Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  And if this was true, what must now happen to his belief that she had loved so often it was cheap to her, that she had betrayed him because she neither understood nor respected true love?

  “No, it didn’t hurt to kiss,” she was agreeing. “In an earlier generation, I guess I’d have got a little romantic experience before the sword fell, but for us—even at thirteen we knew kisses led to sex, didn’t we? I told myself I could never risk having a boyfriend, in case he got angry when the day came that I had to explain. Maybe if my mother had been alive, she’d have taught me another way. Raoul Spitzen—the surgeon who cured me—said that in certain positions sex would have been possible, and I guess if I’d had the courage to date a boy who liked me, who knows? Maybe if he’d been patient I’d have learned to trust him, and then—certainly if I knew a girl in the same situation I wouldn’t advise her to do it the way I did. But I never thought of asking Dad about things, I just took it on the chin.”

  Almost unconsciously Jude leaned forward to pick up the photo again, and looked between the cherished, confident child and the tragic teenager.

  “But I was not your first lover,” he said after a bit. He couldn’t have been that insensitive, not to have realized it if he had been.

  “No, not technically, but emotionally, as good as,” Hope said, and something struck him hard over the heart so that he lost his breath. He grunted with the unexpected force of it, yet when he searched he could not find what feeling it was.

  “You had no experience of... love?” he said slowly.

  “Virtually none.”

  “So when they told you that... I had pretended to love you so that you would commit perjury for me, when Corinne said that she and I were engaged—you were a girl with no previous experience. You didn’t know what we had, how special it was.”

  She sat motionless, looking at nothing, as his voice washed over her. “I knew it was special for me,” she said.

  “But not for me?”

  “You had never said anything in words. And you didn’t say you loved me when I asked you at the detention centre. That was what I remembered, that you hadn’t said it.”

  His voice was rough with regret. “A man can’t say I love you to a woman when he might be convicted of manslaughter!”

  “No?” She looked at him at last. There was no blame, only deep sadness in her eyes. “Still, I wish you had. I wish I’d heard it once, whatever happened after.”

  Her chin quivered, her lips trembled in a smile, and his heart seemed torn from its moorings. He no longer knew who he was, what he felt, what was certain.

  “Yes,” he said, the words coming from him without his will. “I should have said it. I should have said it at the beginning. A man should tell a woman how he feels while he has the chance.”

  Chapter 16

  The moonlight fell across her pillow as he stood in the darkness watching. It illumined a soft curl of hair on the pillow, a pale shoulder where a scrap of lace lay against her skin, the slender form under a thin sheet.

  He had awakened from a dream of her to find himself alone in his bed, and thought himself back in a barred cell. How many times he had awakened thus in the year just past, aching to hold her, burning with need, turning to her, and then had seen the bars against the window, remembered all over again where he was, reminded himself with ruthless accounting why she could never be his again...

  Tonight he had awakened, prepared to remember the bars, and there were none. Tonight, for the first time, he had awakened to remind himself that he was free. And then his eager flesh had demanded hers, and he had been driven up out of his bed to come and find her.

  He stood like a thief, watching as a cloud moved against the moon, so that the soft glow seemed to caress her. His yearning, his need, was unbearable. All that time behind bars he had somehow been able to fight it, to control it so that he was not driven mad by it. Each night he had ruthlessly reminded himself of her betrayal, and calmed his desperate flesh that could never remember that she was lost to him. But now she was here, and the gulf that lay between them was harder to remember.

  She turned her head on the pillow, and the moonlight kissed her full lower lip, and he felt that touch of light on flesh as a knife of need in his gut.

  No. He could not give in. He had been weak once and it had been torment and punishment to him, and cruel to her. Jude put up his hand and gripped the door post and wrenched his gaze from her.

  “Jude.”

  He heard the pleading whisper of his name as it ignited his skin to flame, and something in him cracked from side to side, and he knew that he had lost. Silently he turned, silently he stepped across the carpet to the bed, and looked down.

  Her eyes were shut. As he watched, she frowned and twisted her head. “Jude, Jude!” she wept, and then the sound of her own voice woke her. Her hand lifted to her eyes. “Oh, God!” she muttered.

  He said her name, and she gasped and looked up. The moonlight fell across his face. “Jude?”

  He was too hungry now to speak. He slipped down to sit on the bed beside her, wrapped his arms under her, and pressed his starving mouth to her breast, then her shoulder, then lifted it to smother her mouth.

  He felt the response in her, felt the ease with which his presence ignited her own hunger, and his body clamoured to appease her hunger and his own. His hands moved to enclose her head and he held her as if she had tried to escape, his mouth hard and hungry with need.

  Hope wrapped her arms around him and moaned as his lips crushed hers.

  His mouth lifted then, and laid a trail of sparks down her throat to the lace at her breast. “I need you!” he said hoarsely.

  She felt passion pour through her being as floodgates opened somewhere above her, and knew the force would sweep her away to her doom. “No,” she breathed. “No.”

  He was almost beyond hearing, but he heard. “Hope, don’t say no to me,” he begged. “I need you. Do you know how many times I woke in that place, dreaming of you, and you were not there? And now you are here, I am here, don’t say no, Hope.”

  But she remembered the pain when she had given in to his need last time. It means nothing, he had said then. Only that there was no other woman.

  She reached out and found the switch of her bedside lamp. They both blinked in the sudden soft glow. Hope struggled to sit up. Jude’s hands gripped and then released her, and he sat back to look at her.

  “Do you love me, Jude?” she asked.

  His jaw clenched. He could feel shutters come down inside him. “Hope,” he said gently, “don’t ask me this question.”

  Tears burned her eyes. “Don’t ask me for meaningless sex.”

  He looked at her. “What meaning would you like it to have, Hope?”

  She said, “I don’t believe there’s no other woman you could have, Jude, if you went looking. So why don’t you ask yourself why you don’t go looking?”

  “What are you trying to say?” he asked cynically, as all his anger rushed to the ramparts. “That I’m cherishing a secret love for you that I’m afraid to tell you about?”

  His tone hurt, but she stood her ground. “Maybe you’re afraid to tell yourself,” she said softly.

  But the challenge was too dangerous, too soon, he was not ready for it. Unable to face the new truth, he hid behind the old certainties. “The one who is afraid to face the truth is you, Hope,” he said. “You are afraid to face the truth that this was always meaningless sex—for you. Why should it not be so again, now that I also understand the rules?”

  All the fire died in her, and she shivered under the freezing rain of his words. “When you can tell me why you want me, Jude, you come to me again. When you’ve really looked at it and know the truth.”

  “You are very sure the truth is something you will want to hear,” he said.

  “I am not going to make love to you again and then listen to blame. I’m not a masochist. Either you love me and forgive me, or you have to leave me alone. I’m not a punching
bag.”

  He felt threatened by some nameless thing, and his heart beat light and fast, urging flight. “Good night,” he said, as if that were his answer, and left her.

  Behind him, in the room, the tears she had been holding back gushed out of her eyes. Was she a fool? Had she been wrong to send him away? If he did not love her, he would never come to her again. Hope bent forward, her hands on her upbent knees, her face in her hands, and, knowing herself to be a starveling, sobbed for the half loaf she had been offered and had turned away.

  “You can’t ask me to do it!” Gig Young pleaded hoarsely.

  “Oh, I can ask a lot more than that,” Jude replied, in a soft tone that terrified the draughtsvman.

  “I should never have talked to you! Bill would kill me if he knew. And if I take you in there—what if he finds out?”

  “He will find out if you don’t,” Jude said, his voice harsh with threat. “Because then I will go to the police and the records will be subpoenaed and you will be called as a witness.”

  “I’m going to end up in jail! I know I am! I’ve got kids to think of!”

  “It is late to think of your children. But now at least they have the chance to see their father an honest man who confessed and tried to put justice right instead of a villain who thought of nothing except—”

  “Shut up! You think because you’re the one who went to prison you’re the only one who suffered? You had it easier, let me tell you! You at least knew you were innocent! You haven’t been looking at the face of a moral coward in the mirror for the past year!”

  Jude’s gaze remained steady on him, saying nothing, and Gig Young’s eyes fell.

  “Tell me again what it is you want,” he muttered.

  “We want to go inside the offices at night and search for evidence in the files and on the computer.”

  “I told you, he wiped everything! He shredded the evidence!”

  “If you are right, then no proof exists anywhere. If you are wrong, if he overlooked something, then it is there. Yes?”

  “He’ll kill me. The son of a bitch will kill me,” Gig Young said, but there was resignation in his tone and Jude knew he had won.

  “My dear, let me say that this is all absolutely wonderful!” the too-thin woman discreetly gushed at her. “A marvellous show, Daniel!” She reached past Hope to grip Daniel’s sleeve. “What a talent! What a discovery!”

  “Hope, let me introduce Veronica Taggart. Veronica is an interior designer, and one of my best customers.”

  “How do you do?” Hope said.

  “I particularly adore you in semi-mimetic mode! Those—Empty Bed, isn’t it, and what’s the other—those are unreservedly fabulous! Well, and of course, the nudes!” She twinkled conspiratorially at Hope to indicate that they both adored naked men, flicked a nervous glance at Jude. But her courage failed her there. “Now, Daniel, I’m definitely having one of those, so you must come and tell me which one I should take. And then I think two more for clients.” She put her arm on the art dealer’s sleeve with the utter confidence of a regular buyer whose taste is impeccable and who will not be rebuffed. “Oh, by the way,” she said to Hope as she led him off, “it was my son who bought your father’s Picasso for his new place in the Romanoff! Justin McCourt! You remember! He was absolutely thrilled about it!”

  “Oh,” Hope said. But luckily, no more was expected of her. Veronica Taggart had gone.

  The gallery was as full as it could stand. The buzz of conversation, the clink of glasses and the smell of success danced on the air. After only one hour into the private viewing, there were at least four red dots on pictures around the room. Daniel Johnson had already confidently stated that every picture would sell by the end of the two-week run.

  Every picture except one. In the end, she could not part with the painting of Jude the Lion. The notice beside that read, “From the artist’s private collection” to signal that it was not for sale.

  Beside her, Jude, handsome as a devil in a black dinner suit, lifted his glass. “That woman is even worse than someone having an architect design her house,” he muttered.

  Hope laughed and sipped from her own glass. Pure mineral water, because she would need a glass in her hand all night to give her confidence and she didn’t want to get drunk.

  “Thanks for coming tonight, Jude.”

  “But you didn’t need me, after all,” he pointed out, his eyes wandering over the well-dressed crowd. Of course she had been frightened that no one would come.

  “I’m sure half the people are only here to see Jude Daniels in the flesh,” she said.

  His eyes glinted down at her, with no message except the amusement of the moment. “Well, they can do that with or without me, can’t they?”

  Hope gurgled with laughter.

  “You’re the artist, aren’t you? I wonder if you would come and tell me about one of your pictures,” a middleaged woman said beside them.

  “Yes, of course,” said Hope, and with a smile at Jude moved off. She was wearing black, a simple ankle-length dress with plain scooped neck and short sleeves that emphasized her slimness. Her red hair was caught up in a loose knot on top of her head, and her long neck held her head like a flower on a stern. Silver earrings dangled from her ears, catching the light. She was pale, he thought suddenly, and looked fragile, not glowing with health and vitality as she had been when they met.

  He watched her bend to hear a question and then smile gently, nod and speak. He guessed that the question was naive, not very insightful, but she listened to the woman with the perfect humility of one who might hear genius.

  Then his vision did a curious thing, shifting forward and back like a camera, as if to get her in better focus. And now he saw her as he should always have seen her—as a human being who has been tempered by deep suffering and whose heart is open to the pain of the world.

  The shock he experienced was not the shock of surprise, but that of someone who has stared at an optical illusion which suddenly flicks into place. Why had he not seen this before? Why had he never put all the pieces together? He saw that whatever he had slowly learned about her, even as he fell in love with her, he had not seriously adjusted his first impression of her as a frivolous, somewhat shallow woman. And although he had never consciously formed the thought before, the deep reason why he had never told her he loved her was because of a fear that she was incapable of returning his love at the level he had wanted from her.

  She was right: they had not known each other. If he had known her, if he had understood the sensitivity of that soul, he would have understood the look he got from the stand that day as self-doubt, and not doubt of him. If he had known her—if he had known himsetf!—he would have committed to her emotionally as well as physically, long before tragedy overtook them.

  Behind her head the large canvas she had done of him most recently hung on a burlap-covered room divider. It was placed last in the chronologically arranged sequence, in such a position that the viewer came on it unexpectedly. It had been finished only days ago, was still unvarnished, unframed.

  She had placed him on the terrace outside her studio, on a white plastic garden chair. She had stood behind him, just inside the patio doors, and he had sat three-quarters, his back to her, looking out past the treetops. That was all it was, a barefoot man, blue jeans and a polo shirt, through an open door. But somehow, he did not know how, she had captured the feeling of the wind against his face, so different from any prison breeze. Captured both the wind and its meaning for him.

  Wind, she had titled it. Now, seeing her and the painting together, he understood the message that she was trying to send him through this.

  To truly love another is to know oneself. Had he heard that somewhere? Jude was ashamed. He had not known himself until this moment. He had accused her of not loving him. The truth was, it was he who had not loved her.

  “I’ve told the night watchman I’ll be working for a couple of hours and he can relax,” Gig Young hissed. “He
doesn’t know I’m not working here anymore. He’s at the back watching television. For God’s sake, keep your voices down! If he sees you, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  Jude and Hope nodded silently, slipped through the door and followed him past rows of desks. Down a short corridor they saw light falling through a doorway, and it was there that he was leading them. Once inside the office, he closed the door.

  “This is Bill’s office,” said Gig Young.

  A computer sat on a console at one side of the room, glowing with life. “I’ve put the computer on,” he said needlessly. “This is the only computer on the floor that is connected to every other computer—the factory, the testing lab, all the office computers.”

  There were two chairs in place in front of the computer. Jude held one for Hope; Young sat in the other. “So, what do you want first?” he asked.

  “The secretaries’ document files directories,” Hope said.

  One wall of the room was filled with filing cabinets, and as Hope and the draughts man bent to their work, Jude moved over to them. They were locked, but he had guessed that they would be. He moved to the desk. It, too, was locked.

  “Have you got a key for this desk?” he asked quietly.

  Gig looked up. “No, he’s very careful about keys. The filing cabinet keys are usually in the desk, but he has his desk key on his key ring.”

  Without another word Jude reached into his pocket and pulled out the Swiss army knife he had put there. “If you do that, he’s going to know!” Young protested, but it was the protest of one who has already lost the argument. Jude flicked a look at him and away, and Young turned back to the computer.