LITMIR.BIZ

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been too late. Feeling as though her world had broken apart in front of her, Emily had forced herself to confront the truth and to demand to know what he had meant.

      Watching him hesitate, knowing how much she ached to believe the lies she already knew he was trying to formulate, she had deliberately denied herself that surcease, and had said quietly, ‘Will it help you to tell me the truth if I say that there’s absolutely no chance of our being lovers?’

      If she had thought his temper was out of control before, she had then realised her mistake. The language he’d used, the virulence of his temper, ought to have terrified her; but somehow she had gone beyond that, to find a temporary harbour in some small corner of her mind that had sheltered her while she had listened to him pouring scorn on her, telling her that the only reason he had bothered with her was because some fellow students had challenged him to get her into bed—humiliatingly having guessed at her total lack of experience. Heavy bets had been placed on his ability to do so. He himself had stood to gain financially if he succeeded.

      And what had shocked her most of all was that he had not been in the least ashamed of admitting it to her. If anything, he had seemed to think that she was the one who had behaved badly—that she had been the one at fault. Well, perhaps she had been, although her fault had not been in not allowing him to use her body, but in ever thinking that he might have actually cared for her.

      She had seen him so clearly then, and had hated herself for the tawdry cheapness of the image she had foolishly believed she had loved. What she had loved was a man she had created out of her own daydreams and imagination and then clothed with Gerry’s features. The real Gerry had been nothing like the man of her daydreams.

      She had learned a hard and painful lesson, and she had sworn to herself, as she had quietly demanded to know exactly how much money he would have won had he succeeded, that never again would she repeat her folly. When he had grudgingly told her, she had written out a cheque and had handed it to him.

      Her parents had been generous, and she had never been short of money. There had been very little she had wanted to spend it on. She had not been fashion-conscious like most of her contemporaries. She had smiled grimly to herself, realising that she was probably the only girl in the whole university who still wore clothes that approximated to something like a school uniform: neat woollen jumpers, sturdy brogues. She dressed for comfort in clothes that helped her to blend in with her surroundings, not stand out from them.

      Gerry had taken the cheque, blustering that it was no less than she owed him, and adding sneeringly that if she changed her mind and decided that she wanted to get rid of her virginity after all, he’d be prepared to oblige her for a similar amount. ‘After all,’ he had taunted her, ‘what’s the point in saving it…unless you’re planning to become a nun…’

      She would cry later, she had told herself stonily, watching him leave. She would grieve later for the destruction of her dreams, but right now the most important thing focusing her mind had been that somehow or other she patch together the broken shards of what had once been a person named Emily Francine Blacklaw, and that she find a way of making that person appear to be a human being, and not a robot from whom the ability to think, reason and feel had been taken away.

      Somehow, from a reserve of strength buried inside her which she hadn’t known she possessed, she had managed it, just as she had managed to appear not to notice the sometimes curious, sometimes amused looks of those of her peers who must have been privy to the original bet.

      It had been the year of her finals, but now, instead of looking forward to the future, she had simply tried to endure the passing of each day as best she could. Then in a letter from her mother had come the news that her father’s Uncle John had been about to embark on actually getting down to write the book he had been threatening to work on for as long as Emily could remember. He would need to find a devoted and very patient research-assistant-cum-secretary, her mother had written, and, when she had read those words, Emily had known that she had found somewhere where she could hide herself away from a world which had become too painful and alien for her. Not a convent, precisely, she had thought with the small bitter smile which had been beginning to replace her once warm and natural, if slightly shy beam.

      Perhaps if her parents hadn’t been so busy with the preparations for their forthcoming trip to Mexico…perhaps if her sister hadn’t elected to take a year off between A levels and university and travel to Australia…perhaps if she had had a close girlfriend to note the warning signs and do something about them, someone might have intervened and turned her back to face the world instead of withdrawing from it. But fate had decreed otherwise, and, by the time her parents had returned from Mexico, she had obtained her degree and had been working for Uncle John for three months.

      Despite the almost monastic life he lived in the rather ramshackle house several miles outside the university town, Emily had settled very well into her new existence. She enjoyed working for Uncle John, and she had the patience to help him to disentangle and transcribe the notebooks which held over twenty years of notes made supposedly in preparation for the opus it had been his life’s dream to complete.

      Although neither of them realised it, Emily’s was the hand and brain that had translated the dusty dry facts so painstakingly uncovered by the scholar into the first outline for a book—a book which John Blacklaw’s publishers had found surprisingly readable. They were an old-established and very small firm, based in the same town as the university, and well versed in dealing with their sometimes eccentric would-be authors.

      Peter Cavendish, the great-great-grandson of the original founder of the business, had raised a few tut-tuts from his older relatives when he had commented enthusiastically that at last he had read a manuscript which he could not only understand, but which he had also found made him want to explore its subject in more detail.

      Peter Cavendish was thirty years old and unmarried and, in the eyes of his grandfather and great-uncles, a little too frivolous for their kind of publishing. Privately, Peter confided to his mother and sisters that he intended to drag the firm into the twenty-first century by the scruff of its neck if necessary. ‘And I think I’ve found the book which will do it…’

      Neither Emily nor Uncle John were as yet aware of his intentions; the book was still in its very early stages, and he had enough of the family caution to want to make sure that the old boy could produce more than half a dozen chapters before committing himself.

      Now, as she drove with proper respect for the howling wind buffeting the car and the thick snow which was all too quickly whitening the road, Emily wished she had ignored Gracie’s pleas to her to extend her visit long enough for her to get to know Travis, her Australian fiancé; but, ever sensitive to the opinions of others, Emily had felt that if she did not stay her family might think that it was because she was envious or resentful of Gracie’s happiness.

      She had once overheard her mother discussing her with her father, saying that she was the type of girl best suited to marriage with a similarly quiet man, with whom she could live in suburban security to raise the requisite two-point-odd children. The words hadn’t meant to be hurtful, but they had been to a girl on the threshold of womanhood who had still been dreaming of a lover of heroic proportions…a lover straight from one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, or one of Georgette Heyer’s wondrous Regency Romances; a lover who would see through her quiet exterior, who would cherish and adore her…

      She knew better now, and, if it was foolish of her to say to herself that, if she could not reach the stars, if she could not experience the heights of emotional intensity she had once dreamed of reaching, then she would rather not bother than settle for the kind of mundane relationship her mother had described, then only she knew of that folly.

      And so she had stayed on, to smile at Gracie’s Travis, and to hide her real feelings at the astonishment on his face as he had looked from the tall, golden, glowing Blacklaw parents and his equally golden, glowing fiancée to the small, brown little creature who was their daughter and sister.

      And then yesterday it had snowed enough for Gracie to insist on their digging out the old sledge and going tobogganing on the snowy fields beyond the house. Unwillingly, Emily had allowed herself to be dragged along

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