Forgotten Passion

by Penny Jordan

  Could she go back? Had she strength to return to the place where she had known such delirious happiness, and such bitter pain?

  ‘Come back, Lisa, you were miles away,’ Rorke’s voice goaded. ‘Where, I wonder? In the arms of your lover?’

  Lisa’s mouth compressed in a tight line,

  ‘I’ve only had one lover, Rorke,’ she told him levelly.

  ‘You mean you expect me to believe there’s been no one else since Peters?’ he mocked, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘Why? After all, you were willing enough to go to bed with me, before I found out the truth.’

  ‘The truth?’ Lisa stormed, the cold condemnation in his eyes and voice suddenly unleashing a torrent of rage—against Rorke himself, against his wilful blindness, against Helen who had destroyed their marriage almost before it got started, but most of all against Rorke, for his lack of faith, of trust, and surely love, because if he had truly loved her he would have believed her.

  ‘Mummy!’ Robbie wailed, sensing the antagonism springing up between the two adults. ‘Mummy!’

  ‘Don’t cry, Robbie, everything’s all right.’

  ‘He loves you now, Lisa,’ Rorke said softly, as she bent to pick Robbie up, ‘but will he still love you when he learns the truth about his daddy?’

  ‘I know about my daddy,’ Robbie piped up shrilly, fixing his eyes on Rorke. ‘He lives a long way away, over the sea. That’s why we never see him. Jamie has a new daddy,’ he announced gravely to Lisa. ‘Will I ever have a new daddy?’

  Out of the corner of her eye Lisa saw Rorke’s mouth tighten.

  ‘It’s time for Robbie’s lunch,’ she told him. ‘We can’t talk now, Rorke. I’ve got some work to do this afternoon.’

  ‘Then I’ll come back this evening, and when I do, I expect to get an answer from you, Lisa. Don’t forget, will you, that if Robbie were my child, I’d be able to take him back with me, with or without your permission, and if that’s what it takes to get you to see Dad, then that’s exactly what I’ll do. He needs you, Lisa.’

  * * *

  Long after Rorke was gone and Robbie was back at school, Lisa still heard those words. Leigh needed her. Could she refuse to go to him? Did she really want to? When Rorke had refused to accept that she was expecting his child she had run away, unable to stay, and, she acknowledged, in some ways she had been running ever since. Perhaps now the time had come to stop. She pushed away her work, unable to concentrate. Tonight Rorke would be back, wanting her answer.

  She sighed, and got up, not seeing the neat living room, but instead the high-ceilinged gracious rooms of Rorke’s home on St Martins.

  It was there that their engagement had been announced. Rorke had been withdrawn even then. She had overheard him complaining to his father that he hadn’t wanted all this fuss, just a quiet, simple wedding. Lisa hadn’t heard Leigh’s response; she hadn’t wanted to eavesdrop, but her heart had been warmed by Rorke’s admission, coming after several days when he had done nothing more than give her his customary brotherly kiss at breakfast and again at night, making no attempt to be alone with her.

  She had intended to go to him and tell him that she too wanted them to be married quietly, but before she was able to do so he had been called away to one of their hotels.

  It had been while he was away that she discovered she was pregnant. She had been feeling nauseous in the morning for several days, but had thought nothing of it until one afternoon when she had gone up to the hospital to help out by chatting to the patients and generally making herself useful. It had been unusually hot, but that alone did not account for the sudden faintness that overcame her; it had taken Mike to point out the truth to her, gently and with considerable concern. He had wanted her to be completely sure, and Lisa had agreed to go with him to his bungalow where he had a small surgery and where there would be less chance of anyone else guessing.

  The examination had been over in minutes. Mike had been entirely professional, and Lisa trusted him completely, but there had been a hard edge of anger to his voice when he asked abruptly when he had finished, ‘What the hell was Rorke thinking about? A man of his experience, surely he…’

  ‘Rorke doesn’t know,’ Lisa was quick to correct him, to defend her beloved Rorke from his disapproval, the words tumbling out of her mouth as she explained blushingly what had happened.

  A little to her surprise Mike looked very grave.

  ‘Concussion is a very strange thing, Lisa,’ he said slowly when she had finished. ‘You must realise there’s no guarantee that Rorke will ever remember.’

  ‘But he’ll know anyway when I tell him,’ Lisa pointed out, to her mind logically. ‘And then there’s the baby…’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mike seemed very abstracted, and the first frisson of fear had shivered over her.

  ‘Lisa, I don’t pretend to be any kind of psychiatrist, but it strikes me as odd that Rorke should choose to blot out such a very personal memory. I…’

  ‘Choose?’ Lisa had demanded, instantly picking him up. ‘But you just said that concussion…’

  ‘Yes, I know what I said,’ Mike agree, ‘but I think there’s more to it than that. I think you must tell Rorke straight away about what happened, and about the baby. Lisa, try to understand. Rorke’s been away one hell of a lot just recently, hasn’t he?’ He had given her a direct look. ‘Rorke’s a man in his late twenties, Lisa, and you’re a girl of seventeen. He loves you, he’s going to marry you, and so it follows like night follows day that he wants you—and probably very badly. What I’m trying to tell you is that he’s probably been keeping away from you deliberately, restraining himself because… Oh, hell!’ he broke off angrily.

  ‘But there’s no need for him to keep me at a distance, we’ve already made love,’ Lisa had pointed out, frowning.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mike had agreed. ‘And what do you think it’s going to do to him to discover that he’s already violated the innocence he’s trying so damned hard to protect. No wonder he can’t remember—He’s a very complex character Lisa, and at a guess I’d say he probably feels very conscious of the age gap between you. You’re still a child; he’s been an elder-brother, protector figure to you for so long that you can’t blame him if he finds it difficult to make the adjustment from brother to lover, however much he wants you.’

  ‘You mean he won’t believe me?’ Lisa had whispered, her throat dry with tension and fear.

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying that,’ Mike had been quick to comfort her. ‘Of course he’ll believe you, but my guess is that he won’t like himself much—at least for a while. He’s a tough character, Lisa, with a will as strong as steel, and something tells me he’s going to find it hard to forgive himself this.’

  He had seen the tears forming in her eyes and had leaned forward to comfort her, holding her gently against his shoulder, and that had been when Rorke had walked in. Lisa had seen him first, over Mike’s shoulder, stubble darkening his jaw, his eyes smouldering with an emotion she couldn’t define.

  She had left with him, tense and on edge, dreading having to tell him about the baby, wondering how on earth she was to find the right words.

  To make matters worse Helen had been at the house when they got back. She had travelled over from St Lucia with Rorke, and Lisa had felt red-hot jealousy claw at her when Helen mentioned that they had spent a couple of days together on St Lucia. She was doing it deliberately to make her jealous, Lisa told herself stoutly. She knew that Rorke had been working. She only had to look at Rorke’s tired features to know that. But that didn’t stop the pain, nor the ache of doubt that still lingered from her talk with Mike.

  Later that night she had heard someone outside her door. Thinking it might be Rorke, she had sat up excitedly, her face eager, but it had been Helen who stepped through the door, Helen, her face alight with triumph, her voice a low purr as she said venomously, ‘Expecting Rorke? My dear, if you had that sort of relationship with him he would hardly be marrying you, would he? Rorke is a
realist first and last. He’s marrying you because he wants you and he can’t get you any other way. Also you’re the sort of wife his father approves of, but don’t deceive yourself that he loves you, Lisa. Rorke loves me, and he’ll come back to me when he’s grown tired of making love to a child. Your innocence might be a challenge now, but…’

  Unable to bear the other woman’s mockery, Lisa had burst out, ‘What makes you think that Rorke and I aren’t already lovers?’

  Helen’s smile had been openly derisive. ‘If you are, it can’t have been very successful, otherwise why would Rorke have come to St Lucia—to me, Lisa?’

  She could still remember the pain of it now, the desire to scream that Helen was lying, but she hadn’t been able to, and instead it had been Helen who had the last word, saying spitefully, ‘A final word of warning, my dear—Rorke doesn’t like sharing, and if you’re wise you’ll keep your… friendship… with our handsome young doctor a secret from him.’

  Helen had stayed for two days, monopolising Rorke, excluding Lisa from everything they did together. Plans for the wedding went ahead, and Lisa was aware of Leigh watching her with concern in his eyes as she had tried to hide her despair and misery from everyone, longing only for the opportunity to talk to Rorke, to tell him about the night on board Lady and the repercussions from it, but he was strangely elusive. It was almost as though he didn’t want to talk to her.

  The night Helen left Lisa waited until the others had gone to bed and then followed Rorke to his room. She had knocked and then entered without waiting for him to call out. He had been standing in the middle of the room when she opened the door, his shirt already off, moonlight silvering the streamlined muscles of his torso. Her body had clenched in unwilling excitement, her mouth unbearably dry as she looked at him.

  His heavy-lidded glance swept over her, and in sudden heated urgency Lisa murmured his name, closing her eyes as she swayed towards him, feeling the hard band of his arms tightening round her as he swore under his breath, and then her cheek was against the cool skin of his shoulder, and she was breathing in the warm male scent of his body.

  ‘Lisa, what is it?’ she heard him demand above her, and her whole body started to tremble, her pulses leaping in response to the raw thread of sensuality running through his words.

  ‘Lisa, can’t you feel what you’re doing to me?’ Rorke muttered thickly against her hair.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’ There, the words were out, but Rorke ignored them, laughing savagely, as he released her and snapped on the light.

  ‘Not tonight you don’t, Lisa. Go to bed,’ he told her, his voice suddenly harsh, ‘before I forget all the promises I’ve made myself and take you to mine. Go, Lisa,’ he had told her harshly, and because of what she had read in his face she had fled, tears streaming down her face as she curled up in her own cold bed, wondering if Helen had been right and Rorke was simply marrying her because he wanted her physically.

  Too bemused and confused to rationalise her thoughts, she had at last fallen asleep, wishing childishly that somehow during the night all would be made well and when she woke up all the dark clouds would have vanished.

  * * *

  It was just after eight when Rorke returned. Lisa had just finished putting Robbie to bed.

  She refused to look at him as she let him in, but somehow his tall frame drew her eyes as he followed her into the small living room. He had changed into narrow dark cords and a checked woollen shirt which stretched tightly across his shoulders. He was carrying a leather blouson which he tossed casually on to a chair before sitting down.

  ‘Do make yourself at home,’ Lisa gritted sarcastically.

  ‘Thanks, I will.’

  He seemed impervious to her anger—but then he had always been impervious, she just hadn’t recognised the fact.

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ he told her coolly, flicking back his cuff to study his watch, ‘I’ve got an appointment later.’

  ‘Who with, Helen? Is she with you?’

  ‘Hardly. After all, in the eyes of the world I’m still a married man.’

  ‘Just as you were an engaged man when you spent two days with Helen on St Lucia,’ Lisa told him huskily, ‘and you needn’t bother denying it—Helen told me herself, just as she told me why you wanted to marry me. But she was right, wasn’t she, Rorke? You didn’t love me. All you wanted to do was to possess me.’

  ‘Always supposing you’re right, I didn’t get what you said I wanted, did I? Although you were willing enough to give yourself to someone else, as I recall. I even found the two of you together in his bungalow. Helen was right to warn me. Perhaps she was also right to tell me I should simply have taken you, the way he did.’

  ‘Mike never touched me!’ Lisa objected furiously.

  So it had been Helen who had hinted to Rorke that she and Mike were lovers. She had always suspected it.

  ‘No? But someone did, didn’t they? I asked you on our wedding night if you were coming to me a virgin, and you told me “no”.’

  ‘Because you and I had already been lovers,’ Lisa told him, her voice huskily taut with the need to make him see the truth.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ A cynical grimace curved his mouth downwards. ‘Don’t give me all that again! How I made love to you on board Lady, and then couldn’t remember a damn thing about it. Not remember!’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘God, if you knew how much I wanted you, you’d never say that! You were almost an obsession with me, Lisa. I tried telling myself you were just a child—my sister almost, but none of it did any good, I just had to look at you and I burned; burned up with wanting you, and you’re trying to tell me I wouldn’t remember touching you, fathering your child. Have you any idea what I put myself through in those days before the wedding, trying to protect you from myself? Nights without sleep, aching for the day, days working myself into the ground so that I could blot you out of my mind. Even promising my father that I wouldn’t rush you, wouldn’t frighten you with my need for you. And then I find out that it was all a sham; that the innocence I’d been killing myself to protect simply didn’t exist. And you try to convince me that I was the one? God, Lisa,’ he muttered, his face suddenly dark and congested with a bitter fury, ‘do you think I wouldn’t know if I’d made love to you? Do you think my body wouldn’t tell me? Do you think I’d ever forgive myself if I thought there was the slightest chance that you’re telling the truth?’

  Lisa had been about to retaliate when the meaning of Rorke’s final words penetrated. She knew he was telling the truth; she could hear the anguish in his voice, see it in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t you think I tried to believe it?’ Rorke demanded roughly. ‘God knows I wanted to, but I swore to myself before we left St Lucia that I wouldn’t touch you. I made myself a promise that I’d wait until we were married, until I could woo you properly, without frightening or alarming you, and then you turn round and tell me that I possessed you on Lady. How the hell do you think I could live with myself if I thought for one single moment that that was true?’

  There was nothing she could say. She knew he spoke the truth; it probably would destroy him if he found out that he had been wrong, and suddenly the image she had held in her mind all those years since Robbie’s birth, of Rorke coming to her, admitting that he had been wrong, telling her he wanted them both back, that he couldn’t live without them, melted, and Lisa knew agonisingly that his knowing the truth would simply make a wider gulf between them.

  Rorke genuinely believed that he could not, would not have made love to her, and she could see with a mature wisdom she had lacked at the time that to discover the truth now would destroy his own faith in himself. And anyway, what did it matter? she asked herself wearily. He didn’t love her; had probably never loved her as she had him. He had wanted her. He was quite frank about that; and she, in her youthful innocence, had assumed that ‘wanting’ and ‘loving’ were synonymous. Now she knew better, and she could also see what Mike had been getting at when he had tried t
o warn her how difficult it might be to get Rorke to accept the truth.

  ‘Well, Lisa?’ she heard Rorke demanding roughly. ‘Are you going to come back with me?’

  ‘Won’t Helen have something to say about that?’

  ‘My relationship with Helen is strictly out of bounds as far as you’re concerned. For all that you may deride her, Lisa, at least she’s honest in what she is.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she flung back at him, suddenly infuriated by his defence of the other woman. ‘And it’s all right for Helen to sleep with whoever she wants—you can’t tell me you’re the only lover she’s ever had, but simply because you think I…’

  ‘It wasn’t your virginity, damn you!’ Rorke gritted, a dark tide of colour creeping up under his skin, as he reached for her, fingers circling her wrists like a steel clamp.

  ‘No?’ Lisa said shakily, trying to twist free. ‘You’ll have to forgive me if I think differently, Rorke—after all, the facts speak for themselves. You were pretty quick to point out that you didn’t want “another man’s leavings”—that was the polite way you described me, as I remember.’

  ‘You were my wife!’ Rorke was breathing heavily, his eyes dark with remembered rage. ‘I’d torn myself apart trying to protect you, trying… Oh, for God’s sake what’s the use? What really galled me was not so much what you’d done, but the way you tried to deceive me, to tear me apart by telling me it was me, and then trying to foist Peters’ brat off on me.’

  The sharp sound of Lisa’s open palm connecting with his jaw echoed through the small room, her face as white as milk as she stared blindly up at him.

  She was trembling in fear and shock. She had never employed physical violence in all her life, and yet for one brief second of time she had found pleasure and release in the sting of her palm against Rorke’s face.

  ‘Why, you…!’

  She was yanked bodily into Rorke’s arms, her heart pounding in terror as they locked round her and she was forced backwards against his arm, his hand lifting to grasp her chin and lift her face so that he could look into her eyes.