by Penny Jordan
CHAPTER NINE
CHRIS had to wait three days before an opportunity presented itself for her to ring John without being overheard by Slater. It was unsettling, knowing that he was in the house with her, and it made her stay in bed much longer than she had anticipated. On one or two occasions when he had come up to see her, she had the suspicion that that was exactly what he had wanted, and she couldn’t help remembering his grim expression on the day they had left the hospital and she had announced her intention of getting back on her feet just as quickly as she could.
It was, she had told herself, just a matter of biding her time, and eventually she was proved right. On the third morning of her enforced stay in bed, Slater walked into her room and announced tersely that he was having to visit the factory.
“Don’t even think of attempting to do anything foolish while I’m gone, Chris,” he warned her tersely, coming to stand beside her. He hadn’t yet put on his jacket and the thin white silk of his shirt lovingly outlined the taut muscles of his chest. She ached to touch him Chris admitted to herself, half shocked by the intensity of her physical desire for him. Seven years ago, she had wanted him yes, but then she had been more than content to let him set the pace of their relationship and to follow his guidance whereas now… Now she was a woman, not an adolescent, she reminded herself wryly, dragging her eyes away from him, lest they betrayed something of her thoughts to him.
“We still have to talk.”
“No.” Her response was instantaneous and very revealing. She knew from his expression that Slater had heard the fear in her voice. His mouth had gone hard, his eyes almost amber as he stared down at her.
“Yes, damn you,” he contradicted thickly, adding, “What are you so frightened of, Chris? Is it this?”
His mouth was on hers before she could move, his body blocking out the light, his hands imprisoning her shoulders against the mattress.
At first she twisted desperately from side to side trying to escape, but the fierce heat of his mouth; the need that his angry, almost bitter kiss aroused in spite of all her determination not to acknowledge it, overwhelmed her and her mouth softened beneath his, her arms going round his neck, stroking the softness of his hair.
She felt the bed depress under his weight and her treacherous body gloried in having him so close to her; offering no resistance at all when he slid aside one of the delicate straps of her nightdress to cup the rounded firmness of her breast.
The soft sound of pleasure she made in the back of her throat must have reached him. Chris felt him tense, registering her response. A bitter wave of shame flooded over her and she pulled away from him, turning her face into the pillow.
“Running away again, Chris?”
She felt his breath brush her skin, and shivered involuntarily, trying to withstand the stroking probe of his thumb, as it moved over her lower lip.
“All right, I’ll let you get away with it—this time. But you can’t run for ever, Chris.” She felt him get up, her body instantly missing the heavy warmth of his, and as she heard him move towards the door she ached to call him back. Only after the door closed behind him was she able to expel a shaky breath. The sooner she left here the better, she told herself, listening for the sound of his car driving away. She didn’t know what game he was playing with her, but what she did know was that if she allowed herself to be drawn into it, she would definitely be the loser.
Once she was sure that Slater was gone she dressed as quickly as she could, taking care not to put too much weight on her injured ankle.
Luckily Mrs Lancaster was out with Sophie, and there was nothing to stop Chris from ringing John.
Nothing apart from her conscience which urged her to tell Slater what had happened in the cottage, before she told anyone else. Why should she, she argued stubbornly with herself, Sophie wasn’t even his child; he didn’t really want her, he simply looked after her through habit… And yet…she had been so sure she had seen real love and caring in his eyes for the little girl.
John Howard was a doctor, she told herself. He would know far better than Slater what interpretation to put on Sophie’s behaviour.
She got through to him straight away, and asked him if he was free for lunch. She didn’t want him coming to the house again—not after what had happened last time.
He seemed rather restrained and cool towards her, but Chris urged him to accept. Perhaps he thought she was making a play for him, she thought bitterly. After all, if what Sarah had said about Natalie was common knowledge in the local’s eyes, she might already be tarred with the same brush!
Eventually John gave way and agreed to meet her at the same restaurant where they had originally been introduced.
“I wouldn’t ask, but it really is important,” she told him before ringing off, “and I just don’t know who else to turn to.”
She was in a fever of tension as she went back upstairs to collect her things, dreading Slater coming back and preventing her from going out. She daren’t even leave a note for Mrs Lancaster just in case Slater came after her.
It wasn’t until the taxi she had ordered to take her to the restaurant cleared Slater’s drive that she was finally able to release her pent up breath. To her relief John was already sitting in the bar waiting for her. He greeted her briefly, looking tense and ill at ease.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much time,” he apologised, ordering her a drink. “I have a pretty heavy schedule today, and my wife wasn’t too well this morning. I want to go home and check up on her before I go back to work.”
“I wouldn’t have rung you if it hadn’t been important,” Chris began defensively. “I just didn’t know who else to turn to…It’s about Sophie…”
Quickly she outlined what had happened; when she had finished there was a long silence. John Howard’s face was white, his eyes almost haunted. He looked so ill that Chris was shocked. She had never imagined him reacting so violently to her disclosures.
“Dear God, I’ve got to get out of here,” he told her unsteadily. “Are you desperately hungry?”
Chris shook her head. Her stomach was churning it was true, but not through hunger. She had the sensation of being poised on an unexpected precipice, and it was an extremely unwelcome one.
“Did you drive here?” John asked tersely.
When Chris shook her head again, John took her arm and led her out of the bar. “We’ll go for a drive… Come on.”
He still looked ill when they were installed in the car, so much so that Chris felt extremely guilty.
“Look,” she began uncertainly, “I’m sorry I bothered you with all this. I should have told Slater, but I was afraid he would dismiss it as sheer fantasy… That was before I learned that he isn’t Sophie’s father, of course.” She bit her lip wondering if she had revealed something that John didn’t know, but his mind was obviously running on different lines from hers because all he said was, “She promised me she wouldn’t do it.” His voice sounded thick and strained, almost as though he found uttering the words a huge physical effort.
The road he took was a meandering country one that Chris dimly remembered. He pulled off it by a farm gate, and switched off his car engine. His face was still grey with pain, and Chris felt the nervous tremors of dread inside her building up as he finally turned towards her.
“God it’s times like these that I wish I’d not given up smoking,” he said tensely. Abruptly he looked at her. “You’re sure that Sophie really spoke?”
“Quite sure,” Chris confirmed quietly, “although she seems to remember nothing about it.”
“No…no she wouldn’t do…it would be the trauma of being there in the cottage alone, especially after seeing me…her mind would blot it all out I expect.” He took a deep breath and let it out on a shuddering sigh. “None of us really knows what will happen about Sophie. A trauma as great as the one that originally caused her dumbness would be the ideal solution, but such things cannot be manufactured or controlled, and can go dangerous
ly wrong…”
“What was the trauma that originally caused the problem?” Chris asked quietly. “No one seems to know…”
“I know,” John told her, “and so does Slater.” There was a long, long pause during which Chris held her breath wondering if he would go on and if he did, what he would tell her? Was Slater to blame for Sophie’s illness? Was that what John was going to reveal to her?
“Is that why Slater feels so responsible for her?” she asked at last, needing to break the painful silence. “Because he’s to blame?”
“No…no.” The anguished denial filled the interior of the car with emotion so intense that it was almost tangible. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.”
The admission shocked her, robbing her of breath and the ability to rationalise. It took her several stupefied seconds to find the impetus to say huskily, “You…but how could that be possible?”
“Natalie and I were having an affair.”
Once again Chris was lost for words. Of all the men to be involved with her cousin, John Howard was the very last she would have thought of.
“But…”
All that she was thinking must have shown on her face because John grimaced slightly and said, “Yes, I know…but there are times in our lives when we all do things we can’t explain or analyse. Natalie was the very worst woman for me to become emotionally involved with. Demanding, petulant, selfish, greedy, unstable, she was all of those things—completely opposite from my wife, in fact, and perhaps that’s where the attraction lay. It wasn’t even a physical thing—at least not at first. She seemed so gay…so pathetically lonely and vulnerable. She came to see me when I was doing some locum work for her regular doctor. She wanted me to prescribe tranquillisers for her. She couldn’t sleep, she told me. She was thin, almost painfully so.
“I didn’t realise then that her thinness was part of a deliberate campaign to get at Slater. I thought her husband the most selfish inconsiderate brute alive. She rang me up a week later. She needed someone to talk to she told me… I fell for it… It was very flattering to have such a beautiful woman wanting my company.
“We started meeting…lunching together, and then later going to the cottage. I’ll never forget the first time we made love there. Natalie seemed to be on an intense high… She kept laughing, gloating almost… I knew there was something wrong, but I closed my eyes to it, by then I was too deeply involved. I refused to see what should have been obvious to me; that Natalie was desperately ill. We kept on seeing one another, and then one day she told me she wanted me to get a divorce. I told her it was impossible. She’d always known that… Whatever my feelings, I couldn’t leave Helen.
“She seemed to change completely from the person I thought she was. She screamed and raved, calling me vile names, telling me she’d tell Helen about our affair. On and on it went until she’d exhausted herself. I admitted then that she was seriously mentally ill, but I couldn’t break off our relationship—I daredn’t. I tried to persuade her to go and see a specialist, but she had such severe hysterics that I tried to take the coward’s way out then I’m afraid. I reminded her that she had a husband…a child…
“Her husband loved someone else, she told me and as for her child, Sophie! She hated Sophie she told me. She had always hated her. It was because of Sophie that she was trapped in her marriage with Slater. It was only later that she told me that Sophie wasn’t even his child, by which time I was at my wits’ end, desperate to prevent my wife from finding out about our affair, and terrified for Natalie who, it was becoming increasingly obvious, was very, very ill. I was caught in a cleft stick. In other circumstances I could have approached Slater and told him my fears, but because of my relationship with Natalie, that was impossible.
“She rang me up at home one evening demanding that I meet her at the cottage the next day. I went to bed that night determined to sort things out once and for all.
“She was jumpy and on edge when I got there. Slater was furious with her, she told me because she’d threatened to tell Sophie that he wasn’t her father… She was very wild and distraught. She wanted me to go away with her, to leave my wife. I explained that it was impossible. While we were arguing Sophie walked into the cottage. I didn’t know it but Natalie had been taking her there. She had a thing about the place that I couldn’t understand. She hated it, and yet she wanted to be there. Before I could stop her Natalie turned on the little girl screaming at her. She actually hit Sophie across the face before I could restrain her. Sophie was crying naturally. She wanted her daddy, she sobbed.”
He broke off, shuddering deeply, his eyes dark with pain, remembering what had happened, and Chris held her breath.
Her own chest felt tight and uncomfortable. If anyone else had told her this she doubted that she would have believed them.
“That was when Natalie told her that Slater wasn’t her father… I’ll never forget it. Sophie just stared at her, and then she said slowly, ‘I hate you and I wish you’d go away and never, ever come back.’ She ran out of the cottage before I could stop her and when I started to go after her, Natalie held me back, screaming that she’d go straight to my wife, if I left her. I didn’t know what to do. All my instincts, my training, urged me to go after Sophie, but my guilt, the knowledge of what Natalie could and would do to our life together, stopped me. And that’s something I’ll never cease to regret, never be able to square with my conscience—something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.
“I never saw Natalie alive again after that night. I eventually managed to calm her down, and I took her home. Slater was away in London.
“He rang me the next day. I think I knew the moment I heard his voice. He asked me to go round. When I got there he told me that Natalie was dead. She’d taken a massive overdose cocktail of tranquillisers and God knows what. She left a letter, blaming me, saying that she was carrying my child, that I’d seduced and then abandoned her.
“I just didn’t know what to say to Slater, but he made it easy for me. He knew what Natalie was like, he assured me. He also destroyed the letter. He told me that what had happened—the truth—would remain between the two of us. Natalie had been unwell and unbalanced for a while. Her own doctor could attest to that. He had in fact notified her own doctor the moment he discovered her. As you know they had separate rooms, and apparently it was Sophie who found her. Slater found her standing beside the bed, just staring at her mother. She hasn’t spoken a word since.”
He laced his hands together and studied their blunt tips. “It’s quite obvious that Sophie blames herself for her mother’s death. I never want to see you again, she said, and what happens…her mother disappears. Of course we’ve tried to explain…but she’s a child…and also deep inside her there’s still hatred there for Natalie. Natalie never showed her any affection. In fact she seemed to hate her, but Slater…” He shook his head. “Some days I wonder how I can live with the burden of guilt I have to carry. I look at my wife… I think of my life, and I wish to God I had the guts to tell her. She’s strong enough to take it, much, much stronger than Natalie, much stronger than me, but I’m afraid that if I do tell her, she’ll divorce me, and if Natalie taught me anything, it was just how much Helen means to me.”
It was all so very different from what she had imagined that Chris had difficulty in taking it all in. Far from being the cause of her cousin’s death, Slater had in actual fact been more of a victim, both of her treachery and her unstable nature. In mentally depicting her cousin as desperately unhappy because of the unkind treatment of her husband, she had been about as far from the truth as it was possible to get. But that didn’t alter her own vulnerability to Slater; nor the fact that she would be wise to get away from him before she revealed to him more than she wanted to know.
She was still as far away as ever from discovering why Slater had married Natalie in the first place—the only person who was ever likely to find out was Sarah, once they married. As his wife, she would have a right to kno
w. And Sophie? What of her?
That Sarah didn’t want Natalie’s child to have a place in their lives Chris knew, but would Slater be in agreement to her having sole guardianship of the little girl? She had enough money now to retire from modelling; she could give Sophie a comfortable home, love, care; and perhaps even in time she might be able to introduce her to her real father…
But Slater was Sophie’s real father, part of her insisted. Slater was the father she wanted; the father who had brought her up. How could Natalie have been so cruel? Instinctively she knew and she blanched at the knowledge, apart from Slater none of them were innocent of hurting Sophie. Natalie couldn’t love her daughter because she looked too much like her, Chris acknowledged.
“Are you all right?”
She smiled painfully. “I’m fine, just rather shell-shocked. No…please… You don’t owe me any explanations or apologies…I’m glad you’ve told me though… It explains so much…why Sophie should be so upset after your visit.”
“Yes, poor child. Slater seems to think she believed that I might take you away from her as, in her eyes, at least, I had taken her mother.”
So Slater had talked to him about that. Chris chewed absently at her bottom lip. She needed time to think, time to sort herself out and come out with a concise, workable plan for her own and Sophie’s futures—a plan that Slater would agree to.
“Shall I take you back now?”
They were only a couple of miles from Slater’s house, as the crow flies, and Chris shook her head.
“No I think I’ll walk back through the fields,” she told him. “I need time to think—to re-assess things. The walk will help me.”
“Well take it easy on that ankle.”