ‘If you must know I’m feeling… stunned! I can’t believe I’m seeing you again!’ Horrified, she heard herself blurting it out. ‘I thought I never would. See you again, I mean. Part of it is like a nightmare. Part of it feels more like a dream. A dream I’ve had on and off since that weekend at Farthingley…’

She caught her lip in her teeth, mortified. So much for her urgent desire to play it cool, to escape.

‘I’ve thought about Farthingley, too.’ His deep voice was guarded.

Her face felt hot. Beneath her loose, scoop-necked emerald sweatshirt, her breasts tingled, the tips traitorously tightened like press-studs.

How could he still make her feel like this? Fighting the waves of heat, she struggled angrily to examine her subconscious feelings. Trying to make sense of her reaction to him felt like agitating muddy water with a stick. Hadn’t she hated him, despised him, resented him, blamed him for her sexual hang-ups, for the last four years? Burned with mortification, whenever she remembered that rejection on the lawn, and then the second, even more devastating rejection, the later episode she could hardly bear to relive? Was she so weak that she could sit here now, bleating on about dreams, as if he could still mean something to her?

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘No. I guess you wouldn’t.’

She fixed him with an intense brown gaze.

‘Unless it was to think back and gloat?’ she suggested tightly. ‘Presumably you got quite a kick out of that weekend?’

Jed’s face had darkened.

‘I was doing a job that weekend.’

‘Oh, yes, the mysterious “job". The one which entailed prowling round with portable phones and two-way radios and pouncing on innocent girls practising their Shakespeare in the garden?’