The Perfect Lover (19 page)

'Not much at all...only that Jack has taken it into his head that he wants to find David.'

'Yes, that's right, he does. I've tried to talk to him, but I'm worried about him, and I wondered if perhaps you... He
needs
someone to confide in, someone he can tafk to who he can trust.'

'I'll do my best,' Saul promised her gravely.

'He thinks his father didn't love him.'

Saul, was starting to frown, and to her chagrin Louise suddenly felt her eyes fill with tears.

When he saw them Saul's frown deepened with concern.

'Lou...' he began. But she shook her head trying to smile as she told him huskily, 'Saul, I'm sorry... It's just... I can't understand why I'm such a fool. You'd think after the lessons I learned through having that fearsome crush on you that I'd know better than to risk loving a man who doesn't love me back. But...'

'A man who doesn't love you back... Are we talking about your extremely unfriendly friend and ex- tutor Gareth Simmonds, here?' Saul asked her dryly.

Louise shook her head, but it was no use; the strain of the last twenty-four hours was having its effect on her, and the next thing she knew she was in Saul's arms, her head pressed firmly against his shoulder while he comforted her in much the same way he had done many years ago, when she had still been a child suffering from the pain of a scraped knee. But broken skin could in no way be compared to the agony of a broken heart, and she wasn't a child any more but a woman, Louise reminded herself.

'I'm being an idiot. I'm sorry,' she apologised, blowing her nose firmly on the handkerchief he proffered as she gave him a frail smile.

She was still smiling up at him, and still held securely in his arms, several seconds later as the sitting- room door burst open and Joss and Jack, followed by Gareth, came in.

The sight of Louise in Saul's arms was plainly of no interest to either Joss or Jack, both of whom, in their different ways, were anticipating their return journey to Britain in Saul's charge with a certain amount of trepidation.

Gareth, though, reacted completely differently, coming to an abrupt halt only feet away from them and saying with open contempt, 'I'm sorry if we're interrupting something...private.'

Automatically Louise started to move away from Saul, but to her consternation, instead of letting her go, Saul kept a firm hold on her arm, his other hand giving her a small warning pinch out of Gareth's sight as he countered dangerously, 'Yes, so am I.' He turned his back on Gareth, so that his view of Louise's face was blocked as he told her tenderly, 'I meant what I said the last time we met, you know. You'll always be very...special to me, Lou...'

Louise gawped at him. What on earth was Saul trying to do? He must know the interpretation that Gareth would put on his comments after what she had just told him, and now here he was, quite deliberately, or so it seemed, adding some volatile and combustible material to the flames fuelling Gareth's suspicions.

'Come on, you two,' he instructed the boys, in a much firmer tone of voice, before turning to Gareth and telling him formally, 'It seems I owe you a debt of thanks...' And then, to Louise's bemusement, he lifted her hand to his mouth and gently kissed her fingers, before very firmly and expertly drawing her into his arms and holding her there intimately for a few long seconds.

Louise didn't offer to go down to the foyer to see Saul and the boys off; her legs felt as though they wouldn't carry her as far as her own front door, never mind .the foyer.

What on
earth
had got into Saul to make him behave so...so outrageously? It must have been as obvious to him as it had to her that Gareth was not in the least amused by his behaviour. Shakily she closed her eyes and put her hand on the back of her small sofa to steady herself as the apartment door banged shut behind them all.

'
H
AVE
you gone completely out of your mind? He's a married man, for God's sake, and no matter how much he might feel like having a bit of sex on the side with you, right now I'll bet that's
all
he's got on his mind. Have you stopped to
think
that if he really wanted you, if he
really
cared...if he
really
had the least degree of respect or affection for you, he would never...?'

'Gareth.' Weakly Louise opened her eyes. 'I thought you'd gone. What...?'

'For God's sake, Louise. He
might
be your cousin...you
might
still love him, but—'

Louise had had enough—more than enough.

'No, I don't,' she corrected Gareth flatly. 'Or at least I don't love him in the way that
you're
trying to imply. And even if I did...' She pushed her hand tiredly into her hair.

'If you don't love him then what the hell were you doing in his arms back there?' Gareth demanded furiously.

'He was just holding me...comforting me...' Louise told him wearily.

'Comforting you? Oh, my God, now I've heard everything—'

'That's right,' Louise interrupted him. 'You
have.
Or at least you've heard all you
are
going to hear and if you want the truth, Gareth, what I've
heard
is too much...much too much from
you.
I want you to leave,' she told him. 'You have to leave,' she added with quiet desperation. 'You have to leave, Gareth, because if you don't...'

She stopped, unable to say any more as one bright tear and then another filled her eyes and splashed down onto the hand she had lifted to wipe it away.

'Oh, God, Louise, how
can
you love a man who...?'

'Who doesn't love
me?'
Louise supplied for him, when, instead of obeying her command, Gareth took a determined step towards her.

'A man who isn't
worthy
of your love,' Gareth corrected her gruffly. 'I know how you feel about me, Lou. I know how much you dislike and resent me...'

He stopped as Louise gave a small strangled yelp of mingled pain and laughter deep in her throat.

'No, you don't,' she told him bravely. 'You don't know how I feel at all...because if you did... Gareth, please, I just can't
cope
with this. You
have
to leave,' she begged him.

But inexplicably, instead of obeying her, he was suddenly reaching out for her and taking hold of her and telling her hoarsely, 'I may not know how
you
feel, Lou, but I certainly know how I feel, and how I've felt for one hell of a long time. It's tearing me apart, thinking about you wasting your love, your life, on someone who...on a man who... I
know
he's your cousin but...'

'For the last time, Saul is
not
the man I love,' Louise told him, her self-control finally deserting her. 'You are that man, Gareth.
You
are the man I love, the only man I have
ever
properly loved, and the only man I am
ever
likely to properly love. The reason Saul was holding me in his arms when you and the boys walked in was because I had just been telling him about you, and—'

'Gareth! Gareth! Let go of me,' Louise demanded breathlessly as she lifted her hands to push him firmly away from her.

But it was too late, and besides, Gareth quite obviously had absolutely no intention whatsoever of letting her go. Instead he was demanding thickly, 'Say that again... You love
me
...? When...? How long...? Why...?' he began, and then stopped, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths before muttering something under his breath that Louise couldn't quite catch.

When he opened his eyes Louise felt her heart lurch dangerously against her chest wall as she saw the way he was looking at her.

'We can
talk
later,' Gareth informed her softly, barely breathing the words so that she automatically had to move even closer to him to hear what he was saying.

'Right now there's something far more important I need to do...far more important and far, far more pleasurable…'

'Gareth...' Louise protested weakly, but it was too late. His mouth was already moving over hers and she was responding to him, her body melting against his as his mouth moved more determinedly over hers, his tongue tracing the shape of her lips and then gently probing them apart.

'No,' Louise whispered, but the word was more a soft sigh of pleasure than any kind of real denial.

It was the longest, sweetest, most loving, cherishing kiss she had ever known, Louise decided dreamily as Gareth continued to caress her lips, his hand cupping her face, stroking her skin, his heartbeat thudding fiercely beneath the hand she had originally lifted to fend him off and which had now stayed to curl possessively into the front of his shirt. She felt dizzy, light-headed almost, with a mixture of desire and disbelief, unable to comprehend properly that this was actually happening, that
she
was
here
in Gareth's arms, that
he
was holding her, kissing her, loving her, as though he actually meant it.

'Have you any idea just how much I've been wanting to do this?' he was whispering against her mouth. 'How much I've
ached
to touch you...kiss you
...love
you, Louise?'

'I thought you despised me...disliked me,' she whispered back.

'Despised
myself,
disliked
myself,
yes. But
never
you,' Gareth groaned. 'When I came to the villa that morning...the morning after and found that you'd all left...I thought at first that it was because...that I'd...that you'd been so affected by what had happened, that your parents... But then Maria told me that there was some problem at home.'

'I
was
affected by what...what we did. But not in the way you mean,' Louise told him truthfully, shivering in delicious pleasure as his lips started to caress the soft curve of her throat.

'I knew that I'd...enjoyed...what happened, and that you'd made me feel things...do things...I'd no idea I could feel or do. But it wasn't until the following Christmas that I realised what had happened to me. I'd told myself that I hated you, that I was glad you weren't my tutor any longer and that there was no contact between us. I even managed to persuade myself that I was still in love with Saul, that I had simply transferred what I felt for him into a physical response to you...'

'Well, you certainly had
me
convinced,' Gareth interrupted her hoarsely. 'You called out his name when I...'

'I didn't even know I had...it must have been a protective reflex,' Louise told him softly, achingly. 'A way of trying to pretend to myself that you weren't...that I wasn't...' She stopped, and her eyes widened in fierce response as he ran his fingertip around the neckline of her top and her breasts immediately started to ache wantonly for his touch.

'Last time, when I went home, Saul and Tullah were both there. Everyone was tiptoeing around me as though I was an unexploded bomb. 1 admit I had been dreading seeing them myself, but when I did...' She looked up into his eyes. 'He was just Saul again,' she told him simply. 'Just my cousin. There was
nothing
else, and I couldn't really understand how I had ever thought... felt... wanted...

'Ever since Tuscany I have been having these dreams about you... Dreams when I...we... I thought it was simply because you were the one who...' She paused, flushing, and then laughing as she shook her head. 'I was so naive...naive and stubborn. I didn't
want
to admit the truth to myself, but I looked at Saul and I ached for you so badly... wanted you so badly...'

As her eyes filled with tears at the memory of the shocking fierceness of the pain, Gareth's eyes darkened in protective love.

'I was thinking about
you
as well,' he assured her. 'Wondering what you were doing...and who you were with...wishing it was me and wishing to hell that I hadn't been stupid enough to give way to feelings that I knew then were dangerous...'

'But you didn't
love
me when we...when you... You didn't
love
me. Not then,' Louise protested.

Gareth looked steadily at her.

'You're right. You
were
naive,' he told her huskily. 'Of course I damned well loved you. You don't think for a single solitary moment that I would actually have...that a man who didn't love...? You couldn't really have believed I could be so unprincipled as to...?'

'I thought you did it because you were angry with me,' Louise told him simply. 'I thought it must be a male reaction thing.'

'"A male reaction thing."' Gareth laughed huskily and closed his eyes. 'Oh, it was certainly that, all right,' he assured her. 'A
very
male reaction thing. The kind of male reaction thing that happens when a male, a
man
, falls deeply and passionately in love.

'I could have killed you when you told me that you were planning to lose your virginity with Giovanni. Do you know that?' he asked her lovingly.

'Well, you certainly made it plain that you didn't think it was a very good idea,' Louise agreed demurely. '
When
did you fall in love with me...?'

'It started one afternoon in my rooms. You were arguing passionately about something. I can't remember what. I looked at you and suddenly...' He paused and shook his head. 'It just happened. I told myself not to be a fool. I even reminded myself of all the reasons why it wouldn't work. And then you started skipping lectures, getting Katie to sit in for you instead…'

'Katie
said
you knew about that.'

'Of course I knew,' he told her lovingly, adding wryly, 'And so, too, did my body. It never reacted to Katie the way it did to you. And then, when I found out that you were in love with someone else...' He paused and shook his head. 'That day when I came to your room and found you there half-drunk...'

'I felt so humiliated that you'd seen me like that,' Louise whispered. 'And then you turned up in Tuscany…'

'I wasn't too pleased either. I'd gone there hoping to get things in perspective, to get my emotions under control, and instead...'

'Why didn't you
say
something...tell me how you felt?' Louise asked him.