Marjorie Lewty - A Real Engagement

He ignored her words. He stood quite still, but she saw the steely grey eyes narrow and his hands clench. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’ he said, with the same soft contempt he had used before. ‘I thought I told you to clear out.’

‘Well, as you can see, I chose not to obey your order.’ She tried to sound mocking, but this had no effect on him. ‘I came to—’

She had no chance to finish the sentence. In three long strides he had crossed the space between them and a second later she was in his arms.

‘Oh, I know why you came.’ The grey eyes were only inches from her own alarmed ones, his mouth almost touching hers. ‘And if this is what you want you shall have it.’ His arms tightened around her and his mouth came down on hers.

He kissed her almost savagely, at the same time drawing her closer still against his hard body.

Josie had been taken completely by surprise, but now she managed to get her wits back. ‘No,’ she gasped against his mouth, struggling wildly. He was holding her so tightly against him that she couldn’t get her hands up between their two bodies.

The kiss went on and on. She kept her lips tightly closed but he forced them open. She had never been kissed like this before, never so intimately, and suddenly her body responded with a mad need to take part in this crazy emotion of anger, or lust, or whatever it was. She wanted to press herself against him, to kiss him back as intimately as he was kissing her, to dig her nails into his smooth, warm back. A few moments of weakness possessed her, and she thought she was going to faint.

Then he lifted his head and held her a little away from him. ‘Maybe I don’t prefer brunettes after all,’ he said softly, and would have drawn her back to him, but Josie saw her opportunity at last. She gathered all her strength to push him away and delivered a stinging blow to his cheek.

He backed off, one hand to his face. He was breathing as fast as she was, and Josie tried to think of her plan to make him grovel but nothing occurred to her.

He said in angry exasperation, ‘What do you want here, then?’

Her knees were shaking and her throat was tight but she managed to say, with what dignity she could muster, ‘I came to ask you to turn on the water supply to my kitchen.’ She remembered that that was the first sentence in her grovel routine. Then he was meant to say, in surprise, Your kitchen? and she would take it from there.

To her surprise, he laughed. ‘Well, that’s a wonderful anticlimax. Now let’s have the truth—all of it. How did you manage to get in next door when it was locked up?’

He had missed his cue, but this would do as well—better, really. ‘I had a key to my own house, of course,’ Josie said loftily. Her hand encountered a chair behind her and she sat down on it rather quickly. The compelling eyes, fixed so relentlessly on her, were making her feel unnerved.

She said shakily, ‘I’m very tired. If you will please turn on the water I’ll go back and have a night’s sleep.’ She passed her hand wearily across her eyes.

He stood still, looking down at her darkly. Then he walked across the room and opened a door. When he came back he said, ‘I’ve turned the water on. I suppose I can’t throw you out tonight. But you’ll have to go first thing tomorrow morning. I don’t want squatters here.’

She braced her knees and walked to the door. She turned as she opened it. ‘I think you’re detestable,’ she said.

Outside it was quite dark. The sky was thick with stars, and the only sound was the constant loud chirping of the cicadas. That sound triggered the memory of a holiday in the little seaside resort of Boulouris, near Saint Raphael, with both her parents when she was about ten. Her mother had been so happy then. Josie didn’t want to think about what had happened afterwards.

She found her own front door, and, once inside, felt round for a light switch, making a mental note that she must buy a good strong torch. At last her fingers encountered the switch. She turned it on and was rewarded by a feeble light from an unshaded central hanging fitting, which was just enough to allow her to find her way across the room.

The tiny kitchen was even more inadequately lit, but she found the tap and turned it on. The water spurted out with such force that it splashed up from the sink and soaked the front of her dress. She muttered all the bad words she knew about the Enemy next door. It was all his fault. Oh, well, the dress would soon dry in the heat of the house. It was unbearably hot, and Josie wondered if she should keep the window in the sitting-room open to let in the cool evening air. But she decided not to risk insect bites.

Upstairs, she groped around both bedrooms to find switches, none of which yielded any light. She would have to sleep on the divan in the room below.

Downstairs in the kitchen again, Josie yawned hugely. What she really needed was sleep, but first she must eat something. She had bought some provisions in Menton, when the bus from Nice Airport had set her down there, and now she opened the plastic carrier and found a baguette, some butter, which had melted all over the bag, and a packet of cheese.

There were three mugs in one of the cupboards, and she chose the best of these, rinsed it and filled it with water. She pulled off hunks of bread and broke pieces of cheese from the packet. Her first dinner in her new house! She chuckled, refusing to feel disappointed. Everything could be put right, given time—and money. She wouldn’t think about the horrible man next door. He would leave her alone when he realised that she was really the owner of Mon Abri.

When she had finished all she could manage to eat, she refilled the mug and took it back to the sitting-room. She carried a small chair to the divan, to act as a bedside table, and on this she set the mug of water, her watch and a silver-framed snapshot of her mother, taken in the garden of their house last year. She picked it up and looked into the wan, lined face which had once been beautiful. ‘This is my new house, Mum dear. You should have come with me,’ Josie whispered, her eyes suddenly misty with tears. ‘But I don’t think you would have cared for it very much. Certainly not as it is at present.’

Marion Dunn had liked everything neat and predictable, and when, eight years ago, her husband left her for a younger woman the shock had been too much for her. She had gone to pieces. When she’d received the final divorce papers she had collapsed. ‘My life is over,’ she had mourned. And sometimes Josie thought that was true. Every year her mother had suffered from some new ailment, and when a bad attack of flu had struck her last winter she had not had the strength to resist. She had developed pneumonia, and in spite of all Josie’s care had died six months ago, just after Christmas.

Josie put the photograph down again on the chair. She had loved her mother sincerely, and she missed her, but the years had shown her what resentment and self-pity could do to a woman if she gave way to them. Her mother had been so romantic, but women were more realistic now, the twenty-three-year-old Josie told herself confidently. They didn’t break their hearts over men.

It would be lovely to have a shower and wash off all the hot stickiness of the day, but the shower-room, like the other two rooms upstairs, was in darkness. She pulled off her clothes, draped the sundress over a chair to dry and left her bra and lacy pants on the floor, to be washed tomorrow when she had found out how to get hot water. Fortunately there was a tiny cloakroom beside the front door, and she washed her face and wiped wet hands over her hot body, drying herself with the small hand towel she had brought with her to use on the journey. She found a thin nightie in her bag and put it on, covering her body quickly.