The Hidden Years

by Penny Jordan

  There had been an accident in the high street—a lorry had overturned disgorging its load. Luckily no one had been hurt, but there was a considerable delay to the traffic, causing Daniel to reflect as he waited for the congestion to clear that with the projected increase in road traffic, the majority of Britain's small towns, with their narrow streets, would encounter severe congestion problems, which would eventually result in a good deal of replanning and new roads. Good news for companies like his father's… good news ultimately for him as well.

  Eventually the road cleared and he was able to get through but it had taken him longer to reach the hospital than he had anticipated and he half expected to discover that Sage had gone.

  He went straight to the ward, where the sister, a pretty and very efficient-looking girl in her mid-twenties, gave him a warm smile and explained that Sage was in the waiting-room.

  'And Scott?' Daniel asked her.

  She shook her head.

  'He's still in a coma…there have been occasional signs that he's starting to come out of it… His father's very anxious to get him home. In fact he's made arrangements for them both to leave tomorrow… He's chartered a specially equipped plane…' Her eyebrows rose. 'Nice if you can afford it.'

  Acting on impulse, Daniel asked quietly, 'I don't suppose there's any chance of Sage seeing him, just for a few minutes? After all, if he's leaving so soon…'

  The ward sister looked at him.

  'Well, it does seem as though Mr McLaren has relented. He has said that she can have five minutes with him but that a nurse must be in attendance. Only five minutes, mind, and it might be an idea if you could accompany her.'

  Thanking her, Daniel headed for the swing doors and the corridor. He found Sage sitting alone in an airless, depressing cube of a room with no windows, furnished basically with several chairs and a table heaped high with out-of-date magazines.

  When he walked in she was staring blankly at the wall. His heart somersaulted and then stood still. He had never seen such a dramatic change in anyone.

  All the life, all the colour seemed to have drained out of her. She had lost more weight… too much—where she had been slender she was now haggard. She raised one hand defensively to her face as she saw him and he was shocked by the thinness of her wrist. He suspected he could have circled it easily with his thumb and forefinger.

  She was dressed all in black, whether deliberately or by accident he had no way of knowing, but the sombreness of her clothes added a shockingly clown-like falsity to her appearance, as though it was impossible for anyone to actually look as intensely unhappy as she so patently was. Her suffering was all the more shocking for being so unhidden; he could well imagine how others would turn away from it, frightened or angered by its intensity. In this world it was considered self-indulgent, immoral almost to allow one's feelings to show so clearly, to the discomfort of others.

  She wasn't crying, but her eyes were red-rimmed, as much from lack of sleep as anything else, he suspected, and when she looked at him they were without their usual fire, without fight, without hope… without anything, he recognised.

  'Sage.'

  When he said her name she focused briefly on him but with so little reaction that for a moment he actually feared that her grief might have even affected her mentally.

  'Daniel. What are you doing here?' Her voice was slow and heavy, apathetic and without inflection, like someone heavily tranquillised.

  'The hospital rang me…they're very concerned about you. You've got to stop doing this,' he told her when there was no response, wondering angrily where her family were, her friends. Did they know what was happening to her? They must do… and if so why weren't they doing something to help her? Or did they simply not care?

  He waited for her to explode with anger and frustration, to fly at him physically and verbally as she had done before, but shockingly she stayed mute, simply looking at him with vacant, uncaring eyes until he said quietly, 'It seems that Scott's father has relented and said that you can have five minutes to say goodbye to Scott and I have to stay with you… But Sage…'

  She wasn't listening. She was standing up and half walking, half running towards him, her face suddenly transformed with a happiness so brilliant, so luminescent that it was almost frightening.

  He caught up with her as she reached the door, his hand closing round her arm, his mind wincing with pain as he felt its thinness.

  'No scenes, Sage,' he warned her, keeping hold of her. 'Scott is very sick. He's still in a coma, so he won't recognise you. You know his father is having him flown back to Australia tomorrow?'

  She nodded. Her hands suddenly twisted together as she turned to him and spoke for the first time. 'It won't make any difference. I love him and he loves me…nothing can change that. Once he's well he'll come back for me, you'll see…'

  Scott was in a private room, a nurse discreetly in attendance when Daniel opened the door and ushered Sage in.

  He felt the shudder that went through her as she stared at the bed. Scott was still unconscious, his body connected to a vast battery of medical equipment.

  A cassette recorder was playing silently in the corner, and the nurse explained briefly, 'We're playing him messages from his father… that's why he's wearing ear-plugs.'

  'Scott's father said you could have five minutes with him, Sage,' he reminded her, but if she heard him she gave no indication of having done so.

  All her attention was concentrated on the bed, as she leaned over Scott, the look on her face as she gently touched his arm a mixture of youthful anguish and almost maternal love.

  'How is he?' she asked the nurse without looking away from Scott.

  'Still very poorly,' she told her.

  'Will he… will he get better?'

  'It's too early to say yet. He's very strong physically, and young. We've had patients with far more stacked against them who have made remarkable recoveries.'

  There was a chair beside the bed. Daniel pulled it back a little, inviting Sage to sit in it. She did so, and he noticed how much she was trembling. She reached out over the bed, smoothing the already immaculate cover, and although he didn't know why something about the awkward, tender little gesture brought a huge lump to Daniel's throat.

  He wanted to take hold of her and to go on holding her, to give her all the love, all the security he knew instinctively she craved, and the reason he knew she craved it was because he recognised within Sage the same doubts, the same vulnerabilities, the same loneliness that had so often plagued him.

  And yet why should he feel like this about her? They were worlds apart in every way. Her life had been completely different from his. There had been no John Ryan in her life, no bullying cousins, no taunts, no feelings of not fitting in, of being different.

  And yet still he couldn't stop his thoughts from focusing on her. Her head was bowed, her hair parting to reveal the vulnerable nape of her neck. Her skin there was white and fine, the bones of her spine far too sharp beneath her skin. The radiant vivacity that had made her such a beauty had gone and yet strangely he found her almost as desirable now as he had done before, even if now his desire was muted by compassion and concern. Now if he were to make love to her it would be with tenderness, his possession gentle and coaxing, rather than with the fierce intensity which had burned in him before.

  She was crying, he realised, watching the silent glissade of tears fall on to her hands.

  The nurse coughed warningly and glanced at her watch.

  Daniel touched Sage lightly on her shoulder, but before he could speak she reached down and gently removed the ear-plugs from Scott's ears and before either of them could stop her she was whispering pleadingly to him, 'Scott… please, please get well… I need you so much. You mustn't leave me… I can't live without you. Scott… Scott.'

  The nurse was frowning, moving closer to the bed, and, anticipating her next action, Daniel took hold of Sage, firmly pulling her back, telling her quietly as he pulled her to her fe
et, 'That's enough, Sage… It's time to leave now…'

  As they all moved towards the door, unobserved by any of them, the still figure in the bed made a small seeking movement, a frown furrowing his forehead as though he was searching the silence.

  As they left the room Sage kept her head down, trying to conceal the fact that she was still crying. Tactfully Daniel affected not to notice, looking away from her.

  There was a man standing in the shadows of the corridor watching them. Daniel's mouth compressed a little as he recognised Scott's father. He was staring at Sage… What was he doing, checking to make sure she didn't overstay her allowed five minutes? He could understand the older man's pain, but he still wasn't going to allow him to vent it on Sage, although why on earth he should feel this urge to protect her he certainly had no idea. One thing he did know, and that was that she wouldn't have thanked him for it.

  She looked so ill that Daniel half expected her to faint before he could get her outside and inside his car.

  He had to fasten the seatbelt for her, though. She had stopped crying, but in a brief moment of forget fulness he looked directly into her eyes and saw such a terrible hell of pain and anguish there that he felt as guilty as though he had stripped the clothes from her body and looked openly at its nakedness.

  He took her back with him to his home, as he had the night of the accident, not knowing what else to do with her. She wasn't the suicidal type, or at least he had never thought of her as such, but he didn't want to leave her alone. And besides, if he kept her under his roof where he could keep an eye on her, it would stop her heading back to the hospital.

  He would put her in Scott's room again, he decided, as he parked his car outside the small narrow house, and went round to open her door for her and help her out.

  The apathetic lack of reaction to him disturbed him, and once he had got her inside, even though he told himself it was not his business and he ought not to get involved, he rang his own doctor, and asked him to call round.

  'She's suffering very badly from shock,' the doctor told him three hours later. 'How long did you say it was since the accident?'

  Daniel repeated what he had already told him.

  'Mmm… well, I've given her a tranquillising shot for now. She'll probably sleep for twenty-four hours, which won't do her any harm. She needs to rest and eat. The rest we can arrange—the eating…'

  The tranquilliser the doctor had given her did its work, and Sage was deeply asleep when the private jet Lewis McLaren had hired took off with its passengers. Her body, craving sleep and a chance to restore its strength, slept well into the next day and night.

  Daniel, who had been checking on her every couple of hours, found her awake at midnight when he went up to look at her.

  'What day is it?' she asked him, ignoring all the questions he had expected her to ask, such as, what was she doing here in his home?

  Sensing the direction of her thoughts, he told her evenly, 'It's too late, Sage. He's gone… the flight left at nine this evening.'

  It was perhaps cruel of him, but sooner or later she would have to accept that Scott had gone.

  'I'm just going to have some supper,' he told her casually and untruthfully. 'Fancy some?'

  He saw that she was starting to shake her head and continued as though he hadn't noticed, 'It's only an omelette, but I'll bring you some up, shall I?'

  She had turned her face away from him and he was reasonably sure that she was crying. Repressing a sigh, he got up off the bed and went back downstairs to make an omelette he was quite sure that neither of them were going to eat.

  He put half of it on a tray, poured Sage a glass of milk, and opened the door into the sitting-room where he came to an abrupt halt.

  Sage was standing there in the shadows facing him, and even though the room was only illuminated by the lamp he had been using for reading there was enough light for him to see that she had pulled on his robe without fastening it and that beneath it she was naked. Her hair was wet and starting to curl wildly—tiny droplets of moisture escaped from it, to gather at the base of her throat and run down between her breasts and over her belly to become lost in the even more tangled curls between her legs.

  A suffocating heat overwhelmed him, a fierce jolting surge of need that blotted out everything else but his need to discover if the shadowed areola of flesh surrounding her nipple was the delicate clear pink he had always envisaged, if her nipples themselves really were so hard that they were pushing out the fabric of his robe or if he was just imagining it. He wanted to take hold of her and show her what she did to him, to rub his face against that tormenting triangle of damp curls and breathe in the individual woman scent of her, to slowly touch her sensitive woman flesh with his tongue and delicately explore its most intimate secrets while she trembled with a need as explosive as his own and opened herself to him, whispering to him how much she wanted him to pleasure her.

  All sheer fantasy, of course. He didn't know what she had come downstairs for, but it certainly wasn't because she wanted to make love with him—and yet as he put down the tray and started to speak, she slid his robe off her shoulders and came slowly to him, her eyes fixed on his face, as though it drew her like a lodestone.

  'Sage…'

  He told himself later that he had intended to hold her off…that he had only wanted to talk to her, but she walked into his arms and pressed her body against his, winding her own arms around him, her voice a feathery, urgent plea against his ear as she begged:

  'Make love to me, Daniel… Please make love to me… I need it so much…'

  He forgot what he had been intending to do and could remember only how many nights he had lain alone aching for her, dreaming of her coming to him like this, wanting her so much that he had scarcely been able to admit even to himself how much he desired her.

  His brain became jammed with conflicting signals, any warning it might have tried to put through brutally murdered at birth by the overwhelming need of his body.

  He held her, and discovered that he was trembling like a boy with his first girl, far more apprehensive and enthralled in fact than he had ever been that first time. Her body was still half cloaked in shadow. Alluring, mysterious, a small slight upwards curve of her mouth and the dark, knowing watchfulness of her eyes holding all the enticement and promise of a Lilith.

  He touched her, smoothing his hands over her skin, feeling the first magical assurance that she wasn't a phantom conjured up by his imagination, that she was actually real flesh and blood, and then letting his hands drift slowly, absorbing the texture of her skin, satin-smooth and cool, still damp in places from her shower, still and quiescent beneath his hands as though waiting for him to give it life.

  He purposely didn't touch her breasts, just skimming their outer curves as he took his hands upwards to cup her shoulders and then to close them round her throat, his thumbs searching for the pulse at its base as he kissed the curve of her jaw, and felt the violent churn of sensation in his stomach as he dragged his mouth towards hers.

  For what seemed like a lifetime he had wondered how she would taste, how those so full lips would feel, whether those small sharp teeth would bite frantically at him in passion, but abruptly she turned her head, her body stiffening, her withdrawal startling him.

  Her sex normally enjoyed the sensuous contact of mouth upon mouth, of tongues twining and entwining, of a lover's hands stroking the soft contours of their face, of his fingers tangling in their hair, and he enjoyed it too, relishing this small act of foreplay with almost as much enjoyment as he enjoyed the physical act of possession itself.

  Daniel liked women and he liked making love to them, and he knew without vanity that he was a good lover; not because he deliberately strove to be—anyone could learn such mechanics and still not be able to give and take one tenth of the pleasure shared with a partner who had an instinctive delight in, and love for, his lover's very different and wholly desirable female flesh. He liked women; liked to hear their
soft sighs of pleasure, liked to feel the soft satin of their flesh against his own, liked to stroke and taste every inch of them until their own arousal was as great as his; and never had he wanted that more with any woman than he wanted it with this one.

  The second time she tried to turn her face from his, he stopped her, anticipating her and sliding his hand along her jaw to hold her still so that he could slowly explore the unbearable softness of her lips. They trembled when he caressed them, causing deep shudders of need to jerk through him as he fought to hold on to his self-control and deny the ferocity of his instinctive need to lay her down on the rug where they stood and stamp his possession on her so thoroughly that no other man would ever be able to overlay its memory.

  Such instincts were not commensurate with his desire to be compassionate and civilised, with his need to show her tenderness and respect.

  He traced the shape of her mouth with his tongue and tried to slide between their closed softness, but she wouldn't let him. She even trembled against him as though she was afraid.

  He was the one feeling fear. Fear that he wouldn't be able to match the skills of her past lovers… fear that she might after all change her mind…fear that—what— that she was using him as a substitute for Scott? Scott whom he knew she loved… ?

  He closed his mind to the thought, whispering to her that he wanted to take her to bed and make love to her until she cried out with the pleasure of it, telling her how much he wanted her, how much she pleased him, stroking her skin with ever-increasing urgency, kissing the smooth flesh of her throat, the sharp angle of her jaw, the unbelievable delicacy of her ears.

  She trembled in his arms, her eyes closed in the shadowed half-darkness that cloaked her body.

  He shuddered as he looked at it, feeling his stomach twist in knots as he gazed at the soft paleness of her skin, the firm fullness of her breasts, their areolae the deep, dark pink he had envisaged, her nipples hard, swollen.

  He stared to undress, almost tearing off his clothes in a feverish sweat of anxiety not to lose her, not to let her somehow slip away from him. Every inch of her was perfect… perfect…