Exorcism

‘I want you to make love to me.’ She had said it as calmly as she could, her eyes defying him to reject her. If that was the sacrifice demanded of her to prove her love then she was prepared to make it. No doubt she had looked the complete tragic heroine, Christy reflected sardonically now, and that was doubtless the reason for the alien twist of emotion she had seen blaze momentarily in his eyes.

‘Do you now.’ He had pulled her down on to the bed alongside him, his hard, experienced hands dealing efficiently with her nightclothes, his eyes hooded and mysterious as he studied her trembling, naked body in the light through the open windows.

‘Be still my little sacrificial lamb,’ he had murmured to her as he bent towards her. ‘You wanted this—remember?’

His mouth was hot and forceful on her own, his touch drugging her senses, everything else forgotten as he brought her body burningly alive. A wild elation sang in her veins; an overwhelming compulsion urging her forward.

‘I hope you’re remembering that this is only lust,’ he had muttered the words against her mouth and instantly her blood had chilled, her eyes enormous, frozen pools of pain in her pale face.

‘You really don’t love me?’ She had stammered the words, colour stinging her skin as he mocked.

‘No, I really don’t. If I take you now it will be because my body craves yours, that’s all, Christy, and if you’re honest, you’ll admit that it’s the same for you …’

‘No!’ The denial had burst past her lips as she sprang off the bed, all her desire suddenly gone, and a deep sense of humiliation taking its place. She couldn’t remember finding her nightclothes or going back to her own room, but she must have done so. She had cried long into the night, muffling the sound against her pillow, not sure whom she hated the most Simon, or herself. He didn’t love her at all … he had never love her …

It was only pride that enabled her to face him the following morning. She refused his invitation to play tennis, marvelling at his ability to put aside what had happened, ignoring it almost. She could not do so. For the remainder of the duration of his stay she had treated him with a frozen politeness, breaking down only when he had gone, pouring out her pain to her mother.

Georgina had sighed and berated herself for not realising what was happening. ‘Simon is a loner, darling,’ she had told her. ‘He’s also, unfortunately for you, an extremely sexy man. You’ll get over it,’ she had promised, but Christy hadn’t believed her. Not then.

She had of course, but the pain of her humiliation at his hands had left a legacy that still stung. He could have let her down more easily. Realising that she was not going to go back to sleep she got up and showered.

Downstairs the house drowsed in the early morning sun. She went into the kitchen and started to prepare her mother’s breakfast tray. Georgina was normally a late night person, and preferred to have breakfast in bed.

Christy was just pouring water on to the tea when she heard the squeak of the back door. Harry didn’t come on a Thursday and it wasn’t Mrs Carver’s day either. She turned round slowly, her nerve endings prickling warningly as her eyes met those of the man leaning against the kitchen door.

Six years had barely changed him. He was a little thinner perhaps, but his hair was still just as dark, his skin just as tanned, his eyes impossibly golden.

‘Hello, Simon.’

She was pleased that her voice was so even.

‘Still the devoted handmaiden I see.’

‘My mother likes to have breakfast in bed, I like to get up early.’ She kept her voice deliberately neutral. ‘Have you come to see her?’

‘No, I’ve come to see you, as you damn well know. Why won’t you come and work for me?’

‘Why should I?’ She shrugged slim shoulders.

‘Still not forgiven me?’ His mouth twisted derisively, and anger quickened inside her. Her eyebrows arched, her eyes coolly meeting his.

‘What for? Inviting me to share your bed? My dear Simon, I’m old enough now to realise what an accolade that was, especially in view of my own pathetic lack of experience.’

‘Are you?’ His voice was infused with mild irony. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Christy? That given the choice now, you’d choose differently—lust in preference to virtue?’

‘I wasn’t aware that I did make the choice,’ she replied evenly, but he confounded her by saying.

‘You were scared to death of me making love to you, you simply thought that if I did I’d have no option but to marry you.’

‘That’s not true.’ The denial was a cry of pain, her face white under her tan.

‘What does it matter? It’s all water under the bridge now anyway. Why won’t you come to the Caribbean with me? What are you so afraid of? That I’ll try to make love to you?’

‘Hardly.’ Her voice was extremely dry. ‘In point of fact, I’m not afraid at all, Simon, simply uninterested.’

He came towards her, taking her chin between his fingers, before she could avoid him, his expression mocking as he drawled, ‘Well, well, you have grown up, haven’t you? And what have you been doing with yourself for the last six years?’

His voice suggested that whatever it was it couldn’t have been anything of any merit and where once his cynicism would have unnerved her now it simply made her angry.

‘Living well,’ she told him sweetly, shaking herself free. ‘Didn’t you know—it is the best revenge.’

His mouth twisted. ‘All grown up with a vengeance, aren’t we? I wonder how far that sophisticated veneer goes? It might be interesting to find out.’

‘Far enough to deal with men like you, Simon,’ she told him coolly. ‘Please stop baiting me and go and find someone else to work for you?’

‘Sure you’re indifferent to me?’ he mocked, grasping her wrist, his thumb on her racing pulse. ‘If so, prove it and come and work for me.’

‘I don’t have to prove it.’ She gave him a tight smile.

‘Come with me, and I promise I won’t put your indifference to the test.’

His arrogance infuriated her. It flashed darkly in her eyes, her mouth tightening with temper. ‘Why me?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘God, you could have your pick.’

His mouth twisted. ‘Very flattering, but I’m not prepared to pay the price. You, on the other hand, I know I’m safe with.’

‘Get a male assistant if you’re that scared.’

‘A man probably wouldn’t be prepared to cook and clean,’ he told her arrogantly. ‘I want to keep what I’m doing as secret as possible. I can manage the boat we’ll be using single-handed, and I want as few people as possible involved. You fit the bill on every count.’

‘Right down to not wanting to share your bed,’ Christy seethed.

‘Oh, it’s not sharing my bed that worries me, it’s the price I might be expected to pay for the privilege of enjoying my female companion’s favours,’ he returned cynically.

‘Still the same old Simon.’

‘But of course. Now will you come with me?’

‘If I refuse?’

‘Then perhaps I’ll just stay around and see just how deep your indifference goes, gipsy.’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Come with me, you know in your heart-of-hearts you want to. How can staying here compare with a summer spent in the Caribbean?’

‘Extremely favourably,’ Christy flung at him tartly, ‘especially when the Caribbean includes you.’

‘But you’ll come?’

His thumb was caressing her wrist and it was taking all her willpower not to respond to his insidious caress. She didn’t love him; she didn’t even like him very much, but her body was aware of him. He had been right, she realised with a certain wry amusement. Lust was all it had ever been. Why shouldn’t she go? It would be good to show him just how much she had changed.

She shrugged carelessly, ‘Why not…? On the strict understanding, of course, that I am simply your assistant.’

It was his turn to shrug. ‘If that’s the way you want it. Was that all you were to Miles? Simply an assistant?’

His question caught her off-guard. On the point of replying truthfully she checked, and then said smoothly. ‘Really Simon, I don’t think my relationship with Miles is any concern of yours.’

‘Not in the ordinary sense,’ he agreed calmly, ‘but he’s in the Bahamas at the moment and it’s quite conceivable that we might run into him. I ought to warn you that at the moment he’s heavily involved with someone else.’

‘Petra Finnegan,’ Christy responded coolly. ‘Yes, I do read the papers, Simon.’

‘Umm. You’re obviously not jealous.’ His eyes searched hers with cool intent, ‘but then I don’t suppose he was your first lover.’

His analytical regard angered her, her voice tense as she bit out. ‘What’s the matter, Simon, regretting that you weren’t?’

He laughed and released her. ‘Hell, no. Timid little virgins weren’t, and still aren’t, my style, Christy. You should know that.’

She almost recoiled from the cruelty of it, but then her sense of humour came to her rescue. ‘Oh I do,’ she agreed softly. ‘Luckily for me it’s not an aversion all men share.’

There was a tense little silence that made her stomach curl in instinctive and unexpected alarm, and then Simon drawled mockingly, ‘Okay, Christy, game, set and match. Now can we get down to business? I don’t have much time.’

‘In that case you took rather a chance, didn’t you?’ she responded coolly. ‘What if I had refused to come with you?’

‘I could have found someone else, it wouldn’t have been an impossibility, but you’re the assistant I want.’

‘And you always get what you want, is that it?’

‘I try to,’ he agreed suavely. ‘Now are you going to take that tray up to Georgina and break the glad tidings?’

Her mother was awake when Christy went up.

‘Simon’s here,’ she told her crisply as she walked in. ‘You did tell him I wouldn’t want the job, didn’t you?’

‘Of course I did, darling.’ Her mother looked away.

‘You told me that Jeremy had suggested me for the job,’ Christy pressed. ‘Simon on the other hand intimated that it was his idea.’

‘He must have already discussed it with Jeremy,’ Georgina suggested. ‘I promise you I told Jeremy you wouldn’t be keen. I couldn’t say too much though, darling, not without reminding him what happened six years ago, and I didn’t think you’d want that.’

No, her mother was right in that. Jeremy was something of a gossip and she didn’t want it put around that she was still suffering from a teenage crush on Simon.

‘Well I’ve agreed to go.’ Christy’s full mouth compressed when she saw her mother’s expression. ‘Let’s just say he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,’ she said with grim humour in answer to her unspoken question. ‘A case of rather unsubtle bribery … besides I’ve nothing else on.’

Anxiety shadowed her mother’s blue eyes. ‘Darling are you sure? You aren’t doing this simply through bravado are you?’

‘Bravely concealing my broken heart you mean?’ Christy mocked. ‘No Mum, I got over Simon years ago. It’s just that my pride still smarts from time to time. As he told me himself at the time all I was really suffering from was infatuation plus lust … he was, as you aptly said, an extremely sexy man.’

‘And still is,’ her mother warned her shrewdly, ‘possibly more so.’

‘Forget it. I’m immune … innoculated for life. I’d better go down and find out if he intends to stay for lunch. From what he was saying it seems there’s some degree of urgency,’

‘Umm, he mentioned to Jeremy that his yacht is moored in St Lucia, I expect he’ll want to fly out there as soon as he can. Darling, before you go down,’ Georgina murmured suddenly, ‘can you see if you can find my notes. I suddenly got this idea last night…’

They had fallen off the bedside table and it took Christy five minutes to uncover them. Leaving her mother to mull over her new ‘idea’ she went back downstairs, wondering a little wryly just what she had committed herself to. There was no going back now. Simon had played cleverly on her emotions, she had to grant him that, but she wasn’t eighteen any longer. She shrugged mentally. All right, she was annoyed at the way he had manoeuvred her, but it had happened and now her best course was simply to treat him as she might Miles or her mother. He was simply another writer for whom she was going to work; someone who was giving her an opportunity to see a part of the world she had always longed to see. He no longer had the power to hurt or humiliate her. That was over and done with.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY flew out to St Lucia three days later. His ketch, Stormsurf was moored there in Castries harbour, Simon informed Christy laconically and they would sail from there to the tiny island of St Paul’s on which he was based.

Mentally blessing the fact that she had kept the clothes she had used for India the summer before, Christy spent a hectic morning going through them, packing those she thought might be useful.

‘Swimsuits, shorts, jeans, that sort of thing,’ Simon had told her in reply to her query as to what she would need. ‘Don’t bother about any diving gear, we’ll get you fixed up with that there—saves air-freighting it out and waiting for it.’

Now they were West Indies bound, Simon immersed in some papers he had brought on board with him, and she still did not have a much clearer idea of exactly what they were going to be doing. He wanted to find a sunken wreck he had told her, giving her some brief background details about the man he intended to make the main character of his new book. There hadn’t been time for her to do any reading up herself, and wishing she had had the forethought to buy some magazines at the airport, she lay back in her seat and tried to relax. Flying had never been something she enjoyed, although it was the take-offs and landings she really loathed.

‘Sorry about this …’ Simon raised his head from the papers he was studying to smile at her. Christy had already noticed the covert glances their stewardess had given him; hardly surprising really. He must easily be the most attractive man on board. The tawny eyes narrowed suddenly, and Christy wondered if he had picked up on her thoughts. Hardly, she derided herself, he was a man, not a mind-reader. The trouble was, although she was loathe to admit it, she hadn’t shaken off entirely the old teenage worshipful awe of him. Oh, consciously she had, of course she had, but her old emotions occasionally sneaked up on her, surprising her, shaking the foundations of self-confidence she had built up so painstakingly. All the more reason to be on her guard, she told herself, acknowledging his apology with a cool smile.

‘Jeremy dumped these on me at the last minute.’ He picked up the folder and grimaced faintly. ‘Tour details from Dee Harland … Jeremy knows I prefer to go through them myself. Oh, Dee is the publicity agent Jeremy uses in the States …’ he added by way of explanation.

His laconic assumption of her ignorance infuriated Christy. ‘You don’t need to explain who Dee is to me, Simon,’ she told him sweetly. ‘Actually Dee and I have met.’

She watched the faint narrowing of his eyes, and thought sardonically that she doubted that the relationship he had had with the glamorous American P.R. woman, had been anything like as cool as hers. ‘I haven’t spent the last six years pining away in the country, Simon,’ she added. ‘Dee and I met the last time my mother was in the States. I went with her.’

It had been one of his more cruel taunts that she was nothing but a child who had seen and done nothing, and she felt a brief stab of satisfaction in underlining the fact that she was no longer that child. In point of fact although she had enjoyed the experience of her mother’s American publicity tour, she did prefer the calm of the English countryside, but there were other ways of broadening one’s mind apart from travel. Reading for instance … All second-hand knowledge, she taunted herself. What had she really discovered or learned by her own experience?

What she had learned from Simon had been enough, she defended herself mentally. Was it really a crime to be without any ambition other than to live peaceably and content? Hers was a spirit that desired quietude; she found no pleasure in adrenalin-pumping excitement, in confrontation or competition; she never had. Perhaps it was arrogant to feel satisfied with the standards and goals she set for herself, instead of being concerned with meeting those set by others … perhaps after her experience with Simon she had deliberately opted out.

‘What deep thoughts are you thinking, I wonder?’ Simon’s voice checked her.

‘I was just wondering what we’d get for lunch,’ she returned blandly, meeting his eyes.

‘Never.’ She could see a hint of laughter in them, and something else; a sharp alertness that warned her that he suspected her of deception and would enjoy accusing her of it, simply for the challenge. ‘Your eyes never glow such a deep amethyst for anything as mundane as food.’

He was too astute; saw and knew too much. She must not forget that he was a writer, his mind attuned to the emotional nuances of others.

‘Perhaps not at eighteen,’ she agreed lightly.

‘You’re very anxious to persuade me how much you’ve changed.’

Christy held her breath for a few seconds. This was getting dangerous. ‘Am I?’ She made a pretence of studying his jibe and then said judiciously, ‘I don’t think so. You’re the one who keeps making comparisons.’

He said nothing but his smile made prickles of alarm race across her skin, and she was glad when he changed the subject, talking about India and asking her for her impressions of it.

For the next hour they talked amicably. Simon was a skilled conversationalist, neither hogging the conversation nor letting it drag. Christy had absorbed a good deal during her weeks in India. Working alongside Miles and helping with his research had been something of a challenge initially, but she had loved every minute of it. History had always been one of her favourite subjects, and at one time she had considered taking her degree in it, but the fields open to students with history degrees were very limited and she had concentrated instead on her art.

Listening to him she had to suppress the temptation to sketch Simon. His features were so strong; his bone structure so positive that drawing him was always a visual pleasure. She had sketched him in the past, of course—but all those sketches, drawn with adoration and love, had been destroyed after he had left her. Now her trained eye detected the small differences in him she had noticed on their first meeting, and she studied him covertly.

He seemed to have lost a little of the restlessness which had once been such an integral part of him. She remembered that that summer there had not been a day when he had not taken her somewhere; wanted to do something. He had rarely been content to simply sit and watch. Unlike her he had always been a keen participator in life, never an onlooker. His face had hardened slightly, too; the cynicism in his eyes more noticeable. He was a man it would always be easy for her sex to love, Christy thought perceptively, and yet very hard to know. She knew very little about his background. Six years ago she had been content simply to adore … she asked for nothing … questioned nothing.

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