by Penny Jordan
Dominic’s face had gone pale.
‘My flight left Heathrow later that afternoon,’ he informed her, adding grimly, ‘It’s a date and time that are engraved on my memory as well. Right up until the flight was called I was still hoping that she would appear…explain…She’d been missing for ten days by then,’ he added curtly. ‘You say she has no memory at all of…of our marriage…of me…?’
Helena could see how hard it was for him to say the words, and she could guess how much it would hurt his pride to hear her answer.
‘No, she hasn’t,’ she told him quietly.
‘She recognised me, though,’ Dominic persisted stubbornly.
‘Yes,’ Helena was forced to concede. ‘In one sense that’s true; she did. But not as a real person. Not as…’
‘…her husband,’ Dominic interjected for her. ‘Is her memory ever likely to return? Can anything be done to…?’
‘It may return. No one can say conclusively whether it will or not. And as for what can be done…Do you really think if there was anything…anything that Annie could do to remember, she wouldn’t?’ she asked him, shaking her head.
‘When we were talking about what had happened, and about you, she told me that she would give anything, do anything, to be able to remember. I can appreciate how much of a shock this must be to you, but try, if you can, to imagine how it must be for Annie. Not only has she had to spend the last five years wondering, worrying about what the missing period of her life might contain, she now has to contend with the added trauma of discovering that she has a husband she can’t remember, who she left without knowing why. I can assure you, Dr Carlyle, that Annie is simply not the sort of person to walk out on a commitment she would consider as important as the commitment of marriage without having a very, very good reason.
‘Perhaps you know more about that reason than you are prepared to say,’ Helena probed, holding her breath as she saw the way Dominic’s expression changed from one of intent concentration to one of inimical anger.
‘I have no knowledge of any kind—secret or otherwise—as to why Annie left. We had had a quarrel, yes, a ridiculous, silly argument about whether we should or should not, at some future stage in our marriage, have children.’
Helena raised an eyebrow.
‘You consider the issue of fathering children trivial?’ she asked him wryly.
‘No, I don’t,’ Dominic immediately defended himself grimly. ‘Quite the opposite. My own childhood taught me the depth of a child’s need to know it is loved and wanted by its parents. This was just a quarrel, a row. Caused, I believe, more by the fact that we were soon to part than any real disagreement between us about children.
‘How is Annie?’ he asked Helena abruptly, totally disarming her. ‘I overreacted a little to…to certain aspects of…of her behaviour towards me, not knowing about the accident…’
‘She’s very shocked,’ Helena informed him truthfully. ‘But she also has a good deal of inner strength. She has needed to have it, otherwise she would never have survived.’
She glanced at her watch. It was time for her to leave.
‘Annie needs your understanding, not your antagonism,’ she told Dominic forthrightly. She hesitated. ‘I haven’t mentioned this to Annie because I don’t want to raise her hopes, but it may be that your reappearance might just trigger something that could make her remember.’
Dominic had been in the middle of working on a very complex report when Helena had arrived, but after she had gone he knew there was no way he could go back to it. Although he had tried his best to hide it from Helena, her revelations had shocked him to such an extent that he still wasn’t fully able to totally comprehend everything she had told him.
The thought of Annie being hurt, lying in hospital alone, afraid…in pain, close to death…filled him with such anger and pain that he simply couldn’t keep still, pacing the floor of his sitting room. Why hadn’t she said something to him? Told him herself? Why hadn’t she explained to him that she was suffering from amnesia? Then he might have understood when she had kept going on about knowing him—about fate. Then he might…
He might have what? It was too late for him to have regrets now, to wish that he hadn’t…
That he hadn’t what? Taken her to bed? Taken advantage of her? In the light of what Helena had told him his own behaviour was little short of sheer outright cruelty.
But he hadn’t known, he reminded himself. He had thought, believed, that she was simply acting…playing him along…Had she really meant what she had said to him? Had she really felt—been reliving—the happiness, the love, they had once shared? Had she really believed that he was her soul mate…that they were fated to meet…that she loved him?
Well, if she had believed that she must be thoroughly disabused of that belief now. Nothing could alter his own belief that in leaving him the way she had she had deliberately destroyed the love they had shared, but that did not excuse his own behaviour. He would have to go and see her, Dominic decided. He owed her an apology for the present, even if she was either unprepared or unable to furnish him with one for the past.
Wearily he recognised that he was in danger of reactivating within himself emotions he had already decided were no longer valid or necessary. But just to think of Annie, his Annie, helpless and hurt, made him feel…made him ache…Made him want…But she wasn’t his Annie any more, he reminded himself savagely. She hadn’t been his Annie from the moment she walked away from him.
Despondently Annie unpegged the washing from the line, checking automatically that it was dry. She had spent the last hours following Helena’s visit in an orgy of cleaning—a displacement activity to stop herself from thinking about Dominic, from worrying and forcing herself unsuccessfully to try to remember.
She knew that she must have loved Dominic—her dreams alone were proof of that—and presumably he must have loved her, although there had been little evidence of that love when…But, no, she must not think about that. She might have loved him but she had still obviously felt she had to leave him—and then, having done, so had recreated via her dreams an image of him as her perfect lover.
She knew better now, of course, but what she still did not know was why she should have dreamed of Dominic in the way she had, as her hero, her saviour, her special one and only person, when the reality was so very different.
‘You walked out on me. You left me,’ Dominic had told her, and she had no defence against this accusation because she had no memory of the events he had described.
Gathering up her dried washing, she hurried towards the house, trying to suppress the feeling of panic that was spreading through her.
By keeping herself physically occupied she might somehow be able to keep her anxiety at a safe distance, or so she tried to reason. She dared not stop, dared not allow herself even to think about the appalling and unbelievable nature of the situation she was in. She was a married woman. She was married to Dominic Carlyle—a stranger!
A fit of shudders ran through her body as her stressed nervous system went into revolt. Putting down the washing, she decided to make herself a cup of coffee. She had just filled the kettle and switched it on when she heard her doorbell. Assuming that her visitor must be Helena, returning to remind her of her invitation for Annie to return home with her, she went to open the door.
The sight of Dominic standing outside on her doorstep was so unexpected that she physically reeled with shock, only her own gritty determination keeping her body rigid as she refused to give in to the wave of sickening panic that swept her.
‘What…what do you want?’ she challenged him, dry-mouthed.
‘I would like to talk to you,’ Dominic responded politely, but Annie wasn’t deceived. She knew now how deceptive that politeness actually was.
‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you,’ she told him proudly, her chin tilting as she clung to the half-open door.
A couple of doors away one of her neighbours was walking down her garden
path, and out of the corner of her eye Annie could see the interest they were attracting.
Instinctively she wanted to hide herself away from her neighbour’s curiosity, and as though he sensed what she was feeling Dominic told her softly, ‘I think you’d better let me in, Annie, unless you want other people to hear…’
He was leaving her no alternative other than to give in, Annie recognised.
Unsteadily she walked into the hallway, allowing him to follow her, needing the cool retreat of its privacy and semi-darkness.
Behind her, as he closed the door, she could hear Dominic asking, ‘Are you all right?’
All right? She had to stifle the shard-like slivers of her own pain as her chest tightened and her throat threatened to close up.
‘I was!’ she told him coldly, when she felt in control enough to speak.
They had reached the end of the hall now, and through the kitchen door she could hear the kettle starting to boil. Automatically she moved towards it, tensing as she recognised that Dominic had followed her.
Don’t come in here! she wanted to scream almost childishly at him. Don’t come anywhere near me. I don’t want you here…in my home…my sanctuary.
‘Helena has been to see me,’ he told her abruptly.
Annie could feel the shock of his words as though someone had opened her vein and let her blood drain away. The feeling was immediate and sickening: a cold wash of emotional pain coupled with a sense of blind panic and shock.
She felt the kettle she had just reached for slipping from her grasp. She cried out in alarm, instinctively jumping back as she dropped it and boiling water cascaded everywhere. She could feel her arm burning where the scalding water had touched it and she could hear herself crying out too. But it felt as though it was happening to someone else, as though somehow she wasn’t really a part of what was happening.
She could see Dominic moving towards her. She could hear the way he was cursing as he demanded harshly, ‘Let me see. You’ve scalded yourself.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she denied as she fought not to give in to the fierce pull of her own emotions. ‘Just a few splashes.’ But it was too late. He was holding her arm and examining it, first his glance and then his fingers examining the long scar that ran from her wrist right up her arm. It had faded a lot now, but it was still—in her eyes, at least—something she preferred others not to notice. Her badge of courage, Helena called it.
‘Why did you leave me, Annie?’ she could hear Dominic demanding rawly, and suddenly everything was too much for her.
The shock she had been fighting to keep at bay ever since he had told her that they were married finally crashed through the barriers she had tried to erect, and she started to cry, her whole body shaking with the force of her emotions. She put her hands protectively over her face, as though somehow by covering her eyes she was concealing herself from him, and concealing too her own shame at her weakness as she sobbed helplessly.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know…I can’t remember. I can’t remember…’
It was as though just making that admission, just acknowledging that weakness, had somehow opened the floodgates to all the pain and fear she had been bottling up right from the time of the accident.
She was shivering, shaking so badly she could hardly stand up, powerless to control what was happening to her. She could hear herself crying out in denial, as though she was being tortured, and then Dominic suddenly reached for her, wrapping his arms around her so tightly that his body provided a blanket that soaked up and smothered her distress as effectively as a blanket of foam might smother a sheet of flames.
‘Right. That’s it,’ she could hear him saying as the shudders started to die out of her body and her tears subsided. ‘There’s no way you’re staying here on your own. You’re coming home with me.’
‘No!’ Annie denied immediately, pulling herself out of his embrace. ‘I’m not a child. I’m an adult…a woman…and—’
‘And you’re also my wife,’ Dominic reminded her sharply. ‘You may not be able to remember that you married me, Annie, but we are still man and wife.’
‘We can get divorced…’
‘Yes,’ Dominic agreed. ‘But so far as I am concerned, before we bring an official end to our marriage, there are questions I would like to have answered. There are things we both need to know…’ he reinforced sombrely.
Annie looked away from him. She still felt weak and semi-shocked by the unexpectedness of her emotional breakdown. Breakdown! Meltdown, more likely. The small patches of flesh the water had splashed were still stinging painfully, and she felt dangerously light-headed, almost relieved to have Dominic take control.
‘You’re in shock,’ he was telling her almost sternly. ‘We both are, I suspect. This situation between us is something we need to work through together, Annie. I have no idea why you chose to end our marriage, and neither, it seems, do you.’
‘What do you mean—it seems?’ Annie challenged him immediately. ‘Do you think I’m just pretending? Do you think I don’t want to remember? Do you think—’ She stopped as she felt fresh tears threatening her. She felt weak and exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and what she longed for more than anything else right now was to be able to curl up somewhere dark and safe, to escape from all the trauma she was experiencing.
‘That scald needs attention,’ she could hear him telling her.
Tears burned the backs of her eyes.
‘Leave me alone. I’m all right,’ she told him. But she knew it wasn’t true—she felt sick, dizzy, and her vision was starting to blur. In her head she could see Dominic’s face—hear his voice—but not as they were now. Through the mists of her own confusion and faintness she tried desperately to catch the fading images but it was too late—already they were slipping away.
There had been a time, when she was first recovering, when she’d wondered despairingly whether she would ever be properly well, whether her inability to remember perhaps signified that her brain had been damaged along with her body. Helena had been quick to reassure her on that point, however, it had remained a slightly sensitive issue for her—one that had underlain her determination to obtain her degree and hold down a proper job.
Now, as she looked away from Dominic, she suddenly saw the blisters forming on her arm and recognised that she hadn’t known she had hurt herself. Through the faintness threatening to overwhelm her she could hear Dominic saying grimly, ‘Right, that’s it. No more arguments. You are coming home with me.’
The emergency doctor they had seen at the hospital’s casualty department might have told them that Annie’s scalds were relatively minor, and that it was delayed shock which had been responsible for her near faint, but Dominic wasn’t taking any chances. At his insistence she had been given both sedation and painkilling injections.
Now, as he headed for his home, the case he had returned to her house to pack for her stowed in the boot of his car, Annie dozed groggily beside him in the passenger seat.
Loath though he was to admit it, the vulnerability he had witnessed in her today had not just shocked him but also touched a nerve, an emotion he had thought he had long ago eradicated.
Because of this he knew he was behaving brusquely and distantly towards her, but if he didn’t…That look of helpless pride and panic he had seen in her eyes earlier had almost been enough to…
It was because it reminded him of how she had once looked at him before, he told himself as he brought the car to a halt outside his house.
‘Don’t move,’ he told Annie curtly as she started to reach for her door handle.
‘I can walk,’ Annie protested as Dominic came round and opened her door and reached inside to lift her out bodily. But even whilst she struggled to free herself from his hold waves of lethargy and weakness were sweeping over her.
The doctor in charge of the busy casualty unit, faced with Annie’s protests that she didn’t want any kind of medication and Dominic’s implacable determinat
ion, had given in to the greater force, and now, as Dominic ignored her protests and swept Annie up into his arms to carry her into the house, she could feel herself slipping away into the comfort of a cotton-woolly world of nothingness.
Because of his impromptu decision to bring her home with him Dominic hadn’t had any time to prepare a room for Annie, which meant that he had to carry her into his own room and place her carefully in the middle of his own large bed.
Studiously avoiding looking at her, he stripped off her outer clothes and pulled the duvet up over her underwear-clad body.
She had always been fine-boned, her body when he had first known her naturally that of a young girl, but now, although his senses told him that her curves were markedly those of a woman and not a girl, he was grimly aware of the fact that she was only just on the right side of being too thin, her ribs clearly discernible against the pale sheeny flesh of her midriff.
The Annie he had known had had a healthy appetite and an innocent enjoyment of her food that had made his body ache with the certain knowledge that her appetite for sex…for him…was just as innocent and enthusiastic. And there at least he had not been wrong. The first time he had taken her to bed—
Abruptly he stepped away. There were some memories it wasn’t wise or safe to exhume, and that was most definitely one of them. But perhaps because of its very danger, he discovered, after he had made his way back downstairs and tried to recommence his abandoned work, it was one that wasn’t going to allow itself to be sent away unrecognised.
Stifling a sigh of exasperation, he got up from his desk and walked over to the French windows, opening them and stepping outside into the garden. He was behaving as though he still loved her—but he didn’t—couldn’t—must not!
In the years they had been apart, the years of her desertion, her destruction of the love they had shared, he had used his anguish to ice-burn his feelings, his love, into a numbness he had refused to feel. Today, seeing the pain and fear in her eyes, he had felt the numbness starting to crack apart.