by Penny Jordan
She could see him just within the periphery of her vision. He was standing in the shadows of the room, his head slightly averted, as though he didn’t want to look at her, to acknowledge her.
His hair, she realised, was still as dark as it had always been, untouched by grey and apparently as thick and vibrant as ever. She remembered how she had loved to touch it, to feel the soft springiness of its curl beneath her fingertips, envying him that natural characteristic which had been denied her. And yet he, it seemed, had been equally fascinated by the soft sleek fall of her own straight locks, praising their silkiness, saying her hair was fluid and warm like sun-stroked water. When they made love he had liked the sensation of her hair against his skin…against his body. He had coaxed her to rub herself against him like a small sleek cat, and the sound he had made in his throat when she did so had not been unlike the rusty purr of some jungle animal.
He had taught her so many things about both his sexuality and her own; not just in terms of the physical act of union, but also of the wide variety of small intimate pleasures that could arise from the lightest, most delicate, and sometimes often unexpected kind of touch. He had been both gentle and passionate, demanding and patient. He had been the best of lovers, and the worst of husbands.
She started to shiver suddenly as her body caved in under the pressure of her shock. Lewis still hadn’t looked at her properly nor she at him and yet she had recalled faultlessly and unwantedly the sensation of his hands against her skin, coaxing, stroking, loving…hands which she now saw were bunched into hard, tense fists.
He moved abruptly, flexing his fingers, a gesture unfamiliar to her and which, being unfamiliar, should have released her from her bondage to her unwanted memories; but instead it eroded her self-discipline, and anguish and desolation rose up inside her. She had changed and so of course must he, and it was foolish beyond all measure of her to mourn her own lack of knowledge of something so slight as an added mannerism.
He was tense; that involuntary flexing of his fingers proved that. He had been tense the night he’d told her he didn’t want her or their marriage any more, but tense in a different way: then he had used his tension as a barrier between them…a barrier which had told her, ‘Don’t come any nearer. Don’t even think about trying to touch me,’ and yet she had done so…foolishly, and his recoil from her had been instant and shocking, betraying his physical revulsion for her.
Alongside her, Ian was still talking.
‘Lacey almost single-handedly organised the appeal for Michael Sullivan; that was why I wanted the two of you to meet. Lacey, Lewis is—’
She couldn’t endure any more. The initial shock had faded now, but what was left in its place was even worse: a kind of sick anxiety, coupled with pain and something more…something she could not bear to analyse.
‘Ian, I’m sorry,’ she interrupted shakily. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay…’
As her dazed brain sought frantically for some excuse for her unscheduled departure, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Lewis had turned his head, and was looking at her.
Their glances met, meshed; blue eyes blazing into grey. Every never-ending in her body burst into painful life. It had been like that all those years ago. He had looked at her then with those amazing blue eyes, and then…
But then the look in his eyes had been one of admiration; or arousal and eagerness. Now it was one of…
Of what? she asked herself dizzily as she tried to look away. Absently she wondered why—when his body had so obviously matured from the slight thinness of his early twenties as though now he had finally grown into the height and breadth of the bone-structure nature had given him—his face seemed so much more sharply sculptured, so much harder, so much more shockingly masculine. He had never been good-looking in the almost too handsome fashion of a film star, but he had always had a potent, very unnerving almost—at least to her—aura of male sexuality which time seemed to have enhanced rather than lessened; and yet there was nothing overtly sexual about him. He was wearing a well-tailored plain navy suit, a crisp white shirt and a suitably discreet tie, his clothes very similar in fact to those worn by both Ian and Tony, and yet on him…
The slight movement of his body re-attracted her attention, her glance flicking helplessly towards it so that she was gut-wrenchingly conscious of the power of the muscles that lay beneath his skin, achingly aware of his body, his maleness, in a way she hadn’t been aware of a man’s physical masculinity in years.
‘I…I must go,’ she reiterated huskily. ‘I promised I’d go round and see Michael.’
‘But I thought we were going to finalise the formal winding down of the appeal,’ Ian protested. ‘I—’
‘I’m sorry, Ian. I…I can’t stay. Not now!’
She was almost gabbling now as she headed for the door, desperately conscious of the way Lewis was watching her, and desperately anxious to escape from the room before she panicked completely. She knew that her behaviour must, to Ian at least, seem totally out of character, totally immature and illogical, and that as such it must be completely bewildering him. Later she would have to apologise to him…to make some kind of amends for what she was doing, but if she stayed in this room with Lewis even one second longer…
She shuddered, acknowledging how, for one heartbeat, she had been horrendously tempted to close the gap between them; to walk up to him and be at his side as though it was her right to be there.
That had shocked and frightened her even more than her sexual awareness of him. He had hurt her so badly that she had believed that nothing would ever make her forget that pain, and yet in the space of a handful of heartbeats she had found herself recklessly, dangerously ignoring reality and allowing herself to pretend that they were still together…a couple…a pair…that they were still…still what? she asked herself sickly as she pulled open the door and walked through it. Still lovers?
The wave of heat that suffused her told its own betraying story.
Ian, who had followed her through the door and who was now reaching out to delay her, asked anxiously, ‘Is everything all right? You seem…different, somehow. I…’
‘I’m fine, Ian. It’s just that I feel so guilty about forgetting I had promised to see Michael today. I only remembered when I was halfway here, so it seemed simpler to explain in person.’
She had never known she possessed such a facility for fiction…for lying.
‘I’ll ring you tomorrow about the appeal. I…I am sorry.’
He was smiling at her, still quite obviously concerned, but, being the man he was, he made no attempt to restrain or question her, and it was only once she had reached the sanctuary of her car that she realised that she still had no idea what on earth Lewis was doing in town, nor, more importantly, how long he intended to stay.
To judge from his shock at seeing her, if he had had any intentions of staying on he must surely now have changed his mind, she reflected grimly and self-punishingly. Thank goodness Jessica was back at university!
Jessica. She felt sick inside. How would she feel if she knew that her father had been here in town and she, her mother, had not said one word to alert her? But Jessica had never expressed any desire to try and track down her father.
That did not mean that somewhere, buried deep inside her, there wasn’t a very natural desire to know more about him. She would hardly have been human if she had ever experienced that emotion, that need, even if loyalty to her mother had kept her silent on the subject.
As she sat in the car, knowing that she was still too shocked to drive, Lacey leaned her head back against the neck-rest and acknowledged wearily that she was now in danger of adding guilt to all her emotional burdens.
It was a long time before she felt physically and emotionally able to start her car and drive home. When she did, her fingers were over-tight on the wheel, a frown of concentration furrowing her forehead, and she tried desperately not to let her mental images of Lewis come between her and her driving.
/> If she could react so horrendously to simply seeing him, she could barely endure the thought of what might have happened had he actually touched her.
Touched her! A small hysterical sound bubbled up in her throat. The last time he had touched her had been the last time he made love to her; less than a week before he had told her that their marriage was over.
She trembled violently, her eyes clouded with tears; only the blaring of another driver’s car horn bringing her sharply back to reality and her responsibility as a driver to pay attention to what she was doing.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Lacey got home she was actually trembling in a physical reaction to her shocked and confused emotions. She went straight upstairs, sluicing her overheated flesh with cold water, trying to jolt her body back to normality and at the same time to quench the disturbing heat twisting her insides.
How on earth was she going to explain her ridiculous behaviour to Ian? She had lied to him, a lie so obvious and ill-judged that she was sure he must have known it, and she abhorred deceit of any kind—a legacy from the past, from the knowledge that, even as he had made love to her, Lewis must have been thinking of that other woman; the woman she had never seen but whom she had known existed and for some time, for surely a man did not simply fall out of love with one woman and into love with another in the space of a single week, and she could have sworn that when he was making love to her there had been love as well as desire and passion in his touch…his possession of her.
For a long, long time after he had left her, she had not allowed herself to think about that particular betrayal; her pregnancy had helped, keeping at bay those kinds of self-destructive thoughts, but eventually there had come a time, a day when, long after Jessica’s birth, her thoughts, her time were not totally and completely absorbed by the responsibility and joy of her new daughter, and she had wondered then in revulsion and pain how Lewis had been able to make love to her with so much passion and apparent sincerity, with so much intensity and counterfeit love, when only days later he had shuddered back from her in physical revulsion, abhorring her briefest touch, the imploring plea of the hand she had stretched out towards him while she’d begged him to explain, to help her understand how his love could have died, how he could possibly tell her that he no longer loved her: that their marriage was over.
That was when they had begun, those tormenting, shocking dreams where she relived over and over again their physical communion. In those dreams there were no barriers, no pain, no sense of reality, only a shimmering, ecstatic kaleidoscope of remembered pleasures and delights, but in the morning had come the reality, the pain, and the guilt that she should continue to dream so idiotically and pathetically about a man who had forgotten her years ago.
She rang Michael’s mother, asking if she could possibly go round to see Michael earlier than they had originally arranged, so that she could at least give her lie to Ian some form of substance.
The time she spent with Michael and his family as always left her feeling both spiritually uplifted and at the same time humbled, achingly conscious of the sheer purity and shining strength that the small boy evidenced, and yet heartbreakingly aware of the mortal frailty of his physical body.
Michael was in remission, the devastating effects of his condition halted—for the time being. For the time being, but not forever…
Being with the Sullivans should have brought her own self-indulgent emotional problems into their true perspective, she told herself later on her way home, but instead she hadn’t been able to help contrasting the closeness between Michael’s parents, their shared love for their child, for their other children, with her own solitary state. They, for all the despair and heartache they had suffered, had something she had been denied.
At eighteen and twenty-one, she was fully prepared to admit now, she and Lewis had been too young to get married, and yet it had been at Lewis’s insistence that they had done so, not hers. She had been living in a hostel then with other girls in the same situation as herself. Lewis had had his own flat. His mother had died when he was nineteen, their orphaned states being something they had in common. Lacey had learned that his parents had divorced when he was very, very young and that he could barely remember his father, who had apparently emigrated immediately after the divorce. His mother had gone back to live with her parents, who had welcomed both her and her child. In contrast to hers, Lewis’s upbringing had been a comfortable, protected one, and yet he had seemed to know instinctively how much her own aloneness had hurt her.
He had shared her desire for a large family, for children, teasing her that the reason he was insisting on marrying her so quickly was because he was in a hurry to start his own dynasty. They had laughed a lot together in those days, or so it seemed in retrospect.
They had married very quietly—a church ceremony, something they had both wanted. He had taken her on honeymoon to Italy, a small secluded villa on a hilltop, overlooking the sea. She had woken every morning to the warmth of the sun against her closed eyelids, and the warmth of Lewis’s hands and mouth against her skin.
When she tried to let herself into her house she was trembling so much that she dropped the key. She could hear the phone ringing, but by the time she had unlocked the door it had stopped.
It was probably Ian, she told herself, ringing to discover what on earth had prompted her earlier behaviour.
Her head was aching, the tormenting dull pain that warned of an impending migraine. She had thankfully suffered from them less and less as the years had gone by and now had enough experience of them to know that the best thing she could do, the only thing she could do in fact, was to take her medication immediately and then go upstairs and lie down.
Hopefully in that way she might just be able to avert a full-blown attack.
No need to ask what had brought on this: stress…anxiety…call it what you liked, she knew it was as a direct result of having seen Lewis.
Her mouth twisted as she went upstairs and removed her tablets from her bathroom cabinet. They were on the top shelf and she had to stretch on tiptoe to reach them. Old habits died hard, and she still continued to observe the same rules of safety now that she had done when Jessica was only a small child. These days Jessica was the one who could reach into the highest cupboards while she needed to find a stool. Jessica…Her hand shook as she poured herself a glass of water. Whatever pain Lewis had caused her, Lacey had never been able to forget that he had given her one of her life’s most precious gifts—her daughter…their daughter.
She closed her eyes, tormented by the memory of the slurred warmth of his voice, thick with passion, his breath dragging erotically against her bare skin, her tight swollen nipples as he had told her softly, ‘Girls…I want girls…at least half a dozen daughters, all of them exactly like their delicious, desirable mama.’
‘What if we only have boys?’ she had protested, drugged on the intoxication of their love…their desire…on the sensuality he had shown her that she possessed and had given her licence to enjoy and indulge.
‘Then we’ll just have to keep on trying, won’t we?’ he had told her softly, and then his mouth had captured the tantalising peak of her breasts and all meaningful conversation had ceased for a very, very long time.
It was the sensation of the glass slipping from her fingers that brought her back to reality; that and the ache of anguish tormenting her throat, the pulse of all too easily recognisable desire invading her body.
That memory was over twenty years old and yet it was as clear and sharply cut as though it had happened only yesterday.
What was the matter with her that she was still almost obsessed with a man she ought to have dismissed from her mind and her heart years ago? Why was it that, even knowing that her image of Lewis had been a false one, that all the tenderness, all the love, all the care he had shown her had been nothing more than an illusion, she still so stubbornly persisted in using those early days with him as a measuring stick against which she jud
ged the other men, kind gentle men like Tony and Ian, who wanted her to allow them into her life? Was it because she knew that no man could ever come anywhere close to measuring up to such impossible and idealised memories, and that their failure to do so meant that she would be safe, safe from the experience of believing herself loved, only to turn round and discover that she was wrong?
Perhaps it would have been better if she could have hated Lewis; but that solace had been denied her. Instead she had suffered anguish and loss and the most viciously self-destructive sense of failure and shame; a deep-seated and very hard to eradicate belief that she had somehow not been worthy of being loved; that she had been a failure as a woman.
Over the years she had managed to get these self-destructive feelings virtually under control. Virtually. Another reason why she had been wary of becoming involved in another relationship. She had been afraid to trust her own judgement, afraid to allow herself to believe that anyone could love her, just in case the same thing happened again.
After all, wasn’t it true that there were people, women in the main, who seemed to love self-destructively over and over again?
Her head was starting to pound as the tension in her muscles locked her veins. She went into her bedroom, quickly stripping down to her underwear, force of habit making her fold her discarded clothes before curling up on top of the duvet.
It was hot up here in the bedroom, vague sounds from outside drifting in through the open window, its curtains closed against the bright sunlight.
The tablets were slow to take effect, and for a long time Lacey seemed to drift in and out of an uneasy sleep permeated by sharply focused memories of the past, of Lewis.
She fought against them, a frown marring the smoothness of her forehead, her body tensing in rejection of what she knew subconsciously lay waiting for her if she succumbed to the lure of her dreams. In them she could walk through a doorway that led back to the past; in them she could relive those precious shared hours when she had believed herself loved, cherished, desired; but beyond her dreams and their brief panacea lay reality and pain.