by Penny Jordan
As he touched her Annie felt a tremendous surge of longing kick through her body. Lovingly she reached out for him, tensing in shock as he pulled away from her, saying sharply, ‘No!’
‘You really do want your breakfast, don’t you?’ Annie teased him tenderly as she smiled up at him.
‘I’ll go down and start preparing it,’ she heard him telling her almost tersely as he got off the bed and turned away from her, heading for the bedroom door.
Annie watched him go. Her body still ached for him, and yet beneath that ache lay a delicious contentment, a warm, positive memory of the night they had shared.
The bedroom had its own en suite bathroom which she quickly found, almost as though she knew already where it was. So much about the house was familiar to her that in certain other circumstances she might have found her instinctive familiarity with it slightly spooky. As it was she simply felt that it was all part of the extraordinary workings of fate.
Once downstairs, she found the kitchen as easily as she had done the bathroom, this time not so much by instinct as by the smell of freshly brewed coffee and cooking bacon.
‘I’ve scrambled your eggs for you. I know that’s how you prefer them.’
Annie stared as she was waved into an empty seat at the table and a plate of piping hot food was placed in front of her.
‘I…I never eat a cooked breakfast,’ she whispered. ‘Only…’
‘…at Christmas and other special occasions. Yes, I know,’ she was told, her sentence finished for her.
Grimly Dominic watched her as confusion shadowed her eyes and she toyed with the plate of food.
‘I can’t believe that you can know so much about me without us ever having met,’ she began slowly, and then she stopped, a brilliant smile illuminating her face as she told him blissfully, ‘I’m so glad that we’ve found each other and that you love me.’
‘Found each other,’ Dominic derided grimly. ‘You can stop pretending, Annie, the game’s over. And as for me loving you…Just what the hell do you think I am? What kind of fool do you think I am? There is only one reason for what happened between us last night so far as I’m concerned, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with love. Quite simply I reacted to man’s age-old need to scratch a certain itch.’ He paused and waited.
Annie stared at him. Her heart had started to hammer shockingly fast, hurting her so much as it thudded against her chest wall that she could barely breathe.
‘I don’t understand,’ she began painfully. ‘What are you saying…? What do you mean…? I…’
‘Oh, come on, Annie, get real. How much of a fool do you take me for? All that rubbish about fate…My God, but you’re a cool one. Walking back into my life…crawling into my bed just as though the last five years have never happened.’
Annie felt as though a huge weight, a huge stone was crushing down inside her, preventing her from thinking, preventing her from speaking, preventing her from breathing, almost. But not preventing her from feeling fear and pain. No, not preventing her from feeling those.
‘Please,’ she croaked when she could finally force her vocal cords to unlock themselves. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t understand?’ Dominic countered irritably.
She could see the way his chest rose and expanded under the pressure of his anger, but her fear of it and of him was somehow distant and vague, as though she simply didn’t have the energy, the strength to come to terms with it as she battled with the enormity of the shock she was suffering.
‘Do you think I understood when you walked out on me…on our marriage?’
Their marriage!
Without knowing she had done so Annie stood up, and then gasped as the room spun giddily around her. In that instant she heard a harsh male voice speaking sharply.
‘Oh, no, you don’t. You won’t escape by pulling that trick on me and pretending to faint. Annie…Annie…’
She heard him emphasise her name in raw fury as she finally slipped into the blessed relief of the darkness waiting for her.
When she came round she was sitting down again, but this time in a deep comfortable armchair in a large, pleasantly furnished sitting room. Like the other rooms of the house she had already seen it was somehow vaguely familiar to her.
A horrible, unwanted ice-cold sense of fear was beginning to fasten its death-inducing fingers around the tender vulnerability of her heart. A horrible, unwanted, uncertain sense of…something…
‘I…We…We can’t be married,’ she whispered painfully. ‘I…I don’t know you. I don’t even know your name…’
For a moment she actually thought he was going to strike her he looked so angry, but when she flinched he stepped back from her, throwing back his head and laughing savagely.
‘Oh, my God, now I have heard everything. Last night you were claiming me as someone sent to you by fate, your one true love, and now you’re trying to tell me that you don’t know who I am. Tell me something, Annie, do you make a habit of going to bed with men you don’t know? Is that another part of your personality I never knew existed? Just like your propensity for disappearing without explanation? Did you ever once—just once—stop to think how I might feel? How—’
Dominic could feel himself starting to sweat and he recognised how dangerously close to losing his self-control he was getting. He was becoming far too emotional. After all, what could her lack of love for him possibly mean to him now?
Annie could feel the pain welling up inside her, the awful, uncontrollable feeling of having stepped into a world of nightmarish terror, of having all her worst fears made real.
‘We can’t be married,’ she repeated, her mouth trembling. ‘We can’t be…’
‘Do you want me to prove it to you?’ Dominic asked her tersely. ‘Very well…’
Walking past her, he went over to an antique desk in the corner of the room, pulling open a drawer and extracting a small box from which he produced a piece of paper. He brought it over to her and held it in front of her.
‘Read this,’ he commanded acidly.
Her heart thumping, Annie did as he instructed. Her blood seemed to be freezing in her veins; her hands were deathly cold, her head light and hurting.
Slowly and carefully, as though she was a child, she read the words written on the certificate, lifting her eyes briefly from it to gaze into those of the man holding it with sick dismay before returning to read it a second time.
‘Your name is Dominic,’ was all she could say when he started to refold it.
Her mouth had gone dry and her heart was pounding sickly. There were so many questions she wanted to ask him but she was afraid to do so, afraid of his answers.
Twice now he had mentioned her walking out on him…disappearing. What kind of relationship must they have had for her to do that? Instinctively she knew it was simply not within her to walk out of the kind of commitment that marriage entailed. So what kind of marriage and what kind of man…? The kind of man who would take a woman to bed, as he had done her last night, simply for sex?
‘I can’t stay here. I have to go,’ she began unsteadily, but Dominic was already standing over her, blocking her escape.
‘No way,’ he told her angrily. ‘No way. Not until…Not until you’ve told me why you did it, Annie. Why you walked out on me.
‘My God, it’s the least you owe me, especially after that pathetic charade…that play-acting you put on for me last night. “I’ve wanted you so much”,’ he sighed, mimicking the emotion of her voice. “‘I’ve wanted you so much…this is fate…”’
Annie winced as she heard the acid bitterness underlying the contempt of his words. What could she say? How could she explain. Every word he said felt like another blow to her sensitive emotions.
She tried to defend herself. ‘It must have been…I would never…’ She stopped, too proud, too shocked, too raw to tell him of her instinctive knowledge that everything she had said to him was true. Was true? She wasn’t still dreaming ab
out him, was she? Still…
‘It must have been…?’ Dominic was mimicking relentlessly. ‘Can’t you remember?’
Annie swallowed painfully.
‘No, actually, I can’t,’ she told him quietly, raising her eyes to his.
They stared at one another in silence for several tautly tense seconds before he cursed and swung round, so that he wasn’t looking at her when he demanded tersely, ‘What kind of answer is that? What kind of fool do you take me for, Annie? You remembered well enough in bed last night. Every little touch, every little word…every single caress and kiss that ever meant anything to me…’
‘That wasn’t deliberate—’ Annie began, and then stopped. What he was saying was too shocking…too painful. She desperately needed to get away, to be on her own and absorb properly what she had been told.
‘Hey! Where do you think you’re going?’ Dominic demanded sharply as Annie took advantage of his lack of concentration and made a bolt for the door, running through it at full speed and almost colliding with the postman as she flung open the front door.
Dominic, who was right behind her, cursed as the postman waved a piece of paper in front of him, demanding a signature for a registered envelope. He could hear the engine of Annie’s car firing, and then with a spurt of gravel she was speeding off down the drive.
She had done it. She had got away from him. Annie was trembling so violently as she drove the car out onto the main road that she knew she was not really fit to be driving, but there was no way she was going to stop now…not until she had got away from him and was back safely and securely in her own little house.
Tears were streaming down her face and her heart was pounding with shock and emotion. She wasn’t Annie White, she was Mrs Dominic Carlyle—a married woman…married to the man of her dreams…
As she finally stopped her car outside her house Annie was laughing wildly in hysterical shocked disbelief. The man of her dreams…Maybe, but to him she was the woman of his worst nightmares!
CHAPTER SIX
‘WE HAD a wonderful time. Bob says that we really should try to go again, and I said…’ Worriedly Helena stopped talking as she recognised that Annie wasn’t really listening to her.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she demanded.
‘I…’ Annie began, intending to deny that anything was the matter. She was an adult, after all, and surely capable of dealing with her own problems. But two nights of broken sleep coupled with the shock of discovering that she and Dominic were married had taken their toll.
‘I’ve found out why Dominic, the man at the restaurant, seemed so familiar to me,’ she told Helena bleakly.
Her anxiety increasing, Helena put down the mug of coffee Annie had poured for her and waited. Getting up from her small kitchen table, Annie walked over to the sink. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it to moisten her nervously dry throat, before continuing shakily, ‘He’s my husband.’
‘What?’ Helena stared at her.
‘It’s true,’ Annie assured her, giving her a look of dry-eyed anguished despair. ‘He showed me our marriage certificate.’
Half an hour later Annie had managed to tell her the full story of what had happened between Dominic and herself—or most of what had happened! There were some things, some betrayals of her self-esteem, she could not even bring herself to admit to herself, or to tell even her closest friend.
‘Have you told him about your accident?’ Helena questioned her.
Annie shook her head.
‘No. I…I couldn’t…He says I walked out on him, and…I…I don’t know why he married me, Helena. It’s obvious how he feels about me now…’
‘What about you? What do you feel for him?’
Helena questioned her gently, momentarily ignoring Dominic’s feelings.
‘I don’t know,’ Annie admitted. ‘It’s been such a shock. I still can’t believe…’
‘You’ll have to tell him about your accident,’ Helena told her firmly.
‘Helena, I can’t,’ Annie protested. ‘And to be honest I don’t think he’d be prepared to listen. I feel such a fool,’ Annie told her. ‘All those idiotic things I felt and said about my dream man, over and over, and all the time…’
‘He was your husband,’ Helena supplied grimly.
There was one more very important question she had to ask Annie, even though she could see how distressed and unhappy she was.
‘When he…Dominic…told you that you were married, did it…did you—?’
‘Did I remember anything,’ Annie interrupted her, guessing what she was going to say and shaking her head as she did so. ‘No…nothing. I only wish I had, then I could at least…’
She got up from the table and started to pace the small kitchen floor.
‘I’ve got to remember what happened now, Helena…I’ve got to. Until I do…’ She stopped, her voice and face so tortured that Helena longed to be able to comfort and reassure her.
‘Why would I do something like that? Why would I just walk out on the man I was supposed to love and our marriage? I can’t believe…I’ve got to know the truth—otherwise…’
‘Couldn’t Dominic throw any light on why you might have left?’ Helena asked her.
‘I…We didn’t…He was so angry with me…’
Helena could see how distressed Annie was, and she didn’t want to put her under any more pressure, so instead of asking her any more questions she started to soothe and reassure her. But privately she had already decided that Annie’s husband would have to be told the truth of Annie’s accident, and that if Annie didn’t feel able to tell him herself then she would have to do so for her.
After Helena had gone Annie washed their coffee mugs, grimly forcing her hands to stop the slight trembling they seemed to have developed. Two anxious nights lying awake unable to sleep were beginning to take their toll on her, but she knew if she tried to sleep now she would be unable to do so.
What you need, my girl, is some healthy exercise—a good brisk walk, she told herself sternly. But deep down inside another voice, sharper and less comforting, was telling her instead that what she needed more than anything else was to be able to remember those lost weeks, that lost period of time. Not until she had done so would she ever be in a position to defend herself against Dominic’s accusations, to refute his allegations.
From Petrofiche Helena had learned that Dominic was currently working from home, and she had decided to pay him a visit there without giving him any prior warning of her arrival, just in case he should refuse to see her.
His house and its setting were certainly very impressive, she acknowledged as she climbed out of her car and walked towards the front door. Why had Annie left her husband and her home? Dominic Carlyle held the key that could unlock the mystery, Helena felt sure. Was there some vital piece of information that he was withholding, or was he genuinely, as he had implied to Annie, as unaware of her reasons for leaving him as he had claimed?
Firmly Helena rang the doorbell and waited. She didn’t have to wait very long.
‘Dr Dominic Carlyle?’ she questioned as Dominic opened the door.
‘Yes?’ Dominic agreed, frowning a little as he studied the set expression on the face of his unexpected visitor.
‘I’m Helena Lever,’ Helena introduced herself. ‘Annie’s doctor and friend…’
‘Her doctor?’ Dominic questioned, his frown intensifying as he invited Helena inside, closing the hall door on the room where he had been working and leading the way into the sitting room.
‘Annie doesn’t know I’m here,’ Helena told him, shaking her head in refusal of the refreshments he was offering. ‘But I had to see you because there’s something I think you should know.’
Dominic studied her assessingly. She had all the hallmarks of a dedicated and very professional woman. She was Annie’s doctor, she had told him, and suddenly an ominous chill of foreboding feathered down his spine.
‘She’s ill?’ he ques
tioned abruptly.
‘Not in the physical sense,’ Helena responded, equally curtly. The anxiety and concern she had heard in his voice had caught her somewhat off-guard. From Annie’s description of what had happened she had expected him to be far more hostile.
‘Annie was the victim of a serious road accident which resulted in her suffering from amnesia. Which is why—’
Helena stopped speaking as Dominic interrupted her, urgently demanding, ‘What do you mean a serious road accident? We…’
Trenchantly Helena explained, concluding, ‘So you see, when Annie told you that she did not know you were her husband she was telling you the truth. She has no memory of the accident or of the weeks prior to it. If you don’t believe me there are medical records,’ Helena informed him grittily, but Dominic was shaking his head.
He did believe her, but he was still in shock from the total unexpectedness of her revelations.
‘Why the hell didn’t Annie say something…tell me?’ he demanded hoarsely. ‘If she had…’
‘If she had you would never have bullied and threatened her the way you did?’ Helena offered crisply. ‘No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. No man worthy of the name would behave in such a way, would he?’
Helena could see from the slow dark burn of colour tingeing Dominic’s cheekbones and jawline that she had made her point.
‘Perhaps I was…Perhaps I did…overreact,’ he admitted. ‘But do you have any idea what it did to me when she simply walked out and disappeared?’ he demanded, when Helena made no response.
‘No,’ she told him remorselessly. ‘But I do know what it did to Annie when she was knocked down in the street and left in a coma, when she came round and it was discovered that she couldn’t remember large chunks of her life…’
‘When…when did it happen…the accident…?’ Dominic asked her harshly.
As she witnessed his reaction to her comments Helena found herself relenting a little towards Dominic.
‘Tuesday the twenty-eighth of September, just before midday, according to the witnesses,’ she informed him. ‘The date and the time are engraved on my memory—after all, I heard them often enough when I sat through the court case with Annie. She had to go to court to get proper compensation for her injuries,’ she explained.