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Oh, my darling. As she looked at the back of his head, the sunlight turning the burnished brown gold, she knew she was experiencing the worst that could ever happen to her. The future, with its promise of a living nightmare, was nothing compared to the piercing agony that was gripping her soul in a stranglehold, killing every spark of joy, every good thing. She would exist from this day but she wouldn’t really be alive. But she loved him too much to take him with her into the pit. This way he could recover and live his life. And he would recover. He was a survivor. He’d forget her in time and there would be countless women only too ready to help him.
Her eyes were dry. This pain was too deep for tears, and she turned blindly to look at a tiny farmhouse far in the distance from which a plume of smoke was slowly rising into the blue sky. ‘It was just one of those things,’ she said slowly as she forced the words out through stiff lips. ‘Life’s like that …’
‘Amy?’ She hadn’t been aware that he had turned and was watching her, and now, as she met his eyes, she quickly schooled her features into an acceptable mask. ‘There isn’t something more, is there? Something you aren’t telling me?’
She stared at him, her heart pounding and her mouth dry. She should have been on her guard every second, she shouldn’t have relaxed for a moment. He was too intuitive, too perceptive. How many times had she seen him go straight for the jugular in the past and marvelled at his ability to see beyond the obvious, to expose every little weakness? The same attributes that made him so formidable in business were in force now and she must be careful, very careful.
‘Aren’t the facts enough?’ she said tightly. ‘Do you want more skeletons from the closet? Well, I’m sorry, I can’t oblige you, Blade. You’ll have to hate me for what you know; there isn’t more.’
He stared at her for a whole minute, his eyes searching her face with an intentness that made her breath stop, and then he shook his head slowly, his mouth a thin white line in the starkness of his face. ‘There couldn’t really be more, could there?’ he said with biting cynicism. ‘It was just that for a minute—’ He stopped abruptly and indicated the car with a violent wave of his hand. ‘Get in, I’ve had more than enough.’
They didn’t speak on the return journey, and as he drew up outside Arthur’s little restaurant he leant across her and opened the door in one easy movement. ‘Goodbye, Amy.’ The tone was flat, all emotion gone.
‘Goodbye.’ She never did know how she got out of the car, but it took all the will power she possessed to walk away. She opened the door of the restaurant without looking round, hearing the car pull away with a furious roar of the powerful engine as she did so. She just made it through the kitchen door before she collapsed in a heap at Arthur Kelly’s feet, her eyes big and stunned.
‘Amy?’ Arthur pulled her to her feet, guiding her to the one and only small stool by the back door, his lined face tight with concern. ‘What on earth is it, lass? What’s happened?’ He patted ineffectually at her hands as he spoke, obviously quite out of his depth.
‘Arthur, can I go home?’ She couldn’t speak for several seconds but when she did her voice was a tiny whisper. ‘I feel awful.’
‘You look it.’ He peered distractedly through the pane of glass in the kitchen door at the customers beyond. ‘I can’t really take you now; I’ll call a taxi, yes?’
‘No, please don’t.’ The nearest taxi-cab service was in a small market town miles away and she needed to be alone now. ‘I’ll be home in ten minutes, I’d rather walk.’
‘You don’t look fit to walk, lass, let me—’
‘Please, Arthur.’ She faced him, her blue eyes enormous. ‘I’d rather.’
‘OK, lass, have it your own way.’ He wrinkled his brow worriedly. ‘But give me a call once you’re home, eh? Just to keep an old man happy.’
‘I will. And I’ll see you tomorrow as usual.’
Much later that night, as Amy sat in her darkened room filled with evening shadows, after a meal cooked by the reputable Mrs Cox of which she hadn’t been able to eat a bite, she forced herself to face the fact that had emerged from her meeting with Blade earlier. She had been hoping subconsciously against all reason and all logic that when she saw him again—and she had known, knowing Blade as she did, that she would see him again—that somehow he would work a miracle and things would be all right. It was ridiculous, insane, like a fully grown adult insisting in believing in Father Christmas when the magic had been dead for years, but a tiny part of her had clung on to the hope without her being aware of it.
In all she had had nine months with him, three of those as his wife, and it had been heaven on earth. She had been terrified that first day, as a relatively new employee of the large catering firm she worked for, when she had been called upon to liaise with the great man’s secretary about a formal dinner Blade was holding that weekend. She had ventured into the massive office block with the warnings and admonitions of the other staff ringing in her ears.
‘He’s incredibly difficult to please, so make sure you get every little detail down on paper.’
‘He never tolerates mistakes; go through things with his secretary at least twice to make sure you’ve got it right.’
‘Don’t question anything he asks for; his word is law.’ The list had been endless and had reduced her to a nervous wreck before she knocked on the door to his secretary’s office, which was more luxurious than her own little flat.
The room had been empty, and as she had stood in the midst of the ankle-deep carpeting, the hushed atmosphere reaching out to intimidate her still more, the catch to her case containing all the firm’s literature had broken and the whole mess of papers cascaded out on to the floor. She had been on her hands and knees retrieving them with frantic haste when a deep cool male voice from the doorway froze her in her tracks.
‘Miss Myatt? From Business Catering?’ She raised doomed eyes to the laconic unsmiling figure leaning lazily in relaxed scrutiny as her brain had died on her. ‘My secretary is indisposed today, Miss Myatt; I’m afraid you will have to talk to me.’
He was afraid? She had followed him weakly into the sumptuous office beyond the interconnecting door, setting the case down quickly, which caused it to spill open again in a repeat of the fiasco.
‘Miss Myatt, this is not your day …’ He moved round the desk to help, dark eyes filled with wicked amusement at her discomfiture.
Later he told her he’d fallen in love with her at that moment. ‘Like a bolt of lightning,’ he’d said seriously, his eyes following the smooth pure profile of her face topped by its mass of rich golden hair. She had been twenty-one and hopelessly naïve; he had been thirty-five and anything but.
He was successful, wildly handsome, with a string of much-publicised affairs credited to his account, but when he told her he had never been in love before she believed him. If it had been different he would have told her. He was that type of man. They had laughed together, loved together—and now it was over. Because Blade Forbes was an action man. Their honeymoon had been spent scuba diving and hang-gliding with long, warm nights of passionate love. He hardly knew what it was to be still. And she had loved that too along with everything else about him.
But how would such a man, hard, dynamic, with a zest for life that was unquenchable, cope with a wife who would be confined to a wheelchair by the time she was thirty and a hospital bed five years after that? Unable to move, breathe by herself?
The impersonal brutality of the stark medical facts came back to her as though she were reading them for the first time. The doctor’s report she had been shown hadn’t pulled any punches; indeed the clinical outline of the effects of the disease that was lying dormant in her body till it was matured enough to rear its head in a few years’ time had seemed almost savage on that first reading. But then, how many ways were there to impart news like that? She twisted in the darkness, a pale slender figure in the shaft of moonlight from the uncurtained window.
The cold, typewritten report was engraved in her memory word for word; she only had to close her eyes for the small black letters to be there in all their severity. Her heart pounded as she ran over them again in her mind, their message of a living death as hard to take now as when she had first read it.
She had been right to leave Blade, she had. She caught her breath on a sob of pain; she had had no choice. But, oh—she gazed round the dark room almost wildly—that didn’t make it any easier.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOOD morning, Amy.’ She stood transfixed, halfway out of the kitchen door, as Blade sauntered across the small restaurant after shutting the front door quietly behind him.
‘What do you want?’ she breathed softly, her eyes drinking in the sight of him even as her logic repudiated the thrill that had shot through her whole body.
‘Lunch? If that’s not too outrageous? I did assume this was a working restaurant?’ The sarcasm was cold and biting and she blushed hotly as he seated himself at a table, his whole demeanour lazy and relaxed.
‘Why are you here?’ She moved to stand by his chair, her voice a low hiss.
‘I am here to eat,’ he said slowly, with exaggerated patience. ‘You do remember that I do all the things a normal man does? Some with more enjoyment than others,’ he finished silkily, his voice dark and rich and his eyes hard and mocking as she blushed hotly.
Thank goodness John would be away for another twenty-four hours yet; she had to get rid of Blade before that somehow.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ she flashed back tightly. ‘We said all that could be said yesterday—’
‘We did not,’ he said sharply. ‘And please cut the naïve and stupid act because we both know that you are neither. We still have arrangements to make and matters to discuss. And my movements are my own affair, remember that, Amy. You have waived the right to question me in any way.’
‘I see.’ She glared at him angrily. ‘It’s the muscle-man approach, is it? Forcing your way in—’
‘It was barely twenty-four hours ago that you accused me of being a bully in this very place,’ he interrupted her coldly, his words falling like small pieces of ice into the heated atmosphere. ‘I’d drop the insults if I were you, sweetheart. I don’t like them and I have no intention of tolerating any more. Now, get the menu and do the job I assume the proprietor is paying you to do.’
His arrogance left her speechless and as she swung round, with a furious twist of her body that set the high silky ponytail at the back of her head swinging madly, she heard him laugh softly and the sound chilled her blood. There was no amusement, no mirth in the sound, just a callous, biting cruelty that brought all her fine body hairs upright in instinctive protection. Whatever game he was playing he wouldn’t be able to keep it up forever and she would just have to put up with things for the moment, but why was he here? He’d said he despised her, that he felt nothing but contempt and scorn for her, so why was he back here this morning …? To torment her? She looked him full in the face as she placed the handwritten menu on the table in front of him, and the black eyes stared back at her, their expression unfathomable. Yes, that must be it. She wouldn’t have thought he was capable of such pointless cruelty, but then she had never defied him before and after what he thought she had done maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. Some men wouldn’t have stopped at verbal abuse. And he still clearly intended to settle things with John in his own way.
‘Thanks.’ As he studied the menu she stood at his side, her eyes drawn to his bent head and a feeling of inexpressible emotion causing shivers of fear to flit down her spine in ever-increasing rhythm. His tawny brown hair gleamed richly with virile health in the May sunlight, his coal-black eyes with their thick, almost feminine lashes in impressive contrast. How often had she run her fingers through that mass of strong, coarse hair after a night of passion when she had felt as though even her toes were alive with sensual delight? He had been a magnificent lover. She forced her gaze up to stare blindly out of the window. Sensuous, erotic, but with a tender sensitivity to her own feelings that had caused the bond between them to strengthen and grow night by night. No wonder he didn’t understand why she had left. If only she hadn’t followed through on the impulse to visit Sandra that day …
‘I’ll have the soup, followed by an omelette, please.’ She jumped visibly as he spoke and a dark frown creased his forehead. ‘Daydreaming, Amy? I won’t ask who’s featured in them but for the moment would you concentrate on doing your job?’ The tone was biting.
‘You don’t have to be so thoroughly unpleasant,’ she said tightly as she wrote his order on the small notepad attached to her belt.
‘You call this unpleasant?’ he asked with a mocking, frosty amazement. ‘You don’t know the half, girl. But you will.’ The dark eyes were pure granite. ‘Oh, yes, you will.’
As she walked through to the kitchen a feeling of incredible weariness had her hands shaking. Was all this worth it? Perhaps it would be better to tell him? To let him share in the agony with her rather than bear it all alone? But then she remembered Sandra’s drawn, lined face, the sunken features and the still young body already twisted into a caricature of an old woman. Could she bear those eyes that had always blazed with love and passion dulling with pity and wretched, helpless misery? To have him look at her each day as she slowly got worse, to see— She stopped her thoughts from the destructive path they were following and straightened her back as hot rage against the unfairness of it all flooded her system with adrenalin.
Stop your whining, girl, she told herself fiercely as the doorbell in the outer room signified more customers. One day, one hour at a time. She had realised weeks ago that was the only way she was going to bear the months and years ahead. If she looked into the future she lost all her courage.
She took Blade’s bowl of soup to his table before she turned to the family that had seated themselves in a corner across the other side of the room. All the time she chatted with the two children and took the parents’ order she was aware of his gaze trained on the back of her head even though she was turned from him, but when she swung around and made her way to the kitchen he was quietly eating a bread roll, his dark eyes lazily surveying the peaceful scene outside the window.
‘What time do you finish work?’ His tone was brusque and his face expressionless as she served him the freshly cooked Spanish omelette and baked potato with a side salad.
‘What?’ Startled, she looked him straight in the eyes and then wished she hadn’t as the force of his gaze pierced her to the spot.
‘You heard what I said, Amy.’ His voice was quiet but with an undertone of iron that she knew from old. How often she had heard him use that tone in the past when he intended to get his own way. ‘We need to tie up a few loose ends so that the formalities can progress smoothly. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be rid of me at the earliest opportunity?’
She dropped her eyes quickly, her face bleak. If he only knew … She had never wanted or loved him as much as she did now, when she was frightened and lonely and desolately aware of what the future held. To be able to lean on his strength, to rest in the knowledge of his love, to be cushioned, at least in part, by the comfort and support of his wealth … ‘I finish at eleven,’ she said quietly. ‘But I can meet you tomorrow morning, if you like?’
‘I’ll be outside at eleven.’ His tone brooked no argument and she nodded, still without looking at him, before turning on her heel and seeking the sanctuary of the steaming kitchen and Arthur’s blunt normality.
All the rest of the afternoon and evening she functioned on automatic, taking orders, smiling, engaging in conversation while her mind ticked away on a completely different plane altogether.
When she had married Blade Forbes she had never considered for a moment that it wouldn’t be forever. Her own parents had died in a car accident when she was four years old and her sister, Sandra and herself had been dispatched to different homes of distant relatives, Sandra to the wilds of Scotland and herself into the heart of London. The two sisters hadn’t been close, the eight-year age-gap proving insurmountable in view of Sandra’s raging jealousy of her beautiful baby sister, but Amy remembered crying as much for her big sister as for her parents in the early days.
It wasn’t until she had reached the age of sixteen that she learnt Sandra had purposely repudiated all contact in the intervening years, and after one shattering, stunning visit to her married sister’s home in Scotland when she had quite literally had the door banged in her face, she had determined to put Sandra out of her life as successfully as her sister had apparently done with her. But … Amy shook her head slowly as her thoughts travelled on. It hadn’t been as easy as that. Sandra was her only immediate family; the same blood ran in their veins; she had wanted, needed her love.
Weak and foolish, Amy thought grimly as she smilingly served home-made steak and kidney pie to a little Japanese couple with three cameras between them. And how she had paid for the insecure feeling of inadequacy that had always dogged her footsteps. She should have been satisfied with Blade, she shouldn’t have wanted more. What was a sister that she hadn’t seen for most of her life, after all?
The somewhat elderly aunt and uncle that she had been homed with had caused her anxiety and insecurity, she knew that now after long, deep conversations with Blade when she had poured out all her doubts and fears. They had been fanatically strait-laced, with a list of dos and don’ts that she had never got the hang of, and her outstanding beauty had alarmed and repelled their austere, bigoted minds from the word go. She had been taught that she was undeserving and wayward, that her beauty was in some way shameful, from the first day that she had lived with them, and although something in her had always rebelled against such harsh reasoning some of the poison had got through.
But Blade had changed all that. She took a deep breath as her heart pounded painfully against her chest. He’d brought out all the old festering sores, held them up to the clean, purifying liquid of logic and reason, and in the process washed the wounds clean. And because of that she had felt strong enough to try and see Sandra again. And what she had seen and heard had appalled her.
Enough, Amy, enough, she told herself fiercely as she stared out into the dark night outside. An hour to go and you’ll need all your wits to talk to Blade. Several cups of strong black coffee now and no more post-mortems.
When she emerged from the warm, cosy interior of the restaurant just over an hour later she thought for a moment that Blade hadn’t come, and her stomach lurched churningly, whether in relief or disappointment she wasn’t sure. And then she heard her name at the same time as he emerged from the shadows across the other side of the road.
‘Where’s your car?’ she asked weakly, as he reached her side. He was dressed casually in jeans and black leather jacket and he’d turned her legs to water.
‘Quite safe.’ His voice was mocking with a hard bite of cruelty. ‘I thought we would walk the short distance to your lodgings.’
‘You know where I live?’ she asked in alarm.
‘Of course.’ He looked down at her, slender and waiflike against his hard masculine bulk. ‘The private detective I hired to find you is both thorough and discreet and excellent at his job.’
‘He would be,’ she answered dully. Blade only tolerated the best.
‘Come along.’ He took her arm in a firm grip as he turned her in the direction of Mrs Cox’s little guest house, and although the contact was brief the heat from his fingers seemed to burn her arm. She had jerked away before she could check herself and as his body stiffened at her side she cursed the gesture. It would only make him angrier. It did.
‘I’m not a disease that’s fatal on contact,’ he said cuttingly, ‘and another little move like that and I warn you now I won’t be responsible for my actions. Understand?’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘I know what you meant.’ The hard voice was inflexible. ‘And I’m quite aware that I’m not the person you wish to be with, but as I’m here and he isn’t I suggest you act accordingly.’
They walked the length of the street in silence and she began to feel almost faint with a mixture of terrified foreboding and lack of food. She hadn’t been able to force anything past the huge lump in her throat all day and she hadn’t eaten her evening meal last night. He had eaten the meal at lunchtime with every appearance of relaxed enjoyment, she thought resentfully as they turned into the quiet unlit lane that led eventually to the small row of cottages in which her lodgings were situated. But then, why shouldn’t he? she asked herself honestly. What a mess this was, what a hopeless, terrifying mess.
‘Now then.’ As he swung her round she had no idea of his intention, but as his arms closed round her in an embrace that had her arms pinned at her sides and her head thrown back he took her lips in a brutal punishing kiss that spoke of his fury more eloquently than any words could have done.
She tried to move her head, to break the hold of his mouth on hers, but his force was relentless and she was trapped as effortlessly as a tiny mouse between the paws of a big black cat. The familiar smell of him filled her nostrils and in spite of the knowledge that this was intended as a cruel exercise in submission she found herself responding to his touch in the old way, her body eager for any contact with the man she loved beyond life. He sensed her capitulation immediately, his mouth softening fractionally as his hands moved up and over her straining breasts, caressing her thoroughly and completely before he moved away in a hard movement that almost threw her from him. The whole embrace couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of minutes but as she stood swaying in the darkness, her eyes fixed on his in mute appeal, she felt as though they had made love for hours.
‘I don’t believe it.’ There was contempt and raw scorn in his voice along with something else she couldn’t recognise, something almost bordering on pain. ‘You can kiss me like that after all you’ve done. Who the hell are you, Amy, what are you?’ His eyes were dark and glittering in the single shaft of moonlight filtering down between the newly leafed branches of the huge oak trees bordering the lane. ‘I expected you to fight me, to object—something!’ He was furiously, bitterly angry, she reflected dully as she watched his contorted face in the shadows, more angry than she had ever seen him. ‘I thought I’d met the lot in my time but you sure as hell take the biscuit! Even the trashiest whore wouldn’t …’
He was still speaking as she slid into a dead faint at his feet, her hair fanning out in a golden halo under her head and her face deathly white in the still night.
She came round slowly, her head jangling with a thousand nightmarish images, to find herself held close to his chest as he knelt beside her on the thick grass of the small verge. ‘Blade …?’ She couldn’t speak very well; her brain seemed to know what it wanted to say but her tongue wouldn’t obey.
‘Keep still.’ There was a look on his face that caused the blood to pound violently in her ears, a piercing, haunting cry of burning hunger, unmitigated rage, dark fear and a terrible expectation of she knew not what. ‘You fainted. Keep still.’
‘I fainted?’ Her lips seemed wooden she reflected dazedly. ‘I’ve never done that before.’
‘No.’ He seemed about to speak and then the words were stilled as he surveyed her through veiled eyes in which all emotion was suddenly blanked. ‘Have you got something to tell me, Amy?’
‘Tell you?’ She tried to move away but his arms were rigid. ‘I don’t understand.’
He swore, softly but with deadly intensity, before lifting her up into his arms as he stood upright. ‘Let me put it like this,’ he said grimly as he stood for a moment before striding down the lane in the direction of the lights in the distance. ‘It is not unusual, in certain circumstances, for a woman to pass out round about the time of three months. Do I have to go on?’
‘What?’ She twisted so sharply in his hold that he almost dropped her. ‘You think I’m—you do, don’t you?’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman has left her husband for another man and in the first flush of unbridled passion got a little more than she had bargained for,’ he said, with a terrible lack of expression in his voice and face.
‘Put me down, Blade.’ Her voice was faint, more from the intoxicating sensation of being held in his arms again than the import of his words. Her head was muzzy and her legs felt like jelly but she knew she had to stand on her own two feet again before she disgraced herself a second time. The temptation to wind her arms tightly round his neck and kiss his face and throat was fast becoming too strong to resist, and she could just imagine his reaction. It was clear from what he had said that he had intended the kiss as a punishment and lesson in obedience; he hadn’t expected her either to enjoy or tolerate it. He was probably very disappointed his chastisement hadn’t worked as he’d envisaged, she thought miserably.
‘Can you walk?’ Even as he spoke he had placed her on terra firma again, moving back a pace swiftly as though the contact with her body had repelled him.
He loathed her, she thought painfully. Loathed and hated her. ‘I’m not expecting a baby, Blade.’ How she kept her voice steady she would never know. ‘There is no possibility of that at all.’
‘I see.’ He surveyed her coldly, eyes narrowed and hands thrust deep in the pockets of his jacket. ‘Well, at least you kept enough sanity to take care of that side of things.’
‘I don’t want to discuss it.’ As she went to walk he stepped forward abruptly to block her path, his eyes icy.
‘Don’t you indeed?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘You know, your sheer effrontery amazes me. What happened to the happy innocent girl I married, Amy?’
‘She’s dead.’ The words passed her lips before she had even thought about them, coming straight from the heart, and something in her tone of voice must have set the antennae buzzing again because his eyes searched her face slowly and consideringly, their inky depths thoughtful, before he took her arm and indicated that they continue walking.
‘Now what makes me think that the course of true love is not running as smoothly as you would have liked?’ he asked coldly, with bitterly raw cynicism. ‘What’s the problem, Amy? Did lover-boy prefer having you as an extra little titbit now and again rather than you camping on his doorstep?’
She glared at him without answering as Mrs Cox’s small detached cottage drew nearer.
‘Or maybe the appeal of being a working girl again in the big bad world is less than attractive?’ He looked down at her steadily, his eyes veiled.
‘Can’t you just leave things alone?’ she asked tightly. ‘Accept—’
‘By “things” I take it you mean you?’ He smiled coldly. ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you: to be able to finish my chapter in your life as though this were all an abstract exercise? But it isn’t and we aren’t. You are still my wife—my wife, Amy.’ The emphasis and intonation of his words were exactly as spoken in the dream, and as a slow shiver crept down her spine she gazed up at him with naked fear in her eyes.
‘Do I frighten you?’ They had reached the cottage now and he leant back against the post of the garden gate as he swung it open for her, his stance lazy and laconic and his face cruel. ‘You’d be wise to fear me, Amy. People have feared me for far less than you have done.’
‘You don’t scare me,’ she lied bravely as she lifted her chin a fraction. ‘And I don’t like threats.’
‘Then take it as a warning,’ he drawled smoothly as his gaze held her eyes, their blueness dark and velvety in the moonlight. ‘One that you can pass on to interested parties. I understand John is due home tomorrow.’ The last sentence had been arctic cold, his voice chilling.
