Lingering Shadows. PENNY JORDAN
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as a male to take care of the females and to protect them, and most of all to make sure that he earned enough money to look after them properly.
Saul’s father had had his chances, Saul knew that, because he had often told Saul so, but he had not made the most of them. Saul must not repeat his mistakes. Saul must work very hard at school. There was no money in the family for him to inherit, no family influence to secure a safe future for him. He would have to succeed by his own endeavours.
The year Saul came third in the class in the end-of-term examinations his mother praised him but cautioned him to remember that there were other things, other gifts, other virtues that were just as important as being clever.
His father, on the other hand, told him that only the very best, the very cleverest children were given the chance to make the most of their lives, and Saul sensed that somehow he had let his father down. That being third was somehow not good enough.
The next year he was first. His father praised him, but still Saul felt empty inside. And not just empty, but lonely as well. He thought about all the football matches he had missed … all the times he had stayed in to work when his friends were out having fun, and he told himself again that he was wrong to feel that doing well and being a success had not made him feel happy in the way that his father had told him they would.
By the time he was ready to sit his GCEs Saul had dismissed those earlier childish feelings of doubt and pain. He was almost a man now, and he had absorbed his father’s teaching so well that he no longer questioned how he felt. Feelings were for girls, anyway. He had more important matters to concern him.
Saul was going to do well. Everyone said so, and Saul could see how proud and pleased that made his father. He was going to be accepted for Oxford if he did as well in his exams as his teachers felt he could. He knew already what subjects he would read, and that he would leave Oxford to go to America to spend some time in Harvard, getting his master’s.
After that the world, the commercial world, at any rate, would be his oyster. He would have the kind of qualifications that would make firms eager to employ him.
Saul saw his way ahead very clearly. A man with no money behind him and no family influence had to work, and work hard, to achieve … to make something of his life, and he intended to do just that … he had to do that … didn’t he? His family, his father, were relying on him to do so.
When he was seventeen Saul fell in love. He was a handsome boy, tall, taller than his father, with strong bones and powerful muscles; looking after the garden had become his job, and all those winters spent digging over vegetable beds and all those summers pushing the old-fashioned non-electric mower had built up his muscles and weather-hardened his flesh.
The combination of his thick dark hair and pale blue eyes with their rimming of thick black lashes had already had a devastating effect on many of his sister’s friends, but Saul had remained impervious to their flirtatious giggles and wide-eyed admiration.
Angelica, though, was different. In addition to looking after his parents’ garden, Saul earned himself some much needed pocket-money by working in other people’s gardens as well.
Angelica’s parents’ was one of these gardens.
Angelica’s parents were a very well-to-do couple. Gordon Howard was away a great deal of the time on business. Amy Howard was a small, fragile-looking blonde woman with a vague manner. To Saul she always looked somehow as though she was about to burst into tears. Whenever he went to work there she appeared in the garden with glasses of fruit juice, tinkling with ice, and more often than not Saul could smell alcohol on her breath. He didn’t like her very much. She was so very different from his own mother and yet in some way he felt sorry for her, and he had the same feeling in the pit of his stomach when she talked to him as he had had all those years ago, when his father had talked to him about his missed chances.
These days, though, Saul didn’t allow himself to dwell on those kinds of feelings. He blocked them off, denying them. They were not male, and they were not going to be a part of his life. He was going to be successful and do well. He was not going to have any doubts … any regrets. When he married, his wife would never have that sad, despairing look in her eyes that he sometimes saw in his mother’s.
The Howards had one child, Angelica. Saul had heard about Angelica from her mother, who, it seemed to him, appeared to adopt a very odd attitude to her daughter, one moment praising her to the skies, referring to her in such terms of glowing perfection that Saul frowned, secretly despising this wonder child, and then at other times complaining petulantly that Angelica did not love her, that she never spent any time with her, choosing to spend her holidays with her friends and their families.
Angelica was a year older than Saul. After leaving boarding-school, she had gone to an exclusive private college in Oxford, where apparently she was perfecting her languages and taking a very advanced secretarial course.
The half-term before Saul was due to sit his A levels Angelica came home.
Amy Howard was away in Miami, visiting friends. Gordon Howard was also away, on one of his business trips. Saul had gone round to the house to do the spring pruning and to dig over the formal beds which Gordon Howard had religiously filled with annuals every late spring, their precise colour patterns somehow reinforcing Saul’s awareness of the rigidity of the Howard home and the remoteness from one another of the people who lived there.
He had been working for a couple of hours before he realised that there was someone in the house, and he wouldn’t have realised it then if he hadn’t happened to turn his head and glance towards its windows just as the curtains at one of them were swished back.
The girl who stood in the window was definitely not Amy Howard. She had long dark hair that tumbled down on to her naked shoulders, and Saul felt his throat go dry with shock, and his muscles tense with something that was very definitely something else, as she stood there, stretching the suppleness of her body, apparently uncaring that he could see her.
Female nudity wasn’t completely unfamiliar to him; he had a sister, after all, and there were magazines freely available to anyone who chose to look at them, depicting the female anatomy in far more explicit detail than anything he could see now as he stood motionless, staring up at the girl moving her body as languorously as a lazy cat, her stretching movement lifting her breasts so that he could see how firm they were, how narrow her ribcage, how softly rounded her hips, how fascinatingly erotic and enticing the small patch of hair between her thighs, how long and supple her legs.
As he stood transfixed, staring at her, he knew he should look away, but he simply could not move. A raw, scorching heat seemed to spread through his body, a sharp, pulsing ache that made his face burn with embarrassment and confused his mind.
He had made forays into exploring the technicalities of sex, of course, and had thought himself well aware of what did and what did not turn him on, but this girl, with her wild, gypsyish mane of hair, her strong, lithe body, her apparent indifference to her nudity and to his observation of it, excited his senses in a way that wasn’t solely sexual.
He wanted to take hold of her, to run his hands over her skin, to close his eyes and absorb its silky texture, to breathe in the scent of her, to stroke her with his tongue, to …
He groaned out loud, aware that he was almost shivering with the intensity of what he was feeling. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out her image, trying to deny his need to reach out to her, to touch her face, to explore its delicacy, to see if the full smoothness of her lips felt as soft and silken as it looked. They reminded him of the petals of a poppy, vulnerable, rich, drawing the eye and enticing the touch, but all too easily bruised if treated too roughly.
He gave another deep shudder, his body racked by the physical torment of his desire, by the emotional impact of his reaction to her. He felt somehow awed, and humbled, his mind a jumble of conflicting sensations and needs. He had an unfamiliar urge to throw himself at her feet, to tell her she was the most perfect, the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. He wanted to hold her, to cherish her, to tell her how much she moved him and in how many ways, and he wanted also to crush her body beneath