Shadows of Yesterday

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked in a solicitous voice. ‘You look as though you could do with one. All that exercise on that bicycle of yours. Quite bad for you, of course, as I’ve told you a dozen times. God knows why you don’t get yourself a car.’

  ‘Because I don’t have the money!’ she said, distracted and annoyed. ‘And I didn’t come here to chat about my mode of transport!’

  He swallowed some of his drink, eyeing her over the rim of the glass.

  ‘I came,’ she said, ‘to return this.’ She held up the key, dangling it from its piece of string, and he looked at it, all amusement vanished from his face.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous, Claire,’ he said, walking over to where she was standing on very unsteady legs, and relieving her of the key, which he tossed on to one of the small tables dotted about the room. ‘I suppose this is a follow-on from yesterday?’

  ‘Yes,’ Claire responded tersely.

  He looked at her, his green eyes dark with annoyance. ‘For God’s sake, aren’t you being a bit childish?’

  That made her see red. Childish? Her? Simply because she had decided to leave him? She might have guessed that this would have been his reaction, once his fury over her finding that photograph had subsided. She might have guessed that he would have simply expected her to carry on with him because, of course, no woman walked out on James Forrester. He was always the one who did the walking off.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I’m being a bit childish. How clever you are to see through me like that’

  Her remark was like waving a red rag at the bull. He looked as though he wanted to throttle her.

  ‘I thought we’d been through all that. I admit that I was damned angry when you showed me that photograph of Olivia, and maybe I over-reacted, but,’ he shrugged, ‘I expect that you would have found out about my marriage sooner or later.’ His jaw tightened as he said that and she could see that the mere mention of his wife’s name was enough to stir something in him, something that she had never been able to stir.

  ‘Would I?’ Claire replied coolly. ‘Why? Would you have mentioned it to me?’

  ‘Possibly not,’ he admitted, swallowing the last of his drink and prowling restlessly around the room. ‘But now that it’s out in the open, I don’t see why it should have any bearing on us.’

  Claire looked at him in appalled amazement. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ she said incredulously. ‘I find out, by accident, that you’ve been married, and you don’t see why that should have any bearing on our relationship?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You were secretive! You deliberately hid it from me! I feel as though I never knew you at all, as though I’ve spent months in bed with a complete stranger.’

  ‘You’re being over-dramatic.’

  ‘And stop treating me like a halfwit!’ she shouted, dogging his steps with her hands on her hips. ‘I am not being dramatic!’

  He stopped abruptly and she nearly crashed into him.

  ‘Yes, you damn well are being dramatic. I wasn’t secretive; as I said, I just didn’t see the necessity of giving you an elaborate account of my past. But,’ he added scathingly, ‘with typical female logic, you find that impossible to accept, don’t you? You’d not only like a blowby-blow account of my marriage, no doubt you’d like a detailed post-mortem as well.’

  ‘I would just have appreciated some honesty!’

  ‘I thought I had given you quite a bit of that. I was honest enough when I told you that I didn’t want commitment, and I thought that you accepted that.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then where’s the problem?’ His brows were drawn together, giving his face a harsh arrogant stamp, and she realised that he was controlling his temper but only just.

  ‘The problem is that I’m not prepared to live in someone else’s shadow.’

  ‘What exactly are you saying, Claire?’ he asked in a soft, forbidding voice, his green eyes hard as he stared at her. ‘That you were looking for some kind of commitment with me even though I told you I wasn’t interested?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she was forced to admit, reluctantly, not daring to meet his eyes. She was beginning to feel tired and drained and, besides, it was getting later and later. ‘I must go,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s no use fighting with each other like this. At least let’s part on amicable terms.’ She turned and began walking towards the door.

  ‘Where are you going? I’m not finished with you as yet.’

  Claire didn’t bother to turn around; she couldn’t face being skewered by his eyes any longer. She just wanted to get out, get away. She carried on walking, feeling rather than hearing him as he walked up behind her.

  ‘It’s late—you can’t cycle back at this hour.’

  ‘Go away. I can cycle back at any damn hour I please.’

  ‘And look at me when I’m talking to you!’ he roared, making her jump, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of looking around. She had been doing what he wanted for way too long as it was. Against all common sense she had been stupid enough to have fallen in love with him, and he had manipulated her love to enslave her. When he crooked his finger, she leapt into bed with him. He called the shots and she danced to his tune.

  She pulled open the front door, no mean feat considering its weight, and he slammed it back shut before she could walk out, his face thunderously angry. This time she did turn around and look at him, her back against the massive door.

  ‘Stop bossing me about!’ she said, exploiting her newfound courage to the limit. She had never seen him as livid as he was now, but then again, she had never stood up to him with such hostile vehemence. In time, she thought, I’ll laugh about this. Right now, though, she was quaking inside, even though her chin was stubborn and her eyes stormy.

  He towered over her, his brows drawn together, his mouth tight with anger.

  ‘What the hell has got into you?’ he thundered. ‘You’ve never been like this before! I thought you were sweet and innocent and uncomplicated.’

  ‘Well, you can’t be right all the time,’ Claire responded quickly, ‘and if you keep up the shouting you’ll have the housekeeper down to see what the hell’s going on.’

  That only made him angrier. ‘I don’t care if the whole damn county comes to investigate!’ he informed her, making no effort to control his voice.

  ‘Well, I do.’ She turned to open the door, half expecting him to slam it shut again, but he didn’t and she stepped outside, bracing herself as the cold wrapped around her in an icy sheet.

  Her bicycle was leaning against the wall and she reached for it, but, before she could hop on, it was snatched from her and was being carried off, towards the side of the Ananor.

  Claire stared at him, open-mouthed, then she ran after him furiously.

  ‘Give me back my bike!’ she wailed. She felt like stamping her feet in frustration or else screaming at the top of her voice, but she did neither. ‘Where are you going?’ she demanded, running behind him, and he said grimly, ‘To my car. You’re damn well not cycling back at this time of the night.’

  His car. Where was it? Parked, she saw soon enough, at the side of the house, and almost entirely obscured by the trees and shrubbery. Normally it was parked out front, in the courtyard, which was why she had initially assumed that he wasn’t in when she had rung the doorbell.

  He opened it with a button on his key-ring and yanked open the boot, shoving her bike inside then slamming shut the boot. Claire stood staring at the closed boot in helpless frustration.

  ‘Get in,’ he said, opening the passenger door and then walking around to slip into the driver’s seat.

  Over my dead body, she wanted to retort, but then that was all well and good, but he had the upper hand, didn’t he? In the absence of her bike she could hardly walk back, it would take forever, and there was no way that she was going to demean herself by asking for the cottage keys after she had stormed into the house and practically slammed them down h
is throat. Oh, no, that would certainly give him the last laugh, wouldn’t it?

  She remained standing, biting her lip with indecision, until it felt as though hypothermia was beginning to set in. With bad grace she deposited herself in the seat and the door was hardly shut before the car was pulling away.

  She looked covertly at the hard profile and then looked away, aware that her heart was being very erratic.

  ‘I’m staying at Karen’s house,’ she said into the silence, and briefly gave him directions on how to get there, to which she received no acknowledgement, and she pursed her lips and stared out of the window, watching the dark outlines of trees and fields and houses swishing past.

  The car turned sharply into the left-hand lane and she stiffened in alarm.

  ‘This isn’t the way,’ she said, and his mouth curled into a smile.

  ‘I told you, I’m not finished with you as yet.’

  He pulled into a small path that wound away from the side road into open fields and killed the engine, turning to face her with one arm extended along the back of the seat. She found that she was perspiring slightly, nervous and apprehensive even though she knew that she had nothing to fear from him, not physically at any rate.

  ‘I grew up with her,’ he said at last, breaking the silence which had been stretching between them like elastic. ‘At least, she had been around for as long as I can remember, a pretty girl who blossomed into a beautiful woman.’

  Claire stared at him, wishing that it weren’t so dark in the car because she would have liked to have seen the expression on his face. His voice told her nothing, it was carefully controlled, expressionless.

  ‘Olivia?’

  ‘You wanted to know about her, didn’t you?’ he said mockingly. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I never really noticed her until she was nearly twenty, not sexually at any rate.’

  Claire winced at that. She could imagine him falling in love with the leggy blonde, his green eyes devouring her in that way he had, telling her that he wanted her, a mixture of deadly charm and blatant invitation that could devastate. He had a way of communicating what he wanted without saying a word, and how could any woman resist that?

  ‘And then what happened?’ she asked in a strange voice, feeling like a voyeur, but needing to hear everything, absolutely everything that he was prepared to divulge about her.

  ‘The inevitable. I slept with her. We were married shortly after. In the end, it was something of a whirlwind romance, even though I’d known her in passing for years.’

  ‘The photo was taken on your wedding-day.’

  ‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘I liked having it there, at hand, to remind me of other times.’

  Claire swallowed painfully. Memories of the past and dreams of the future were the stuff that life was built on. He had memories of the past, but the dreams of the future had died the day his wife had. Wasn’t that what it amounted to? There was no room at the inn for her.

  ‘Is that why you never married,’ she asked, ‘because of your wife?’

  ‘I suppose you could say that.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders.

  ‘How did she…how was she…’

  ‘Killed?’ Out in the open the word sounded bleak and slightly offensive, like an oath uttered in a church. ‘She was driving back home one night, one very rainy night. It was late and dark and she lost control on one of the sharper bends. She was always inclined to use the roads as her own personal race-track.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I was told that death would have been instantaneous.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Claire murmured.

  ‘And satisfied, I hope? Now that I’ve explained about it all, maybe we can just let the matter rest?’ He started up the engine, reversing out of the path. In his mind, she knew, it was now resolved. She knew about Olivia, she knew fully his reasons for not wanting involvement, so no more problem. She would accept his terms once again and they would be back to square one.

  He began driving back to the manor and she said sharply, ‘Wrong direction. I told you, I’m going to Karen’s house. I shall be staying there until I can find somewhere permanent of my own.’

  She felt infinitely safer saying that with him behind the steering-wheel. He looked at her with a harsh frown, as though he couldn’t quite believe his ears.

  ‘Stop being a fool!’

  ‘I have,’ she retorted. ‘I did the minute I decided to end our relationship.’

  He didn’t slow down. She glanced at him furtively from under her lashes, wondering whether she would be subjected to another blistering torrent of wrath, but nothing. His face remained averted and she began to feel wary at the lack of reaction. Of course, she told herself, this is much better, it means that what I’m saying has finally sunk in, and he’s accepting it.

  ‘I’ll collect the stuff from the cottage tomorrow. I had planned on calling Karen across to give me a hand this evening, but I didn’t manage to finish on time, and I thought that since I wasn’t going to be staying there the night, I’d lock up the cottage and return the key to you. I should have kept it, I suppose. It would have been more logical, wouldn’t it? As it is, I’ll have to fetch it off Mrs Evans tomorrow evening after work. Silly me.’ She was rambling on and her voice abruptly petered out.

  ‘I was right about you, wasn’t I?’ he rasped, ignoring her long-winded monologue, and she looked at him, surprised.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You want marriage—you’ve always wanted marriage.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ Claire burst out defensively, not bothering to disguise it. ‘Yes, I want marriage, kids, the works! I thought that I could live with you, no questions asked, but I couldn’t, especially not now that I’ve found out about Olivia.’

  ‘No,’ he said in a smooth, cold voice, ‘especially not now.’ They were approaching Karen’s house and he slowed down until he had pulled to a halt outside, then he faced her, his face icy and disdainful.

  ‘What are you implying?’ she asked, bewildered.

  ‘I always wondered what a talented girl like you was doing working as a cleaner, but you were so convincing, weren’t you, with all that rubbish about loving beautiful things and loving to be surrounded by them. I looked at that fresh, innocent, blushing face of yours and I actually, for the first time, asked myself whether I wasn’t being over-suspicious. After all, suspicion is one of those pieces of baggage that every wealthy man is forced to carry on his shoulders; it becomes a habit that guides everything you do, every response you make. But you were clever, weren’t you? Not overtly glamorous, no designer clothes, the right little noises of refusal every time any present was offered to you.’

  Claire felt her body turning to stone. She knew what he was saying but she couldn’t say a thing, her mouth simply wouldn’t function.

  ‘You threw yourself at me and I thought, no, no scheming woman would be that obvious. If you were a gold-digger, you would have played hard to get, hoped that your girlish naivete would arouse my interest.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she denied, horrified. ‘I don’t know how you can think those things.’

  ‘You knew that I wasn’t looking for marriage, but you hoped you would be able to convince me that I was wrong, didn’t you? But then you found that picture and now that you know the whole story, now that you see that I really am deadly serious about steering clear of involvement with any woman, you’ve decided to cut your losses and run.’

  She swung round and began groping for the doorhandle and he yanked her back to face him.

  ‘Truth hurts, doesn’t it, Claire?’ he sneered. ‘You played your game and you lost.’

  She looked at that hard, sensuous face, his eyes glittering in the darkness of the car, and she couldn’t find a thing to say.

  ‘Until you found that picture, you were warm and yielding. Overnight you changed. What a breathtaking coincidence.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ But he ignored that. She wondered whether he had heard her protest at all.
/>   ‘Did you get a kick out of making a fool of me? No woman has done that before! Did the thought of that turn you on?’ His fingers were biting into her and she had to stop herself from crying out in pain. ‘Let’s just see how indifferent you are, shall we? Let me just see how much was real and how much was pretence.’

  He pulled her towards him and his mouth met hers with a force that sent her head reeling back. With one hand he cupped the back of her neck; the other held her head so that her efforts to escape were fruitless. She closed her eyes and groaned as his lips forced hers to part.

  He whispered something against her mouth, but she didn’t catch what he said. I don’t want to respond to this, she told herself desperately, but her senses were fighting a losing battle with her brain, and the heat that his touch had stirred in her overwhelmed her until her hands wound round his neck and she frantically kissed him back, no longer caring about the stupidity of what she was doing. He knew her body so well, he knew what she liked, and he used the knowledge ruthlessly, finding her breast and caressing it roughly until she wanted to cry out.

  It was a dark street, and at this hour of the night there wasn’t a soul around. Theirs was one car sandwiched between many, invisible, not that James seemed to notice one way or the other.

  He hoisted her jumper up and undid the buttons of her blouse and she caressed his dark head as he bent to lick her hardened nipples, sending shivers of excitement through her.

  She no longer gave a damn what happened tomorrow, she just wanted that passionate unison of their bodies.

  When he pulled down her jumper and drew back, she looked at him, dazed.

  ‘Point proved,’ he said softly. ‘It’s gratifying to know that at least in that area you weren’t pretending.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she said. He was sitting back against the door, his face shadowed, his lips curled in satisfaction and she had to stop herself from striking out at him. ‘Yes,’ she said, buttoning her blouse with shaky fingers, ‘you proved your point. Now will you sleep better tonight?’

  She threw open the car door and snatched her bag from the ground and, as she let herself into the house with the key that Karen had lent her, she didn’t look back.