by Penny Jordan
He moved quietly around his room, collecting his clean clothes, and then went into the bathroom to shower and dress.
When he came back, Debra was still asleep.
He had some telephone calls to make. He wondered if Debra kept any clothes at her parents’, and acknowledged grimly that she would probably feel unable to wear anything that had been in her own house when Kevin Riley had broken into it, and he couldn’t blame her for that.
The boy might have had a poor start in life and been set a bad example by his father, but there was no way Marsh could ever condone what he had done. His mouth tightened as he remembered the look on Debra’s face when she had seen her bedroom.
He went downstairs, made his phone calls, including one to Debra’s parents to explain what had happened, and to assure them that Debra was safe and that he would be driving her out to see them later in the day.
He then went to make some coffee, and realised when he opened the fridge that he didn’t have any milk.
He frowned, wondering whether to wake Debra and tell her he was going out, and then decided that he wouldn’t be gone long enough to bother disturbing her.
* * *
Debra woke up with a start. It was light outside, and she wasn’t in her own bed. Where was she... what... ?
And then abruptly she remembered.
She glanced at the pillow next to her own. Trembling a little, she touched the indentation where Marsh’s head had lain.
It had really happened. She and Marsh had really made love, and not just once but twice. She gave a tiny shiver as her brain suddenly leapt into frantic overdrive.
Marsh wasn’t with her now. Did that mean that he regretted what had happened? That he was subtly trying to tell her not to read too much into the intimacy they had shared? Not to behave like a callow innocent who believed that making love was the same as sharing love; as giving love?
She shivered again, knowing that this was what she had dreaded all along; that this was the reason she had been so afraid of her own feelings.
She hadn’t wanted to love Marsh because she was afraid of the pain of losing him.
She tensed as she heard a sound from downstairs that she couldn’t wholly identify. It sounded like something breaking, but the sound was somehow slightly muffled, as though whoever had made it was trying to disguise it.
A tiny thread of alarm jerked at her nerve-endings. She sat upright in the bed, gripping the covers, calling out anxiously, ‘Marsh.’
She could hear someone coming upstairs and she called out again, more sharply this time.
The bedroom door opened.
Shock held her rigid as she saw who had come in. She recognised him immediately from McDonald’s. Kevin Riley.
The sound she had heard must have been him breaking into the house. Those were her last reasoned logical thoughts as panic filled her.
One look into his eyes told her that he had known she was here; that he had come here deliberately looking for her.
‘Bitch,’ he told her, enjoying the sound of the word, rolling it round his mouth before spitting it out at her.
‘You and that little whore, Karen—you grassed on me, didn’t you? Think you’re so good, don’t you? But you’re not... you’re just a tart, like all the others. Good at it, was he?’ he asked, nodding at the indentation on the pillow. ‘Made you scream, did he?’
Debra felt the nausea bum her stomach, a sour acid mixture of fear and revulsion and shame as well that she, an adult, should allow this boy to humiliate and terrify her like this.
He was only fourteen, she reminded herself, but she could still remember the photograph he had pinned up in her bedroom, the destruction he had wrought, and she dared not look away from him... dared not let her glance waver. If she did he might move...come over to the bed...
She could feel the sweat breaking out on her forehead, the numbing singing beginning in her ears that warned her that she was dangerously close to fainting.
She must not... she must not faint, she told herself as she tried to blow out the words he was saying to her, the sickening flood of invective and filth that poured from him, and to her most degrading of all the way he described in the most disgusting language there was the intimacy which she had so recently shared with Marsh.
She tried to distance herself from it, to tell herself that he was simply making assumptions, repeating things he had heard from others, and yet she could not escape from the feeling that he had actually witnessed their lovemaking, that he had somehow been there in the room with them.
Was that how Marsh had thought of her? she wondered sickly as she fought to suppress the urge to cover her ears with her hands so that she could blot out the destructive corruption pouring over her.
Did Marsh too think of her as just a body, a piece of inanimate disposable flesh?
Neither of them heard the car pull up outside. Kevin had broken in through a rear window, and so it wasn’t until he was inside the house and he heard his voice that Marsh realised what had happened.
He took the stairs two at a time, silent and lethal as a jungle cat, pushing open the door and overpowering Kevin so quickly that to Debra it all seemed to happen in a blur, in the fraction of time between one heartbeat and the next.
‘Are you all right?’ Marsh asked her tightly as he grabbed hold of him.
She managed to nod, but couldn’t look at him. Kevin’s words still filled her senses, the ugly picture, mental images he had drawn for her destroying her self-confidence and what she now saw as a naive belief that what she had shared with Marsh had been as awesome and full of wonder for him as it had been for her.
Even when Marsh had removed Kevin from the room and taken him downstairs she still couldn’t move.
She heard the front door open and continued to sit there in a frozen trance while the sickness clawed at her stomach.
Although Kevin hadn’t touched her physically, she felt as though he had verbally assaulted her, his destruction of the pleasure she had shared with Marsh worse than the threats of violence that had been made against her.
How could any woman ever know that a man really shared her emotions, that he really understood her vulnerability, that he really knew what it was for her to trust and want him enough to put aside centuries of inbred caution and to allow him the freedom to love her and with it the potential to hurt and degrade her?
Was there a part of all men that thought of women in the terms Kevin had just described?
Had Marsh secretly been thinking like that about her; had he secretly been amused by and contemptuous of the way she had so quickly and so completely succumbed to her desire for him?
Did men, all men perhaps, deep down somewhere inside them, divide women into two sharply separate categories—whores or virgins? Did giving yourself wholly and completely to a man mean a subtle shift in his judgement of you? And if it did, shouldn’t that be their problem, their guilt, their blame and not hers?
So why did she feel that if Kevin had attacked her, had attacked her physically, that somehow she would have been in part to blame because he had found her here in Marsh’s bed?
When Marsh came back upstairs and into the bedroom she kept her expression rigidly blank.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked her huskily. He was walking towards the bed, and immediately she tensed in rejection.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she told him tersely.
He stopped moving, watching her, his concentration on her making her edgy and nervous. What was he looking for? What did he see when he looked at her? A woman who had given herself to him too easily and whom he now despised?
‘Where.. .where is he?’ she asked him, her mouth dry.
‘Kevin? I’ve locked him in the car. The police are on the way. It seems he must have overheard them saying that you were staying here.’
He saw the agitated movement she made and came to the side of the bed.
Debra flinched as she felt his hands on her shoulders. Was it real
ly such a short space of time ago that she had welcomed the touch of those hands, that she had pleaded for it... begged for it?
She writhed inwardly in self-torment, rigid beneath his touch, rejecting it.
‘I’m sorry. He must have given you a hell of a fright. I should have been here.’
Debra could hear the anguish in his voice and with it the guilt, but she pushed that awareness away. She had enough burdens of her own to bear; she couldn’t carry his as well.
‘Please don’t touch me,’ she told him quietly and with immense politeness, the kind of chilly distancing politeness one used to unappealing strangers.
Immediately he released her, his fingers flexing as he stood up.
‘Debra—’
‘I’d like to get up,’ she told him, her glance strayed betrayingly to the indented pillow at the side of her own. ‘I expect the police will want to question me, and I don’t—’
‘You don’t want them to guess that we’re lovers?’ Marsh supplied quietly for her.
There was a huge painful lump in her throat, a misery and anguish she couldn’t begin to conquer. She wanted to cry out to him that she could not bear the humiliation of other men looking at her and thinking those words which Kevin had said, but her pride wouldn’t let her make that kind of appeal.
‘We aren’t lovers,’ she told him. ‘We just had sex.’
She saw the colour leave his skin. So he didn’t like it either, having something stripped of its softness, its delicacy, its personal intimacy and made ugly and raw. Well, how would he have liked to have been in her shoes, listening to Kevin Riley?
‘Debra...’
They both heard the car drawing up outside at the same time.
Marsh cursed under his breath. ‘That will be the police,’ he told her unnecessarily.
She waited until he had gone before hurrying into the bathroom. Her new underwear was still there, and if she did not have the time for the luxury of the kind of grim cleansing of her body she felt necessary then at least she could shower quickly, and dress in the uncontaminated clothes, which, she realised abruptly, were now all she possessed.
She could certainly never, ever wear any of her others again; the mere thought filled her with such repugnance, such sickness that she had to swallow quickly to suppress it.
She had no make-up other than her lipstick, but the last thing she felt like doing was adorning herself. However, the sight of her pale, strained face in the mirror made her change her mind and wish that she had the benefit of some kind of camouflage to hide herself behind.
The police interview was mercifully brief. She thought she saw the WPC’s eyelashes flicker a little in brief awareness when she was asked if Kevin Riley had attempted to attack her and she replied huskily that he had merely been verbally abusive.
Merely verbally abusive. She doubted if she would ever stop hearing the echo of his words.
Before they left the police explained to them what had happened. Kevin had apparently been found in Chester in an amusement arcade. They had taken him into custody, telling him that they wanted to talk to him about the break-in at her house, and they suspected that it must have been while he was either in the car or in the police station that he had overheard someone saying that she was staying with Marsh.
There had been some confusion at the police station caused by an influx of tourists who had come to report one of their number having her handbag snatched, and it had been during this confusion that Kevin had escaped.
‘I shouldn’t have gone out,’ Marsh intervened bitterly. ‘I should have guessed that he might come here.’
‘How could you?’ the police officer asked him. ‘None of us had any idea he knew Debra was here. Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked Debra. ‘Shock can be a funny thing.’
‘I’m all right,’ Debra told him quickly. He was probably a perfectly pleasant man, but suddenly his very presence seemed to intimidate her.
Was he thinking the same as Kevin Riley? Beneath his surface concern and respect, was he mentally describing her with the same ugly words that Kevin had used?
Instinctively she took a step back from him, unaware of the way Marsh frowned as he watched her.
After the police had gone Marsh asked her quietly, ‘Debra, what exactly did Kevin Riley say to you?’
‘Nothing,’ she lied quickly, too quickly, she recognised as she saw the look in his eyes. ‘He simply threatened me, that’s all. He must have found out that I’d reported him to the supervisor. He knew that Karen had told me.’
Her face suddenly went white... Karen. She had almost forgotten about her.
‘Karen?’ she demanded rawly.
‘She’s fine,’ Marsh assured her. ‘It was probably because he couldn’t get to her that he came looking for you.’
Debra said nothing. She knew without being able to say why that he would have done it anyway... that he had enjoyed doing it, and that he had marked her out as one of his victims from that moment outside McDonald’s but she couldn’t express those feelings to Marsh. She couldn’t say anything to Marsh. Not now. Not ever.
‘I want to go home. To my parents,’ she added quickly in case he thought she meant she wanted to return to her own house. That wasn’t her home any more and could never be her home again.
‘Yes, of course. I rang them earlier this morning to explain what had happened, and I told them that I’d be driving you over later.’
So even then... he had been planning to get rid of her. He had had what he wanted from her just as Kevin Riley had taunted her, and now he wanted her out of his life. Well, she felt exactly the same.
She wasn’t going to allow any man to use her as a means of gratifying his sexuality, no matter how much she might love him.
As he drove towards her parents’ house, Debra a silent and somehow hostile passenger at his side, Marsh ached to be able to turn the car round and take her back home with him, but how could he?
How could he criticise her for rejecting him, for blaming him for what had happened? He couldn’t stop blaming himself either.
If only he had thought, before so carelessly going out for that milk, he might have worked out for himself the possibility of Kevin Riley’s guessing where she was, but he had been so high on happiness and love that he hadn’t been able to think of anything else but that love, and how she had felt in his arms, how she had touched and responded to him, how after her initial hesitation and self-consciousness she had allowed him to coax her into abandoning herself so completely and to him so arousingly into her own sensuality.
He hadn’t been able to think of anything other than being with her, watching her as she woke up, seeing the awareness dawn in her eyes and then slowly and thoroughly loving her all over again, but now that was all gone, destroyed by his own carelessness.
Of course she must resent him. Of course she must blame him. After he had removed Kevin Riley from the bedroom, all he had wanted to do was to hold her and to reassure her, to wipe from her eyes the glazed, sick look he had seen there, but she wouldn’t let him anywhere near her.
She had rejected him totally and completely. It was just sex, she had told him coldly, and, even though he had known she was lying, he had also recognised that there was no way she was going to allow him through the defences she had thrown up against him.
And how could he blame her? He had let her down in one of the worst ways a man could betray a woman. He had told her he would keep her safe and he had not been able to do so. He should have been there to protect and safeguard her and he knew he would never be able to forgive himself for the fact that he had not been.
It made no difference that the sexes were supposedly equal, that women these days had no desire at all to be considered as either weak or helpless, and that was certainly not how he saw them. He respected them, accepted their right to define their own lives, and to be treated with the same respect he would accord another man, but nothing could dislodge that centuries-old atavistic feeling that, as
a man, he should have been there to protect the woman he loved. It had nothing to do with seeing her in any way as an inferior and everything to do with the fact that he loved and cherished her and that despite that he had not been aware that she was in danger.
What had happened to her diminished his own respect for himself as a man, and he was not in the least surprised that she was so hostile to him, so bitter and rejecting.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Are you sure you won’t stay, just for a cup of tea?’ Debra’s mother pressed as she looked anxiously from Debra’s remote, expressionless face to Marsh’s strained one.
Marsh shook his head and thanked her, turning towards Debra, who immediately stepped back from him.
As she saw the look in his eyes she felt her own heart tighten a little in sympathy for him, but Debra was her child and her prime urge was to comfort and protect her, and so she immediately stepped between them, leaving her husband to escort Marsh to the door and to thank him for all he had done, while she gently ushered Debra towards the stairs.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Debra said woodenly when they were alone. ‘I just want to forget it ever happened; to put it all behind me.’
Wisely her mother said nothing, but later she voiced her anxiety to Don and to Leigh, who had called round to see if there was anything she could do to help.
‘You might try to persuade Debra to go out with you and buy some new clothes. According to Marsh, all she’s got is what she’s wearing.’
‘Marsh brought her home?’ Leigh asked speculatively.
Immediately Debra’s mother shook her head. ‘He was so kind to her, Leigh, so gentle with her, and yet it was obvious she couldn’t bear him anywhere near her.’
‘She’s had a very bad shock,’ Leigh comforted her. ‘And shock affects people in different ways.’
‘Has Dr Morris seen her?’
‘No. She says she doesn’t need to see him; that all she wants is to put the whole thing behind her and to get on with her life. Perhaps you could talk to her.’