Redeemed By Her Innocence (HQR Presents)

by Bella Frances

  ‘You won’t get up and leave me in the middle of the night this time?’

  ‘No. You’re my guest here. I’m not going to do that,’ he said.

  His guest.

  Was that all she was to him? A house guest, here today, gone tomorrow?

  What if there was no tomorrow? What if she was just filling his nights the way Lauren filled his days? Was she just the disposable blonde from England who happened to fall into bed with him whenever he clicked his fingers? No matter how she looked at it, she wasn’t his equal in this. It was his apartment, and these were his terms.

  And she was worth more than this. She was from a family where love was not throwaway. It was for ever—and she wanted a for-ever love.

  With strength that came from somewhere deep inside, she pulled herself out of his arms.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to be your guest.’

  He stood there, exposed, his erection straining forward, his shirt tugged open, his face stained with lipstick and his eyes wild with disbelief.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he said.

  ‘I want to know what I am to you,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘Jacquelyn,’ he said, but she couldn’t look at him. ‘What do you want me to say? You’re staying here with me for a few days, as my guest. I don’t get what the problem is.’

  ‘I’m sorry, no. I can’t do this.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  She straightened her dress, and turned away from him, fixing herself as best she could, stopping the tears with sheer willpower as they pooled in her eyes. She breathed deeply and, with a sigh that came from the pit of her stomach, she shook her head and walked away.

  ‘I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t right. It’s not who I am.’

  How did she explain this to him? How could she tell him that she felt so strongly that making love was so much more than a fun way to spend an evening?

  It was huge, bigger even than she had ever suspected. Since she’d taken Nikos to her bed, she’d given away part of herself and she felt the weight of her decision so deeply.

  She looked back but he was still standing where she’d left him, his face a mask of disbelief. How could she say any of this to him when she was just another woman in his bed?

  ‘Would you mind telling me what’s going on?’

  She looked blankly around. The apartment was exactly as she had imagined it. The walls a dark burgundy, vintage furniture, brass and mirrors from a more elegant age. Statuettes of long-limbed women with short hair holding glass shades, twenties icons, art deco, beautiful.

  She clutched her arms around her body, protecting herself from the fierce blast of his maleness, in case she succumbed again, because she did so want to. She had to distance herself from this, put some space between them, calm it all down, pour ice on the heat.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ she said.

  He stared, incredulous.

  ‘Look, I know it looks as if I’ve led you on, but I—I can’t explain.’

  ‘I wish you’d try, Jacquelyn. I really thought we were on the same page here.’

  Why was this so unfair? Why couldn’t Nikos be hers? Why, when she had finally found him, was he so unavailable in the way that really mattered? He was everything to her, she would never meet another like him, and it broke her heart that there was no future for them.

  She felt tears form and her head hung and then he was there as his arms slid back around her. Close and closer they stood, hugging and holding one another under the cool stares of his art deco sculptures. Through the damp linen of his shirt she scented him, learned the slow steady beat of his heart, let the rhythms of her body and breath settle and synchronise with his.

  He was a rock, a solid, kind, stable man. A good man. But he wasn’t her husband and he wasn’t even her lover. She was just one of many and then she’d be gone, and he’d always have a part of her and she’d only have this part of him, and it hurt her so badly to know it.

  It was a bond that was deep, vast, endless. She felt it with every steady beat of their hearts, but he was miles away from where she was.

  ‘I’m the one who is sorry now,’ she said finally, peeling herself back from him. ‘I owe you an explanation. But it’s hard for me. I don’t think like other people.’

  ‘Let’s sit down and talk about this.’

  In the sleek, modern kitchen he made tea as she eased herself onto a chair. The reassuring sights of water filling a kettle, cupboards being opened, mugs produced, soothed and settled her. It was lovely to watch Nikos’s masculinity in such simple, domestic tasks.

  He would have been a good husband, she thought. There was no bitterness in her heart; she wouldn’t allow it.

  ‘You know your way around this place a lot better than the last kitchen we were in.’

  ‘I can make tea in any country. Bear that in mind,’ he said, brandishing a teaspoon. He was trying to lighten the mood, she could tell that, but it was an empty laugh she returned and it echoed around the kitchen, hollow and cold.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked, noting the collection of books that were piled on the table, management and leadership titles, bookmarks poking out. Under a shaft of light in the hallway, photographs of Nikos with some of his very famous and less famous friends. She strained her eyes, noting that Brody was among them.

  ‘Seven years,’ he said, wearily, as he settled a mug of tea down in front of her. She clasped her fingers around it, glad of the heat it brought. ‘I bought it when I was going through a rough patch with Maria. That’s not to say that every other patch was smooth—they were all bumpy one way or another. That time was one of the worst.’

  ‘Was she unfaithful?’

  She asked it carefully. Her opinion of the woman wasn’t great, but to think she could have deliberately hurt Nikos was awful. Infidelity was as painful as being jilted, she supposed.

  He raised his eyebrows and laughed mirthlessly, and she knew she was right.

  ‘Let’s keep tonight to the present. You were going to tell me what happened back there.’

  ‘I...’ she began. How to find the words? How to say this without looking like a complete fraud? She should have told him before now. She should have told him that she had once believed in something so deeply that she had cherished it until the safety of it had become more important than what it stood for. How she had never, ever before been so swept away that her lifetime promise had felt meaningless. How she had let it go like opening her hand on a breezy day and letting a precious flower be blown away by a gust of wind.

  She knew he wouldn’t understand her either; nobody did. But she had no other truth to tell.

  ‘I don’t believe in sex before marriage.’

  He was leaning against the kitchen worktop, handsome, virile and strong, looking godlike, as he always did. The only sign that he’d even heard her was the surprised hitch of one jet-black eyebrow.

  ‘OK. That’s not what I expected to hear. So if that’s what you believe, why did you sleep with me?’ he said. ‘You can’t honestly think it was going to lead directly to a proposal?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, blushing furiously.

  ‘Just checking,’ he said. ‘It’s different, but it wouldn’t be the first time a woman has asked me to marry her.’

  ‘You’re completely misinterpreting what I said,’ she said, putting her tea down a little too vigorously.

  ‘Tell me, what does us having great sex have to do with a lifetime commitment? I’ve lived that particular nightmare already, remember? I’ve lived it and I’m still reliving it. It’s still haunting me. She might be dead but the ties are still choking me. And there’s no way, none, that I’m ever going near that again.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to marry me!’ she said as anger bubbled right up and over. He was ins
ulting her, choosing to totally misunderstand her, just because he didn’t want to lose face.

  ‘Maybe not, but I’m feeling manipulated here. We had a great night together. Why do we need to wrap it up as something it’s not? I barely even know you, Jacquelyn. I promised myself I was never going to get into one of these scenes again so, trust me, I’m not the marrying type. Not any more.’

  She stood up, pushed herself back from the table, stared at him.

  ‘I—’

  ‘I,’ he said, silencing her, ‘was asking you to go on a date, with a view to going on another, you know, the way people do, gradually getting to know one another.’

  Yes, she wanted to yell, and that was the problem. They should never have done what they’d done. She should never have succumbed.

  ‘Why don’t you take that as a compliment? Or are you planning to give me the “bitterly regret it” line again? It only works once. Or at least, it only works once with me. How many other times have you used it?’

  ‘I’ve never used it,’ she said, her voice shaking over the huge hot lump that formed in her throat. The thought of being wrongly accused was always awful, but to be wrongly accused over something like this was beyond the pale. It pierced her, it cut her, and she had no weapon to fight back with, other than the truth.

  ‘I was a virgin. You are the first man I ever slept with. And you have no idea how deep my bitterness goes. None.’

  She couldn’t see his face because she was staring at the pile of his stupid books, straining so hard not to bleed from the hurt of this awful conversation.

  ‘A virgin?’ he repeated, as if she’d said ‘an alien’ or ‘a unicorn’ or something equally unusual. ‘A virgin? But I asked you. I knew there was something going on and I asked you.’

  She didn’t look up from the mug of tea in front of her, now glassy and opaque with unshed tears, but she could tell he was walking about the kitchen and she waited to hear him, waited to hear what he would say.

  ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

  She shook her head and crushed her eyes through the glassy tears, forcing them to disappear. So that was it. That was how he took the news. The secret and all that it meant to her was just a ‘thing’ to him. This was even worse than she’d imagined. He was so callous. What a fool she’d been.

  She shook her head and pushed herself up from the table. She didn’t need to prolong this. The faintest tiny flicker of hope that something might linger and grow was completely doused, ashes cold in a grate.

  Everybody does it these days. There is no shame—none...zero—in having sex. There is much more shame in not having it.

  She’d thought about that so many times. Her needs were romantic and spiritual. They were lifelong, enduring and deep as the widest, bluest ocean. There was nothing throwaway about anything she offered and nothing she could do would ever change that.

  The awful thing was she’d traded that one single night for all the nights that would come after.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Away from here.’

  ‘I’m sorry if you’re not getting the reaction you want but if you’d told me at the time I would have handled things differently.’

  ‘It’s not the kind of thing I go around broadcasting.’

  ‘Maybe you should. Because any man taking a virgin to bed needs to know that stuff.’

  ‘My body is my business.’

  ‘You’re smarter than that, Jacquelyn. You’re the one who’s held on for twenty-five years. You were engaged to some guy, for God’s sake. What the hell happened there that you chose to sleep with me and not him?’

  ‘Just leave me alone. The last thing I want is a post-mortem.’

  ‘No, but I do. You’re the one who’s been holding all the cards and you’ve just landed this on me. Look, sit down. I’m not going to let you go anywhere so let’s get that straight.’

  She stopped in the doorway, her back to him; the beaming smiles of politicians and movie stars gazed at her from photographs on the wall. She searched for the photograph of Brody and wondered with a lurch of panic if Nikos would get in touch with him over this, if it would somehow sour things.

  ‘OK,’ she said, lifting her jaw and turning around. ‘Maybe I should have told you, but I didn’t. I didn’t think it was anyone’s business but mine, so if I have upset you I apologise.’

  ‘You don’t look or sound the slightest bit sorry. Actually, you look angry. With me. As if I’m the one who’s done something wrong.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m just so disappointed,’ she said. ‘I had my own rules and I broke them, and I’ve got to live with myself.’

  ‘Hang on, I think I’m working this out—you actually think that there are rules around this sort of stuff? You need to sign a licence or wear a piece of metal on your finger? Making love isn’t about rules, it’s about people. It’s about chemistry. The fact that you didn’t make love until you were twenty-five is because you didn’t meet anyone that turned you on enough.

  ‘And then I came along. And suddenly you felt real chemistry. Just like I did. And just like I did you gave in, you followed your instincts. And your instincts were proved right because we fit. We work. On a physical level we work. But that doesn’t fit with your plan because in your world of unicorns and fairies, your handsome prince is supposed to marry you first and then you have babies and live happily ever after.

  ‘But life isn’t like that. Marriage isn’t like that. Marriage is hard work. It’s making the best of a goddamned terrible life. It’s waking up one morning and seeing your glamorous new wife for what she really is. It’s coming home from work one night and finding her naked in the hot tub with another man.’

  He threw his head back, bunched his hands in fists and shook them at the ceiling, hissed curses. Then he spun round, and the look blazing from his eyes was awful. He looked tortured, a soul bound in some dark, desperate hell that he could never escape.

  ‘That’s marriage. And that’s what I will never do again. OK?’

  ‘I’m so sorry for you,’ she said, hearing those words as if they were rocks he’d flung at her, flinching with every blow. ‘I don’t know what you lived through and I’m glad I never will, but your experience is unique to you. It doesn’t mean that mine or anyone else’s will be the same.’

  He shook his head; he’d turned away, defeat in every muscle, every movement of his magnificent body. She sensed it from him and she wanted to wring it out of him like water from a cloth, but there was no point any more—he had moved so far away from her, so far from that place where they’d shared something and could build on it, to a place buried beneath walls of guilt and shame and his own dreadful past.

  ‘Yeah, well, your experience is a bit limited, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  He poured a glass of water and drank thirstily.

  ‘Not every experience has to be lived first-hand. I saw the marriage of my parents, every day until they moved to Spain. And it wasn’t perfect, but it was good. They were solid. Not everyone lies and cheats, Nikos.’

  ‘No, and I don’t suppose every wife has to be beaten until she haemorrhages either, but some do, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that either,’ he said, walking past her back into the hallway. ‘I need a drink.’

  She stood watching him disappear through a huge doorway. The Beast in his castle, howling with pain and unable to see the light in the world.

  She had known pain, but not like his. Not pain so deep it had seeped into the air in his lungs, the blood in his veins. Nobody could leave any creature in pain like that, no matter what he had done or how he had treated her. No matter that she was alone in an unfamiliar apartment in an unfamiliar city with no friends and nowhere to go, completely beholden to this man for his kindness, and dependent on him for a roof over her head, and business contacts and a way out of debt to save her busines
s.

  No matter that he was so far gone he’d forgotten she was even here.

  She had to do something.

  Clicking fiercely along the parquet, she followed him, rounding the massive doorway and entering the room. For a moment she struggled to see him, so vast was the space.

  Huge gilt mirrors towered over sleek furniture, all of it way out of her income bracket. A marble fireplace as big as her shopfront, its grate like the mouth of a cave, sat centrally under an oil painting that was surely a Picasso. Windows like skyscrapers opened onto the darkest night sky and the myriad lights of the New York skyline.

  It was breathtaking, and there was Nikos, in the corner, turning on lamps and lifting a bottle of amber liquid from a silvery tray. She heard the soft pop of a cork as he started to pour it into a glass. He filled it half-full and lifted it straight to his mouth.

  It was an act of self-destruction and it frightened her.

  ‘Not even going to add water?’ she heard herself cry.

  He paused, but only for a second before he threw it down his throat.

  ‘Oh, I bet that feels better now. Just what you need. Get yourself legless. Anything to drown out the drama that this pain in the backside has brought to your door. Poor you.’

  He poured another and put it to his lips, but then turned and stared at her.

  ‘You’ve got a problem with my drinking now?’

  ‘No. You’re the one with all the problems, remember?’

  He swilled the whisky around his glass, looking at it as if it was his enemy and he was going to take it head-on.

  ‘That’s right, sweetheart, they just keep on coming.’

  ‘You’re not the only one in pain around here,’ she cried. ‘Plenty of people have difficult marriages and hurt each other. But I thought more of you than this.’

  ‘Save the sermon. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Look at what you’ve built. Look around you. This was all you. House is your creation, and you’re...kind, you’re a good man. You were a great husband. And you’ve given me a chance here—and I know I won’t have been the first one. Nikos, stop doing this to yourself and listen.’