by Penny Jordan
She said goodnight to him as she let herself into her room, firmly closing the door behind her and then locking it. She had her pride, after all, she decided savagely as she threw her bag on to the bed. She was not going to beg him or any other man. If he got some kind of pleasure from letting her think that he had wanted her, from letting her believe that her desire was reciprocated, from subtly stage-managing the whole evening so that it had gone from phase to phase in the same climactic way their bodies might have later approached orgasm, well, then let him. She wasn’t going to let it bother her and she certainly wasn’t going to meet him tomorrow morning.
* * *
Nevertheless, at eleven o’clock the next day she was getting out of the lift and walking into the lobby, her body tensing with a sudden surge of excitement as she saw Leo standing waiting for her.
He hadn’t seen her yet. Perhaps last night he had been too genuinely busy to be with her, and perhaps she had taken him a little off guard by signalling to him that she wanted him to stay with her.
She wondered how long his proposed tour of the city would take. Like her, he must want to attend this afternoon’s lecture. It was, after all, the highlight of the entire weekend. A talk on the progress of modern drugs given by the head of Hessler Chemie.
She might be opposed to all that Hessler’s and others like them stood for, she had been grimly disdainful of the product leaflet she had been showered with during the conference, the samples and sweeteners so freely handed out, but she was anxious to attend the lecture, since there was to be a question-and-answer session at the end of it, and she was interested to see how Hessler’s would defend any criticisms if such criticism was allowed to be made. She had heard a rumour that Hessler Chemie were underwriting some of the costs of the conference.
Her stomach lurched as Leo turned round and saw her, his face breaking into a smile of such warmth and sweetness that all her doubts about seeing him again were banished.
She was within yards of him when a man rushed up to him, exclaiming urgently in German, ‘Herr von Hessler; your brother is on the telephone. The call was put through to your suite at the other hotel. I am afraid he is not in too good a mood at the delay in reaching you.’
Herr von Hessler!
Christie’s understanding of German was patchy, but just hearing his surname was more than enough to take in. She froze, unable to take her eyes off Leo’s face. He was frowning, brushing aside the other man’s anxiety, telling him firmly, ‘I’m afraid my brother will have to wait. Tell him that I shall ring him back, will you, Jürgen? Christie,’ he called out to her quickly, but she had already turned her back on him, shock and anger tensing her body. The crowd of people milling around the lobby made it impossible for her to escape as quickly as she had hoped. When she felt his hand on her arm, she demanded brittly,
‘Please let go of me.’
He didn’t make any pretence of not understanding. ‘Christie, please listen, I can explain.’
‘Why should you?’ she asked him coldly. ‘I can well understand that a man of your … importance … might feel it politic to conceal his identity.’
She was jostled by the crowd and had to turn half towards him, so she saw him wince, the skin round his mouth paling with tension as his jaw tensed. She had made no effort to conceal either her anger or her contempt. Why should she? He had deliberately deceived her.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ he protested. ‘I had intended to tell you.’
‘But you decided not to bother.’
‘We were getting on so well. We had formed such a rapport that I didn’t want to spoil things.’
Christie laughed bitterly. ‘What rapport?’ she demanded acidly. ‘How could there be any rapport between us when you were deceiving me? What was it? Did you think I might refuse to go to bed with you once I knew your real identity?’
His face suddenly burned with angry colour. ‘You know better than that,’ he told her sharply.
‘Yes, I think I do,’ Christie agreed, her own face white now. ‘Was that why you backed off last night, Leo? A man in your position must have to be so careful. No carelessness, producing a child that might ultimately have some claim on the von Hessler millions. Is that it? Well, for your information—’
‘Christie, stop it,’ he commanded. ‘That was not the reason at all, and you must know it. I didn’t want us to be lovers until I had had a chance to tell you the truth. I had intended to do so this morning, only unfortunately Jürgen has forestalled me.’
‘Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for me,’ Christie told him. Her face felt hot and tight with anger, her whole body burning with it, and with the humiliation of being so easily deceived … like an unprotected child.
‘I wanted to tell you last night,’ he stressed.
‘And last night I wanted to have sex with you,’ Christie told him. ‘Isn’t it a good job that neither of us got what we wanted?’
‘Christie, please—’
‘No, Leo,’ she told him, turning to face him, her eyes bright with anger and rejection. ‘I hate deceit. I hate it more than anything else there is. And you did deceive me, even if only by omission. You let me expound freely and openly on my views and beliefs when all the time—’
‘When all the time what?’ he challenged. ‘You would have edited and tailored them to suit my position with Hessler Chemie if you had known the truth?’
‘Of course not,’ Christie denied hotly.
‘Then letting you speak genuinely and honestly can have done no harm, can it? I am a man, Christie, not a corporation; in fact, I—’
‘I am not interested in what or who you are,’ Christie cut him off. ‘I am not interested in you in any way, Leo. Now, please let go of my arm. I loathe being manhandled.’
It was said with such contempt that he released her immediately, stepping back from her to give her the space her body language demanded.
‘Think of it like this,’ she told him fiercely as she moved away from him. ‘If you had not been so careful last night, at least you would have had sex with me. As it was, all you did get was the bill for a very expensive meal.’
‘I did not want to have sex with you,’ Leo told her equally fiercely.
The look she gave him was corrosive and bitter.
‘No, you didn’t, did you?’ she agreed as she turned her back and walked away from him, before he could tell her that what he had wanted, what he still wanted, was to love her!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AT FIRST when Giles woke up he couldn’t even remember where he was. The angle of the light falling through the thin curtains fell harshly into his eyes, making him wince with pain. His mouth felt dry, sour, and the smell of the half-full tumbler of whisky beside his bed made his stomach churn with nausea.
Where the hell was he?
And then he remembered. He looked at the glass next to the bed and the bottle beside it, a thin film of colour darkening his skin.
What was happening to him? Was he really so weak, so lacking in self-control, so unable to focus himself on a goal and to reach it that he had to turn to drink to escape from his own sense of failure? No wonder Davina had refused to let him stay with her. He had never been a heavy drinker, not even really a social drinker, but just recently …
He remembered his row with Lucy, the things she had said to him. He groaned, leaning forward in bed. He had the most God-awful headache. It was probably just as well Davina had refused to let him stay last night. His mouth twisted bitterly. Even before he had demolished the better part of that bottle of whisky sitting on the bedside table, he had hardly been in a fit state to perform well as a lover.
Lucy had once told him that he was the most perfect lover she had ever had or had ever been able to imagine having. And he had told her truthfully that giving her pleasure, watching her face as he loved her, had been his pleasure. When she had started to turn away from him, to reject him, he had known that he had lost that ability to please her. The damage that knowledge
had done to his sexual self-confidence had made him reluctant to touch her, afraid of disappointing, or, even worse, disgusting her.
Lucy … What had happened to the love they had once shared? As he now thirsted for the cool solace of Davina’s calm orderliness, a part of him knew that he would never attain with her the heights he had reached with Lucy. Lucy, turbulent, temperamental, impossible to understand, impossible sometimes even to talk to, generating within him such a complexity of emotions that just thinking about them sometimes exhausted him.
A relationship with Lucy demanded one hundred and fifty per cent of a man and he simply didn’t have that to give, especially not now, with Carey’s and his job both so precarious.
Even before Gregory’s death Lucy had been urging him to leave Carey’s, to find a job that wasn’t so demanding. He had agreed with her then, but after Gregory’s death, when Davina had needed him so much …
Couldn’t she see how selfish she was being? he had asked Lucy angrily one evening when she had barely let him get inside the door before launching an avalanche of bitter invective and complaints against him. He was the one who was being selfish, she had countered. More than selfish. She wasn’t deceived; she knew it was Davina who was keeping him at Carey’s, even if he refused to admit it.
He winced now, the brief denying movement of his body making his stomach heave. He pushed back the bedclothes and stood up slowly. His head swam with pain and nausea.
Half an hour later, showered and dressed, he studied his reflection in the mirror with grim distaste.
‘Go to Davina and don’t come back,’ Lucy had told him, and in the heat of the moment he had done exactly what she had said. But of course he had to go back. He was an adult, not a child to run from his responsibilities.
If he and Lucy were to separate … divorce … there were arrangements that would have to be made. He winced again. Divorce. The word tasted bitter, its consonants harsh and jagged like the emotions it aroused within him.
Divorce. He hated everything that the word implied, but what alternative did he have?
An hour later Giles let himself into the house and stood for a moment in the hall. Empty silence greeted him and his heart started to race in panic and fear. The house was empty … Lucy had left. Gone. Why should that thought fill him with such despair?
He walked into the kitchen, unfamiliarly tidy, its surfaces and floor gleaming.
Lucy was the kind of woman who liked clutter, things around her; every room always seemed to have a jug of flowers somewhere in it, a collection of photographs; a display of china Lucy had collected from rummaging among the stalls of street markets and antique fairs.
In the kitchen, the billboard was normally covered in brightly penned notes, postcards, invitations, messages Lucy had written to herself. Once, a long, long time ago, or so it seemed now, she had written messages on it for him, sometimes huge scrawly ones, sometimes tiny hidden ones in the shape of a cut-out heart, sometimes more sexually explicit ones that employed a secret language of their own.
Today the billboard was empty.
Like the house. Like their lives together.
He went upstairs slowly and mechanically. He needed a change of clothes and another shower—the smell of the whisky was still on his skin, in his mouth, and he wanted to purge himself of it. As a divorce would purge him of the pain of their marriage?
The bedroom, like the kitchen, was immaculate and empty. In their adjoining bathroom the air carried a faint trace of Lucy’s perfume. Giles closed his eyes in denial of a sudden image of Lucy’s body, of the scent and feel of it, its warmth and femininity; of the way she moved when she was aroused; the way she touched and held him; the sharp staccato cries she made as she approached her climax.
He had started to shake, his body cold with sweat, beads of it formed on his skin as the desire to be violently sick overwhelmed him.
Fifteen minutes later, showered and dressed in clean clothes, he closed the bedroom door behind him.
Wherever Lucy was, she hadn’t left permanently. Her clothes were still in their bedroom.
Perhaps she had gone to a friend.
He frowned, one foot on the top stair as he realised that the door to the room that had once been her child’s nursery was half open. He went back and stood outside it. He had come back from the hospital after Nicholas’s death and had systematically stripped the room of everything, everything … even down to the wallpaper, releasing the violence of his grief and pain in the destruction of the room’s pretty aqua and cream colour scheme, in removing that border with its gambolling animals, its message that a child’s world was a secure, happy one without clouds or pain.
His child’s world had not been like that. His child’s world had been filled with pain and death.
He pushed the door open and went inside, and then stopped abruptly. Lucy was curled up asleep in the rocking-chair he had bought for the nursery and which had escaped his destruction as it was away being restored and cleaned.
Her face free of make-up, her curls tangled, she looked more like a teenager than a woman, and he had to resist the urge to push the heavy weight of her curls out of her eyes; to straighten the arms and legs she had curled around herself as she huddled asleep in a small cramped ball. Her face was pale, the skin milk-white without its normal covering of make-up, her lashes thick and dark, matted together slightly, her mouth red and full.
In her hand she was clutching a piece of paper, and other pieces of paper littered the floor at her feet. Frowning, he bent down to pick one of them up. His heart raced as he realised that it was a piece of their marriage certificate.
Slowly he picked up every piece, carefully rearranging them on the chest below the window, carefully smoothing out the ones she had screwed up until, like doing a jigsaw, he had remade the whole.
He looked at her hand and gently removed the paper she was holding. It was their baby’s death certificate.
He could feel the tears burning his own eyes. He ached to reach out to her, to hold her; to confess to her the burden of his own guilt and pain.
Why had they never talked about losing their son? He hadn’t done so because he had been afraid of distressing her; because he had simply not known how to do so.
And she had behaved as though nothing had happened; as though there had never been a child … a life … a death.
Yesterday had been the anniversary of the day he died. An anniversary he and Lucy should have marked together. Instead they had both ignored it. And now it was too late. Or was it?
Quietly he walked out of the room and went downstairs, letting himself out of the house and getting into his car.
The garden centre was busy and it took him a long time to find a parking spot.
Of the two of them, Lucy was the gardener, but he knew exactly what he wanted.
Did he know exactly how large it would grow? the assistant asked him doubtfully. Giles felt the anger and grief welling up inside him.
‘It’s a large strong tree,’ the youth persisted. ‘A proper tree, not a pretty ornament for a suburban garden.’
‘It’s exactly what I want,’ Giles informed him tersely. The tree would put down roots, it would grow and mature. It would live throughout his lifetime and well beyond it. It would thrive as their child had not been able to do. It would be steadfast and enduring … as he had failed to be for Lucy.
He couldn’t get it in the car, of course. It would have to be delivered and planted. He paid for it, having given them their delivery instructions. And then he went back to the main part of the garden centre.
The girl inside the flower shop blinked a little as he gave his order. She had to help him carry the flowers out to his car.
‘What do you suppose he means to do with them?’ she asked her colleague. ‘I mean, he bought enough to cover a whole room with them.’
‘Or a whole body,’ the other girl pointed out with a sigh. ‘I have a fantasy about that, you know. Imagine making love on a bed covered in
flowers, the scent of them on your skin as you crush them.’
‘Some of them can leave awful stains on things,’ her companion pointed out dubiously. ‘I mean, those lily things. I ruined my black T-shirt with the pollen off them, and what if some of them were roses? Some of those thorns …’
Her companion sighed a little impatiently, only half listening as the other continued, ‘Do you suppose that’s why he bought them? He did have a bit of a wild look about him, didn’t he?’
Giles had to hunt through several cupboards before he found enough jugs. An urgency, an anger, an emotion so powerful that it controlled him, rather than the other way around, directed him.
Quickly, roughly almost, he thrust handfuls of flowers into the jugs, oblivious to any discordance of colour or shape, a need driving him, obliterating everything else. Soon every downstairs room had its quota of jugs, deposited haphazardly on every conceivable surface.
As he worked there was only one image in his mind. That of his infant son. ‘These are for you, Nicholas,’ he whispered fiercely beneath his breath. ‘For you; because you did exist … you did live … you were here, a part of us, and you always will be.’ And, running through his heart in a silent refrain, were the words, Forgive me … forgive me.
He had tried to deny his son’s existence, to deny him his right to remain a part of his life, but not any more.
‘Giles … what are you doing?’
He turned round. Lucy was standing just inside the door. She had obviously heard him moving about and come down to see what was going on. She had evidently showered and dressed and there was no sign now of the vulnerability of the woman he had seen curled up asleep in the chair.
‘These flowers …’
Was she remembering that once he had bought flowers for her … roses … a symbol of his love and joy? His heart ached with the weight of the burden of his thoughts.
‘They’re for Nicholas,’ he told her quietly.
Lucy stared at him. ‘It was yesterday,’ she told him mechanically. All the colour had left her face. She seemed to be looking at them rather than him.