Christmas Nights

by Penny Jordan

  ‘No?’ Oliver strode past her and walked into her bedroom, demanding dangerously, ‘No? Then would you mind explaining to me what the hell has been going on here?’ He picked up the half-empty champagne glass that she had abandoned the previous evening and gestured to its now flat contents contemptuously as he snarled, ‘Couldn’t he even wait to let you finish this? His glass is empty I note…’

  His glass?

  Indignantly Lisa opened her mouth to put him right, but before she could say anything Oliver demanded savagely, ‘It must have been quite some celebration the two of you had. What the hell did he do—tear the clothes off your back? You should have told me that that was what you liked,’ he advised her, his voice suddenly dropping dangerously, his eyes glittering as his glance raked her from head to toe. ‘I’d no idea your sexual tastes ran to such things. If I had—’

  ‘Oliver, no…’ she protested as he reached for her, catching hold of her arm and dragging her towards him as he ignored her angry denial.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, but he was beyond listening to reason or to any of her explanations, she realised, her heart lurching against her chest wall as she saw the way his gaze raked her, his look a mingling of loathing and desire.

  ‘I think it’s you who doesn’t understand,’ Oliver was correcting her softly, but there was nothing remotely soft about the way he was holding onto her or the way he was watching her. Her body trembled, her toes curling protestingly into the carpet. ‘I thought we had something special, you and I… I thought I could believe in you, trust you… Like a fool I thought, when you told me you needed me, that you…

  ‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ he asked her as he felt her body shiver and his apparent concern almost caught her off guard, until she saw the steely, almost cruel look in his eyes.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Lisa denied. ‘I just want you to let me go.’

  ‘You’re trembling,’ Oliver pointed out, still in that same nerve-wrenchingly soft voice. ‘And as for letting you go… I will let you go, Lisa, but not until I’ve reminded you of exactly why you shouldn’t be marrying Henry…’

  I’m not marrying Henry, Lisa wanted to say, but she only got as far as, ‘I’m not—’ before Oliver silenced her mouth, coming down hard on hers in a kiss of angry possession.

  She tried to resist him and even physically to repel him, her own anger rising to meet his as she alternately tried to push him away and twist herself out of his grasp, but the more she fought to escape, the more her body came into contact with his, and as though something about her furious struggles only added extra fuel to the flames of his anger Oliver responded by propelling her back against the bedroom wall and holding her there with the hard strength of his body whilst he lifted her arms above her head and kept them pinioned there as he continued to brutalise her mouth with the savagery of his punishing kiss.

  Lisa could feel his heart thudding heavily against her body, her own racing in frantic counterpoint, her breathing fast and uneven as her anger rose even higher. How dared he treat her like this? All thoughts of trying to explain and pacify him fled as she concentrated all her energy on trying to break free of him.

  She could feel the heat coming off his body, the rough abrasion of the fabric of his clothes on her bare skin where her robe had come unfastened. Her mouth felt swollen and bruised from the savagery of his kisses, but there was no fear or panic in her; she recognised only an unfamiliar and fierce desire to match Oliver’s fury with her own.

  ‘You want me… Me…’ she heard Oliver telling her thickly between plundering kisses.

  ‘No,’ she denied, but the sound was smothered by the soft moan that rose up in her throat as her body responded to its physical contact with his. Somehow, against all logic, against everything she herself had always thought she believed in, she was becoming aroused by him and by the furious force of their mutual anger, Lisa recognised. And so was he.

  On a wave of shocked despair she closed her eyes, but that only made things worse; the feel of him, the scent of him, the weight of him against her—these were all so familiar to her aching, yearning body that they immediately fed her roaring, feral need, turning her furious attempt to wrench herself free from him into something that even to her came closer to a deliberately sensual indication of her body’s need to be possessed by his than a genuine attempt to break free.

  Her anger now wasn’t just directed at him, it was directed at herself as well, but with it now she could feel a surge of sensual, languid weakness, a heat which seemed to spread irresistibly throughout her body, so that under the hard pressure of Oliver’s searing kiss, instead of resisting him, her body turning cold and lifeless in rejection of him, she was actually moving, melting, yielding, moaning softly beneath her breath.

  ‘Lisa, Lisa…’ She could hear the responsive urgency in Oliver’s voice, feel it in his hands as he released her pinioned arms to push aside her robe and caress her body.

  Her anger was still there, Lisa saw as she watched him studying her semi-naked body, and so was his, but somehow it had been transmuted into a form of such intense physical desire that she could barely recognise either herself or him in the two human beings who had suddenly become possessed of such a rage of physical passion.

  She had never dreamed that she could feel like this, want like this, react like this, she acknowledged dazedly several minutes later as she cried out beneath Oliver’s savage suckling of her breast, clawing at his back in a response born not of anger or pain or fear but rather of a corresponding degree of intensity and compulsion.

  And she made the shocking acknowledgement that there was something—some hitherto secret and sensually dark part of her—that actually found pleasure… that actually wanted savagery, a sensation that was only seconds away from actual pain, that a part of her needed this release of her pent-up emotions and desires, that this dark self-created floodtide of their mutual fury and arousal possessed a dangerously addictive alchemy that made her go back for more, made her cling dizzily to him as he wrenched off his clothes and lifted her, still semi-imprisoning her, against the wall.

  He entered her with an urgency that could have been demeaning and unwanted and even painful but which was, in fact, so intensely craved and needed by her body that even she was caught off guard by the intensity of her almost instantaneous orgasm and by her inner knowledge that this was how she had wanted him, that part of her had needed that kind of appeasement, as Oliver allowed her to slide slowly down towards the floor.

  Shocked, not just at what had happened but by Oliver’s behaviour and even more so by her own, Lisa discovered that she was trembling so much that she had to lean against the wall for support. Ignoring the hand that Oliver put out to steady her, she turned away from him. She couldn’t bear to look at him, to see the triumph and the contempt she knew would be in his eyes.

  ‘Lisa…’

  Whatever it was he was going to say she couldn’t bear to listen to it.

  ‘Just go,’ she told him woodenly. ‘Now… I never want to see you again… Never…’

  She could hear her voice starting to rise, feel herself starting to tremble as shock set in. Her face burned scarlet with mortification as she reached for her abandoned robe and pulled it around her body to shield her nakedness as Oliver got dressed in grim-faced silence. Now that it was over she felt sick with disbelief and shock, unable to comprehend how she could have behaved in the way that she had, how she could have been so… so… depraved, how she could have wanted…

  ‘Lisa…’

  Oliver was dressed now and standing by the door. A part of her could sense that he too had behaved in a way that was out of character but she didn’t want to listen to him. What was the point? He had shown her with damning clarity just what he thought of her.

  ‘No… don’t touch me…’

  For the first time panic hit her as she saw him turn and start to walk towards her. She couldn’t bear him to touch her now, not after…

  She could
sense him, feel him willing her to look at him but she refused to do so, keeping her face averted from him.

  ‘So that’s it, then,’ she heard him saying hoarsely. ‘It’s over…’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It’s over.’

  It wasn’t until well over an hour after he had gone, after she had cleaned the bedroom from top to bottom, changed the bed, polished every piece of furniture, thrown every item of discarded clothing into the washing machine and worked herself into a furore that she realised that she had never actually told Oliver that she and Henry were not getting married. She gave a small, fatalistic shrug. What did it matter? What did anything matter any more after the way the pair of them had destroyed and abused their love?

  Their love… There had never been any love—at least not on Oliver’s side. Only lust; that was all.

  Lisa shuddered. How had it happened? How could anger—not just his but, even worse, her own—become so quickly and so fatally transmuted into such an intensity of arousal and desire? Even now she could hardly believe it had happened, that she had behaved like that, that she had felt like that.

  Later she would mourn the loss of her love; right now all she wanted to do was to forget that the last few hours had ever happened.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LISA WOKE UP WITH A START, brought out of her deep, exhausted sleep, which she had fallen into just after the winter dawn had started to lighten the sky, by the shrill bleep of her alarm.

  Tiredly she reached out to switch it off. She had spent most of the night lying in bed trying not to think about what had happened—and failing appallingly. Round and round her thoughts had gone until she’d been dizzy with the effort of trying to control them.

  Shock, anger—against herself, against Oliver—grief, pain, despair and then anger again had followed in a relentless, going-nowhere circle, her final thought before she had eventually fallen asleep being that she must somehow stop dwelling on what was now past and get on with her life.

  Her head ached and her throat felt sore—a sure sign, she suspected, that she was about to go down with a heavy cold. The faint ache in her muscles and her lethargy were due to another cause entirely, of course.

  Quickly she averted her gaze from the space on the bedroom wall—the place where Oliver had held her as he… as they… The heat enveloping her body had nothing to do with her head cold, Lisa acknowledged grimly, and nor had the hot colour flooding her face.

  It was bad enough that she had actually behaved in such an… an abandoned, yes, almost sexually aggressive way in the first place, but did her memory have to keep reminding her of what she had done, torturing her with it? she wondered wretchedly. She doubted that Oliver was tormented by any such feelings of shame and guilt, but then, of course, it was different for a man. A man was allowed to be sexually driven, to express anger and hurt.

  But it hadn’t been Oliver’s behaviour—hurtful though it had been—that had kept her awake most of the night, she acknowledged; it had been her own, and she knew that she would never be able to feel comfortable about what she had done, about the intensity of her passion, her lack of control, her sexuality, unchecked as it had been by the softening gentleness of love and modesty.

  Women like her did not behave like that—they did not scratch and bite and moan like wild animals, they did not urge and demand and incite… they did not take pleasure in meeting… in matching a man’s sexual anger, they did not… Lisa gave a low moan and scrambled out of bed.

  There was no point in going over and over what had happened. It wouldn’t change anything; she couldn’t change anything. How on earth could Oliver have possibly thought that she could want any other man, never mind a sorry specimen like Henry…? How could he have misinterpreted… accused her…?

  Angrily she stepped into the shower and switched it on.

  That was the difference between men and women, she decided bitterly. Whereas she as a woman had given herself totally, emotionally, physically, mentally to Oliver, committing herself to him and to her love in the act of love—an act which she naïvely had believed had been a special and a wonderful form of bonding between them—to Oliver, as a man, they had simply had sex.

  Sex. She started to shudder, remembering. Stop thinking about it, she warned herself grimly.

  As she dried her hair and stared into the mirror at her heavy-eyed, pale-faced reflection she marvelled that such a short space of time could have brought so many changes to her life, set in motion events which had brought consequences that she would never be able to forget or escape.

  Such a few short days, and yet they had changed her life for ever—changed her for ever. And the most ironic thing of all was that even if Henry or another man like him were to offer her marriage now she could not accept it. Thanks to Oliver she now knew that she could never be content with the kind of marriage and future which had seemed so perfect to her before.

  Fergus her boss gave her an uneasy look as he heard her sneezing. He had a thing about germs and was a notorious hypochondriac.

  ‘You don’t sound very well,’ he told Lisa accusingly as she started to open the mail which had accumulated over the Christmas break. ‘You’ve probably caught this virus that’s going round. There was something on last night’s TV news about it. They’re advising anyone who thinks they’ve got it to stay at home and keep warm…’

  ‘Fergus, I’ve got a cold, that’s all,’ Lisa told him patiently. ‘And besides, aren’t we due to go down to Southampton on Thursday to start cataloguing the contents of Welton House?’

  Welton House had been the property of one of Fergus’s clients, and following her death her family had asked Fergus to catalogue its contents with a view to organising a sale. Normally it was the kind of job that Lisa loved, and she thought that it would do her good to get away from London.

  ‘That’s next week,’ Fergus told her, his voice quickening with alarm as Lisa burst into another volley of sneezes. ‘Look, my dear, you aren’t well. I really think you should go home,’ he said. ‘In fact, I insist on it. I’ll ring for a taxi for you…’

  There was no point in continuing to protest, Lisa recognised wearily; Fergus had quite obviously got it into his head that she was dangerously infectious, and, if she was honest, she didn’t feel very well. Nothing to do with her slight head cold, though. The pain that was exhausting her, draining every bit of her energy as she fought to keep it at bay had its source not in her head but in her emotions.

  Her telephone was ringing as she unlocked her door; she stared at it for a few seconds, body stiffening. What if it was Oliver, ringing to apologise, to tell her that he had made a mistake, that he…?

  Tensely she picked up the receiver, unsure of whether to be relieved or not when she heard her mother’s voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Darling, I’m glad I caught you. I’m just ringing to wish you a Happy New Year. We tried to get through yesterday but we couldn’t. How are you? Tell me all about your Christmas with Henry…’

  Lisa couldn’t help herself; to her own consternation and disbelief she burst into tears, managing to tell her mother between gulped sobs that she had not, after all, spent Christmas with Henry.

  ‘What on earth has happened?’ she heard her mother enquiring solicitously. ‘I thought you and Henry—’

  ‘It’s not Henry,’ Lisa gulped. ‘He’s getting married to someone else anyway. It’s Oliver…’

  ‘Oliver. Who’s Oliver?’ her mother asked anxiously, but the mere effort of saying Oliver’s name had caused her so much pain that Lisa couldn’t answer her questions.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Mum,’ Lisa fibbed, unable to bear any more. ‘Thanks for ringing.’

  ‘Lisa,’ she could hear her mother protesting, but she was already replacing the receiver.

  There was nothing she wanted to do more than fling herself on her bed and cry until there were no more tears left, until she had cried all her pain away, but what was the point of such emotional self-indulgence?

>   What she needed, she acknowledged firmly, was something to keep her thoughts away from Oliver not focused on him. It was a pity that the panacea that work would have provided had been taken away from her, she fretted as she stared round her sitting room, the small space no longer a warm, safe haven but a trap imprisoning her with her thoughts, her memories of Oliver.

  Impulsively she pulled on her coat. She needed to get away, go somewhere, anywhere, just so long as it was somewhere that wasn’t tainted with any memories of Oliver.

  Oliver was in a foul mood. He had flown straight back to New York after his confrontation with Lisa, ostensibly to conclude the negotiations he had left hanging fire in his furious determination to find out what was going on. Well, he had found out all right. He doubted if he would ever forget that stomach-sickening, heart-destroying, split second of time when he had seen Lisa—his Lisa—in Henry’s arms.

  And as for what had happened… His mouth hardened firmly as he fought to suppress the memory of how easily—how very and humiliatingly easily—with Lisa in his arms he had been on the point of begging her to change her mind, of pleading with her at least to give him a chance to show her how good it could be for them.

  He had known, of course, how reluctant, how wary she had been about committing herself fully to him, how afraid she had been of her own suppressed, deeply passionate nature. Then it had seemed a vulnerability in her which had only added to his love for her. Then he had not realized… How could he have been so blind—he of all people? How could she have been so blind? Couldn’t she see what they had had… what they could have had?

  The American negotiations were concluded now and he and Piers were on their way back north. They had flown back into London four hours ago to cold grey skies and thin rain.

  ‘Oliver, is something wrong?’

  He frowned, concentrating on the steely-grey ribbon of the motorway as he pulled out to overtake a large lorry.