Response

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I expect it was because he discovered that a man whom he obviously thought of as a friend and trusted had done it,’ Sienna said colourlessly. She ought to be feeling pleasure in Rob’s vindication, in Alexis’ shock, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel anything other than a weak exhaustion. Now she was glad that Gill hadn’t been with them to recognise Alexis and possibly alert Rob’s suspicions. ‘At least Sofia seems happy now,’ Sienna murmured, draining her mug and putting it on one side. ‘Constantin is obviously deeply in love with her.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a widower, and apparently an enlightened member of the species. I still can’t get over the fact that Stefanides didn’t come gunning for me when he thought I’d raped her. He’s an extremely wealthy and powerful man. He could have done anything, ruined my career, caused me a fatal accident—anything. When I think about it it makes my blood run cold. In some parts of Greece they still practise vendetta. If he’d chosen to do so, none of us would have been safe, not Dad, not you….’ Rob’s eyes darkened. ‘Strangely enough, I think I can guess how he must have felt when he thought I had raped her. If any man hurt you, despite the fact that we’re supposed to be civilised, I think I’d tear him apart!’ He laughed, but Sienna was conscious of feeling deadly cold. Rob had been quite serious, and if he ever discovered just how badly she had been hurt and by whom… but Rob would never find out. He must never find out, because as he had just said, Alexis possessed the wealth and power to totally destroy him if Rob should ever try to strike out against him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘NO!’ Sienna awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright in the bed, her body rigid with rejection, every muscle tensed. With a slight sigh she exhaled, and glanced out of the window at the familiar view she had seen every morning on waking throughout her childhood and adolescence. It ought to have reassured and relaxed her, but it didn’t. Her nightmares had become a nightly occurence since that fateful meeting at the Savoy, and always took the same form. Alexis would approach her on some pretext and ask her if she loved him. Her answer was always the same and she shivered in her thin nightdress, angry with herself for not being strong enough to withstand their potent aura of menace. It was nearly a week since that night. She ought to be over the shock of it by now. If she had needed any further convincing that Alexis simply wasn’t interested in her surely she had received it. Not once during that meeting had he so much as glanced in her direction. Her mouth tightened in a rare grimace of cynicism. How did he feel now knowing that Rob had never touched his sister? Ashamed? Remorseful? Strange how the thought of seeing him humbled brought her so little pleasure, but then since that night at the cottage she had come to believe she had gone beyond feeling either pleasure or pain. They were emotions that belonged to the naïve girl she had been, not the woman she was now.

  Her days had developed their own routine following her arrival at the village. She got up and dressed in old jeans and a Rugby shirt that had once belonged to Rob, made herself a cup of coffee, deciding against any breakfast. Her appetite was still very meagre, and she hadn’t lost that haunted, grief-stricken look which had so worried her brother and Gill.

  Carrying her mug of coffee, she made her way to her father’s study, and sat down in the chair which had once been his. She was meticulously listing all his books—some of them were valuable first editions, and the time-consuming task of listing them kept her busy.

  That it was a form of therapy she was quite well aware, and she even found the detachment to be slightly amused by her own obsessive care of her self-imposed task. Detachment was what she craved these days. Detachment offered safety, relief from the pain of loving too much and giving that love unwisely. Her old friends found her changed and had been quick to say so. She had been asked out several times by men she had known before she left for London, but she had no desire for their company. No desire for anyone’s company, if the truth were known, she thought wryly, examining an exquisitely bound book, and checking it carefully before adding to her list. Her mental vulnerability reminded her sharply of how she had felt as a child after a bad bout of ’flu. She was experiencing in a mental context this time that same inability to rely on the reactions of her own body, that shaky insecurity that denoted the convalescent—but surely convalescing was a sign of recovery? She had been hurt, and badly, but no one would ever be able to hurt her like that again. It was over—a closed chapter of her life, and now in this time of gathering her strength and assessing herself she must try to choose what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She had never been particularly career-conscious, but perhaps that was what she needed, something to absorb every ounce of energy she had, something that demanded a total commitment.

  She heard the front door open and sighed. Mrs Mallors, their neighbour, had been very good at keeping an eye on the house while it was empty, but she had also developed a rather trying habit of walking in unannounced, for a ‘little chat’, as she termed it. She was a widow and lonely, and Sienna knew she meant well, but she found it too difficult to relate to other people to want her company. She wanted to withdraw completely into herself and be left alone. All her energy was concentrated on healing her inner wounds; there was nothing left to spare for anyone else. But Mrs Mallors had been extremely good about looking after the house, and she couldn’t totally ignore her, much as she wanted to.

  Getting up, Sienna walked over to the door and opened it, forcing herself to smile, her smile rapidly fading as she found herself face to face, not with Mrs Mallors but with Alexis.

  Her first instinct was to retreat behind the door and bolt and bar it against him, but he anticipated her urge to flee by walking past her inside it so that she had no option but to follow him, closing it after them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Strange how mundane her first words to him should be! So trite and easily anticipated. She forced herself to look at him, fighting down the sickeningly acute feelings of pain surging through her.

  His mouth twisted a little in something she took to be mockery, and she flushed despite her resolutions. He looked so tall and formidable in the small confines of her father’s study, a remote stranger whose life had briefly touched her own, changing its course for ever.

  ‘What do you think? I tried to contact you at the flat and the agency.’ She had told Gill she was taking a few days’ holiday, only Rob knew where she was, but of course Alexis had studied their family life and would have known where to find her. ‘We have to talk.’

  ‘Not as far as I’m concerned.’ She turned her back on him, returning the volume she had been studying to the shelves, and reaching for another. Something in the quality of his silence disturbed her, a prescience that he wasn’t simply going to go. ‘I have nothing to say to you, Alexis,’ she told him coldly. ‘I never believed Rob was guilty of raping your sister, you know that.’

  ‘Yes.’ His assent fell heavily into the thick silence. ‘But until I heard her say it, I did not know that he was not Sofia’s attacker.’

  ‘No, you just assumed it was Rob,’ Sienna agreed bleakly, wondering how she could appear so calm and civilised when inside she was still bleeding to death from the wounds he had inflicted. Pride and pride alone kept her from screaming her hatred at him, from wanting to wound and maim him as he had done her. ‘Sofia was too shocked at the time of the… attack to answer my questions. I knew that she was seeing your brother, he was older than her, far more experienced, from a different race, it seemed natural to suppose….’

  ‘And on the strength of that supposition you planned the method of your revenge,’ Sienna said quietly. ‘There really was no need to come all the way down here to tell me that, Alexis. Contrary to the impression of my intelligence I must have given you by being so gullibly easy to seduce, I am quite able to draw the correct conclusions from what Sofia said. I never believed for one moment that Rob had hurt your sister,’ her head lifted proudly, brown eyes squarely meeting grey across the width of the room, ‘and not merely because he is my
brother.’

  ‘You haven’t told him what happened?’

  ‘No. There was no point.’ She bit her lip, remembering what Rob had said about wanting to tear any man who harmed her apart. ‘It might interest you to know, though, that he shares your views—at least on the subject of sisters. He was surprised that you hadn’t tried to hurt him in some way—through his job perhaps. He said you were rich enough to have accomplished it. I didn’t disillusion him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want him to get hurt.’ She said the words softly, and watched him pale a little beneath his tan. ‘And besides, no matter what he did, it can’t put things right, can it? Sofia is lucky to have found a man like Constantin who obviously loves and cherishes her.’

  ‘Is that what you want? The safe harbour of marriage to a man who cares enough for you not to mind that he is not your first lover?’

  ‘I don’t want to be any man’s lover,’ Sienna replied flatly, her eyes betraying all that she didn’t want him to see, and his own leapt and hardened in recognition of what she was feeling, smouldering with an intensity that stopped the breath in her lungs and infused the room with a subtle sense of menace.

  ‘You’re lying,’ Alexis said smokily. ‘You wanted my love, Sienna. You begged me for it,’ he reminded her cruelly.

  She wanted to scream out with the pain he was causing her, but the new Sienna, the one who had taken the place of that girl, simply said calmly, ‘Yes, I know, but you see that was before I realised how naïve I was. I don’t believe you’re capable of loving anyone, Alexis. Your insufferable sense of pride wouldn’t allow you to. Oh, I don’t doubt you have desired and will desire very many women, and that you make love to them expertly, even perhaps deceive them into thinking you genuinely care, but I don’t believe you do. No man who really cares about women could do to one what you did to me.’

  ‘You came to me willingly.’ His face was tight with anger. It glittered in his eyes and was betrayed in the grim compression of his jaw, but strangely enough she wasn’t afraid any longer. ‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly, ‘and that’s what I mean. I can’t argue with your claim that you had to use me because of the crime you believed my brother committed, but you weren’t satisfied with that, were you Alexis? You wanted to add a little refinement, to torture and then humiliate me by allowing me to fall in love with you….’

  Her mouth curled contemptuously. ‘No man who really likes and admires women would have done a thing like that, and to me it betrays what you think of my whole sex. Even your own sister couldn’t confide in you, not even the name of the man who attacked her, because he was your friend and she feared that you would believe him before you believed her.’

  She knew that her words had found their mark. His skin looked grey beneath its healthy tan, and his eyes were bleak, darkening with a pain she could only guess at, but she refused to feel pity for him.

  ‘I came here today to apologise to you, to try and….’

  ‘And what?’ she taunted. ‘Wipe out what happened? Don’t you think if that was possible I would have already done it? No matter how much you regret it, Alexis, you can’t regret it one quarter as much as I do. Now please leave.’ She walked over to the door and held it open, tensing when he refused to move.

  ‘I haven’t said all I came here to say yet,’ he began tersely, but Sienna refused to listen. Suddenly the adrenalin which had kept her going since his arrival deserted her, leaving her sick and shaking.

  ‘Very well,’ she said bitterly, ‘if you won’t leave, then I will.’ She turned for the door before he could stop her, throwing it open and fled through the hall, panicked by the sound of his footsteps behind her, hard and determined. The house only had a short front garden which bordered on the narrow main road, curling through the village. Sienna felt the latch on the gate give under her fingers, and her eyes darkened with fear as she glanced over her shoulder and saw Alexis striding towards her, determination in every line of his face. Thrusting open the gate, she stepped out into the road, the sound of Alexis’ voice calling her name mingling with the squeal of car brakes and tyres. She had a brief impression of a glittering bonnet and beyond it a man’s face, contorted with horror, and then the world exploded in pain, wave after wave of it, flooding over her carrying her to a place where nothing else could possibly reach her.

  She opened her eyes slowly, aware of confused impressions of a vague memory for some reason of the words of the Church of England marriage service, of a man’s voice, deep and sure, saying, ‘I do’, and another, lighter, hesitant, her own, echoing the words, although every instinct she possessed screamed out that such a service could only be a dream. She was in a room, unlike any room she remembered, and which somehow she knew to be in a hospital, although she had no knowledge of how she came to be there. From her bed she could see through the window, skyscraper blocks and an intensely blue sky. The window was open and she could feel the heat wafting inwards, and something told her that she wasn’t used to such high temperatures. Her door opened and a nurse came in, startled to find her awake. She disappeared before Sienna could speak, then returned with a man. Middle-aged and slightly stooped, he had an olive complexion and dark, intense eyes. He smiled at her, and said in English, ‘So, you have decided to wake up properly at last.’ He kept talking to her while he examined her, then stood back, smiling down at her. ‘So…. Are you ready for a visitor?’

  The door opened and another man walked in. Her eyes leapt to his dark, impassive and totally unfamiliar face, her heart twisting with a curious current of pain which seemed to run from the top of her body to the bottom. Fear tinged the pain and she stiffened without being aware of it, rejecting him with her eyes as he walked towards the bed. He stretched out and lifted her left hand. On it a diamond ring glittered, beside it a plain gold band. So she was married. Why should she feel she wasn’t?

  ‘Where am I?’ she demanded huskily, struggling to sit up, overwhelmed by a sensation of panic. ‘Who are you….?’

  He looked back at her without smiling. ‘I’m your husband, Sienna.’

  She could see the doctor frowning, and a feeling of deep despair, of being trapped and helpless, flooded through her. ‘But I don’t know you,’ she protested. ‘I don’t know you!’

  ‘Now, Mrs Stefanides, it’s all right. You had an accident, and as a result….’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Theonstanis, but I will explain. If you would leave us for a moment.’ The doctor frowned again, but signalled to his nurse to leave, following her to the door, and Sienna knew instinctively that he did not usually allow the relatives of his patients to dictate to him.

  Stefanides, Theonstanis—these were Greek names, strange that she should know that, when she couldn’t even remember her own, wouldn’t have known it if this stranger who claimed to be her husband had not told her. She glanced down again at her left hand. The rings were new. How long had they been married? How long had she been lying here?

  ‘Now. You have had an accident, and as a result you’re suffering from amnesia. Nothing to worry about, it’s quite a common occurrence.’

  ‘But surely only when people want to forget something to begin with?’ How had she known that? She stared up into the cold grey eyes searching her face, and shivered. How could she be married to this cold, frighteningly austere man? Marriage to her meant love, and she was sure love could never have existed between this stranger and herself. Her husband, the closest relationship two human beings could have, and yet he was a stranger to her.

  ‘You’re speaking to me in English,’ she said huskily, ‘but your name is Greek.’

  ‘I am Greek,’ he told her, ‘but you are English.’

  ‘How long… how long have we been married?’ She returned to the subject of their marriage like someone probing an aching tooth, unable to accept its reality, overwhelmed by a feeling of frustration that she was totally reliant on this man to tell her the most basic things about herself.

  ‘Not very long.’<
br />
  ‘And my accident?’ Her mouth was dry. Somehow she knew that her marriage and her accident were connected.

  ‘Shortly after we were married.’

  ‘Then….’

  ‘We have been lovers,’ he supplied, watching her face, smiling grimly at the tide of colour that swept it.

  ‘I… we….’ Suddenly she started to shake, her face as white as the cotton sheets on her narrow bed, her body tensing against his words. This man, this stranger, privy to the most intimate secrets of her body—it was more than she could bear!

  ‘Sienna… Sienna, don’t faint, damn you,’ she heard him saying, but the words came from far away, too distant to reach into the warm secret place she had escaped to.

  ‘So, you are with us again, young lady.’ Her eyes searched the room feverishly, but she was alone in it with the doctor. He seemed to guess at the reason for her tension and frowned, consulting a chart he was holding, then smiled at her when he perceived her anxiety.

  ‘Am I… am I going to be all right? My husband said I had an accident.’

  ‘Yes, you will be fine,’ he assured her. ‘You are blessed with a particularly hard skull. Can you remember anything about your accident?’

  Sienna shook her head. ‘I can’t remember anything, full stop. Where did it happen?’

  ‘In England, so your husband told me. He brought you here to Greece, as soon as the doctors permitted him to have you moved. Tell me, can you remember anything at all? No, don’t force yourself to remember… it will all come back in time.’