The Trusting Game. Penny Jordan

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      ‘What? I don’t believe it…you…’

      ‘It’s in our brochure,’ he told her unapologetically. ‘I did send you a copy.’

      Yes, he had, and she had promptly thrown it away without bothering to read it, so angry had she been at the way she had allowed herself to be manipulated into such a time-wasting situation.

      ‘That’s why I thought you might appreciate a lift…’ Suspiciously Christa watched him through narrowed eyes. What was the real purpose of his visit? Not to do her any favours, she was sure of it. If she didn’t arrive on time for the commencement of her course, would he gloatingly proclaim that she had backed out of their arrangement and seize this as evidence that she was afraid of losing?

      ‘I can’t leave yet,’ she told him edgily. ‘I’m still working and I haven’t packed…’

      ‘That’s all right. I can wait…’

      Wait…Where? Not here, Christa decided, but he seemed to have other ideas.

      He was studying her collage again.

      ‘Nice…’ he told her. ‘You have an excellent eye for colour, but did you know that your choice of such rich colours, especially the red, denotes a very powerfully driven and ambitious personality?’

      ‘And you, of course, would know about such things,’ Christa agreed derisively. ‘It goes hand in hand…’

      ‘It is one of the subjects I have studied,’ he agreed, apparently not picking up on her contempt. At least not on the surface; whatever else might be fake about him, she was pretty sure that his intelligence was genuine enough. Which meant that he was more than likely suppressing what he really felt…because he wanted to lull her into a state of false security. Well, she would soon make him realise his mistake.

      ‘You’re wasting your time, you know,’ she told him curtly; ‘there’s absolutely no way that spending a month or even six months in the middle of the Welsh countryside is going to change anything about me or my outlook on life. And besides,’ she challenged him, her eyes narrowing watchfully, ‘surely I’m right in thinking that the normal duration of such courses would only be two weeks at the most?’

      He looked, Christa recognised in swift triumph, almost uncomfortable—uncomfortable and rather caught off balance by her question, although he quickly hid it, turning his head slightly away from her so that she couldn’t see his full expression. Was that just discomposure she had seen in his eyes or had there been a hint of anger there as well? she wondered gleefully. If she had managed to get under his skin already, then so much the better. She was not afraid of his anger—she welcomed it. When people lost control of their emotions they betrayed themselves more easily.

      ‘Normally, yes,’ she heard him agreeing, ‘but in your case…’

      ‘You decided to balance the scales in your own favour and give yourself extra time,’ she suggested tauntingly.

      To her surprise he didn’t try to deny her accusation or to defend himself, instead giving her a look that for some unaccountable reason made her pulse start to race frantically and her heart to execute a high-dive.

      ‘It’s no good,’ she repeated quickly, ‘I shan’t change my mind…

      The long, level look he gave her rather surprised her. That he should acknowledge her antagonism was to be expected, but that he should allow her to see that it affected him wasn’t. Men like him were very much into control of their own emotions as well as those of the people around them. She would have expected him to want to give her the impression that he was above acknowledging her dislike, not to react to it with such a very male and challenging gleam in those cool, grey eyes…The kind of gleam that, if she was foolish enough to be vulnerable to his particular brand of male magnetism, could quite easily have made her heart beat just a little faster and her body…

      ‘You sound very sure about that.’

      The gleam was gone now, replaced by a cool, distancing scrutiny. ‘I am,’ Christa confirmed firmly. ‘I know myself very well.’

      ‘Yourself, or the self you allow yourself to be? You do realise how stressful such rigid control of your personality is, don’t you?’

      Christa glared angrily at him.

      ‘And you would know about such things, I take it. Tell me…what exactly did you do before you jumped on the modern bandwagon of the…the quasiprofessional soothsayer and reader of runes?’ Christa demanded insultingly.

      She waited for the storm to break, for the grey eyes to darken and the sensually curved male mouth to utter retaliatory insults, but to her consternation he said simply instead, ‘I lectured in psychology at Oxford. I don’t want to rush you, but it would be a good idea if we could leave pretty soon. I don’t want to get back too much after dark. We haven’t had much wind recently, and if the power supply is low it might mean starting up our subsidiary generator…’

      The speed with which he changed subjects, the apparent calmness in his manner after delivering a statement which had left her feeling as flattened as though she had been mown down by a boulder, left Christa floundering and impotently angry, not just with him but with herself as well.

      A lecturer in psychology…

      ‘It was in the brochure, along with the qualifications of the other members of our staff.’

      The quiet statement brought a surge of humiliated colour to Christa’s skin, despite her attempts to stop it.

      ‘A generator,’ she repeated, determinedly adopting his own tactics. ‘Does that mean you don’t have a proper reliable electricity supply?’

      ‘We aren’t on the national grid, no,’ he agreed. ‘Our electricity is generated by wind machines. We try at the centre to be as environmentally aware and as independent as possible. That includes generating our own electricity, growing our own fruit and vegetables. We even tried supplying our own meat, but that didn’t work out too well.

      ‘The sheep became too tame and no one wanted to send them to market,’ he explained. ‘Same with the hens; none of us could bring ourselves to wring their necks.’

      Mentally, Christa contrasted what he was saying with the lives of some of the people in the villages she had visited in India and Pakistan. There they did not have the luxury of allowing their livestock to become tame pets.

      As though he had read her mind, he said quietly, ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re probably right, but would you have wanted to be the one to sign the death warrant?’

      His perception was beginning to disconcert her.

      ‘It would depend whose name was on it,’ she told him pithily.

      The sound of his laughter surprised and irked her. He was supposed to get offended, angry, to be betrayed by his pride and ego into revealing himself as he really was-not to be tolerantly amused.

      Daniel Geshard was dangerous, Christa acknowledged uneasily. His claim that a month on one of his courses would change her entire outlook on life was one she still scathingly discounted. Her own claim to herself that, knowing who he was, or more importantly СКАЧАТЬ