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Perhaps he was more like his cousin Margot than he had previously imagined, he acknowledged ruefully.
There was something in Tara’s make-up, a streak of idealism, the result perhaps of having always and only ever known the loving, tender protection of those around her and of having known, as well, just how much she was cherished and valued, that somehow set her apart and made her special, made him love her.
‘I do understand you have to return,’ Tara assured him, adding, ‘I just wish that Boston wasn’t so far away.’
‘It isn’t,’ Ryland murmured, tilting her face up towards his own so that he could look down into her eyes as he whispered softly a second time, ‘It isn’t.’
As he bent to kiss her, Tara shook her head. ‘Not to us, perhaps, but it is to Ma. I could see it in her eyes. She looked almost … almost frightened … as though … I’ve never seen her look like that before. Not even when she and Dad … I hated it when they divorced. I don’t want anything like that to ever happen to us, Ry.’
‘It won’t,’ he reassured her gently. ‘It won’t. Your mother probably just needs a little time to get used to the idea of our living in Boston,’ he added comfortingly. ‘After all, she’s got her own life. She’s still a very active and attractive woman … a very, very attractive woman,’ he noted appreciatively, causing Tara to give him an indignant pinch. ‘Perhaps we could give ourselves a week or so to settle in and then get her to come over for a visit,’ Ryland suggested as he removed Tara’s fingers from his arm and then bent his head to slowly suck them one by one.
‘Mmm …’ Tara moaned responsively.
‘Mmm …’ Ryland agreed as he eased her down against the bed and transferred the moist heat of his mouth from her fingers to her nipple.
Tara closed her eyes and gave herself up voluptuously to the pleasure of his lovemaking.
Ryland had teased her shortly after they had revealed their love for one another and celebrated that revelation with a romantic and very sensual weekend away at a discreet country hotel in a bedroom complete with a four-poster, a huge open fire and, even better, a bed-sized open space in front of it that there was a delicious wanto
‘That’s because I’m in love with you,’ Tara had told him seriously and meant it, because it was true.
Her emotions had always been close to the surface, easily stirred and fired, and it had taken the gentle influence of her mother to help her learn how to harness the impetuous, impulsive side of her nature and to look beyond its immediacy to the eventual consequences. Tara felt privileged that in her the passionate intensity she felt, an inheritance from her father’s side of the family, was tempered and strengthened by the quiet wisdom that was her mother’s. Passion and sensitivity—they could, for someone without the loving parenting she had received, have been uncomfortable bedfellows, but Tara loved and valued both sides of her personality because they were her emotional inheritance from her parents.
She liked knowing that in her individuality she was still a part of them, just as the children she and Ryland produced would be a part of them. Like her, she hoped that they, too, would one day listen with the same rapt attention as she had while their grandparents told them stories of their own youth and that they, as she had done, would absorb from those stories a sense of family and continuity, a sense of security and safety, of warmth and belonging.
It still sometimes brought quick emotional tears to her eyes to visit her grandparents and to see the love and pride in their eyes, to see and touch the familiar things that she had known from babyhood: the Sèvres di
Despite her totally modern outlook on life, Tara was a girl who was very much in touch with, very much in tune with, her family’s past. Ryland, who had already recognised that about her, hoped it might incline his aunt to look favourably on Tara and approve of their marriage.
He might neither need nor particularly want that approval and the inheritance that would ultimately go with it, but as he had already told Tara, he felt it was his duty to accept the role in the family business for which he had been groomed. There were certain things about his family and that role that he had not as yet told Tara, but they did not affect his love for her, and who knew, if his cousin Margot changed her mind about remaining single …
He smiled in the darkness as Tara fell asleep in his arms. How could his family not love her? How could they possibly find fault with a person as instantly lovable and totally adorable, so perfect in every way, as his Tara?
‘Ryland’s coming home and he’s bringing a girl with him.’
‘A girl? Who?’
Lloyd propped himself up on one elbow as he looked down into the face of his lover—and cousin.
Margot shrugged dismissively. ‘I don’t know, some English girl.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘No relationships are allowed to be serious in this family until mother’s sanctioned it. You know that.’
The expression on her face echoed the bitterness and resentment in her voice as she sat up in bed and reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table, lighting one and drawing fiercely on it.
In the clear light of the island morning, the sharp angularity of the bones both of her body and her face was almost cruelly revealed. What had, on the girl, been extreme slimness had become, on the woman she was now, an almost bony thi
‘My God, if only things were different,’ she burst out intensely, her dark eyes flashing as she turned to look at the man lying beside her.
Three years separated them in age—three thousand miles in distance, apart from the brief days and hours they occasionally managed to snatch together, those and the six weeks they shared a
Every summer for over twenty years, both of them had come here to be together, away from prying eyes. As first cousins, certain states considered their blood relationship too close for them to marry and legalise their love for each other as Margot so passionately wished they might. Margot wasn’t sure which was the stronger feeling she had for these weeks in the summer—hatred or longing. Longing when they were apart from one another and hatred when she was here because being here meant being aware of the fact that she could never ever have her heart’s desire; that she could never be with Lloyd as she ached and wanted to be with him. As they both wanted her to be with him, she amended hastily. After all, he suffered just as much as she did, yearned just as much as she did … ached, needed, wanted, loved just as much as she did.
They had both known, of course, even before they had fallen in love that such a love was forbidden.
‘But what will happen if I get pregnant?’ Margot had asked Lloyd tremulously the first time they had made love, lying uncomfortably together in the sandy earth amongst the trees, hidden out of sight of the house.
‘You won’t,’ Lloyd had assured her, showing her the condom he had bought.