by Penny Jordan
The house smelled of damp and decay. An old chair, gaping holes in its worn cover, the stuffing spilling from them, added to the air of desolation. As she walked across the floor, Sage closed her ears to the soft scufflings and squeaks that rustled around her.
In Agnes's day she had visited the house quite often. Her mother had kept a neighbourly eye on the older woman, and Sage had been fascinated enough by the house and its occupant to relish these visits.
In those days Agnes had lived mainly in one bedroom, the kitchen and a small sitting-room. The rest of the house had even then been falling into a state of disrepair, what furniture there was in the other rooms enshrouded with white linen covers, which had been referred to as 'hollands' and which, her mother had explained to Sage, was an old-fashioned term for the covers used to protect the furniture in large houses when its occupants were away.
To Sage they had always been reminiscent of shrouds; white and ghostly and somehow filled with sadness.
Now, as she walked through the sculleries and pantries, and then the kitchen, she saw that most of the furniture had gone.
No doubt Daniel with his orderly mind wanted the house cleared before he finally dealt it its death blow.
The Tudor section of the house had a small narrow hallway with a flight of equally narrow stairs, which Agnes had always referred to as the servants' stairs. The main hallway was in the Georgian wing of the building, a pretty oval room, with a delicate marble and wrought-iron staircase that seemed to float upwards through all four storeys of the building. Sage remembered how amazed and enthralled she had been as a child to look up the entire height of the building and to see a painting on its ceiling enclosed in a delicate oval plaster frame— a mural depicting what her mother had explained to her was meant to represent the Greek god Zeus peering down towards the earth through dark thunder-clouds.
As she picked her way through rooms thick with cobwebs and dust, filled with stale damp air, trying not to look at the betraying stains on the walls and ceilings, trying not to notice rotting panelling and damaged stucco, she wondered if the mural was still there.
It was… True, the once magnificently storm-laden clouds had now turned a uniform leaden grey, the paint flaking off in places. True, Zeus's once proud features had become obscured and faded. True, since she had first set eyes on this mural she had visited Italy and seen the magnificence of Michelangelo's breathtaking Sistine Chapel. But perhaps your first awareness of something that was to motivate your whole life was like your first lover… Something you never forgot, something you always remembered with affection and tenderness, something you cherished in your heart with loyalty and love.
She might cherish her awed reaction to her first realisation that someone, a person had actually painted Zeus and his clouds on the ceiling, but she certainly did not cherish any memories of her first lover. Not in the way she would have done if Daniel…
She tensed immediately like someone trying to clamp down on intense physical agony, the ceiling blurring as she fought against what she was feeling.
She started to climb the stairs, trying to concentrate on her physical movements to blot out the enormity of her thoughts.
At first-floor height, a narrow oval gallery encircled the hallway. A corridor led off it to the bedrooms, its style repeated on the second floor. Sage paused at first-floor level, noticing how much of the balustrading was missing… how dangerous and uneven the floorboards were. Plaster and dust covered the floor, and no matter how carefully she placed her feet every time she moved she sent up choking clouds of dust. The closer she got to the mural, the more she was aware of its destruction. Paint was peeling away from the plaster in thin soft sheets. Daniel would need to do nothing to destroy Zeus—time and neglect had already done his work for him.
She felt tears sting her eyes. Suddenly all she wanted to do was to escape from the house and its forlornness.
She turned on her heel and started back down the stairs, coming to an abrupt halt near the bottom, the breath hissing out of her lungs, as she saw Daniel Cavanagh standing below her in the hall watching her.
'What are you doing here?' she demanded aggressively, masking her own shock.
He looked up at her and then said with deceptive calm, 'Well, I'm not trespassing.'
Sage stared at him, felt herself flush as guiltily as a schoolgirl, saw him come towards her, and, without knowing why, took an instinctive step backwards, losing her balance as she stepped on to a piece of fallen plaster.
She heard Daniel call out sharply and warningly. As she stumbled she reached for the balustrade, only she missed it and with nothing to hold on to… nothing to stop her fall, she plummeted through space and down towards the marble floor.
She heard herself cry out, closing her eyes automatically, tensing her body for its impact with the floor, but instead she felt hard fingers grab hold of her, heard the savage rush of breath that left Daniel's chest as he caught hold of her, heard him curse with what was left of that breath as he dragged her free of the plaster and debris which were showering down around them.
'You little fool, couldn't you see those stairs weren't safe?' Daniel was shouting in her ear.
The shock of her near accident had made her lightheaded. 'Is that what you're going to claim when you raze it to the ground?' she flung at him.
She then gasped as he literally lifted her off her feet and shook her, saying angrily, 'You stupid woman, don't you understand? You could have been killed.'
She already knew that, and her stomach was still twisting nauseously with that knowledge, and yet she still fought it and him, saying mockingly, 'So what? It would have let you off the hook, wouldn't it? Pity you didn't think about that before rushing in to play Sir Galahad.'
'My God.'
She could feel the bite of his fingers into her skin, even through the protection of her sweater, wincing at their crushing strength. She felt faint and sick and more vulnerable then she could remember feeling in a long time.
There was something sticky and hot on her face, and as she raised her hand to touch it her fingers came away stained with blood.
'It's all right,' Daniel told her roughly, one hand leaving her arm to push her fingers away. 'It's only a scratch.'
She jerked back from him as he reached out to touch her skin, her eyes reminding him in their ferocity of an eagle's. There was dust on her skin, and with her hair tied up in that ponytail she looked as young as she had done the first time he had seen her. Emotions he had thought he had long ago taught himself not to feel boiled up inside him. She could have been killed, could have been lying there on the floor under that crushing burden of wood, plaster and metal, her face as white as it had been the night she had come to him and…
Sage didn't like being so close to him. It stirred up too many memories. She was having to fight too hard to stop herself from simply letting go and leaning into him… on to him… From…
'You've always got to fight, haven't you, Sage?' she heard him challenging her. 'You've always got to prove how tough you are. How independent, how invulnerable, and how you enjoy it… You just love putting us down, don't you? Do you know what they call you behind your back, when they've finally managed to crawl out of your bed? They say that for all your sexual skill, for all your experience and your inventiveness, at heart you're a real balls-breaker, and as destructive as hell.'
She went white and then red, not knowing why she should feel this raging, searing pain, not knowing why she should care what he thought of her, not knowing why she felt this helpless, crippling, endless pain, only knowing that she had to hurt him back, to kick out at him… to retaliate and wound him as cruelly as he had done her.
She tried to break free of his hold and, when he wouldn't let her go, said bitterly, 'Then it's just as well that you turned me down all those years ago, isn't it? Trust a man like you to protect his precious machismo…'
'A man like me.' He was furious with her and showing it. 'You don't know the first thing about
me,' he told her.
'And you don't know the first thing about me,' she flung back.
'Oh, no? I know you want this.'
She had been kissed before in anger, had even deliberately incited that kind of anger, enjoying the sexual power it gave her, but suddenly and painfully this was different, her mind and body wiped clear of the memories which should have given her the experience to cope with what was happening to her. She couldn't move in his arms, felt frighteningly helpless beneath his mouth, unable to reject its bruising pressure, so that her lips were as vulnerable and defenceless as though the only kisses they had previously known had been those free from any kind of sexual intimacy. Her body felt curiously stiff, locked in a strange paralysis, which she recognised as stemming from intense shock. The shock of her near accident, the shock of Daniel's presence… and most of all the shock of this brutal, punishing kiss that wiped away all the years that lay between them, transporting her instantly back to another time, another place, another occasion when she would have welcomed the ferocity of that angry male mouth. .
Suddenly she broke free of her paralysis, biting angrily at his mouth as she fought its dominance, but to her shock he retaliated equally violently, his teeth savaging her bottom lip so that she could taste the hot salt of her own blood.
She made a helpless, angry sound and touched the wound with her tongue, only to have it pushed out of the way by his as he quickly explored the small wound and then explored it again, far more slowly, stroking the violently sensitive flesh.
It was such a brief touch, such a stupid weakness… such an implausible cause of the heat that exploded so violently inside her, taking her so completely off guard that she had no way of protecting herself against it, could only stare at him with angry, betrayed eyes as she felt the rolling heat burn through her body. Helpless to stop the sudden fierce tightening of her nipples, the brief flaring of longing that darkened her eyes, the small betraying sound she tried to stifle in her throat. All of these were nothing compared with the reckless racking agony of need that pulsed so sharply through her lower body, enforcing on her too-intelligent mind the knowledge that if he chose to, right here and now, without the softening veils of shared liking, humour or respect, without any of the trappings of civilisation and sophistication, without the excuse of senses blurred by a good wine, soft light and sensual music, without even the comfort of her own bed, without any of the fastidious trimmings she normally considered an essential ingredient of any kind of sexual intimacy—clean linen sheets, the amusement and assurance of knowing how much her partner desired her, of how much she could tease and torment him—without even the most simple and basic precautions against pregnancy, she would eagerly, hungrily, wantonly have allowed Daniel to bring the explosive violence between them to its natural conclusion, in an act of possession as immediate and violent as the need it had aroused within her.
It was a knowledge that nauseated and horrified her. Whatever else she might have been, she had never, never descended to those depths, to that kind of personal degradation… She had never wanted a man like this… never felt this savage raw hunger for another human being to such ah extent that it transcended every single one of her most deeply held and most private tenets of self-respect and pride…
As she stared into his face she had a second's horrifying awareness that Daniel knew exactly what she was feeling, just as intimately as she did herself; she saw the knowledge in his eyes and was sickened by the realisation of it, shocked back to a burning, bitter reality that had her tearing herself out of his arms, at the same time as he said thickly, 'No, Sage, don't…'
He was standing between her and the door, and she could see no way of effecting the escape she so desperately craved. No way of salving her pride by ignoring what had happened, by lying or pretence…
There was nothing for her to do but face him. She did it as bravely as she could, knowing there was no point in concealment, in the fiction of a deceit which would convince neither of them, and only leave her feeling worse than she already did.
Head held high, she asked bitingly, her voice low with self-revulsion, 'Don't what, Daniel? Don't lust after you like a bitch on heat?'
She saw the bones in his face tighten as his jaw clenched and she laughed bitterly. 'You're quite right. It's obscene, isn't it? Disgusting—the very last thing you want, and the very last thing I want as well. You needn't worry—these days I do have some small measure of self-control.'
She gave him a glitteringly painful smile that made him wince and ache inside. 'Don't ask me why I want you—I don't know the answer. Perhaps it's the old story of the one who got away.' She was back in control of herself now, her voice strong and self-mocking, the whiteness dying out of her skin, the shock leaving the green eyes remote and wary, as though she was looking not at him, but beyond him.
Determinedly she walked towards him, intending to leave, but he checked her, standing in her way, 'Sage, we—'
'There is no "we",' she told him sharply. 'There never has been and there never will be.'
'You want me.'
She looked at him, her eyes a bitter hell of rage and impotence. 'Yes,' she agreed shakily. 'But I want my self-respect more. Gaining it has been a long, hard fight for me, Daniel. I don't need any man to have sex with me out of pity or curiosity… and if you were thinking of using my… my vulnerability towards you in order to bribe me into conveniently forgetting about your involvement with this place…'
She'd gone too far. She saw it in his eyes, felt the fierce burn of his anger, suddenly gone out of control.
Panic clawed at her, an entirely female panic born of instincts given to the feminine sex at the very beginning of time. She tried to push past him, forgetting all that her life had taught her, but instead of standing to one side he caught hold of her, half lifting her off her feet as he almost slammed her back against the wall, imprisoning her there with the weight of his body, while his fingers closed round her wrists, restraining her flaying arms.
As his mouth touched hers, she heard him saying fiercely, 'I should have done this years ago. God knows if I had…'
The words stopped, dying beneath the pressure of a kiss she tried to tell herself that neither her body nor her soul had hungered for for nearly a half of her whole lifetime. Memories she had thought long forgotten stirred, giving birth to an aching need, and with that need came her old fear, her old dread that this man above all others possessed something that was so dangerous to her that even to allow herself to acknowledge its presence was to fatally weaken her own defences.
She fought against herself and him with every ounce of self-control she had, but he knew her vulnerability now, knew it and used it against her, refusing to accept the closed hard line of her mouth, the rigid, defensively tight muscles of her body, letting his full weight rest tormentingly against her, keeping her arms at her sides, while he moved against her with such deliberate sensuality that her soul cried out inside her in silent anguished need and her flesh ached as though it had been pummelled by a thousand tormenting fists.
As he felt the response stir inside her, and suffered his own helpless, overwhelming reaction to it, he lifted his mouth from hers, briefly relaxing the pressure that imprisoned her, wanting to find the words to soften the bitterness in her eyes, to tell her that she wasn't alone in either her anguish or her need, but that brief moment of relaxation was all she needed to break his hold on her, and to push past him, almost running towards the door.
He could have stopped her… could have caught up with her and taken her back in his arms, but he had never forced a woman to make love with him in his life, and the revulsion he felt at the thought of doing so now checked him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sage didn't stop running until she had reached the sanctuary of her car.
Once there, she turned the key in the ignition and locked the doors, but she was shaking far too much to drive. Her body was hot with sweat and fear. She wiped her trembling hands on her jeans, grimac
ing as she did so. She was appalled by her own self-betrayal, her almost total loss of self-control. She wasn't nineteen any more, for God's sake, she told herself angrily as she set the car in motion at last. What on earth had made her go overboard like that? She had enough experience of her own sexual needs and those of the majority of the heterosexual male sex to have been able to avoid that disastrous conclusion to her run-in with Daniel.
It was no use telling herself that it was the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly—it was no use telling herself anything other than the truth, and since that truth was something she didn't have the strength to face up to right now, the best thing she could do was to blot it out of her mind, It wasn't as though she didn't have anything else to think about… She smiled cynically to herself, wondering how her mother would have reacted in similar circumstances…
Would she have retained her ladylike self-control, her calm self-assurance? Would she…?
Angrily she pressed down harder on the accelerator, trying to use the car's swift responsive surge of power to drown out what she was thinking. She would find some escape from her thoughts by pulling up the opportunistic weeds in her mother's garden for the rest of the day. She needed some physical activity to keep her mind away from Daniel.
The next morning she came downstairs to find Faye pacing the hall, her normally almost too bland sweetness of expression marred by a deep frown.
Suppressing a faint sigh, not really wanting to hear any more about her problems with Camilla, Sage stopped to ask, 'Is anything wrong?'
'Yes… No… I've got to go out. Camilla's gone down to the stables. Will you tell her when she comes back?'
She was heading for the stairs before Sage could say anything, moving so quickly and tensely that Sage stared after her curiously.
What on earth was the matter with Faye? Her behaviour these last few days had been so out of character, but, come to think of it, that same charge could be laid against all of them recently…
