by Penny Jordan
There was a moment when she could have drawn back, but it was swiftly gone, only Zach’s surprised, and passion-drugged, ‘Why so tense?—relax,’ intruding upon the dream world she was now inhabiting.
Pain, swift and unexpected, lanced through her. Above her she saw Zach’s face, alien and almost savage with anger, and then the moment was gone and she was soaring higher and higher on the wings of pleasure; far beyond the cobalt blue of the heavens to a place where all the colours of the rainbow exploded and dazzled all around her, before floating her back down to earth on mother-of-pearl clouds.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin? Does your fiancé know what a rare prize I’ve stolen from him?’
The brutal words shattered her dreams and Tamara stared at him in growing bitterness, as she realised that his anger sprang from the fact that he had taken her to be a woman of experience, and simply did not want the involvement that might come from someone who was sexually unawakened.
‘No, he doesn’t know,’ Tamara told him scornfully. ‘And he won’t know that I was—from me.’
Without a word Zach left her, returning several minutes later with the underclothes she had left by the pool, his flesh damp as though he had taken the opportunity to bathe—washing away her touch, Tamara thought sickly as he dropped her bra and briefs on the ground beside her and then started to pull on his jeans.
They walked in silence through the jungle, until Tamara thought she must scream with the tension of it. If only he would say something, even if it was only that she wasn’t to read anything into what had happened. She knew that already, just as she knew that had they not been alone together, fighting for survival, she would never have known Zach’s fiercely demanding possession.
As the day wore on the tension between them increased until Tamara’s nerves were stretched to breaking point. She couldn’t bear another night alone with Zach, and that and that alone kept her going when exhaustion and anguish would have overwhelmed her. She was too dazed to realise that the terrain was gradually changing, the steep slopes giving way to more undulating ground, the forest lusher, aware only of the sickness growing in the pit of her stomach, the burning shame of having given herself to a man who, for all that she loved him, thought of her only as an unwanted encumbrance. Even her fears that they might be pursued retreated as she relived those emotional seconds in the aftermath of Zach’s possession when he had demanded harshly to know if Malcolm had known of her virginity; as though his prime concern was for what Malcolm might have to say when he discovered the truth, and since she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Zach couldn’t possibly be afraid of another man’s reaction she could only come to the conclusion that his anger had sprung from the fact that had Malcolm known of her virginity he might with good reason demand an end to their engagement, and she might try to turn to Zach himself for consolation.
Her face burned at the injustice of it. She would die rather than ask Zachary Fletcher for so much as the time of day. She brushed impatiently at the tickly sensation on her arm, and then froze, her scream disturbing a flock of parrots who rose screeching into the air.
Zach swung round grimly, demanding, ‘What the …!’ his expression changing when he saw the scarlet swelling on her arm.
‘What was it?’ he demanded briskly, reaching her and grasping her arm around the bite.
‘A spider.’ Tamara shuddered. ‘It was huge!’ For some reason Zach’s face kept receding and fading, a strange lethargy affecting her ability to respond to the questions he was rapping out.
‘All right, just keep still.’
She saw the glint of light on the knife he had taken from the guerrilla, but mercifully the poison the spider’s bite had injected had numbed her senses, and she watched like a sleepwalker as Zach drew the blade swiftly across the swollen skin and then bent his head to suck fiercely on the cut, spitting out the blood.
‘We’ll rest now,’ he told her tersely.
‘I can go on,’ Tamara lied doggedly.
‘Perhaps you can, but if you do every breath you take will circulate the poison deeper into your body. You have to rest.’
Tamara opened her mouth to argue and closed it again slowly as a peculiar feeling of light-headedness dizzied her. She was dimly aware of Zachary unzipping her sleeping bag and putting her in it, of him touching her arm, which now felt faintly numb, but it was as though it were all happening to her while she stood apart and looked on, divorcing herself from her body.
It was only later that Tamara was told the full story of their return journey to civilisation—Zach had long since gone and the nurses watching over her in the island hospital thought it very romantic how she had come to be there and delighted in telling her over and over how Zach had walked into a small village at the edge of the rain forest carrying her in his arms, her skin dry and tight with the fever which had come from the poison injected by the spider, but she had no personal recollection of the events leading up to their eventual arrival at the island’s main town, transported there in a donkey cart.
The first person Tamara had seen when she eventually threw off the fever had been Dot Partington. The Partingtons had deliberately extended their holiday to be with her when she recovered, and she had been more touched by their kindness than anything else in her life.
It had been Dot who had told her, avoiding her eyes, that Zach had left the island. Malcolm had not been told of what had happened—Dot had not known where to get in touch with him, and Tamara suppressed the guilty knowledge that once she returned home she would have to face him and terminate their engagement, for both their sakes. She could no longer contemplate the sterile sort of marriage they would have and she knew she could not in all fairness marry him feeling the way she did about Zach. Not that she was foolish enough to believe there was any future for her with Zach. His absence and silence only confirmed her own thoughts which were that he wanted her to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that whatever had been between them had been as a result of proximity and circumstance and was now very definitely over.
Three days after she had first come out from her fever, Tamara was beginning to grow bored with her hospital bed.
Dot had promised to come and spend the afternoon with her, and at the end of the week they would all fly home.
‘You’re a very lucky young woman,’ the doctor told her chidingly, when he came to see her. ‘You’ve cheated death not once but twice.’
Although the hospital authorities had had to be told how Tamara had come to be poisoned, the authorities on the island had deliberately shrouded the kidnapping in secrecy—something which would have gone against Zach and Tamara if they had not managed to escape, Dot had informed her.
‘I honestly never thought I’d see you alive again,’ she told Tamara for the umpteenth time when she came to visit her. ‘When we had to leave you behind with those men … I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘I shouldn’t remind you of it. It must have been a dreadful experience.’
‘Yes,’ Tamara agreed listlessly, unable to tell Dot that her memories of St Stephen’s would be among the most treasured of her life.
‘Never mind,’ Dot comforted. ‘You’ll soon be back home with your fiancé …’ She darted Tamara a shrewd look. ‘It’s just as well you’re safely engaged, otherwise I don’t see how you could have failed to fall in love with Zach. I think I would have done myself, George or no George!’
Tamara managed a hollow laugh, diverting Dot’s attention away from her betrayingly pale face to ask her what time she and George would be collecting her from the hospital. She knew she ought to be looking forward to going home, but she wasn’t. All she could feel was an enervating apathy. An aftermath of the poison, so the doctor told her, but Tamara knew differently. It was nature’s way of cushioning her against the agony of losing Zach. She smiled mirthlessly. Nature was fighting a losing battle. Nothing would ever make her forget; he was burned into her mind, imprinted against her flesh, a part of her until the end of her life.
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br /> CHAPTER SIX
IT was raining as the huge jet circled Heathrow. They descended through thin grey cloud merging drearily with the tarmac, the only spots of colour coming from the planes themselves with their distinctive markings.
Terminal Three was busy; there had been talk of a go-slow on the part of some of the airport’s personnel, and those who were able were rushing to get away before it started, precipitating the crisis they had hoped to avoid.
Tamara said her goodbyes to the Partingtons in the restaurant, where they had insisted on taking her for a final cup of coffee.
‘Promise you’ll write and let us know how you’re getting on,’ Dot urged her, ‘and any time you feel like a break you know you’ll always be welcome—you and your fiancé. Did you let him know what time you were arriving back? I should have thought he would have met you, knowing how ill you’ve been.’ There was a trace of disapproval in her voice, and Tamara hastened to defend Malcolm, explaining that she hadn’t wanted to worry him and so had simply sent a cable telling him that she was extending her holiday by a week. She intended to phone him once she got home.
She said her final goodbyes to the Partingtons at the taxi rank, promising to let them know how she was getting on.
London seemed grey and drab after the brilliant tropical colours of the Caribbean, or perhaps it was her own mood which permeated the city streets with dullness. Since the fever had left her she had found herself inhabiting a curious world where nothing seemed to matter; where tiredness surrounded her like a grey pall and where the only emotion she experienced was the sharp pain the merest thought of Zach occasioned.
Her flat was in a small modern block. She had been lucky to get it. Her boss had helped her to obtain the necessary mortgage, and although sometimes meeting the repayments left her shorter of money than she would have wished, she derived considerable satisfaction from knowing that the flat was hers.
The block was surrounded by neatly lawned gardens, randomly landscaped with flowering shrubs and trees; the ancient chestnuts which the builder had had the foresight to leave as a boundary between Tamara’s block and that adjacent to it a spectacular backdrop of colour with their new green leaves and deep pink candles.
Gravel crunched under the taxi’s wheels as it drew to a halt by the main door. Beneath the block was garaging for residents’ cars, although Tamara didn’t own one—she could have afforded it, but thought it unnecessary anyway, living as she did in the heart of London.
She paid her fare, surprised when the driver clambered out to carry her cases into the foyer for her.
‘You look more like you need a holiday—not as though you’ve just come back from one,’ he told her frankly as she tipped him.
In the lift she glanced in the small mirror. It was true, she did look pale. Her faint tan had faded while she was in hospital and she had also lost weight she could ill afford. Her face had a fragile, vulnerable look about it, her eyes wounded; glazed with a pain they seemed barely able to comprehend.
The eight-hour flight had left her tired and drained, and instead of unpacking she went straight into her bedroom, smoothing clean sheets on the bed she had stripped before going on holiday, then crawling under the duvet where she fell asleep almost the moment her head touched the pillow.
It was dark when she woke up, her mind disorientated, so that it took her several minutes to remember where she was. An oblong of light from the living room bore witness to where she had left a lamp burning and her suitcases lay casually on the floor. She switched on the bedside lamp and glanced at her watch. Three in the morning! Hardly the right time to ring Malcolm and let him know she was back, and she had to go in to the office tomorrow. The authorities on St Stephen’s had rung them to explain why her return had been delayed, but still Tamara was not looking forward to the questions she knew her boss would put to her. Even though her body was still tired her mind was too alert for her to be able to go back to sleep. She climbed out of bed and padded around the flat, unpacking her clothes, sorting them into neat piles ready for the washing machine.
People who knew her from the office often expressed surprise when they saw her flat; even Malcolm—not particularly sensitive to his surroundings—had commented rather disapprovingly.
Tamara herself wasn’t sure what had prompted her to furnish her small home with soft pastels and natural fabrics—perhaps some dim and distant memory of the happy childhood she had shared with her parents.
Her bedroom was decorated in soft peaches and greens, the wallpaper and fabrics Designers’ Guild and horrifically expensive. The small nursing rocking chair had been a junk-shop find which she had stripped and lovingly waxed herself, to match the pine dressing table which had been her first purchase when she bought the flat.
Malcolm’s parents’ home was furnished with ponderous Victorian antiques, stiff and formal like them, and Tamara had been able to see that when they were married he would expect her to furnish their home in the same style as that favoured by his mother and father.
In the small kitchen Tamara made herself a cup of coffee. The pine units gleamed softly under the pretty lemon-shaded light—the kitchen window overlooked the balcony which ran the length of Tamara’s flat with access from the living room, and the windowboxes and plants she had growing there fostered the country atmosphere.
She took her coffee through into the living room—again decorated in her favourite colours, although in here the walls were palest green rather than soft peach; a warm floral fabric in apricots and greens covering the ancient settee Tamara had found on another of her scavenging operations among the local junk-shops.
The stained and polished floor had been her greatest extravagance, brightened up with a rough woven striped rug from Designers’ Guild. Tamara loved their fabrics—and their approach, and if other people were amused by the feminine, countrified prettiness of her home she didn’t care.
It was her bolthole, her escape from the rest of the world, and she loved it.
In contrast to the femininity of her home the contents of Tamara’s wardrobe were bleakly stark; as though all the repression she had learned from her aunt had been swept away in the furnishing of her home, only to reappear when it came to her personal appearance.
For the first time Tamara felt the desire to experiment with more than the basic foundation, eyeshadow and lipstick she kept in her dressing table drawer, and sitting on the tube on her way to work she found herself covertly studying the girls around her, trying to draw comparisons between their appearance and hers. Aunt Lilian had not approved of make-up, ‘tarting up your face’, she had called it, and while the adult Tamara had acknowledged the narrowness of her aunt’s comments, there had still persisted a tiny feeling that make-up should be minimal, utilitarian rather than enhancing, and yet today she found herself wondering if she too could wear that pretty shade of shimmering lilac eyeshadow and that soft pink lipstick.
As she walked down Bond Street her attention strayed to shops in a way it had never done before, especially one displaying an exquisite selection of frivolous underwear. Chain-store undies—and very plain ones at that—had always seemed perfectly adequate to Tamara in the past, and yet now she found herself staring at silk briefs in palest écru, trimmed with satin ribbon. She imagined Zach’s fingers on the satin ribbons—on her skin, and then pulled herself up quickly, her face on fire with resentment and embarrassment. What on earth was the matter? She was mooning about like an adolescent or a problem page junkie, imagining that seductive underwear would somehow achieve a miracle and make Zach love her.
‘Well, well, you certainly believe in living dangerously!’ Tamara knew her boss well enough to respond lightly without committing herself. She had been told by the authorities before she left the island that while her employers had been put in the picture as regards her spider bite nothing had been said about the circumstances in which she had got it except that she had been walking in the rain forest, and Tamara had agreed that that was the way things wou
ld stay.
Nigel Soames had been Tamara’s boss for three years. They worked well as a team; Tamara cool and controlled, Nigel sometimes erratic but possessed of the verve and flair that made him such an outstanding success in his job, which was the discovery and promotion of new writing talent. The publishers might be an old-established firm, but that did not mean it was old-fashioned; Nigel had had several notable successes in recent years, including an almost but not quite libellous autobiography by a prominent television personality whom Nigel had caught at a vulnerable moment when he had just been refused a plum job and had consequently been in the mood to be far more forthcoming about his colleagues than he might otherwise have been.
Another coup had been a ‘faction’ novel by a Hong Kong entrepreneur which had reached the best-seller lists in the first few weeks after publication.
Both these and other successes had a habit of draining Nigel of the fierce energy which seemed to burn in him while he was nursing his authors along, and it was Tamara’s job to sustain him through the lulls between ‘discoveries’.
By the time she had removed her coat she could see that Nigel was on another ‘upper’. All the signs were there; the preoccupied, restless manner, the constant pacings of their small office, the incessant coffee drinking and the long abstracted silences, and Tamara blessed Nigel’s ability to completely steep himself in whatever he was doing, primarily because it took his attention away from her. Apart from commenting that she didn’t look very brown, and calling her ‘Miss Muffet’, he made very little reference to her absence.
As always when he had a project going, there was no stopping for lunch.
‘I think I’ve hooked him,’ he told her enthusiastically, ‘and it’s going to be a real big one. I can’t tell you about it yet.’