A Masterful Man

And, because she was weak with desire and love, she simply sat up and did it herself then slipped down beside him again. 'Does that answer all your questions, Mr Warwick?' she murmured, as he enfolded her completely naked in his arms. 'Beautifully,' he replied seriously.

That afternoon, despite the soft rain, he found some old waterproofs and they went for a tramp up to the Catalina crash site and he told her the history of it, how the Royal Australian Airforce flying boat in 1948, flying low with a faulty hydraulic system, had clipped the ridge and plummeted down the paddock, and they inspected the wreckage then walked up to the memorial plaque in memory of the men who had died. When they got back, Davina was glowing from the exercise and the fresh misty rain, and Steve stopped to chop some wood for the stove and the fireplace-and the heavens opened again and it started to pour heavily. They were laughing breathlessly as they got inside with bundles of wood and after they'd dried off, Davina turned her attention to cooking dinner on the wood stove. They'd combined breakfast and lunch into one meal, chops and eggs which had been relatively simple to fry, whereas dinner was going to be more complicated…

'But I always wanted to try one,' she assured him as she assembled her ingredients for a beef and burgundy casserole, potatoes Anna and broccoli in a cream sauce.

He watched her working, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved white jumper with an old-fashioned frilly apron complete with bib tied around her. Her hair was loose and the moisture in the air had added to its fullness, and he smiled slightly as she tucked some strands behind her ears and regarded the stove that he had lit thoughtfully. 'I guess one has to guess at the temperatures,' she murmured.

'I guess so,' he agreed, his eyes still on her.

She looked up and an impish light lit her eyes. He, too, had changed, into jeans and a yellow sweater and he looked big and vital, and as if he had other things on his mind. 'You're not going to be much help, are you?'

'I know next to nothing about cooking on one of these; there used to be an electric stove but Lavinia threw it out. Besides which-' he paused and his hazel eyes locked with hers '-I could get into trouble for interfering with the cook. There's something about your apron that is driving me wild.'

'Why don't you go and do something else, then?' she suggested airily but with her pulses beginning to hammer. 'There's nothing else I want to do.' He leant his shoulders against a cupboard and folded his arms.

'Steve,' she tried to say seriously, not quite sure whether he was serious or not, 'I don't take my cooking lightly, so I'm liable to get irritable if-what are you doing?' she queried as he pushed himself away from the cupboard and came to stand right in front of her. 'I'm trying to take this rejection lightly,' he murmured. 'It's not a rejection!' she protested. 'But we have to eat.'

'Yes, ma'am.' But he didn't move.

She made an exasperated sound and stood on her toes to kiss him. 'There, will that do?'

He considered. 'If I were to be assured it was only a down-payment, it might.'

'You… oh!' She relaxed as she saw the laughter beginning to lurk in his eyes.

'Had you going there for a bit, didn't I?' he teased.

'Yes, you did,' she retorted, but laughing herself. 'Now, will you leave me in peace, please?'

'Certainly,' he replied promptly, but added, 'When I've done this.' And he took her in his arms and kissed her thoroughly. 'I was only half teasing you, you see,' he said, as she lay flushed and breathless against him.

'You're impossible,' she said huskily, but amended that almost immediately as he stroked her hair. 'If anyone had told me you could be like this when we first met, I wouldn't have believed them.' 'Like what?'

'So… nice,' she said barely audibly. 'So much fun to be with.'

He grimaced slightly. 'Has it occurred to you that we might bring out the best in each other?'

She lifted her eyes to his and they stared at each other for a long moment. 'I didn't know I could be fun to be with any more,' she said uncertainly.

'Well, you are, take it from me,' he said in what she later thought might have been a deliberate lightening of the moment, and couldn't help wondering why.

But at the time, when he went on to say that if she was serious about wanting to cook them dinner now might be the time to start just in case she was instrumental in him getting seriously carried away, she pushed herself away from him and said in mock reproof, 'Mr Warwick, you started all this!' Then they were laughing together and he kissed her briefly and told her he would desist, for the time being.

After dinner, they sat together in front of the fire and he asked her about her family.

'Well I was an only child,' she said slowly, 'and my parents-well, my father…' She stopped and sighed.

'Tell me about him, Davina.'

'He was such a difficult person.' She laid her head on his shoulder. 'He was intensely ambitious and he started and built up the business that was to be his downfall and it took a lot of drive and energy and expertise to do it. Yet looking back now I think he was rather insecure or something, because he was never really happy and he could be terribly critical, so that both my mother and I, we later discovered, always felt as if we were letting him down in some way or other. If I did well at school he always pointed out that it was possible to do better. If things went wrong at work, he took his frustrations out on her-oh, not physically, but she once told me she often thought that she was never a good enough mother or housekeeper or wife, yet she was all of those things. And he never let us forget that our growing wealth and so on was solely due to his efforts. This may seem crazy but we both acquired guilt-complexes, I think.'

'Which didn't help when it came to paying him back when the chips were down,' he said thoughtfully. She swallowed. 'No. But I did it more for my mother than I did it for him, although she begged me not to. But I couldn't bear to see what she was going through.'

'Did you consciously decide on a course of passive resistance when you married Smith-Hastings?'

Davina thought for a while. Then she said bleakly, 'I was conscious of two things. That he frightened me in a way that was hard to define-perhaps I just didn't want to think about it too much; and that I didn't know how, without jeopardising my father's position, but no one was going to blackmail me into faking love. I told Darren that before I did it. He said it didn't matter.'

'How long were you together?'

'Twelve months.'

He moved abruptly. 'Twelve months of… coercion?'

'No… After about three months of, well, I suppose passive resistance on my part is a good way of putting it-his ego got in the way. I think he was genuinely stunned that he couldn't… bring me round. So he then set out to humiliate me, or so he hoped, with any willing woman he could find.' She smiled without humour. 'I was so relieved I just didn't care. But he made one stipulation. Either I put up a front or he pulled the plug on Dad. So I did. For nine more months I went everywhere I was commanded to, did all the kind of socialising he wanted me to, entertained all the people he needed me to, wore all the clothes his money paid for, got photographed and written about and even smiled at him in public and stood by his side like the dutiful wife I wasn't. He used to make a habit of parading his latest lover at all those parties and making sure I knew who she was.'

'My dear,' Steve took her hand, 'you deserve a medal.'

Davina grimaced. 'If Paul Grainger is to be believed, I didn't fool everyone.'

'He could have been talking from hindsight.'

'I suppose so.' She shivered.

'When did you find out he was going under?'

'My father was the first to tell me. He was… so shocked and ashamed-something Darren had relied on to keep him from telling me, incidentally-but apparently the rumours had been circulating for a while. It was when Darren started to want to transfer a lot of things into my name that I knew I had to get out. That he was a fraud as well as everything else. On the day my father died I did just that and left everything he'd ever given me behind.'

'He didn't try to stop you?'

'He did. He threatened me and all sorts of things. He said he had, after all, propped my father's business up- he didn't know my father had finally told me that there'd been a lot of promises and that for a while being associated with the Smith-Hastings name had kept the wolf from the door, just. But nothing had actually eventuated. But I went straight to a lawyer and set the thing in motion. And then I concentrated on keeping out of his way and trying to help my mother get over it all.' 'How is she now?'

'I don't think she ever will get over it but she wasn't left destitute, fortunately, though only by coincidence-she had a very elderly maiden aunt who died not long after Dad did and left her some money. She tried to give it all to