Her mouth claimed his as she mounted him, taking him deep inside her with one thrust that made them both gasp. It was only then he realised he had no
préservatif
.
He ached for her, but he forced himself to tell her so, through gritted teeth. ‘We have to stop,’ he said.
She shook her head and lifted herself up, sliding down slowly this time, her hands gripping his shoulders. Luc cursed. ‘Sheila.’
‘Tell me when,’ she said, and thrust again, and he thought fleetingly what a compliment of trust she had paid him, and then he all but lost control.
He kissed her deeply. She was so tight around him, he thought he might just pass out from the pleasure of it. She leaned farther over him, her breasts crushed against his chest, taking her weight on her hands, and thrust again. He squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to come. He didn’t want it to end. Then she thrust again and he felt her pulse, heard her guttural cry, and he knew he couldn’t hold on any longer. Calling out her name, he lifted her away just as his climax took him, twisting him from the inside and turning him inside out.
Chapter Eight
S
heila lay back, gazing up at the sky, waiting for her heart rate to return to some semblance of normality. Beside her, Luc, too, lay on his back, his chest heaving. He was naked. What clothes she had on were in complete disarray. She felt weightless and weighted, as if she were two people, one humming with pleasure, the other already wondering how on earth she could have behaved so wildly.
She sat up and began to straighten her underwear, to pull her blouse over her chest. ‘I can’t imagine what you must think of me,’ she said.
He sat up and caught her hands, forcing her to still. ‘I think a great deal of you.’ When she made no reply, he frowned. ‘Sheila? What is wrong?’
‘This. We shouldn’t have. You’ll think...’
‘What?’
‘That I’m— That you don’t want...’ Now was the time to tell him about Mark Seaton, but she could not. ‘I don’t want you to think less of me,’ she said instead, turning her face away.
‘Do you regret that we made love?’ Luc asked her.
‘Do you?’ she asked, unable to keep the defensiveness from her voice.
‘No, but perhaps I should. Perhaps this was a mistake.’
‘You think so?’
He sighed. ‘If you think so. I don’t know.’ He got to his feet and began to put on his clothes.
Sheila finished dressing while he had his back to her. What an idiot she had been! If only she hadn’t kissed him. If only she had told him she was far too busy to take time off. For more than a month she’d managed to resist him. She’d worked hard and she’d earned his respect, and now it was destroyed, and for what! A few fleeting moments of pleasure.
Her body protested that it was more than that, but she ignored it. So she’d made another mistake, but this time she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. ‘Luc, this doesn’t have to change things,’ she said urgently. ‘It was a mistake, but surely it needn’t prevent us working together?’
‘Of course I want us to work together. Is it not obvious how much I appreciate you, and how much I have come to rely upon you?’
He broke off and stared out at the view over the loch, taking deep breaths. When he turned back to her, his expression was sombre. ‘Our relationship is important but does not take precedence. The success of the hospital is what really matters. My work means more than anything to me.’
‘I understand. I feel the same way, Luc.’
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes, I do.’ He looked dubious. Now was the time to tell him about her experience with Mark, because then he would be convinced. She steeled herself. ‘Luc, I...’
‘Sheila, I need to explain something first.’
Luc paced over to the edge of the gorse. ‘What you said earlier, about your ape man being too busy saving lives to have a mate, it was true. About me, I mean. I was married. Before the war. Her name was Eugenie.’
Shelia felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. Her knees gave way, and she dropped onto the blanket. ‘Married,’ she repeated dumbly. Luc was married! She thought she might be sick. Surely he would not have—with her—not if he was married.
Was
married. Did that mean he was no longer married? Or that his wife... ‘Oh, God, Luc, she died, didn’t she? In the war. I’m so sorry.’
He held out his hands to ward her off. ‘I don’t want your sympathy, Sheila. I want you to understand.’ He sat down, keeping a careful distance away, clasping his hands around his knees. She could see he was having to work himself up to speak, so she forced herself to wait, though the questions roiled in her head.
‘I have always been ambitious,’ he said, finally breaking the silence. ‘I have always wanted to be the best at anything I tried. My father was the same.’ He looked up to smile wryly. ‘I am prejudiced, of course, but he really did make the best bread in Paris, I think. When I announced that I wanted to be a doctor, I was just seven or eight. He didn’t laugh at me, he simply told me that if I wanted it enough and worked hard enough I would succeed.’
His expression was distant. Sheila’s skin was clammy. She had no idea where this story was heading.
‘When you want something so badly,’ he continued, ‘when you have to work so hard for it, it means more to you, but that’s no excuse. Eugenie, my wife, and I, we agreed it would take four or five years for me to establish my career, and then we would settle down, have a family. And I meant it, Sheila. At the time,’ he said earnestly, ‘I really did mean it.’
‘But it took longer?’
‘No. It actually took less time, but then it wasn’t enough. There were always new techniques to learn, new methods to try. It was a bone of contention between us, the number of hours I was spending at the hospital. We began to argue. I began to resent her because she made me feel guilty for being at work when I should want to be at home with her.’
‘Did you love her, Luc?’ It was a painful question to ask.
‘Yes, I did. I did love her.’
And now she had her answer, and it was even more painful. She had no right to feel jealous, and no reason, either, and so she chose to twist the knife. ‘What was she like?’ Sheila asked.
‘Young. Pretty. Fun. Clever enough to be bored waiting at home for me, and then bored enough not to wait at home for me. When the war broke out, she took a job in a munitions factory. Clerical work at first, but when demand for shells increased, she moved to the factory floor working shifts. It meant we were hardly ever home together. I think—no, I know—she meant to prove a point to me, and she was right. I had grown arrogant. I would never have said it, or even admitted it if she’d challenged me, but I did think my work was more important than hers.’
There was a time when Sheila would have defended his view, but not now. The servants’ hierarchy at Glen Massan she had taken for granted was something that appalled her now. Young, naive and anxious to please, she’d accepted the doctor, nurse, VAD hierarchy that mimicked it in France until experience taught her differently, just as experience since the war had taught her, to her dismay, that few people thought as she did. ‘It was the way of things before,’ she said, because it was true, even if she didn’t believe it was right.
‘An explanation, but not an excuse. I put myself first. That was selfish and unfair of me. I paid a heavy price for my arrogance.’
‘What happened?’
Luc closed his eyes, and began to speak very fast. ‘We had arranged to go out for dinner. Things had been strained between us—we had hardly seen each other for weeks. Eugenie swapped shifts at the factory, and I agreed to be home early, but then an emergency came up at the hospital and I stayed on. When I got home, I found a note saying that she’d decided to go to work. “At least there, I know I am wanted,” it said.’
His fingers were kneading the blanket as he spoke, curling and uncurling around a fold in the fabric. Sheila discovered she was holding her breath.
‘I went there—to the factory. I was angry because I knew I was in the wrong. When I got there...’ He choked, took a deep breath. ‘I walked into the aftermath of an explosion. Commonplace in those early days, such accidents. It wasn’t a large explosion, but it was enough. Eugenie and three other women were— They died.’
Luc threw back his shoulders and gazed straight at her. His face was grim rather than sad. ‘She wouldn’t have been there if I had come home as I promised. I blamed myself for a long time after that, but I don’t anymore. It was an accident. A tragic accident, but it wasn’t my fault. The dead are dead. So many of them, since Eugenie, that it is impossible to imagine. But it is as you said, Sheila, there has to have been a point. I cannot bring Eugenie back, but I can dedicate myself to using my talents to save others. It’s the least I can do. It is all I can do. So you see, there can be no room in my life for anything else. Or anyone else. Not in that way.’
He was warning her off. ‘So we need to put our feelings to one side and work together professionally for the good of the hospital,’ Sheila said. She sounded hurt. She couldn’t understand why she sounded hurt when he was offering her exactly what she wanted.
‘Exactly. We did before,’ Luc said.
He didn’t sound convinced, but that was most likely her imagination. She was deeply moved by what he had told her, and touched that he had confided in her what was obviously so painful, but she had no idea how she felt about what he’d said, save that she was extremely glad he had pre-empted her own sordid confession. What mattered most was exactly what he said. Their work. The hospital. She, too, could be wedded to her vocation. ‘Yes, we did,’ she said, telling herself it wasn’t a lie because they had, up to a point.
She leaned over to press his hand. ‘Thank you, Luc, for trusting me with this. I do understand.’
His fingers curled tightly around hers. ‘I have never spoken to anyone about that day. When Eugenie died, I told myself that part of me had died with her. Until I met you, I have not wanted any woman, and since I met you, I have not been able to stop wanting you. But I will. I have to. It is the only way.’
She nodded. She had what she wanted: his respect, his trust and his support. Far more valuable, she reminded herself, than something so ephemeral as attraction. Or love.
‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ Luc asked.
She felt uncomfortable with her own lack of disclosure, especially after Luc had bared his soul like that, but her emotions were in a turmoil, and when she tried to assemble her thoughts to confess all, her brain simply refused to cooperate. Aware that Luc was still waiting on a response, Sheila forced herself to smile and busied herself with the haversack. ‘Nothing important. We haven’t eaten our picnic,’ she said, beginning to unpack it. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.’
* * *
She barely saw him for the next ten days as the rest of the hospital staff settling in, and Luc’s attention turned to the imminent arrival of the first patients. Sheila did as they had agreed and concentrated on her work. For the most part, she managed. When she did not, when she caught herself staring at him, it was never for long, and as far as she could tell no one, not even Luc, noticed. The fact that he spent most of his time with the medical staff made it easier.
* * *
The first patients arrived towards the end of April. ‘Long-term cases,’ one of the younger nurses told her as they went through stores one day. ‘Some of them absolutely hopeless. But Dr Durand, he says no case is hopeless. He doesn’t make any promises, mind, but there’s just something about him that sort of inspires trust in the patients,’ she said with a dreamy smile. ‘You can see it in their faces when he talks to them. He never minces his words, none of this stiff upper lip, old son nonsense. No, he tells them it’s going to be a long and painful process, and he tells them it’s going to be tough, and they respect him for that, Miss Fraser, and every single nurse in the hospital does, too. It makes our job a lot easier, let me tell you.’ The nurse laughed self-consciously. ‘Listen to me, going on like a love-struck schoolgirl. Mind you, I’m not alone. Most of the nurses have a crush on him. What do you think of him?’
‘I find him very professional,’ Sheila said determinedly, and carried on counting bandages.
* * *
The first board meeting, which she attended with her trepidation kept well under wraps, was for her a landmark. The board members, predictably, tried to direct their questions to Luc, but he was so adept and resolute in redirecting them back to Sheila that they were forced to engage with her. And once she began to speak, her voice stopped quavering, she stopped sitting like someone there on sufferance, and they actually seemed impressed by her knowledge.
‘Thank you for having faith in me,’ she said to Luc afterwards as she tidied up the papers in what had formerly been the room where the laird managed his estate.
‘I did nothing except give you the opportunity. You are the one who took it,’ he replied.
‘I did, didn’t I!’ she said, smiling broadly, relieved that it was over but delighted with how it had gone. ‘That toffee-nosed lawyer was even calling me Miss Fraser by the end of the meeting, although it looked as if it might kill him.’
‘I rather thought he was afraid you would kill him when he tried to tell you your figures were wrong.’
‘Was I rude?’
Luc shook his head. ‘
Formidable
, not rude.’
He was smiling at her. Not the Dr Durand smile, but Luc’s smile. Their eyes met and it was there between them. Awareness. Tension. He lifted his hand as if he would touch her, then let it fall. ‘I have my first jaw reconstruction scheduled for tomorrow.’
She asked him for details, at first because she didn’t want him to leave, and then because she was genuinely interested. He talked, and she became immersed in the discussion, which moved from this first patient to the next five.
‘One of the men lives in Cornwall,’ he said, ‘and he’ll be with us for several months. It’s so remote here if you don’t have access to a motor car, which, let’s face it, most people don’t. It makes it almost impossible for families to visit, something that I believe is crucial to the patients’ well-being. We need to find a way to provide guest accommodation for visitors.’