Читать книгу A Savage Adoration - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 5

CHRISTY opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. The air smelled of snow. She breathed it in slowly, savouring the crisp scent of it, and looked at the leaden winter sky.

A thin curl of smoke from her father’s bonfire smudged the skyline before mingling with the greyness of the cloud. Beyond the garden lay a vista of fields broken by clumps of woodland, backed by the slopes of the Border hills, their peaks already whitened by the first fall of snow. Everything lay intensely still beneath the cold January air. It was all so very different from London and the life she had lived there, but it was familiar as well. After all, she had spent the first seventeen years of her life in these Border hills. And the last eight away from them, apart from brief visits home.

She reached the bottom of the garden and stood for a moment watching her father as he threw the last of the rubbish on his bonfire. He was wearing the same tweeds she remembered from her teenage years, shabby and well worn. He turned and saw her, and smiled affectionately at her; a tall, mild-mannered man who had passed on to her, his only child, his height.

‘Lunch is ready,’ she told him.

‘Good, I’m hungry. I’ll just damp this fire down and then I’ll be in.’

If her height had come from her father, then her oval green eyes had come from her mother’s Celtic ancestors, like her rich banner of copper hair, and her quick temper. Scots and English had quarrelled and married across the Border for centuries, but her mother’s family had been Highlanders from Glen Coe, and she had often bemoaned the fact that Christy seemed to have inherited their fierce warring spirit.

Christy waited for her father to finish putting out the fire.

‘You know, Christy,’ he said, ‘it’s good to have you home, although I wish it could have been in happier circumstances. You don’t have to stay, you know. Your mother…’

‘I want to stay,’ she interrupted firmly. ‘I would have come home even if Mum hadn’t had to have that operation. You know, in London it’s all too easy to get out of touch with reality, with everything that’s important in life.’ She sighed faintly, a frown touching her smooth forehead. ‘I’ve given up my job, Dad.’

There hadn’t been time in the frantic telephone call telling her of her mother’s emergency operation for Christy to tell her father her own news, but now that the danger was over and her mother was safely back at home, it was time for her to talk of her own plans.

Now it was her father’s turn to frown, and Christy looked away from him. She could sense his surprise and concern, and bit down hard on her bottom lip.

‘But you seemed so pleased to be working for David Galvin,’ he said. ‘When you came home last summer you seemed so happy.’

‘I was. But David has been asked to write the music for a film and to do that he has to go out to Hollywood. He asked me to go with him, but I didn’t want to, so I handed in my notice.’

She prayed that her father would accept her explanation at face value and not press her any closer. What she had told him was in effect the truth, but there was a great deal that she had concealed from him.

There was David’s desire for them to become lovers, for a start. She shivered slightly, a frisson of sensation running through her that had nothing to do with the cold. She didn’t love David, but he was a very magnetic and masculine man; she had known that if he continued to press her she might have been very tempted to give in to him—and how she would have hated herself if she had done so. She wasn’t blind, or a fool; she knew that David was almost consistently unfaithful to his wife Meryl, and that Meryl accepted his infidelities as the price of being married to a man whose artistic abilities had made him world-famous by the time he was thirty years old.

The sort of affairs David indulged in meant nothing in any emotional sense; he was an intensely sensual and sexual man who enjoyed women and, shamingly, she knew that there had been the odd moment when she had not been sure of her own ability to withstand him should he choose to use the full force of his sexual power against her.

She had worked for him for four years, and had been accepted by Meryl and his children almost as an honorary member of the family. She knew what his brief affairs did to them, and the last thing she wanted was to inflict further hurt on them, so she had done the only thing possible: she had run away.

He had flung that at her in their final confrontation. She had told him just before Christmas that she was resigning. There had been no need for him to ask why, and she remembered how his mouth had compressed with anger and mockery. There was an almost childish side to him that loathed being thwarted or denied anything he had set his heart on, and he had wanted her. Consequently he had used that skilful tongue of his mercilessly to destroy her defences, bringing her close to the edge of tears and total self-betrayal, but somehow she had managed to hang on to her self-control. A small, bitter smile twisted her mouth. She knew whom she had to thank for that self-control, for that hard-won ability to refuse to give in to her feelings. It seemed that she was doomed to be unlucky in the men in her life.

She had spent Christmas alone, refusing Meryl’s pleas to join them in their huge Wimbledon house, as she had done at other Christmases, and then, just when she had felt that her loneliness and misery might cause her to give way, she had received a telephone call from her father telling her of her mother’s collapse.

She hadn’t wasted a moment in racing home, and now that she was here she intended to stay. She felt calmer, safer, more secure than she had felt in a long time. Her mother was going to need careful looking after for at least a couple of months—plenty of time for her to think about what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She could even work for her father in his busy country solicitor’s practice if need be; his secretary of thirty years was on the point of retiring. She knew she had made the right decision; the only decision. If she had stayed in London, David might have found a way of persuading her to go to Hollywood with him after all, ostensibly as his personal assistant, of course… but she had known that her agreement to go would have been her agreement to their affair.

So, instead, she had ruthlessly cut all her links with London, giving up her flat and her few friends. It had been disturbing to realise how few friends she had to show for eight years in London, but then she had always been something of a loner, cautious about revealing or giving anything of herself, and even more so after that disastrous summer when she was seventeen.

Her mouth compressed again as she opened the back door and went into the warm kitchen.

Her parents’ home stood almost alone at the end of a narrow country lane, some ten miles outside the town where her father practised. They had come here shortly after their marriage, when her father had bought himself into the partnership. Now the other partners were either dead or retired, and her father ran the business alone with the help of a young articled clerk.

The house was solidly built of local stone, sheltered from the harsh winters that could affect the Borders by the small valley in which it stood. The village, with its school and church, was less than a mile away, and Christy could vividly remember the long winter trudges through the snow to the village bus stop, where as a teenager she had waited with the other children for the bus to take them to school. Those had been good days; life had been simple then, and she had been happy, if somewhat alone. The other children had often teased her, calling her ‘Carrots’ because of her red hair.

What was past was past, she reminded herself as she dished up the lunch. She had already been up to see her mother and supervise the very light meal that was all she was allowed at present.

‘I had a message from the surgery this morning to say that the doctor would be out to see Mother this afternoon. Do you still have Doctor Broughton?’ she asked her father as he sat down.

‘No. Didn’t your mother tell you? Alan Broughton retired early just before Christmas. Dominic Savage is our doctor now.’

Christy’s arm jerked and she spilled some carrots. She was glad that she was facing the Aga and that her father couldn’t see her expression.

‘Dominic? I thought he was in America?’

‘So he was, but he decided to come back. I suppose it’s only natural in a way. His grandfather was the only GP here for a long time, and he was responsible for starting up our present practice.’

‘But Dominic always seemed so … so ambitious …’

‘People change.’ Her father smiled, and there was a slight twinkle in his eye. ‘Look at you, for instance. I seem to remember a time when we couldn’t mention Dominic’s name without you colouring up like a sunset.’

She fought down the panic and pain clawing through her stomach and summoned a brief smile.

‘Yes, I was rather obvious in my adolescent adoration, wasn’t I? Thank goodness we all grow out of that sort of thing! I must have driven you all mad, especially Dominic…’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It always seemed to me that he had rather a soft spot for you.’

A soft spot! If only her father knew. The last thing she had expected or wanted when she came running for home and safety had been to meet up with Dominic Savage again—the very last thing. She doubted her ability to face him with equanimity and coolness even at her most self-composed, but having to face him like this, when she was feeling so vulnerable and torn … She shuddered slightly, remembering how his cold grey eyes could see through her defences, and how that deep incisive voice of his could shred through her puny arguments.

Her heart was pounding as she served the rest of the meal. If she could have, she would have got on the next train to London and stayed there, but it was too late, she had burned her bridges, and then there were her parents to consider. Her mother needed careful looking after—someone to watch over her and make sure that she didn’t do too much. Christy knew her mother; she had always led an active, busy life, and she wouldn’t take kindly to her restricted regime.

Dominic Savage back in Setondale; that was the last thing she had expected, or wanted.

While she cleared away after their meal, her father went upstairs to sit with her mother. Dominic was due at three o’clock, and Christy wondered cravenly if she could find some excuse not to be there when he called. Her face burned as she remembered their last horrific meeting.

It was true that at seventeen she had had a mammoth crush on him; but what her parents didn’t know was that it was Dominic who had been indirectly responsible for her decision to leave home and go to college, and ultimately to work in London. After that last traumatic meeting she had not been able to endure the thought of seeing him again, and so she had virtually run away. Quite needlessly, as it turned out, for Dominic himself had left Setondale that autumn to continue his medical studies in America.

Unable to stand the pressure of the old memories surging inside her, she paced the kitchen. She needed to get out, to breathe in the cool, calm air and gather her composure.

An old anorak from her college days was still hanging on its peg in the laundry-room, and she pulled it on with jerky, unco-ordinated movements.

Outside the sky had grown more leaden and menacing, the scent of snow stronger now. On the hills she could see a shepherd and his dog working the sheep, bringing them down to lower pastures. She started walking at a speed that set her hair bouncing on her shoulders, tension bracing her muscles, the cold air stinging her face. The path she took was a familiar one, climbing up towards the foothills, and gradually as she walked she felt her tension ease slightly. She passed the Vicarage, disturbing a dog that set up a clamorous barking. The house and its grounds had recently been sold, but she didn’t pause to wonder about the new inhabitants of the sturdy Georgian building.

Dominic back! Her body shook with renewed tension and she expelled her breath on a pent-up sigh.

Her father had said that Dominic had had a soft spot for her. How little he knew. Savage by name and savage by nature, that was Dominic, and God, how she had suffered from that savagery!

With words that even now were engraved on her soul he had torn apart her childish fantasies and destroyed her innocence, holding up to her his contemptuous awareness of her adolescent feelings, giving her a distorted mirror-image of them that had scorched her with shame and anguish that still lived on in her soul.

It had all been her own fault, of course. She should have been content with simply worshipping him from a distance, and blissfully cherishing their longstanding friendship. Their parents had been friends, and from an early age she had attached herself to him even though he was eight years older. Dominic had lived with his parents in the house attached to the medical practice while he worked as a very junior doctor at the hospital in Alnwick. Her crush on him had developed the year she was sixteen. No doubt she would have been content with simply seeing him, and sighing over him, if it hadn’t been for her schoolfriends.

For a reason she had never been able to define, during her last year at school she had been befriended by a crowd of girls led by the precocious daughter of their local MP. Helen Maguire was far more sophisticated and worldly than the other girls in the class, and she had sought out Christy as her best friend. How flattered and delighted she had been! Until then she hadn’t had many friends. She was too quiet and shy to make friends easily, but she had glowed and relaxed in the flattering warmth of Helen’s friendship, pushing aside her own doubts and natural reticence about the wisdom of joining in the giggled discussions on sex and boyfriends initiated by Helen. Naturally, since Helen was the one with the most experience, she was the one who did most of the talking, and although sometimes she had experienced a sense of revulsion when Helen described her sexual exploits, for the most part Christy had been caught too deep in the adolescent thrall of having such a wonderful friend to question too deeply Helen’s values and morals.

Of course, it was as inevitable as night following day that Helen should worm out of her her feelings for Dominic, and that once having discovered them, she should exhort Christy not to be such a baby.

‘If you want him, you ought to go out and get him,’ she had informed Christy, giving her a sly sideways smile as she added softly, ‘it’s easy when you know how. Shall I tell you?’

The stitch in her side made Christy pause and lean momentarily against a large rock. A feeling of nausea gathered in the pit of her stomach as she tried to drag her thoughts away from the past. Remembering did no good … and no matter how often she went back she couldn’t change the past; she couldn’t wipe out or obliterate what had happened, no matter how much she might want to. She shuddered deeply as she drew in lungfuls of air, icy cold now that she had climbed above the valley bottom, stinging the inside of her chest. She welcomed the pain, because pain meant reality, and reality was now, eight years on from that awful summer.

She ought to have forgotten it long ago. Dominic Savage’s memory should have faded and been lost beneath happier memories of other men, but it stood between her and her fulfilment as a woman like some sort of revenging spirit.

She smiled without mirth as she remembered David’s incredulous look of disbelief when she had told him.

‘You’re still a virgin? But that’s impossible! God, Christy, a man only has to look at you! Those eyes … that red hair … your body … they don’t belong to some chaste Victorian maiden.’

She hadn’t been able to stop her mouth from trembling, and he was sensitive and intuitive enough to know that she wasn’t lying. If only David hadn’t been married. How willingly she would have given herself over to his sexual mastery. Physically she had found him attractive, even while she knew she didn’t love him. She had wanted his lovemaking, his skill, and his expertise, like some sort of sleeping princess awaiting the awakening kiss of a prince, she thought now, dourly. But she couldn’t hurt Meryl, and so the chasm of fear and self-loathing that Dominic had blasted between her and her sexuality had remained unbreached.

As she stood leaning against the stone, the first fine flakes of snow began to fall. She knew that she ought to go back, but she was unwilling to do so, unwilling to face Dominic until she had made herself relive the full horror of that awful night.

She wasn’t going to blame Helen; the fault, the desire had been hers. She was the one who had listened with awed fascination to Helen’s description of how easy it was to seduce a man. The other girl’s voice had been edged with the contempt of an intrinsically sexually cold female for the vulnerability of the male, but then she had been too naïve to see it, and so, round-eyed, and inwardly faintly shocked, she had drunk in Helen’s detailed instructions.

‘But what if he doesn’t … you know? What if he doesn’t make love to me?’

Helen had shrugged. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. Once you’ve aroused him, he won’t be able to stop himself. None of them can.’

Alarm and excitement had twisted inside her; excitement at the thought of Dominic making love to her, and alarm at the thought of her own daring in imagining that he might.

It had been quite easy to discover an evening when Dominic would be at home alone. Every fortnight her own parents and his met up to play bridge, and she only had to wait until the venue for this fortnightly get-together was her own home.

‘Wear something sexy,’ had been Helen’s first instruction. Easy enough to say, but there was nothing in her wardrobe that remotely deserved such a description.

In the end, feeling more uncomfortable and embarrassed than sexy, she had taken off her bra, and unfastened her cotton shirt to show the taut upper swell of her breasts, before tugging it into her habitual jeans.

A cardigan hid the evidence of her bra-less state from her parents as she said her goodbyes, guilt and desire mingling in almost equal quantities as she got on her bike and sped down the drive.

It had been a hot summer, and the French windows of the Savages’ house stood open as she cycled down the drive and round to the back door.

Since their parents were close friends, it was not unusual for her to visit the house, but as she got off her bike she was filled with an awareness that she was trespassing, not just against the Savages’ friendship but also against her parents’ trust.

She would have turned back then if it hadn’t been for the fact that she would have to face Helen in the morning, and so, quelling her feelings, she went round to the French windows and knocked briefly before walking in.

The sitting-room was empty; her heart thudding, she walked through into the hall, and then stood there transfixed as she saw Dominic coming towards her down the stairs, pulling on a white shirt.

His hair was damp, his skin tanned and firm against the powerful male muscles. Something seemed to expand and flower inside her, a deep pulsating excitement that brought a delicate flush of colour to her skin and deepened her eyes to dark jade.

‘Christy, is everything all right?’

The sharpness in his voice brought her back to reality. ‘Yes.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’ He was frowning at her as he buttoned his shirt, and because he had never before spoken to her in anything other than a teasingly indulgent voice, Christy could only stare at him. ‘I asked you what you came here for.’

He was at the bottom of the stairs now, frowning at her, and even though she was tall she had to tilt back her head to look at him. She had taken off her cardigan as she stepped back from him, the dying rays of the evening sun falling across the thin cotton of her blouse, revealing the uncovered peaks of her breasts.

She heard Dominic catch his breath on what sounded like an impatient sigh, and said hurriedly, ‘I … I came to see you …’

‘Me?’ He was frowning even more now. ‘What about?’

Panic flared inside her. This wasn’t going the way it should. By now he shouldn’t be questioning her; he should be looking at her … wanting her. It wasn’t going to be as easy as Helen had said. Confusion flooded through her, and she turned puzzled, worried eyes up to him, betraying more than she knew.

‘I … I just wanted to talk to you,’ she said lamely, flushing a brilliant shade of red as he suddenly said harshly, ‘Christy, what’s this all about? You aren’t in some … some kind of trouble, are you?’

Her eyes widened, and went brilliant with shock as she absorbed his meaning. There was only one kind of trouble he could mean, and she jerked back from him indignantly.

‘No … no, of course not! How could you think anything like that …?’ She was shocked and hurt that he could think that she would give herself to anyone other than him, barely taking in his curt, ‘All too easily, especially when you parade yourself around dressed like that.’ A flick of his hand indicated that he was aware of her near-nudity, and she flushed again. This wasn’t the way he was supposed to react. Helen had said …

She bit her lip and moved closer to him, her voice shaking as she implored huskily, ‘Dominic, please don’t be angry with me …’ Tears weren’t very far away; she could feel them clogging up the back of her throat.

She heard him sigh, and then rapturously felt his arms go round her; she was being cradled against him, her head resting on his shoulder, the bare heat of his chest against her thinly covered breasts.

She quivered with nerves and excitement, aching to reach out and touch him, but scarcely able to even draw breath, never mind do anything else.

Helen was right, and it had worked! Her legs shook and threatened to give way beneath her. Her heart seemed to have lodged somewhere in her throat and was threatening to suffocate her. Could Dominic feel it beating? She could feel the steady, even thud of his. Instinctively she moved her hand to touch the place where she could feel that strong beat.

Her fingertips trembled against his skin and then, shockingly, almost frighteningly, her wrist was seized in an iron grip and she was forcefully pushed away from him.

Angry grey eyes glared down into the bemused jade of hers. ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

The shock of his sudden withdrawal was too much for her to cope with. She was still lost in the rapturous dream of her own intense desire and love, and without comprehending his anger she burst out eagerly, ‘Dominic, make love to me. Please … I know you want to.’

For a moment it was as though they were frozen in time: she gazing pleadingly up at him, her mouth soft and trembling, her body, supple and eager for his touch; he, tense and angry, the grey eyes darkened almost to black, his mouth drawn in a tight hard line, his body tense as though he was too furious even to draw breath.

And then the spell was broken, and the reality of his anger crashed through her physical arousal as he breathed harshly, ‘My God, I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Is this why you came here dressed like … like … like a modern-day Lolita? To ask me to make love to you? And you’re so damned blatant about it, as well!’

He saw the shock and pain on her face, and although she wasn’t aware of it, his voice softened slightly. ‘Christy, I can’t make love to you … you know that.’

‘Because you don’t want me?’ She made herself face him, and saw his face grow cold and shuttered.

‘Among other things,’ he agreed evenly, adding, ‘it is customary for the woman to wait to be asked, you know. Who put you up to this? Come on, Christy, no lies. I know you; you’d never have thought of doing this for yourself.’

She had been too distraught and humiliated to keep back the truth, and he had kept on and on at her until she had told him everything. She had had to sit there answering his questions and seeing the look of contemptuous disgust darken his eyes, until he had moved away from her as though even to look at her had contaminated him.

‘Well, now it’s my turn to tell you something,’ he had said at last, when she was finished. ‘Contrary to what your friend informed you, it isn’t that easy to make a man desire you.’

She had flushed with shame and pain then, but he hadn’t let her look away, holding her chin with hard, hurting fingers as he said cruelly, ‘Look at me, Christy. Go on … take a good look … your friend has told you what to look for. Do I look as though I want you physically?’

She had wanted to get up and run away then, but shock and pain had held her rigidly where she stood, shivering like a rabbit before a hawk, totally unable to do anything other than stare blindly back into his savagely dark eyes.

When she couldn’t turn her eyes in the direction of his body, he taunted with soft menace, ‘If you won’t look at me, perhaps you’d like to touch me instead. Just so that you know I’m not lying to you …’

She had shuddered deeply then, knowing that he had just destroyed her childish illusions, exposing her as what she was, and how she had hated the image of herself that he had held up to her gaze! She had turned away from him then, struggling to subdue the sob of terror and anguish that rose up in her throat.

He hadn’t let her go, though; there had been more for her to endure. A lecture about the physical dangers she was courting: about the health risk of promiscuity, about the danger of rape and worse, and a reminder of how much her parents loved and trusted her and how shocked they would be if they knew what she had done. Worse still, he hadn’t let her ride home on her bike, but had sent her upstairs to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her hair, and once she had done that he had waited until she had buttoned herself into her concealing cardigan and then had driven her home.

There was only eight years between them, but he had been as stern and forbidding as any Victorian parent, and when he had let her out of the car at the end of her parents’ drive she had known that she would hate and loathe him for the rest of her life.

But not as much as she would hate herself, she reflected bitterly as she emerged from the past and came back to the present.

She had avoided Helen after that and had asked her parents if, instead of going back to school, she could attend college instead. They had agreed and found her comfortable digs in Newcastle, where in addition to her secretarial skills she had learned how to begin living with herself again.

It was as though those hectic weeks when Helen had been her friend had been some sort of sickness from which she had emerged with a revulsion for all that she had been and done. The very thought of meeting Dominic in those early days had been enough to make her feel physically ill, and if her parents thought it was curious that she never mentioned him, they kept it to themselves.

She sighed faintly. The snow was coming down more heavily now. It was time for her to return home. She glanced at her watch. Ten past three. Good, by the time she got back Dominic should have left. She knew she couldn’t spend her entire life avoiding him, but discovering that he was back had been such a shock. She hadn’t been ready for it. Now, having endured the catharsis of making herself relive the past, she should be stronger, more able to judge her teenage actions with tolerance and compassion. But she couldn’t. That was the problem: she couldn’t get over the feelings of shame and self-disgust that Dominic had given her; they still haunted and tainted her life like a disease that, although dormant, still possessed the power to return.

She hated Dominic because of the picture he had drawn of her and made her face. She hated the fact that he had witnessed her shame and humiliation. She hated him because he made her hate herself.

Sighing, she pulled the hood of her anorak up against the snow and started for home.