And No Regrets (24 page)

He was gone. Slowly she subsided into the pillow, filled with an inarticulate misery. Her tears had formed into a hard lump in her throat, so there was no relief to be found in weeping.

Next morning the crowd turned out in strength to speed her departure. A space on deck had been cleared and a table with drinks set against the rail. A dapper little skipper informed them that they had fifteen minutes in which to make their adieux.

“Help yourself to drinks,” said Ross. “I’m going forward to see what they’ve made of the cabin.”

He was holding Clare’s arm, pushing her firmly in front of him. It was a cabin for two, and Clare guessed
at once that Ross must have paid well for it. Not luxurious, for the boat, which would pick up more cargo and passengers at Lagos, was hardly a cruiser. “Well, there isn’t much more to say except goodbye,” Clare said quietly. She was facing him, looking up into his darkened eyes.

There came between them the whiff of tropical flowers on a wall table, a mass of them, certainly not provided by the shipping line. “Thank y
o
u for those,” she smiled. “And for bringing me out here. You’ve been a marvellous companion.
I ...
hope you get that plantation you want
.
”

“Shut up, for heaven’s sake.” He spoke roughly.
“
You’ll have me in tears.”

“That would be something to see.” She held out her hand, but he didn’t take it, and she let it fall back to her side, to clench on the material of her dress.

“I can hear the skipper clearing the decks.” Ross backed to the cabin doorway. “Maybe I’ll see you again, Clare.”

“Maybe.” The tears were breaking up inside her, and if he didn’t go quickly she would make a fool of herself in front of him. “Hurry, Ross, or they’ll be pulling up the gangplank. I—I can feel the engine throbbing—” He gripped her then, gazed down hard and long into her thin, gallantly smiling face. He muttered something—maybe goodbye—then turned and strode out of the door, banging it shut behind him.

Clare stood very still; hammer-strokes seemed to be directed at the soles of her feet, driving nails that would fix her to this spot for ever, gazing with tear-blinded eyes at the door out of which he had walked without a backward glance. The vessel was moving
... and then she moved, to one of the beds, where she sank down as though her legs were no longer capable of supporting her. It was all over, her dream of winning his heart, and holding him for always as a real and loving hus
band. Her
h
and gripped the bed-cover, her slim body was racked by a long, dry sob.

Had she really said that it was Don Carter whom she wanted? What an actress she had become, if her eyes had not revealed the true state of her heart to Ross.

Lying there as the packet boat steamed on its
way, the cabin redolent of the s
cent of his flowers, Clare took no heed of time. It could have been hours later—though it wasn’t—when knuckles rapped her cabin door and someone came in. “I—is that you, steward?” Clare did not look round. “Could you bring me some tea, please?” The cabin door closed, and then she sat up, pushing the tumbled hair from her wet eyes and turning to slide off the bed. She never completed the action.
H
er heart turned over, there was a thundering in her ears, the walls bent inwards then righted themselves
... Ross stood with his back to the door. “You?” she whispered. “You—Ross?”

“Am I such a painful surprise, honey?” he asked quietly.

She couldn’t answer, she could only gaze at him as though her dazed mind and her hungry heart had made him materialise. And then he moved, a tall, white-clad figure coming closer all the time. She caught her breath, and realised that he was no figme
n
t of a dream. “Didn’t you have time to get off the boat?” she whispered.

“Ample time, honey. I didn’t want to get off
... had no intention of doing so. I booked for the passage to Lagos.”

“Of course.” Her eyes dulled over again. “Patsy’s there, waiting for you.”

“Darn Patsy
!
” he said explosively. “If you throw that creature in my face once more, Clare, I swear I won’t be responsible for what I do.”

As his words sank into Clare’s mind, she gazed at him disbelievingly. He had called Patsy a—creature
!
“S
top looking at me as though I’m a ghost,” he
growled, and suddenly he was sitting beside her on the bed, vital and very
real.
“If I tell you, honey, that Patsy Harriman couldn’t be your successor in a million years, will you say the same about Carter?”

“Is this a game?” she asked, like a bewildered child.

“A game that turned into something I wasn’t prepared for.” Still he quizzed her but did not touch her. “Which pawn shall I move first, Clare—the one named Patsy?”

Her teeth clenched together. She nodded.

“Patsy’s an orchid on a wilting stem,” he began. “A type doomed to make a hash of her life, but right from my college days I’ve had a tendency to get mixed up in some way with her sort—I don’t mean romantically, Clare.
I
mean that I feel sorry for them, that I can’t resist their appeals for help. Do you know what I’m
getting at?”

“Not quite.” Clare shook her head, still dazed by his very presence here beside her.

“Patsy Harriman is suicidal,” he said bluntly. “I roomed with a guy like that when I was at college. He got mixed up with a girl from a sweetshop in the town, had her back to our room when I wasn’t about. It slipped out, as it always does, that a girl had been seen coming and going to and from our room, and Pat—”

“Pat!” Clare exclaimed.

“Pat Raymond, charming but weak as water. His family wasn’t all that well off and they had worked hard so he could take his degree. Expulsion from the college was something he just couldn’t face, and he threatened to take a boat on the weir and not come back. He meant it, his emotional sort always do. So I let it be thought that I had been entertaining the girl, and I got sent down. My father,” Ross looked his old cynical self for a moment, “wasn’t at all pleased. Nothing I did ever pleased him very much, I’m afraid.”

“So that was the Pat you were mumbling about in your delirium,” Clare said, and her eyes were really beginning to shine as she sat looking at him. “Pat was a man, after all.”

“What delirium?” Now it was Ross’s turn to look bewildered.

“Oh—you weren’t supposed to know.” She gave him a guilty smile. “I—I came into your room and looked after you, that time you had fever at Bula. You didn’t remember—and you kept mumbling about this Pat, and I thought—well,
she
had been writing to you—”

“I said she could, Clare.” Now he took hold of her hands and held them tightly. “Her marriage wasn’t working out, and I said she could write to me every time she felt—despondent. Clare,” she saw the white glimmer of his teeth,
“
did you think those pink epistles were tokens of a violent love?”

“D-don’t mock me—” she tried to pull away from, him, but it was quite impossible, for now he was gripping her by the elbows. “Ross, what are you doing here? We made a clean break, now we’ll have to go all through i
t
again at Lagos.”

“I—hope not,” he said deliberately. “Why did you look after me when I had fever?”

“Humane reasons—I wouldn’t see a dog suffer—”

“Why were you so jealous of Patsy?” His voice soft-stroked her.

“I—I was your wife—”

‘You’re still my wife.”

Something in his tone—something she had never heard before—made her pulses race. “You—you might, have told me the truth about Patsy at Bula,” she said shakily.

“I was using her as a sort of last defence against your invasion, Clare,” he said deliberately. “Someone once said that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. That was me till
I met you—and even afterwards, for a long time. Then without doing a thing, you got to work on me—”

His voice went on, soft yet crisp. With the months her influence had gained strength. He’d half expected it, living with a woman in that environment, but had been unprepared for the sudden shock of finding himself not merely fond of her, but desperately in love with her. Did she remember the night he had gone out after the leopard?

“Yes,” she whispered.

“That was it,” he said laconically.

Well, the fires had gone on leaping, but he hadn’t trusted them. Common sense told him that their aloneness together in the bush had caused attraction to spark. He was determined to believe it just an attraction.

“We didn’t question each other, you and I,” he said. “Neither did we ever admit, in words, to any deeper emotion than liking. I thought it better to let that situation go on—for your sake.”

“For my sake?” She raised her head and looked
at him with big, wet eyes that were just beginning to believe all this. “You thought it wrong to keep me with you in the bush?”

“You’ll never know the hell I’ve been through,” he spoke through gritted teeth, “watching you grow thinner, hearing that time that you’d fought a fever all alone—”

“Ross,” sh
e
put a hand against his cheek, “anywhere with you would be heaven, and if I looked as though I was pining, it was because you were sending me away when with every particle of my heart I wanted to stay.”

He lifted his own hand and pressed it over hers, then drew it round until her palm was under his
w
arm lips. “I really t
h
ought I could let you go, until you started talking about going home to England with Carter. My arrogance couldn’t support that.”
He
gave
a
short
laugh, and his breath fanned warm against her arm. “You’re my wife and I’ll live in a cottage in a rustic English village, if you want that, Clare.”

“Such a setting wouldn’t suit you at all, Ross.”

“But if it’s what you want—” His face had a wrenched look that tore furiously at her heart. “It’s what
you
want, honey, that counts.”

“I want you,” she said very simply. “I’ve never
w
anted anything else but you....”

And then she drew back a little, unready for the sudden blaze of love in his eyes, the unleashed love of a very masculine male. “You still don’t know everything about me, Clare,” he spoke passionately. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever known myself. I’m sure of this, though—” she felt his sudden ferocious grip on her hands, “I might well kill the next man who so much a
s
looks at you.”

For a long moment the threat seemed to hang vibrant in the air. A dark tress of hair had fallen forward over her eyes and he pushed it back, letting his fingers linger and slowly move round to the nape of her neck. “Clare,” his voice had grown raw, “I want to take you right inside where I live, if you can bear that?”

She nodded. She was no longer afraid of anything. “Oh, Ross,” she said, and was suddenly swept hard and close to him, to suffer the fierce possessiveness of his arms, and the hard, sweet strength of his kisses.

“I love you, Clare.” He spoke it against her eyes. “I want to keep saying it, over and over. I love you.” Sweet music to which she could have listened for ever
.
.. let it never fade or die.

“Take a good long look at me,” he smiled wryly and held her a little away from him. “I inhabit this body no longer. It has been taken over by a dark little slip of a thing
...
a rather beautiful slip of a thing, I might add.”

He stared down into her eyes, his own eyes merciless with love. Then she smiled, her hands tightened on his shoulders, and the scent
of his flowers was all about them as the boat steamed on towards Lagos
... where they would both disembark for Bula. Three wonderful honeymoon months at Bula, then the world was theirs.