by Helen Brooks
‘Your solicitor has informed mine that you want no financial settlement of any kind. Is that true?’ His voice spoke from the kitchen, harsh and abrasive, and she winced inwardly at the tone.
‘Yes.’ Her voice died in her throat and she tried again. ‘Yes, that’s true. This is all my fault after all, it wouldn’t be fair—’
‘What, exactly, is all your fault, Amy?’ He appeared in the doorway and her heart nearly stopped at the sight of him. He was so cold, so angry … If she could stop loving him, wanting him, needing him, this would be so much easier, but she knew with dreadful finality that no matter what he said or did to her it wouldn’t make any difference. He was everything she had always wanted, dreamed of, in the long cold years of growing up without love and warmth. And now he despised and hated her. And it had to stay that way. ‘I mean, I’d really like to know, strange as it may seen, in spite of being an almost irrelevant complication in your life. I wouldn’t expect a little thing like a husband to stop you following your own star but, if it’s not too much trouble, a slight indication of why would be helpful.’
She stared at him, her eyes wide with apprehension and confusion, as he came nearer. What could she say after all? ‘I have told you,’ she forced out at last through white lips as he paused to kneel at her side, his eyes narrowed black slits. ‘I just realised we’d made a mistake, that’s all, that we weren’t compatible—’
‘The hell we aren’t.’ She had known, from the first moment in the cottage, that he was going to make love to her and now as the heat of his mouth seared her lips open she found her resistance was only a token gesture. Her head knew she ought to fight him, that she had to prove to him that she meant what she said, but her body was a different matter. That was alive with such a fierce deep hunger that even a will of iron would have melted with the heat. ‘You are mine, Amy, you’ll always be mine. If I really believed you’d slept with John, I’d kill him …’
How they came to be on the thick sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace she wasn’t quite sure, but as she felt the length of his body against hers all lucid thought was a thing of the past. Her hands lifted to his shoulders and the back of his head, her fingers luxuriating in the feel of his thick virile hair as she brought his head down to meet her lips. His mouth was intoxicating, sensual, and now his hands slid from her waist to open her blouse feverishly, seeking and finding the firm silky line of her breasts as he expertly unclipped her bra and let the burgeoning swell free.
His touch was like fire on her overheated senses, the rolling waves of pleasure that swept her body unmistakable, and as his mouth followed his hands in a seductive caress that had her aching for more, she whispered his name over and over again, half mad with desire.
Her fingers were stroking the hard male body under his shirt, revelling in the familiar feel and smell of him, and as he raised his head again to find first her mouth and then the shell-like sensitivity of her ears she felt the need inside her grow to unbearable proportions. It had been so long. She had been in the desert place so long.
‘I need you, Amy.’ His voice was thick and deep, an echo of her own heart, and now the tide was carrying them both to the ultimate conclusion, fierce and unstoppable. ‘You are so perfect my love, so very perfect.’ So very perfect? His words were bitter gall in her mouth.
For a moment he didn’t realise she had frozen beneath him, his desire a fierce consuming fire, but then as she wrenched her mouth from his and beat her fists frantically against his back she heard him groan deep and harsh in his throat. ‘Amy, you can’t do this …’
But even as he spoke he rolled away, sitting up in one violent movement as his breath filled the small room in shuddering gasps.
He had stopped. She lay exactly as he had left her, her clothes dishevelled and open, her heart pounding so sickeningly that for a moment the room faded away. He could have taken her, he had been so close, but in spite of all his threats and accusations he had stopped.
They remained in a frozen tableau for a full minute as he fought for control, and then he stood up slowly without glancing at her once. ‘I’ll be outside when you’re ready,’ he said expressionlessly, his voice empty and cold. ‘Take as long as you need, you have all the time in the world.’
She heard the front door open and close and then she was alone, surprised to find that she was crying soundlessly, her tears soaking her hair into wet tendrils that clung stickily to her face. He would never forgive her for this, she thought bleakly into the deathly silence as she sat up slowly, adjusting her clothing with limp shaking hands. She had made things so much worse, or maybe …? She closed her eyes as a thought pierced her heart—maybe they had had to get this bad for him to finally accept it was over? But she didn’t want it to be over. The words were fierce and hot in her head. She wanted him to keep trying, wanted him close because if he went away … Her eyes opened very wide. He would never come back.
She stood up wearily, her head pounding. She was going mad, insane … Of course it had to be over, she knew that. What was the matter with her? ‘You’re cracking up, girl,’ she whispered to herself flatly as she combed the wet tendrils of her hair back from her face slowly. ‘You are so perfect, so very perfect’. The cataclysmic blow he would never understand, but which summed up everything. She wasn’t perfect any more, she was badly flawed and beyond repair. ‘A beautiful little doll.’ Sandra’s words were engraved on her soul in letters of fire, but her eyes were dry by the time she joined him in the car. He glanced once at her white face and then concentrated on the darkness beyond the headlights. ‘Do I take it that was an object lesson in how adeptly you can switch on and off?’ he asked harshly, after a few minutes had screamed by in absolute silence.
‘I didn’t plan it, Blade,’ she protested quietly without looking at his dark profile, wincing as he made a deep sound of disbelief in his throat. ‘I didn’t!’ she said more vehemently. ‘Can you say the same? That you didn’t have this evening all worked out?’
‘If I did it sure wasn’t one of my best deals, was it?’ he growled bitterly and with scathing cynicism. ‘I thought I knew you, Amy, I mean really knew you. I would have trusted my life on that belief. Hell!’ He shook his head angrily as his face hardened into cold steel. ‘I hate a bad loser.’ She missed the self-contempt in his voice, hearing only the words themselves.
‘A bad loser?’ She turned to stare at him in the darkness. ‘Is that all our lovemaking meant to you, one of us winning while the other lost?’
He stiffened, his knuckles white on the steering-wheel, before relaxing slowly after long seconds as he let his breath out between his teeth in a cool tight angry sigh. ‘That’s about what you would expect from me, isn’t it?’ he answered coldly. ‘You’ve made that perfectly clear. And maybe you’re right. According to you there was only ever physical love between us, sex in its crudest form, anyway? At least on your side. Right?’
She froze, unable to reply. ‘Right?’ The word was a pistol shot in the darkness.
‘Yes!’ She took a deep breath as she forced herself to go on, to put the last nail in her coffin. ‘I realise that now. As I said, you were my first lover and I mistook what I felt, our physical attraction, for love. I had nothing to compare it with, no way of knowing …’ Her voice trailed away at the complete stillness of his body.
‘I don’t believe you, Amy,’ he said at last, his voice calm now. ‘I’m darned if I know why, but I don’t. Call it intuition or sixth sense or whatever, but there is more, much more, to all this. But I can see that for whatever reason you have made up your mind, and I won’t try to dissuade you any more. Our marriage is over. I accept it.’
‘You do?’ Where was the relief? The conviction that she had done the right thing now, when she needed it most?
‘Yes, I do.’
The rest of the drive home was conducted in tense silence but never had she been so aware of the big male body next to her. Every movement, however slight, brought her over-stretched nerves to breaking
point, and as they drew into the lane leading to Mrs Cox’s cottage she turned to look at him, her face white.
‘This is goodbye, then,’ she stated expressionlessly. ‘I suppose you’ll go back to London tomorrow, you must have a lot to do.’
‘Yes, I have a lot to do.’ As the car drew to a halt he left the engine running as he came to open her door. ‘But I’ve made a promise to Mrs Cox so I shall be around for a while yet. You needn’t worry—’ his voice was mockingly derisive ‘—I’ll leave you alone.’
‘Thank you.’ If the world had stopped, thrown off its axis at that precise moment, she wouldn’t have cared. It was all too much. He was going to go, in a day, a week, believing that it was what she wanted. She shut her eyes tightly for a second. She had to accept it was over. She never had before, she thought wonderingly. Why hadn’t she realised she had been holding on? ‘Goodbye, Blade.’
She passed him without looking up into his face, walking with careful measured steps to Mrs Cox’s front door and slipping inside quietly like a small ethereal shadow. As the door closed behind her, Blade remained staring at it for a long, long time, and when, eventually, he sat back in the car his face was wet and his fists tightly clenched as he drove them against the hard unyielding dashboard time and time again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IF ANYONE had told Amy that she would laugh again, especially in Blade’s presence, she wouldn’t have believed them, but that was exactly what she found herself doing five days after the fateful visit to Blade’s cottage.
The intervening days had settled themselves into a pattern almost without her being aware of it. Blade arrived mid-morning to work in the overgrown jungle of a back garden, where he remained until after she had left for work. From the vastly improved appearance of the front garden she assumed he moved there once she was safely out of the way to avoid any chance of their meeting. It hurt, but not as much as seeing him would, she reminded herself grimly night after long night when she lay awake tossing and turning into the early hours.
If she thought about it, it frightened her that she barely recognised herself any more. The old Amy had been very young and childish, painfully insecure and with a need to be loved that had been almost obsessive. The new creature born of all the anguish and hurt was different … She didn’t know if this new woman was better, she only knew she was different.
John had said much the same thing when he had called in the restaurant the day before for a late lunch. She found that she was suffering more for Blade than herself, which gave her the courage to go on. He, at least, would have the chance of a long and full life once he had put the bitterness concerning their marriage behind him, but it was the final irony that the new Amy would have been a tower of strength to him if things had been different, she thought painfully. When she thought back, in the peace and quiet of the long night hours, there had been so many times when he had arrived home tired and drained with the demands that his huge empire made on him. He drove himself too hard. She nodded to herself in the shadowed darkness. But the chance to tell him was lost now.
She had just returned to her room on the morning of the fifth day with a cup of coffee and some toast, made hastily before Blade arrived, when she heard his deep rich voice with its American accent greet Mrs Cox in the kitchen. Her heart thudded into her mouth, but she was getting used to that now, she reminded herself firmly, and then for a few minutes all was silence and tranquillity.
The uproar, when it happened, was sudden and intense and at the same moment as she became aware of Blade swearing loudly and profusely, Amy heard Mrs Cox calling her name frantically. She took the stairs two at a time, thankful she had dressed early in jeans and T-shirt, to enter the kitchen in a burst of adrenalin that stopped abruptly at the sight that met her eyes.
‘It was a swarm of bees,’ Mrs Cox gabbled quickly. ‘He must have disturbed them.’
‘A swarm of bees?’ She repeated the little woman’s words vacantly as she gazed at Blade, big and heart-stoppingly attractive, but undeniably rattled as he glared at Mrs Cox ferociously, his bare torso and legs pinpricked with red.
‘There was no need to cause such a fuss,’ he ground out irritably through clenched teeth as he raked back his hair harshly. ‘A few bee stings never hurt anyone.’
‘Unless you’re allergic.’ Mrs Cox was determined to make a drama out of a crisis. ‘My sister’s boy nearly died with just one. Terrible time of it he had. Swelled up like a balloon.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Cox.’ Blade’s face was a study in self control. ‘But I shall be perfectly all right, I do assure you.’
‘I think we’ve got some cream somewhere.’ Whether it was hysteria born of anti-climax or the sight of Blade totally out of his depth for once Amy didn’t know, but the desire to laugh was growing dangerously by the second. He was so furious at being caught out, so enraged that the small insects had had the temerity to attack him, that she had to bite her lower lip until it drew blood in an effort to keep control, and Mrs Cox didn’t help, continuing to describe her nephew’s brush with death at the hands of a bee with enormous relish that increased at Blade’s lack of a suitably awed response.
‘Here we are.’ As Amy fished the tube of cream and antihistamine pills out of the first aid kit in the back of the big pantry, she motioned for Blade to sit down on the kitchen stool. ‘I’ll just bathe the stings with cold water first and make sure none is left in,’ she said quietly, ‘before I put the cream on.’
‘I’m perfectly able to do all that myself,’ Blade replied stiffly, very much on his dignity, the effect of which was spoilt slightly by the carefulness with which he sat down on the stool and the red patches burning on his tanned skin.
‘Where’s the swarm now?’ Amy asked blandly, after she had ascertained all the stings were out and had daubed cream over the marks on his back, Blade insisting that he do the rest himself. She didn’t protest; there had been something immensely sexy about his vulnerability that had her hands shaking before she had finished applying the cream to the big, hard-planed body.
‘You’ll have to excuse me, but I didn’t stop to find out where they went,’ Blade said scathingly as he moved to the kitchen window and peered out. ‘I was rather preoccupied myself.’
‘Ran in here like a greyhound,’ Mrs Cox supplied helpfully, ‘swearing like a trooper he was. Banged the door shut so hard it’s a wonder it didn’t fly off its hinges.’
It was the final straw. The picture that Mrs Cox had conjured up was so unlike the smooth powerful businessman and ruthless tycoon that the world knew that Amy felt the last of her composure melt on a flood of laughter that was unstoppable. She was aware of Blade’s face changing from one of aggrieved surprise to wry humour and then he was laughing too, his eyes rueful.
Quite when her laughter changed to tears she wasn’t sure, but at the same time as Blade lifted her up into his arms as he sat back on the stool she was aware of Mrs Cox quietly slipping away into the small front room closing the door gently behind her. ‘I’m sorry …’ She tried to pull away but the hard masculine arms tightened as he pulled her closer into his hair-roughened chest, and then the flood-gates really opened, the tide unstoppable.
It was a good few minutes later before the racking sobs turned into tearful hiccups and then stopped altogether, but as they died she became aware that Blade’s arms were wonderfully comforting, his strength non-threatening. ‘Better?’ He raised her tear-drenched face by lifting her chin carefully, gazing into the drowned violet eyes searchingly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, her cheeks scarlet as she tried to move out of his arms. ‘I didn’t mean—’
He sensed her panic, his voice soothing. ‘Relax, sweetheart, relax. I haven’t taken this little display of normal human weakness as an invitation in any form. This is just a friend comforting a friend, OK?’
‘You said we weren’t friends any more,’ she said shakily as she slid to her feet, her hair tangled gold, its colour all the more vivid against her white s
trained face. ‘Remember?’
‘In certain circumstances we have to adjust,’ he said with dry humour, his eyes warm. ‘Once you are your old self again we can resume hostilities, if you insist.’
‘I don’t want us to be enemies, Blade,’ she whispered honestly, her eyes enormous. ‘I want …’ Her voice trailed away.
‘I don’t think you know what you do want,’ he said slowly. ‘You sure are one mixed-up lady.’ Again he sensed her withdrawal at the oblique probing and he finished the moment of intimacy by getting to his feet and reaching for the small tube of ointment. ‘Are you going to continue the Florence Nightingale act?’ he asked drily. ‘Because one of those little hornets made a short and fatal journey into the inside of my shorts, the result of which needs attention. Care to investigate?’ His eyes were wicked and she blushed hotly as he lowered his denim shorts in careless disregard of his nakedness. ‘You could always kiss it better,’ he suggested, his face straight, as he daubed a small blob of cream strategically in place before hoisting the shorts into place again and swallowing a couple of the small white tablets.
‘I’ve got to get ready for work,’ she said faintly, escaping out of the kitchen to the sound of a deep mocking chuckle of dark amusement.
Once back in her room she paced restlessly, her head spinning. That was stupid, stupid, she told herself frantically as she relived the scene below. He’ll think … What would he think? She shut her eyes tightly as she sank down on the small narrow bed. She didn’t know. She had never understood that cool analytical mind that was so dangerously astute and intelligent. She knew he was feared, as well as highly respected, amongst his peers with a reputation for striking straight at the jugular with deadly precision, but with her he had been different. From carefully stage-dropped remarks at parties and such like she had gathered he could be just as ruthless in his private life as in business and yet with her … She shook her head slowly. He had been gentle and tender and wonderfully loving.
