Eldorado

by Yvonne Whittal

  'Do you have something to take, or would you like me to go out and get you a medication from the all-night emergency chemist?' Jarvis questioned her when they entered their bedroom at Eldorado, and Gina stared at him blankly for a moment before she realised what he was referring to.

  'I have something,' she lied, taking two headache tablets out of the dressing-table drawer and swallowing them with a glass of water in the bathroom.

  She cursed herself later. She had behaved like a frightened child. She felt guilty, and she had to make it up to Jarvis somehow.

  'Are you feeling better?' he asked when she lowered herself on to the bed beside him.

  'Much better.' Her green gaze was apologetic when it met his. 'I'm sorry if I spoiled the evening for us.'

  'The evening isn't over yet,' he smiled, a fire smouldering in his eyes as he sat up in bed to lift the lacy straps of her nightgown off her smooth shoulders. The flimsy garment slithered down to leave her naked from the waist up. 'The evening has only just begun for us,' he added throatily.

  'I'm so glad,' she agreed, her voice no more than a distracted whisper when his fingers gently stroked her taut, pointed breasts.

  The rush of blood into her nipples was achingly sweet, and her gasp of pleasure was smothered against his mouth when he pulled her down on to the bed beside him with one arm locked about her waist while his free hand stripped off her nightdress. She wanted him so much that she met fire with fire until she was immersed in an inferno that robbed her of everything except the need to give as much as she was receiving.

  'You're so beautiful I want to kiss you all over,' Jarvis groaned, and Gina felt no alarm, only an intense and erotic pleasure when his hot, seeking mouth began its slow and meticulous exploration of her body until every pulse was throbbingly alive to his touch.

  'I want you, Jarvis! I want you now!' she begged, her body moving beneath his with a wild and primitive urgency which was alien to her. 'Please! Please take me!'

  'Not yet, my sweet,' he murmured against her smooth, pulsating throat, his hands stroking her passionately eager body and stilling her in much the same manner that she used to stem the quivering impatience of her Arab stallion. 'We have the entire night, and I'm going to make sure we enjoy every minute of it.'

  Gina was too drugged with desire to wonder if he was joking, but she would soon have discovered that he was not. His lovemaking that night was a prolonged and achingly sweet torment that made her fear at times that she might die with the pleasure of it. Jarvis was in complete control, and she submitted to the dominance of his powerful, thrusting body by allowing him to take her where he pleased until a shuddering cry of exaltation escaped her as the world seemed to explode around her and leave her trembling and trapped in the wake of its ferocity.

  It was much later, when Jarvis lay sleeping beside her, that Gina's thoughts turned again to Lilian. Jarvis and I belong together, Lilian had said, and this cruel intervention on our happiness is a matter I will not overlook.

  Gina did not want to hazard a guess as to Jarvis's feelings, but her own were perfectly clear. She loved him, and she hoped and prayed that as the year progressed he might learn to care for her in return. She knew that he found her attractive and desirable, but that meant nothing at all. He was capable of finding any number of women attractive and desirable, but she happened to be there for him. She was the woman he had been forced to make his wife, and there was no sense in deluding herself that she meant anything more to him at the moment than a means to an end. Eldorado was the prize, and Evelyn Cain had been correct in saying that Jarvis would do anything to get it.

  Gina would not have believed that a foolish and unfortunate accident could disrupt the harmonious atmosphere at Eldorado within a few short weeks, but it did. She had planned a special dinner party at Eldorado as a surprise for Jarvis to celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday, and she had invited a few of his closest friends to join them that evening.

  She was in an excited and slightly distracted mood when she hurried downstairs that afternoon to make sure that her instructions to the kitchen staff were being carried out, and as she flew down the last flight of stairs the heel of her shoe caught in a loose thread in the carpet. For one terrifying, heart-stopping instant Gina was still upright, and then the world took on a new, sickening dimension as she rolled and bumped down the remaining steps into the hall below.

  A scream echoed through the silent house. It could only have come from her, but she could not recall a sound passing her lips during that painful, tumbling passage down the stairs. She lay stunned for a fraction of a second, her eyes wide and questioning as she looked up at the circle of anxious faces which had appeared above her, and then an excruciating pain tore at her savagely and unexpectedly. A cry of agony rose in her throat, but she slipped into that mercifully dark abyss of unconsciousness before a sound escaped her.

  Gina came to her senses a few hours later to find herself lying flat on her back in a strange bed with a strange man and a white-clad woman hovering over her.

  'Who are you, and where am I?' she questioned them in a voice which she could not raise above a painful whisper.

  'I'm Dr Hirshfield, and you're in hospital, Mrs Cain,' the man with the dark-rimmed spectacles answered her, a suggestion of a smile lifting the corners of his mouth. 'You had a nasty accident, do you remember?'

  An accident? Gina stared blankly at the high ceiling, and then something clicked in her brain. She nodded in reply to the doctor's query, and a look of relief flashed across the faces of the two people who had been observing her so intently.

  'Falling down those stairs was such a damn silly thing to do,' she added, trying to laugh away her embarrassment, but the effort seemed to exhaust her and stab painfully at her ribs.

  'You're a very lucky woman,' Dr Hirshfield explained gravely. 'We're treating you for bruises and possible concussion, but I'm afraid there was nothing we could do to save the child you were carrying.'

  Gina's face went a shade paler against the stark white linen on that hospital bed, and for one terrible moment it felt as if her head was going to crack wide open. A child! She had been carrying Jarvis's child! Dear God, was that possible?

  'How… I mean, why…' Her bewildered voice croaked into silence, and Dr Hirshfield did not quite succeed in disguising his surprise and concern.

  'I gather you didn't know you were pregnant?'

  Gina shook her head mutely, her eyes filling with tears she could not suppress, and she swallowed with difficulty to rid herself of that painful lump in her throat before she risked using her voice to ask, 'How—how far was I?'

  'I would say you'd been six to seven weeks into pregnancy,' the doctor explained quietly. 'I would, however, like to assure you that there was no internal damage, and there's nothing to prevent you from having other children.'

  Gina's mind was spinning like a rocket which had veered off its plotted course, and it required several agonising seconds of deep concentration before she was capable of thinking rationally. The anxiety to maintain that new, harmonious level in her relationship with Jarvis had caused her to overlook the irregularity in her normal body functions, and then there had also been that slight stab of nausea which had plagued her on a few occasions at the breakfast table during the past weeks. The signs of pregnancy had been glaringly obvious, but she had foolishly ignored them. Oh, God, how had it happened? How and when could they have been so careless? To bring a child into their marriage would have been a disaster, but… oh, God, to lose it was something she would mourn for the rest of her life!

  'Does my husband know?' she questioned the doctor nervously, and that rugged, bespectacled face above her nodded gravely.

  'I told him the moment we brought you out of the theatre.'

  'What—what did he say?' she croaked, making a feeble attempt to wipe her tears away with her fingers until the nurse completed the mopping up process with a paper handkerchief.

  'He never said anything, but he looked as stunned as most h
usbands do when confronted with the news I had to give him.' Dr Hirshfield smiled reassuringly, but he would never guess at the fear which was lacing itself through her chaotic emotions at that moment. 'Your husband is waiting to see you, but I'll send him only if you promise not to tire yourself,' the doctor's pleasant voice intruded on her thoughts. 'You need rest, and plenty of it, at the moment.'

  The doctor gestured authoritatively to the nurse, and Gina was left alone in that private ward for a few minutes to take stock of herself. She was aching all over, but there was an ache deep inside her which she knew could have nothing to do with the superficial bruises she had sustained. She had been mentally crippled by the simultaneous discovery that she had been pregnant and had miscarried, but, as the shock wore off, she became aware of new feelings churning through her which she had neither the strength nor the courage to analyse at that moment.

  'Gina?'

  Jarvis seemed to materialise from out of nowhere beside her hospital bed, and she swallowed convulsively to rid herself of the tears which threatened to choke her once again.

  'I'm sorry,' she whispered, forcing her unsteady lips into a smile as she looked up into his grim, ashen face. 'This wasn't part of the surprise I'd planned for your birthday, and—' She broke off in a panic as her mind registered the preparations which had gone into her desire to make that evening a success. 'Oh, Lord, what are we going to do about all those people I invited?'

  'Rosie found your guest list, and she called everyone to cancel the arrangements.' Steel-grey eyes held hers compellingly while his hand found hers on the white coverlet, and his grip on her fingers was so fierce that she almost cried out with the agony of it. 'Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant?'

  'I didn't know.' Her eyes misted with the tears which seemed to come so easily in her weakened state. 'I honestly didn't know.'

  The bruising pressure of his fingers lessened, and an angry, ragged sigh escaped him. 'My God, you're lucky you didn't kill yourself today.'

  Was there an accusation in his voice, or was she imagining it? Was he annoyed that, despite their precautions, she had succeeded in getting herself pregnant, or was he annoyed that she had lost the baby? The latter seemed improbable, but she was physically and mentally too weak to decide, and neither could she control a wave of cynical depression that was beginning to engulf her.

  'It would have been luckier still for you if I had succeeded in killing myself. My death would have set you free.'

  She could not explain what had prompted her to say that, she certainly had not intended to, but it was too late to retract that terrible statement and the damage it had done. Jarvis had gone white about the mouth, and his features had settled into a granite-hard, impenetrable mask that filled her with a sense of foreboding.

  'You need to get some rest,' he announced in a clipped and impersonal voice that chilled her. 'I'll see you again tomorrow.'

  The tears spilled freely down her cheeks from the moment he left, and she was still crying weakly when the nurse walked into her room some minutes later. It was reaction, the nurse explained, jabbing a needle into Gina's arm, and the tears finally subsided as a blessed drowsiness invaded her mind.

  Gina could not decide whether she felt better or worse the following day. She was so stiff and sore that she could barely move, and her head was pounding as if someone was knocking a hammer against her skull.

  'Jarvis came again that evening to see her, but his visit was brief and his polite, impersonal questions left her weeping once again with the despairing knowledge that she had only herself to blame for the cool, distant stranger he had become.

  Gina was allowed to go home on the morning of the second day after the accident. Jarvis collected her at the hospital that Saturday morning, and drove her back to Eldorado where he escorted her safely up to their bedroom.

  'I'm sending Rosie up to help you pack a suitcase,' he said in the clipped voice she had learned to dislike intensely. 'I'm taking you out to the farm after lunch. The change of scenery will be good for you, and I'll fetch you again in two weeks' time.'

  'I'd rather stay here,' she protested, afraid of what this separation might do to their swiftly crumbling relationship, and she was so desperately in need of an opportunity to make amends for the dreadful remark she had made that first night in hospital.

  'It's all arranged, Georgina.' His jaw was set in a hard, unrelenting line as he brushed aside her protest in a court manner. 'I have a difficult murder trial coming up, and I'm going to be working almost day and night during the next two weeks. The farm is the best place for you in the circumstances, and your father agrees with me on this issue.'

  He turned on his heel and strode out of the room, and she was left with a numb acceptance of something she did not have the strength to alter. He was taking her home to her family for two weeks, and that seemed to be that.

  Gina had to admit during those fourteen days on the farm that she would have been of little or no use to Jarvis if she had remained at Eldorado. She would, in fact, have achieved nothing by remaining there. She had suffered severe bouts of deep depression and moments when that deep sense of loss would make her weep herself into a state of exhaustion, but her family had rallied round to comfort her and boost her moral in their own quiet way. Her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage were never mentioned, but Gina could not forget it. She had lost something precious, something she could never reclaim, and she had to resign herself to the certain knowledge that her mental bruises would take considerably longer to heal than the physical ones she had sustained in that disastrous tumble down Eldorado's stairs.

  To have Jarvis's children had been something she had dreamed of before their marriage, but Aunt Evelyn's will had cruelly killed that dream in its infancy. She had known on their wedding day that having a baby would have to be deleted from the agenda of her marriage to Jarvis. A child would merely aggravate the delicate and sometimes explosive situation, but she could not help wishing she had not had that stupid accident. There would be other children, the doctor had said, but that was not quite true. If she could not have Jarvis's children then she would prefer not to have any at all. No other man could ever take Jarvis's place, and that was something she had to accept and learn to live with.

  The period of truce was over, Gina realised when she returned to Eldorado, and it was not the fact that the stairs had been recarpeted that had alerted her to this new development in her unconventional marriage. It was the shattering discovery that Jarvis had moved out of the master bedroom during her absence and into the room across the passage that had given her an insight into what the future held in store for her, and it hurt. It hurt her more than she had imagined possible, and the explanation for this drastic transition was painfully and glaringly obvious. He was afraid she might become pregnant again, and a child would merely strengthen the chains which held him in unwilling bondage.

  The routine at Eldorado might not always have been stable, but it was completely disrupted during the weeks that followed. Gina not only had to accustom herself to the loneliness of her nights in the four-poster bed, she was also confronted with the frightening knowledge that there was an almost complete break in communication between Jarvis and herself, and she was nearly frantic in the face of her inability to do something constructive about it.

  Their new existence did not seem to cause Jarvis the slightest discomfort. He frequently came home late at night, and the calls from his secretary, telling Gina not to expect him home for dinner, had become a regular and embarrassing occurrence. He was going through an unusually busy period, he had explained once when Gina had summoned up sufficient courage to question him, and she had no cause to disbelieve him until the day she had found traces of lipstick on a handkerchief which she had removed from the pocket of a suit prior to sending it to the cleaners. The lipstick was a deep crimson, the colour Lilian Ulrich favoured. That was not sufficient proof on which to base an accusation, but it placed Gina on the alert to something she prayed could not be tru
e.

  Jarvis displayed characteristics quite alien to his nature on the few evenings when he favoured Gina with his presence at Eldorado's dinner table. He would be morose and irritable, and their meal would invariably end in an argument after which he would storm out of the house, or closet himself in the study until the early hours of the morning.

  Gina was completely at a loss. She felt as if she had been caught in a vicious, punishing trap from which there was no escape, and she decided finally that the only way to deal with the pain would be to steal herself mentally against future attacks.

  She had, at length, considered herself prepared for anything, but she was caught off guard one morning when she opened Eldorado's front door to find Lilian Ulrich standing on the doorstep.

  'May I come in?' Lilian asked, and Gina gestured her inside in silence while she took the time to gather her scattered wits about her. Lilian stepped into the hall, her expensive perfume filling the air as she cast a critical glance about her. 'This really is a lovely old house, but rather antiquated, don't you think?'

  Gina could almost feel her godmother's bristling displeasure enfolding her as if it were her own. Eldorado was an old, but a well-preserved house, and each room had been furnished to give it an individual character. Gina loved this old house as it stood, and to modernise it would be tantamount to defiling a consecrated monument to the past.

  'I presume you're of the opinion that Eldorado needs to be redecorated in a more contemporary style?' Gina commented distastefully on Lilian's remark as she directed her unexpected and unwanted guest into the living-room.