The Hidden Years

by Penny Jordan

  He deliberately kept them both in the pub with him for longer than he had intended, insisting on buying them lunch, and then suppressing the laughter that sprang to his eyes as she looked at him as though she wanted to rake her nails down his face, or throw her unwanted lunch at him.

  Scott, oblivious to all this, was genuinely pleased to have his company, and he felt the first sharp spiralling of irritation with his friend. If he didn't watch out he was very quickly going to lose his girlfriend—other men wouldn't be as reluctant to take her from him as he was.

  Or would it after all be so easy? he wondered, frowning as he saw the almost desperate way Sage had pulled her chair closer to Scott's, nestling up against him as though he was her only protection, her only security, in a world which terrified her. Sage, terrified… Impossible—she wasn't the type, and yet for a moment he had glimpsed something vulnerable and afraid in her eyes as she looked at her lover.

  Observing them, he recognised how reluctant she was to so much as allow Scott out of her sight… how her whole face lit up when he came back to her side after going to the bar… how she forcibly had to stop herself from reaching out and touching him… how the whole of her fiery pride and arrogance became tamed and dimmed when she looked at the young Australian.

  It was almost as though he had alone satisfied some deep psychological need within her, as though Scott and only Scott could complete her and make her whole, as though she herself felt that without him her life had no pivot on which it could turn, as though without him she was only a shadow of reality…

  To recognise in someone else that depth of insecurity, that level of dependence, made his frown deepen. For the first time he wondered about her background, about her life, about what had shaped and moulded her to give rise to those vulnerabilities, and why in someone like Scott she should apparently have found the antidote to them.

  He needed, he discovered, to know more about her… Much, much more.

  He waited until he could get Scott on his own. The younger man had been commenting that he was not entirely happy with his room, and although in the past Daniel had been wholly against inviting another student to share with him, not even allowing his lovers to move into the small house, he invited Scott round one evening, with the suggestion that since he had a bedroom to spare Scott might like to consider moving in with him.

  It was the evening they attended their debating society. Scott had thanked him eagerly, and then added a little uncomfortably, 'I mustn't stay too long, though. I promised I'd see Sage later…'

  'Possessive, is she?' Daniel asked him, already knowing the answer. 'Careful, Scott, possessive women can be the very devil. Even ones as attractive as Sage. If you'll take my advice you'll tread warily there—she's a very turbulent lady.'

  'She… she hasn't had an entirely happy home life,' Scott countered quickly. 'It makes her prickly and defensive, but underneath…underneath she's the sweetest girl really.'

  Sweet… Daniel wondered how on earth Scott could deceive himself. Sage was pure gall and brimstone—the only sweetness about her was the aftertaste you got from drinking poison.

  When he deliberately kept Scott longer than the younger man had intended he told himself that he was in reality doing them both a favour; that Sage would have to learn sooner or later that everything in life couldn't run her way. Despite Scott's claims that she had had an unhappy childhood Daniel still perceived her as an indulged, cosseted child who had never known either emotional or material hardship or paucity.

  When Scott moved in with him, he waited half impatiently, half cynically—the .latter emotion directed at himself for his almost obsessive interest in her—to see how Sage would react.

  They had met several times now, meetings carefully stage-managed by him although neither she nor Scott was aware of it, and Daniel knew that she resented his influence over Scott.

  She wanted Scott to be all in all to her and she to him, Daniel recognised, but Scott did not have her passionate nature, her fierce possessive desire, and he doubted that the romance would last. When it eventually did end… He frowned to himself—Scott was his friend, but Sage, he was beginning to recognise, was a woman he desired with an intensity he could rarely remember ever feeling before.

  One weekend at the beginning of the third term she took Scott home with her to introduce him to Cottingdean. When they came back Scott talked enthusiastically of her home and her mother. 'A truly wonderful woman, although she and Sage don't seem able to get on… A pity—she's so very special in some way…'

  Daniel watched him. Surely Scott wasn't falling out of love with Sage to fall in love with her mother? He could well believe that any woman who had produced Sage must be both beautiful and strong, and Scott, who had never had a mother, could be fatally attracted to that kind of woman.

  'Does she have red hair?' he asked Scott flippantly. The latter shook his head.

  'No, she's blonde. We were lucky to find her at home. She'd just come back from Hong Kong. She's been out there selling the wool they make. It's unbelievable really what she's achieved, and all through her own endeavours. By all accounts Sage's father has been an invalid all through their marriage.'

  'Not that much of an invalid if he managed to father Sage,' Daniel pointed out drily.

  Scott shook his head.

  'No, no, he didn't… Sage did have a brother, ten years older than her, but he died when she was in her last year at school. He was killed in an accident, but Sage told me herself that she was conceived through artificial insemination. Sage doesn't say much about it—understandably she's a little sensitive on the subject. She says she feels that her father has never really accepted her, never really considered her his child…'

  Daniel frowned, wondering irritably if Scott was aware of how much Sage would resent him passing on her confidences, how very hurt she would be if she knew he had shared her secret with someone else, and then he reminded himself that it was not his role to protect the woman—that she was perfectly capable of doing that for herself.

  It had piqued him a little that Sage never called at the house, that she always arranged to meet Scott outside it. What he did know, though, was that Scott never spent the night with her. He tried to visualise himself, if he was her lover, leaving her alone in her bed, to return to sleep alone in his own, and failed.

  If he was her lover…but he wasn't. She loved Scott… or thought she did.

  Four days after Scott and Sage returned from their visit to her family home, Scott received a telegram from Australia, announcing that an emergency on the sheep station meant that he would have to return home almost immediately.

  Daniel had always known that for Scott it was not necessary that he obtain his degree, that his time in England was more a mind-broadening exercise than anything else, and as he waited while Scott put a call through to his home to find out exactly what had happened he wondered if Scott had thought yet about how Sage was likely to react to his departure.

  Infuriatingly for Scott, his telephone call yielded very little extra information. His father's housekeeper could tell him very little other than that the foreman had had a heart attack and that he was at present in hospital undergoing tests. All she could tell him was that his father expected him to make his return just as soon as he could, since in the foreman's enforced absence Scott was needed to take over the running of the vast sheep station.

  It was a role Scott had been bred for from birth, and one which held no fears for him—he was more than content to follow in his father's footsteps, but now, as he promised he would be on the first flight he could arrange and replaced the receiver, Daniel asked him quietly, 'What about Sage?'

  'Sage…'

  For a moment it was almost as though Scott had forgotten who she was, and then he frowned anxiously. 'I'll have to tell her, of course. I must go round and see her… She'll understand… I wish I could take her back with me, but…'

  Sage, living in the vast Australian outback… Daniel wondered if either of them
had ever given any real thought to the future. Sage was too brittle, too finedrawn, too short of any inner resources to sustain her to be able to endure the loneliness of that kind of life. If she married Scott and went out to Australia with him she would leave him within a year.

  And as for Scott… Did Sage really think he would be happy living here in this country, when all his life he had known he must one day step into his father's shoes? Must and wanted to. They said that love was blind… Blind and self-destructive in Sage's case, and Daniel was nearly sure that although Scott did undoubtedly love her, it was not with the single-minded, passionate, blind intensity with which she loved him.

  'I'll go and see her now,' Scott announced.

  Daniel listened as Scott drove off in his MG. Scott had a generous father, but perhaps a possessive one… certainly a determined one. The kind of father who would have clear-cut, definite ideas about the kind of girl he wanted his son to marry, and he doubted if that girl bore any resemblance to Sage.

  When midnight came and went and Scott hadn't returned, Daniel looked up from the book he was studying and frowned. It had been eight o'clock when Scott left-four hours was surely long enough for him to have made his explanations and say his goodbyes, no doubt adding to them promises that he would quickly return, that Sage would be constantly in his thoughts and his heart during their enforced separation.

  At one o'clock, just as he was about to go to bed, the phone rang. When he picked up the receiver, he could hear Sage on the other end of the line, hysterically crying his name.

  It took him several precious minutes to calm her down enough to find out what had happened. When he did, he felt his heart plummet with despair and guilt.

  'Which hospital is it?' he demanded brusquely, and when she told him he added, 'Stay there. I'll be there as fast as I can.'

  As he climbed into his own car, he prayed that matters weren't as serious as they seemed. From what Sage had said to him, they had gone out for a drive—perhaps Scott had decided to explain to her that he was leaving some-where where they could be on their own. He had no idea.

  What she had told him was that they had quarrelled, that she had been angry…angry enough to distract Scott to the extent that he had failed to see the oncoming car which had run into them; a car apparently driven by a drunken driver—a now dead drunken driver.

  Sage herself had hardly been hurt—scratched, bruised, and frightened out of her wits, Daniel had deduced. But Scott… Scott was in a coma and the hospital staff were asking her for the name of his next of kin.

  It took Daniel less than half an hour to sort everything out. He explained to the nursing staff about Scott's father being in Australia and gave them Scott's father's telephone number and address, having discovered that Scott had luckily doodled it down on the pad beside the phone while waiting for his Australian call.

  When the doctor told Sage that there was no need for her to stay and that she could go home, she practically had hysterics, crying and pleading to be allowed to stay, but the doctor remained adamant.

  It was Daniel who was left with the task of half carrying and half dragging her away, of manhandling her into his BMW and then swiftly locking the doors as she tried desperately to claw at the handle and get out.

  His decision to take her home to his own house instead of dropping her off at the hall of residence was based more on a reluctance to cope with any more hysterics and explanations than any carnal thoughts about proximity and propinquity.

  Getting her to take the tranquilliser the doctor had handed him meant virtually forcing it down her throat, which he did as quickly and efficiently as he had once had to feed worming tablets to his puppy, holding her jaw tightly closed, and massaging her throat until he felt her swallow—and all the time she was watching him with wild green eyes blazing her bitterness and hatred.

  He carried her upstairs to Scott's bedroom and dropped her body on the bed, warning her that all the doors downstairs were locked and that he had the keys— but in the morning when he searched for her he discovered that she had gone… out of one of the downstairs windows.

  After that he didn't see her again for some days even though he called regularly at the hospital to see Scott, who was still distressingly deep in his coma.

  His father had flown in almost immediately on hearing about his son's accident, and when Daniel asked about Sage Scott's father told him quietly, 'I've told the doctors that I can't see her.'

  'Can't see her.' Daniel wondered why 'can't' and not 'won't' but he knew better than to question the Australian.

  Scott's father was a tall, still dark-haired man with green eyes and tanned skin moulded round facial bones which were sharply pared to the kind of austerity that hinted that there had been a good deal of suffering in his life. He was a remote man, Daniel recognised. A man who had suffered greatly at some time in his life. Oddly he looked as though he could possibly be a very compassionate man but he obviously had no compassion for Sage. Did he blame her for the accident? Daniel wondered.

  'If you see her, please tell her also that she isn't to come and see Scott. The doctors feel it would do little good.'

  If he saw her… that was hardly likely, Daniel reflected, and yet oddly that very night when he opened his front door to an unexpected caller he discovered that it was Sage.

  She looked hauntingly pale and too thin, so fragile that she almost took his breath away. Her eyes had lost their fire and become flat discs of banked-down pain.

  Even the wild fieriness of her hair seemed tamed somehow and subdued.

  'Sage…' He stepped back to allow her to come in.

  'They won't let me see Scott,' she told him, almost wringing her hands, her voice thick with suppressed tears and anguish. 'I must see him, Daniel… I must see him… I love him. He loves me…' Her voice had started to rise. Daniel caught hold of her arm and guided her into his small sitting-room, pushing her gently into a chair.

  'Scott is a very sick man, Sage,' he told her quietly. 'Surely the most important thing of all is for him to get properly well? His father believes that this can be best accomplished in his own home. He's flying back to Australia and with the doctor's agreement Scott is going with him.'

  'No!'

  The denial was ripped from her throat, the frantic wild sound of an animal caught in a trap. It hurt his ears and savaged his senses, but he couldn't allow himself the luxury of those emotions.

  'Yes, Sage,' he repeated firmly. 'And I'm afraid there's nothing you can do about it.'

  'It's your fault…all your fault,' she suddenly cried out, beating at his chest with her fists. 'You wanted this to happen… you wanted to break us up.'

  For a moment Daniel thought she was actually going to say that she knew that he wanted her, and he braced himself to reject her accusations even while he knew it was true. He had wanted her. Still wanted her… but never at the price of Scott's accident and this terrible grief that was now possessing her. But instead she said furiously, 'You've never liked me… I knew that right from the start—you've never thought I was right for Scott.'

  'No, I haven't,' Daniel agreed truthfully. 'But that doesn't mean that I've ever tried to break you up. Scott is a man, Sage, not a boy. He makes his own decisions.'

  'Not now, he doesn't… It's his father who's insisting that he must go back to Australia… If only I could see Scott. Get him to come out of his coma and respond to me.'

  'You can't,' Daniel told her flatly. 'His condition is still far from stable. Life goes on, you know,' he counselled her. 'You'll see—'

  'No,' she denied fiercely. 'Without Scott I have no life… without him I have nothing… I am nothing.'

  Her words shocked him, but he hid both his shock and his compassion behind his next cynical question.

  'You see him as your soul mate, is that it?'

  'Yes… no…' Her voice sounded harsh, drugged, her eyes flat and unseeing. 'Not my soul mate,' she told him jerkily. 'He is my soul itself, my other half… he is a part of me and
without him I cannot exist… Don't you understand?'

  Daniel stared at her, curiously moved by her passionate outburst, feeling against his will a helpless compassion for her in her agony and her ignorance.

  Strange, when he had always known she would be capable of intense physical passion, that he had not realised she would be capable of equally explosive emotional passion as well, but then men never wanted to meet danger head on… to heed such inner warnings.

  'It's over, Sage,' he told her softly. 'And the sooner you accept that, the easier your life will be.'

  'No!' she screamed at him. 'No, it isn't over. It can never be over, not while either of us lives… He loves me… I love him…'

  'No, Sage,' he corrected her. 'You love yourself. You want him as a greedy child wants a new toy, and in your wanting you've almost destroyed him… It was your temper that provoked the accident, your refusal to accept that he had to return to Australia.'

  She stared at him.

  'I'm right, aren't I? That was how it happened. You refused to accept that he had to go and in his attempts to placate you and make you understand he lost his concentration… and almost lost his life. Let him go, Sage, before you destroy him completely.'

  She had flown at him then, attacking him with her fists and then her nails, tears pouring from her eyes as she screamed her anguish and defiance, but he had held her off until finally, frightened that she might actually hurt herself, he had yanked her into his arms and bound her so tightly to him that he could actually feel the frantic race of her heart as though it were beating within his own chest.