by Penny Jordan
‘Yes. We need stamps, and the bank will be open.’
‘Oh, yes… There are one or two other things we could do with as well.’ She gave Susannah a list, and then suggested, ‘Why don’t you go now? I’m a bit bogged down at the moment.’
The first draft of Emma’s novel was finished and with her publishers, and she was now involved in plotting out a sequel to it. Knowing that Emma liked to be alone to tussle out problems with her characters, Susannah got up and picked up the list.
* * *
Susannah was in the village for almost an hour. There was a long queue both in the post office and at the bank. When she got back, Emma was in the kitchen. She seemed nervy and on edge.
‘I have to go to London tomorrow. My publishers have been on. They want to discuss the draft.’
‘I’m sure they must like it,’ Susannah comforted her. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’
‘Yes… Will you be all right here on your own? I shan’t be gone more than a couple of days.’
A couple of days! This would be the first time she had stayed at the farmhouse on her own. What was there to worry about? Susannah chided herself. She was twenty-four, not fourteen.
‘I’ll be fine. I could drive over to York tomorrow and get down to that research.’
‘Oh, no!’ Emma looked dismayed. ‘I mean, I think I’d prefer you to stay here… I don’t like the house being left empty for too long. We can go to York together when I get back.’
Feeling a little hurt that Emma perhaps didn’t trust her to do the research on her own, Susannah forced herself not to betray her feelings. She was becoming far too sensitive and emotional, she warned herself.
Emma’s trip to London necessitated a pre-dawn start. She protested that there was no need for Susannah to get up with her, and Susannah refrained from saying that she was invariably awake at that time anyway. Sleep was something that had become elusive these days, and when she did sleep her dreams were so full of Hazard that she often felt more exhausted when she woke from them than before she went to sleep.
* * *
The house felt empty without Emma.
She spent the morning industriously cleaning the kitchen, and then typing up Emma’s latest notes. The chores were something they shared between them, and working in the large, comfortable kitchen was something Susannah always enjoyed.
At lunch time, she was surprised to discover that she actually felt hungry. She made herself an omelette and ate it at the kitchen table while reading a magazine. Over a cup of coffee, she tried to finish the article she had been reading, but images of Hazard here in the kitchen with her kept on intruding.
Had she come up here in her desperate flight from London and reality because this was the place where she had been so happy?
Although she hadn’t wanted to, she had spent a good deal of time mulling over what Richard had said to her. His revelations about Hazard’s childhood had shocked her, but she had tried to banish the compassion she had felt. Hazard’s determination to protect Caroline’s marriage she could understand, but his means of achieving it she could not.
She got up, moving tensely, hugging her arms round her too-slender body. It was so much colder up here, and she felt it. Outside, grey clouds gathered on the horizon. Only last week Emma had mentioned Christmas. It seemed she normally spent the holiday with her niece.
Susannah had not made any plans, although normally she went home to her aunt. Both she and Hazard were, in their separate ways, victims of an upbringing that was out of step with modern life but, while her aunt’s sternness had been motivated only by the highest intentions and her belief that she was doing the right thing, Hazard’s mother was obviously a very sick woman mentally. Susannah bit her lip, not wanting to dwell on what Hazard himself must have suffered. She didn’t want to sympathise with him. She wanted to block herself off from all knowledge of his pain; she wanted to forget him.
But that was impossible!
She was in the study when she heard the car. She went to the front door, only to realise that whoever it was must have driven round the back, and by the time she had reached the back door the driver was walking into the kitchen.
She was totally unprepared for meeting him, the sudden cessation of all movement within her body freezing her to a statue as Hazard walked towards her.
‘Susannah.’
The harshly familiar sound of her name on his lips, as though he found the very saying of her name acutely painful, woke from her tormented trance. She stepped back as he came towards her, putting the length of the table between them, and then hanging on to the solid edge of it as she felt the weakness invade her body.
‘Susannah, please, I have to speak to you.’
‘Richard’s already said it all, Hazard,’ she told him quietly. ‘There’s nothing more for you to say.’
He shuddered, and her eyes widened as they registered his pain; he looked pale, and thinner, too. He put his hand out, as though he was going to implore her to change her mind.
‘Darling, please, please let me talk to you.’
His voice, raw with longing, penetrated her defences. Unwillingly, she found that she was looking at him, her eyes meeting the grim despair in his. She hadn’t wanted to look at him, knowing it would weaken her.
She started to shake, and then she registered that hoarse ‘darling’, and her skin changed colour, her eyes darkening with pain and rage.
‘Please, Susannah, tell me you forgive me for misjudging you. I’ve been driven nearly out of my mind. I…’
She couldn’t bear to see him like this, humbling himself, his face white with agony. She didn’t want to listen to any more. It hurt her too much. Turning her back on him, she said huskily, ‘I forgive you. Now, will you please go?’
She could hardly breathe. With every pulse beat, she half expected to feel him touching her, but he didn’t and the silence lengthened, pulsating heavily between them.
At last he spoke, his voice devoid of all emotion. ‘Do you really want me to go?’
It caught her raw nerves at their most vulnerable. She spun round, her eyes glittering with resentment and pain.
‘No! No, I want you to stay and humiliate me all over again! Of course I want you to go, and I wish you hadn’t come here in the first place. And, anyway, you weren’t so far wrong about me, you know. There was a married man…’
‘Yes… Yes, I know.’
He knew? Richard, of course.
She heard his footsteps on the tiled floor, not coming towards her but retreating. He was doing what she had asked. He was leaving.
She felt the gust of cold air as the back door opened, and her whole body tensed in anguish as she fought to suppress the plea rising inside her.
The door closed. The car engine fired.
She couldn’t bear to see him drive away, and so she fled instead to the sitting-room. Richard had been right. She had held on to her pride. But at what cost?
‘Darling’, he had called her. But it couldn’t have meant anything. How could it, when he himself had told her that he had never loved her, never felt anything for her other than hatred and contempt? She buried her head in the cushions of the sofa, giving way to the storm of misery engulfing her.
Now, at last, she could admit the truth. She loved him, and she would continue to love him, no matter what he had done to her.
CHAPTER TEN
THE FIRST INTIMATION Susannah had that she wasn’t alone was the sudden touch of cherishing male hands taking hold of her and turning her round.
Hazard was kneeling on the floor at her side, his face taut with despair and pain.
‘Oh, my darling, please don’t! I can’t bear to see you like this.’ His hands cupped her face, his lips caressing her skin. She wanted to push him away, but she felt too weak.
Instead she protested huskily, ‘Stop it… Stop it, Hazard. I don’t need your pity.’
She felt him tense. ‘We must talk.’
‘There’s nothing to talk ab
out.’ She would have given anything for him not to have seen her like this. ‘You’ve already said it all—remember?’
She wasn’t able to keep the bitterness from her voice and, to her shock, Hazard bowed his head, his voice tormented as he protested rawly, ‘Please don’t. You can’t know how I’ve regretted…’
‘I know you’re sorry, Hazard. Richard’s already told me that,’ she interrupted him bleakly. ‘I don’t know why you’ve come here—or for what. If it’s absolution, then you’ve got it. From what Richard’s told me about your background, I can understand why you felt the need to protect their marriage.’
‘No…no, that isn’t why I came, Susannah. Look at me…’ His hands tilted her face so that she was forced to look into his eyes. They were dark with emotion, agonised with pain, containing a despair she recognised from her own reflection. Her heartbeat slowed and then jerked frantically. ‘I love you.’
She heard the words, but couldn’t respond to them.
‘I had to tell you that.’
‘You said I meant nothing to you,’ she whispered miserably.
‘I lied…’
She searched his face for some sign that his words were cruel lies, designed to torment her, but all she could see was his pain and humility. But even then she couldn’t believe it.
‘You can’t love me,’ she told him with painful honesty. ‘I’ve been involved with a married man. I…’
His fingers trembled oddly against her lips as he silenced her. ‘No… Don’t. Please, don’t.’
‘But it’s true,’ she protested huskily. ‘David…’
‘I know all about that.’ His voice was harsh. ‘I went to see your aunt after…’
Susannah waited, expecting to hear him say after he had learned the truth. Instead, to her shock, he said, ‘After you didn’t come back to the office. We had a long talk. I confessed to her how badly I’d treated you, and she told me all about what happened with David.’
‘Aunt Emily did? But she knows nothing…’
His wry grimace silenced her.
‘I think you’ll find she knows far more about you than you realise. She told me how concerned she’d been when she had heard gossip that you were involved with David, and how upset she’d been when you had told her you were leaving home. She guessed why, and was proud of you for your decision.’ He looked away from her for a moment, his face bleak. ‘I went to see him. I couldn’t find you anywhere and I thought…’
‘That I’d gone to David?’
‘I was desperate,’ he told her simply. ‘I had to find you. Instead, I saw his wife. She told me everything that had happened. That you and her husband had never actually been lovers, and that you hadn’t even realised he was married, at first.’
Susannah remembered telling Louise those facts, but she had never dreamed that they would be repeated to Hazard.
‘Even if you and David had been lovers, it wouldn’t alter how I feel about you,’ Hazard told her emotionally. ‘It couldn’t. I’ve had to do a lot of thinking these last few weeks, Susannah. I’ve had to accept that love is far too strong an emotion to be cast aside lightly.’
‘You can’t love me.’
She was trembling wildly beneath the fingers that touched her skin with such tender concern.
‘You mean, you don’t want me to love you? I can’t blame you for that,’ he said sombrely. ‘Believe me, I didn’t come up here to burden you with my emotions.’
‘Then why did you come?’
‘Because I had to,’ he answered honestly. ‘I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work…’
‘Richard told me you were in New York,’ she said inconsequentially, not really knowing what to say, what to believe.
‘I was. My mother had another heart attack.’
A spasm of pain crossed his face, and instinctively she reached out to touch him. An electrifying sensation shot through her as her fingertips came into contact with the hard maleness of his skin. A dark shadow was already developing where he shaved, tiny bristles prickling against her flesh.
‘This time it was fatal. I know that, for her, death is a merciful release from a life that became unendurable the moment my father walked out on us. All my life, I’ve fought against that knowledge, fought against admitting that I carry within me the genes of a human being so vulnerable to love. All my life, for as long as I can remember, I’ve sworn that nothing like that would ever happen to me, that I’d never give my happiness into someone else’s keeping.’
This was the communication between them that she had wanted; this was the lowering of the barrier she had sensed within him, but all she could feel was a hollow numbness, an inability to believe that any of it was real.
‘I should go.’ He released her and stood up. ‘I promised Emma I wouldn’t overstrain you.’
‘Emma knows you’re here?’
‘Yes,’ he told her quietly, holding her shocked gaze. ‘I rang her the other morning when I got back from the States. She told me to ring back.’
Of course! The phone call that preceded her trip to the village.
‘I managed to persuade her to allow me to come up to see you. She said it would be best if I saw you alone…’
‘Oh, Emma!’
‘Don’t blame her. She told me you had said you didn’t want to see me.’
But she had still gone and left her here alone, not warning her what to expect, Susannah reflected numbly.
He was walking towards the door and out of her life. He turned the handle and breathlessly she called out, ‘Hazard! That night, when you came to my flat, when you accused me of having an affair with Richard and you said that you had never wanted me…’
He turned slowly to face her, his face haggard.
‘I’d just flown in from New York. They’d told me that this time my mother really was dying. All the way back, during the flight, I kept remembering how often she had tried to die. I went straight from the airport to your flat. I couldn’t think of anything other than how much I needed to be with you… I wanted to lose myself, my past, in the warm sweetness of you… I couldn’t believe it when I saw you in Richard’s car. It was as though all my nightmares had suddenly come true.
‘I lied to you that night, Susannah. I hit out at you in my torment and said and did things I know can never be forgotten, not by you and certainly not by me. After I left you, I went back to my flat, already regretting every word I’d said and cursing myself for a fool. I told myself I should have stayed and fought for you, made you love me instead of Richard. I went round to see you the next day, but your flat was empty, and you weren’t at work. I told myself you must be with Richard, so I went home and demolished the best part of a full bottle of whisky.’
He grimaced distastefully. ‘That, on top of the jet lag I was already suffering, knocked me out completely, and that was how Caroline found me.’
‘And then you started to look for me; after you knew the truth.’ She spoke almost absently.
‘Yes, but I would have looked for you anyway. The way I feel about you has nothing to do with whether or not any of your past lovers have been married. There’s no way I can prove that to you, though, Susannah, just as there’s no way I can ask you to take me on trust. You gave me your trust and I abused it, and that’s something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.’
He opened the door, and she felt as though a vice tightened painfully inside her. She could let him go, and remain secure within the citadel of her pride, or she could open herself once more to pain and hurt by risking believing in him. The choice was hers.
He had reached the back door before she was able to make it.
‘Hazard.’
The moment she spoke his name he stopped, waiting, watching her with such a look of agonised tension in his eyes that she could have wept for him as well as herself.
‘Please stay.’
Two words, and yet they meant so much. He came back to her, trembling as he caught hold of her.
/>
‘If this is just a dream, I pray I never wake up from it,’ he said fervently, as his hands shaped the narrowness of her back, their touch warm and comforting. ‘I don’t deserve this. I promise, somehow I’ll try to find a way of making it all up to you. I won’t ask you to love me, Susannah, not yet. But…’
She shook her head, interrupting him. ‘If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t be doing this,’ she told him quietly. ‘Oh, I’ve tried to deny it, tried to fight against what I feel for you, but I can’t.’
‘Will you hate me if I tell you that I’m glad?’ he asked thickly, bending his head towards her.
She tensed instinctively, avoiding his kiss, pain shadowing her eyes as she slipped out of his arms. ‘You must be hungry. It’s a long drive up here; I’ll make you something to eat.’
Could this really be her, chattering nervously, dreading the thought of him touching her? What was wrong with her? She loved him, and yet the moment he came close to her she became confused and fearful. Was the trust she had once felt completely gone?
Hazard let her go without a word, but she saw the pain she felt mirrored in his eyes.
She loved him and he was here with her, but something was stopping her from reaching out to him.
Quietly, he agreed that he would like something to eat, helping her with the meal and then with the clearing up afterwards.
Early in the evening, Emma rang, apologising for the trick she had played. They both spoke to her but, after the telephone call had finished, a tense silence engulfed the sitting-room.
Despite the warmth, Susannah shivered, hugging her arms around herself. Since her rebuff in the afternoon, Hazard had made no attempt to touch her. Instead, he had talked to her, describing to her his childhood, laying bare for her to see the miseries it had contained. Slowly, he encouraged her to share her childhood memories with him, and as she did so she had a new image of her aunt, as a lonely and rather tragic woman who had wanted to do all she could for the child in her care, but who had no way of showing her love for her. Her aunt did love her, Susannah recognised now. It was just that she had never been able to show it. Her sternness, her determination that Susannah would grow up in what she considered to be the right way—these had been her ways of showing that love.