Power Play. PENNY JORDAN
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was laughing now, grinning ruefully as he brushed himself down.
“Damn! I think I’ve twisted my front wheel. That’ll teach me to look at pretty girls!” He moved and then winced, taking his weight off his left foot. “I seem to have twisted my ankle as well. My rooms aren’t far from here…If you give me a hand I should be able to make it to them without too much difficulty.”
At any other time Rachel would have found his assumption that she would automatically agree to help him off putting, but for some reason she found herself responding to his smile and walking towards him.
“If I could just put my arm round your shoulders…”
His arm was muscular but thin, and she could smell the scent of his body mingling with the oily odour of wool from his sweater. He smiled at her, his teeth white in the tanned darkness of his face. For some reason she almost wanted to reach out and touch him. Shocked by her own reaction, Rachel dragged her gaze away.
He was like no other boy or man she had ever known. There was an aura about him that she could feel herself responding to. She looked at his hand, cupped round the ball of her shoulder. His fingers were long, the nails well cared for.
“Cat got your tongue?” he demanded with another grin.
Rachel shook her head. He was going to make her late for work, but recklessly she didn’t care.
He said it was only a little way to his rooms, but in actual fact it was half a mile. Rachel gazed up in reverence at the ancient buildings of his college. She had explored them all during the summer recess, combining her walks through their hallowed grounds with knowledge she had gained from the books she had borrowed from the library. It had been the publican’s wife who had come to the rescue and shown her how to join the library, and now she touched the weathered stone as they rounded the corner of the building and entered the enclosed quadrangle.
“Tom Quad,” her companion told her cheerfully, glancing sideways at her.
Rachel only smiled. She knew all about the history of Christ Church College; that it had first been commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey, four years before he fell from Henry VIII’s grace. Christopher Wren had added the Tower over Wolsey’s gate, in 1682, and Rachel glanced up towards it automatically, just as Great Tom, the bell, tolled its curfew.
“Bang on time as usual! Come on, my rooms are up here.”
His weight was beginning to make her shoulder ache, but it never occurred to Rachel to refuse to go with him. During the summer recess she had learned to parry the flirtatious remarks of the pub’s patrons, but both Bernadette and the landlord’s wife had warned her that Oxford’s students could be remarkably persistent.
“You’d think they’d have better things to do with their time than spending it trying to get you into bed with them,” Bernadette sniffed disdainfully.
It was from Bernadette and the other girls at the hotel that Rachel had gradually learned to be a little more worldly. Now when she worked she often hummed the latest pop tune. She wore make-up—something her grandmother had always disapproved of, and she was gradually adopting the manners and fashions of her peers.
For the first time in her life she felt that she was actually accepted on equal terms with her peers, and she liked that feeling, but Rachel was by nature cautious. When the other girls disappeared for the evening with flurried giggles, and didn’t appear until the following morning, Rachel listened to their whispered confidences about the boys they had been out with, but when anyone tried to date her she kept them firmly at bay. She wasn’t interested in boyfriends and romance; there wasn’t time in her life for them. She had so much to do; coming to Oxford had opened her eyes to all that was missing from her life.
These students who flocked through Oxford’s streets would one day go out into the world and become people of eminence, secure and respected. The bitterness of her childhood haunted her and Rachel was determined to make herself inviolate. The only way she could do that was by achieving financial security.
She had a quick intelligence and had soon realised that she could never be content with the goals Bernadette and the other girls set themselves. They were happy to drift from day to day, spending their wages on new clothes, dating a different boy every night. They were like the poppies that bloomed in the cornfields in the summer, Rachel thought wryly—pretty and giddy, blowing this way and then that at the will of the wind, but once summer was gone they wilted and died; they could not survive without the sun, without warmth.
“Think you can get me up the stairs?”
Rachel frowned and looked consideringly at him. He wasn’t the first student who had shown an interest in her, and caution warned her to tread carefully.
“I have to get back,” she told him. “I should be at work.”
“You work?”
He said it with such amused condescension that Rachel could feel her skin flushing with resentment.
“Yes,” she told him curtly, “at the King’s Arms.”
“Ah…Yes. I see.”
He was looking at her differently now, consideringly; and Rachel knew what was going through his mind. In her almost teenage uniform of jeans and cotton peasant blouse, her long hair down on her shoulders, he had mistaken her for a fellow student. Now that he knew she was not, he was looking at her in much the same way the village children had regarded her and her contemporaries when they camped near their homes. Only the suspicion was absent from his eyes, and in its place was an intense glitter of sexual speculation.
“So you’re not a student.”
Her head lifted, her eyes coolly meeting his and dismissing the look of desire he gave her.
“No.”
“What’s your name? Mine’s Tim…Tim Wilding.”
His abrupt change of tack caught her off guard, and unwillingly Rachel found herself telling him,
“Rachel.”
The blue eyes laughed down into hers. “I don’t like it…it’s far too biblical for you! I shall call you Gypsy…it suits you far more.”
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