Lee Wilkinson - Running From the Storm

She smiled dreamily and turned her face up to his, giving a sigh of pleasure as his mouth brushed hers.

Her lips parted beneath the light pressure of his, and when he deepened the kiss her arms went around his neck. Her whole body melting, she kissed him back.

Then, suddenly scared by her own reaction to that kiss, she drew back, demanded raggedly, ‘Why did you do that? You had no right to kiss me. Don’t ever do it again. I hated it!’

As soon as the words were out she knew she’d made a bad mistake.

She sat still as any statue as his hands moved to cup her chin and tilt her head back, so that she found herself looking up into his handsome face, intriguingly inverted.

‘So tell me,’ he said silkily, ‘if my kiss is such anathema to you, why did you kiss me back?’

LEE WILKINSONlives with her husband in a three-hundred-year-old stone cottage in a Derbyshire village, which most winters gets cut off by snow. They both enjoy travelling, and recently, joining forces with their daughter and son-in-law, spent a year going round the world ‘on a shoestring’ while their son looked after Kelly, their much loved German shepherd dog. Her hobbies are reading and gardening, and holding impromptu barbecues for her long-suffering family and friends.

Recent titles by the same author:

CLAIMING HIS WEDDING NIGHT

CAPTIVE IN THE MILLIONAIRE’S CASTLE

THE BOSS’S FORBIDDEN SECRETARY

MISTRESS AGAINST HER WILL

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

Lee Wilkinson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To Ned

THE twelfth-century, lichen-covered church was filled with the fragrance of roses and lilies and the strains of Mendelssohn’s traditional and well-loved Here Comes The Bride .

Bright sunshine slanted through the stained-glass windows and, as the trees in the churchyard moved in the breeze, made changing kaleidoscope patterns across the backs of the polished pews and the grey stone slabs of the floor.

Nothing seemed quite real as Caris walked slowly up the aisle on the arm of her Uncle David. Her father, still angry with her, had refused to give her away.

A man, presumably the best man, was waiting by the chancel steps. He had his back to her and she couldn’t see his face.

There was no sign of her groom.

On both sides of the aisle the congregation turned their heads to look and smile at her as she passed in a froth of white tulle that, even then, she knew was all wrong for her.

She did her best to smile back, but her face felt set and stiff, as though it was made from wax, and she couldn’t.

As she reached the chancel steps she was aware that her bridegroom had joined her and was standing by her side. She didn’t look at him.

The elderly priest stepped forward, gathered the congregation’s attention with a glance and began with the traditional words, ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together …’

While the wedding service solemnly progressed, Caris stared straight ahead and asked herself what she was doing here.

When they reached the point where she and her bridegroom needed to make their vows and she still refused to look at him, he took her upper arms and turned her to face him.

His green eyes were cool, commanding; his blond, well-shaped head had that slightly arrogant tilt she knew so well.

‘Say it, Caris.’

But she couldn’t. This was all wrong! She couldn’t, wouldn’t , marry Zander!

Dropping the bouquet of pale-pink roses she carried, she turned and, gathering up her full skirts, fled down the aisle between the rows of gaping guests, tears pouring down her cheeks.

She could hear him calling after her, ‘Don’t go, Caris … Don’t go …’

But she had to. No matter how much she loved him, she wouldn’t marry a man who didn’t love her, who could well suspect that he had been trapped into marriage.

Gasping for breath, sobs rising in her throat, she reached the gloomy inner porch of the church and flung open the heavy door.

Stumbling through into the outer porch, she was met by bright sunshine and a brisk breeze that blew the folds of the fine silken-net veil over her face.

The dreamer was endeavouring to tear off the suffocating veil when she awoke and, sitting bolt upright, found she was in her own bed, the uncertain light of a rainy, late-spring morning filtering in.

Even so, it was a few seconds before the panic subsided and the sight of her familiar room, with its pastel walls and pretty, flowered curtains, steadied her a little.

Somewhere nearby a car door slammed and she could hear the unmistakable sounds of the quiet, tree-lined street coming alive—Billy Leyton’s motorbike being kicked into life, the shush of tyres on the wet road, next door’s dog barking.

Right on cue, the bedside alarm-clock announced with a loud jingle that it was seven-thirty.

‘It was a dream,’ Caris said aloud as she brushed a hand over her wet cheeks and reached to switch off the alarm. ‘Just a dream.’

But a haunting, reoccurring dream that had disturbed her sleep and, like some earthquake, shaken her world, causing the ground beneath her feet to open into a gaping chasm.

Since coming to England almost three years ago, she had fought hard to push all thoughts of Zander and the past out of her mind, and over the last six months she had started to believe she was succeeding.

Despite the gloomy economic climate, the estate agency she ran kept her so busy that, immersed in work, she could sometimes go for days on end without thinking of him, days on end without picturing his face.

In consequence she had gradually gained some kind of shaky equilibrium. She was able, at last, to look back and put their relationship into perspective.

It hadn’t been all bad.

Though it had ended in tears and heartache, for a while she had enjoyed the kind of happiness that she had never known existed.

And hadn’t it been said repeatedly that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

Pleased that she was able to think that way, she had congratulated herself on her newly found emotional stability.

Now, all because of a dream, that had been swept away. She was once again off-balance and Zander was back in her head, his handsome, strong-boned face clear in her mind’s eye.

All at once she felt cold and bereft. Churned up and desolate. All the old bitterness back.

But she wouldn’t let a dream throw her into emotional chaos again. She was no longer the vulnerable, inexperienced, round peg in a square hole she had been when they had first met.