Forcing a smile, she suggested, hoarse: “I think You will need to let a little water out of the bath…”
Alonso half-smiled in askance.
“If I get in with you, I mean, we’ll flood the whole bathroom,” Henrietta explained, looking at her feet.
This had all seemed so simple when Melody had suggested a way to ‘break the ice’ with Alonso. She was suddenly afraid what she planned might come across as sluttish, as if she was throwing herself at him and that was no basis for a lasting relationship.
“This was Melody’s idea?” The man asked rhetorically.
Henrietta nodded.
“She says one of us should marry you but,” she shrugged, “she thinks she’d make you unhappy. She says she’s not the wife a man like you needs or deserves… but I know you are crazy about her and that she loves you.”
Alonso gritted his teeth and tried to step past the unreality of the conversation.
“Melody and I have never discussed such things.”
“No,” Henrietta giggled, venting a little pent up nervous energy, “you were too busy…”
Her voice trailed away.
“Having sex and generally endeavouring to exchange bodily fluids?” The man in the bath suggested, dryly.
“Yes… I’ve been a little jealous about that, actually,” Henrietta confessed. “I cried my eyes out when you slept with Melody back at your house in Chinchón, by the way. I was angry with Melody, but I blamed you for seducing her. How stupid is that? Mostly, I was hurt because I thought I’d lost you forever. Sorry, all this must sound completely weird…”
That was the moment Henrietta realised she needed to stop talking: rising to her feet she began, jerkily horribly uncomfortably, to peel off her blouse, over her shoulders and head, revealing her arms, shoulders, and – she had always thought – slightly overlarge breasts, presently, teasingly contained in a lacy, white bra. She knew better than to risk meeting Alonso’s eye as she stepped out of her skirt, and turned away and with oddly numb fingers, unhooked the clasps of her bra, letting her breasts sag a little, free. She kicked away her knickers.
Still not daring to renew eye contact she stepped, feeling very bovine and clumsy, right foot, then left into the tub. The water was cool and she shuddered involuntarily. The man had drawn up his knees to give her space as if he too, was wary of actually making physical contact. She lowered herself, dropping the final few inches into the water, thinking how impossibly hard it was to keep one’s legs together when getting into a bath with a handsome man with whom one had been unrequitedly besotted for the last two years...
Presently, her arms crossed over her breasts, Henrietta raised her eyes.
“This is,” she grimaced, “more uncomfortable than I thought it would be. I seem to be getting a lot of things wrong lately,” she murmured.
“And the water is cold,” Alonso observed, apologetically. It was hard to resist the urge to pinch himself.
Was this, any of it… real?
He began to cautiously re-arrange his legs.
Henrietta shivered as if tingling with electricity at his touch as his ankles brushed her hips.
“Move forward, perhaps,” Alonso suggested, as if he was standing before her about to lead off into a slow step on the dance floor rather than sitting with her, stark naked, in a bath tub.
She too began to open herself up.
In a dream she wriggled closer until legs akimbo, shamelessly but by no means unpleasantly, she decided, she looked in Alonso’s eyes.
Their faces were barely inches apart.
“I’m sorry, I need to reach past you to turn on the hot water tap,” he said hoarsely.
“Yes,” Henrietta gasped. “You should…”
His chest touched her breasts; her nipples Henrietta became aware, were suddenly as hard as nails as warm water roared behind her, spreading around her ribs and hips.
It was dreamlike.
Still, naked together they were playing the game; pretending they were not, yet, lovers.
The bath filled; the tap was turned off.
Alonso smiled, raised an eyebrow, teasingly.
“You were saying, My Lady?”
Now, for the first time it was Henrietta’s turn to laugh, and with it all her pent-up terrors seemed to flee away.
“Melody says if she married you, she’d ruin your life,” she confided. “And she loves you far too much to do that to you.”
The man was hardly listening.
“You,” he whispered, “were the most beautiful woman in that room in Philadelphia the first time we met. The most beautiful and by far and away the cleverest,” his gaze was roving over her bare shoulders and torso and coming back to hold her face, mesmerically in its focus. “I loved you from afar from the start even though in those days, I knew it was hopeless.”
Henrietta just wanted to melt into his arms.
“So,” she gasped, knowing that her words were about to fall, one over the other, “we’ve decided, that you have to marry me instead!”
The man was laughing again.
“You’ve decided that, have you?” He chortled. “You and Melody?”
“Yes. We have! Oh, and just so you know,” Henrietta was crying and laughing now, “I want a whole brood of babies!”
Chapter 33
Sunday 7th May
HMS Perseus, 133 nautical miles NW of San Juan
One of the three experimental London Aircraft Corporation R-1 Albatrosses based at the St John’s River Naval Air Station at St Augustine had flown, unseen, undetected – and in the absence of ELDAR virtually undetectably – at an altitude of thirty-eight thousand feet, over eastern Santo Domingo and onward to the east and south east, quartering the Leeward Islands shortly after dawn that morning.
Commander Alex Fielding was probably one of less than twenty men among the sixteen thousand at sea with Task Force 5.1, who even knew of the existence of the remarkable reconnaissance-bombers. The Albatross, of which only two test prototypes and ten pre-production variants had been built to date, was so secret that any reference to a ‘super plane’ being test flown in New England had been rigorously embargoed, and such fragmentary reports of a ‘new warplane that flew like the wind at extraordinary altitudes’ which had leaked into the public domain had instantly been quashed as ‘imaginary sightings’, or contemptuously written off as ‘unidentified flying objects’, with witnesses who claimed to have seen one of the aeronautical marvels of the age in the flesh, cavalierly dismissed as ‘sad’ and ‘delusional’.
Alex was in the Captain’s day room digesting the texts of the terse intelligence digests literally hot – some of them honestly and truly warm out of the print box – from one of the ship’s two (also ultra-secret) digital decoding computers, in the company of the carrier’s Captain, Executive Officer, the ship’s CAW, Commander Andrew Buchannan and his newly installed deputy, Lieutenant-Commander Francois de Montfort Percival. The six men were briefly locked in such intense concentration that they might have been antiquarian treasure hunters studying freshly discovered maps revealing exactly where several previously unknown stashes of ancient pirate gold were buried.
The London Aircraft Company already had a long – although admittedly, in the early days of flight now and then chequered – history of designing lightweight, high-performance aircraft, and for ‘thinking outside the box’, innovating in proudly open defiance of Air Ministry or Royal Air Force requirements or operational specifications, that its legendary design bureau considered to be out of date, or just plain wrong. The R1-Albatross had the potential to be the LAC’s most revolutionary product yet, seemingly so far ahead of its rivals that it had very nearly created a new genus of aircraft.