‘You’re looking very serious, something on your mind? Second thoughts about spending the day with me perhaps?’
Somer glanced in shocked response into Chase’s shuttered face. His sunglasses hid his expression from her, her heart pounding in frightened reaction to his astute perception.
‘No…’
‘You don’t sound very sure. Don’t worry about it, whatever you might have heard to the contrary, I don’t go in for rape. I don’t need to,’ he told her wryly, ‘and now that we’ve got that out of the way how about telling me what you’re doing here on holiday alone.’
‘I…I was going to come with my boyfriend, but…but we had a row and…’
‘And now you’re looking for a substitute,’ he suggested drily. ‘Well why not? Strange, from the tragic look on your face earlier this morning, I thought the roof had fallen in on you at least. You looked like a tormented lost kitten whom someone had kicked once too often,’ he mocked, smiling into her pale, stunned face.
‘You felt sorry for me?’ Somer blurted out. ‘Is that why…’
‘I let you pick me up?’ he offered, smiling sardonically at her. ‘Not entirely, I’m no altruist. If you’d been forty and plain I dare say I wouldn’t have felt anything like as sympathetic. I suppose I should have guessed it was all down to some man. You’re just the right age for emotional hysterics, aren’t you? How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’ She didn’t even consider lying, but flinched when his fingers tightened momentarily on the steering wheel and he murmured mock piously, ‘Dear God, as young as that. I’m twenty-eight—a whole generation older—or are you going to tell me you prefer older men?’
‘My tastes are pretty catholic,’ Somer retorted, her chin jutting defiantly under his mockery. ‘In everything.’
There was a moment’s silence, and when he glanced at her again there was no humour etched against the curling mouth, only a grim appreciation of her closing remark.
‘Is that so?’ he drawled. ‘Well then it looks like we’re going to have an enlightening day. I would have thought that eighteen wasn’t old enough to have tasted all the pleasures life has to offer, but it seems that I’m wrong, and a girl like you wouldn’t be short of tutors. That pseudo air of innocence must have deceived more than one member of my sex in the past. How many lovers have you had, just as a matter of interest, or don’t you bother to count any longer?’
Half appalled by the direction the conversation had taken, Somer reminded herself that to tell the truth at this stage would probably wreck all her plans. Her mouth opened and almost without her having to think about it, she was saying flippantly, ‘Why do you want to know? Are you hoping to become one of them?’ She had a moment in which to be horrified by the cheap provocation of her remark and then Chase was saying smoothly, ‘So that’s your game, is it? Well, time alone will tell, won’t it? You know the odds better than I do, and you’ve got all day to persuade me that it might be worth my while, haven’t you?’
‘Turn right here,’ Somer interrupted shakily. The conversation had taken a turn she had never envisaged, but surely the fates were playing into her hands once again in allowing her to deceive Chase Lorimer into believing that she was sexually experienced, and that by inviting herself to spend the day with him, she was inviting him to make love to her?
But for how long could she continue to deceive him? Cold reality intruded. Surely he would know the minute he touched her that she had been lying? Was she trying to give herself an excuse to back out again, the voice of her MacDonald pride demanded relentlessly. Didn’t she have the guts to go through with it?
They were driving down a narrow country lane, empty of traffic, a dazzling blue carpet melting into the horizon in the distance.
Directing Chase from memory, Somer heaved a faint sigh of relief when they turned into the small car park at the top of the cliff. The path she remembered was indicated by a small gate in the perimeter of the dusty clifftop.
‘Just how steep is this path?’ Chase asked when they were out of the car.
‘Very,’ Somer told him.
‘Umm, then I’d better make two journeys. I don’t want to risk damaging my camera, but at least we should have the place to ourselves, if it’s as inaccessible as all that. Not the spot to take the kids, I take it?’
‘Not unless they’re the four-legged variety,’ Somer responded humorously, catching the mobile lift of his eyebrows as Chase registered her comment.
‘A sense of humour as well. My, my, things are looking up. Can you manage your own stuff, or…?’
‘I can manage it.’
‘Ah yes, I forgot you’re a product of a new generation aren’t you; a girl who probably imbibed liberation with her mother’s milk. Just as a matter of interest, what do your parents think of your present life-style?’
‘My mother’s dead,’ Somer said shortly, ‘and my father…’
‘Is an ex-sixties hippy who approves of free love and has brought up his daughter to share his views. Well, who am I to complain?’ He shrugged broad shoulders and went to the boot of the car, levering it open.
‘Here you are. You can start down if you like, I’ll get my stuff together. Gorgeous day,’ he added, stretching with the same languorous movement she had noticed the previous day. ‘You’ll have to watch that skin of yours. You’ll find a bad case of sunburn will cramp your style very effectively.’
Her face flushed, Somer grabbed her bag from him and headed for the cliff. The hot weather had dried out the path, clouds of dust and small pebbles were disturbed by her steady progression downwards. Several times she had to grab hold of tussocks of grass to prevent herself from falling and when she eventually reached the small cove Somer let out a sigh of relief.
The cove was every bit as attractive as she remembered, guarded on three sides by the cliffs and on the fourth by the sea. There was no one else in sight, the sand smooth and unmarked, the tide lapping gently at the soft golden sand. Slipping off her mules Somer let her toes curl luxuriously into the sun-warmed fine grains, feeling the tension ease out of her as she breathed in the clear, fresh air, only to tense up again as she heard sounds of movement behind her, and turned just in time to see Chase depositing several pieces of equipment on a small tarpaulin behind her.
‘Umm, we really have got the place to ourselves, haven’t we,’ he commented as he headed back for the path. ‘I shan’t be long—why don’t you make yourself comfortable while I’m gone?’ he mocked her. ‘I’m sure a freethinking, modern liberationist like yourself feels more at home on the nudist beaches of the continental holiday resorts than the family ones of Jersey, but no one’s going to see you if you strip off here. I might even join you.’
With his last threat ringing in her ears, Somer turned her back on him, leaving him to return to his car while she wandered over to the tide-line, watching the small waves lapping at the sand, gradually receding as the tide went out.
By the time Chase finally returned from his second journey, her nerves were coiled as tightly as an overwound spring and she was bitterly regretting her foolhardiness in coming with him, but something stronger than her fear, stronger than her natural reluctance to experiment with what every instinct told her should be a beautiful and precious moment in her life, not something done in anger and a mood of bitter resentment, overrode everything else, urging her to stick to her original plan drowning out all he other warning voices clamouring for attention, telling her that she must seize the moment and make the most of it.
Almost defiantly she retraced her footsteps along the beach, coming to a standstill several feet away from Chase’s equipment. He was standing with his back to her, opening a zipped bag from which he removed a towel, dropping it on the beach, and then glancing at his watch. ‘I can’t do any work for a couple of hours yet, the angle of the