Savage Atonement

by Penny Jordan

  ‘It never occurred to you that the situation could be mutual?’ Elizabeth asked her.

  Laurel shook her head. ‘How could it be? Oh, I know he felt a certain amount of pity for me; but basically as far as he was concerned I was just an interesting subject to be studied and used.’

  ‘But he made love to you,’ Elizabeth reminded her.

  ‘If you can call it that. As I said before, I think he was simply trying to discover if it was possible to break through the fear encasing me. There was nothing really personal in it. It was an experiment; a series of experiments.’

  ‘Have you read his new book?’

  Laurel shook her head. ‘I was going to buy it, and then I changed my mind. He’s in Switzerland at the moment, I believe?’

  She hated herself for asking the question, but talking about the past had weakened her resolve not to spend the weekend drowning in nostalgia and pain.

  ‘He spent Christmas there,’ Elizabeth agreed, ‘I can hear a car,’ she told Laurel. ‘I think it will be Graham.’ She stood up, and Laurel envied her the soft smile of anticipation curving her mouth as she looked out of the window. It must be wonderful to still feel pleasure in someone’s company after so many years of marriage. Would she herself ever marry? Somehow she doubted it.

  Graham Turner turned out to be every bit as pleasant as his wife, a placid humorous man. Laurel could well imagine that he made a perfect foil for Elizabeth’s more effervescent personality.

  ‘Twins, would you believe it,’ he told her in response to her query about his patient. ‘Derek is as pleased as punch, but a bit poleaxed, and Moira came through the whole thing splendidly. One of the bonuses of being a doctor,’ he told Laurel with a smile. ‘The miracle of witnessing the beginning of a new life is something that never loses its magic. What’s for dinner?’ he asked his wife mundanely.

  Elizabeth laughed and winked at Laurel. ‘It does wonders for the appetite as well, so it seems! It’s one of your favourites, as it so happens, beef Wellington—which reminds me, I ought to be doing something in the kitchen.’

  Over dinner Laurel had more leisure to study the family en masse, and she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy as she listened to their cheerful banter. The twins were teasing Rick about his latest girl-friend, their father interrupting them whenever they got a little out of hand, all of them including Laurel in the conversation in such a way that she almost felt part of them.

  After dinner she helped to load the dishwasher and enjoyed the lively discussion in the living room between the twins and their parents about the importance of education.

  ‘Exhausting, aren’t they?’ Elizabeth announced when they left to go and play table tennis.

  Laurel had been invited to join them but had declined. It had been a long day and she was beginning to feel tired.

  ‘One of the bonuses of having such a large house is that at least we have plenty of room for hobbies. We’ve turned what used to be the cellars into a games room—marvellous for keeping them off the streets!’

  * * *

  Perhaps it was the fresh air, Laurel reflected the next morning, but she couldn’t remember when she had last slept as well. A cold nose pushed impatiently at her elbow and she glanced down at the golden retriever grinning silently beside the bed, tail beating anxiously.

  ‘Susie, you naughty girl!’ she heard Elizabeth exclaiming from the door. ‘I’m sorry about that, Laurel,’ she apologised, coming in with a tray of tea, ‘but Susie has appointed herself official looker-in on our guests, and she sneaked up here before I could stop her. She isn’t really allowed upstairs.’

  ‘It can’t really be that time!’ Laurel was appalled to discover that it was almost nine. What on earth must the Turners think of her?

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Actually, I’m afraid I have an apology to make to you. I’d completely forgotten when we invited you that I promised to go and see an old friend today. She and I were at school together and we normally visit them a couple of times a year. I could cancel it, but.…’

  She looked so worried that Laurel said quickly, ‘No, please don’t do that, I promise you I can keep myself occupied for a few hours. Perhaps I could do something towards the party?’

  ‘Er… yes… well, there’s no need to worry about that, but if you’re really sure you don’t mind?’

  As her friend lived in Bath, to make the visit worthwhile they would have to leave immediately after lunch, Elizabeth explained to Laurel.

  Graham was going with her—one of his rare afternoons off, and Laurel decided she would spend part of the afternoon exploring the countryside, perhaps taking Susie with her for company. She had noticed an inviting footpath from her bedroom window, but when she mentioned this idea, Elizabeth looked almost horrified.

  ‘Oh, no… that is… er.…’

  ‘The weather forecast isn’t looking too good,’ Graham supplied for her. ‘The temperature is dropping pretty quickly, and unless you’ve come properly equipped I wouldn’t suggest a walk.’

  Perhaps they were worried that she was too much of a city dweller to be trusted to go out walking on her own, Laurel reflected, but whatever the reason she had no wish to worry them, and so she said instead that she would find some way of entertaining herself.

  What she had in mind was table tennis with the twins, but no sooner had their parents left than the boys announced that they had promised to meet some friends in the village.

  Was it something about her? Laurel wondered humorously; at least Susie seemed to want her company.

  Even Rick had deserted her; gone to see his girl-friend, the twins explained knowledgeably as they left.

  And now there was one, Laurel thought as she wondered how best to spend the afternoon.

  With the party in mind she decided to enjoy a long luxurious soak in the pretty bathroom off her bedroom, and then a proper manicure for her nails. It was a sybaritic, lazy way of spending the afternoon at least.

  She had just emerged from the water, her body scented deliciously with her favourite perfume, when she heard a car outside the house. It was too early for it to be Graham and Elizabeth returning, and thinking it might be someone needing a doctor, Laurel hurriedly pulled on her towelling robe and ran downstairs.

  She reached the door just as she heard a key in the lock. It turned, and Susie, who was whining excitedly, rushed towards the door as it swung open, her whole body quivering with pleasure.

  ‘Down, Susie, you silly dog!’

  The familiar voice held Laurel transfixed, her eyes widening in shocked recognition of Oliver’s familiar figure. He seemed taller and broader in the narrow black pants and dark grey leather blouson, the collar turned up against the cold. His hair needed cutting, she noticed absently as he turned and she saw where it grew over the collar of his jacket. He seemed strangely unsurprised to see her, although something, some emotion she couldn’t recognise, flickered in his eyes, as he gently pushed the dog away and said evenly, ‘Hello, Laurel.’

  ‘I thought you were in Switzerland!’

  Her voice sounded thick and unsteady. She clung to the banister for support, not sure how much longer her trembling legs would support her.

  ‘I know,’ he told her tersely. ‘Let’s get inside, shall we?’

  He took her arm, and beneath the towelling she was acutely conscious of the strength of his fingers, darkly tanned against the white fabric.

  ‘You’ve been very elusive,’ he told her curtly as he closed the door behind them.

  Her mouth had gone dry, and she moistened her lips nervously with the tip of her tongue, trembling uncertainly as she watched Oliver’s eyes darken and narrow as he watched her.

  ‘I… I didn’t know you were looking for me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Laurel,’ he drawled sardonically. ‘You can do better than that! You knew damn well we had things to talk about.’

  ‘If you mean what I wrote in my notebook,’ she began uncertainly, ‘it was a mistake—I realised that almost
straight away. I did feel bitter about you at first, before I realised that… I would never have gone through with what I’d planned,’ she finished nervously.

  ‘So you don’t hate me after all?’ There was a curious thread of uncertainty in his voice, a look in his eyes that set her pulses racing madly.

  She turned, glancing down at a table, startled to realise that a copy of his new book lay on it. She picked it up, disconcerted to find that he was watching her carefully.

  ‘Have you read it yet?’

  Laurel shook her head.

  ‘I’d like you to, but not yet. First we have to talk. Why did you run away from me, Laurel? And not just once. That time in the bookshop, I tried to signal to you that I wanted to talk, but you disappeared.’

  So he had seen her, and it hadn’t been purely her imagination that he had been trying to communicate something to her.

  ‘What about?’ she managed evenly. ‘I thought you’d concluded your experiment. You said you were going to turn me into a woman, didn’t you, and.…’

  ‘Experiment? Just what the hell are you talking about?’ he demanded in a driven tone, his expression suddenly changing, as he muttered hoarsely, ‘Oh, God, Laurel, do you have to walk around half naked? How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on what I’m saying when all I can think about is the fact that you’re wearing damn all underneath that robe, and how desperately I want to touch you. God, Laurel, if you knew how much I’ve wanted you these last months! It’s been purgatory, but this is even worse. I love you,’ he said thickly, ‘and God forgive me, although I swore I’d never say it, never use emotional blackmail to get you back in my arms, I can’t help myself, just as I can’t help doing this. I love you, and it’s tearing me apart,’ he muttered savagely as he jerked her into his arms, burying his mouth hotly in hers, possessing it with a compulsive need that went far beyond anything she had experienced before.

  It was several long, satisfying minutes, when she simply allowed what she was feeling to obliterate everything else, and responded feverishly to his nearness, savouring the crisp feel of his hair beneath her fingers, letting them trace the breadth of his shoulders as she slipped them beneath his jacket, before he released her.

  ‘Laurel, you can’t respond to me like that and not feel something,’ he groaned at last, holding her away from her.

  ‘Can’t I?’ She peeped demurely up at him from beneath downswept lashes, suddenly, gloriously aware of her power. He loved her!

  ‘Laurel!’ He said her name roughly, a warning and a plea, and she was the one who moved this time, curling herself into his arms, her fingers wantonly unfastening the buttons on his shirt, her palm flat against the racing urgency of his heart.

  ‘All right, perhaps it is only physical,’ he muttered thickly, ‘but it could be the basis for something more, something.…’

  He broke off, sweat moistening his skin, and her heart contracted in wonder and love.

  ‘Oliver, it isn’t just physical,’ she told him shakily. ‘I do love you. That’s why I ran away. I thought you were just using me, and I couldn’t stay.’

  ‘Oh God!’ he groaned hoarsely. ‘So much wasted time! At first I did simply want to help you—or so I told myself. Try to understand, Laurel. All these years I’ve carried an immense burden of guilt about what I did. I tried to find you before, unsuccessfully, and then when we did meet and I found you so obviously emotionally scarred and so full of hate for me, I felt I had to try and reach you. But it was a plan that soon backfired on me. Perhaps now is the time to admit that that very first time we met you stirred something in me, something I had no right to feel, and because of that, crazily, I was harder on you than I might otherwise have been. My mother warned me I was being biased, but I wouldn’t listen. I ought to explain that I was very close to Peter, my cousin, and his death.…’ He broke off, and Laurel touched his hand compassionately.

  ‘I’m just trying to excuse the inexcusable,’ Oliver continued wryly, ‘but at the time my emotions were so crazily mixed up. After Peter first died I dreamed continually about him, wondering if there wasn’t some way I could save him, and somehow you became involved in that crusade. Realising the truth brought me to my senses, but by then it was too late, and my nightmares of Peter were replaced by nightmares of you, of your haunting, hurting expression!’

  So that was why he had said she wasn’t the only one to suffer from them!

  ‘We met again, and this time I was determined to make atonement, but all the time I was at war with myself. One part of me wanted to be altruistic, to free you completely from the past, the other, jealous and possessive, wanted to free you so that you would turn to me—not any other man, just me, and I was fighting a constant battle against my love for you, fighting not to burden you with my feelings. I told myself I owed it to you to stand aside and let you make your own choices, but all the time… all the time I wanted you for myself,’ he told her huskily. ‘I wanted you to respond to me and only me, to love me as I realised I loved you. I told myself that it was unfair to you to try and trap you in a relationship with me purely on the basis that you responded to me physically, before you’d discovered more about life and love for yourself. But that didn’t stop me from being jealous as hell when I thought you’d spent that night with Chas, giving him what you wouldn’t give me. Then I was nearly demented with jealousy; just as I was tormented with my aching need for you every time I came anywhere near you. Sometimes I had to physically stop myself touching you. But I couldn’t stop myself loving you. I thought I was destined to remain always confused in your mind with your stepfather.

  ‘I used to dream about you,’ Laurel admitted shakily. ‘I used to dream it was you touching me and not him, and…’ she took a deep breath, confessing for the first time, ‘and… and in my dream I liked having you touch me. Can’t you understand?’ she pleaded with him. ‘I had to bury that even from myself because it was as though I was admitting to myself that Bill Trenchard had been right and I did want him. I told myself I wanted to be revenged upon you, but.…’

  Her words were silenced by the tender possession of his mouth.

  ‘Laurel.’ When he released her she was still quivering with the pleasure of his touch.

  ‘I would never have gone with Chas, if I hadn’t read those notes, that book.…’

  ‘What notes?’

  Briefly she explained about the notes she had seen when she went to get his jacket, and his frown disappeared.

  ‘Laurel, I wasn’t making them because I intended to write about you.’ He cupped her face. ‘As it happens, you are in my new book, we both are, but not in the way you imagine. It’s our story, and I hope when you read it you’ll agree with me that it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, but those notes… call it force of habit if you like, but they were made simply to clarify my own thoughts. I knew by then that it wasn’t simply guilt that motivated me, that my responses to you were far from altruistic, and I was simply hoping that by writing down what had happened in its purest form I might be able to understand my own emotions more. The notes merely confirmed what I already knew in my heart—that I was hopelessly, terrifyingly in love with you. As for the books,’ he grimaced faintly, ‘I needed some books for research into the subject of my next novel—while we were in Provence an idea came to me for my next book. When I worked as a reporter I did some articles on long-stay prisoners and I wanted to do some investigations into the criminal personality—if indeed there is such a thing. I saw the other book while I was buying them and got it on impulse. By that time I was so crazily and desperately in love with you that I couldn’t think straight any longer, and I thought that reading it might help me to understand and reach you. You see,’ he said softly, ‘we both leapt to the wrong conclusion; accused one another unfairly. When I saw what you’d written…! If you only knew you had a far more potent weapon at hand,’ he told her, reminding her that he had used similar words then too. ‘My love for you.…’ he whispered against her ear.

  �
��Can you forgive me?’ he asked huskily, and there was a shadowing of pain in his eyes that told Laurel he would never entirely forgive himself for his original error of judgment. Her love for him welled up inside her, drowning out the past and all its pain.

  ‘Only if you promise to forgive yourself,’ she told him softly. ‘To err is human, remember? And after what happened to Peter I can understand how in your bitterness.…’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted roughly, ‘don’t make excuses for me, Laurel. I can’t think what I’ve ever done to deserve you,’ he added throatily, brushing her skin with his lips. ‘I want you to read my book. I wrote it for you,’ he told her. ‘A testimony of my love. It’s more about me than you; about what I did to you; about the anguish of discovering my love.…’

  Laurel put her finger against his lips, impelled to banish the bitter remorse in his eyes.

  ‘Does it have a happy ending?’

  For a moment Oliver looked nonplussed, and then he saw her smile, and once more he was the urbane man she had first known.

  ‘I’m more interested in happy beginnings,’ he said slowly, responding to her mood, ‘and I’m aching to get started on one right now. How quickly do you suppose we can be married? I doubt if Elizabeth will let us off with anything less than the whole thing, especially after all the trouble she’s gone to to get you here.’

  ‘She kept asking me if I thought you might love me,’ Laurel told him happily.

  ‘Umm, knowing all the time that I did… although I suspect that even my sturdy sister would be surprised to learn that when I first felt the stirrings of that love you were barely fifteen. She kept on insisting that you weren’t entirely indifferent to me, but I wanted to hear it from you, not her. Do you, Laurel?’ he murmured seductively against her throat, his voice suddenly raw with a need that shivered across her nerves. ‘Do you feel something for me?’