Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ by to check on her welfare—then she refused to have him wondering what he had ever seen in her.

      But she was actually shaking as she dressed—in a warm woollen dress which she’d bought at the market, its ice-blue colour matching her eyes exactly. And her knee-high leather boots—absolutely ancient now, but lovingly polished and cared for, so that they had entirely justified their original high price-tag.

      Sabrina went downstairs, expecting—no, hoping—to feel nothing for him. But she wondered who she had been trying to fool, because the moment she walked into the sitting room and saw him she was incapacitated by his sheer physical beauty.

      He looked, she thought with a sharp edge of despair, absolutely wonderful—as wonderful as the first time she had seen him. He was wearing a pair of faded jeans which clung to every millimetre of the longest, most muscular legs she had ever seen. The denim emphasised the jut of his hips and the flat planes of his stomach. And he was wearing a beautiful cashmere sweater in a shade of grey just darker than his eyes. A dark jacket lay heaped over a chair.

      There was nothing she could do to stop the primitive leap of pleasure in her heart. But at least she could keep it from showing. ‘Hello, Guy,’ she said calmly.

      He thought how fine and how translucent her skin was—so fine that you could quite clearly see the shadowed definition of her amazing cheekbones. He had not meant to come here today—he had been waiting for a phone call which had never materialised. He had expected her to ring, the way women always did. And he had been unable to get her out of his mind. Out of a determination to forget her had grown a need to know that she was OK. Well, she certainly looked OK. More than OK.

      ‘Hello, Sabrina,’ he said slowly. ‘How are you feeling?’

      ‘Better,’ she told him truthfully. ‘Much better.’

      They stared at one another, like two people meeting for the first time. Well, maybe not quite like that, thought Sabrina. She knew too much about him to ever be like that. The top button of his shirt was open to reveal the tiniest jagged scar which ran alongside his Adam’s apple. A scar she distinctly remembered running the tip of her tongue along, so that his big body had writhed with a kind of reluctant pleasure.

      ‘Would you like coffee, or something?’

      He looked at the luscious tremble of her lips and the ice-blue dazzle of her eyes. ‘No, I’ll tell you what I’d really like,’ he said slowly.

      It was so like something he had murmured at the most intimate point of their lovemaking that Sabrina felt her cheeks begin to burn.

      ‘I’ve got the car outside,’ he said evenly. I thought maybe you could show me something of the city. I’ll park close to the centre, and we can walk.’

      Sabrina looked around her, at her sweet mother who could never be accused of being uptight. But the house was small, no, tiny, and it would be impossible to do anything other than stumble out pleasantries that neither of them meant.

      ‘I’ll go and get my coat,’ she said.

      ‘Wrap up warmly, Sabrina,’ said her mother. ‘It may be sunny outside, but it’s bitterly cold in that wind.’

      Guy helped her on with the coat, which had a collar of fake fur. Her hair was loose and spilled into the fur, giving her a faintly glamorous appearance, he thought.

      His fingers brushed lightly over her shoulders and he felt the dark lickings of temptation scramble at his senses. He remembered how translucent her skin had been, and that his tongue had followed the fine blue tracery of the veins which laced her tiny breasts.

      She looked at him, a question darkening the blue of her eyes. ‘Where’s the car?’

      ‘It’s a little way along the street.’ He omitted to say that the street was way too narrow for such a powerful car.

      ‘Not the limousine, I hope?’ she asked faintly.

      He heard the trace of mockery, and gave a wry smile. So she wasn’t particularly impressed by status symbols. ‘No, not the limousine.’ They began to walk up the road together. ‘The landlord of the pub ordered that car, not me. He obviously took one look at me and made an assumption about what my requirements were. I wasn’t intending to make quite such a statement,’ he added drily.

      ‘Well, you did,’ Sabrina remarked as they drew alongside a more sedate, but equally luxurious car. ‘My mother said that all week the neighbours have been dying to know who the visitor was.’

      He paused in the act of unlocking the door, his grey gaze steady and imperturbable. ‘And what did you tell them?’

      She managed to return his look, though it wasn’t easy—not when it took her mind back to how she had seen it when he’d been in her arms. Stripped of all pretence, darkened and glazed with…lust, she reminded herself painfully. That was all it had been. Lust.

      ‘I said that you were…’ She hesitated and now the gaze became laser-sharp, lancing through her. ‘A friend.’

      His mouth twisted into a cool smile as he held the door open for her. ‘A friend?’ he mocked.

      ‘What should I have said, then? A lover?’

      ‘That certainly would have been more accurate, wouldn’t it?’

      ‘I don’t think so, Guy. It’s in the past tense now.’

      She slid her legs into the car. Actually, she had wanted to say ‘acquaintance’, because that had seemed more accurate than ‘friend’, though it hadn’t really seemed appropriate either—not in view of what had happened. ‘Acquaintance’ implied that you didn’t know somebody terribly well, and yet she knew Guy Masters exceedingly well. Sabrina swallowed. In certain respects, anyway.

      She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead while he drove into the city and parked. And in the dim, ugly light of the concrete car park he looked down at her.

      ‘You haven’t asked me why I’m here,’ he said suddenly.

      ‘Maybe I’m afraid of what your answer will be.’ She lifted her shoulders a little. ‘Why are you here?’

      ‘That’s just it.’ He gave a short laugh and shook his head as he locked the car doors. ‘I don’t know!’

      With a chill wind blowing in their faces, they walked right into the centre of the city, with the cathedral spire dominating the skyline and drawing them in like a magnet.

      ‘Want to go inside?’ she asked softly.

      He glittered her a dark smile. ‘You know I do.’

      Yes, she had known that, just as she instinctively knew that he didn’t want a guided tour, not today. The stiff set of his shoulders said, Stay away, quite clearly.

      So she walked around the huge empty cathedral with him, quickly turning away when he paused to stare up at the altar and an indescribable sadness seemed to harden his beautiful face into stone.

      And that was grief, she recognised painfully, a grief too bitter to intrude into.

      Outside, the wind whipped her hair into ribbons which curled over her cheeks and СКАЧАТЬ