Response

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Helicopter,’ he said tersely. ‘I’d better get dressed and see who it is. You stay here.’

  He was gone before she could protest, striding naked into the bathroom, his skin tanned evenly all over, the faint marks on his body where her teeth had touched him in passion, bringing a flush of colour to her face as she remembered the total abandon of their lovemaking the previous night. He had incited her to do things she had never imagined herself wanting to do, and she tensed, suddenly puzzled to know how she had known that fact, how she had known what her thoughts and feelings had been in the life she lived prior to her accident.

  When Alexis re-emerged his hair was damp, his skin dark and taut against the white towel he had wrapped round his hips. He got dressed quickly, jeans and a soft white cotton shirt. Sienna watched him tuck it into his pants and felt a spiral of pleasure rising inside her. Just to look at him made her ache.

  ‘I shouldn’t be too long. It’s probably someone bringing me some papers.’

  When he was gone she lay staring at the ceiling and then, suddenly impatient and restless, she got up. The bathroom still smelled of his soap and she closed her eyes beneat the sting of the shower, imagining that he was with her, her body tensing and her breasts swelling slightly with need.

  She dressed quickly in pale pink jeans and a toning tee-shirt. Her skin still held a flush from yesterday’s sun and her blonde hair curled softly on to her shoulders. She moisturised her face, and applied a soft taupe eyeshadow and a slick of lip gloss. Her mouth was swollen, not enough to be painful, but enough to let anyone who looked at her know that she had been passionately kissed. She touched her mouth wonderingly, her eyes unknowingly languorous, then shook herself, half shocked by the direction of her thoughts.

  She could hear Alexis speaking as she approached the salon. He sounded angry, his voice terse and hard. ‘You know I asked you not to come here,’ she heard him say, and then a woman’s voice responded unhappily, ‘But, Alexis, I had to—when I heard what you had done. Cristos, how could you have done such a thing! Alexis, I cannot believe it of you!’

  A knife twisted white-hot fire in Sienna’s heart and she crept to the door. Who was Alexis talking to? Not someone who had brought him any papers, important or otherwise, she was sure of that. No, it was another woman in there with him, a woman who like her had perhaps known the delight of his lovemaking, who didn’t want to step aside for a mere wife. She looked at the door. It was slightly open and all at once she was consumed by a need to see her rival. She approached the door silently and looked through it—and the colour drained from her face, a shocked moan leaving her lips, she must have touched the door, because it swung open and she saw Alexis turn and then stare at her, his face hard and angry. The girl talking to him was watching her too, and Sienna shivered. Dear God, what a fool she had been! A lover! This dark-haired girl with the anxious eyes and pale skin was no lover. She held out her hand, her head high, her eyes blazing hatred and bitterness at Alexis, and said calmly, ‘Hello, Sofia.’

  A look passed between brother and sister, and correctly interpreting it, Sienna said brittlely, ‘Yes, amazing, isn’t it? I heard voices and thought I had discovered my husband with another woman. Until I saw you.’

  ‘Sienna!’ Alexis spoke hoarsely and she looked at him, and on a sudden juddering stab of memory heard his voice saying her name, the sound echoing down long canyons of pain and humiliation, her own voice responding as though it were part of a prayer. ‘I love you… I love you….’

  Alexis was watching her and said slowly, ‘You’ve remembered, haven’t you?’

  ‘Everything.’ Was that really her voice, so light and brittle? ‘How very piquant you must have found it, having me here ignorant of everything that happened between us, not able to understand why I should feel that it was “wrong” for us to make love!’ Her face twisted, mirroring the pain she could feel wrenching inside her, goading her on despite Alexis’ angry, hard face, and Sofia’s shocked, disturbed one.

  ‘You understood didn’t you, Alexis, but that didn’t stop you. But then, of course, I gave you the ideal opportunity to take a little more revenge, didn’t I? I’ve heard it’s like salt water, the more you drink the more you need.’

  ‘Sienna, let me explain.’

  ‘Explain what? There is nothing to explain. I already know it all.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ Alexis said quietly. ‘Am I to be condemned for the rest of my life for that?’

  ‘A mistake!’ Through her pain Sienna stared at him bitterly, wondering if he really knew what he had done. He had destroyed and dissected her emotions, reducing her to the status of a foolish adolescent, easily bemused by the sensual expertise of an experienced man, but there was more to it than that. She had loved him from that first brief sight of him, had loved him without knowing him, without being aware of who he was, had recognised him as a man she would love, giving herself over completely to him. That very first day he could have taken her hand and led her anywhere, her commitment to him was as basic and deep-rooted as that, and that he had failed to perceive it was her only hope of salvation because it showed her that he was not the man she had thought him to be. She had thought herself free of her love for him, but he had used her amnesia, just as he had used her….

  She turned and ran from the room in much the same way as she had done on that other occasion, again half blinded by tears, the cruel grip of Alexis’ fingers in her arm detaining her. She fought against him like a wild thing, conscious of Sofia’s unhappy face, of Alexis’ cruelly implacable one, of Maria suddenly appearing from out of nowhere, of Alexis hitting her briefly with his open palm, and then picking up her broken body, carrying her towards their room. The last place on earth she wanted to be!

  She struggled in his arms, crying out that she would not go back there, but he ignored her, thrusting open the door and dropping her on to the bed. He held her throat while he forced her to take two tablets and a glass of water, then watched as she fought them for endless minutes, his scrutiny as pitiless and cold as she remembered it from that night at the cottage.

  She tried to keep awake, but the pills were too strong for her and she felt her senses slide impotently away, then Alexis was pushing her down against the bed, covering her with the cotton spread, then going to stand by the door, his expression unfathomable as he looked towards her, darkness reaching up to enfold her in its heavy embrace, someone she didn’t realise was herself crying like a lonely child, the sound dying gradually as she gave herself up to oblivion.

  When she woke up he was standing by the bed, watching her, his eyes empty of all expression, arms folded across his chest. Sienna breathed in deeply, feeling the pain inside her grow. She turned away so that he couldn’t see the tears threatening to fall. Her glance fell on the clock beside the bed, and she frowned. Nine? But it had been just after lunch when he gave her those tablets, and now it was broad daylight. She had almost slept the clock round!

  ‘Where’s Sofia?’ How odd that she should ask that question when so many far more important ones clamoured for answers.

  ‘Gone. I sent her back to Athens.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’ How toneless and light her voice sounded, stripped of all emotion and feeling. She blinked back the tears which had threatened earlier, now under control, her face carefully blank. Alexis moved and she saw the echoing ripple of muscles beneath his shirt, her stomach clenching against a wave of self-loathing as she remembered how she had touched him, revealed her most intimate thoughts to him, loved him, and all the time…. ‘How long will it take to get a helicopter here?’ she asked in that same bright dead voice. ‘I’d like to leave as soon as possible. I….’

  ‘You’re not leaving. How much exactly have you remembered?’ His voice was as empty as her own, but when he turned into the light she could see faint lines of what might have been strain etched against his skin.

  ‘Everything. All of it—how we met, how you made love to me because you thought Rob had raped Sofia. How cou
ld you do this to me, Alexis?’ she demanded, her control suddenly breaking. ‘How could you bring me here, knowing? How could you have married me?’ A fresh thought struck her. ‘Are we married, or is that just another game you’re playing, another….’

  ‘Stop this—you’re becoming hysterical, Sienna! Believe me,’ he added darkly, ‘no one regrets what has happened more than me, but it has happened. Because of me you came dangerously close to losing your life. We are married,’ he told her curtly, his expression grim when he saw the disbelief in her face. ‘You said yourself you remembered the ceremony. It took place at the hospital. It was relatively easy to organise once they knew the circumstances.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’ She was bitterly angry, more angry than she had been even when he told her that he didn’t love her, that he simply wanted revenge. He had come close to destroying her life once and she had thought herself free of him, but humilating her once apparently wasn’t enough for him, he had wanted to repeat the experience.

  ‘I told them that we were engaged, that you could be carrying my child, that marriage was what we both wanted. You were in a coma for several days after the accident. They thought at one point that they might have to operate. Your brother couldn’t be reached, and they agreed to the marriage because they knew that as your husband I would have the authority to give them permission to operate should it be needed.’

  ‘But why?’ Sienna demanded bitterly. ‘Why marriage? Why….’

  ‘I am Greek.’ Alexis reminded her curtly. ‘My family has a code of honour that goes back to the dawn of our time. I had dishonoured you, it was my fault that the accident occurred. The only reparation I could make was the protection of my name.’ His mouth was wry. ‘If you are honest with yourself it was, after all, what you wanted.’

  ‘No!’ Sienna was so angry that she threw the denial at him violently. ‘What I wanted was the man I thought loved me as I loved him, the man I foolishly trusted, a man you taught me simply does not exist, Alexis. I should have listened more carefully to what my mind was trying to tell me when I was in hospital. No wonder I felt so apprehensive, so doubtful about you! You lied to me, Alexis. You knew I would never have left Athens with you had I known the truth. You let me think we’d been married for some time, that our marriage was completely normal!’

  ‘Rest assured that it will be,’ he told her grimly. ‘We are married, Sienna, that is an incontrovertible fact, and our marriage will stand. It has, after all, been consumated.’

  She went red and then white, her voice a husky rustle of pain as she whispered, ‘Because you tricked me. You knew that inwardly I doubted you, that it was only because I thought the blame for not remembering you lay with me, because I thought I was the one cheating you.’ Her voice broke and she laughed wildly, ‘You knew all that and yet you let me….’ Love you, she had been about to say, but she closed her mouth in a hard line over the words. No wonder she had felt that starving need for him, that hunger to take and keep on taking, storing up her memories. Her mind had known even then that she was living in a fool’s paradise. ‘I think I could forgive you all the rest, but that, that is something I could never forgive.’

  Alexis’ voice, in direct opposition to hers, was flat, completely devoid of any interpretable emotion. ‘By “that” I assume you are referring to our lovemaking? Whether I had told you the facts or not wouldn’t have made any difference, Sienna. We would still have made love. I knew that first night at the cottage that sexually we were extremely compatible.’ A small smile curved his mouth, but it was a cold assessing gesture. ‘Remember then how you told me “next time”….

  ‘Yes.’ Her face was hot, her voice terse and bitter. ‘And you told me there never would be a “next time”, that I would never find pleasure in your arms.’

  He shrugged carelessly. ‘So I was wrong, on both counts.’ He crossed the floor swiftly, grasping her chin before she could turn away, his breath warm against her skin, his eyes dark and angry, as he forced her to meet them. ‘You can’t deny that you responded to me, Sienna, that you wanted me, that….’

  ‘That I was living a lie,’ Sienna said angrily, ‘But I can’t live it any longer now that I know the truth. I can’t live with you as your wife now, Alexis, you must see that.’

  ‘No,’ he said evenly, ‘I don’t see it. What is the difference between then and now? Will your body react differently to mine ‘because you know the truth?’ he said savagely, anger flaring deeply in his eyes. ‘What is the difference?’

  ‘The difference is in knowing that… that there is no love between us,’ Sienna told him thickly, ‘in knowing that you married me because you felt you had to… because it was your “duty”.’

  ‘And because of that you would condemn us both, deny us both the pleasure you know full well we find in one another?’

  ‘I only found that pleasure because I thought we loved one another,’ Sienna said hotly. ‘Do you honestly believe that a woman who ran from you as I did would find “pleasure”, as you call it, in your touch?’

  His mouth was sardonic. ‘You might very well find it, but no, I don’t suppose you would admit to it. The very fact that you did run proves to me that you aren’t indifferent to me, Sienna. You once told me you loved me, now you claim to hate me, both powerful emotions which cannot be easily subdued.’

  ‘I loved the man I thought you were,’ Sienna cried out passionately, ‘and I hate the man I now know you to be. This marriage must end, Alexis. I can’t live with you now, knowing the truth, and I won’t!’

  ‘We are married and we shall stay married. There has never been a divorce in my family, and I am not going to be the first.’

  She knew it was useless to continue arguing with him in his present frame of mind. Here on the island she was virtually his prisoner if he chose to make her so, and she contented herself with an acid, ‘Very well, if you say so, but I shall never live with you again as your wife.’

  His mouth curled, something dark and unnamable leaping to life in his eyes, making her shrink back against her pillows, her pulses thudding out warning messages to her brain. ‘Then I must just pray that you are already carrying my son, otherwise….’

  ‘Otherwise you’ll do what?’ Sienna taunted, not heeding the messages from her brain. ‘Rape me, as you once accused my brother of raping your sister? Dear God, it only needs that, doesn’t it, to complete this farce full circle! Please leave me now, Alexis,’ she finished tiredly. ‘What would you have done if Sofia hadn’t arrived when she did?’ she asked as he walked towards the door. ‘Gone on letting me live in a pretence world, keeping me here so that I would never remember the truth?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you because Dr Theonstanis said it was best if you remembered the past naturally, and your reaction proves the truth of his advice. You are behaving more like an hysterical child than a woman, Sienna. You once said you loved me, but it is a poor kind of love that will not allow the beloved to make any mistakes, that sets him up on a pedestal and condemns him to remain there. We are married and our marriage cannot be set aside. I admired your bravery in defending your brother and in protecting him by not telling him what had happened, and I would have been pleased to have such a woman as the mother of my sons, but like you I begin to believe I was deceived, because I have seen no evidence of her this morning. Why cannot you be honest and admit that we could build a life together on what we have?’

  ‘What we have? You mean sex!’ Sienna said it disparagingly, and wished she hadn’t when she saw the dark colour seeping up under his skin. He was angry and it showed in the clenched muscles of his face, the hot glitter of his eyes as they raked her pale features.

  ‘How easily and lightly you dismiss it, but you will not find it so easy to dismiss for very long, Sienna. There will come a time when your body will cry out for mine, when you will lie awake remembering how it was between us, when you want the touch of my lips against your skin, my body against yours, when you will yearn to toss aside pride and anger to
come to me.’

  ‘Never!’

  His mouth hardened. ‘I am not prepared to bandy words with you any longer. When you have decided to revert to adulthood once more we can talk. Until then I shall leave you to sulk alone.’

  ‘I suppose I’m allowed to write to Rob? When he gets back he’ll wonder what’s happened to me and where I am.’

  ‘Of course you may write to your brother. He is also quite welcome to visit us here whenever he wishes—but bear this in mind, Sienna, I will not have you confiding the secrets of our marriage to anyone—do I make myself clear?’

  She wanted to demand to know by what means he would enforce his threat, then she remembered Rob’s face when he said he himself would probably want to kill any man who harmed her. If she told Rob the truth she would be exposing him to possible danger. As Rob himself had told her, Alexis was rich and powerful enough to destroy her brother, and she knew that for Rob’s sake, on this occasion she could not pour out her troubles to him, and that Alexis had won that point if no other.

  ‘At least I suppose I have the consolation of knowing I married a rich man,’ she said disdainfully as Alexis opened the door. She threw the taunt at him, wanting to find his Achilles heel, wanting to make him suffer as she was suffering.

  He paused, then said tiredly without turning, ‘It won’t work, Sienna. You forget I know more about you than you know about yourself. Wealth and possessions mean very little to you.’

  He was gone, and she was alone with the torment of her thoughts, images which she had kept at bay ever since she opened the door and saw Sofia and the past came rushing back to her, making her eyes ache with unshed tears and her heart sore with pain. Alexis had married her because his pride demanded it, because he had discovered the truth. Once marriage to Alexis had been all that she had desired in the world, but it was a hollow fulfilment she had now. She had wanted the Alexis she believed loved her, and she shuddered in self-loathing, remembering how she had responded to the touch of his hands, the brush of his mouth over sensitive skin, the way she had kissed and caressed him, every gesture a betrayal of her most intimate thoughts and feelings. She had believed that there was love between them and had given herself to him in the security of that love, and he had let her. That was what she couldn’t forgive—he had knowingly let her make a fool of herself twice over. He could have stopped her. He could have told her their marriage had been an arranged one—there were any number of ways a man of his experience and astuteness could have controlled the tempo of their relationship so that she hadn’t abandoned herself to him so thoroughly, but he had not done so