The Independent Bride Read online

  Pepper shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine it,’ she said, humbled. ‘It must have been just awful.’

  He looked surprised. ‘It had its moments. The guys who were my more natural peers all lived on the other side of town in nice suburbs, with books and two parents. And, of course, they were suspicious about this tough from the war zone. But I learned their language and I could always do those spectacular explosions in old dog food tins. I was a real crowd-pleaser on Bonfire Night. In the end they accepted me. In fact my friend Tom’s parents virtually adopted me when my dad died.’ His smile grew sad. ‘In fact Tom was the reason I chose Maggie’s.’

  ‘Maggie’s?’

  ‘Queen Margaret’s College, God bless it. Tom’s dad had been here. So we both applied. And got in.’ He looked round the bar again. ‘We used to drink in here when we were these guys’ age.’ His expression hardened. ‘And those idiots in the senior common room think I don’t care about the college. Who else would do what I do? I may not be academically respectable, but by God they need me.’

  ‘Do you want to be academically respectable?’ Pepper asked thoughtfully.

  Steven shifted his shoulders. ‘We all want respect,’ he said evasively.

  Pepper looked at him sharply. He sounded defeated. Pepper could hardly believe it. Masterful, witty, responsible Steven Konig—defeated? She felt suddenly fiercely angry with the Dean and the academic snobs.

  ‘You definitely need a prize-winning problem solver,’ she said. ‘Count me in.’

  He went very still for a moment. Then he said in an odd voice, ‘Are you feeling sorry for me, Pepper?’

  Oh, heavens, she thought. Big mistake! What was it Izzy had said? The biggest turn-off in the world was to make a guy feel he couldn’t cope?

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean, not the way it sounded. I meant…’

  He touched her cheek. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he said, with such a wealth of tenderness in his voice that she shuddered to a halt, blinking.

  ‘Just voting myself onto the team,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘My team,’ he said quietly.

  And raised her hand to his lips.

  Pepper quivered and was still. They sat and looked into each other’s eyes in perfect silence.

  He stirred. ‘I’d better go and get that round in.’ He stood up, but held onto her hand as if he could not bear to let it go. Then he brushed his mouth over her knuckles again. ‘Don’t go away. I’ve got a rose garden to show you.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE garden was a wilderness of blousy blooms, all tangled and riotously out of control. They filled the night air with voluptuous scent. Pepper stopped dead and drew the honeyed air into her lungs. She felt as if she were floating on her awakened senses.

  ‘This is just amazing.’

  Steven hugged her against his side. ‘This is the result of staff cuts,’ he said ruefully. ‘We can only afford a part-time gardener, and he spends most of his time nursing the lawn in the main quad. The roses just do their own thing.’

  ‘They’ve got the right idea,’ said Pepper with enthusiasm. She stuffed her nose in some great cabbagey thing that smelt of warm lemons and murmured appreciatively.

  ‘You’re not an expensive date, are you?’ said Steven, touched.

  ‘I’m discriminating,’ she corrected with dignity.

  His arm tightened. ‘You are indeed.’

  They wandered along overgrown paths until the sky was completely dark. There were no clouds and a thin sickle moon incised a sharp little curve into a dusting of stars.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely? And so wonderful that it’s just us,’ said Pepper, letting her head fall dreamily onto Steven’s shoulder. ‘Is everyone else being tactful?’

  ‘It’s the Master’s Garden. Everyone else only gets to come here if I invite them. I took the precaution of locking the garden gate when we got back,’ said Steven smugly.

  ‘Forethought,’ approved Pepper. Between the night and the smell of roses and her own secret fantasies she was feeling slightly high. ‘Impressive.’

  ‘Thank you. So, now you’ve done the Master’s Garden, do you want to inspect the Master’s Lodging?’

  Somewhere deep inside Pepper something began to quiver.

  ‘I thought I saw it this morning.’

  ‘There’s more to the Master’s Lodging than a heritage staircase and a dodgy kitchen.’

  ‘I-Is there?’

  ‘Want to see?’ he murmured.

  Yes. No. I don’t know. Help!

  ‘Yes,’ she said, so loudly that they both jumped.

  His arm was suddenly a vice, nearly crushing her ribs. If it hadn’t been crazy, she would have said Steven was shaking, too.

  ‘Good.’ He led her to a small door in the side of the curved wall. A forest of scented blooms climbed over it but neither of them paused to savour the perfume. He produced a heavy iron key from his pocket and flung open the door with a flourish. ‘My house is your house.’

  Pepper went inside. She followed him upstairs to his untidy sitting room and looked round. Stone walls, flagstones, oak panelling. Books everywhere. It looked like a magician’s den in a secret castle.

  Oh, wow, she thought. Bring on the candlelight and log fires, we’re in for a Traditional English Seduction. Can I deal with this?

  She cleared her throat. Loudly. ‘I feel outclassed,’ she announced. It came out a lot more aggressive than she meant. It almost sounded like a challenge.

  Steven took it calmly, though. He touched her cheek briefly. ‘You’re not outclassed, sweetheart. You’re the most spectacular thing these old walls have seen in a long time.’

  ‘Spectacular!’ She was stunned.

  Steven’s smile tilted ruefully. ‘You’d better believe it.’

  Pepper shook her head, unable to believe it. ‘Wearing a vulgar tee shirt and leaves in my hair?’

  He laughed aloud. ‘Not just leaves.’

  He reached out and picked something off her head, then held his hand out to her.

  She looked at his palm. ‘Rose petals?’

  ‘Very romantic,’ said Steven with a straight face. ‘Goes well with the pollen on your nose.’

  Pepper jumped. ‘I haven’t,’ she said automatically.

  ‘Look.’

  He nodded towards an alcove and Pepper realised that there was an old mirror on the wall. It had a gilded baroque frame and a badly spotted surface. But it reflected a face back at her that bore all the grubbiness of a day in the meadow and an evening among cobwebby roses. Pepper licked a finger and ran it down her cheek. The result was a clear dust trail. She groaned.

  ‘What a mess I am.’

  ‘You’re enchanting,’ Steven said huskily.

  She shifted focus and saw that he was watching her in the spotty old mirror. Her eyes widened. He wants me, she thought. For the first time in her life she had no doubts about that at all.

  He touched her shoulder almost tentatively.

  Suddenly, blindingly, her body remembered her instant response to him on the plane. He had only had to touch her and the turbulence had started. It was the same now. Maybe it was because he was touching her. Maybe it was because it was so late that the shadowy beard was beginning to appear again and she remembered that raffish, dangerous look.

  Or maybe it was neither. Maybe it was the look in his eyes. In the mirror, it was somehow naked.

  Oh, yes, he wanted her all right. And I want him.

  Pepper stood straighter. She felt as if she had come to a point of no return: scared and yet somehow very calm.

  Steven said quietly, ‘I want you to stay.’

  ‘I know.’ She sounded very grown-up, thought Pepper, amazed. Inside she had never felt less grown-up in her life. Inside her thoughts were motoring frantically: I can deal with this. I have got to deal with this. Or spend the rest of my life wishing I had. But outwardly she was totally composed.

  Into her silence he said, ‘I know we haven’t spent a lot of time to
gether. All I can say is—I feel as if I’ve always known you.’

  Pepper drew a deep breath. She turned to face him.

  ‘Will you stay?’ It was oddly formal, almost like a vow.

  She swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  He took her by the hand and led her up the spiral staircase. Pepper went, outwardly assured, inwardly quaking.

  She wanted to make love with Steven. Of course she did. Heck, if he opened her purse he’d find the evidence that she’d even planned for it.

  All through this afternoon, under the golden willow, she had hardly been able to keep her hands off him. But now that it was going to happen—her mouth dried.

  Will I remember what to do? Oh, I still know what goes where, but what about all those secret little signs that people make? Oh, why didn’t I talk to Izzy properly this morning? Why did I just stick my nose in the air and say I wasn’t a virgin? As if that was all there was to worry about!

  And what on earth do you say?

  As if he could hear her thoughts, Steven tightened his fingers round hers.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ he said over his shoulder.

  For a moment Pepper almost dragged her hand away. Does he feel sorry for me? she thought, appalled.

  But then he said, ‘Staircases are always a risk,’ and she relaxed.

  Well, a little. She didn’t pull her hand away, anyway.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I bet more people have changed their mind on the stairs than anywhere else.’ He stopped and swung round. ‘Is this where you usually have second thoughts? Are you having them now?’

  Pepper bit her lip, not answering.

  ‘Oh, God, you are. I’ve messed this up, haven’t I?’

  Pepper searched his face. He looked desperately earnest. Not the laughing seducer any more. Just a man as confused as she was.

  ‘I should have carried you,’ he castigated himself. ‘That’s the only way to do it, isn’t it?’

  She thought, I could hurt this man badly.

  Aloud she said, ‘Carrying me would be a real passion-killer.’

  He was even more confused. ‘What?’

  ‘That little exercise problem we were talking about earlier, remember? I’m not a size to be carried. I like my men standing,’ said Pepper dryly. She went up a step. The staircase was so narrow that she had to crowd on the tread beside him. Their bodies touched everywhere.

  Steven groaned, his eyes closing involuntarily.

  Pepper held his head to receive her kiss. ‘Besides,’ she said huskily, ‘this has compensations.’

  And moved.

  She never remembered afterwards how they got up the rest of the staircase. She only knew that she stopped worrying about what she was supposed to say.

  Or do, for that matter. Steven left her in no doubt about that. He made love like a man inspired.

  At one point Pepper flung herself back on the covers—they had not actually made it into bed—and laughed until she choked.

  ‘You’re laughing at me?’ said Steven. ‘I’m hurt.’

  As he was kissing her stomach at the time, and showed no signs of being discouraged, Pepper did not take this very seriously.

  She ruffled his hair. ‘No, you’re not. You’re wonderful.’

  He raised his head at that and looked at her, all the way along her naked and indulged body. His eyes gleamed. ‘Why, thank you, ma’am,’ he drawled.

  She lay among the pillows and blew him a kiss. It was provocative. It was meant to be.

  He swung round and hauled himself up on his elbow, leaning over her with a curious expression.

  ‘I bet no woman ever laughed at Captain Blood,’ he complained.

  Pepper blinked. ‘Captain who?’

  ‘Never mind. What were you laughing at? Not my technique, I hope.’

  She was shaken by wicked laughter. ‘Yes, I was, in a way.’

  He caught her wrist as she went to stroke his face and held it pinned above her head.

  ‘Madam, you mock me at your peril,’ he growled. ‘Which way?’

  ‘I remembered you telling me you were just a boring chemist,’ she teased. ‘Boring! In your dreams!’

  ‘You inspire me,’ he said, mock solemn.

  He leaned in closer, touching his mouth to her nose, her cheekbones, her closing eyelids, her mouth.

  Her mouth…

  Pepper convulsed. She dragged him down to her, beyond talk, beyond laughter, beyond even that golden gentleness that moved her to the edge of tears. Suddenly she could not wait any longer. There was a new road ahead of her. She had to set out now.

  ‘Touch me,’ she ground out. It was a voice she did not recognise.

  The road took her to a place she had not been before. She had not known it was possible to feel so focused, so utterly concentrated.

  So powerful.

  Or so loved.

  They say that after earthquakes, when everything has settled into its new landscape, there is total silence. The thought came to Pepper as, later, they lay satiated and unmoving. Everything felt new, all right, from her brain out. And in that new silence she made a discovery.

  I love you, she said to him in her head, as he lay collapsed across her in the aftermath.

  But she did not say it aloud. And, as for Steven, he seemed beyond speech.

  She did not know how long they lay like that in each other’s arms. Eventually Steven got up. Left alone, Pepper came out of her trance. She got up, too, and padded among their scattered clothes, looking for a tee shirt.

  She looked around the shadowed room. The bed looked naked. The dark green sheet was wildly creased and coming away from the corner.

  ‘That bed is a wreck,’ said Steven complacently.

  He came up behind her and clipped her body back against his. She could not believe the warmth of him, the strength of the arm round her. She felt his breath in her hair and realised he was laughing again.

  It was not hard to see why.

  The bed was indeed a wreck. There were no pillows left on it. The coverlet had slid off into a heap on the floor. The oversheet was a twisted rope in the corner. Pepper remembered—she thought she remembered—kicking it away in a surge of impatience as she writhed about him, reaching to be closer, and ever closer. Or was it Steven who had kicked the sheet off the bed in that final moment of ecstasy?

  I don’t where he ends and I begin, she thought. It startled her.

  He stroked her breast absently. ‘Cold?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you shivered,’ he said on a faint note of query.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You all right, sweetheart?’

  She put both hands over his protecting arm, hugging him. ‘I’m great.’

  ‘Seconded.’ His voice was full of tender amusement.

  Pepper leaned her head back against his naked shoulder. She could feel his heart under her cheek. It was steady as the pulse of the universe.

  She thought, I’m home.

  Quite suddenly, she knew without question that she belonged with this man. Pepper was awed. She had never felt that before. Never even imagined feeling it.

  It felt as if she had put down a burden she did not know she had been carrying. She was free! She gave a little shiver of amazed delight.

  His arms tightened. ‘You are cold. Wrap yourself in that while I make us a bed fit to sleep on.’

  She found an old robe dropped round her shoulders. She sank down onto an oak chest and watched while he straightened the sheet, pounded the pillows back into shape and flung them back into place, unwound the oversheet and restored it and the coverlet.

  ‘Very domestic,’ she teased, glowing with love.

  He kissed her shoulder as he passed. ‘Oh, I’m not just a pretty face.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  He chuckled. ‘Good.’

  He worked with swift efficiency. As if he had done exactly this many times before.

  Pepper clutched the robe closer.


  Careful, she told herself. Of course he has done this before. That has nothing to do with you. But she felt a little colder.

  She was spiralling back down to earth and she didn’t want to. She watched the bunch and release of muscles in his back as he worked and thought, He is really, really fantastic without his clothes. No wonder Jemima said he was gorgeous. He is.

  Gorgeous. And all those other women who have sat here watching him were probably gorgeous, too. She pulled the robe tighter.

  It took about a minute to get the bed straight. And to send Pepper into silent terror. By the time Steven got her back into bed her head had managed to detach itself from her hated body and was somewhere on the outer edge of the galaxy and travelling fast.

  He did not pick up the widening distance between them, it seemed. He tucked her competently into the crook of his arm and settled himself down to sleep.

  ‘Comfortable?’

  ‘Very, thank you,’ said Pepper politely. She was lying in her teeth.

  He did not realise that either. ‘Good.’

  She felt him fall asleep beside her. His breathing slowed. Then his sheltering arm slackened and fell away.

  Pepper waited a moment and then, very carefully, eased away from him. She was horribly awake. Comfortable? How on earth was she supposed to be comfortable? She was a potato, taking up too much room in a strange bed. He would never have taken a potato to bed before. However kind and funny Steven Konig was, there was no way she could get round that.

  She was the woman who’d had to have a social life organised by her rich family; the wallflower at the high school prom; the businesswoman without a heart. And the sooner she got back where she belonged the better! Before she started to build too much on Steven Konig’s spellbinding courtesy in bed. Or his kindness. If she let herself believe it was more than kindness, she might just end up breaking her heart.

  Pepper’s eyes ached with staring at the darkness. But she did not cry. She might wake him up if she cried, and she did not think she could bear that. So she kept her mind grimly on track on its outward journey from paradise. By the morning she had reached deep space.

  Steven did not realise it. He wandered around the bedroom chatting as if they had woken up together hundreds of times before. His whole manner said, This is no big deal.