The Price of Deceit

by Cathy Williams

  She stood up and walked Claire out to the entrance, feeling that she had to get some fresh air.

  The little voice was still grumbling at her side and she walked out of the building quickly, towards her car, and rolled the window down because she felt hot, even though it was freezing outside and dark, with a heavy fog which had been there all day.

  The cold wind on her face would help her to think. She needed to think, to get her thoughts in order. She drove out of the car park with her mind in a whirl, down the lane with her thoughts crashing about in her head, making her feel hot and feverish. She told herself that she was over-reacting, that if this was how she was going to behave whenever some passing mention of his name was made in her presence, then she was in for a rough ride for the rest of her life.

  The last thing she remembered thinking before she lost control of her car was that she was a sensible woman, a grown woman, and that she had to stop acting like an adolescent suffering from unrequited love.

  The tears made her vision blurry and she felt the impact before she lost consciousness and slumped across the steering-wheel.

  When she came to, she was in a room, on a very hard bed with a very stiff pillow, and facing a television set which was perched in the air and supported by a high-tech contraption which enabled it to swivel around, presumably at the discretion of the viewer. Katherine looked at the television set and let herself slowly remember what she was doing in a hospital. Then she buzzed a little red light next to the bed and waited for someone to come.

  She ached all over, in places which she had never even known existed. Every bone in her body seemed to be independently hurting and, as soon as the nurse entered, she said faintly, ‘Hello. Might I have some painkillers please?’

  ‘Ah.’ The nurse consulted a chart clipped to the bottom of the bed, smiled brightly and said no. ‘Not until you’ve seen the doctor, dear.’

  ‘Please,’ Katherine said, wishing that she could fight off this feeling to cry which overcame her on a regular basis. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ The nurse looked sympathetic but firm, and Katherine thought that she would probably make a very good schoolteacher. ‘I’ll just fetch Dr Sawyers, dear.’ She bustled out and returned within five minutes with a doctor who smiled, sat on the edge of her bed, and listed her injuries with mathematical precision. Two broken ribs, a broken wrist and a severely twisted ankle.

  ‘You’re lucky it wasn’t more serious,’ he said, smiling, as though this was a very happy moment for him indeed. He stood up and informed her casually, ‘I gather your car’s a write-off, though.’ Which was the final straw. She burst into tears, gulped, and blew her nose vigorously with her undamaged hand into a wad of tissues which the doctor handed her.

  ‘Shock,’ he said wisely. ‘I’ll get Nurse to fetch you some painkillers, and I want you just to rest as much as you can.’

  ‘How long am I going to be here?’ she wailed, and he gave this some thought.

  ‘At least a week, but then you can go if there’s someone to look after you. Is there someone to look after you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, gulping, and he frowned worriedly.

  ‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ he murmured in a soothing, bedside voice. ‘Something can be sorted out.’ And he whisked himself off and was instantly replaced by a nurse, who took her temperature while talking incessantly, felt her pulse, took her blood-pressure, and then, last but not least, handed her two painkillers.

  ‘I expect you’d like a cup of tea,’ she said, and Katherine smiled gratefully.

  ‘And a phone, please.’

  And then, after making a call to the school, she settled down to feel thoroughly sorry for herself.

  She had asked two of the teachers at the school to bring her in some reading matter when they came, because she strongly felt that her brain would turn to pulp if she watched television constantly for a one-week period, and was cheered considerably when they arrived with arms full, lots of school gossip, and several drawings which her class had done.

  Katherine held the drawings this way and that and decided that she wasn’t nearly as badly off as the pictures they had done depicting her.

  ‘I’m covered in plasters and blue in this one,’ she laughed, holding up one of the drawings, but she propped them up next to her after her friends had left, and smiled every time they caught her eye.

  She had asked for a couple of books, great big ones, but over the next two days, as the pain subsided a little, she found her thoughts drifting off in the direction of Dominic, wondering about this woman in his life, wondering whether it was serious, and forced to conclude that their brief contact had had very little impact on him if he had found it so easy to jettison her and find a replacement.

  It’s much better this way, she told herself without conviction. It’s easier to forget a man if you know, for sure, that he’s relegated you to a mental rubbish-heap somewhere at the back of his mind. But she didn’t feel much better for thinking that.

  And, also, she had begun to think about what she was going to do once she had left the hospital. Both her friends had assured her that they would be around, making sure that everything was all right, and she would be able to hobble about, but how was she going to cope with the loneliness, cooped up in her tiny house, without twenty school-children to take her mind off things?

  She placed the book on her stomach and stared out of the window. Her job was out there, her house, her garden, and a huge vacuum where her life should have been.

  She heard the door open and she turned round, glad for whatever company had arrived, even if it was just the chattering nurse clutching a thermometer, and then all her pain went away in a rush of adrenaline as her eyes focused on Dominic, standing by the single white snap-together wardrobe. Tall, dark, powerful Dominic, the last person she wanted to see because he was the only one she so desperately needed to.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘OH,’ SHE said tonelessly, while her mind struggled to come to terms with the man standing in front of her. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What happened?’ He glanced around for somewhere to sit and finally dragged the chair by the window next to her bed.

  What do you care what happened? she wanted to ask. The last time I laid eyes on you, you couldn’t wait to get me out of your house. The last time I heard your name mentioned was in connection with another woman.

  ‘I crashed my car,’ Katherine said bluntly, fingering the tail-end of her plait and sliding her eyes around him so that she didn’t actually have to look him in the face. ‘The weather was very bad and I took a corner a bit too quickly. And, now that the pleasantries are over, would you mind telling me what you’re doing here? How did you even know that I was in hospital?’

  ‘Claire told me,’ he said heavily, sitting back and stretching his legs in front of him so that his feet were almost touching the little white cabinet next to her bed. ‘She asked me to help her with a card she wanted to make for you.’ He fished inside his jacket pocket and extracted a folded piece of paper, on the outside of which was a sweetly irrelevant picture of a house and a garden, and inside a little get-well message in large, childish writing, which sloped up the paper and virtually disappeared off the edge. Katherine smiled, but the smile disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  ‘There was no need to hand-deliver it,’ she said stiffly, sticking it up alongside the others she had received.

  Thank heavens for friends, coming to visit, rallying round. It was all she had, she realised, as a single woman.

  ‘No,’ he agreed into the stilted silence, ‘there was no need.’ He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, an oddly impatient gesture which she watched with a cool, detached expression.

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘What do you intend to do when you come out?’ he asked, skirting over her question in a way which frustrated and angered her.

  ‘I really don’t think that that’s any of your business
,’ she said, maintaining her composure with a perverse sense of triumph. A bit of a shame it had so thoroughly deserted her in the past. She could have done with some of this cool composure when she had been struggling to fight off the dangerous attraction she had felt for him.

  He didn’t say anything to that, although he looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Tell Claire thank you very much for the card.’

  ‘The doctor said that you have no one to look after you when you come out.’

  Katherine went bright red and clenched her fists into tight balls. ‘What right have you got to question my doctor about something like that?’ she said through gritted teeth.

  ‘He thought that I might be able to help.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you could help. You could help a great deal by leaving this room. We’ve said enough to each other.’

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ Dominic said, folding his arms and looking at her. ‘We haven’t begun to say anything to each other.’ He gave her a long, cool stare, as if he was throwing down a gauntlet and had already steeled himself for the inevitable fight.

  ‘Oh, get out,’ she muttered wearily. ‘I’m too tired to cope with this.’ She raised one shaking hand to her forehead and rested against it.

  ‘Katherine,’ he said, and that challenging note was still in his voice, ‘I’ve come to take you home.’

  ‘I’ll get a taxi,’ she informed him, not looking at him, staring down at the white coverlet. However did they get their sheets to be quite so hard? she wondered. Were they designed to be as uncomfortable as decently possible, so that patients wouldn’t be tempted to malinger on much-needed beds?

  He stood up, walked round the bed to the wardrobe and opened the door. Then he started packing her clothes into her bag, cramming them in, and she looked at him with open-mouthed horror.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she asked in a high voice. She would have jumped out of the bed, but her injuries put paid to any such spontaneity. ‘I’m not due to leave for another night!’ she said, in as loud a voice as she could manage without bringing a stream of nurses in to see what was going on.

  ‘The doctor said that you can leave now, provided you have someone around to take care of you on a constant basis.’

  ‘Will you get your hands off my clothes?’

  ‘No.’ He continued packing, and when he was finished he turned to her and said in a very calm voice, ‘I was told that you were lucky to have escaped so lightly. If the impact had been only a little harder, you might not be here today.’

  ‘And what a great loss to the world that would be.’

  He moved swiftly across to her and held her wrist in his fingers, and when he spoke there was a furious edge to his voice.

  ‘You stupid, selfish, stubborn, thoroughly infuriating creature, Katherine Lewis,’ he grated. ‘I should just walk away from here. I should just leave you to wallow in your own self-pity.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ She glared at him, and there was a long silence.

  Then he said roughly, turning away, ‘Because I damn well can’t.’ A red flush had appeared on his neck and his voice was savage.

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ She knew what she would like it to mean, but she was finished living in dreamland. Reality was getting on with things, not pretending that there was anything left between them, any little morsel of love from six years back.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said, which made her even angrier.

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me to shut up!’ she snapped.

  ‘Why? What are you going to do? Leap out of bed and punch me? You can’t do any leaping, woman, with broken ribs and a twisted ankle.’

  ‘The ankle is much better,’ Katherine snarled. ‘And you might as well put that bag down because I have absolutely no intention of leaving here with you.’

  He ignored her. He walked across to the door, vanished, then reappeared a few minutes later with the doctor, a feat which bordered on the miraculous because, she thought acidly, doctors were never around when you wanted them. They flitted in and out of their wards at a marathon pace, generally leaving a trail of unanswered questions behind them, because it was difficult to get your thoughts in order when you had to fire questions like a bullet from a gun to a consultant who appeared to be on the run.

  ‘Ah, Miss Lewis,’ the doctor said brightly. ‘Mr Duvall here says that he’ll be taking you home.’

  ‘Oh, he does, does he?’

  ‘There’s no reason for you to stay here. You’re well bandaged up and you appear to be healing well. Your own local doctor can have a look at the bandages every couple of days. I’ll be in touch with him. I can prescribe some strong painkillers for you, if you feel that you need them, but really, I find that most patients do much better if they recuperate in their own homes.’ He smiled a smile of camaraderie at Dominic, which got on her nerves. ‘No domestic chores for a while, though,’ he said, and Dominic laughed, his green eyes roving over her.

  ‘We’ll work round that one, Doctor.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent.’

  Katherine opened her mouth to protest but, before her vocal chords could oblige, Dr Sawyers had gone, and she looked at Dominic with dislike.

  ‘Now look at what you’ve done. There’s no convenient twenty-four-hour-a-day companion at my house to take care of me.’

  ‘You don’t think that I intend to deposit you on your doorstep with a broken wrist and cracked ribs, do you? You must still be in shock after the accident, if you think that.’

  He stepped aside to let the nurse in, complete with wheelchair and the usual bright smile which appeared to be some kind of job regulation.

  ‘I refuse to leave this room,’ Katherine stated flatly, which threw the nurse into a dither of uncertainty.

  She stammered hesitantly, looked to Dominic for guidance, and was clearly relieved when he said in an authoritative voice, ‘Leave her to me, Nurse.’

  ‘Leave me to you?’ Katherine turned to him as soon as the nurse had left the room. ‘Leave me to you? I would rather be left to a pit of vipers. The last time I saw you, you informed me that you never wanted to lay eyes on me again. Now you turn up here and start giving orders and you expect me…you expect me to just fall in with you?’ She was so angry that she had to stop speaking, because she knew that anything she said would just degenerate into a series of inarticulate splutters. And she hadn’t even got round to the topic of Gail whatever-her-last-name-was as yet.

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t elaborate on that. He just scooped her off the bed, deposited her on to the wheelchair, eyed her grey cardigan and tracksuit bottoms dubiously, and asked, ‘Will you be warm enough in that?’

  ‘Dominic,’ she said, ‘why are you doing this?’ She wished that she was more mobile, mobile enough to head off down the hospital corridor at a running pace, so fast that he would never catch up with her. ‘Do you feel guilty? Because the last time you saw me we parted in anger, and now here I am, bedbound? Is that it?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he muttered under his breath. He took her coat and placed it over her legs.

  ‘Stop telling me not to be stupid!’

  ‘Stop arguing with me. You won’t win. I’ve come to take you home and nothing you say is going to stop me.’

  She felt a curious excitement spread through her at the way he said that, in that darkly, angrily possessive voice, and she just as quickly resented her wayward emotions. For a moment, she had felt a wild surge of hope fill her, and hope was something she never wanted to feel in her life again. Hope ignored too many unavoidable questions; it ignored his real feelings towards her, the dislike, the disillusionment, and it ignored the woman he was now seeing, making love to and—who knew?—perhaps even falling in love with.

  So she maintained a tight-lipped silence through the formalities of departure and in the car, which was chauffeur-driven and waiting outside the hospital for her, and was only swamped in confusion once again as the car drew up outside his house and she was lifte
d inside, even though she informed Dominic that she could walk, that she wasn’t a complete invalid.

  ‘You can be a maddening person,’ he said, placing her on the sofa in the living-room and then sitting next to her, so close that her breathing became all erratic.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ she answered, lowering her eyes.

  ‘You can’t stay anywhere else,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve discovered that not having you around is bad for my health.’

  Hope reared its head again and she fought it down, but it was getting harder. There was a look in his eyes that was telling her things that he wasn’t saying with his mouth and that she desperately didn’t want to believe.

  ‘I’ve been a fool,’ he said. ‘I was a fool to let you walk out six years ago; I was a fool not to have raced back to try and find you.’

  She didn’t think that she could say anything even if she wanted to, which she didn’t.

  ‘When you turned me away, I felt as though my world had collapsed. I’d never let myself get close to anyone the way I’d let myself get close to you, and when you told me that it had all been a game, that there was someone else involved, I could have killed you. I went back to France and did the worst possible thing. I got involved with someone else, and then everything that followed was just a series of complications.’ He pressed his thumbs against his eyes and sighed. ‘The marriage was a farce from the word go, and at the end of it I was left with such a bitter taste in my mouth when it came to women that I never stopped to wonder how it was that for all that time I still kept on thinking about you. You just hung around like a miasma.’

  ‘It all went wrong,’ Katherine said, with a wonderful, frightening feeling of standing on the edge of a precipice. ‘I’m so sorry I never told you the truth, Dominic, but it was so very hard. When I went to London, I never thought that I would become involved with anyone. You weren’t a situation that I courted.’