Indiscretions

by Robyn Donald

  “Then marry me, and we’ll devote the rest of our lives to seeing if it can be done.”

  Her breath came sharply. She covered his hand with hers, pressing it against her heart, and said unevenly, “Sex isn’t love, Nicholas. And love is the only reason for marriage.”

  “Whatever we have is something worth fighting for. We talk together, we argue without fighting, we enjoy each other’s company.... Oh, I’ll admit I wondered whether we’d tire of each other when we’d made love, when all the excitement of the preliminary fencing was over, but I find your mind infinitely fascinating. And is it too conceited of me to believe that you enjoy my company as much as I enjoy yours?”

  She scrambled off his lap; for a moment his hands tightened cruelly on her waist, indenting the fine skin, and she was pinned, held captive, until he swore under his breath and let her go. Her heart was slowly shattering in her chest, fragmenting into millions of painful shards amidst the ruins of her life.

  “You know I do,” she muttered, “but I can’t marry you.”

  “Can’t?” His voice was harsh. “Or won’t?”

  She should say that she wouldn’t. Then he would hate her and perhaps get over her more quickly. But even as she toyed with the idea she knew she couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t believe her, anyway; that astute brain had picked up on the small clues that gave her away.

  Besides, she owed him the truth.

  And when she told him he would no longer want to marry her. In fact, he would probably despise her.

  “I should have left as soon as I realized that you’d brought me here,” she said raggedly. “Because I knew then—I’ve always known—that there’s no future for us. Nicholas, my parents were Joy and Gordon Frensham. You must have heard of them. Twenty years ago they were posted to the New Zealand Embassy in Hong Kong. Three years later they were accused of spying for the Soviets. They committed suicide before any case could be brought against them, but apparently there was no doubt about their guilt. What would it do to your career to marry their daughter?”

  She heard him stand up, but kept her face turned resolutely away.

  “Why tell me now?” he asked in a voice so icily measured it chilled her through.

  “I don’t go around telling people,” she said wearily. “I’m not proud of what they did. They ruined not only their own lives but my aunt’s, as well. She had a career in the diplomatic service, was well on the way to becoming New Zealand’s first woman ambassador, and she had to resign. Mud sticks, Nicholas. If I married you it would ruin your career, too, because there are still people in positions of power who remember them. Just as there are people who would use me against you. Peter Sanderson, for instance.”

  “I can deal with the Sandersons of this world,” he said arrogantly.

  She shook her head. “It would ruin you, Nicholas.”

  “Mariel, it would not—”

  Tears gathered on her lashes, clogged her throat. “I know it would. When I told David, he consulted his parents and his old headmaster and his uncle—Sir Richard Greville, the British ambassador in Germany, who should know if anyone does—and they all said marrying me would be fatal for his prospects.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, they’re a pack of old—”

  “I won’t marry you,” she said firmly. “And when you’ve thought about it, you’ll agree it would be impossible.”

  “Mariel, I knew who you were before you left the island a month ago.”

  She felt her mouth drop. “What?” she whispered, her head jerking up.

  He was watching her with narrowed eyes, his face hard and alert and determined. “One of the older members of the group recognized you,” he said.

  “The security guard,” she said numbly. “At the gym.”

  “Yes, Ogilvie. You look like your father, apparently— same colouring, same bone structure. And you move your head in certain ways and use the same expression. Ogilvie was sure he knew who you were, but you weren’t calling yourself Frensham. Security men being security men, suspicious to the core, he checked your dossier with Forsythe, the hotel head of security, purely as a precaution. It stood up to scrutiny, but he wasn’t satisfied, so he got on the line to New Zealand. After that it didn’t take much time to find out what had happened to you and who you were. The day the minister ordered me to take you out to dinner I’d just been told that you were almost certainly the daughter of the Frenshams.”

  “Was that why Ogilvie interrupted us by the staircase?” Another memory struck her. “While you were talking to him Peter Sanderson came up and tried to get me to go to the nightclub. Did he know?”

  “Of course he didn’t,” Nicholas said.

  For some reason that comforted her.

  “And yes, that was why Ogilvie called me away. He and Forsythe had gone through your dossier with a fine-tooth comb before Ogilvie got on the line to Wellington. Once Wellington got back to me and confirmed that you were definitely their daughter, he sent Susan Waterhouse down to the bar to confirm it.”

  “So I was automatically tarred with the same brush,” she said bitterly.

  Exasperation sharpened his words. “Admit it, Mariel— it did look suspicious. You weren’t using their name, you certainly weren’t telling anyone who you were, and you were in a position to gather information.”

  “So spying has to run in the genes. Did the minister decide that you should take me out to dinner and use your powerful masculine magnetism to pump me?” Better a sneer than a wail of agony!

  The hesitation was so brief she almost missed it, but she had come to know him over these past few days. “Yes, he did.”

  And she thought Mr. McCabe had been kind! Just another small disillusion amongst so many, and yet it hurt almost as much as Nicholas’s part in the situation. Perhaps she was concentrating on the lesser pain to spare herself the anguish of the greater. “Ply me with wine, perhaps kiss me several times so that I wasn’t thinking clearly, and then ask the question and watch my face?”

  He shrugged. “Possibly that’s what he had in mind. Now you can see why I was so angry, why I asked those bloody intrusive questions. I knew I was strongly attracted to you, I was fighting it, and here I was being ordered to use that attraction to get information from you. I felt like a heel.”

  “But you did it,” she said stonily.

  “I did it.” The harsh contours of his face defeated her accusing glance. “Partly because I wanted to take you out, wanted to kiss you, but mostly because, if it turned out you were spying for whatever reason, I was sure the knowledge would kill whatever it was I felt for you. Only I blew it properly, stumbling over the crudest of queries with all the finesse of an ant in a sugar bowl because I was repelled by what I had to do, and because all I really wanted to know was how much that bloody St. Clair meant to you.”

  Silently she considered his words, trying hard to fan the tiny flicker of hope in her heart. But she knew that she couldn’t; he wanted her, and with his natural arrogance he thought he could bend the world to his bidding. Unfortunately life didn’t work that way.

  She said dully, “It doesn’t really matter. It’s impossible.” The water in the pool shimmered in her eyes. Urgently, giving him no time to speak, she said, “David was— is—as ambitious as you are and he did love me, Nicholas. He didn’t give in easily. But in the end, the real world, the one we live in, not this idyll you’ve created for us here, broke his dreams.”

  Nicholas came up and put his hands on her shoulders, twisting her around so that he could see into her face. His own was serious, the blazing eyes hooded, his mouth firm. “He was a coward,” he said quietly. “Darling, trust me.”

  Grief splintered through her, robbing the world of all warmth, all colour, all joy, but from somewhere she summoned the grim endurance to continue.

  “It’s not a matter of trust.” She turned her head and kissed the strong wrist, leaning her cheek against it because that way she could keep her face averted.

  “Then what...” Irrit
ation and anger sounded in his voice.

  “Don’t make it any harder for me, please,” she interrupted. “I am the daughter of two traitors. I believe the information they sold to the Soviets led directly to the deaths of at least half-a-dozen agents, American, as well as British. Governments have long memories, and diplomats’ wives are vetted almost as carefully as their husbands. If we marry, your career path is going to be much rockier than it need be. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  He hesitated, considering her words. Then he said shortly, “It could, I suppose.”

  Oh, he was different from David. No swift protestations, no facile promises.

  Now, she told her heart. One last blow and then you can die. “Do you think I could bear knowing I had done that to you?”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  Tears burned at the back of her eyes. “It’s no use,” she whispered. “I know how much you love your career. Mr. McCabe told me you have a great future in the corps. I can’t jeopardize that.”

  “I see.” Merciless eyes pierced the sorry rags of her self-possession and stabbed right into her soul.

  She held them for only a moment, because she couldn’t allow him to see how much this was hurting her. He was a good man, and later, when he realized how impossible the situation was, it would worry him to know how much pain she was feeling.

  “I’ll leave straight away,” he said without expression, “but there is, of course, no reason for you to go. The cottage is at your disposal until the end of the week.”

  Unevenly, stupidly, she said, “Nicholas, no. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  His brows shot up. “What are you offering?” he asked courteously.

  She bit her lip. “I... we could...”

  He didn’t help, simply stood there looking at her with a flat, lethal gaze.

  Mariel swallowed. “We don’t have to call it all off,” she said, endeavouring to sound normal, to hide the fact that she was dying inside. Against everything sensible, against her compulsion to protect him, she said, “We could still see each other,” even as she was horrified at the reckless need that had summoned the words from the depths of her heart.

  “Conduct a long-distance love affair?” he said with cutting politeness. “See each other every three months or so when our paths coincide? Is that what you want, Mariel? A nice, convenient lover who doesn’t clutter up your life? I don’t have the same outlook as my mother. I wouldn’t find much joy in that.”

  She dragged a deep, painful breath into her lungs, striving for composure. “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “It was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Very,” he said.

  Pride raised her head, kept her voice cool and even slightly mocking. “So it’s all or nothing?”

  “I prefer a quick, clean death to a lingering decline,” he said, and turned and walked away from her, sun gleaming red on his hair, highlighting the angular features, the disciplined grace.

  It was then, as Nicholas strode out of her life, that she admitted she’d been fooling herself. She’d fallen into the oldest trap in the world, one baited with her heart, and now she was a prisoner behind the bars of her needs and her emotions. She didn’t just want him, she loved him, and because her parents had been greedy and treacherous twenty years before she was never going to have him.

  She had loved David, and she grieved when he left her, but it had been nothing like this. This pain wrenched her whole body, tore at her heart, numbed her mind. Shivering, she wrapped a huge beach towel around her and walked into the woods, farther and farther into the shadows until she was stopped by a large live oak. She put her forearms against the trunk and stood with her face pressed into them, too spent to cry, too wounded to do anything but bear the agony.

  He left nothing behind, not even a note.

  But two weeks later Carole said, “Oh, by the way, a letter arrived with the check for your week at Bride’s Bay.”

  Mariel frowned. Resentment struggled with relief; at least she wouldn’t have to explain any lack of payment but she hated feeling beholden to him. “A letter?” she asked, wondering just what Nicholas had done now.

  Carole sent her a bright-eyed glance. “Yes. With ‘Personal’ stamped on the envelope.”

  He had sent her double her usual fee; the note said negligently, “Dear Mariel, Please accept this. I wish you well in your future life.”

  He was hers, N.

  She gave the money to a charity and tore the note up, then spent half of one sleepless night reassembling it with glue on a sheet of tissue paper.

  Mariel thought she knew about pain and grief, about the bitterness of losing everything she’d ever wanted, but in the following weeks she discovered that David’s betrayal had only scratched the surface. Even the memory of the anguish following her parents’ deaths paled. As she went mechanically about her job she found that her capacity for heartache was limitless, rooted in the depths of her love.

  Unable to eat or sleep, she lost seven pounds and gained two new lines in her face, until at last a friend’s shocked exclamations persuaded her to force food down her reluctant throat, and for the first time in her life to enlist the help of sleeping pills. It took her weeks to re-establish some sort of sleep pattern so that she could give them up. Unfortunately, without them she dreamed—wild fantasies of Nicholas that slid swiftly into erotic illusions from which she awoke aching and heated, her body racked with hunger, her mind in chaos.

  Two months after she’d left the cottage on Jermain Island, Mariel was walking out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan when she saw him. Dry-mouthed, her mind suddenly feverish with hope, she stopped at the top of the steps, watching as he strode down in front of her.

  Pain squeezed her hammering heart. She would know Nicholas anywhere, the set of his broad shoulders, the smooth, masculine grace of his movements. As she watched, the woman beside him stumbled slightly and, laughing, clutched at him. His arm whipped out, caught her around the waist and supported her until they reached the street.

  She was a long-legged, stylishly dressed redhead, a woman whose mouth didn’t strike Mariel as being particularly soft. Susan Waterhouse.

  Nausea and a bitter surge of jealousy raked through her. Bitter as a woman wronged, she stood like Galatea encased in marble and watched them walk down past the lions and out onto the street. They turned toward Central Park.

  “You all right?” a voice asked with the automatic wariness of a native New Yorker.

  “Yes.” Turning her head, Mariel’s eyes met the concerned, cautious glance of a young woman some years younger. “Just indigestion,” she lied. “I’ve taken something for it—I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

  “Can I get you a cab?”

  “No, I’ll just wait here for a few minutes. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” the woman said automatically, and walked on down the steps. At the bottom she turned and looked back.

  Warmed by her concern, Mariel waved. The woman waved back and went on her way, leaving Mariel to turn her head so that she could watch Nicholas and Susan walk into the park. Only half an hour ago she’d stood in the museum by the windows that looked out on the park and seen summer lovers strolling and flirting, family groups chatting and calling out admonitions to laughing children, all grateful for the lush oasis in the midst of the city.

  Oh, God, she thought, unable to move until Nicholas and Susan had disappeared beneath the green of the trees.

  Such pain could not be endured, and yet somehow she managed to find strength enough to make her way to the curb and hail a cab.

  Back in her apartment she sat for a long time, hugging herself with her arms, trying to erase the image of Nicholas and Susan as they walked down the steps together. There had been something so... easy, she thought despairingly, about the way they touched each other, so familiar and right.

  She fought the corrosion of jealousy. If she really loved Nicholas, she would want him to be happy, even if his happi
ness meant that he married another woman. “I do,” she said out loud, her voice strained and unnaturally high. “Of course I want him to be happy.”

  But she didn’t want him to marry anyone else but her!

  Nicholas and Susan must be in New York for the conference on international trade sponsored by the United Nations. Everyone who had any sort of interest in the subject at all was there, busy trying to push their own agenda.

  Mariel had refused to read about it in the newspapers, hadn’t allowed herself to even think about the possibility of Nicholas’s being there, but perhaps she should have.

  No, not all the mental preparation in the world would have made it easier to see them together. And rather than be haunted by how relaxed they were with each other, why not blame the whim of malevolent fate that had made her walk out of the museum after them? Of all the places in New York, she thought wearily, why did she have to see him there? From now on the place would be haunted by his tall figure, the arrogant poise of his dark head, the smooth, effortless walk.

  Carole called the next morning, waking Mariel from the too-deep sleep that comes from not dropping off until almost dawn.

  “Yes, I know it’s the weekend,” she said when Mariel croaked a complaint into the receiver, “but this is an emergency. An interpreter has got some sort of vicious bug, and we’ve been asked for someone who speaks Mandarin and French.”

  “What about Gee-Ling?”

  “She’s already booked up solid.”

  Mariel said resignedly, “Oh, all right.” It would stop her from worrying about what Nicholas and Susan were doing.

  The meeting, held in a hotel not far from the United Nations building, began at lunchtime, and the negotiations didn’t wind down until eight that night. It certainly kept her mind off herself; by the time it finished she was utterly exhausted.

  At least, she thought, waiting as the doorman called a cab, she would sleep tonight. No more highly coloured nightmares of Nicholas and Susan entwined together in the throes of passion, no memories of Nicholas’s face as he reached his climax, the agonized starkness of his features, mouth drawn tight, the way his head went back at the moment of greatest pleasure—