by Penny Jordan
She had been so protective of her father, sensing his solitude, his loving absorption in her life. Where, previously, his had been the only company she had wanted, now she was increasingly experiencing a yearning for the company of her own age group, for female friends with whom she could share the mystery and excitement of what was happening to her. And yet, at the same time, she had sensed how hurt her father would be by her alienation from him. Side by side they had battled it out; her loving daughterly desire to protect him and her growing need to spread her own wings.
There had been many hours spent in the bathroom worrying about what she should do: go on to university as she so longed to do or stay at home with her father.
In the end it had been her father himself who had resolved her dilemma for her—wiser and more aware than she had guessed—telling her firmly how disappointed he would be if she did not finish her education and go to university.
Dee was lost in her thoughts and her memories of the past when the doorbell rang and, at first, she was tempted to ignore its summons. Then, reluctantly, she acknowledged that perhaps she ought to see who it was, pulling on her robe as she opened the bathroom door and padded quickly downstairs.
‘Dee.’
Frowning slightly, Dee peered through the frosted glass of her front door and then, realising just who her visitor was, she quickly unlocked and opened it, exclaiming thankfully, ‘Anna! Come in!’
Still semi-dazed with shock, Anna followed Dee into her hallway.
It was a relatively warm day but she had started to shiver, her eyes blank and unfocused as she allowed Dee to take hold of her arm and virtually guide her into the kitchen.
‘Sit down,’ Dee commanded her firmly, relieving her of Whittaker’s cat box and deftly removing Missie’s lead from her hand at the same time.
Something very distressing had obviously happened to Anna, Dee recognised as her initial relief at seeing her standing outside her front door was swiftly replaced by concern.
‘We’ve been wondering where you’d got to,’ she told Anna chattily as she filled the kettle.
Instinct was warning her not to make too much of a drama of Anna’s reappearance, nor to bully her into immediate explanations.
Instead, as she made them both a cup of tea, she kept up a stream of light, inconsequential chatter, telling Anna that she had recently seen both Beth and Kelly, watching her as she did so to see how she reacted, but apart from a brief flicker of her eyelids Anna remained almost motionless. She was not, perhaps, actually catatonic, but she had most certainly undergone some kind of severe trauma, Dee realised, and she, after all, knew all the signs of acute emotional shock.
There were some things you never forgot, some experiences that never faded.
Now, as she put Anna’s cup of tea down in front of her, she saw that the other woman was simply staring into space.
‘Anna,’ she said gently, touching her arm. ‘What is it? What’s happened? What’s wrong?’
What was wrong?
Anna focused despairingly on Dee’s face.
‘I... I...’ Slowly her face crumpled and her body started to shake.
Instinctively Dee put her arms around her, holding her comfortingly.
‘If it’s about Julian and the money...’ she guessed. She knew how distressed Anna had been about the fact that Julian had outwitted them both.
‘No. No...’ Anna shook her head and then stopped.
‘Then what is it? What’s wrong?’ Dee asked her gently.
Anna put a trembling hand up to her face. She still wasn’t sure what she was doing here in Dee’s kitchen or really why she had come. All she did know was that she simply could not go back to her own house.
‘Dee, I’ve been such a fool,’ Anna told her dully. Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘I should have known, guessed, but instead...’ She gripped her hands into angry fists, her body shuddering in self-loathing. ‘I don’t know what came over me...or why...’
Patiently Dee waited, listening to her incoherent utterances for several minutes before coaxing, ‘Anna, why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything?’
‘Everything...?’ Anna’s face changed colour, going pink and then white. ‘I can’t...tell you everything,’ she said flatly. ‘Some of it.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘Oh, Dee, I just don’t know what I’m going to do, how I’m going to get over...’
How I’m going to get over Ward, she had been about to say, Anna recognised, but she had managed to stop herself. How many times did she have to remind herself that the Ward she had believed she loved simply did not exist? In reality, there was no Ward, no lover for her to get over.
‘Tell me,’ Dee repeated softly.
Slowly, haltingly at first, Anna started to explain what had happened.
‘He did what?’ Dee demanded flatly in disbelief when Anna explained about the mistake at the hospital and how she had assumed that Ward was her lover.
‘He...this man, this stranger, who less than twelve hours previously had been threatening you...actually allowed you to believe that you and he were lovers...?’
The furious outrage in Dee’s voice made Anna bite her bottom lip.
‘I’ve been thinking about it over and over again,’ she told Dee in a low voice. ‘I was the one who assumed that we were lovers. I’m to blame for that and—’
‘You were suffering from amnesia,’ Dee reminded her grimly.
‘He knew perfectly well what the real relationship—if it can be called a relationship—was between you. He should never...’ She stopped, her eyes flashing with contempt. ‘Of all the underhanded, conniving...’
‘I thought he loved me,’ Anna told her shakily, ‘but all the time he actually hated me, loathed me...’
Closing her eyes, she placed her hand over her mouth to silence the sobs of emotion she could feel rising in her throat.
‘I never suspected anything; I truly believed...’
Dee watched her silently. She didn’t want to upset Anna by questioning just how far the deception had gone. It appalled her to know that Anna had been victimised, and in such a cruel and dangerous way, and she could well understand why her friend felt that she didn’t want to return to her own home where she would be on her own.
‘What I don’t understand is how on earth anyone could possibly justify such behaviour,’ Dee breathed furiously when Anna had eventually told her everything. ‘What possible motivation could he have had?’
‘He wanted his half-brother’s money back,’ Anna told her quietly.
She was beginning to feel slightly more in control now. Telling Dee what had happened, painful though it had been, had had a cathartic effect on her, helping to ground her a little better and make her feel more like her normal self instead of as though some unfamiliar stranger was inhabiting her body and her emotions.
‘He did that to you for money?’ Dee demanded savagely.
‘No, not just for money,’ Anna told her, shaking her head. ‘I think there must have been a certain degree of revenge and punishment in it for him...’
‘What? How could anyone...?’ Dee began, but Anna shook her head, giving Dee a small, painful smile.
‘We did,’ she reminded her dryly. ‘Or at least we tried to with Julian...’
‘Oh, yes, but that wasn’t the same thing at all,’ Dee protested quickly. ‘There’s no way anyone could compare you with Julian. You weren’t in any way responsible for Julian’s scams...’
‘You and I might know that, but Ward...’ She paused, and had to swallow hard before she was able to continue speaking. ‘Ward thought I was.’
‘But to deceive you like that. To...’
‘To pretend that he loved me? Take me to bed?’ Anna gave a brief mirthless laugh. ‘He did actually try to insist that we had separate rooms
. I was the one who...’ She stopped again.
‘Oh, Dee,’ she wept. ‘I feel so...so degraded, so...so—’ She broke off. There were some things that were just too painful to discuss.
‘Well, at least you’re back and you’re safe; that’s the main thing,’ Dee told her briskly. When she saw Anna’s face she touched her arm a little awkwardly and told her gruffly, ‘I know you won’t think it possible right now, but eventually time will soften... You’ll feel...it won’t seem so bad as it does right now. After all, you’re over the worst, you’ve experienced that already, so, logically, things can only get better.’
Anna gave her a small wry smile.
‘What did he say when you confronted him, when you told him that you knew the truth?’ Dee asked her. ‘Did he express any kind of remorse, try to make any kind of explanation or apology...?’
‘No...’ Anna began, and then, when she saw Dee’s outraged expression, she told her shakily, ‘I didn’t confront him. I...I just left him a note saying that I’d remembered everything; that I knew... I couldn’t bear... I just wanted to get away, Dee,’ she told her. ‘You see...’ She paused and a single tear rolled betrayingly down her pale face. ‘You see...’ Despairingly she twisted the damp tissue she was holding in her fingers. ‘I really thought I loved him; I really believed... He seemed so...so right,’ she told Dee helplessly. ‘Being with him felt so right... It was as though...it was as though he filled in all the missing pieces of my life, as though he completed it and me in a way that I’d never dreamed I could be complete. It was as though he... Even now I can’t really believe... It all seems like a dream...’
‘Nightmare, more like,’ Dee told her angrily as she leaned over to take her in a protective hug.
Anna smiled sadly. It was crazy, humiliating and dangerous, she knew, but deep down inside she knew that a part of her was always going to ache and long for him, that that part of her which he had touched so vibrantly and brought to life so immediately and intensely was always going to yearn for him. No amount of righteous anger, of bitterness and contempt, or logical emotional response to what he had done, was ever going to completely wipe out of her memory the sweetness of what they had shared, even though she now knew it had been a poison-tipped sweetness.
But that was her secret, her cross to bear for the rest of her life.
‘I’d love to have him here right now to give him a piece of my mind,’ Dee told her with angry contempt. ‘To do something like that, to you of all people...’
She saw that Anna’s eyes were filling with tears again.
‘Come on,’ she told her gently. ‘Let’s get you upstairs and in bed. You look exhausted.’
‘No. I’m fine,’ Anna protested, but she still obediently followed Dee towards the stairs.
* * *
‘SO HOW IS Anna now?’ Kelly asked Dee anxiously. ‘What did the doctor say? Is she...?’
‘She’s fine,’ Dee assured the other girl, tucking the telephone receiver under her chin so that she could stroke Missie, who was as anxious about Anna as the rest of them were. ‘The doctor has given her the all-clear medically; he said, though, that she needed to rest as she’s obviously undergone a tremendous amount of trauma.’
At Anna’s specific request, Dee had kept the details of Ward’s role in what had happened to her to an absolute minimum. So far as Kelly and Beth knew, Ward was simply someone who had stepped in to help her after her accident and subsequent loss of memory—a good Samaritan, so to speak, even though it had practically choked Dee to have to refer to him as such.
‘Did she say why she went away—or where?’ Kelly asked Dee curiously.
‘Oh, she just felt like a few days away,’ Dee responded airily and, she hoped, dismissively enough not to further arouse Kelly’s curiosity, but despite her outwardly relaxed manner inwardly Dee was seething with fury over the way Ward Hunter had behaved towards her friend. How could he possibly have thought she was the kind of woman who would get involved in anything even vaguely underhand? Anna was the type of woman who panicked if she couldn’t get a parking ticket out of the machine and instead left a message plus an IOU for the car park attendant—and, even if he had thought she was involved in some kind of criminal activity with Julian Cox, to have done to her what he had done...
Dee closed her eyes as she replaced her telephone receiver after Kelly’s call. Why, why were they the way they were? For every man like her own father and Kelly’s Brough there were ten—no, a hundred—who seemed to deliberately go out of their way to hurt the woman they professed to love. Dee carried her own scars from the war she believed existed between the sexes, but that was another story.
A little ruefully Dee admitted that she had perhaps been rather heavy-handed, in more than one sense, with the large brandy she had insisted on Anna drinking earlier in the evening, but it had had the desired effect and now Anna was getting some much needed sleep. The trauma of her temporary amnesia was something that anyone would find difficult to come to terms with, never mind the added misery and anguish Anna had been caused, Dee reflected as she checked that Anna’s pets were secure in their new temporary home.
She still had some financial reports to read before she went to bed. The responsibility of handling her father’s complex financial empire was one she took extremely seriously. His death had been totally unexpected, and it had thrown her head-first into relatively unfamiliar work, but Dee had felt she owed it to him to become familiar with it and to ensure that his business interests generated enough money to service his varied philanthropic activities.
The only changes she had made were such that his financial generosity to the various charities he had helped had been made public, so that other people would know, as she had known, just what a very special and caring man her father had been.
There were times when she still missed him very badly. If he could see her now, would he be disappointed in her? she wondered. He had been a little old-fashioned in some ways, and she knew he would have wanted her to marry and have children. But how could she do that? There was enough of him in her for her to know that she could only make that kind of commitment to someone if she truly loved them and was loved by them in return. And how could that ever be possible when she didn’t believe that love, the kind of love she had dreamed of as a young girl, actually existed? Love was simply a word used to cloak far more practical and less ideological emotions. Love, or rather the promise of it, was just a weapon men used against women.
‘I love you,’ they said, but what they meant was, ‘I love myself.’
‘You’d better watch it,’ she mocked Whittaker playfully. ‘There aren’t many males brave enough to come into this house!’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘HOW IS HE?’
Ward put down the article he had been reading as his mother came out of his stepfather’s hospital room, closing the door behind her.
Instantly his mother’s face broke into a relaxed smile.
‘He’s feeling much better. The specialist just wants to have a few words with him and then he... He saw the specialist this morning and he’s confirmed that it wasn’t a heart attack after all. They’ve got all the test results back now and he thinks the pain was caused by anxiety.
‘You know how your stepfather is, and he’s been worrying about this trip Ritchie is planning to make to America...’
Ward made a small, explosive sound before getting up and reassuring his mother.
‘There’s no need for him to worry about anything...’
‘I know that, dear, but you know what he’s like. He feels it isn’t fair that you’re having to finance Ritchie through university when you...’
She stopped and Ward gave her a wry look.
‘When I what? When I had to work my own way through life? Ma, for heaven’s sake, surely he doesn’t think I begrudge Ritchie the chance—
’
‘No. No, of course he doesn’t,’ his mother reassured him quickly. ‘He knows how fond you are of Ritchie, Ward,’ she told her elder son, placing her hand on his arm. ‘We both do. You’ve done so much for all of us. I just wish... You really ought to marry again, you know,’ she told him gently. ‘Have children... I know that...’ She stopped and then looked at him intently.
‘You’ve met someone, haven’t you? Don’t deny it, Ward. I can see it in your eyes...’
Ward was too taken aback to deny her maternal perception, stating curtly, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, and anyway—’ He broke off, his mouth hardening.
Perhaps it wasn’t really surprising that his mother had guessed about Anna. After all, he had barely stopped thinking about her from the moment he had read her note. Even in his most anxious moments for his stepfather, Anna had still been there in his thoughts, tormenting him, haunting him.
He had tried telling himself that everything he had done had been justified; that he had owed it to Ritchie and her other victims to do what he had done, but, instead of being able to focus on her crime, all he had really been able to do was remember how she had felt in his arms, how she had smelled, tasted, been, and how much he was missing her, how damnably much.
‘Tell me about her,’ his mother insisted with firm maternal authority.
Ward glanced towards his stepfather’s closed hospital-room door, but it was obvious that no help or rescue was going to come from that area.
‘There isn’t anything to tell,’ he informed his mother brusquely. ‘Oh, you needn’t look at me like that.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking; it’s no match made in heaven, Ma, far more like one made in hell.’
His skin darkened slightly as he saw the look of mingled despair and compassion in his mother’s eyes.
‘She’s a liar and the next damned thing to being a thief,’ he told her baldly. ‘By rights there’s no way I should feel about her the way I do, but...’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘And, even if she felt the same way about me, which now that she knows...’ He stopped again.