That Devil Love

by Lee Wilkinson

  When he followed her in, she turned to face him. She expected him to take her in his arms and kiss her, but, leaning his back against the panels, a cruel little smile on his lips, he suggested, ‘Suppose you get undressed?’

  When, eyes widening, she stared mutely at him, he said with bitter mockery, ‘You were prepared to hold another man’s hand because you felt sorry for the way you’d treated him. After the way you’ve treated me, I figure you owe me a great deal more…’

  ‘You’re just trying to humiliate me, to make me feel ashamed…indecent,’ she charged breathlessly.

  ‘Now why would I want to do that?’

  When she stayed mute, his voice silky, he added, ‘And really it’s quite decent for a wife to strip for her husband…even if, at the same time, it proves to be thoroughly erotic.’

  A shade wildly she fought back. ‘If it’s eroticism you’re looking for, a husband stripping for his wife could prove just as erotic.’

  He laughed suddenly, white teeth gleaming. ‘Well, I’m a firm believer in the equality of the sexes…’ His eyes holding hers, he began to undo the knot in his tie.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  STANDING rooted to the spot, Annis watched as though hypnotised while he pulled the tie free of his collar and, having tossed it aside, started to slowly unbutton his shirt.

  Smiling a little, his movements full of masculine grace, yet oddly threatening, he eased it from its waistband and discarded it.

  When his hands moved to unfasten his trousers and slide them over lean hips, her mouth went desert-dry, and as his dark silk briefs followed she swallowed convulsively.

  Wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped, bronzed skin gleaming like oiled silk, he was as magnificent as some Greek god, only the area of paler skin that had been covered by his briefs betraying a more modern civilisation.

  Wanting to look away, but unable, she felt her nipples tingle and firm betrayingly beneath the thin silky material of her black dress.

  ‘You were quite right,’ he said softly, significantly.

  Her eyes lifted to his face, to find he was studying the clear evidence of her arousal with more than a hint of triumph.

  She longed to fold her arms over her breasts, but a kind of perverse pride kept her chin high and her hands by her sides.

  ‘Your turn now,’ he commanded.

  When she made no move to obey, he suggested, ‘Or would you rather I did it for you?’

  Resisting the panicky urge to back away, she forced herself to stand silent and unresisting while he took the pins from her hair and let the heavy silken mass tumble around her shoulders.

  Then, his fingers having dealt unhurriedly with the zip, he slid the black dress down her slender body, before crouching to unfasten her suspenders and roll down the gossamer nylons.

  Suddenly afraid of being overwhelmed, of losing sight of all she’d been fighting for, she began to resist fiercely. But despite her struggles her dainty bra and panties soon joined the small heap of clothes on the floor.

  Lifting her in his arms, he carried her to the bed and, tossing her on to it with almost contemptuous ease, used the weight of his body to hold her there.

  Realising her writhings were only inflaming him more, she forced herself to lie quite still while he ran a hand up her ribcage to cup and fondle a pink-tipped breast. Feeling the shiver that ran through her, he smiled and looked into her aquamarine eyes. What he saw there wiped the smile from his lips. ‘Don’t look so scared,’ he said roughly. ‘I’ve no intention of hurting you.’

  She sucked air into her lungs like someone drowning. ‘How can you not hurt me? You’re going to take what I don’t want to give.’

  ‘Oh, Annis… Annis…’ He sounded like a soul in torment. ‘Why must you keep fighting me? You could make me the happiest man in the world if only you’d—’

  ‘I don’t want to make you happy,’ she hissed at him. ‘I married you with the intention of making you as unhappy as possible.’

  She heard the slight whistle of indrawn breath through his teeth. ‘I wish to God I’d never used blackmail. It’s only made you hate me…’

  ‘It isn’t just the blackmail. I hated you right from the start.’

  Clearly shaken by her vehemence, he said slowly, ‘I had hoped to overcome your initial dislike and distrust. I tried to tell myself that you couldn’t really hate a man you didn’t know, without cause…’

  ‘I had cause enough.’

  Perplexed, he half shook his head. ‘You’re not making any sense… What in heaven’s name had you got against me?’ When she stayed dumb, running out of patience he demanded angrily, ‘Or is this some rubbish you’ve just dreamt up in order to keep me at arm’s length? Well, if it is, it won’t work. This time I’m—’

  ‘No, it isn’t…’ she broke in desperately. ‘I’ve always hated you because of Maya.’

  Looking startled, he swung his feet to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, facing her. ‘Who told you about Maya?’

  Though she was well aware it was stupid, aware she was being totally illogical, she had wanted to believe she’d made some dreadful mistake. Wanted him to deny all knowledge of Maya.

  As soon as his weight lifted from her she struggled into a sitting position, pulling the clothes up to cover her nakedness. ‘No one told me.’

  ‘Then how do you know? What do you know?’

  ‘Quite a lot, as it happens.’

  ‘Well, you’d better forget it.’ His voice was harsh, uncompromising. ‘There’s no point in causing unhappiness. Dragging up the past.’

  ‘I’d expect you to say that,’ Annis said contemptuously. ‘You’d hardly want the world to know what an utter swine you are.’

  For a split-second he appeared taken aback, then a shutter slid down, successfully hiding what he was thinking, feeling.

  After a brief pause, he remarked carefully, ‘A moment ago you said you knew quite a lot about Maya… What exactly do you know? Or think you know.’

  The accusing words spilled out. ‘I know you and she were lovers. I know that when you got tired of her you quite callously ditched her. I know you ruined her life and caused her death…’

  His face bleak as winter, he said, ‘I’m not sure how you begin to justify all these wild accusations, but I—’

  ‘They are not wild accusations!’

  ‘How else would you describe charges that haven’t a word of truth in them?’

  ‘I don’t know how you have the gall to sit there and say that!’ she cried passionately. ‘You’re as guilty as hell and you know it, even if you won’t admit it.’

  ‘Well, at least this tirade should help clear the air,’ he said grimly. ‘Now I know what you’ve been holding against me…why you’ve looked at me with such animosity… Listen, Annis—’ he caught and held both her hands in a strong grip ‘—and believe me when I tell you that you’ve got it all wrong. I did know Maya. But I was never her lover. I swear it.’

  Tearing her hands free, she cried, ‘If you swore it on a stack of Bibles I wouldn’t believe you.’

  His jaw tightened and a white line appeared round his lips. ‘In that case there’s nothing more to be said.’

  ‘There’s a great deal more,’ she countered furiously. ‘For a start you could say you’re sorry for what happened.’

  ‘I’m certainly that. If I could have changed anything, made her see things in a more balanced way, I would. But Maya was a sick woman, emotionally unstable…’

  Though in her heart Annis knew it was a fair assessment, she choked, ‘You swine!’

  ‘If you’d ever known Maya, you’d know it was the truth.’

  ‘I did know her.’

  Unconvinced, he pressed, ‘How well?’

  ‘Very well. She was my mother.’

  He looked first shocked, then incredulous. ‘What utter nonsense! Her name was Moncrief, and she couldn’t have been more than thirty-two or -three at the most.’

  ‘Moncrief was her stage name and she wa
s thirty-nine when she died,’ Annis said baldly, and saw that she had succeeded in flooring him completely.

  Watching him struggle to regain his equilibrium she felt the same sense of triumph that David must have felt on toppling Goliath.

  It didn’t last long.

  Within seconds he had recovered his self-possession and was once more master of himself and the situation.

  Olive skin stretched taut over strong bones, the planes and angles of his face thrown into sharp relief, his clear-cut mouth a thin slit, he looked formidable. Curtly, he said, ‘If you knew her that well, suppose you tell me the rest.’

  He wasn’t touching her, but there was a look in his tawny eyes that made Annis feel as though she’d been backed into a corner with his hand at her throat.

  Mingling with her righteous anger came uncertainty and apprehension. ‘The rest?’ she faltered.

  ‘How come she never mentioned having a family? What makes you so sure we were lovers? Why you blame me for her death… Everything, Annis.’

  When she hesitated, reluctant, even after three long years, to talk about the past, he said with a kind of raging calm, ‘I intend to know, even if I have to beat it out of you.’

  Scared of that latent violence, she found herself stammering a little. ‘I—I’m not sure where to start.’

  ‘You can start by telling me what made her the kind of woman she was,’ Zan suggested shortly.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ Annis said, her slanting aquamarine eyes flickering away from the steely purpose in his. ‘All I know is she was special. Amoral rather than immoral…exquisite, highly strung, magical, restless…always searching for the kind of love that, despite her beauty, she never managed to find…’ Her voice wavered and she stopped speaking abruptly.

  ‘Go on,’ he ordered, no sign of softening in his hard face. ‘And start from the beginning.’

  After taking a moment to gather herself, she obeyed, her voice as steady and dispassionate as she could make it.

  ‘My father was a gentle, serious man, a university professor. He was almost thirty-six, and seemed to be a confirmed bachelor, when he met Maya.

  ‘She was just sixteen and breathtakingly beautiful even then. He lost his head completely and within a week had asked her adoptive parents’ permission to marry her.

  ‘From the age of fourteen she’d been difficult to control and, at their wits’ end, they were only too pleased to give their consent. I don’t think they’d ever really understood her, and as she reached adolescence they weren’t able to cope with her mercurial temperament and all the problems her beauty caused…’

  With a sigh, Annis continued, ‘Though Dad was a nice-looking man, to Maya he must have seemed middle-aged and staid, and I still don’t understand why she accepted him. Perhaps, never having got on well with her parents, she needed a father-figure. Or maybe she just wanted to get away from home…

  ‘Whatever her reasons, she said yes, and they were married as soon as the banns could be read.

  ‘Dad rented a picturesque old cottage on the outskirts of Rowley Beck, a small market town in Kent, and they went to live there. Ten months later I arrived, and Richard was born the following year.

  ‘Maya was like a little girl playing with her dolls, until the novelty wore off, then she began to hate the quiet life they led at Hamble Cottage and resent being tied. Though it was a financial strain, Dad engaged a housekeeper-cum-nanny to give her more freedom. But she wanted bright lights and excitement, and there wasn’t a lot of either in Rowley Beck, so she took to going up to town every day…

  ‘Soon she was staying away nights, then weeks at a time. Dad did his best to keep her at home, but it was like trying to keep a butterfly in a cage. After a while she moved in with a stage writer-producer who bought her a sports car and promised to make her a star…’

  Zan was sitting quite still, watching Annis’s face through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Though she didn’t stay with him long, he kept his promise. She had talent as well as looks, and in an incredibly short time she was appearing in the West End.

  ‘Young as we were, she insisted on us calling her Maya, rather than Mother. But though she changed her name to Moncrief and hid the fact that she had a family, she still came home periodically to make a fuss of us and bring us lavish presents.

  ‘She was like a beautiful princess in a fairy story, and we adored her. But she always went away again…’ Annis blinked, and twin tears escaped and rolled slowly down her cheeks.

  Zan muttered something under his breath. Getting up abruptly he pulled on a short robe and went to stand by the window, his back to the room.

  After a moment, he said gruffly, ‘That kind of on-off relationship is hard for any child to take. And surely your father must have been angry and bitter?’

  Staring at his broad shoulders, noting abstractedly how the silky black hair curled into the nape of his neck, she said with an odd mixture of pride and sadness, ‘Dad never blamed her, nor did he stop caring about her. She knew that, and she always came home if she needed comfort or reassurance, and Dad always gave it to her. He was her rock.

  ‘For years she burnt the candle at both ends, working hard, playing hard, living life to the full and at a pace that would have killed most people. Then, one after the other, two of the shows she was starring in flopped badly. She quarrelled with her agent, and because she’d started drinking too much no one else would take her on…’ Annis’s voice wavered and stopped.

  Head bent, she stared blindly at her interlaced fingers until she’d regained control. Then she went on, ‘Living on her own after the break-up of her last relationship, she was lonely, hard up, afraid of getting old, terrified of losing her looks, at her most vulnerable…

  ‘Knowing she was having a struggle to pay the rent of her flat, Dad begged her to come home, and just when it seemed she might she met you and you became her new lover.’

  Turning a bleak face towards her, Zan asked, curtly, ‘Did she usually name the men she went to bed with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how did you know who her new lover was?’

  ‘At the time I didn’t. I only found out later.’

  ‘Go on.’ His voice was brittle as frosty glass.

  ‘It was soon clear that this relationship was different. She visited us briefly and it was wonderful to see her so vital and alive, so incandescent with you.

  ‘For the first time in her life she really cared and we hoped she’d finally found the love she’d been looking for.’

  Swallowing past what felt like jagged shards of red-hot glass lodged in her throat, Annis forced herself to go on. ‘The next time Maya came to Hamble Cottage I was the only one there. Richard was still at university, and Dad had gone to the States to undertake an extensive lecture tour.

  ‘The change in her was heart-rending. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed, drinking heavily again and chain-smoking, clearly living on her nerves.

  ‘When I asked her what was wrong, she said her lover wanted to end the affair and she couldn’t go on without him. She was so upset and agitated that I pleaded with her not to drive back to town, but she said she had to, she was having dinner with him that evening and hoping to get him to change his mind. Afraid for her safety, I decided to drive her back myself and then come home by train. I left her at her flat in Knightsbridge and went to get a meal at a quiet little restaurant close to Victoria.

  ‘I’d paid my bill and was about to leave when, by one of those strange coincidences that do happen, Maya walked in followed by a tall, broad-shouldered man with black curly hair. He turned his head and for a moment appeared to look straight at me…’

  Some strong emotion flitted across Zan’s face, and the hands hanging loosely by his sides clenched into fists.

  ‘It was you.’ There was no possibility of a mistake. That dark, arrogant, handsome face, the well-shaped head of shorn black curls, those incredible tawny eyes, had been branded indelibly on her mind ever since.

>   He made no attempt to deny the fact, merely stood there as though turned to granite.

  Raggedly, she went on, ‘Maya didn’t notice me, and I escaped as quickly as I could. It was three weeks before I saw her again. She arrived very late one night, and in such a state it was a miracle she hadn’t had an accident on the way. She wanted to talk, but she’d been drinking, and half the time she was barely coherent.

  ‘I gathered that everything was over between you, and that you’d left for California that evening. For the first time she called you by name…Zan… It’s not a common name…’

  Even then Annis found herself clinging desperately to the hope that he might have something to say that would mitigate his part in the tragedy.

  But, sounding suddenly weary, sick to death, all he said was, ‘Go on, tell me the rest.’

  ‘There’s not much more to tell…’

  He came back to sit on the edge of the bed, much too close, waiting, sparing her nothing.

  She bit her inner lip until the blood trickled warm and salty, before continuing, ‘Eventually I managed to put her to bed. It was almost dawn. When I got up to go to work she was sleeping like a log. I thought if I went home at lunch time it would be safe to leave her…

  ‘I had a job with the local solicitor. Just before twelve o’clock the police called at the office. There’d been a blaze at Hamble Cottage, they said. The thatched roof had caught and the place had been gutted. Firemen had brought out the body of a woman…’

  To keep control, Annis had been speaking in short, staccato sentences. Now, in spite of all her efforts, her voice faltered, and it was a moment or two before she could go on. ‘I got in touch with Dad and he came home as soon as he could…except that we no longer had a home.

  ‘The university were very kind and offered us temporary accommodation until we had time to sort things out. But Dad seemed to have no will left. He admitted that all he could do was think of Maya.

  ‘When the post-mortem results came through they showed it wasn’t the fire that had killed her. She’d died of a massive overdose of drugs… They believe she was smoking a cigarette when she lost consciousness…