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Description
They walked, through woodland, across a wheat-field, hand in hand, as the sun sank lower in the western sky. Dominic slung his jacket over one shoulder and led her up the slope of a little hill where three meadows converged. At the crest, he stopped and spread his jacket on the ground. She sat down where he indicated and he sank beside her, watching the sunset with a quiet smile on his face, his arm around her shoulders.
“The moon’s rising,” she pointed out and he nodded sagely.
“This is a very lovely place. Almost a sacred place.” He traced the junction of the meadows towards their hill with one long finger, smiling appreciatively.
“Yes.” Gerry could not disagree.
Dominic turned and cupped her face in his hands again and this time when he kissed her, he did not draw away so quickly. She sank down, cradled in his steady embrace, leaning back in the deep, rustling grass, his hands warm and unexpectedly supportive against her back and shoulder. Tenderly he massaged her skin through the silk of her blouse. The combination of sun and moonlight gilded the leaves and branches overhead, and the shining stalks of wheat and tall grasses, and the loose, silver and gold curls of his boyishly tousled hair.
Her fingers moved through the tangles as he pressed his mouth to hers for a long, intimate time. It was like talking without words. She had kissed before, but somehow it had never felt like this.
As they melted down into the lengthening shadows, he let his lips lift from her own and wander across her cheek and down the curve of her neck. His hands released her, ghosting softly to her hips and upward over her ribcage to encircle the swell of her breasts as she lay beneath him. Gerry caught her breath and he whispered; “Are you all right?”
Rapidly, she nodded her head, too breathless for words. She was trapped painfully between the fear of this mysterious power of his – the enchantment he wove around her which pulled her in seductively then tied up all her efforts towards resistance in delicate threads as soft to the senses as gossamer but harder to break than tempered steel wires – and her awareness of how much she wanted him. This was not a simple desire for kind words and comfort, it was a savage, primal longing; a raw, animal hunger that ached to haul him in and spend him utterly.
Gerry blushed at the idea of it; a furious, uncontrollable diffusion of blood, marking her cheeks, chest and upper arms with spots of traitorous scarlet. Dominic peered down at her now with his familiar, slightly bemused smile.
“You taste nice,” he said in an odd, slightly mocking tone of voice that dared her to respond. Dominic generally had no use for the word ‘nice’. It was not a polite verb in his vocabulary. ‘Nice’ was a roundabout insult, a word he used habitually to mean the opposite of its general translation. Or – as he used it now – to provoke a reaction. He had had her in stitches one year at Royal Ascot by greeting every other woman he saw with the words “That’s a terribly nice hat you’re wearing Lady So-and-So…” ‘Nice’, in these instances translating as; “Good God! Something from the Dark Dimensions is trying to eat your head!”; “Are you wearing that to win a bet?” and “Why on earth are you standing under a raffia rendition of the Kew Palm House?”
“Are you saying that I’m drunk, or that I don’t floss regularly enough for your liking?” Gerry riposted after the briefest of hesitations.
“That’s better!” Dominic looked relieved. “I was beginning to wonder if your family had abducted the real Geraldine and left me with a Stepford version!”
“You… you took me by surprise,” she ventured, clearing her throat which had suddenly tightened again..
His pale eyes roamed her face with restless curiosity and an intense pleasure. Quietly, he breathed; “I beg your pardon. Shall I ask permission next time I wish to kiss you?”
Gerry flashed him a tight-lipped smile.
“Does Mi’lord wish to kiss me again, then?”
“You sound surprised,” he teased, stroking one still-flushed cheek with cool fingers. “You look incredibly lovely lying there underneath me, Geraldine. A lesser man might well have lost control.”
“A straighter man, you mean!” She laughed nervously, destroying the bold front that had been her intention.
Dominic raised his eyebrows enquiringly at that but did not appear to be offended. In a quiet, enquiring tone he murmured; “Do you wish that I was? Is that the problem?”
“Problem?” she echoed at once, derisively. “Who says there’s a problem?”
“Did we walk all the way out into the middle of nowhere and snog each other’s faces off for nothing?” Dominic persisted. If he was irritated, he did not let his emotions spill over into his voice. The enquiry was boyishly teasing. He was playing cute in an effort to win her around.
“You said it was lovely,” Gerry countered defensively.
“It is,” he nodded. “You are…”
She felt her pulse quicken again as he let the words trail off deliberately, never taking his eyes off her face.
“What am I?”
His lips quirked upward at the corners and he watched his fingertips trail in a preoccupied manner down the line of her neck, across her collar bone and down into the hollow of her cleavage. A pearly button offered tenuous resistance and he coaxed it from its buttonhole deftly and parted the silken folds of her modest neckline a little more provocatively. Without looking up at her, he brushed the pale, slightly freckled skin of her upper breasts gently with the backs of his fingers, like a pathologist searching for minute circumstantial evidence.
“You are…” He paused again, very briefly. “…lovely… and mysterious, and intriguing and infuriating, and reassuring and exciting and unfathomable, and….” His words had quickened and he stopped again, taking a quick breath and collecting himself as he met her eyes once more. The pupils of his eyes were dilated wide in the gathering gloom. “…absolutely unlike any woman I have ever known.”
She forced an awkward, schoolgirlish smile onto her face deciding that she ought to be flattered by that. Damn it! She was bloody flattered! Dominic did not have a reputation for opening his heart. He could charm the birds from the trees but she always knew when he was being manipulative and this evening was not it. Genuine romantic compliments from him were rarer than Dodo eggs. Tonight in the car he had told her ‘I love you’, three small words, often lightly given. But even Gabriel, who had shared her best friend’s life and bed for the past twelve years, had departed complaining that Dominic never told him that.
Gerry experienced a sudden surge of profound anxiety.
“Is this your mid-life crisis then?” she asked desperately, trying to make light of it. He could not be serious. This was just his way of showing her that he cared. She was bereaved; he was in shock over Sheila’s request – a problem not yet solved.
“I don’t know,” Dominic admitted now, but quickly covered this lapse into weakness by caressing beneath the lace trim of her partly exposed bra-cups. The touch sent shivers through her in spite of her resolve not to be seduced. “It’s unusual, I suppose, but not unique.”
Gerry wriggled down into the grass a little more deeply, but continued to meet his eye as if challenging him to see how far he could get this time. She was sure he had not forgotten his last attempt to get her undressed. It had been over fourteen years ago, for sure, but Geraldine still recalled it clearly. It was the only time she had ever physically hurt him. This time she had no idea how far she would let him go before she stopped him. Or even if she would stop him.
“So… I’m not your first?” she queried casually. “I don’t know whether to be insulted or relieved.”
His answering smile was infuriatingly enigmatic.
“I might surprise you.”
Gerry found herself wondering just how many women he had slept with. He had turned down Sheila (he said) but she had seen him flirt with women before now. There had been the girl who came up from the Ministry of Agriculture to inspect his organic fruit and veg enterprise, whose father had been at school with Lord Warren. He had taken her out to dinner and it was three days before she went back to London. And there had been the glamorous wife of the American Ambassador to London, whom Dominic claimed was the daughter of a woman who had been in Connie’s San Francisco Coven. She still could not conclusively say that Dominic had not been sexually intimate with her. Their behaviour together certainly crossed the boundaries from flirtation to something more.
“You invariably surprise me,” Gerry told him now. “It’s the one thing I know I can rely on. I suppose… decent looking guy, good prospect, all his own teeth… it shouldn’t be a total shock!”
He laughed appreciatively, so she added: “…and you’re such a tart, of course!” just to keep his ego under control.
“Does a woman cease to be a tart if all her innumerable lovers are also women?” Dom asked with a reprehensible grin.
She slapped him, not hard but quite vigorously.
“Innumerable? You cheeky old mare! You make me sound like some kind of Serial Dyke!”
“One is forced to admit,” he murmured, unfastening her blouse still further and kissing her exposed midriff beneath the lower seam of her second best brassiere; “that upon a number of occasions, the High Priestess has turned up to Rituals and gatherings wrapped in a delicious aura one can only describe as incredibly well-laid!”
Gerry propped herself up on her elbows and stared incredulously at him.
“I so have not! I’ll have you know I take our rituals v…”
She got no further with this tirade because he knelt up over her and, without warning bent and silenced her mouth with his own. Gerry continued a muffled protest for a moment or so but all that came out was series of puffs and squeaks. As she wriggled beneath him, Dominic’s long, gentle hands wandered slowly back down her body to her thighs, slipping beneath the lace trim of her underskirt and gliding back smoothly towards her hips, taking the material with them. Gerry experienced a mixture of pleasure and shock that tingled through her body like static from the point of contact with his steadily caressing fingers. His lips broke the kiss just long enough for her to think of words. Only then did she realise that she had one hand flat against his bared chest within the open neckline of his shirt. She wondered if it was his rapid pulse or her own that she could feel in the palm of her hand.
“What are you doing?” she exhaled.
He looked down on her with a brave, martyred smile.
“Making love to you?” he suggested sweetly.
“Have you gone insane?”
Dominic shook his head, undeterred by her sudden hostility.
“I thought you wanted me to. I supposed that must be why you brought me here to the middle of nowhere and lay down with me and kissed me…”
She was already shaking her head long before he finished.
“Uh-huh… no… Dominic, you know I can’t!”
He curled the fingers of one hand around the forearm she still held braced between them then moved off her, lying down almost wearily beside her. His fingertips moved gently up her arm to the elbow and drifted across to her exposed belly and the lacy cup that shielded her left breast, touching slowly and tentatively as if he feared she might take fright and run.
Geraldine lay motionless, on her back, staring at the sky, painfully conscious of his immediate proximity. She could not look at him. She thought she would probably cry if she did. Dominic had been so patient with her this evening but she knew how deep his feelings for her were. This was not the first time they had fallen into one another’s arms after all.
The silence carried her back fourteen years to another night, far away from here, just after the party Dominic had thrown to celebrate his fortieth birthday and her thirtieth (in spite of their being six months apart). They had both been drunk and a tiny bit stoned, admittedly, but that had not stopped him trying to get her completely undressed on the lounge carpet. That night, they went beyond the boundaries of friendship. The intervening years had left her wondering if she did not dream most of what came to pass during that highly charged forty five minutes on the sofa and on the floor. He had certainly astounded her by proving without a moment’s hesitation that he knew exactly how to get a woman aroused. She never had dared to ask him how he learned to do that.
Now she lay here beside him, gazing at the pink-tinged clouds and praying to the Goddess that this time it would be different; that this time she would not be consumed by the defensive urge to lash out and protect herself. She prayed that the fear would not squeeze her heart to bursting point as he lay down on top of her. It was no use, even though she told herself over and over that this was Dominic – her kind, gentle, utterly trustworthy friend, who would never knowingly hurt her…
Tears welled up behind her eyes and she tried to shut them in, but they forced their treacherous way out from beneath her eyelids and coursed down her cheeks anyway. She felt his lips close to her ear, his quiet, lovely voice murmuring to her; “I know you can’t. What I don’t understand, even after all this time, is why? You can tell me, darling. I won’t be unsympathetic. I just think that if there’s something chewing you up, I hate to see it. I want to help you, really I do.”
His mouth touched the shell of her ear and he kissed her softly there. She had to swallow hard, twice before she could speak.
“I can’t tell you. It’s too horrible!”
Dominic’s arms slipped around her, he drew her head onto his shoulder as the sun dipped lower, and long shadows crept stealthily across the meadow towards their golden hill. She turned into his warmth, clinging to him, hiding her tearful weakness in the crisp, sweet smelling linen of his crumpled shirt.
“I’ve seen horrible,” he soothed. “I promise not to run away screaming!”
She shook her head but could not look up.
“It’s worse than that. I’m scared that it will change the way you feel about me. You’ll… maybe… you’ll think that I’m damaged… dirty.” Tears strangled her words and he pulled her closer, swaying her in his embrace reassuringly. His warm hands were inside the filmy material of her blouse, resting between her shoulder blades and the small of her back. She did not resist his touch.
“Sweetheart,” he chuckled ruefully into her ear, “after some of the things I’ve confessed to you over the years, how could I ever think you dirty?” He buried his face in her dishevelled hair, breathing in the scent of her skin and herbal shampoo steadily. “How could I ever cast such terrible aspersions against my precious Gerry?”
Dominic hugged her body close to his own and she did not try to push him away this time. His lean frame pressed against her from shoulder to knee as she cried in his arms, weeping out the fear and rage and frustration until her throat hurt and his shirt front was soaked.
“Goodness!” he murmured into her hair, once she was still again. His breath felt like a temperate breeze against her scalp. “I do hope you feel better for that.”
“I’m sorry,” she croaked.
“There’s no need,” he assured her. “I don’t mind. Although I’m still curious to understand why?”
Gerry pulled away defensively, bending her head to hide a face she knew would be puffy and red from crying. After a moment, one sun-tanned hand appeared in her line of sight holding out a handkerchief and she took it gratefully.
“That’s better,” Dominic said, once she had mopped away the tears and blown her nose. His smile, when she dared to meet his gaze, was affectionate and concerned. Gerry experienced a twinge of guilt.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, stuffing the hanky awkwardly into her bag, suddenly conscious that she was half undressed. There was a run in one of her stockings that snaked up from her ankle to the middle of her thigh. She cursed it huskily.
“Take it off!” Dom suggested, boyishly mischievous.
“Oh yes.. and I’ll look completely unhinged with my hair full of grass and one stocking on,” Gerry admonished.
“Take them both off then,” he teased, winking at her. “Better still… leave them on and take everything else off!”
Her mouth fell open. A part of her could not believe that he had said it. Another part believed he might think it but still could not imagine…
“Dominic Warren!”
He sat back, surveying her with childlike glee, his shirt pulled open all bar the last two buttons; tie-less and uncharacteristically crumpled. Gerry was prey to a pang of emotion that most certainly was not guilt. Of course, she had always been aware that Dominic was an attractive man, it had been the very first thing she noticed about him after all.
“I’ve always had a thing about stockings and suspenders,” he confessed when she did not say anything else. His grin was positively feral.
“Uh…?” Gerry managed, unsure how she was supposed to answer this.
“I think it all stems from spying on Sam when I was a boy,” Lord Warren elaborated, shaking his head. “He was my father’s chauffeur… very handsome! He was knocking off the housemaids. Of course it was him I was primarily interested in seeing starkers! But there was this one girl… Mandy. She always wore black stockings and suspenders under her uniform. Probably she did it for him, but I was only a kid, how was I to know? He used to rip off her dress and leave them on while he had her on the sofa.”
Gerry stared back at him with round eyes, only half astonished.
“Didn’t he shut the curtains?”
“What was the point?” Dominic chuckled. “He had no reason to believe he was being watched. It was dark outside and his cottage was in the middle of nowhere… by modern standards. I was hiding in the shrubbery anyway!”
“You are a wicked creature, Warren,” she told him.
“I was only ten!” he laughed. “It was educational.”
Gerry rolled her eyes. “Rather a difference though, between me; chubby and middle-aged in laddered nylons; and some nubile slut in kinky black undies!”
“I told you…” Dom protested, flushing unexpectedly. “It wasn’t her… it was the stockings that got me going!”
“Charming!” She shook her head.
He rolled fluidly to his knees and moved over to sit close beside her again/
“So… “ he whispered conspiratorially into her ear, “now you know at least one of my dirty secrets. Are you going to tell me yours?”
Gerry sobered at once and he put his arm around her.
“It’s much worse.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” he promised adamantly.
“But you’ll still know,” she countered in a solemn monotone. “And then I’ll have to kill you!”
“Oops!” Dom murmured, no more than a trickle of sound close to her left ear. Then he kissed her there, very tenderly.
“Don’t!” Gerry tried to shrug him off at once.
“Why not? You’re lovely. I want to kiss you,” he sighed. “It feels right… somehow. We’re meant to be here; together… tonight… with no distractions.”
Gerry looked into his eyes anxiously.
“It’ll be dark soon. Your friends will be worried.”
“I’ll phone them.” He fished his mobile from the breast pocket of his discarded jacket and waved it at her.
“And tell them what?” she asked incredulously. “We went to a funeral, not some wild all-nighter!”
“I’ll say we promised to have dinner with your brother and his wife,” he soothed, but Gerry was not consoled. She pulled a face, more at the idea of the lie than the validity of it. Dominic raised an eyebrow.
“Would you rather I said, it was because I was fucking you hard in a field somewhere?”
She laughed nervously at the unexpected obscenity. Dominic could swear like a trooper, but he did so very rarely. “They’d probably believe that less!”
His answering smile softened the lines of concern in his face.
“We would know differently.”
Gerry shook her head at once.
“No. Dominic, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Dom peered at her, visibly perplexed.
“Sorry because you want to, or because you think my feelings will be hurt?” he asked at last.
She looked away, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging her legs closer to her body. With departure of the sunlight it was getting cold, but that was not the only reason.
“Can we go back?” she implored.
“Sure… when you tell me what the problem is,” he countered, feigning a lack of concern.
“Dominic!” Geraldine rounded on him. “There is no problem. I’m a lesbian! I’m not interested in men that way… that’s all.”
He rolled smoothly to his knees, catching her face in his hands before she could look away. Gerry blinked and tried to look as innocent as possible. It was not a huge lie. She wasn’t interested in men; at least… she wasn’t interested in most men!
“Sweetheart,” he said in quietly rational tones. “I’ve known you for twenty years and change, and you do not burst into tears all over me without damned good reason. I know it’s not just the funeral. Now we’re out here, just you and I and the Lady, why on earth won’t you tell me? I just want to see the full picture for once. I want you to be happy.”
She caught her breath, holding it until the impulse to sob had passed completely. It was the second time he had said something like that to her today.
“I am happy,” she lied desperately.
He shook his head at once, observing her in proprietary silence.
“I am! I have everything I could ever want. It’s the past, not the present that makes me… like this. Dominic, darling, I really don’t want to rake over the cold, dead past again. I want to put him behind me now and get on with my life,” she pleaded, sensing the tears rising again.
“Good,” he murmured, stroking her cheeks with the backs of his fingers. There was something in his voice however that told her he was not done with this. Sitting so close to him she could see the flecks of gold in his pale green eyes and the way that his long lashes were dark at the roots and ghostly translucent out at the tips. The very faintest twitch of the small muscles around the edge of his mouth and eyes made the difference between disapproval and affection, but his expressions were so familiar to her that she did not even have to look hard. “Do you know how many people in my life I’ve loved enough to tell them so?” he asked her quietly.
The question took Gerry by surprise. She shook her head with a little shrug.
“Loads, I suppose!”
His eyes half closed and for a moment she worried that this really was the final straw and he would storm off and abandon her in the middle of this wretched meadow. Then she wondered why that idea was so terrible to her. Was it just the thought of being left alone with no way of getting back home, or was there more to it than that. If he walked away from her now, would she call him back for her own sake, or for his?
“Three,” he said, breaking into her contemplation. He was looking very intently at her.
“Uh…?” Gerry blinked, hauled out of her introspective self-analysis.
“Three people,” Dom elaborated evenly. “Five if you include Danny and Constance, but he’s family and she was virtually my surrogate mother, so they don’t really count.”
“Um… well… that’s not bad,” she ventured warily, not quite sure what was expected of her.
Dominic sat back with a little sigh, releasing her and turning away. His eyes were on the moon rising clear and bright over the nearest coppice. In the space of a moment it was as if he had physically put miles between them. He was silent for a small slice of eternity and Gerry shivered as the darkness intensified around her and inside her.
“When I was nineteen,” he said distantly, at last, “I gave my heart and soul to James Hamilton-Trelawney. He was so fucking beautiful, Gerry. I truly believed that I had found my life’s mate. He was sweet and funny and he looked after me so well. We spent every moment we could together. Every night for nearly six months we made love like each time would be the last.” He exhaled tremulously at the memory and sat in silence, breathing rapidly, as if the words were sucking the life out of him. “James was a year older than me,” he continued after an interminable silence; “in his final year at Oxford; destined for greatness. He was a championship-pace middle distance runner and Captain of the Rowing Club. Everyone adored him, but he only had eyes for me. He told me every night, in bed, how fantastic I was and how much he needed me. And I thought he was wonderful.
“On the night before term officially ended, I plucked up the courage to tell him… to say that I was in love with him that I always wanted to be with him. It took me a month to make myself say those words. I was so afraid that he would laugh; that I would make a fool of myself…”
Gerry was watching his face in profile. Briefly she saw that elegant, impassive mask crumple and fail, replaced for just a moment by an expression etched with acute pain. She knew of James of course. Dom had told her innumerable tall tales over the years about his stunning beauty and his impossibly potent physical prowess between the sheets (and behind the boating sheds after dark!) He had never once mentioned that it was anything more serious than a first grown up crush.
“Were you?” she asked, when he remained silent for a little while. He looked sideways across his right shoulder at her, a small curious frown between his brows as if he had forgotten that she was there, so she elaborated; “In love with him, I mean?”
Dominic shrugged wearily.
“God alone knows!” he exhaled cynically. “How the hell should I?”
She hugged herself, growing conscious of the evening chill.
“What did he say… when you told him?”
“Oh… you know…” Dominic waved a deprecating hand and turned back towards the steadily ascending moon. “The usual… how much fun it had been; how he hoped we’d be friends and stay in touch. But he had a career and a good marriage mapped out for him. I don’t know… I stopped listening. I knew what he really meant… that what we were doing was ‘just a phase he was going through’. That I was okay, until something more bloody conventional came along!”
She flinched at the harsh tone of that closing remark. It was as if admitting it released a fresh flood of angry humiliation that he had never quite expunged. Gerry wished she had not asked. Dominic’s dark moods could come without warning and she knew from experience that he was vicious with himself and with others when they did. Few people ever even guessed at this side of his nature, she supposed. The Coven had witnessed him in his cool and withdrawn phase often enough, but both she and Gabriel had felt the sharper edge of his tongue.
“You were both very young,” she said pacifically, but he ignored her.
“Cameron, on the other hand, was very different,” he addressed the moonlit night in disdainful tones, speaking of Connie’s Vampire mate, for whom he had never disguised his admiration. After Constance Harper, their previous High Priestess, met her death in a road accident, the grave, handsome Vampire took his own life, choosing to end over nine hundred years of existence rather than be without her. Dominic knew how much they had loved one another but his tone was still scathing. “It was no great secret that my ardour amused the crap out of him.”
Dominic stopped and lowered his face into his hands abruptly. Gerry was shocked. She had never heard him speak a bad word about Cam Eldridge and could not believe that he truly felt such bitterness. The pair of them had been a formidable force for most of the twenty-odd years she had known Dom.
“That’s ridiculous,” she protested now. “Cameron was very fond of you. He would have done anything for you.”
She reached out towards him but he shrugged her off roughly, then rounded on her.
“Anything but stay with me!”
“Don’t be stupid. You know how he felt about Connie,” she rebuked him, feeling a small, hot thread of anger infiltrate her concern. “You’re just being selfish now! Cam told me plenty of times how much he cared for you.”
“Like a child… or a pet!” Dom spat out caustically. Before she could counter that blast, he added snidely; “Then, of course, there was you!”
Gerry’s lower lip trembled and she bit down on it, all too aware of what was coming. She should have guessed all those years ago that he would never forgive her for turning him down. Oh, on the face of it they were great friends; he was always there for her. There was nothing he would not do to make her happy, and she returned the favour as often as her limited resources allowed. She knew that he would do almost anything she asked of him… anything but absolve the sin of rejection. It burned in him like a poisoned dart, and she saw that barb coming for her heart now and could not deflect it.
On the balance, it was not fair. She loved him; he had to know that, surely!
“Dominic…” she warned him.
“You could have played it any way you wanted,” he snarled at her, making her sit back smartly. “I’d have given you the run of the house, any car you desired, as much space as you needed. I didn’t want a great deal in return!”
“Dom, stop this,” she protested “You’re being impossible and we’ve been through it all before. You know my reasons.”
“Oh, I know, all right!” He pulled away from her attempts to calm him down. “You enjoy it, don’t you? You love having people know that I’m wrapped around your little finger! But you don’t care how that leaves me feeling. You don’t give a damn that at the end of the day, when you go back to your cosy, lesbian love nest, I’m left on my o…”
He stopped short because she slapped him hard for that. When he just stared at her defiantly, she hit him again, as purposefully as she had ever struck anyone in her entire life. He went down this time, with a little yelp of pain and astonishment. Gerry did not wait to see if he got up, she snatched up as much of her spilled clothing as she could find in the gathering darkness and ran.
Struggling across the field, barefoot with one shoe in her hand (and the Goddess alone knew where the other was) Gerry thought she heard a raw, strangled sobbing sound. Then she realised with a start that it was coming from her own mouth. You bastard! She thought furiously. How dare you make such pathetic presumptions! So I don’t care, do I? I come running whenever you have a domestic crisis! I pick up all the pieces when your ruinous love life falls apart, over and bloody over! When the hell do I have time to build a Love Nest? In twenty years, how long have I spent in a settled relationship? Tears blinded her but she ploughed on, almost to the very edge of the coppice by the road, where a snarled root snaked up treacherously out of the earth and brought her down. She lay in the place where she had fallen, weeping inconsolably for the death of her father, the mess she had managed to get herself into and her sheer exhaustion. Most painful of all was the knowledge that the most constant friendship of her life was virtually dead in the water, and all for what?
Oh, let him go back to bloody Sheila! She thought bitterly, then cried even harder at the idea of it.

To be continued...

Description
They walked, through woodland, across a wheat-field, hand in hand, as the sun sank lower in the western sky. Dominic slung his jacket over one shoulder and led her up the slope of a little hill where three meadows converged. At the crest, he stopped and spread his jacket on the ground. She sat down where he indicated and he sank beside her, watching the sunset with a quiet smile on his face, his arm around her shoulders.
“The moon’s rising,” she pointed out and he nodded sagely.
“This is a very lovely place. Almost a sacred place.” He traced the junction of the meadows towards their hill with one long finger, smiling appreciatively.
“Yes.” Gerry could not disagree.
Dominic turned and cupped her face in his hands again and this time when he kissed her, he did not draw away so quickly. She sank down, cradled in his steady embrace, leaning back in the deep, rustling grass, his hands warm and unexpectedly supportive against her back and shoulder. Tenderly he massaged her skin through the silk of her blouse. The combination of sun and moonlight gilded the leaves and branches overhead, and the shining stalks of wheat and tall grasses, and the loose, silver and gold curls of his boyishly tousled hair.
Her fingers moved through the tangles as he pressed his mouth to hers for a long, intimate time. It was like talking without words. She had kissed before, but somehow it had never felt like this.
As they melted down into the lengthening shadows, he let his lips lift from her own and wander across her cheek and down the curve of her neck. His hands released her, ghosting softly to her hips and upward over her ribcage to encircle the swell of her breasts as she lay beneath him. Gerry caught her breath and he whispered; “Are you all right?”
Rapidly, she nodded her head, too breathless for words. She was trapped painfully between the fear of this mysterious power of his – the enchantment he wove around her which pulled her in seductively then tied up all her efforts towards resistance in delicate threads as soft to the senses as gossamer but harder to break than tempered steel wires – and her awareness of how much she wanted him. This was not a simple desire for kind words and comfort, it was a savage, primal longing; a raw, animal hunger that ached to haul him in and spend him utterly.
Gerry blushed at the idea of it; a furious, uncontrollable diffusion of blood, marking her cheeks, chest and upper arms with spots of traitorous scarlet. Dominic peered down at her now with his familiar, slightly bemused smile.
“You taste nice,” he said in an odd, slightly mocking tone of voice that dared her to respond. Dominic generally had no use for the word ‘nice’. It was not a polite verb in his vocabulary. ‘Nice’ was a roundabout insult, a word he used habitually to mean the opposite of its general translation. Or – as he used it now – to provoke a reaction. He had had her in stitches one year at Royal Ascot by greeting every other woman he saw with the words “That’s a terribly nice hat you’re wearing Lady So-and-So…” ‘Nice’, in these instances translating as; “Good God! Something from the Dark Dimensions is trying to eat your head!”; “Are you wearing that to win a bet?” and “Why on earth are you standing under a raffia rendition of the Kew Palm House?”
“Are you saying that I’m drunk, or that I don’t floss regularly enough for your liking?” Gerry riposted after the briefest of hesitations.
“That’s better!” Dominic looked relieved. “I was beginning to wonder if your family had abducted the real Geraldine and left me with a Stepford version!”
“You… you took me by surprise,” she ventured, clearing her throat which had suddenly tightened again..
His pale eyes roamed her face with restless curiosity and an intense pleasure. Quietly, he breathed; “I beg your pardon. Shall I ask permission next time I wish to kiss you?”
Gerry flashed him a tight-lipped smile.
“Does Mi’lord wish to kiss me again, then?”
“You sound surprised,” he teased, stroking one still-flushed cheek with cool fingers. “You look incredibly lovely lying there underneath me, Geraldine. A lesser man might well have lost control.”
“A straighter man, you mean!” She laughed nervously, destroying the bold front that had been her intention.
Dominic raised his eyebrows enquiringly at that but did not appear to be offended. In a quiet, enquiring tone he murmured; “Do you wish that I was? Is that the problem?”
“Problem?” she echoed at once, derisively. “Who says there’s a problem?”
“Did we walk all the way out into the middle of nowhere and snog each other’s faces off for nothing?” Dominic persisted. If he was irritated, he did not let his emotions spill over into his voice. The enquiry was boyishly teasing. He was playing cute in an effort to win her around.
“You said it was lovely,” Gerry countered defensively.
“It is,” he nodded. “You are…”
She felt her pulse quicken again as he let the words trail off deliberately, never taking his eyes off her face.
“What am I?”
His lips quirked upward at the corners and he watched his fingertips trail in a preoccupied manner down the line of her neck, across her collar bone and down into the hollow of her cleavage. A pearly button offered tenuous resistance and he coaxed it from its buttonhole deftly and parted the silken folds of her modest neckline a little more provocatively. Without looking up at her, he brushed the pale, slightly freckled skin of her upper breasts gently with the backs of his fingers, like a pathologist searching for minute circumstantial evidence.
“You are…” He paused again, very briefly. “…lovely… and mysterious, and intriguing and infuriating, and reassuring and exciting and unfathomable, and….” His words had quickened and he stopped again, taking a quick breath and collecting himself as he met her eyes once more. The pupils of his eyes were dilated wide in the gathering gloom. “…absolutely unlike any woman I have ever known.”
She forced an awkward, schoolgirlish smile onto her face deciding that she ought to be flattered by that. Damn it! She was bloody flattered! Dominic did not have a reputation for opening his heart. He could charm the birds from the trees but she always knew when he was being manipulative and this evening was not it. Genuine romantic compliments from him were rarer than Dodo eggs. Tonight in the car he had told her ‘I love you’, three small words, often lightly given. But even Gabriel, who had shared her best friend’s life and bed for the past twelve years, had departed complaining that Dominic never told him that.
Gerry experienced a sudden surge of profound anxiety.
“Is this your mid-life crisis then?” she asked desperately, trying to make light of it. He could not be serious. This was just his way of showing her that he cared. She was bereaved; he was in shock over Sheila’s request – a problem not yet solved.
“I don’t know,” Dominic admitted now, but quickly covered this lapse into weakness by caressing beneath the lace trim of her partly exposed bra-cups. The touch sent shivers through her in spite of her resolve not to be seduced. “It’s unusual, I suppose, but not unique.”
Gerry wriggled down into the grass a little more deeply, but continued to meet his eye as if challenging him to see how far he could get this time. She was sure he had not forgotten his last attempt to get her undressed. It had been over fourteen years ago, for sure, but Geraldine still recalled it clearly. It was the only time she had ever physically hurt him. This time she had no idea how far she would let him go before she stopped him. Or even if she would stop him.
“So… I’m not your first?” she queried casually. “I don’t know whether to be insulted or relieved.”
His answering smile was infuriatingly enigmatic.
“I might surprise you.”
Gerry found herself wondering just how many women he had slept with. He had turned down Sheila (he said) but she had seen him flirt with women before now. There had been the girl who came up from the Ministry of Agriculture to inspect his organic fruit and veg enterprise, whose father had been at school with Lord Warren. He had taken her out to dinner and it was three days before she went back to London. And there had been the glamorous wife of the American Ambassador to London, whom Dominic claimed was the daughter of a woman who had been in Connie’s San Francisco Coven. She still could not conclusively say that Dominic had not been sexually intimate with her. Their behaviour together certainly crossed the boundaries from flirtation to something more.
“You invariably surprise me,” Gerry told him now. “It’s the one thing I know I can rely on. I suppose… decent looking guy, good prospect, all his own teeth… it shouldn’t be a total shock!”
He laughed appreciatively, so she added: “…and you’re such a tart, of course!” just to keep his ego under control.
“Does a woman cease to be a tart if all her innumerable lovers are also women?” Dom asked with a reprehensible grin.
She slapped him, not hard but quite vigorously.
“Innumerable? You cheeky old mare! You make me sound like some kind of Serial Dyke!”
“One is forced to admit,” he murmured, unfastening her blouse still further and kissing her exposed midriff beneath the lower seam of her second best brassiere; “that upon a number of occasions, the High Priestess has turned up to Rituals and gatherings wrapped in a delicious aura one can only describe as incredibly well-laid!”
Gerry propped herself up on her elbows and stared incredulously at him.
“I so have not! I’ll have you know I take our rituals v…”
She got no further with this tirade because he knelt up over her and, without warning bent and silenced her mouth with his own. Gerry continued a muffled protest for a moment or so but all that came out was series of puffs and squeaks. As she wriggled beneath him, Dominic’s long, gentle hands wandered slowly back down her body to her thighs, slipping beneath the lace trim of her underskirt and gliding back smoothly towards her hips, taking the material with them. Gerry experienced a mixture of pleasure and shock that tingled through her body like static from the point of contact with his steadily caressing fingers. His lips broke the kiss just long enough for her to think of words. Only then did she realise that she had one hand flat against his bared chest within the open neckline of his shirt. She wondered if it was his rapid pulse or her own that she could feel in the palm of her hand.
“What are you doing?” she exhaled.
He looked down on her with a brave, martyred smile.
“Making love to you?” he suggested sweetly.
“Have you gone insane?”
Dominic shook his head, undeterred by her sudden hostility.
“I thought you wanted me to. I supposed that must be why you brought me here to the middle of nowhere and lay down with me and kissed me…”
She was already shaking her head long before he finished.
“Uh-huh… no… Dominic, you know I can’t!”
He curled the fingers of one hand around the forearm she still held braced between them then moved off her, lying down almost wearily beside her. His fingertips moved gently up her arm to the elbow and drifted across to her exposed belly and the lacy cup that shielded her left breast, touching slowly and tentatively as if he feared she might take fright and run.
Geraldine lay motionless, on her back, staring at the sky, painfully conscious of his immediate proximity. She could not look at him. She thought she would probably cry if she did. Dominic had been so patient with her this evening but she knew how deep his feelings for her were. This was not the first time they had fallen into one another’s arms after all.
The silence carried her back fourteen years to another night, far away from here, just after the party Dominic had thrown to celebrate his fortieth birthday and her thirtieth (in spite of their being six months apart). They had both been drunk and a tiny bit stoned, admittedly, but that had not stopped him trying to get her completely undressed on the lounge carpet. That night, they went beyond the boundaries of friendship. The intervening years had left her wondering if she did not dream most of what came to pass during that highly charged forty five minutes on the sofa and on the floor. He had certainly astounded her by proving without a moment’s hesitation that he knew exactly how to get a woman aroused. She never had dared to ask him how he learned to do that.
Now she lay here beside him, gazing at the pink-tinged clouds and praying to the Goddess that this time it would be different; that this time she would not be consumed by the defensive urge to lash out and protect herself. She prayed that the fear would not squeeze her heart to bursting point as he lay down on top of her. It was no use, even though she told herself over and over that this was Dominic – her kind, gentle, utterly trustworthy friend, who would never knowingly hurt her…
Tears welled up behind her eyes and she tried to shut them in, but they forced their treacherous way out from beneath her eyelids and coursed down her cheeks anyway. She felt his lips close to her ear, his quiet, lovely voice murmuring to her; “I know you can’t. What I don’t understand, even after all this time, is why? You can tell me, darling. I won’t be unsympathetic. I just think that if there’s something chewing you up, I hate to see it. I want to help you, really I do.”
His mouth touched the shell of her ear and he kissed her softly there. She had to swallow hard, twice before she could speak.
“I can’t tell you. It’s too horrible!”
Dominic’s arms slipped around her, he drew her head onto his shoulder as the sun dipped lower, and long shadows crept stealthily across the meadow towards their golden hill. She turned into his warmth, clinging to him, hiding her tearful weakness in the crisp, sweet smelling linen of his crumpled shirt.
“I’ve seen horrible,” he soothed. “I promise not to run away screaming!”
She shook her head but could not look up.
“It’s worse than that. I’m scared that it will change the way you feel about me. You’ll… maybe… you’ll think that I’m damaged… dirty.” Tears strangled her words and he pulled her closer, swaying her in his embrace reassuringly. His warm hands were inside the filmy material of her blouse, resting between her shoulder blades and the small of her back. She did not resist his touch.
“Sweetheart,” he chuckled ruefully into her ear, “after some of the things I’ve confessed to you over the years, how could I ever think you dirty?” He buried his face in her dishevelled hair, breathing in the scent of her skin and herbal shampoo steadily. “How could I ever cast such terrible aspersions against my precious Gerry?”
Dominic hugged her body close to his own and she did not try to push him away this time. His lean frame pressed against her from shoulder to knee as she cried in his arms, weeping out the fear and rage and frustration until her throat hurt and his shirt front was soaked.
“Goodness!” he murmured into her hair, once she was still again. His breath felt like a temperate breeze against her scalp. “I do hope you feel better for that.”
“I’m sorry,” she croaked.
“There’s no need,” he assured her. “I don’t mind. Although I’m still curious to understand why?”
Gerry pulled away defensively, bending her head to hide a face she knew would be puffy and red from crying. After a moment, one sun-tanned hand appeared in her line of sight holding out a handkerchief and she took it gratefully.
“That’s better,” Dominic said, once she had mopped away the tears and blown her nose. His smile, when she dared to meet his gaze, was affectionate and concerned. Gerry experienced a twinge of guilt.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, stuffing the hanky awkwardly into her bag, suddenly conscious that she was half undressed. There was a run in one of her stockings that snaked up from her ankle to the middle of her thigh. She cursed it huskily.
“Take it off!” Dom suggested, boyishly mischievous.
“Oh yes.. and I’ll look completely unhinged with my hair full of grass and one stocking on,” Gerry admonished.
“Take them both off then,” he teased, winking at her. “Better still… leave them on and take everything else off!”
Her mouth fell open. A part of her could not believe that he had said it. Another part believed he might think it but still could not imagine…
“Dominic Warren!”
He sat back, surveying her with childlike glee, his shirt pulled open all bar the last two buttons; tie-less and uncharacteristically crumpled. Gerry was prey to a pang of emotion that most certainly was not guilt. Of course, she had always been aware that Dominic was an attractive man, it had been the very first thing she noticed about him after all.
“I’ve always had a thing about stockings and suspenders,” he confessed when she did not say anything else. His grin was positively feral.
“Uh…?” Gerry managed, unsure how she was supposed to answer this.
“I think it all stems from spying on Sam when I was a boy,” Lord Warren elaborated, shaking his head. “He was my father’s chauffeur… very handsome! He was knocking off the housemaids. Of course it was him I was primarily interested in seeing starkers! But there was this one girl… Mandy. She always wore black stockings and suspenders under her uniform. Probably she did it for him, but I was only a kid, how was I to know? He used to rip off her dress and leave them on while he had her on the sofa.”
Gerry stared back at him with round eyes, only half astonished.
“Didn’t he shut the curtains?”
“What was the point?” Dominic chuckled. “He had no reason to believe he was being watched. It was dark outside and his cottage was in the middle of nowhere… by modern standards. I was hiding in the shrubbery anyway!”
“You are a wicked creature, Warren,” she told him.
“I was only ten!” he laughed. “It was educational.”
Gerry rolled her eyes. “Rather a difference though, between me; chubby and middle-aged in laddered nylons; and some nubile slut in kinky black undies!”
“I told you…” Dom protested, flushing unexpectedly. “It wasn’t her… it was the stockings that got me going!”
“Charming!” She shook her head.
He rolled fluidly to his knees and moved over to sit close beside her again/
“So… “ he whispered conspiratorially into her ear, “now you know at least one of my dirty secrets. Are you going to tell me yours?”
Gerry sobered at once and he put his arm around her.
“It’s much worse.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” he promised adamantly.
“But you’ll still know,” she countered in a solemn monotone. “And then I’ll have to kill you!”
“Oops!” Dom murmured, no more than a trickle of sound close to her left ear. Then he kissed her there, very tenderly.
“Don’t!” Gerry tried to shrug him off at once.
“Why not? You’re lovely. I want to kiss you,” he sighed. “It feels right… somehow. We’re meant to be here; together… tonight… with no distractions.”
Gerry looked into his eyes anxiously.
“It’ll be dark soon. Your friends will be worried.”
“I’ll phone them.” He fished his mobile from the breast pocket of his discarded jacket and waved it at her.
“And tell them what?” she asked incredulously. “We went to a funeral, not some wild all-nighter!”
“I’ll say we promised to have dinner with your brother and his wife,” he soothed, but Gerry was not consoled. She pulled a face, more at the idea of the lie than the validity of it. Dominic raised an eyebrow.
“Would you rather I said, it was because I was fucking you hard in a field somewhere?”
She laughed nervously at the unexpected obscenity. Dominic could swear like a trooper, but he did so very rarely. “They’d probably believe that less!”
His answering smile softened the lines of concern in his face.
“We would know differently.”
Gerry shook her head at once.
“No. Dominic, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Dom peered at her, visibly perplexed.
“Sorry because you want to, or because you think my feelings will be hurt?” he asked at last.
She looked away, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging her legs closer to her body. With departure of the sunlight it was getting cold, but that was not the only reason.
“Can we go back?” she implored.
“Sure… when you tell me what the problem is,” he countered, feigning a lack of concern.
“Dominic!” Geraldine rounded on him. “There is no problem. I’m a lesbian! I’m not interested in men that way… that’s all.”
He rolled smoothly to his knees, catching her face in his hands before she could look away. Gerry blinked and tried to look as innocent as possible. It was not a huge lie. She wasn’t interested in men; at least… she wasn’t interested in most men!
“Sweetheart,” he said in quietly rational tones. “I’ve known you for twenty years and change, and you do not burst into tears all over me without damned good reason. I know it’s not just the funeral. Now we’re out here, just you and I and the Lady, why on earth won’t you tell me? I just want to see the full picture for once. I want you to be happy.”
She caught her breath, holding it until the impulse to sob had passed completely. It was the second time he had said something like that to her today.
“I am happy,” she lied desperately.
He shook his head at once, observing her in proprietary silence.
“I am! I have everything I could ever want. It’s the past, not the present that makes me… like this. Dominic, darling, I really don’t want to rake over the cold, dead past again. I want to put him behind me now and get on with my life,” she pleaded, sensing the tears rising again.
“Good,” he murmured, stroking her cheeks with the backs of his fingers. There was something in his voice however that told her he was not done with this. Sitting so close to him she could see the flecks of gold in his pale green eyes and the way that his long lashes were dark at the roots and ghostly translucent out at the tips. The very faintest twitch of the small muscles around the edge of his mouth and eyes made the difference between disapproval and affection, but his expressions were so familiar to her that she did not even have to look hard. “Do you know how many people in my life I’ve loved enough to tell them so?” he asked her quietly.
The question took Gerry by surprise. She shook her head with a little shrug.
“Loads, I suppose!”
His eyes half closed and for a moment she worried that this really was the final straw and he would storm off and abandon her in the middle of this wretched meadow. Then she wondered why that idea was so terrible to her. Was it just the thought of being left alone with no way of getting back home, or was there more to it than that. If he walked away from her now, would she call him back for her own sake, or for his?
“Three,” he said, breaking into her contemplation. He was looking very intently at her.
“Uh…?” Gerry blinked, hauled out of her introspective self-analysis.
“Three people,” Dom elaborated evenly. “Five if you include Danny and Constance, but he’s family and she was virtually my surrogate mother, so they don’t really count.”
“Um… well… that’s not bad,” she ventured warily, not quite sure what was expected of her.
Dominic sat back with a little sigh, releasing her and turning away. His eyes were on the moon rising clear and bright over the nearest coppice. In the space of a moment it was as if he had physically put miles between them. He was silent for a small slice of eternity and Gerry shivered as the darkness intensified around her and inside her.
“When I was nineteen,” he said distantly, at last, “I gave my heart and soul to James Hamilton-Trelawney. He was so fucking beautiful, Gerry. I truly believed that I had found my life’s mate. He was sweet and funny and he looked after me so well. We spent every moment we could together. Every night for nearly six months we made love like each time would be the last.” He exhaled tremulously at the memory and sat in silence, breathing rapidly, as if the words were sucking the life out of him. “James was a year older than me,” he continued after an interminable silence; “in his final year at Oxford; destined for greatness. He was a championship-pace middle distance runner and Captain of the Rowing Club. Everyone adored him, but he only had eyes for me. He told me every night, in bed, how fantastic I was and how much he needed me. And I thought he was wonderful.
“On the night before term officially ended, I plucked up the courage to tell him… to say that I was in love with him that I always wanted to be with him. It took me a month to make myself say those words. I was so afraid that he would laugh; that I would make a fool of myself…”
Gerry was watching his face in profile. Briefly she saw that elegant, impassive mask crumple and fail, replaced for just a moment by an expression etched with acute pain. She knew of James of course. Dom had told her innumerable tall tales over the years about his stunning beauty and his impossibly potent physical prowess between the sheets (and behind the boating sheds after dark!) He had never once mentioned that it was anything more serious than a first grown up crush.
“Were you?” she asked, when he remained silent for a little while. He looked sideways across his right shoulder at her, a small curious frown between his brows as if he had forgotten that she was there, so she elaborated; “In love with him, I mean?”
Dominic shrugged wearily.
“God alone knows!” he exhaled cynically. “How the hell should I?”
She hugged herself, growing conscious of the evening chill.
“What did he say… when you told him?”
“Oh… you know…” Dominic waved a deprecating hand and turned back towards the steadily ascending moon. “The usual… how much fun it had been; how he hoped we’d be friends and stay in touch. But he had a career and a good marriage mapped out for him. I don’t know… I stopped listening. I knew what he really meant… that what we were doing was ‘just a phase he was going through’. That I was okay, until something more bloody conventional came along!”
She flinched at the harsh tone of that closing remark. It was as if admitting it released a fresh flood of angry humiliation that he had never quite expunged. Gerry wished she had not asked. Dominic’s dark moods could come without warning and she knew from experience that he was vicious with himself and with others when they did. Few people ever even guessed at this side of his nature, she supposed. The Coven had witnessed him in his cool and withdrawn phase often enough, but both she and Gabriel had felt the sharper edge of his tongue.
“You were both very young,” she said pacifically, but he ignored her.
“Cameron, on the other hand, was very different,” he addressed the moonlit night in disdainful tones, speaking of Connie’s Vampire mate, for whom he had never disguised his admiration. After Constance Harper, their previous High Priestess, met her death in a road accident, the grave, handsome Vampire took his own life, choosing to end over nine hundred years of existence rather than be without her. Dominic knew how much they had loved one another but his tone was still scathing. “It was no great secret that my ardour amused the crap out of him.”
Dominic stopped and lowered his face into his hands abruptly. Gerry was shocked. She had never heard him speak a bad word about Cam Eldridge and could not believe that he truly felt such bitterness. The pair of them had been a formidable force for most of the twenty-odd years she had known Dom.
“That’s ridiculous,” she protested now. “Cameron was very fond of you. He would have done anything for you.”
She reached out towards him but he shrugged her off roughly, then rounded on her.
“Anything but stay with me!”
“Don’t be stupid. You know how he felt about Connie,” she rebuked him, feeling a small, hot thread of anger infiltrate her concern. “You’re just being selfish now! Cam told me plenty of times how much he cared for you.”
“Like a child… or a pet!” Dom spat out caustically. Before she could counter that blast, he added snidely; “Then, of course, there was you!”
Gerry’s lower lip trembled and she bit down on it, all too aware of what was coming. She should have guessed all those years ago that he would never forgive her for turning him down. Oh, on the face of it they were great friends; he was always there for her. There was nothing he would not do to make her happy, and she returned the favour as often as her limited resources allowed. She knew that he would do almost anything she asked of him… anything but absolve the sin of rejection. It burned in him like a poisoned dart, and she saw that barb coming for her heart now and could not deflect it.
On the balance, it was not fair. She loved him; he had to know that, surely!
“Dominic…” she warned him.
“You could have played it any way you wanted,” he snarled at her, making her sit back smartly. “I’d have given you the run of the house, any car you desired, as much space as you needed. I didn’t want a great deal in return!”
“Dom, stop this,” she protested “You’re being impossible and we’ve been through it all before. You know my reasons.”
“Oh, I know, all right!” He pulled away from her attempts to calm him down. “You enjoy it, don’t you? You love having people know that I’m wrapped around your little finger! But you don’t care how that leaves me feeling. You don’t give a damn that at the end of the day, when you go back to your cosy, lesbian love nest, I’m left on my o…”
He stopped short because she slapped him hard for that. When he just stared at her defiantly, she hit him again, as purposefully as she had ever struck anyone in her entire life. He went down this time, with a little yelp of pain and astonishment. Gerry did not wait to see if he got up, she snatched up as much of her spilled clothing as she could find in the gathering darkness and ran.
Struggling across the field, barefoot with one shoe in her hand (and the Goddess alone knew where the other was) Gerry thought she heard a raw, strangled sobbing sound. Then she realised with a start that it was coming from her own mouth. You bastard! She thought furiously. How dare you make such pathetic presumptions! So I don’t care, do I? I come running whenever you have a domestic crisis! I pick up all the pieces when your ruinous love life falls apart, over and bloody over! When the hell do I have time to build a Love Nest? In twenty years, how long have I spent in a settled relationship? Tears blinded her but she ploughed on, almost to the very edge of the coppice by the road, where a snarled root snaked up treacherously out of the earth and brought her down. She lay in the place where she had fallen, weeping inconsolably for the death of her father, the mess she had managed to get herself into and her sheer exhaustion. Most painful of all was the knowledge that the most constant friendship of her life was virtually dead in the water, and all for what?
Oh, let him go back to bloody Sheila! She thought bitterly, then cried even harder at the idea of it.

To be continued...