by Liz Fielding
He was wrong.
Now she knew the truth a world of possibilities opened up before them. Before her. There were countless children for whom she could make a difference, with her time, her love, her money. There was only one man. And with one arm trapped beneath her, one hand occupied keeping hers captive, he was at her mercy. With her hand neutralised she did what any woman would do and used her mouth to break down his resistance.
She heard the hiss of agony as she laid her lips against his heart, feeling the hammer of it. His skin was warm, like silk beneath her tongue.
He tried to speak, caught his breath as she curled her tongue around his nipple, tasting him, savouring him as it responded, tightening to her touch. The power was all hers and she used it, taking her mouth across his chest to the concave space beneath his ribs. He gathered himself then, made an effort to put an end to this raid on his senses, but he’d left it too late and the soft twirl of her tongue around his navel wrung a groan, more pain than pleasure, from him.
He was a strong-minded man, but his body betrayed him, rising to meet her. She welcomed it with open mouth.
Ivo had swiftly discovered that quadratic equations were no match for his wife when she was set upon seduction. That when he should have been saying ‘No…’, the only word he seemed capable of saying was ‘Yes…’ That when she straddled him, leaned forward so that her luscious breasts stroked against his chest, sheathed herself on him, as she said, ‘I love you. Love me, Ivo…’ that the small warning voice hammering away somewhere inside his head was wasting its time.
Afterwards, when they’d made love with no secrets, no barriers between them, she cried. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, dashing her tears away with the back of her hand. ‘I don’t do this…’ Then, smiling, if somewhat shakily, ‘You didn’t bargain on this when you dropped by with that package, did you?’
‘I might start sending them to you myself if this is the welcome I get,’ he said. Then, ‘Or you could just come home.’
She stiffened. ‘I can’t. I can’t go back there…’ Then, ‘Did you hear something?’
A crash, then the sound of the front door being slammed, the feet pounding down the stairs, made denial impossible and Belle catapulted out of his arms, grabbed a dressing gown, clutching it around herself as she wrenched open the door.
‘Oh…’
She sounded as if she’d been punched, as if the air had been driven from her and he didn’t stop to pull on his pants, but followed, coming to an abrupt halt in the doorway of the small third bedroom that Belle had converted to a wardrobe and dressing room.
The dress that she’d worn for the awards ceremony, the lace evening coat, had been reduced to litter. Mere shreds of material.
Daisy.
How long must it have taken her? How long had she been home? Seeing his coat hanging beside Belle’s, the shut bedroom door, standing there, listening to the sounds made by two people lost to the world as they made love.
He looked up and saw that the scissors she’d used had been flung at the mirror.
His instinct was to reach for Belle, protect her from this, but she twitched away from him, rejecting a gesture of comfort that an hour before she’d begged for, the kind of gesture that was fast becoming second nature to him.
‘Something’s happened,’ she said. ‘Something bad.’ She turned on him. ‘She needed me, Ivo, and I wasn’t there for her.’
He drew in a breath, hunting for something to say, anything to help reassure her. To reassure himself. The painful reality was that sometimes there were no words.
‘She’ll have gone to the squat.’
‘Why would she do that? She knows it’s the first place I’ll look for her.’
He wondered if the switch from ‘we’ to ‘I’ was conscious, or whether Belle had slipped instinctively into self-preservation mode in anticipation of what was to come, already anticipating the worst.
‘She wants you to find her, Belle.’ He indicated the coat stand where she’d hung the expensive quilted jacket that her sister had bought her alongside his overcoat. ‘She didn’t take a coat.’
Because she wanted to punish her sister, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
‘She’ll be freezing.’
‘Come on, I’ll drive you-’
‘No!’ Then, more firmly, ‘No.’
Daisy had helped to bring them closer, to open up, let light and air into the dark core of suffering that they’d chosen to bury, but she was a loose cannon and, in her need, was just as capable of driving them apart.
Forced to choose between them-and Daisy would make her choose-Belle, driven by guilt, would sacrifice anything to convince her sister that she was loved. Him. Her own happiness.
All he could do was hang in there. Do whatever he could to make it easy for her. Starting now.
‘She’ll want to shout at someone. Blame someone for the fact that when she needed you, you were in bed with me. If I’m there she can use me as her verbal punch bag,’ he said.
‘I wanted you, Ivo. This isn’t your fault.’
‘This isn’t about us. She needs you, Belle. I’m dispensable.’
The squat had been secured against intruders-he’d called the property developers himself to make sure it was done quickly and they’d made a solid job of it.
Daisy had clearly tried to kick her way in-there were footprints on the new board-but, beaten, she was now sitting, hunched up, shivering, her hands stuffed into her sleeves, on a low wall.
Belle said nothing, just handed her the coat she’d left behind and was invited, in the most basic of terms, to go away. Her response was to take off her own coat, lay the two of them side by side on the wall and sit down beside her.
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ she asked matter-of-factly.
‘Like you care.’
‘If I didn’t care I wouldn’t be here. What happened?’ she repeated quietly.
‘You weren’t there!’
Daisy sounded more like a petulant child than a grown woman, Ivo thought, but she’d been through a lot. Would need a great deal of help, counselling, endless amounts of that unconditional love that Belle talked about, to build up her self-esteem. He knew from experience that it was a full-time job.
‘When wasn’t I there?’ Belle asked patiently.
‘This morning when the agency phoned.’
‘I was at work, Daisy. You know that.’ Calm, steady. He knew how hard that was and he was desperately proud of her. ‘What did they want?’
‘They found my dad.’
‘What?’
Belle, doing her best to remain calm, composed, controlled, was shaken to her foundations and Daisy finally looked at her.
‘They called this morning to tell me that they’d found him.’
‘But they shouldn’t have…’ She’d given express instructions to the agency.
‘What? Told me? Why? He was my dad.’
‘I know, but…I wanted to be there when they talked to you. You shouldn’t have been on your own.’
‘It’s nothing new.’
‘That was then. This is now.’
‘Right.’ Disbelief. A glance in Ivo’s direction that said it all.
‘I can’t believe they told you. Wait until-’
‘They thought I was you. One Miss Porter is pretty much like another on the telephone. They had news; I wasn’t going to say call back when my big sister’s home, was I?’ And, without warning, her face crumpled. ‘He’s dead, Bella. My dad died six months ago. I went to see his grave. I took flowers. It was horrible. There was no headstone. No name. Just a number.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Belle said, putting her arms around her. ‘You shouldn’t have been alone.’ And she never would be again. This afternoon she’d seen a different Ivo-someone caring, someone capable of immense feeling, the man she’d glimpsed in those first heady days, the man she’d fallen in love with and she’d wanted him
, had pushed him into something he knew was a mistake. Selfish, selfish, selfish…‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, please!’ She shook her off. ‘You don’t care. You hated him, blamed him for everything.’ Belle, Ivo could see, was struggling to find a response that wasn’t going to curdle in her mouth, something to comfort Daisy, but her sister didn’t wait. ‘You hated him and you don’t give a damn about me.’ She looked up, glared at him over Belle’s shoulder and said, ‘He’s the only person you ever think about.’
‘No…’
‘It’s true. He’s always calling you. When you talk to him your face goes all soft and gooey and when I came home he was there, in your room. I heard you! You’re supposed to be separated, getting a divorce, not having sex in the middle of the afternoon!’
Her youthful outrage would have been funny, Ivo thought, but he felt no urge to laugh. Belle’s desperate ‘No…’ had chilled him to the bone. He’d known it would be bad-the destruction of the dress was not the work of a girl mildly irritated with her sister-but this was worse than he could ever have imagined.
And when Belle turned and looked at him, he knew he was right. Knew that she would sacrifice her own happiness, this tender shoot that promised a new beginning to their marriage-anything to make up to her sister for a mistake she’d made when she was fourteen years old. A decision she’d made for the best of reasons. The truth was that Daisy needed one hundred per cent of her sister right now and that was what she’d get.
There was nothing he could do or say to change Belle’s mind. That to even try would be to hurt her more than she was already hurting.
He knew because he’d have done the same for Miranda. Would have sacrificed anything to make her well, make her whole; but her words, as she continued to look at him, still tore his heart from his body.
‘Today was just one of those things that sometimes happens when something important is over, Daisy. Revisiting the might-have-beens. The very-nearlys. But we can never go back.’
Her words were telling him that waiting was not an option, that she had made her decision, that today had meant nothing. But her eyes, begging him to understand, to forgive her for putting Daisy first, were saying something else and, as if she knew that they betrayed her, she closed them, turned away, drew Daisy close as if she were a child.
‘You’re more important to me than anyone in the world, Daisy Porter. No one can ever come between us. You have to believe that.’
There were tears in her eyes as she said it, but Daisy, sobbing out her own grief, for a man she’d never known, who’d never loved her, who’d robbed them both of the life they should have had, didn’t see them.
Life had a way of calling you on bad decisions, Ivo knew. He hadn’t walked away three years ago, hadn’t had Belle’s heart, her capacity for sacrifice. This time, though, things were different. Belle had taught him the power of love, its enduring nature.
She needed this time alone with her sister and he was strong enough to give her the space she needed, for as long as she needed.
‘For as long as we both shall live.’
He repeated the words from the marriage service under his breath, the difference being that this time he understood what they meant. And, more importantly, he believed them.
‘You should have an early night,’ Belle said.
Daisy had her feet up on the sofa she’d chosen-fuchsia-pink velvet, not as practical, but a lot more exciting than the brown suede she’d picked out-watching television.
‘An early night?’ She’d got over her tears, had a bath and a slice of pizza, which was all she seemed to want to eat. ‘I’m not a kid.’
Then stop acting like one, she wanted to yell at her. Grow up. I had to. Ivo had to…
She held it in. This was her fault. If she’d been there, if she’d fought with the social workers for access, visiting rights, maybe it would have all worked out.
If she hadn’t lost all sense today, hadn’t been thinking solely of herself, then maybe, gradually, she could have slowly built on this brand-new fledgling relationship with Ivo.
Instead Daisy, selfish, needy, desperate, had forced her to choose between her sister and her marriage. She didn’t know that she’d already chosen Daisy when she’d left Ivo.
For a moment she’d believed that he could be a part of their lives. But he understood the problems, the sacrifice involved in taking care of someone who had been emotionally damaged, broken by circumstance.
There had been no need for words. He’d made it easy for her, making it clear, when he’d dropped them back at the flat that he wouldn’t be around for a while. Offering some excuse about pressure of business…
She dragged her mind back to her life, said, ‘I didn’t say you were a kid, but it’s my last day on the breakfast sofa tomorrow, Daisy. I’d like you to be there with me.’
‘What?’ For a moment she looked excited, then just plain scared. ‘Oh, no…’ Then she bounced back. ‘My hair!’
‘The make-up girls will fix it for you.’
‘But what will I wear? Can I borrow your…?’ she began. Then, as quickly as it had bubbled up, her excitement evaporated and she sank back into the sofa. ‘Forget it. You don’t want me there.’
‘I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want you there. I want the world to know I have a sister.’
‘Parade me as your charity case? No thanks.’
She was doing it deliberately. For a moment she’d forgotten about the dress. What she’d done to it.
‘You don’t have to punish yourself over the dress, Daisy,’ she said. ‘You did it. It happened. You apologised. Now move on.’ She didn’t move. ‘Okay. Let’s deal with this. Come on.’
‘What?’ But Belle had her by the hand and, before she knew what was happening, they were in the room where all her gowns were hanging on rails, waiting for a carpenter to find time to start work on fitted wardrobes.
Nothing had been touched since Daisy’s attack on her dress. She’d simply shut the door on it, unable to face what it meant. For a brief shining moment it had seemed that she’d been offered a second chance, not just with her sister, but with Ivo. Life, however, wasn’t that simple.
She’d never forgive herself for what she’d done to Ivo, for overriding his natural reserve, common sense, with a promise of something that was not hers to give.
Wanting it all.
She, more than anyone, should know how impossible that was. She’d found her sister. Eventually she’d find herself. And Ivo would, now the barriers had been broken down, find someone else.
Now, like her sister, she needed to live with what she’d done, move on, and she walked along the dress rail, running a finger over the hangers.
She’d cleared out a lot of her clothes, sent them to a charity shop. She was already building a new wardrobe for the different woman she was becoming and had only kept those that she needed for work, the ones that meant something special to her.
Her finger stopped at random and she took the dress from the rail, held it up for Daisy, hanging back in the doorway, to see. It was black, a sizzling strapless gown. She’d never wear it again. Had kept it out of sentimentality.
‘I wore this dress to my first awards dinner years ago,’ she said. Remembering the night. How nervous she’d been. How startled she’d been when she’d seen the glamorous photographs in the gossip mags the following week. Thinking it couldn’t be her. It wasn’t her…She turned to look at her sister. ‘I wasn’t nominated for anything. I was just a B-list celebrity there to make up the numbers. I can remember waiting for someone to call me on it. Ask me what the heck I thought I was doing there.’
She picked up the scissors, still lying where they’d fallen, gouging a lump out of the surface of the dressing table, and hacked it in two, discarding the pieces so that they fell to the floor to lie with the shreds of cream and gold. Ignored Daisy’s gasp of horror as she continued running her finger along the rail.
‘Now this one,’ she said matter-of-fa
ctly, picking out a low-cut scarlet gown, ‘was the dress I wore to some fancy affair involving bankers.’
Newly married, she’d been planning to wear something sedate in black, but then Manda had stuck her oar in, warning her not to make an exhibition of herself and what was a girl to do? Ivo hadn’t said a word. His eyes had done the talking and, later, his fingers had done the walking.
‘Billionaires, Daisy, drool just like normal men.’
Her sister whimpered as the scissors flashed and it joined the black dress on the floor.
Moving on.
She worked her way along the rail, picking out special favourites from these treasured gowns, recalling for her sister the special occasions on which she’d worn them. Birthdays, anniversaries, galas. Shutting her mind against the afterwards, when Ivo had unzipped, unhooked, unbuttoned each one, sometimes slowly, sometimes impatiently, always with passion.
By the time she reached the end of the rail Daisy was in tears and she was very close to them, her eyes swimming as she reached for the last gown.
A simple pleated column of grey silk, it was the first vintage gown she’d bought. Chanel at her most perfect. It was the gown she’d been wearing on that evening in the Serpentine Gallery.
Cutting this one would be hardest of all and yet it would be a symbol, a promise to her sister, even though it was one that Daisy would not understand. A promise to her sister, a demonstration that none of this mattered. That nothing would come between them ever again.
As she raised the scissors, Daisy caught her arm.
‘Don’t,’ she sobbed. ‘Please don’t.’ Then she sank to her knees, picking up tiny pieces of gold lace, holding them together as if she could undo the destruction. ‘I’m sorry, Bella. So sorry.’
‘It’s only a dress, Daisy,’ she said, letting the scissors fall to her side, almost faint with relief, sinking down beside her. ‘It’s not important. I just wanted you to understand that there is nothing more important to me than you.’ She lifted her chin, forcing Daisy to look at her. ‘You do believe me?’
‘You looked like a princess that night,’ she said, wiping her cheek with the palm of her hand. ‘I was in the crowd outside the hotel, waiting for you to arrive. I wasn’t going to ever come to you, mess up your life, but I wanted to see you and when you got out of the car everyone just sighed.’