by Susan Napier
'So you said yes,' he guessed gently, cupping her hot cheek, his thumb stroking her mouth. 'Loyal Jane ... What a price you paid for that friendship. When you give your trust you give it totally, completely and forever, don't you?' He sounded deeply satisfied.
'You don't seem very surprised,' she murmured; her terrible revelation having evoked none of the rage she had expected.
'In hindsight, I'm not... There was no excitement between Ava and I ... not the kind of instant spark there was between us.' He narrowed his eyes as they swept over her body, and she instantly felt singing of her blood in her veins. 'I think I was in love with the idea of Ava rather than the actual woman herself... My feelings for her were one-dimensional, whereas with you...'
His voice dropped abruptly. 'With you I get the whole gamut of emotions. I was more offended by the sight of you laughing with Carl than I ever was by the thought of Ava sleeping with someone else.' He shook his head at her. 'The more I got to know you, the more I began to question my interpretation of events... I wondered whether my being jilted had anything to do with the fact that Ava married so quickly afterwards. Was she pregnant?'
'No, but she told me she was to persuade me to help her.'
'What?' This time his reaction was satisfactorily outraged. The lift doors opened and Jane found herself hustled along to her room, where Ryan kicked the door closed and demanded, 'She did what?'
'She was desperate.' Jane excused her friend with a generosity all the more complete for her own recent resort to desperate measures. 'She told me afterwards that she was terrified I might refuse to help, so she lied about being pregnant to make me more sympathetic ... and of course it did .. .'
'So she used emotional blackmail to get you to take the blame for her actions-'
'No, don't you see? That's what's so awful!' If she had been able to Jane would have wrung her hands; as it was she just had to wave them in anguish. 'That wasn't her idea at all-that was me! I was the one who came up with the idea of making a horrible scene at the wedding that would make it easy for Ava to cry off. Because I was secretly glad when she came to me begging to call off the wedding. I wanted to stop it-not just for her, but for me, for selfish reasons, because I didn't want her to marry you ... I wanted you to marry me.'
She spun away, unable to look at him in case she was forced to witness the dawning disgust in his eyes. 'So you see, you were right all along when you accused me of being sick with envy. But it wasn't because I was jealous of Ava having someone to love her; it was because that someone was you.'
Her blue eyes were wild with shame and grief at the memory as she paced up and down. 'I was in love with you and Ava wasn't-and I hated it that you couldn't see that, that you still seemed to want her, and I hated it that you made me feel like an unfaithful friend and that I couldn't stop myself being attracted to you. I felt so guilty that it somehow seemed that I ought to take the blame for her not marrying you, because I had somehow wished it to happen, and that having you despise me would be fitting punishment which would also destroy the terrible temptation to try to make you love me. Oh, it all sounds totally ludicrous now, but back then it made an ugly kind of sense!'
'Not ludicrous at all, just very human,' said Ryan, catching her as she restlessly roamed by, tugging her over to sit with him on the bed. 'We rouse such strong feelings in each other that it's natural to be afraid of being overwhelmed by them, and, of all the passions, fear weakens judgement most.
'You weren't alone in feeling confused back then, sweetheart. Even standing there at the altar, in total shock, I felt a shiver of relief that someone was stopping me from taking the drastic step of marrying a woman whom I respected more than I desired. I tried to smother the feeling in rage and denial, but that moment of self betrayal haunted me, especially since it was somehow tied up with the fact that you were the one who had perpetrated the terrible lies about me.
'But the strange thing was that I felt more betrayed by your lies than by Ava's defection. When you said that you and I were lovers, it was as though you had translated my deepest, most private thought into a deed. And even when I met you again, after I came back from Australia, that was part of the pleasure of punishing you-making you pay for the sin of my desiring, until I discovered there was even more pleasure in loving you...'
'We're quite a pair,' said Jane huskily, wrapping her arms around him. 'A matched pair. You know, I even welcomed your revenge in a horribly twisted way because it meant that at least I knew I wasn't forgotten, I was alive in your thoughts .. .'
'Oh, you were in my thoughts, all right,' he said, kissing her rumpled brow. 'All the time ... And the thought being father to the deed, I couldn't leave you alone, can't leave you alone .. .' he corrected himself, his hands wandering over the luscious curves of the black dress. 'So you'd better be prepared for a lifetime of this kind of attention.'
Jane laughed as he tipped her back on the bed and began to kiss her breathless. She couldn't imagine a more glorious fate!
