by Penny Jordan
Marsh’s face had lost its colour. He looked as though he was in pain, Debra recognised. She also recognised that he seemed to have lost weight and that his skin had lost some of its healthy sheen... that same healthy sheen which had made her ache so to reach out and touch him, to absorb the warmth of his flesh, its maleness... its strength and its weakness.
That same ache possessed her again, but it was deeper, stronger, now that it held all the power and all the pain of knowledge. Now she knew how his skin would feel, how it would react to his touch, how his muscles would tense and clench and then relax as he succumbed to his response to her.
‘You can’t come back, or you won’t?’ she heard him demanding bitingly. ‘And why can’t you, Debra? Is it because of what happened... or is it because of me?’
She sucked in a shocked breath, her eyes suddenly brilliant and dark with emotion.
He knew the answer already... of course he did, but if he wanted to drag it out of her, to hear her admit her vulnerability and stupidity, then he could.
‘You know that it’s because of you,’ she told him.
She got up and walked over to the window, keeping her back to him.
‘I want you to leave, Marsh,’ she told him, hoping he couldn’t hear the tears choking her voice.
‘Have you been back to the house yet?’ he asked her.
His question shocked her. How on earth could he ask?
‘No,’ she told him fiercely. ‘And I never shall. Now please leave.’
She could hear him walking towards her, her whole body went tense and rigid with awareness, but he didn’t touch her.
Standing directly behind her, he said savagely, ‘You’re very good at turning your back on things, aren’t you, Debra? Your job.. .your home.. .me.’
Suddenly his hands were on her shoulders, turning her round to face him, propelling her against his body and keeping her there while he kissed her with a fierce anger that made her pummel his shoulders with her fists until he let her go.
‘I’m sorry. I never meant...’
He looked ill, she recognised, sick and ashamed.
‘Get out,’ she told him hoarsely. ‘Just...just go.’
She could feel the hectic spots of colour burning in her face, but it was only after he had actually gone that she recognised that at no time at all had she actually felt fear; desire, need, anger and even self-contempt, yes; but fear, no.
She walked over to the settee on shaky legs and sank down on to it.
There was something else she had not done either. When she had thought of touching Marsh, of how she had touched him, of how she had loved him, those memories had been completely free of any shadow of degradation, of any echo of Kevin Riley’s taunts.
She had, she realised on a sudden sharp sense of roaring relief, never even thought of Kevin Riley at all, only of Marsh... the way he had responded to her, the words he had said to her.
‘You’re very good at turning your back on things,’ he had accused her.
Was she? Was she, as he had implied, a coward, unable to face reality, wanting only to escape from it? Her house, for instance? She might not want to live there again, but it was her responsibility. She wetted her dry lips with her tongue-tip.
Tomorrow...tomorrow she would go there... Tomorrow she would prove to Marsh and to herself that, although she might be weak, although she might be vulnerable in her love for him, she was not a coward.
Yes, tomorrow she would prove to everyone that she was not a coward.
But first there was something else she had to do which was equally important, and that was to make it clear to her interfering stepsister that she could run her own life.
CHAPTER NINE
‘I MEANT it for the best, you know,’ Leigh told her remorsefully in a troubled voice. ‘He was so very anxious to see you, Debra, and I thought...’
‘What? That he was going to take me in his arms and declare his undying love for me?’
Debra’s hands clenched as she heard the tears beneath her anger.
She had been stiff and cold last night with Leigh when she had returned home, and had not mentioned Marsh. She had been so hurt and angry that Leigh could have gone behind her back in letting Marsh find her when she was alone and vulnerable that she had not been able to trust herself not to lose control and perhaps even to quarrel irreversibly with her stepsister.
And, whatever else she might feel like accusing Leigh of, she knew that her actions had not been motivated by anything other than love for her. ‘So you do love him, then?’
The soft question caught her off guard. She swung round, her body tight with tension, her eyes huge, glittering with the tears she would not let herself shed.
‘Of course I love him,’ she said fiercely. ‘But that isn’t the point. Do you know why he wanted to see me, Leigh?’
Leigh frowned.
‘I assumed you’d had some kind of quarrel and that he wanted to make it up.’
‘A lovers’ quarrel, do you mean?’ Debra laughed bitterly. ‘Hardly. What he wanted to see me for was to tell me that I needed to give the firm three months’ notice of my resignation and not one, as I had thought.’
‘You’re leaving! But—’ Leigh knew that she mustn’t let Debra realise that Marsh had told her this already.
‘I have to. You must see that. I can’t continue to work there. Not with Marsh there.’
She saw Leigh’s face, and told her despairingly, ‘I might love him, Leigh, but he doesn’t love me.’
‘But he was so concerned about you...’
‘Concerned to keep me out of his life, not in it,’ Debra told her with uncharacteristic bluntness. She glanced at her watch. ‘I must go. I want to get to Chester before the traffic gets too busy.’
‘Chester?’ Leigh’s frown deepened.
‘I’m going to check on the house,’ Debra told her, deliberately avoiding looking at her. ‘I... I rang my insurance broker earlier and he says that most of the redecoration work has been finished, and I wanted to check on what still needs to be done before I can put it up for sale.’
Strictly, that wasn’t the truth. She had spoken to her broker, who had seemed surprised and oddly confused to hear from her, but then she could understand why. In the first few days after Kevin Riley had broken in she had refused to have anything to do with any of the arrangements for clearing the house up. She didn’t want anything from the house, she had told him sickly. Not one single item from her personal possessions. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing them, touching them, remembering ... knowing.
She would leave it in his hands to have the place cleaned up and redecorated once the insurance assessors had agreed her claims, she had told him, and until last night she had had no intention of ever going back there again.
Until last night. Until Marsh had so cruelly accused her of being a coward.
‘Look, if you’d like me to come with you...’ Leigh suggested uncertainly.
Immediately Debra shook her head.
‘No. I’ll be fine on my own,’ she told her.
All the locks had been changed, of course, but she had a new set of keys, sent to her by her efficient insurance broker, and these were now tucked safely in her handbag.
She kissed her mother and Leigh and opened the back door. Her stomach was churning, but she wasn’t going to back out now, not with Marsh’s words still ringing in her ears.
As she climbed into her car the telephone started to ring. Leigh, who was standing closest to it, answered it, her expression changing as she heard Marsh’s voice.
‘No, I’m afraid she isn’t here,’ she told him.
The closer she got to Chester, the more nervous Debra became. Three times she circled the end of the street before finally managing to find the courage to turn her car into it.
She was trembling so hard when she parked outside the house that she stalled the gears, wincing at the tortured noise from the engine, stiffening defensively as she looked around, but no one wa
s watching her; the street was quite empty.
As she walked up to her front door she noticed that even that had been repainted and that the brass letter-box gleamed brightly with polish.
The new locks were a little stiff—or was it just that she was shaking too much to turn the key properly?—but at last she got them unfastened and opened the door.
The hall smelled of polish and fresh flowers. She frowned a little over this, and then came to a startled halt as she saw the huge copper bowl of flowers on the hall table, their colours reflected in the mirror on the wall behind it.
The same mirror which she had last seen lying on the carpet in so many tiny pieces, she recognised, unable to resist walking up to it and touching its smooth surface.
The wall sconces had been repaired as well. And, where the walls had dripped paint as bright as any blood, they were now smoothly papered, the paper exactly the same as the one she had chosen with such care and pleasure.
In fact, she realised as she looked around, everything was just as it had always been.
Apart from the flowers. She frowned a little over those, wondering if her insurance broker had arranged for them, perhaps to add a homey touch to the house’s emptiness, to woo prospective buyers. But the house wasn’t up for sale as yet.
She walked slowly into her sitting-room. Here, as in the hall, everything had been restored and replaced exactly as it had originally been, but here too there were flowers, a large jug of them in the hearth and then a slightly smaller display on the round table behind the settee.
And they must have been freshly delivered, she reflected as she touched the petals of the massed arrangement of sweet peas, because these were still slightly damp.
Slowly she made her way to the kitchen, pausing only briefly at the foot of the stairs as she walked past them, trying to ignore the sudden surge of panic that hit her stomach.
The bedroom. Could she really face going up there?
She fiddled with the flex of the kettle, a new one, but exactly like her old one. As she glanced through the window she saw that the plants in her terracotta pots were enjoying the sunshine, opening their petals to it. She frowned a little as she recognised that someone must have been watering and feeding them for them to look so healthy. Her insurance broker had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble.
She must thank him, she recognised absently as she marvelled at the way even the plates on the dresser had been replaced in their original positions.
Somewhere in the distance the wail of an ambulance siren broke the silence.
The sound made Debra blink. She had dreaded coming back here so much, feared to do so because she had been so convinced that, no matter how much clearing up had been done, she would still see and smell the filth with which Kevin Riley had desecrated it.
And yet now, standing in her kitchen, breathing in the smell of fresh paint, looking through the window to the peaceful scene outside, it seemed as though that violence, that ugliness could never possibly have happened.
But she still had to go upstairs.
Shivering a little, she walked back into the hall. The scent of the flowers seemed stronger now.
She paused to study them, sharply aware of the stairs behind her and of the dread clogging her throat and racing her heart.
Her hand trembled as she placed it on the banister. The wood was smooth and warm beneath her fingertips.
Slowly she walked up the stairs, tensing a little as one of them creaked slightly under her weight.
At the top she stopped.
All the doors were open, as though somehow someone had left them like that deliberately, so that there were no secrets, no hidden dangers.
Her own bedroom door was the nearest, but she went into the spare room first, exhaling jerkily as she studied its clean prettiness.
Like the kitchen, the bathroom had been restored exactly as though she were still living there, right down to her favourite shower gel and toiletries.
All that was left now was her bedroom.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, opening them again, quickly afraid of the mental visions her memory might conjure up. She had gone this far. Wasn’t that enough? she asked herself. Marsh had said nothing about her going in every room. Hadn’t the mere fact that she was here proved that he was wrong?
To others, perhaps, but not to herself, she acknowledged shakily.
She walked jerkily into the bedroom and then came to in an immediate shocked halt, the breath leaving her lungs as though she had been punched.
Where downstairs everything was as it had always been, here in her bedroom nothing was the same.
On the wall where her bed-head had been, where that awful, terrifying photograph had been, there were now fitted hand-painted wardrobes, pretty feminine ones with glass doors and soft fabric curtains behind them.
The bed was now facing the window, the sun pouring in, to highlight the soft peaches and creams of the intricately quilted bedspread.
Her furniture, the pretty little desk and chest were still there; and so were her other small treasures; the silver-back hairbrushes; the pretty antique jars with their silver tops.
The fabrics, the colours, her personal things, all these were just as they had always been, but the room itself was completely different; so different that surely only someone who knew her, really knew her and understood her feelings, could possibly be responsible for those changes.
Leigh perhaps. Her mother. Her heart ached suddenly with the burden of her own guilt. She had not been the easiest person to live with since the break-in, and she certainly didn’t deserve the consideration, the thoughtfulness, the love she was witnessing here in this room.
She moved towards the bed, touching the quilt where the sun was on it. It felt warm and soft, and then abruptly a small sound registered in her awareness, shocking her whole body into terrified, frozen immobility.
Someone was coming up the stairs. She had heard that betraying stair creak. Someone was in the house with her.
She opened her mouth to scream, but her vocal cords were paralysed with fear.
She saw his shadow before he came into the room and she started to shake, her body convulsed with violent spasms of terror.
‘Debra... Debra! It’s all right. It’s me... Marsh.’
Marsh.
She stared at him, watching him run towards her, feeling the hard warmth of his hands as he held her, feeling the heat coming off his body, seeing the emotion in his eyes, and yet somehow it was almost as though she wasn’t there inside the body that felt these things at all, but rather that she was standing outside it, watching its reactions with detached curiosity, wondering at the strength of the emotion that shook and convulsed her.
‘You’re all right. It’s all right,’ Marsh was saying huskily to her, still holding her. ‘I’m sorry; I should have thought, but I saw your car outside. You shouldn’t have come here by yourself.’ His voice was rough now, making her flinch slightly.
‘How... how did you get in?’
Her voice sounded dry and harsh, the words unevenly spaced and formed.
She had locked the door, hadn’t she...hadn’t she?
‘I’ve got a key,’ Marsh told her absently. ‘I’ve been calling round most days to check that...’
He stopped suddenly, his face flushing slightly, and instantly Debra knew.
It wasn’t her insurance broker who was responsible for this careful, caring restoration of her house... her home. It was Marsh.
‘You... you did all this?’
He didn’t attempt to deny it.
‘It was the least I could do,’ he told her gruffly.
‘But why?’ Debra asked him. ‘Why?’
Her heart was beating painfully fast, her breathing suddenly uncomfortably constricted.
‘Why?’
He gave her a self-derisive smile.
‘Because I love you, of course.’
‘You love me?’
He must have caugh
t the wonder that mingled with her disbelief, because, as he released her and started to step back from her, he suddenly tensed and looked at her.
‘It was never “just sex” for me, Debra. Not before, not after, and certainly not during,’ he told her roughly.
‘But you never said... You let me...’
Her pain was mirrored in her face and in her voice as she raised her eyes to meet his.
‘What could I say, after the way I’d let you down?’
He saw that she was starting to frown, and told her brusquely, ‘I should have been with you, Debra. When he broke into my house I should have been there to protect you.’
The anguish in his voice startled her, but it was the sight of the tears shining in his eyes that really shocked her, moving her to a totally unexpected protective compassion. She touched his shoulder gently, her eyes soft and warm.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she told him.
‘No.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘That wasn’t what you thought at the time, was it? Oh, I saw the way you felt... the way you rejected me.’
‘Not because you weren’t there!’ Debra told him, horrified that he should think that.
He went very still, his eyes dark and bright with self-contempt.
‘No? Why was it, then?’ he demanded harshly.
For a moment Debra couldn’t speak. Her own eyes were shadowed as the memories swept down on her, degrading, frightening memories of words, phrases, descriptions that had destroyed her joy in her own sexuality.
How could she describe those things to Marsh? How could she tell him?
‘I love you,’ he had said, and she had seen, felt, that he meant it. She hadn’t wanted him to love her and she had certainly not wanted to love him. She had been afraid of that love, resenting and rejecting it, and yet now suddenly she knew that it was more important to her than anything else in the world; that he was more important to her... Much more important than her own fears; than anything Kevin Riley might have said or done.
She was still touching his shoulder. She smoothed her fingers against it in a brief gesture of comfort and love.