Christmas Nights

by Penny Jordan

  Lisa could feel fresh tears starting to sting her eyes. All these years and she had misunderstood the motivation behind her parents’ constant uprooting of her, had never known how much she was actually loved.

  As they looked at one another her mother reached out and took Lisa’s hand, telling her firmly, ‘When Oliver comes to see you—and he will—listen to what he has to say, Lisa—’

  ‘When,’ Lisa interrupted her. ‘Don’t you mean if…?’

  ‘No, I mean when.’

  ‘But how could he believe I could go behind his back and return to Henry?’

  ‘He’s a man and he’s vulnerable, as I’ve already told you, and sometimes, when we feel vulnerable and afraid, we do things which are out of character. You said yourself that losing his mother when he did made him feel wary of loving someone in case he lost them too. Such emotions, even when they’re only felt subconsciously, can have a very dramatic effect on our actions.’

  ‘He won’t come back,’ Lisa protested dully. ‘I told him I never wanted to see him again. We both agreed it was over.’

  ‘Well, in that case, why don’t you come back to Japan with me?’ her mother suggested prosaically.

  ‘I can’t… My job… Fergus—’

  ‘Fergus would give you some extended leave if you asked him,’ her mother told her. ‘He adores you, you know that…’

  ‘Not when he thinks I’m full of germs,’ Lisa told her ruefully. ‘I’d like to come back with you,’ she added hesitantly, ‘but…’

  ‘But not yet,’ her mother finished for her, getting up to kiss her gently on the forehead and tell her, ‘Well, I’m going to be here for a few days so you’ve got time to change your mind. But right now you’re going to bed and I’m going to ring your father. I promised him I would. He’ll be worrying himself to death wondering if you’re all right. Now, bed…’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ Lisa yawned obediently.

  It felt so good to have her mother here with her, to know that she was cared for and loved, but no amount of parental love, no matter how valued, could erase the pain of losing Oliver.

  He’ll be back, her mother had promised her. But would he? Had they perhaps between them destroyed the tender, vulnerable plant of their love?

  CHAPTER TEN

  PIERS HAD BEEN RIGHT to caution him against driving back to London tonight, Oliver admitted as his concentration wavered and he found himself having to blink away the grittiness of his aching eyes as he tried to focus on the road. With all that adrenalin and anxiety pumping through his veins it should have been impossible to start drifting off to sleep, but the compulsion to yawn and close his eyes kept on returning.

  Up ahead of him he could see the lights of a motorway service station. Perhaps it would be wiser for him to stop, even if it was only for a hot, reviving cup of coffee. He knew there was no point in his trying to sleep; how could he when all he could think of was Lisa and the injustice he had done her?

  The motorway services were closer than he had thought; he had started to pull into the lane taking him off the motorway, when the metal barrier at the edge of the road loomed up in front of him. The shrill squeal of brakes was followed by the harsh sound of metal against metal and his head jolted forward, pain exploding all around him.

  ‘If it’s that bad why don’t you go out for a walk? It will be cheaper than wearing the carpet out.’

  Lisa frowned as she looked at her mother.

  ‘You’ve been pacing up and down the sitting room for the last half-hour,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And besides, it will do you good to get some fresh air.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right,’ Lisa agreed. ‘A walk might do me good.’

  ‘Put your jacket on and some gloves,’ her mother instructed her as Lisa headed for the hallway. ‘I know the sun is out but we had frost last night.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ Lisa agreed dutifully, amusement briefly lightening her eyes and touching her mouth.

  It had been three days since her mother’s unexpected arrival now; in another two she would be returning to Japan. She was still pressing Lisa to return with her, and Lisa knew that she had spoken the truth when she had said that Fergus would give her the extra leave. There had been plenty of occasions in the past when she had put in extra hours at work, given up weekends and been cheerfully flexible about how long she worked. No, it wasn’t the thought of Fergus that was stopping her.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ she suggested to her mother as she pulled on her jacket and found her gloves. The virus she had picked up had been thankfully short-lived, but Fergus had insisted that she did not return to work for at least a full week, and although she was enjoying her mother’s company there were times when she was filled with restless energy that nothing seem to dissipate—a sense of urgency and anxiety.

  Both of them knew what was causing it, of course, but since the night she had confided in her mother neither of them had ever referred to Oliver—Lisa because she couldn’t bear to, couldn’t trust herself to so much as think, never mind say his name, without losing control and being swamped by her emotions, and her mother, she suspected, because despite her initial conviction that Oliver would discover the truth and want to make amends she too was now beginning to share Lisa’s belief that it was over between them.

  ‘I won’t be too long,’ she told her mother as she opened the front door.

  ‘No… there’s an exhibition on at the Tate that I thought we might go to this afternoon, and then I thought we might have dinner at that Italian place in Covent Garden that your father likes so much.’

  Her mother was doing her best to keep her occupied and busy, Lisa knew, and she was doing all she could to respond, but both of them also knew that she was losing weight and that she didn’t sleep very well at night, and that sometimes when she did she woke up crying Oliver’s name.

  Her head down against the sharp January wind, she set off in the direction of the park.

  Once she had gone Lisa’s mother picked up the receiver and dialled her husband’s number in Japan.

  ‘I still haven’t managed to persuade Lisa to come back with me,’ she told him after they had exchanged hellos. ‘I’m worried about her, David. She looks so pale and thin… I wish there was some way we could get in touch with this Oliver. No, I know we mustn’t interfere,’ she agreed, ‘but if you could see her. She looks so… I must go,’ she told him. ‘There’s someone at the door.’ Quickly she replaced the receiver and went to open the front door.

  The tall, dark-haired man wearing one arm in a sling with a huge, purpling bruise on his cheekbone and a black eye and a nasty-looking cut on his forehead was completely unfamiliar to her and yet she knew who he was immediately.

  ‘You must be Oliver,’ she told him simply, extending her hand to shake his. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I’d just about begun to give up on you. Silly of me really, especially when… You look rather the worse for wear; have you been in an accident…? I’m Lisa’s mother, by the way; she’s out at the moment but she’ll be back soon. Do come in…’

  ‘I had a bump in my car a few days ago,’ Oliver told her as he followed her into the flat. ‘Fortunately nothing too serious. I say fortunately because it was my own fault; I virtually fell asleep at the wheel…’ He caught the frowning look that Lisa’s mother gave him and explained tersely, ‘I was on my way back to London to see Lisa. Where did you say she was…?’

  ‘She’s gone out for a walk; she shouldn’t be too long. She’s been ill and I thought some fresh—’

  ‘How ill?’ Oliver pounced sharply.

  Hiding her small, satisfied smile, Lisa’s mother responded airily, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, the doctor seemed quite concerned, but I’m a great believer in the efficacy of plenty of fresh air myself. She did say she felt a bit weak but—’

  ‘A bit weak… Should she be out on her own?’

  Poor man, he really had got it badly, Lisa’s mother decided. As she witnessed his obvious concern Lisa’s mother
relented a little; this was no uncaring sexual predator, this was quite definitely a man very, very deeply in love.

  ‘She’s a lot better than she was,’ she told him more gently.

  Her half-hour in the park might have brought a pink flush to her skin and made her fingertips and toes tingle, Lisa acknowledged, but it had done nothing to alleviate the pain of loving Oliver. Only one person could do that, and with every day that passed her common sense told her that there was less and less chance of Oliver doing what her mother had claimed he was bound to do and coming in search of her, to tell her that he had discovered his mistake and to beg her to forgive him.

  Grimly, Lisa retraced her steps towards her flat. Part of her wished desperately that she had never met Oliver, that she had never been exposed to the agony of loving him and then losing him, and yet another part of her clung passionately to the memory of their brief time together.

  As her mother opened the door to her knock she told Lisa, ‘I’m just going out. Oh, and by the way, you’ve got a visitor.’

  ‘Oliver?’

  Hope, disbelief, the desire to push open the door and run to him and the equally strong desire to turn on her heels and run from him were all there in Lisa’s eyes.

  ‘Treat him gently,’ her mother advised her as she took hold of her and gave her a supportive hug.

  ‘Treat him gently’, after what he had done to her? In a daze Lisa walked past her mother and into the flat, closing the door behind her. Oliver was actually here… here. The angry relief that flooded her was that same emotion so familiar to parents when a child had emerged unscathed from a forbidden risk—relief at its safety and anger that it should have taken such a risk with itself, with something so precious and irreplaceable.

  In fact she was so angry that she was actually shaking as she pushed open the sitting-room door, Lisa discovered, her mouth compressing, and without even waiting to look directly at Oliver, without daring to take the risk of allowing her hungry heart, her starved senses to feast on the reality of him, she demanded tersely, ‘What are you doing here?’

  He was standing with his back to her, facing the window, apparently absorbed in the view outside. He must have seen her walking back to the flat, Lisa recognised, her heart giving a small, shaky bound. He turned round and every single thought, every single word she had been about to voice vanished as Lisa saw his cut and bruised face, his arm in a sling.

  ‘Oliver…’ Her voice cracked suddenly, becoming thready and weak, her eyes mirroring her shock and anxiety as she whispered, ‘What’s happened? Why…?’

  ‘It’s nothing… just a minor bump in my car,’ Oliver assured her quickly. ‘In fact I got off far more easily than I deserved.’

  ‘You’ve been in an accident. But how?’ she demanded, ignoring his attempts to make light of his injuries and instinctively hurrying towards him, realising only when it was too late and she was standing within easy distance of the free arm he stretched forward to her just how physically close to him she actually was.

  Immediately she raised her hand in an automatic gesture of rejection, but Oliver had already stepped forward and the hand she had lifted in the body-language sign that meant ‘No, keep away from me’ was somehow resting against his shirt-covered chest with a very different meaning indeed.

  ‘Oliver,’ she protested weakly, but it wasn’t any use; it wasn’t just her legs and her body that were trembling now, her mouth was trembling as well, tears spilling over from her eyes as she said his name, causing Oliver to groan and reach for her, cradling her against his body with his good arm as he said, ‘Lisa, darling, please don’t… please don’t cry. I can’t bear to see you unhappy. I’ll never forgive myself for what I’ve done—never. My only excuse is that I was half-crazed with jealousy over Henry.’

  ‘Jealous?’ Lisa questioned. ‘You actually believed…? You were jealous of Henry?’ She couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Oliver admitted ruefully. ‘It all seemed to slot so neatly into place—your reluctance to commit yourself to me, the news that Henry was marrying an old flame, the sight of the two of you together. I know I overreacted. I was jealous, vulnerable,’ he told her simply. ‘You’d already made it plain that I wasn’t the kind of man you wanted for a husband. I knew how reluctant you’d been to commit yourself to me, to our love.

  ‘I knew, as well, how much I was rushing you, pressurising you, using the intensity of what we both felt for one another to win you over. I suppose a part of me will always be the child who felt that in dying my mother deliberately abandoned me. Logically I know that isn’t what happened, but there’s always that small worm of fear there—fear of losing the one you love—and the more you love someone, the greater the fear is. And I love you more than I can possibly tell you. I’m not trying to look for excuses for myself, Lisa; there aren’t really any. What I did was…’ He paused and shook his head as she touched his hand gently with understanding for what he was trying to say. ‘At the time it seemed logical that you should have changed your mind, decided you preferred the safe life you had already mapped out for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver.’ Lisa shook her head.

  ‘I was wrong, I know, and what I did was… unforgivable…’

  The bleakness in his eyes and voice made Lisa want to reach out and hold him, but she restrained herself. She was already in his arms, and once she touched him…

  ‘I… I didn’t know that loving someone could be like that,’ she told him in a husky voice. ‘That anger could… That physically… I felt so ashamed after you had gone,’ she admitted shakily.

  ‘To have wanted you the way I did, to have responded to you, said the things I did, when I knew that you weren’t touching me out of love. I felt so…’ She shook her head, unable to find the words to express her own sense of horror at what, at the time, had seemed to her to be her own totally unacceptable and almost abnormal behaviour.

  ‘Being angry with someone doesn’t stop you loving them,’ Oliver told her quietly. ‘I was angry, bitter—furiously, destructively so; I can’t deny that. I wanted to hurt you in the same way that I felt you had hurt me, but those feelings, strong as they were, destructive as they were, did not stop me loving you. In fact…’

  He paused and looked down into her upturned face, searching her eyes before telling her roughly, ‘I tried to tell myself that I was punishing you… that I wanted to punish you… but almost from the moment I held you in my arms…’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘No matter what I might have said, my body was loving you, Lisa—loving you and wanting you and hating me for what I was trying to do.’

  ‘What made you think I was marrying Henry in the first place?’ Lisa questioned him.

  ‘My cousin,’ he informed her briefly. ‘Emma had phoned from Yorkshire and she’d heard that Henry was getting married to someone he had already known for some time.’

  ‘And you assumed it was me…’

  ‘I assumed it was you,’ Oliver agreed.

  A little uncertainly Lisa looked up at him. The sadness she could see in his eyes made her heart jolt against her ribs.

  ‘Have I completely ruined everything between us?’ he asked her huskily. ‘Tell me I haven’t, Lisa. I can’t… Being without you these last few days has been hell, but if you…’

  He paused and Lisa told him shakily, ‘I’ve missed you as well…’

  Missed him!

  ‘I should have rung you from New York and talked to you instead of flying back like that, but it looked like those damned negotiations were going to go on for ever and I’d already missed being with you on New Year’s Eve. And then when I reached your flat and saw you there with Henry…’

  ‘He came to tell me that he was getting married. His mother had sent him,’ Lisa explained drily. ‘She was concerned that I might get in touch with him and try to patch up our differences… I had just finished telling Henry that there was absolutely no chance whatsoever of that happening when you appeared. I thoug
ht when you didn’t make New Year’s Eve that you were having second thoughts… about us,’ she confessed.

  ‘Me having second thoughts… There’s no way I could ever have second thoughts about the way I feel about you… about what I want with you…’

  Lisa took a deep breath. There was something she had to tell him now, whilst they were both being so open and honest with one another.

  ‘I did,’ she confessed. ‘I had second thoughts… the day we parted…’ She looked anxiously up at him; his face was unreadable, grave, craven almost, as he watched her in silence.

  ‘I tried to tell you then,’ she hurried on. ‘I tried to say that I had changed my mind, but you didn’t seem to want to listen and I thought that perhaps you had changed yours and that—’

  ‘Changed your mind about what?’ Oliver demanded hoarsely, cutting across her.

  ‘About… about wanting to make a commitment,’ Lisa admitted, stammering slightly as she searched his face anxiously, looking for some indication as to how he felt about what she was saying, but she could see none. Her heart started to hammer nervously against her ribs. Had she said too much? Had she…? Determinedly she pushed her uncertainty away.

  ‘I knew then that it was just fear that had stopped me from telling you what I already knew… That I did love you and that I did want to be with you… I was even going to suggest that I went to New York with you.’ She paused, laughing shakily. ‘When it came to it I just couldn’t bear the thought of not being with you, but you seemed so preoccupied and distant that I thought—’

  ‘You were going to tell me that…?’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Oh, my God, Lisa… Lisa…’

  Any response she might have made was muffled by the hard pressure of his mouth against hers as, ignoring her protests that he might hurt his injured arm, he gathered her up, held her against his body and kissed her with all the hungry passion she had dreamed of in the time they had been apart.

  ‘Lisa, Lisa, why didn’t you say something to me?’ Oliver groaned when he had finally finished kissing her. ‘Why…?’