by Penny Jordan
It was two floors down to the study. It had been in that room that Marcus had told her that he was going to get engaged, and with those words had broken the spell of her fantasy world for her.
She had screamed out at him that it was impossible, that he loved her, and her grandfather, passing outside the room, had come in, and she had turned to him and begged him to stop Marcus from betraying her.
She stood at the top of the stairs with her hand on the worn wooden rail, lost in the past. She had said things that even now she couldn’t bear to recall…made allegations in the furnace of her passion and pain which, had they been true… She shuddered coldly. But of course they hadn’t been true, and Marcus had forced her to admit as much. And she, unable to bear not just the burden of the truth but the added and far heavier burdens of her grandfather’s shock and Marcus’s hatred, had fled rather than face up to reality.
Reality had its own way of making itself felt, though, and in London she had been forced to come to terms with what she had done…to leave behind her comfortable fantasy world and see life as it really was.
She didn’t blame Marcus for what he had done. She never had. The blame and the fault were hers, and though there had been many, many times when she had ached to come home, when she would have given her soul for Marcus’s forgiveness and warm smile, she had forced herself to remain in exile until now.
Her concern for Susie had brought her north on a fast-flowing flood of emotion which was now starting to ebb, leaving her feeling vulnerable and defenceless. In the heat of the moment she had told Marcus that she intended to stay, virtually challenging him to stop her.
The house was centrally heated, the evening balmy and warm, but she was still shivering as she reached the bottom of the stairs and made her way to the study door.
It was closed, and she rapped on it tentatively.
‘Yes?’ Marcus looked up, frowning as she walked in, his voice terse. His desk was covered with files. He had always worked hard, first as a junior partner in the estate agents and auctioneers he had joined after leaving university, and then when he’d set up his own estate agency.
The harshness of the desk lamp illuminated the lines of tension on his face, cut sharply in grooves that ran from his nose to his mouth. Lines which were new to her, she recognised sadly.
‘You wanted to see me,’ she reminded him.
A gas fire burned in the Adam grate and she went over to it, holding out her hands to the flames, even though they gave off little heat.
‘Cold?’ he asked her sharply.
She was, but not in any way that had anything to do with the temperature of the air. No, the chill eating away inside her came from years of guilt and pain…from knowing just how much she had wronged him…from carrying the anguish of remorse and regret as her constant burden.
‘Not really. I thought for a moment the fire was real.’
‘Mrs Nesbitt, our last housekeeper, told me that there was no way she was going to clean out coal fires, so I had that installed. It’s far from an adequate substitute.’
‘It looks effective, though.’
‘Maybe, but as you’ve just discovered, there’s nothing more disappointing than discovering that your eyes have deceived you into believing an attractive and welcoming exterior means there’s going to be something equally warm behind it.’
He sounded very tired, and as he got up from behind his desk he half stumbled, bumping into it, and sending a silver photograph frame clattering down on to its wooden surface. As he picked it up, Maggie saw the photograph it held and her lungs seized up in a paroxysm of shock.
It was her. Taken on her seventeenth birthday, a formal photograph commissioned by her grandfather.
‘You’ve still got that,’ she whispered huskily, the words scraping her tense muscles.
‘Yes,’ Marcus replied tersely, without looking at her. ‘It serves to remind me…’ He broke off and looked directly at her, shocking her into frozen immobility. She had forgotten the effect those hypnotic grey eyes could have… She had forgotten how it could feel when he looked at her like that…as though he could see right through to her soul.
Once she had fantasised about seeing those eyes grow warm and then burn with desire. Had mentally visualised them darkening with passion, as he held her and touched her, her imaginings as wild and feverish as only those of teenage girls can be…her knowledge of sex gleaned more from what she had read than anything she had personally experienced.
And she didn’t have much more experience than that now, she reminded herself grimly. The only difference was that now she realised that there was far more to loving someone than sexual desire.
‘So you still do that?’
The harsh words shocked her, and she focused abruptly on him, staring at him in confusion.
‘What?’
‘Do you really not know? It used to infuriate me, that ability of yours to drift off into your private world where no one could follow you. I thought you must have grown out of it.’
Her face flamed the guilt that was never far away from surfacing painfully. ‘I have,’ she told him shortly. ‘What do you want to talk to me about, Marcus? It’s getting late, and I have to be up early in the morning to drive the girls to school. I’m hoping to get something organised on a rota basis once I’ve found my feet, but I thought it might be an idea to see if I can arrange to see the headmistress and have a chat with her. What’s she like?’
‘So you still intend to go through with it?’ Marcus demanded ignoring her last question.
Maggie tensed. This was it. This was what she had been dreading…why she had been putting off this confrontation all evening.
‘Hadn’t I already made that clear?’ she answered obliquely, feeling her nerves tighten when he remained silent, staring, not at her, but out of the window into the dusky twilight of the June garden.
‘I thought perhaps once you’d had time to reflect you might…’
‘Change my mind? No, Marcus,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘Susie and Sara need me here. Even you can’t deny that. They don’t like Isobel, and from what I’ve heard her say I judge that she doesn’t care much for them…’ She saw that he was about to interrupt and held up her hand, continuing challengingly, ‘You’re going to deny it! Why—when we both know that it’s true? Look at it this way: my staying here to look after the girls will free you and Isobel to make your own lives.’
‘Away from here?’ Marcus asked her silkily.
‘Did I say that?’
‘By implication, but my life is here, Maggie. My home is here, and I intend that it is going to remain here.’
‘That’s something you should take up with Isobel, not me,’ Maggie told him unwisely. ‘After all, she’s the one who’s going to be your wife.’
The minute she said the words, she knew it was a mistake. They were too dangerous…too evocative of all that lay between them…
She saw a shadow pass across Marcus’s face and wondered if he was thinking of that other girl who should have held that role. The girl she had never met. He must have loved her a great deal indeed not to have married for so long. Why hadn’t he married her once she herself had gone? These were questions she could never ask him. The old intimacy and easiness between them had gone forever, and in its place was a savage hostility which both of them tried to mask but which constantly flared into life. And she was going to have to live with the knowledge of that hostility. She was going to have to live side by side with Marcus and Isobel… She was going to have to see them building a life together…having a family…and suddenly she wondered what on earth she had done.
‘See, you’re not as convinced you’re doing the right thing as you pretend,’ Marcus pounced, seeing the doubt fill her eyes. ‘Taking on the responsibility of parenting two teenage girls is no easy task…as I know.’
‘So do I,’ Maggie told him fiercely. ‘I’m not seventeen any more, Marcus. I’m an adult…a woman. Or are you, oh, so subtly, trying to i
mply that you don’t consider me a morally fit person to have charge of them?’
The tension was almost tangible now, and Marcus was obviously as aware of it as she was, because he limped over to the french windows and pushed them open angrily, standing in the cool waft of evening air, staring out over the grounds. He was silent for a long time and then, when he did speak, his voice was so raw and low that she had trouble hearing it. Automatically she walked closer to him, trying to catch what he was saying.
‘Maggie…think…think what you’re doing.’ He swung round, catching her off guard, less than half the length of the desk between them, his eyes brilliant and glittering oddly, the pupils slightly enlarged. Every bone in his face seemed to be tensed in fierce pressure, and Maggie had a tremendous awareness both of his power and his emotional control. She had the vivid impression that he would like to do her violence, and that he was only stopping himself with great difficulty.
‘I have thought,’ she told him shakily. ‘And I’m staying. You can’t make me leave, Marcus.’
It was the wrong thing to say. He closed the gap between them, saying harshly, ‘Can’t I? We’ll see about that.’
And then, shockingly, he had taken hold of her, her body suddenly frighteningly fragile as she felt the pressure of his grip, threatening her ribcage.
‘What have you really come back for, Maggie?’ he demanded thickly, his breath warm against her skin. She wanted to pull away from him, but she was too conscious of the weight of his casts to push him hard in case she damaged them, and besides, he had her trapped between his body and the desk.
His body… She drew an agonised breath of shock as he shifted his weight and leaned heavily into her. He was aroused physically in a way that was totally unfamiliar to her, and where once she would have swooned with pleasure at the knowledge, now she was sickened by it…knowing that it sprang not from desire but from anger.
She felt the heat of his breath graze her ear and knew that he was going to kiss her. She turned her head away from him and demanded, ‘Stop this, Marcus. I know you must hate me…I know you must want to punish me for what I did, but not…’
‘Then if you know it, why don’t you stop fighting me and accept your punishment?’ he jeered harshly.
She could feel in the heavy rise and fall of his chest the effort it was costing him to breathe. One sharp push and she could probably unbalance him… As though he picked up her thoughts, he pushed her back harder against the desk, pinning her there.
‘You owe me this,’ he told her angrily, and then his free hand slid into her hair, tightening almost painfully in it, holding her immobile while his mouth savaged hers in a kiss of such violence that she could scarcely believe it was happening.
During her years in London she had dated many men. A goodnight kiss was as far as she allowed them to get, and over the years she imagined she had experienced every kind of kiss there was, but now, shockingly, she realised she was wrong.
As she fought to deny the angry domination Marcus was forcing upon her, he grated against her swollen lips, ‘Open your mouth. Open it, Maggie, or I’ll make you.’ And when she still refused, her body trembling with shock and fear, his fingers tightened their grip and he whispered savagely, ‘Remember what you said to your grandfather…that you and I were already lovers…that I had taken you to my bed and initiated you into every art there is… You owe me this, Maggie.’
And, because her muscles had suddenly turned weak and fluid at the mention of the past, she obeyed him, limply and automatically, a rag doll in his arms while he savaged her mouth until she could bear it no more and the salt tears ran down her cheeks, stinging the tender, bruised flesh of her lips.
He released her then, staggering back from her as though she had indeed pushed him. He looked dazed and white, his eyes unfocused, his muscles clenched as though he himself couldn’t believe what he had done.
When he lifted his hand and reached out to touch her sore mouth, she jerked away.
‘Oh, Maggie…’
‘You aren’t going to make me go away, Marcus,’ she told him thickly, and then added quietly, ‘And if you ever touch me like that again, I promise you I’ll go straight to Isobel and tell her exactly what kind of man she’s marrying.’
He looked like a man who’d been put on the rack, she recognised, her own emotions running too strongly and turbulently for her to recognise the anguish that darkened his eyes as his hand fell away and he said rawly, ‘Maggie, I’m sorry. I just…’
‘Wanted to punish me. Yes, I know.’
She had to get out of this room before she broke apart completely…before she broke down in front of him and sobbed out her pain and grief.
As she turned for the door, her sight was blinded by the bitterness of her tears. All these years she had kept in the secret places of her heart an image of Marcus as the perfect lover. All these years she had rejected other men because they were not him, and now, shockingly, in one brutal kiss he had shown her how far her dreams had been from reality.
She found her way back upstairs more by instinct than anything else, suddenly realising she was standing in her bedroom without having any real idea of how she had got there.
She hadn’t closed the curtains, and outside the sky was that intense shade of dark blue lighting to pale turquoise that seemed to be a feature of the short Northern summer night.
She had no idea what time it was. She could have been in the study hours or seconds. Stars made pinpoints of light overhead. Her window was open, and through it she could smell the rich scent of the old-fashioned climbing rose on the wall outside.
It was a French rose, brought home, so the tale went, by the Deveril who managed to attach himself to the court of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, and planted, where it had eventually flourished, in the gardens of the original Pele tower.
The foundations of that tower still existed in the grounds, and when the new house had been built the new bride had insisted on planting an offshoot of that original rose against its walls…for good luck, or so the story went.
Her husband, who had little time for such sentiment, but was mindful of his wife’s handsome dowry, let her have her way just as long as the rose was not allowed to spoil the handsome proportions of the new mansion, and so it had been planted here at the back of the house.
It had been her father who had told her that story, Maggie remembered numbly. She closed the curtains, but left the window open. How clean the air was up here…she had forgotten.
She crossed to the dressing-table and switched on the lamp, exclaiming in shock as she saw how swollen and bruised her mouth looked.
As he’d tasted her tears, Marcus had sworn savagely against its softness. She could have sworn that when he released her he had been as shocked by his behaviour as she was herself. She had always had a good deal too much imagination, she acknowledged bitterly, as she used some moisturiser to soothe the worst of the sting.
If she bathed her skin with cold water, with luck by tomorrow morning most of the bruising would have gone down.
Even now she found it hard to believe what had happened. She had known Marcus would not welcome her back, of course. How could he? She had expected objections…reasoned arguments, sarcasm, and even a downright refusal to let her stay; but the last thing she had been prepared for had been that furious kiss.
She slipped off her blouse and skirt and put on her robe over her underclothes, gathering up her toilet-bag. The bathroom was only a little way down the passage, and she was hardly likely to meet anyone, least of all Marcus.
Even so, she was relieved when she was actually inside the bathroom with the door locked safely.
She showered quickly and then spent almost fifteen minutes doing what she could do to control the swelling that made her lips look so full and red. Her hand trembled just a little as she touched antiseptic to the tiny cuts inflicted by Marcus’s teeth, and her reflection in the mirror shimmered and danced in front of her as fresh tears filled her eyes.
She refused to let them fall, tensing every muscle until the desire to cry was beaten back. She was not one of those fortunate women who could cry beautifully, and besides, she had surely cried enough tears for one lifetime over Marcus.
When she went back to her room, the lights were still on downstairs and Marcus was presumably still in the study. Her last thought as she drifted off to sleep was that, no matter what Marcus might do, she was not going to leave. Susie and Sara needed her, and she…well, she needed to be needed, she acknowledged sleepily. Good friend though Lara was, she was a very independent person, and long ago, during the early days of their relationship, she had teased Maggie so much about her yearning to provide Lara and her father with the kind of domestic comfort and contentment she herself had known in her aunt’s household that Maggie had taken the hint and ceased trying to ‘mother’ them.
‘Some women have an instinctive urge to nurture,’ John Philips had told her consolingly, sensing her distress. ‘And there’s nothing to feel ashamed of, no matter what Lara might have told you. For Lara, her career and perhaps ultimately one man will always dominate her life.’ He had smiled whimsically at her then and added, ‘If God chose to make us all different, who are we to question his judgement?’
There was that need in her, she recognised tiredly. In London she had subdued it in forcing herself to take a more practical attitude, but Lara still teased her that she could never resist filling the flat with flowers and their friends with home-made food. Even in her work the need was there, as nothing gave her more satisfaction than to see a writer’s face light up with pleasure when she had successfully captured the essence of their characters in her illustrations.
It had been a long journey home to this very special place, and now that she was here… Now that she was here, she fully intended to stay.
* * *
THAT NIGHT she had a dream. It was as familiar to her as her own reflection, and as it started she had the dreamer’s awareness that it was just a dream and at the same time the familiar terror of wishing there was some way she could avoid what was to come.