Vacation with a Commanding Stranger

by Penny Jordan

  Livvy frowned as her cousin took hold of her arm, almost as though she intended forcibly to prevent her from leaving. ‘Gale, I did say I could only stay for an hour or so, and—’ She broke off as she heard the doorbell ring.

  ‘Look, just hang on for a few minutes while I go and see who that is,’ Gale urged her.

  It was easier to give in than to argue. Livvy wandered back into the living-room and sat down in an empty chair.

  Livvy could hear the front door opening and Gale speaking to someone, her voice slightly higher pitched than usual, either with excitement or tension, or both.

  ‘Robert… We were just beginning to worry that you might not make it. Was your flight delayed?’

  No need to wonder who the new arrival was, Livvy acknowledged grimly. Mr Wonderful himself.

  Gale was hurrying into the sitting-room, a tall, dark-haired, dark-suited man at her side.

  Richard! Livvy was halfway to her feet without even realising she had moved, her face white with shock and disbelief. Her body felt as though it belonged to a wooden-jointed doll, her movements jerky and uncoordinated, and as for her heart…her heart was ricocheting around inside her ribcage, bouncing off the walls of her chest with such high-speed velocity that she actually thought she was going to faint.

  Richard…Richard was here!

  ‘Livvy,’ she heard Gale saying to her, ‘Livvy, I want you to meet George’s employer…Robert Forrest.’

  Livvy stared at her blankly. No need now to question the guilt and discomfort she could see in her cousin’s eyes. No need now to wonder at Gale’s odd nervousness and insistence that she didn’t leave.

  Richard Field…Robert Forrest. Why on earth hadn’t she realised, recognised…?

  She felt too sick to move or speak, but Richard—Robert was moving closer towards her, and if she didn’t do something soon she would be imprisoned…trapped.

  She turned to Gale, two angry spots of colour burning on her cheeks.

  ‘How could you do this to me?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘How could you…?’

  And before Gale could say anything she turned on her heel, almost running past Gale and Robert, ignoring the politely curious glances of the other guests and the embarrassed apology George was trying to give her as she wrenched the front door open and left.

  The first thing she did when she got back home was lock the doors and unplug the telephone, silencing it in mid ring.

  Her stomach was churning nauseously, and she had the most violently painful headache. Her body seemed to be out of her own control, and when she turned on the tap to run some cold water for a drink, her hand was shaking so much that it took her several attempts to fill the glass.

  Her teeth chattered as she raised it to her lips, and yet she wasn’t cold. In fact she felt almost suffocatingly hot.

  Richard was Robert Forrest, and Gale had obviously known it…known all about his deliberate deceit. And the rest as well?

  No wonder her cousin had been behaving out of character. Why on earth hadn’t she told her…warned her…?

  Because Rich—Robert Forrest had asked her not to.

  So much for family loyalty, Livvy reflected sourly, her top lip curling.

  Gale wasn’t totally to blame, though. She ought to have guessed that something was wrong. Richard Field…Robert Forrest… She had thought it odd that Gale had not seemed to want to discuss the man whose buying the farmhouse she had been so bitterly opposed to. Knowing Gale as she did, she had half expected her cousin to have something to say about him.

  Because of her own anguish, her own fear that Gale might guess what had happened, she had been too grateful to question Gale’s unusual silence.

  For Gale to guess what had happened… Gale already knew, didn’t she? Otherwise…

  How much had he told them? What exactly had he said…that he was sorry but he had had to destroy her, Livvy’s life? That she had been expendable, an unfortunate victim he had had to sacrifice?

  On what? The altar of his own need to revenge himself against her sex? Not because it would in any way aid George and Gale’s marriage. She couldn’t have made it plainer that she wanted them to stay together.

  Why couldn’t he have told her who he was? Why had it been necessary for him to lie to her about his identity?

  Perhaps he had enjoyed deceiving her. There couldn’t surely be any other reason.

  What difference would it have made to her, knowing that it was Robert Forrest who wanted to buy the farmhouse and not Richard Field?

  She frowned… Why, if he had been so keen to preserve Gale and George’s marriage, had he deliberately tried to cause problems between them by encouraging George to go behind Gale’s back and sell him the property?

  She wondered bitterly what Gale would say if she knew the things he had said about her…the criticisms he had made. No doubt she wouldn’t think him so wonderful then.

  And what had he told them about her? How had he explained her departure?

  She had simply left a message on Gale’s answerphone saying that she couldn’t stay any longer. Had Gale challenged him, asked him why it had been so necessary for her to leave? If she had, Livvy doubted he would have told her the truth.

  She tensed as she heard a car draw up outside. The sight of the familiar lean, dark-haired man uncoiling himself from the driver’s seat made her shake with nervousness. As she backed away from the window so that he couldn’t see her, she saw him pause and look towards her home.

  What was he doing here? What did he want? To reassure himself that what had happened between them was something he could safely ignore? To warn her that it had meant nothing and that as far as he was concerned she meant nothing?

  Her mouth curled into a tight, bitter smile. Did he really think she was stupid enough to need that kind of warning?

  She heard him knocking on the door but she refused to answer it. It seemed like hours rather than minutes before he eventually gave up and went back to his car.

  * * *

  It was a long time before Livvy got to sleep that night. She lay in bed, her mind churning over and over, and when, just as the birds began to sing the dawn chorus, she fell into a drugged, heavy sleep, it was only to dream of Richard…Robert…and awaken with red, dry eyes and a leaden weight pressing down on her chest.

  Groggily she crawled out of bed and listlessly made herself a slice of toast and a strong cup of coffee. Silence surrounded her, and she sat for what seemed like hours, staring into space, the toast untouched on her plate in front of her.

  Eventually she remembered that she had unplugged the phone last night. Her first reaction was to shrink from replacing the connection—but that was just cowardice, she recognised wearily as she went to reconnect it. Much as she might want to, she couldn’t hide from the world forever.

  It rang, as she had known it would, within ten minutes.

  ‘Livvy?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you, Gale.’

  ‘Oh, Livvy, look, I know how it seems…’ Her cousin sounded really worried, but Livvy wasn’t feeling in a forgiving mood.

  ‘I didn’t want to see him again, Gale, and you knew that. You knew all the time you were telling me about George’s wonderful, wonderful boss what he had done. You knew as well that if I had known who he was there was no way I’d have been at that party last night.’

  ‘Livvy, please…’

  ‘Don’t waste your breath, Gale. I left the farmhouse to get away from Richard Field…or rather, Robert Forrest, and no matter what the man calls himself, I still don’t want to see him. You might consider that you misjudged him, Gale, but I, on the contrary, believe that my assessment of him was too generous.’

  ‘Livvy, please try to understand.’

  ‘Oh, I do understand. He apparently went to a good deal of trouble to protect your marriage and you’re grateful to him for that. I do understand that. But what I don’t understand is why protecting your marriage necessitated him lying to me, pretending to be someone he
wasn’t…’

  ‘He only wanted to help George,’ Gale protested. ‘To prevent him from falling into the same trap he’d been caught in. His wife tricked him into marriage by pretending she was carrying his child. She wasn’t pregnant at all, but she had hatched up a plot to force Robert to marry her so she could then divorce him and get a large divorce settlement out of him. She knew the type of man he was and that he would never desert his child.

  ‘He said that the moment he set eyes on Sandra, George’s secretary, he recognised that she was the same type as his ex-wife. Apparently she even tried to make a play for him, but he gave her short shrift and sacked her. He tried to warn George, but, as George himself admits now, he was infatuated with her and refused to stop seeing her.

  ‘That was why Robert sent him away so much. He was trying to keep them apart.’

  ‘And why he lied to me about who he was…and threatened you with buying the farmhouse?’ Livvy suggested sarcastically.

  Gale paused. ‘I…I can’t explain about that, Livvy. You’ll have to ask him those questions yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want to know the answers,’ Livvy told her curtly. ‘I already know as much about him as I want to know…more. He doesn’t like our sex, you know, Gale. He’s one of those despicable men who have to boost their own egos by putting women down…’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Gale protested. ‘He’s been so concerned about you, Livvy. He came straight back to England after you left, you know, and there hasn’t been a day since when he hasn’t either rung or come round to see if you’d been in touch.

  ‘A man doesn’t behave like that unless he cares, Livvy…’

  ‘No? Try substituting “cares” for “a guilty conscience”,’ Livvy suggested.

  ‘Livvy, I hate to see you like this. Won’t you at least see him…let him explain?’

  ‘There isn’t anything for him to explain,’ Livvy told her fiercely. ‘And if he thinks that I’m going to let him manipulate me just so that he can ease his conscience… I don’t want to see him, Gale, and that’s final. And if that means that I don’t see you either, well, then, so be it.’

  Livvy could tell from her cousin’s silence how much she had shocked her, but she hardened her heart. Gale couldn’t know just why she was so determined never to see Richard…Robert Forrest again. It was obvious that she had no idea how Livvy really felt about him. Of course she wanted Livvy to allow Robert to explain and to have everything smoothed over and sorted out, but she couldn’t see him, Livvy knew painfully.

  She couldn’t willingly or voluntarily subject herself to that kind of hurt.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ONE more day and then she would be back at work.

  Thank goodness. She needed something to occupy her time and her thoughts.

  And her heart as well?

  Livvy dismissed the thought, stifling the pain that came with it.

  She hadn’t heard from Gale since Sunday morning and, although she missed her cousin, she was determined not to go back on what she had said.

  For so long as Robert Forrest remained a part of her cousin’s life, she could not do so.

  She stopped her car and got out. The supermarket had been crowded and she felt tired and jaded, her nerves constantly on edge.

  Now, as she went to unlock her door, she was glancing over her shoulder as though half expecting Robert Forrest to materialise behind her.

  Robert…it suited him. She gave a fiercely bitter shiver. How long was it going to be like this…how long would it be before she finally started to get over him?

  Knowing what he was, which ought to have made it all so much easier, might have increased her misery but it had not decreased her love.

  She pushed open her door, wincing beneath the weight of her heavy shopping bags.

  There was somebody standing in her living-room. A tall, dark-haired man who had no right whatsoever to be there.

  As he came towards her, the earth seemed to tilt beneath her feet. She saw the anger in his eyes and made a small helpless sound of pain.

  He took the shopping from her, his fingers manacling her wrist as he almost dragged her into her sitting-room.

  ‘Just what the hell are you trying to do with yourself?’ he demanded roughly. ‘If you lose any more weight, you’ll…’

  It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t eat, she wanted to tell him. It wasn’t her fault she hurt so much inside, ached so much with the burden of her unwanted love, but stubbornly she held the words back, dragging herself out of his grasp to demand bitterly,

  ‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’

  ‘Gale gave me her key,’ he told her.

  Gale… Another betrayal. Livvy stifled her pain.

  ‘She had no right to do that,’ she told him stiffly. ‘She knew I didn’t want to see you. Please leave. Otherwise…’

  Otherwise what? Otherwise I might break down completely and tell you just how much I love and need you?

  ‘I’m not leaving until I’ve said what I’ve come to say,’ Robert told her grimly. ‘And you will listen to me, Livvy. You owe me that much at least…’

  ‘Owe you?’ She stared at him, fighting down the hysteria exploding inside her.

  ‘Well, don’t you? Walking…running out on me like that… What was it you were so afraid of, Livvy? That I might want more from you than you were prepared to give?’

  That she might want more? He was confusing her, Livvy recognised, deliberately trying to turn the conversation, the situation to his own advantage.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ she challenged him. ‘Why did you pretend to be someone else…?’

  ‘You were the one who mistook me for a potential buyer for the farmhouse,’ he told her quietly. ‘The last thing I’d expected to find when George had given me the keys for the place so that I could have a few days’ much needed solitude was to find it already inhabited by a very disturbing and aggressive woman. It seemed more sensible to let you go on seeing me as the enemy…than…’

  ‘Sensible? Deliberately to deceive me?’

  The look he gave her had something haunted and pain-filled about it.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But you see, I didn’t know then… You called me a misogynist, Livvy, and it’s true that I have felt a certain mistrust of your sex… My marriage…’ He shook his head. ‘My marriage was something that should never have happened. It was all my own fault. I was twenty-one when Claire and I met; she was slightly older, twenty-four. I suppose I was too young and too idealistic to know what real, genuine love was. Because I wanted her and she seemed to want me, I decided that we were in love. And then she told me that she was pregnant… Carrying my child. We’d barely known one another three months. Foolishly I’d assumed… I think I knew even then, before I married her, that all I’d really felt was physical desire, but she was carrying my child…’

  He grimaced painfully. ‘Or so I thought… That, like the love she claimed to feel for me, was another fiction, but by the time I realised the truth, by the time she told me that she’d made a mistake and there was to be no baby after all, it was too late and we were married.

  ‘I thought she was as devastated as I was by the way our marriage seemed to be falling apart, but she laughed in my face when I tried to talk to her about it. She told me that the only reason she’d married me in the first place was to get back at her married lover for refusing to leave his wife; that and the fact that I was rich enough to give her a comfortable lifestyle.

  ‘After she told me, I discovered that not only did I not desire her any more, but that it was physically impossible for me to be in the same room with her, never mind actually touch her.

  ‘Then I found out that she had started meeting her married lover again.

  ‘I could have divorced her, of course—I had the grounds—but my pride wouldn’t allow me to admit what a fool I’d made of myself, and it didn’t suit her to divorce me… Not then… However, all that changed when her lover
’s wife left him.

  ‘In order to keep everything quiet and discreet, I agreed to the large divorce settlement she demanded… My pride again.

  ‘She died three weeks after the divorce became final…with her lover…I felt guilty about that…the car he was driving had been paid for with the money she got out of me. I felt guilty but I resented her as well for burdening me with that guilt.

  ‘I didn’t love her, but I didn’t hate her. I did hate myself, though…I told myself I’d only got what I deserved for being such a fool. That if I’d been less idealistic and more honest with myself, I’d have realised what I felt for her was only desire instead of trying to glorify it…to change it into something it wasn’t. I was too proud to admit that I could be that much of a victim to such a basic human drive…that I didn’t have more self-control… I swore I’d never fall into the same trap again.

  ‘And then I saw you and there was nothing I could say or do that was strong enough to make me stop wanting you. I was unfair to you, Livvy, totally wrong about you…but please try to understand that was the only way I had of defending myself.’

  ‘Defending yourself? From what?’ she demanded.

  He looked at her for a long time before saying slowly, ‘From loving you.’

  ‘From loving me?’ Livvy wondered if she was having some kind of hallucinatory fantasy. She blinked and then blinked again, but no, he was still there.

  ‘Stop lying to me, Robert,’ she protested huskily. ‘You don’t love me. You told me in France that you—’

  ‘I told you lots of things,’ he interrupted her quietly, ‘but those were only words. I thought I’d shown you just how shallow and meaningless those words were. I thought I’d shown you in my arms just how much you do mean to me…’

  ‘By having sex with me?’ Livvy tried to make her voice sound scornful, but it wobbled very betrayingly instead.

  ‘No. By making love with you,’ Robert corrected her. ‘Why did you leave like that, Livvy? Have you any idea how much what you did has tormented me…how much…?’

  ‘I heard you on the phone to George,’ Livvy told him grittily, lifting her chin. ‘I heard what you said to him about knowing how to get rid of me.’