Too Long a Sacrifice

by Yvonne Whittal

  'I'm free to marry whomever I please, and you have no right to tell me that I—'

  'You don't love him!'

  Her heart lurched violently in her breast, but her angry glance did not waver from his for an instant. 'Since when have you become an authority on my feelings?'

  'You love me, Julia!' he answered her with that unfamiliar savagery, and it felt as if her heart and lungs had come to a grinding halt inside her.

  She could feel the last vestige of blood drain away from her face to leave it cold and clammy, and she fought desperately against that perilous darkness which threatened to engulf her. The last thing she wanted at that moment was to collapse in a heap at Nathan's feet.

  'You're crazy!' she cried hoarsely, shuddering inwardly as her vitals resumed their normal function.

  'Am I crazy, Julia?' he smiled twistedly, his eyes glittering with a hateful mockery as he jerked off his tie and undid a few extra buttons down the front of his shirt to expose his powerful chest with the matting of dark hair against his tanned skin. 'Would you rather have me believe that when we made love it was a purely physical act for you, and nothing more?'

  'It was just a physical thing!' she lied frantically.

  'You're a bad liar, my dear Julia.' His smile deepened with derision. 'You always were, and you always will be.'

  She cast caution aside in her desperate attempt to conceal her true feelings. 'You're planning to marry Marcia, so why can't you leave me alone!'

  A muscle leapt in his jaw and a terrifying look entered his eyes. 'Who told you that I was going to marry Marcia?'

  Julia cursed herself silently for not keeping her mouth shut about what she knew, but it was too late now to retract her statement, and she swallowed nervously, knowing that only the truth would suffice under these distressing circumstances.

  'Marcia implied as much during our conversation that night when Damian took me out to your farm, and she didn't deny it when I questioned her for clarification,' Julia explained, her voice husky with the effort to force the words past the tightness in her throat.

  'And you were more than ready to assume that I was planning to marry her,' Nathan accused harshly, flinging her mind into complete confusion.

  'Aren't you?' she asked, deliberately quelling that flame of hope which had been ignited inside her. 'Aren't you planning to marry Marcia?'

  'My God!' Nathan exploded savagely, and fear clutched at her chest and stilled the breath in her throat when he raised his hands as if he intended to choke her, but he controlled himself and let them drop to his sides again. 'You haven't credited me with the slightest sense of decency, have you! You simply took it for granted that I was capable of making love to one woman while at the same time I was contemplating marriage to another!'

  'I had no reason to believe that she was lying to me, so why shouldn't I have assumed that you were going to marry her?' she parried his accusation with an indignant anger which helped to deaden the pain inside her. 'You have been seeing Marcia for the past year, and everyone knows that she has spent a considerable amount of time with you at Honeywell since you bought the farm.'

  Nathan's glance sharpened, and the probing intensity of his gaze heightened her wariness and placed her on her guard. 'Have you been jealous?'

  'Don't be ridiculous!' she snapped, turning from him in a fury which was directed mainly at herself when she felt that tell-tale warmth sliding into her cheek.

  It was true… dammit! Jealousy had been gnawing away at her like a cancer these past weeks, but she was not yet ready to admit it to him while she was still in the vice-like grip of a rampaging uncertainty.

  'You're the only woman I have ever proposed marriage to. What made you opt out at the last minute, Julia?'

  She should have known that this verbal altercation would lead to an interrogation, but she had been too busy attempting to cope with the bewildering discovery that Nathan was not planning to marry Marcia, and his probing query had been delivered with the unexpectedness of an electric shock. It jolted her nerves violently, and it left her momentarily numb.

  'I'm almost convinced that it wasn't because you stopped loving me, so I've concluded that there had to be another reason,' he persisted when she remained silent, and his voice had an ominous ring to it that made the blood chill in her veins.

  'Go away, Nathan!' she said through her teeth, shaking in every limb and close to breaking-point as she gripped the back of a chair once again to steady herself. 'For God's sake, go away and leave me in peace!'

  She had that terrible feeling again that she was sitting on the edge of a volcano, but this time she knew it was going to erupt, and she was panic-stricken at the knowledge that she could do nothing to stop it.

  'Julia…'

  'No!' She brushed off his hand when he touched her shoulder, and her face was white and pinched when she spun round to face him. 'Leave me alone!'

  The atmosphere between them was heavily charged as they stood facing each other like opponents locked in a deadly battle of wits, and the unrelenting set of Nathan's jaw filled Julia with the awesome suspicion that she was going to be the loser.

  'I deserve to know the truth, Julia. I'm entitled to it, and I demand an explanation now!'

  Nathan's command made her shrink inwardly, but she was forced to recall something which Damian Squires had said. 'You've got to tell Nathan the truth. It might make him human again instead of the insufferable, unreasonable man he has become.'

  An intense weariness seeped into her body, and she could feel her rigid resolve crumbling. It was as if she had walked a long, exhausting distance which had robbed her of the stamina to contemplate taking another step. If Nathan wanted the truth, then she no longer had the strength to withhold it from him, and she was simply too tired to care about the consequences.

  Her shoulders sagged wearily, and she walked away from his glaring appraisal to stare blindly out of the window with eyes that were dark with the pain of remembering.

  'Julia?'

  'Yes, yes, I'll tell you what you want to know. It doesn't matter any more, and I—' She halted abruptly to rid herself of that aching restriction in her throat, and it took a few moments for her to control herself sufficiently before she could continue speaking. 'A few weeks before our wedding I—I was told that my grandmother had cancer and, when I considered all the sacrifices she had made for me, I felt I owed it to her to—to stay and nurse her through those last two years of her life.'

  The ensuing silence was so intense that Julia was convinced Nathan could hear the painful pounding of her heart, and her mouth was suddenly so dry that her tongue was threatening to cling to her palate.

  'Why didn't you tell me this five years ago?'

  The hint of incredulity in his voice made her turn, but his features were etched in a black fury that quickened the pace of her heart with fear, and she leaned back against the window-sill to support her body on trembling legs.

  'What would you have done if I had confided in you, Nathan?' she counter-questioned.

  'I most certainly wouldn't have allowed you to bear that terrible burden on your own.' His tight-lipped reply did not come as a surprise to her; it was what she had always known he would say, but the confirmation of her suspicions was of little comfort to her. 'We could have been married,' he added, 'and I would have postponed my study-trip to Europe.'

  'Opportunities like that don't come along every day, Nathan. We both know it,' she smiled mirthlessly, 'and I didn't want to stand in your way.'

  'My God!' He crossed the room in a few long strides, and she shrank back against the window at the menace in his stance when he towered over her. 'So you broke off our engagement almost on the eve of our wedding, and left me to believe the worst of you!'

  'I had no choice.'

  'The choice to stay or go should have been mine, not yours! For God's sake, Julia!' His hands shot out, and she cried out in fear when he took her by the shoulders and shook her until it felt as if her neck was in danger of snapping. '
You had no right—no right whatsoever—to make a decision like that on my behalf!'

  'I did what I thought was best for you!' She choked out the words, and he thrust her aside with a force that made her stagger back against the polished window-sill.

  'Best for me? Dammit!' His harsh voice grated along raw nerves, and she raised her wary glance to see him run his fingers through his hair in a furious gesture before he pinned her down with a blazing glance that made her quake inwardly. 'Do you have any idea what I went through when I received that polite and uninformative note of yours telling me that the wedding was off? Does it matter to you that when I couldn't contact you I nearly went out of my mind trying to find a reasonable explanation for your actions, or don't you care at all?'

  Dear God, how could he ask her that? She cared more than he could ever know, and her actions in the past had been motivated solely by her love and concern for him! The pain of it all washed over her, tearing cruelly at her soul as she recalled the hours and the days of agonising torment which had finally led to her decision to sever their relationship. She had always been convinced that she had made the right decision; it was that thought which had sustained her during the past five years, but now she was beginning to think that she might have been wrong, and that Nathan had every reason to be furious with her.

  'I'm sorry,' she apologised lamely, her voice a husky whisper with the effort to force the words past that aching tightness in her throat.

  'Is that all you can say?' he demanded harshly.

  She looked up to encounter the fiery anger in his probing eyes, but a numbness was taking hold of her, and it robbed her of the ability to feel and think coherently.

  'What else is there to say?' she croaked.

  Nathan's lips drew back in a snarling fury, and a stab of icy terror succeeded in penetrating that blanket of numbness which surrounded her.

  'My God, I could—'

  He broke off abruptly, and Julia had a blurred vision of his menacing features when he pulled her roughly and unexpectedly into his arms to set his mouth on hers in a brutal kiss that crushed her soft lips against her teeth. The agony of it made her want to cry out, but the sound was stifled in her aching throat, and hot tears welled up behind her closed eyelids.

  This was a punishment which Julia knew she would not forget in a hurry. Her arms were pinned helplessly at her sides, and her breasts were hurting against his hard chest. Any attempt to escape this ruthless embrace would merely have intensified the pain, and it was the numb acceptance of the punishment he was dishing out that made her body yield against his. Her soul was beginning to feel as bruised as her body, but the most painful of all was the dawning suspicion that she deserved it.

  Nathan's furious assault could not have lasted for more than a few seconds, but it felt as if an eternity had elapsed before she was released to stand swaying dazedly on her feet with the distinct taste of blood in her mouth. She could not see his features clearly through her tears, but she heard him curse throatily before he stalked out of the cottage and slammed the door behind him with a force that made the windows rattle.

  Julia could not sleep that night. She tossed for hours while her mind worked its way repeatedly through everything that had occurred that evening. How could something which had once seemed so right suddenly appear to be so wrong? She was too confused and bewildered to find the answer to that question, but most of all she was labouring under a feeling of guilt which was making her squirm inwardly.

  During that storm of soul-searching and self-reproach there was one vital and tantalising piece of information which she had overlooked, and it was not until the early hours of the following morning that she found herself recalling Nathan's accusation that she had not credited him with a sense of decency. 'You simply took it for granted that I was capable of making love to one woman while at the same time I was contemplating marriage to another,' he had said. What, exactly, had he meant by that? And what about Marcia? Had there been no truth at all in Marcia's statement that she and Nathan were going to be married?

  Julia's mind was too exhausted to reason, and she finally drifted into a troubled sleep from which she awoke three hours later with the feeling that she had a head which was twice its normal size. She groaned and had to drag herself out of bed to get herself ready for work. Her temples were pounding, and the day loomed ahead of her like an unassailable mountain. Her headache abated after she had swallowed down a couple of tablets with a cup of coffee, but there was nothing she could do about her tender, bruised lips, and she winced several times when she applied her lipstick.

  If Roland noticed during his busy daily schedule that something was amiss, then he made no mention of it, but Julia was relieved when he left the consulting-rooms that afternoon to keep an appointment with Nathan at the hospital, and the door had barely closed behind his tall frame before she took advantage of the fact that she was alone to lean back in the chair behind her desk with a tired sigh. She felt drained, and the cool, pleasant mask which she had been forced to wear all day was slipping to reveal her hollow-eyed exhaustion. She wanted to go home. She needed to catch up on the hours of lost sleep, but, more than that, she needed time alone to think.

  Julia's hopes for a quiet evening alone at home were dashed when Warren arrived at her cottage shortly after seven thirty. She was not in the mood for company, but she resigned herself to it when she recalled that there was an important matter which had to be settled between them, and the sooner she settled it, the better for both of them.

  She made coffee and took it through to the lounge where Warren coaxed her on to the cane bench beside him. They talked quietly while they drank their coffee, and Julia somehow succeeded in keeping their conversation on an impersonal level while she waited for the right moment to broach the subject she had to discuss with him, but she knew that she could not delay the inevitable when Warren made an attempt to take her into his arms.

  'There is something I have to tell you, Warren,' she began, her voice husky with regret and self-reproach as she gently warded off his embrace, and the pained expression on his face made her look away guiltily. 'I want you to know that I'm deeply honoured by your proposal of marriage, and I've considered it most seriously these past weeks, but I—I know now that I can't marry you. It was wrong of me to allow you to hope for something which I've known all along would never work. I'm fond of you, I really am, but I couldn't marry you without loving you.'

  'I've been expecting this,' Warren announced without rancour, but there was a hint of bitterness in the smile that curved his mouth. 'It's Nathan Corbett, isn't it? You're still in love with him.'

  He was not asking a question, he was making a statement which did not require an answer, and her gaze fell before his. It was true; she was still in love with Nathan, and she had always known that no other man could ever measure up sufficiently to take his place in her life.

  'I'm sorry, Warren,' she murmured ruefully, hating herself for allowing their relationship to progress as far as it had, and she wished there was some way she could ease the pain for him. 'You've been a good friend, and I thank you for that.'

  An awkward silence followed, and she sat staring miserably at the carpet beneath her feet when she sensed his disappointment and anger. He had every right to be annoyed with her, and she would not blame him if he chose to berate her for leading him on along a path which she had known from the start could lead nowhere, but he surprised her by taking her hand in his and raising it to his lips.

  'I would like always to be there for you as a friend, and if you need me you only have to call.' He was smiling when he released her hand and rose to his feet, but the smile did not quite reach his dark eyes when he stood looking down at her. 'Remember that, Julia.'

  He was gone before she could say anything, and she was still sitting there in the lounge long after she heard him drive away. She was weeping silent tears, but she could not decide whether her tears were for Warren, or for herself. She had sent him out of her life because of
her feelings for Nathan, but Nathan had not come, and now she had no one.

  Julia arrived home shortly after one on the Saturday afternoon, and she was garaging her car when she heard her telephone ringing. Nathan? She rushed inside to answer it, but it stopped ringing a fraction of a second before she lifted the receiver, and she bit her lip nervously as she frowned down at the instrument. It rang again a few seconds later, and she snatched up the receiver, but that flicker of hope in her heart was doused when she recognised Damian Squires's gravelly voice. 'I have news for you,' he said without preamble, and an odd tremor raced through her. 'I've heard from a reliable source that Nathan has declined the position Basil Grant offered him at that fancy new clinic.'

  'I doubt if that will please Marcia. I wonder how it will affect their relationship.'

  She wished she hadn't said that, but it was too late now, and she held her breath mentally as she waited for Damian to speak.

  'I think their relationship ended a long time ago for Nathan, but Marcia's very good at hanging on to what she's got and, knowing Nathan, he simply didn't bother to do anything about it until now.'

  'Why now?' she asked, her heart beating in her throat and making it difficult for her to speak. 'If you suspect that he has ended their relationship, then what would have made him end it now?'

  'I was hoping you could tell me.'

  Julia was not quite sure how she ought to respond to that remark. Her thoughts and her feelings had been flung into a chaotic state, and she was too wary to grasp at something which she feared might disintegrate the moment she touched it. Her future had suddenly taken on the appearance of a fragile soap-bubble which was floating and hovering rather precariously over a thorn tree, and she could not decide what to do about it.

  'Have you told Nathan the truth?' Damian intruded on her thoughts, and it took a few frantic seconds to gather her scattered wits about her to realise what he was referring to.