Substitute Engagement

by Jayne Bauling

  His words shocked her, and she strained to see his expression in the darkness as he began fastening his shirt

  ‘But…’

  Her voice faded away as she registered his tone. Humiliation scalded her. He had been showing kindess to her, but he wasn’t prepared to take it beyond a certain point! Dear God, had she been imposing on him? Her face flamed, making her glad of the darkness.

  ‘Accept it, Lucia. I don’t think you’re ready to take things further yet, which means I’m not ready either, and I may never be. Can you manage?’ he added abruptly, seeing that she was struggling to disentangle her bra from her blouse.

  ‘Yes!’ Embarrassment made her voice clipped and emphatic.

  She could guess what the wrong reason on his side had been. The need to pretend that he was involved with her was preventing anything developing between him and Madelon, or any of the other glamorous women around in whom he might have taken an interest, so he had probably been driven by simple frustration as much as by kindness or pity. She had been the substitute!

  She was recalling the words he had used at first. ‘Not yet.’ He had been willing to indulge her with a few preliminaries to full lovemaking, and to indulge himself too—he must have been equally caught up in passion or he wouldn’t have let it go so far—but, he was probably waiting before taking things any further, until he had decided how long he felt they needed to keep up the fiction in which they were engaged.

  If it went on too long he might think it was worth going further, especially if he didn’t feel that he could fairly go beyond mere flirtation with Madelon while ostensibly involved with another woman, but if they were to abandon the public pretence fairly soon then he wouldn’t want the complication of a real entanglement.

  Neither did she, Lucia reminded herself bleakly, so it was just as well that he had possessed the control to terminate the cycle of passion before it could complete itself. She didn’t think she could cope with an affair based on sexual attraction. It would do too much damage to her self-respect, and how could she have forgotten that Rob himself had no emotional regard for her?

  ‘All right?’ Rob saw her fasten the last button of her blouse. ‘Then come back to the hotel.’

  ‘I apologise if I’ve…been imposing on you,’ she offered stiffly as they started walking.

  ‘You haven’t.’ He sounded slightly amused.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking properly,’ she excused herself in a rush. ‘That’s what happens when you’re so…Maybe you should go back to being all horrible and mocking. Then I’ll behave normally.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I can do that—unless you provoke me sufficiently, of course,’ he qualified in a curiously regretful tone. ‘You’ve needed the strength anger gives you, but you shouldn’t any longer.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me,’ Lucia snapped.

  ‘Combustible Lucia! But I wasn’t being patronising; I was merely stating what I know. Stop a moment; you’ve got sand all over you,’ he informed her as they came within the flood of light streaming from the hotel building, and Lucia stood still and tense as he brushed gently at her hair and then the back of her shorts, emitting a breath of laughter as he did so. ‘If anyone can see this they’ll know exactly what we’ve been doing out on the beach.’

  ‘Then at least from your point of view some good has come of it,’ she quipped brightly as he finished and she turned to face him. ‘After all, that’s what our association is all about, isn’t it?’

  Rob studied her for several seconds without speaking, shadow making a mystery of his eyes.

  Then he said, ‘Anyone seeing your face will also know. Go in now, Lu. Goodnight.’

  The abbreviation of her name startled her, because it ought to have denoted affection but that was the last thing he could possibly feel for her. Oh, it was probably just that Zimbabweans were as lazily casual in their speech as she had found their South African neighbours to be and shortened everything they could. Hadn’t she once heard some of his compatriots referring to their country as ‘Zims’?

  A need to be out of his presence abruptly paramount, she obeyed with a curt nod, aware that he remained standing there, watching her go. Reaching her room in the staff annexe, she saw what he had meant by his reference to her face when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Attention arrested, she stared briefly before averting her gaze self-consciously.

  Glittering eyes, blurred lips and flushed cheeks all proclaimed exactly what he had said they did, and even when this outward evidence had faded an inner disturbance remained, encroaching relentlessly on her mind, troubling her while she was awake and fretting at her dreams.

  It was still present the next day too, pushing its way forward whenever she had a moment to spare from the demands and distractions of her job. Lucia was afraid of her thoughts now, with a feeling that she was incubating some item of knowledge that would cease being inchoate and emerge absolute, exact and unalterable if she gave too much time to nurturing it.

  Thus she welcomed every customer to the hotel shop, especially those who were disposed to linger and chat. She didn’t want to have to give mental space to anything personal, least of all the way Rob had made her feel and the unwelcome truths it seemed to presuppose.

  At least she saw nothing of him all day, but out of sight definitely didn’t mean out of mind in this case.

  Even Thierry Olivier, waiting for her after she’d left the shop in the care of the Comorean teenager who looked after it during the evenings, was to be seized on as a useful distraction from thought, if nothing else.

  ‘We haven’t really had a chance to talk properly,’ he ventured longingly as she looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘I thought we said everything relevant the other evening,’ Lucia responded a little tartly. ‘I know I did, especially now I’ve met your Nadine. Did she tell you she’d been to see me? I’m sure you’ll be very happy together. When’s the wedding?’

  ‘I’m not sure. We’re still deciding,’ Thierry replied; he paused and rushed on anxiously, ‘Lucia, you must tell me. Am I doing right to be marrying her?’

  To her surprise her initial reaction was to feel a prickle of irritation, and she sighed sharply.

  ‘Thierry, you’ve got Nadine now.’ She tried to speak gently. ‘You have to get out of the habit of expecting me to make up your mind for you. That’s all it is, and you know something? You’re already sure she’s the right woman for you or you couldn’t have brought yourself to the point of getting engaged to her and running the risk of having to face all sorts of unpleasantness when she and I found out about each other, although I know you must have been hoping that somehow that side of it would just go away. But think about it. You made the decision.’

  ‘Yes, I did!’ Thierry sounded more confident. ‘I had got into the habit of waiting for you to decide things for us, but when I met her I found I knew my own mind again…But you are still good for me, Lucia—the way you make me look at things.’

  She gave him a quick, happy smile as she remembered, ‘I’ve still got our ring. You’d better come and get it now. It’s in my room in staff quarters.’

  She hadn’t put the ring in the hotel safe, mainly because she had shrunk from the idea of some entirely unlikely breach of security by which word might get out about her deposit, causing people who knew her, such as Hassan Mohammed, to realise that she had returned to the Comoros believing herself still engaged to Thierry.

  She would give him the ring now, and then her freedom would be absolute.

  Lucia’s blue-green eyes went blank as the thought finally forced her to confront the revelation she had been first fumbling for and then dodging.

  She didn’t love Thierry, and she hadn’t done so for quite some time. Worse, she didn’t think she had ever loved him in the way a woman should love the man she was going to marry.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘WHAT about you?’ Thierry questioned Lucia when they were in her room. ‘You and Rob Ballard? You’re not serious about
him? Nadine says she thinks he may never marry, and for you…He is so harsh.’

  Lucia managed a brilliant, dismissive smile as she turned to face him, holding out the ring.

  ‘Harsh by your standards, I know. No, of course I’m not serious.’ She laughed as she dropped the shining circle of gold with its glittering stone into the hand he extended. ‘I think you kept the little case it came in, didn’t you?

  ‘I’m just having fun right now, Thierry, enjoying my freedom. We were together too young, weren’t we? Too young for me, I mean; and we were so close and so comfortable that we became a habit with each other, I think, drifting along and never bothering to examine ourselves. We both needed these Ballards dropping into our lives and waking us up.’

  There was no need to hurt him by telling him that she had allowed a need for the security of being settled, of belonging, to persuade her that affection and a youthful, superficial attraction were love. Let him believe that she had truly loved him and stopped.

  ‘Then you have no regrets?’

  Thierry looked and sounded wistful, standing there hesitating as she opened the door for him, and Lucia felt impatient. He had Nadine. What more did he want?

  ‘None. We’ve had some good moments over the years, and I think you probably did me one immense favour, because having you in my life kept me on the straight and narrow at varsity instead of throwing myself into the social side of campus life. It can be a sexual funfair, and I might have been distracted to the detriment of my studies and have ended up breaking my promise to my father if I’d failed and somehow not been able to either sit retakes or repeat a year.’

  Realising that it probably wasn’t what he wanted to hear, she pushed him gently out into the wide, carpeted corridor and added affectionately, ‘I’ll always be fond of you, Thierry.’

  Trite though it was, she realised that it was the strict truth as she hugged him and felt him put his arms round her.

  ‘And I of you,’ he responded emotionally, but then she felt him stiffen.

  Raising her head, she saw Rob striding towards them from the far end of the corridor where the resident staff’s private lounge was situated. Presumably he was in search of her, although not necessarily, as Madelon Brouard occupied the room next to hers.

  ‘There’s an exit the other way,’ she whispered to Thierry, urging him in the opposite direction as a last act of kindness to him, knowing that he was thinking about what Rob might say to Nadine about this. He went with alacrity, leaving her to turn and call impulsively, ‘Rob?’

  There was nothing enigmatic about his eyes as he reached her. They were blazing with anger, and the same emotion was hardening his face and imparting a tight, ruthless curve to his lips.

  ‘Protecting your lover, Lucia?’ he taunted with unconcealed disgust. ‘But it’s not me he’ll have to face. It’s my sister. And he’s not going to slide surreptitiously out of that engagement the way he did with the other.’

  ‘He’s not—’

  ‘How long have you had him in here with you?’ he swept on contemptuously. ‘Long enough for you to effect a reconciliation, anyway, going by the touching leave-taking I’ve just witnessed. I came in the way you’ve just sent him out—I thought I’d see if you were in the staff lounge first, before I tried your room.

  ‘I should have known you’d have a crack at getting him back. You’ve implied that you might try often enough, but I was inclined to think it was the wrong side of pride prompting you, and that you had the intelligence to be looking at it from the right angle by now and wouldn’t have him back on any terms.’

  ‘Nothing happened; I wasn’t trying to get him back,’ Lucia protested with furious indignation, her hands giving agitated emphasis to the denial.

  ‘Spare me the lies even if you must persist in lying to yourself,’ Rob snapped. ‘This door was closed when I passed. Why was the door closed if it was so innocent?’

  ‘I don’t know! Habit—like I told him everything else was,’ she suggested bitingly.

  ‘I’m really not that interested in what you told each other, Lucia,’ he retorted caustically.

  ‘Listen to me, damn it!’ Her voice rose.

  ‘I think what I despise most about you is the damage you’re prepared to do to yourself for him,’ Rob offered savagely, beginning to turn away from her. ‘Not forgetting the damage to him. And I don’t feel like standing here listening to you deceiving yourself, and trying to convince me that you won’t be making any sacrifices for him, when the only real reason you’ve made the effort to get him back in the first place is because you can’t face up to the fact that another woman suits him better than you.

  ‘I suppose you had to use sex to persuade him it’s you he wants after all. Well, you’re good there, I’ll grant you that.’

  It was so insulting that sheer temper held her silent for several seconds. Then she realised that he was walking away from her.

  ‘Come back! Don’t you call me a liar and then walk away from me,’ she raged imperiously. ‘You’re supposed to know me—understand me—so you should know if I’m lying or not!’

  It succeeded in halting his departure. He stood so still that he seemed to have been mentally arrested as well, and she saw the alert, oddly intent angle at which he held his head, as if he was concentrating on something, or, perhaps, waiting for more.

  But she was incapable of further speech for the moment, possessed by a sense of some self-betrayal. Why should she care if he believed her or not? But she did; she needed him to.

  He was turning slowly and retracing his steps, his expression curiously questioning as he searched the angry confusion in her eyes.

  ‘That’s quite a challenge, and perhaps you’re right,’ he acknowledged softly.

  ‘So do you—?’

  She stopped, aware of the door to the next room opening and Madelon looking out, grinning meaningfully at them and retreating.

  ‘Go inside.’ Rob urged Lucia gently into her own room with him and closed the door.

  The contact was brief—just the slightest pressure of his hand on her shoulder, felt through the fine cotton of her short, straight melon-pink shift—but it sent her hurtling back to the mind-fazing physical awareness of him that had possessed her last night. Lucia swallowed, realising that she had probably made a mistake in not letting him just walk away.

  ‘I was…I gave Thierry his ring back,’ she explained haltingly, meeting his eyes warily. ‘That’s why he was in here.’

  ‘Yes?’ He paused, absorbing it. ‘And what else?’

  ‘So obviously I wasn’t trying to get him back!’ she snapped resentfully. ‘You should know that! You talk about my…my pride often enough, and you’re right! Whatever I feel or don’t feel for Thierry, I wouldn’t have him back on any terms, damn it!’

  ‘That’s the intelligent attitude,’ he commended her sardonically.

  ‘And, if you must know, I agree with you that Nadine suits him better than I would,’ Lucia added tempestuously. ‘I’m…I was bad for him.’

  And that was quite enough, she decided, silencing herself. She wasn’t about to tell him about the discovery she had just made concerning her feelings for Thierry. He would only be derisive, or contemptuous. Of course, he would realise sooner or later, if they had much more to do with each other, just as he guessed everything else she was feeling, but he could work at grasping something for once!

  ‘So, even if you’re still hurt by what he has done, you should be able to be philosophical about it for his sake and reflect that he has had a narrow escape,’ Rob suggested brutally. ‘If not for Nadine, you might have been married with babies before you’d realised that, martyring yourself and trying to make the best of things for everyone’s sake.’

  Lucia stared at him, her sensitive imagination cringing before the awfulness of the situation that she might have created.

  Then, without any warning, the emotional resilience that had enabled her to meet the demands of the last few days buckled fatally, a
nd Lucia burst into tears, not so much in relief as in reaction to her own stupidity.

  ‘I still feel such a fool!’ she gulped by way of excuse, although it was part of the truth too. ‘I feel…humiliated!’

  ‘Most people would, and especially anyone with pride as sensitive as yours,’ Rob suggested dismissively, reaching for her.

  The embarrassment she was experiencing at finding herself crying in front of him was compounded by the all too obvious reluctance with which he drew her to him. Lucia didn’t just sense it; she literally felt it in the slow, unwilling way his arm curved about her shoulders.

  ‘And I’m making a total fool of myself again now,’ she sobbed stormily, unable to stop the tears yet, despite her shamed awareness that she was forcing him into a position that he clearly found distasteful—having to offer comfort.

  ‘Not that.’ The long fingers cupping the back of her head as he pressed it into his shoulder were also reluctant. ‘You haven’t let anyone else guess what you’re going through. You’ve stayed and faced both Olivier and Nadine on a couple of occasions instead of running away and hiding, which is what a lot of people would do under similar circumstances.’

  ‘I was only able to do it because I was so angry,’ she said tempestuously.

  ‘I know.’

  Even his voice was reluctant, and it was that which finally enabled Lucia to stop crying. She lifted her head and glared at him with furious, tear-drenched eyes.

  ‘You don’t really want to be here…doing this, do you?’ she accused unevenly, and Rob looked back at her with the faintest of sardonic smiles flickering about his mouth.

  ‘No, not really,’ he agreed coolly after a few seconds, letting her go as she took a step backwards. ‘For various reasons.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to! I’m only using you,’ Lucia asserted defiantly, suddenly desperate to give the appearance of strength as a counter to the shaming weakness she had revealed.