As she heard the trembling stammer in her own voice Dee cursed herself mentally. Damn! Damn! Did she have to act like an awestruck seventeen-year-old? Did she have to betray…?
She stopped speaking as Hugo started to shake his head warningly at her. He pushed open the old-fashioned front-parlour door and indicated that she was to go in.
Obediently Dee did so. She was still in shock, still grappling to come to terms with his unexpected presence. It was years since she had last seen him.
When they had first met he had been a graduate whilst she had still been a first year student. He had been working towards his Ph.D., a tall, quixotically romantic figure with whom all her fellow female students had seemed to be more than half in love. Even in a crowd as diverse and individual as his peers had been, Hugo had immediately stood out—literally so. At six foot three he had easily been one of the tallest and, it had to be said, one of the best-looking men on the campus, so strikingly and malely attractive that he would have automatically merited a second and a third look from any woman, even without his signature mane of shoulder-length thick dark hair.
Add to the attributes of his height and male physique—tautly muscled from playing several sports—the additional allure of shockingly sensual aquamarine eyes and a mouth with the kind of bottom lip that just automatically made a woman know how good it would be to be kissed by him, and it was no wonder that Hugo had been the openly discussed subject of nearly every female undergraduate’s not-so-secret fantasies.
Dee had quite literally run into him as he was rushing to one of Peter’s meetings one day.
Dee, who had heard about Hugo from the female grapevine, and who had glimpsed him to heart-stopping effect in and around the campus, had been astounded to discover that Hugo was a leading activist in Peter’s small army of idealists and helpers.
‘What do you mean, what am I doing here?’ Hugo was challenging her now curtly. ‘Peter and I go back a long way and—’
‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ Dee acknowledged. ‘I just thought…’
She was in shock; she knew that. Her body felt icy cold, and yet at the same time as sticky and uncomfortable as though she was drenched in perspiration. Her heart was hammering frantically to a disjointed and dangerously discordant rhythm, and she suspected that she was actually in danger of hyperventilating as she tried to force some air into her tense lungs.
‘You just thought what?’ Hugo demanded tauntingly. ‘That I was still carrying a torch for you? That I just couldn’t go on living without you any longer…that my feelings for you, my love for you, was so strong that I just had to come looking for you…?’
Dee blenched beneath the witheringly sardonic tone of his voice. Was it really unbearably cold in this room or was it her…? She could feel herself starting to tremble. Only inwardly and invisibly at first, and then with increasing intensity until…
‘How are your husband and your daughter?’ Hugo asked her with obvious indifference. ‘She must be…how old now…nine…?’
Dee stared at him. Her husband…her daughter…What husband…what daughter…?
Someone was knocking on Peter’s front door.
‘That will be the doctor,’ Hugo announced before she could gather her confused thoughts and correct his misapprehensions.
‘The doctor…?’
‘Yes, Peter is very poorly. Excuse me, I’ll go and let her in.’
Her! Peter’s normal doctor wasn’t a woman!
As she stood to one side a very attractive, cold-eyed brunette walked through the door towards Hugo, saying, ‘Ah, Mr Montpelier. I’m Dr Jane Harper; we spoke on the phone.’
‘We certainly did,’ Hugo agreed, with far more warmth in his voice than there had been when he’d spoken to her, Dee noticed, digesting the unwanted recognition that knowledge brought as uncomfortably as though it had been a particularly unwelcome piece of food.
‘Please, come this way,’ Hugo was inviting the doctor, and she was smiling at him as though…
Angrily Dee swallowed down her own unpalatable thoughts.
CHAPTER TWO
PETER was very poorly. She had known he wasn’t well, of course, and had been getting increasingly concerned about him, but to hear Hugo describing him as ‘very poorly’ had come as an unpleasant shock to her. Anxiously Dee followed Hugo down the narrow hallway. She had seen the female appreciation in the other woman’s eyes as Hugo had let her in, even if it had been quickly masked by her professionalism as she’d asked quickly after her patient.
She herself was quite obviously an unwanted third, Dee recognised as Hugo outlined Peter’s symptoms to the doctor and she listened intently to him, positioning herself so that Dee was blocked out of Hugo’s line of vision. Not that she minded that. She was still trying to come to terms with the shock of his totally unexpected presence.
The last time she had seen him he had been a rangy young man dressed in tee shirt and jeans, his wild mane of hair curling youthfully round his face. Initially his reputation as something of a rebel had caused Dee’s father to be a little bit disapproving of him, but even her father could not have found fault with the appearance he presented now, Dee acknowledged as his absorption with the doctor gave her the opportunity to study him surreptitiously. The tee shirt and jeans had been exchanged for a smartly tailored business suit, and the dark hair was no longer shoulder-length but clipped neatly to his head, but the bone structure was still the same, and so were the aquamarine eyes and that dangerously sexy mouth. Dee’s heart gave a dangerous little flutter—and that was something else which did not appear to have changed either!
Anxious to distract herself, as well as concerned for Peter, she started to walk towards the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ Hugo demanded, breaking off his quiet conversation with the doctor.
‘I thought I’d go up and see Peter…’ Dee began, but immediately both the doctor and Hugo began to shake their heads in denial.
Feeling thoroughly chastised, Dee tried to conceal her chagrin.
‘I’d better go up and see him,’ the doctor was saying to Hugo.
‘Yes. I’ll come with you,’ he agreed.
Both of them were totally ignoring Dee. To suffer such ignominy was a totally unfamiliar experience for her, and not one she was enjoying, but there was no way she intended to leave—not until she had discovered how Peter was.
It was ten minutes before the doctor and Hugo came back downstairs, and Dee’s anxiety for Peter overcame her outraged pride enough for her to ask quickly as they walked into the room, ‘How is he? What’s wrong with him? Will…?’
‘He’s got a weak heart and he’s been overdoing things,’ the doctor told her matter-of-factly. ‘Trying to move some books, apparently. He really shouldn’t be living on his own, not at his age. He ought to be living in some kind of sheltered accommodation since he doesn’t appear to have any family, and in view of his recent operation.’
‘Oh, no, that would be the last thing he would want…’ Dee began to protest. but the doctor was already turning away from her.
‘He was fortunate that you were here when he collapsed and that you knew what to do,’ she said warmly to Hugo. ‘If he’d continued to try to lift those books…’ She stopped, and Dee told herself sternly that she was being unfair in thinking that what Hugo had done was quite simply what any person with any sense would have done, and scarcely seemed to warrant his elevation to the rank of a super-hero as the doctor seemed to suggest.
‘I’ll make some arrangements with the social services for some home help for him,’ the doctor told Hugo, once again totally excluding Dee from the conversation.
‘Oh,’