by Penny Jordan
‘Yes, I know,’ he told her, but she scarcely seemed to have heard him.
‘I knew. I knew he had gone,’ she went on. She was speaking slowly, more to herself than to him, Giles recognised as he watched the emotions pass painfully across her face. ‘I wanted to be with him, but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted him to know I loved him … I wanted to hold him … I wanted him to have love. He shouldn’t have died like that, alone …’ Tears had filled her eyes and Giles felt the pain wrench at his guts as he listened to her. ‘It was my fault, all of it. I said I didn’t want him, but I did, and I let him die alone when he should have been in my arms. When he should have been with me. He should have had someone …’
‘He did,’ Giles told her thickly. ‘He had me. I was with him.’
Now for the first time, she focused on him.
‘No!’ she told him fiercely. ‘Don’t lie to me, Giles. You left—’
‘I went back,’ he told her. ‘I couldn’t sleep … couldn’t get what you’d said out of my mind, so I went back. He was looking at me when it happened. I think … I think somehow he knew. All the knowledge of the world seemed to be in his eyes as he looked at me. I felt so helpless, so angry. He was my child and yet I couldn’t help him. I’d let him down and I’d let you down. If I’d let you stay with him as you wanted …’
‘No,’ Lucy told him. ‘We couldn’t have kept him alive, no one could.’ She touched the petals of one of the flowers. Her hand trembled violently. ‘I thought you’d forgotten,’ she told him huskily. ‘That you wanted to forget him; to pretend he’d never been born. I thought you wanted to push him out of your life, the way you do me.’
‘Lucy …’
She trembled violently as he took her in his arms; an instinctive reaction to her pain, a physical denial of what she had said, and once she was there he marvelled that he could ever have forgotten just how it felt to hold her like this.
‘Why haven’t we talked like this before?’ he demanded helplessly.
‘I thought you didn’t want to … that you were angry with me … that you blamed me for …’
‘Blamed you? No! How could you ever think that?’
‘I know I said I didn’t want him. But I did love him, Giles … I didn’t want him to die. I never wanted that.’
‘No … no, of course you didn’t.’ He was holding her, rocking her, aching with grief and pain as he listened to the words pouring from her.
Quite when grief and compassion turned to desire he never really knew; one moment he was holding her, stroking her, sharing with her the aching loss they were acknowledging together for the first time, the next, or so it seemed, her mouth was trembling beneath his in much the same way as her body had trembled in his arms.
The feel of her, the warmth of her body in his arms, the scent of her and his senses’ familiarity with their sensuality hit him like a flash flood, one moment nothing, the next a sudden seizure of desire so acute, so powerful that it totally swamped everything else.
Somehow he must have undressed her, undressed them both, but he had no knowledge of having done so, only of the soft flesh of her breasts beneath his hands, the dark allure of her nipples, the sharp high sounds of pleasure she made as he suckled on them, using his tongue and then his teeth as he responded to the demand of the nails digging into his flesh and the movement of her body against him.
It was a fierce, frantic coming together, full of sharp sounds and almost violent movements, a physical expression of anger and pain, their bodies straining together.
It could have been a soulless physical exchange of greed, but oddly it was not. It was as though some tiny part of each of them managed to remain so deeply aware of the other that beneath the anger, the despair, the unleavened physical ache there remained a recognition of each other’s needs and pleasures, a faint echo of the loving harmony they had once shared.
As Lucy’s orgasm jerked her body in fierce spasms against his own it brought his own release. Her body had never felt hotter, tighter, quicker, and he knew as his erection subsided that physically he still wanted her, his desire an itch still needing to be scratched.
He had never felt like that before; never known that raw ache of lust and need, and both it and the fierce surge of unfamiliar male triumph and power it had brought him left him feeling shaken and disturbed by this new vision of himself.
He looked down at Lucy. Her eyes were closed, her face wet with tears, her breathing shallow and erratic. Her skin had always marked easily and now he could see the faint beginnings of the bruises he had made in the heat of his need. The sight of her body naked, vulnerable, still caught in the after-shock of orgasm, touched a nerve within him.
‘Lucy …’
Her eyes opened as he groaned her name and lowered his head to pillow it against her breasts, his arms holding her.
She hadn’t meant anything like that to happen; it had been like a summer storm, all thunder and lightning, all quick, raw heat and atavistic passion. Now her body ached, inside and out; that unmistakable ache produced only by intense sex. She could smell the scent of the flowers Giles had bought. They made her head swim slightly, or was that because she had not had anything to eat? Not since yesterday morning … not since …
She felt Giles turn his head and start to nuzzle her breast. He had always been a considerate lover, a loving lover, never greedy and demanding. His mouth opened over her nipple, still tender and swollen so that his eager, fierce suckling caused her to cry out and protest.
‘Not that … what, then?’ he muttered thickly as he released her. ‘What is it you want, then, Lucy? Is it this?’
As his hand moved between her legs she saw that he was erect again, wanting her as he hadn’t wanted her in months, but his desire did nothing to melt the core of misery deep inside her; his physical intimacy could not breach the moat of loneliness that surrounded her.
This wasn’t the Giles she knew, her lover … her husband … this was a different Giles, a Giles who might be able to make her body ache with shocked arousal with the skilled touch of fingers that rubbed so persuasively, so determinedly against her.
She tried to hold on to that thought, to remind herself that they were two people whose marriage was virtually over, but her love-starved body refused to listen.
This wasn’t love. It was just sex, but her body refused to acknowledge the difference.
He was holding her now, stroking her, his tongue quickly parting the heavily swollen lips that protected her sex. She shuddered as she felt his mouth move on her, his tongue rubbing fiercely against her clitoris.
She cried out to him to stop and at the same time reached down to twist her fingers into his hair and hold him against her body, her breath panting from her lungs as her acutely sensitive flesh responded to the rhythmic roughness of his tongue. It was a caress, an intimacy to which she had always been vulnerably responsive, but never more so than now, her cries of denial harsh, guttural almost as his mouth opened on her, drawing her down into the inescapable darkness of her own pleasure.
Later, when it was over and he had exhausted both himself and her, he looked into her white, set face and asked hoarsely, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘You used me,’ she told him tautly. ‘You used me as a substitute for Davina.’
Davina. He had completely forgotten about her, Giles realised guiltily. He had thought Lucy was going to accuse him of a lack of tenderness, a lack of consideration for her, and now his face flushed as he recognised exactly what he had done.
‘No, Lucy, that isn’t true,’ he protested.
‘You mean, now that you’ve had us both, you prefer me?’ she demanded acidly. The Lucy who had cried in his arms for the loss of their son was gone, he recognised grimly.
‘I haven’t slept with Davina,’ he told her angrily.
‘So you were using me as a substitute.’ She said it slowly, almost as though she was in pain, but as he reached out to touch her, to try to tell her that he had never even g
iven Davina a thought, that his need, his desire, his urgency had been hers and hers alone, she pushed him off, temper burning bright patches of colour on her pale face as she reached for her clothes, holding them protectively against her.
‘Well, now that you’ve had what you wanted, you’d better go, hadn’t you?’
‘Lucy …’ He cursed as he stood up and tried to pull on his clothes. No man could reason effectively with a woman while he was stark naked and at the wrong side of a physically exhausting sexual encounter, he decided irritably. ‘Lucy … listen … it wasn’t—’
‘What? Important?’ She gave him a thin, curling non-smile. ‘I wonder if Davina will share that opinion. Or aren’t you going to bother telling her?’
Helpless and angry and all too well aware that his behaviour had been less than justifiable, and still shaken by his awareness of how quickly, how easily the woman he believed he loved had been forgotten, he felt powerless to make Lucy listen to any kind of reason and judged it wiser and safer simply to leave. Besides, he needed time to think. Time to understand himself what had happened and why.
As he pulled on his clothes he made one final stand. ‘This is still my home, Lucy, and I intend to go on living here.’
‘Refusing to let you share her house as well as her bed, is she?’ Lucy glared at him.
He heard her slamming the bedroom door and stared round the room tiredly. He had never known she had felt such grief, such pain, such guilt at Nicholas’s death. He had not known either that it would mean so much to her that he had been with him … The doctors had advised him not to raise the subject unless she did so first and yet, crying in his arms, she had told him how much she had wanted him to speak of their baby, how much she had wanted to talk about him and keep his memory alive.
It hurt him that he had never known any of these things. It hurt him and it made him feel guilty, just as remembering the way he had possessed her, needed her made him feel guilty as well.
Davina. He could never imagine her in that kind of sexual context. With Davina sex would be calm, restrained, conducted in the bedroom at night, discreetly, with control and tenderness. It would not invoke in him that hot, unbridled intensity he had experienced here with Lucy; it would not make him question himself or doubt his motives, his civilisation, his ability to be wholly in control of his sexuality.
Tiredly he shrugged on his jacket. How was he going to be able to face Davina after what he had done? How could he even face himself?
He walked into the hall and stood for a moment looking towards the stairs, unable to stop himself visualising Lucy as he had found her when he first walked in, curled up in that small foetal ball in the room that should have been their son’s.
His thoughts, his emotions, his needs confused and bewildered him. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had told Davina that his marriage was over; that it could not be saved or resurrected. And yet he had still had sex with Lucy, had still desired her … wanted her, and had still felt joined to her as they shared their grief over their son.
Emotions caused by the final dying convulsions of his love, or … Or what? Was he going insane, turning into two different, separate men who loved two completely different and separate women?
His brain ached with the exhaustion of trying to think clearly. Last night he had gone to the motel knowing that he loved and wanted Davina.
Now …
Why hadn’t he realised how Lucy felt about Nicholas’s death? Why hadn’t he seen … guessed? Why hadn’t she felt able to tell him, to turn to him?
Had he really failed so badly, and, if he had, had he any right to ask another woman to risk that kind of failure?
He needed time, he decided tiredly. Time to get his thoughts, his emotions in order—but how could he have any time for himself with the full weight of the company’s problems pressing down on him?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SAUL and Cathy had picked Christie up from the airport. Saul had seen at once that something was wrong, but he waited until Cathy had gone to bed before saying anything.
‘Want to talk about it?’ he asked her, walking into the kitchen while she was making them both a cup of tea.
Her defences came up immediately, her back tensing as she went on with what she was doing, feigning ignorance as she asked him, ‘Talk about what?’
‘Whatever it is that’s upsetting you so much,’ Saul retorted. ‘Come on, Christie, this is me,’ he reminded her, taking hold of her and turning her round to face him. ‘And you never were much good at hiding your feelings. Something happened in Edinburgh.’
‘On the contrary,’ she told him brittly. ‘Nothing happened.’
Dammit, what was wrong with her? Aching like a teenager for a man who hadn’t even touched her. A man who was all the things she most loathed in the male sex. Deceiving her.
‘If you say so,’ Saul agreed. He had been working on the file on Carey Chemicals, and Christie frowned as she walked past the table and saw it.
‘Carey’s?’ she questioned him, her earlier suspicions confirmed. ‘So I was right! But why on earth should Sir Alex want to acquire Carey’s?’ She sat down, handing him his mug of tea. ‘I thought they were on the verge of going out of business.’
‘He sees its acquisition as a way of getting a toehold in the drug market,’ Saul told her carefully.
‘And drugs are big business, highly profitable business,’ Christie said bitterly.
Saul looked quickly at her. He knew how she felt about the large drug companies, but her bitterness had something new in it, something personal.
‘Well, Alex won’t get much from Carey’s. Gregory has already picked it clean, by all accounts. By rights the whole place should be closed down anyway. As I said before, their safety record is appalling; I know they’ve been in breach of the health and safety laws; they’ve got people there handling drugs without any proper form of protection. And God knows what effects the stuff they’re handling there might have on them, apart from the contact dermatitis.’
Saul frowned as he listened to her. Christie might be emotional and intense, but she was also a highly qualified professional and he knew she would not make those kind of judgements, accusations almost, without any foundation.
‘You’re sure about that?’ he asked her. ‘That Carey’s is directly responsible?’
‘Just about as sure as I can be without getting in to check on the actual stuff they’re handling, which Gregory James took damned good care I was not allowed to do. He managed to fob off the inspector by giving the place a wholesale clean-up the day he did his inspection. How he knew when he was due to visit, I’ve no idea. Someone must have tipped him off, or been paid to tip him off. It’s criminal, risking people’s health, their lives perhaps and the lives of their children, and for what? For profit. It’s worse than criminal. It’s … it’s grotesque.’
As she spoke, all the anger she had felt against Leo filled her; an anger intensified and fuelled by the bitter sharpness of her own awareness of how strong her disappointment and disillusionment had been. Knowing the truth, accepting it, had always been important to her and it hurt to know that she had actually almost wished it had not been revealed to her. Or that he had not held back from making love to her?
‘Does Davina James know yet … that Alex wants to buy her out?’
‘Not yet. I intend to approach her bankers tomorrow to arrange a preliminary discussion.’
‘Surely she’ll be only too glad to sell out? I’ve heard the company’s in danger of going bankrupt.’
‘Alex likes to drive a hard bargain,’ Saul told her.
Christie gave him a quick look. There was something in his voice that suggested an unfamiliar distaste.
‘At heart he’s a gambler, and, like all gamblers, he likes to feel he’s getting something for nothing.’
‘You don’t like him very much, do you?’ Christie commented. ‘That’s strange. I’ve always thought you rather admired him.’
‘Perhaps
I did once. Before I realised I was looking at what I could too easily become. Then somehow it wasn’t quite so easy to admire him any more. Tell me something, Christie,’ he asked her, standing up to face her. ‘What would you do if you were suddenly to discover that your way of life, that all this … that conventional medicine was all a sham and that instead of helping people, curing them, you might actually have been harming them? How would you feel? How would you react?’
Christie stared at him. ‘I’d feel devastated,’ she told him uncertainly. ‘Angry … cheated. I’d feel as though everything I’d done … worked for … believed in had become totally meaningless … valueless.’
‘Yes,’ Saul agreed quietly. ‘And how would you deal with that feeling?’
She looked helplessly at him. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone could deal with it.’
‘No. Neither do I.’
‘Is that what’s happened to you, Saul? Is that how you feel about your life … your work?’
‘In a sense, yes. I don’t know what’s happened to me, Christie. I only know that the ambitions, the goals I took as mine aren’t really mine any more, if they ever were.’
‘No,’ Christie agreed sombrely. ‘They were Dad’s.’
They looked at one another, Christie’s eyes full of compassion, Saul’s dark with pain.
‘It isn’t his fault,’ he insisted.
Christie said nothing.
‘I was always free to make my own choices.’
Still she said nothing.
‘What is your choice now, Saul?’ she asked him softly after a while.
‘I don’t know. All I do know is that this is my last job for Alex. In a sense I owe him Carey’s. Payment for a debt I reneged on,’ he told her confusingly. ‘But once that debt is paid …’
‘What will you do? Find another job in the City?’
‘I don’t know … I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I want to make time to spend with Josey and Tom. If it isn’t too late. But first I have to get this acquisition out of the way.’
