on the very last day of his visit, he said carelessly at breakfast, ‘Since it’s my last night here tonight, David, why don’t the three of us go out somewhere together?’
At first she was too paralysed to say a word. It was like a dream coming true. Tom was taking her out. Rosily her mind blotted out the fact that David would be with them, too, and that until now her hero had barely addressed more than a single word to her.
It was arranged that the three of them would go to a local barn dance that was held every week, and for the rest of the morning Gemma walked round in a state of ecstatic bliss.
It was only over lunch, which she and her mother ate alone, that reality intruded.
‘I don’t know what on earth you’re going to wear tonight,’ her mother fussed. ‘You haven’t got anything to go out dancing in, really, apart from the dress you had for Christmas.’
The dress in question was fussy and little girlish and Gemma hated it, but her mother was right, there was nothing else she could wear. She had spent the summer in jeans and shorts, refusing to go shopping with her mother when asked, and now she had no alternative but to wear the hated pink frills.
And as the afternoon wore on, that wasn’t the only thing to torment her. Suppose when they were out that Tom did want to kiss her? She had learned from the girls at school that a goodnight kiss at the end of a date was very much the expected thing. From glowing anticipation she went to abject dread. As much as she longed to feel Tom’s mouth on hers, she also feared it. How awful it would be if he turned away from her in disgust, or worse still laughed at her. What on earth was she going to do?
The afternoon stretched endlessly in front of her, and she was glad to be meeting Luke; talking to him would give her something to occupy her mind.
He had been swimming, she saw when she reached the clearing. His jeans were splodged a darker blue where his skin had dampened them. They clung to his body in a way that made her aware of how much taller and stronger than either David or Tom he was.
The companionable silence they normally shared was missing today; she felt tense and on edge, barely aware of what he was saying to her, until, at last, he placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him.
‘Something’s wrong with you, Gemma. Why don’t you tell me what it is?’
She looked up at him uncertainly, blushing and then hanging her head.
‘Is it me? Have I said something to upset you? Have I?’
She shook her head. ‘No … no, it’s nothing like that.’ She looked at him and suddenly a solution to all her problems came to her. Relief spread through her, melting away her fear and tension.
She reached towards him instinctively, her hand on the warm, bare flesh of his arm.
‘Oh, Luke, you’ve got to help me … please …’
‘If I can.’
She saw him frown and was aware of the faint hesitation in his voice, and her courage almost deserted her. She took a deep breath and faced him bravely. ‘Luke … would you … could you teach me how to kiss?’
She could almost feel the shock that ran through him and closed her eyes against the shamed surge of humiliation that coloured her skin. In Luke’s company she had managed to forget that she was too tall and unfeminine, but now in his strained silence she saw all too plainly how little Luke or anyone else would want to kiss a girl like her. Of course Tom wasn’t attracted to her. How could he be? Hadn’t her mother told her often enough how plain she was?
Tears spurted into her eyes before she could stop them. She felt them squeezing through her tightly closed eyelids and splashing down on to her hot cheeks, but as she raised a clenched hand to rub them away, Luke caught hold of her.
‘Stop crying, little one. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ His voice was rough and yet soft at the same time, and her tears turned to a strangled hiccup of laughter in her throat at the thought of anyone describing her as ‘little’, although compared with Luke’s tall, heavy frame she supposed she was.
‘Why this sudden desire to know how to kiss?’ he asked her gently, but underneath his gentleness Gemma was aware of a certain tension within him, a slight withdrawal from her that she could sense but not explain.
One of his hands cupped the side of her face, his thumb wiping the tear stains from her skin.
‘There’ll be plenty of time for you to learn things like that.’
‘No, there won’t. Tom’s leaving tomorrow morning.’
The mournful words made Luke frown at her, the comforting movement of his thumb ceasing. It struck her suddenly that there was something extraordinarily pleasant about having him touch her. Her father was not a physically affectionate man, and she had never particularly wanted his touch, but now she had an inexplicable desire to move closer to Luke and to be held within the comfort of his arms.
‘Tom? Who’s Tom?’ he asked her sharply, dispelling her mood.
‘He’s a friend of my brother’s. He’s staying with us. The three of us are going out tonight, to a barn dance at Winston.’
She looked up just in time to catch the smile that curled Luke’s mouth. There was an expression on his face that she didn’t recognise. It made her shiver as though she had suddenly gone cold.
‘And it’s this Tom you really want to kiss you, is that it?’ His mouth twisted, the dark blue eyes no longer smiling at her, but frighteningly hard. ‘Then he’s the one you should be asking for lessons, not me.’
He made to get up, and Gemma knew instinctively that he was going to leave. She had made him angry, and that was the last thing she wanted to do. She could feel fresh tears clogging her throat, and she reached up blindly, tugging on his arm.
‘No. Please, Luke, you don’t understand. If Tom kisses me, he’ll know that I’ve never done it before. He’ll laugh at me …’ She shivered as he stopped trying to move away and instead looked down into her eyes.
‘I know that I’m not … not pretty, or anything … and you don’t have to kiss me if you really don’t want to … but … but …’ She was struggling against a fresh wave of misery, stumbling over the words as she fought against her fear that she had somehow angered him and might lose his friendship, and her need to explain to him just how much she needed his help.
Without being able to explain why, she knew instinctively that when it came to kissing Luke would know exactly what to do. What he did when he left her in the evenings, and where he went when he wasn’t working, was something they never discussed, but with an age-old female intuition that her body recognised, even if her mind could not yet do so, deep down inside Gemma knew that Luke was a man who would appeal to her sex.
‘No, you’re not pretty.’ He said it roughly, as though something had got stuck in his throat, and when she looked up at him in hurt misery, he veiled his eyes with his lashes. They were dark and very thick, casting shadows on the deep bronze of his skin. He smelled of fresh air and growing things, of sunshine, and something else she couldn’t define but that she liked, Gemma recognised as he moved slightly towards her.
His hands curved round her upper arms, his fingers pressing against their bare flesh. He had touched her like this several times before, but now she knew immediately that this was different.
‘All right, little girl, if this is really what you want.’ They were both sitting down, but now Luke was leaning towards her, blotting out the sunlight. He wasn’t wearing a shirt because he had been swimming, and he was so close to her that she could feel the heat of the sun coming off his skin.
His hands moved up her arms, his thumbs probing the firmness of her shoulders beneath the thin covering of her T-shirt.
For some reason her heart had started to pound heavily, and she couldn’t drag her gaze away from his face. He looked different somehow, not the Luke she