Savage Atonement

by Penny Jordan

  ‘He was very angry when.…’

  ‘When you refused to let him make love to you?’ Oliver intercepted. ‘I can imagine.’ His smile was mockingly wry as though he too could remember what it was like to know the frustration of thwarted desire. ‘And not knowing your circumstances, he probably thought you’d simply been stringing him along. Even so, his behaviour was barely excusable in an eighteen-year-old; he should never have left you like that, and he can think himself lucky that I didn’t find out until he was beyond my reach!’ He looked at her when Laurel laughed huskily, and then grimaced. ‘I suppose you’re thinking that after last night I have scant excuse for criticising someone else’s standards. About last night, Laurel.…’

  He released her and walked away, hand resting on his hips as he stared through the window, his back towards her. ‘I want to talk to you about it, to explain that.…’

  ‘No, there’s really no need. I do understand,’ Laurel rushed in nervously. ‘These things happen, and I suppose because of the way things were… with you knowing about my… my past, and me.…’ ‘loving you,’ she had been about to say, but broke off in time and instead substituted, ‘knowing you from then, it was sort of inevitable.’

  ‘I’m glad that you can take it so philosophically!’

  He still hadn’t turned to face her, and Laurel wasn’t sure if she liked the cool mockery of his voice. It seemed to hint at a sheathed anger that could prove lethal if it was ever allowed to escape, although she couldn’t understand what she had done to arouse it. Could he have wanted her to admit that she knew why he had made love to her?

  She began to feel faintly sick. Had he already noted down her reactions to his lovemaking, stored them away somewhere to use in his book? She berated herself for not having the courage to demand angrily that he stopped using her, but she couldn’t face the inevitable pain of seeing the amused contempt in his eyes when she did so. What right had she to feel hurt or betrayed? Oliver had never for one moment professed to feel any emotion for her. No one had forced her to lie wantonly in his arms, inviting the silken caress of his skin against hers—far from it. She might have been repressed and virginal, but she wasn’t a fool; she did know that men were capable of purely physical desire.

  ‘I haven’t told you have I,’ Oliver continued abruptly, ‘But I have to go to Nice first thing tomorrow morning—Alone,’ he added turning towards her. ‘I’ll be gone all day.’

  ‘You’ll want to give me plenty of dictation today then,’ Laurel marvelled at her ability to keep her voice normal and level when inside she was aching with pain. Why was he going to Nice? To see a woman? It was a question she couldn’t ask, but Oliver was a man who would never be short of female companionship, and she guessed that she was a poor substitute for the women he normally consorted with.

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m still very much at the “thinking” stage, and you’re proving an even greater distraction than I feared,’ he told her. ‘Tape machines are far less troublesome.’

  She managed a smile, as though she thought he was joking, but inwardly she was a mass of anguish.

  It was several minutes before he spoke again, putting down the cup of coffee she had poured to ask shockingly, ‘Laurel, last night—was it entirely my imagination, or did you derive as much pleasure from our… intimacy, as it seemed?’

  Her cheeks were on fire. How could he sit there so calmly discussing what had happened as though he were dissecting a chapter of one of his books?

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ she hedged at last. ‘I.…’

  ‘What I mean,’ he explained patiently, getting up and turning to face her, ‘is were you merely acting when you responded to me as you did, or.…’

  A confusion of thoughts jostled through her mind. Should she lie and say she had been pretending? But what if he knew she was lying, would he then guess the reason why she had lied?

  ‘I wasn’t acting,’ she managed at last. ‘But.…’

  ‘But I mustn’t misinterpret what you did feel? Don’t worry, Laurel. I’m well aware of the potency of physical desire. I’m pleased that you’ve discovered it too, because it helps to absolve me from a sin that’s weighed heavily on my conscience, even if it has turned out to be a viciously sharp double-edged sword,’ he said cryptically. ‘You must never be ashamed of your sexuality,’ he added frankly, ‘and never abuse it. It’s a gift—to you and to your lover. I would hate you to have suffered all these years believing yourself to be frigid, only to go completely in the opposite direction. A woman who values herself cherishes her body, bestowing it as a gift; the supreme gift when desire is matched by love. What I’m trying to say,’ he added ruefully, ‘and not very well, it seems, is that for all this is a permissive age, you have a fragility and sensitivity that could be all too easily crushed by careless fingers. I sound like a Victorian papa trying to warn his precious daughter against the perils of the flesh!’

  ‘But you aren’t my father… and I’m already well aware of them,’ Laurel reminded him unevenly. ‘I learned them young, remember?’

  For a moment a tinge of red seeped under his skin, making her feel that she had dealt him a mortal blow. Tension stretched between them like a fine wire, and suddenly she could bear it no longer. With a small cry she ran from the room, leaving him staring after her.

  Let him think whatever he wanted, she thought childishly an hour later, arms wrapped round her hunched knees as she stared out across the countryside. Did he still think she was an impressionable twelve-year-old? Was that still how he saw her? Not as a woman, but as a child?

  * * *

  The tension between them seemed to thicken as the day wore on. Oliver was in a strange mood, bitingly sarcastic one moment and silent the next. Nothing Laurel did was right, and on several occasions his cutting comments brought her close to tears, all the more so because she knew his barbs weren’t justified.

  Did he suspect how she felt about him? Did he think she had some sort of silly crush on him and he was using this method of stamping it out? If only that were possible!

  Laurel didn’t want much dinner. It was Oliver’s turn to make it, and his mouth tightened ominously when he saw how much of the lasagne he had made she had left. Her listless, ‘I’m not very hungry,’ brought only a further tightening of his mouth, and she couldn’t help noticing the generous measure of whisky he poured for himself after dinner, barely doing more than splashing it with water, before tossing it down his throat.

  She remembered how her stepfather used to return home the worse for drink.

  ‘There’s no need to look like that. I can drink a good deal more than this without showing any ill effects,’ Oliver snapped at her, when her expression unwittingly betrayed her. ‘Or are you thinking that this,’ he tapped his whisky glass, ‘might mean a repetition of last night? You’ve got a lot to learn, my dear,’ he sneered, shocking her with his bitterness. ‘When a man has to bolster himself with drink before he can enter a woman’s bed, it’s rarely an exercise he wants to repeat!’

  He strode across the living room and selected a record which he placed on the hi-fi, but in place of the soothing strains Laurel had expected to hear, the sounds that filled the room were aggressive and warring.

  ‘To match the mood,’ Oliver taunted when she grimaced faintly. ‘But if you don’t care for it.…’

  ‘I think I’ll have an early night—I’m tired.’ Her voice faltered and she half expected some blistering sardonic retort, but none was forthcoming. When she lifted her head, Oliver was staring grimly into the glass he was slowly rotating between his hands.

  There was a book on the chair, and Laurel picked it up blindly. She wasn’t really that tired, and it would be something to read; something to help her sleep and perhaps banish the torturing memories that seemed to spring up like a sowing of dragon’s teeth, tormenting her with what might have been.

  It was only when she had bathed and gone to bed that she realised the book was one of those Oliver had purchas
ed in Arles. It was in English, written by a psychiatrist with a long string of letters after his name, and out of curiosity she started to thumb through it, her expression slowly changing as she realised it was a work dealing almost exclusively with problems such as those she herself had experienced; case histories in the main, many of them almost identical to her own. Children, pre-adolescent or just adolescent, who had experienced some sort of mental scarring due to the sexual overtones of those in authority over them. Many of the cases dealt with incest, some with actual rape, and Laurel was shivering like someone suffering from palsy by the time she had finished. And she had to finish it; even though almost every page, every word, brought back a deluge of memories, her eyes remained riveted to the book. She read how Dr Ealies considered that the first step back to normality for sufferers in these cases was the ability to form a relationship based on trust with a member of the opposite sex; how young adolescents who suffered this particularly harmful adult perversion had to be taught to re-code their senses to experience pleasure where before they had experienced fear, pain and humiliation. The more she read the more Laurel realised how fortunate she had been that her case had been relatively mild; and how for her the ability to trust had not been completely destroyed, otherwise she would never have been able to confide in Oliver in the first place. She also felt with renewed conviction that the hatred she had professed to feel for him had been the result of her belief that he had deliberately violated that trust.

  Oliver could only have bought this book because of her; because he wanted to gain a deeper insight into how her mind worked, which surely must be a plain indication that he was, as she had suspected, using her, or parts of her, with the intention of learning all he could about her so that he could re-create her in his book. When she finally closed the book, Laurel felt as though she had finally emerged from the tunnel that had closed round her when Bill Trenchard became her stepfather. She would have loved Oliver no matter when they met or where, she knew now, because what she felt for him was a woman’s love for a man.

  She fell asleep at last, but the book had reawakened memories she had deliberately subdued over the years, and now they came flooding back; her stepfather, threatening to send her away; touching her; filling her with fury and fear. In her nightmare she relived again the scene that had culminated in the trial—her stepfather pinning her to the floor, his sour breath in her face, her terror when his hands touched her naked skin.

  A scream bubbled in her throat, her threshing body dislodging the bedclothes, as scream after scream tore at her throat. It was the bedroom door crashing open that broke the horror. Oliver’s hands on her body were soothing, as she opened her eyes and saw him watching her with concern in his eyes.

  ‘Laurel! I thought you were being murdered at the very least,’ he said with a wry attempt at humour.

  Still drugged with the terror of her dream, Laurel shuddered, her eyes huge and staring in her pale face.

  From the floor Oliver rescued the book she had borrowed.

  ‘I read it,’ she told him huskily. ‘It brought it all back… Bill… the night… the night.…’

  ‘He tried to rape you? I was in court, Laurel,’ he told her, ‘I heard it all, but it’s over now. It was just a nightmare—unpleasant, as I should know, I’ve had my fair share in my time.’ She barely noticed the oddly brooding quality of his words.

  Still caught up in the horror of her nightmare, Laurel could only tremble and stare at him, flinching as he put out a hand to touch her arm, grey eyes replaced by hot brown ones; Oliver’s strong compassionate features with Bill’s greedily lustful ones.

  She shrank away from him, murmuring breathless protests, her eyes dilated with the emotion of what she was reliving.

  ‘Laurel!’

  The mists cleared and her eyes focused properly. ‘Oh, Oliver!’ Her voice trembled and she flung herself into his arms. ‘It was so awful… so real,’ she told him huskily as his arms closed round her, her head rested on his shoulder, a sense of wellbeing and homecoming washing over her. Seconds ticked by and a drowsy lassitude replaced her earlier terror. The warm, male scent of Oliver’s skin tantalised her nostrils, and suddenly simply being held by him wasn’t enough.

  ‘Laurel? Laurel, are you all right now?’

  Sensing his withdrawal, her fingers curled into the open lapels of his shirt, her plaintive, ‘Don’t leave me, Oliver, please! I’m frightened I might start dreaming again,’ drawing his brows together in a frown.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked her cynically. ‘That we spend the entire night like this?’

  Her pulses leapt at the thought, and an aching yearning spread through her body.

  ‘Laurel.…’

  ‘Oliver, don’t leave me, please!’ she pleaded, gripping him tighter. ‘Please!’

  His fingers were already on her wrists, as though he intended to push her away forcibly, and then suddenly his expression changed, his thumbs stroking sensuously over the sensitive inner flesh of her wrists. A sighing breath was wrenched from her, and Oliver’s face contorted as he muttered thickly, ‘Oh God!’ and Laurel didn’t know if it was an imprecation or a prayer, as his mouth closed on hers with a compulsive hunger that obliterated for all time any image of Bill Trenchard. This was Oliver, and every nerve ending in her body knew it and welcomed him. His lips moved over hers with growing insistence, as though, incredibly, he felt the same wild hunger that tore at her. Amazingly, unbelievably, she was free; and she felt dizzy, lightheaded with the knowledge.

  ‘Laurel, Laurel.’ He muttered her name into her throat, arching it with the pressure of his mouth, stroking the quivering flesh with his tongue, drawing sensual shudders of pleasure from her.

  It was like being caught in a maelstrom where no past or future existed, only a vast wave now that encompassed only them and the tight thread of tension that had been there all day, culminating in the explosion of need that burst like a fireball between them.

  Her fingers tightened into his hair, loving the feel of his scalp, the texture of his hair, and her mouth parted willingly for the heated invasion of his.

  She shivered with anticipation as his hands stroked over her body, with a delicacy that tantalised, her breath trapped in her lungs, desiring him as much as he seemed to desire her.

  There was no thought in her head of holding back; her fingers tugged experimentally at the buttons on his shirt, her tongue touching her lip as she concentrated all her attention on the hair-roughened expanse of chest she was slowly revealing; lost in rapt contemplation of his maleness, her fingers moving with undisguised pleasure over the muscular wall of his chest.

  ‘Laurel!’ His hoarse groan sent a frisson of answering need along her sensitised nerves, as her lips moved slowly over his skin, following the path of her fingers.

  Wholly absorbed in the pleasure of touching him, she forgot that he didn’t love her, and knew only of their mutual need.

  The protest that jerked past his lips as her fingers trailed tantalisingly across his stomach resting on the buckle of his jeans provoked an elemental thrill of power. His hands stroked her breasts, and she moaned softly with fresh delight, impatient for the hard warmth of his body against hers.

  He paused, removing his jeans with fingers that trembled visibly, and Laurel responded eagerly to the growing urgency of his touch.

  His lips playing erotically with the firm tautness of her nipples made her moan with an aching pleasure that began somewhere deep inside her and spread to every nerve. She was drowning, lost in a stomach-clenching excitement that drove her on with no thought of the consequences. Oliver’s hard masculinity against her brought her to a fresh peak of frenzied pleasure, and her body writhed instinctively beneath his, welcoming his intimate caresses without shame or restraint.

  ‘Laurel, is this really you?’ Oliver muttered against her throat. ‘I can hardly believe it. Are you really free at last? No more hang-ups, no more.…’

  Laurel stiffened in his arms. Why, oh, wh
y had he had to remind her? If only he had simply gone on making love to her, by now she might be experiencing his complete possession instead of lying here knowing that what to her had been the culmination of her love was to him nothing more than therapy.

  ‘Yes, I’m free,’ she said dully, pulling away from him. ‘There’s no need to go any further, Oliver. The experiment is over.’

  ‘Experiment?’ She had his full attention now. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ He sat up, a shadowy, alien outline watching her.

  ‘You know what I mean. You were using me, monitoring me so that you could use me in your book. I guessed it almost from the first—the way you questioned me about the past; everything.’

  ‘Laurel, that simply isn’t.…’ He broke off, moving angrily and dislodging the pile of articles she had brought upstairs and her notebook. ‘What the.…?’ He frowned, then snapped on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with light. ‘What are you doing with these?’ he asked her, frowning over the articles, ‘and this? What is it?’ He picked up the notebook and it fell open. He read a few lines and then looked at her.

  Laurel shrivelled under that look, combined of a combustible anger and ice-cold contempt.

  ‘My God,’ he breathed emotively, quickly reading down the rest of the page, ‘and you had the gall to accuse me! What the devil is this?’

  ‘Oliver, I can explain.…’ Desperately she reached for the notebook, but he held her off, quickly flipping through some of the pages, his expression hardening with every word.

  ‘So,’ he said in the silence that followed, ‘now we have the truth. You came here with me with the deliberate intention of somehow discrediting me. Don’t even bother trying to deny it, Laurel. It’s all here, written down by you.’

  What could she say? That it was true that she had written those things, felt them even, but she had been muddled and confused then by her own motives, had not fully understood how she had felt. She couldn’t confess the truth to him—not now.