The Hidden Years

She deliberately waited until Daniel Cavanagh had driven off, in a steel-grey vintage Aston Martin, which she knew quite well had cost far more than her new-model Porsche, before walking away from her own car in the direction of Cottingdean.

The house was only a couple of miles from the village, not far at all, and a pleasant walk on such a warm spring evening. As a teenager, before she had learned to drive, she had travelled those two miles sometimes several times a day and thought nothing of doing so.

Then, though, she had not been wearing three-inch heels, nor had her body been reacting as violently as though it were suffering the most virulent form of viral flu.

What had happened to the life of which she had felt so powerfully in control? When had that control started to disintegrate? With her mother’s accident…with the knowledge that the strictly controlled physical and emotional involvements which were all she allowed herself to share with the opposite sex were designed to appease an appetite she no longer had…

The chain had begun to form long before tonight, long before this unwanted resurgence of old memories, but she couldn’t deny that seeing Daniel Cavanagh again had formed a link in it, so strong, so fettering that she doubted that she could break it open and slip free and safe back to her old life.

She saw the car headlights coming towards her, and instinctively walked off the road and on to the grass verge, only realising when the car swept past her that it was Daniel’s grey Aston.

She could hear it slowing down and stopping. Panic splintered into sharp agony inside her. She desperately wanted to run, to hide herself away from him… Not because she feared him as a man… No, she well knew she had nothing sexual to fear from him. No, it was her own memories she wanted to flee, her own pain, her own self-condemnation.

She heard the car door open and then close, and knew that he had seen her. If she walked away now, if she ran away now… Pride made her stand stiffly where she was, but nothing could make her turn to face him as he walked towards her.

‘I thought you were driving back.’

‘I decided I preferred to walk.’

‘In high heels?’

He always had been far too observant.

‘There isn’t a law against it,’ she told him sharply. ‘Although, of course, if you get your way and you run a six-lane motorway through here, the days of walking anywhere will be over for all of us.’

‘The motorway will run over a mile from here. You won’t even see it from Cottingdean. It won’t interfere with your lives there at all. But then you always did prefer emotionalism to logic, didn’t you, Sage?’

‘What are you doing here, Daniel? You’re on the wrong side of the village for the motorway and London…’

‘Yes. I realise that. I took a wrong turning and had to turn back again.’

She had the odd feeling that he was lying, although what he was saying sounded plausible. Was it because of her knowledge of the man, her awareness that taking a wrong turning in anything was the last thing he was likely to do, that she found it hard to believe him?

He was watching her, she realised, refusing to give in to the magnetic pull of his concentration. His eyes were grey, the same metallic colour as his car, and she didn’t need to look at him to remember how powerful an effect that intense concentration could have. He also had the most ridiculously long curling lashes. She remembered how she had once thought they gave him a look at times of being almost vulnerable. More fool her; ‘vulnerable’ was the very last description that could be applied to him. He was solid steel all the way through.

The sick pounding in her head, which had started to ease a little as she walked, had returned. Automatically she raised her hand and pressed her fingers to her temple.

‘Migraine?’

She stared at him, forgetting her resolve not to do so, surprise momentarily widening her eyes.

‘How did you…?’

The ironic look he gave her made her stop, the swift colour burning up under her skin stripping away the veneer of fifteen years of sophistication and reducing her once again to the girl she had once been.

‘I’ve got a retentive memory,’ he told her drily.

‘You must have,’ she agreed bitterly.

‘I’ll give you a lift. It isn’t safe for a woman to walk alone at night these days… Not even out here.’

‘No, thanks, I’d prefer to walk. I need the fresh air…’

‘So go and walk round Cottingdean’s gardens once you get home. You should be safe enough there…’

His calm assumption that she would allow him to make her decision for her infuriated her. ‘I don’t want a lift,’ she repeated tightly, but he had already taken hold of her arm and was walking her towards his car.

Thankfully the thickness of her jacket muffled the sensation of his fingers on her arm, and his touch, although firm, wasn’t constraining.

It was easier to go with him than to argue, she decided weakly as he opened the passenger door and waited politely until she was safely inside before closing it on her.

‘You really needn’t have done this.’

‘I know,’ he agreed as he set the car in motion.

He was a good driver, careful, controlled.

‘Odd,’ he mused, as the gates to the house appeared, ‘you’re the last person I’d envisage chairing a committee for environmental protection.’

‘I’m not,’ Sage told him stiffly. ‘I’m simply standing in for my mother.’

‘Really? The Sage I knew would have taken that as a heaven-sent opportunity for sabotage rather than a sacred bit of family flag-waving.’

Sage felt herself stiffening. This was what she had been dreading from the moment she had set eyes on him. Being reminded of the past, of its pain, of its shadows…and most of all being reminded of the person she had been…

Was it reading her mother’s diaries which had thrown so sharply into focus the differences between them, made her so sharply aware of her own shortcomings, of her own faults, not just of omission but of commission as well?

‘No comment?’ Daniel asked her softly as he brought the car to a halt.

‘Did you ask me a question?’ Sage challenged him acidly as she reached to open her door. ‘I thought you were simply making a statement. How I live my life has nothing to do with you, Daniel…it’s my own affair.’

‘Or affairs,’ he murmured cynically, making her forget that she was still wearing her seatbelt, so that she pushed open the heavy door and tried to get out, only to discover infuriatingly that she was still trapped in her seat.

‘Still the same old Sage. Impatient, illogical. So damn used to getting her own way that she doesn’t even have the sense to avoid any obstacles.’

He opened his own door, and was round her side of the car almost before she had finished unfastening her seatbelt.

She discovered that she was trembling as she got out of the car, not with dread any longer, but with anger…anger, and something else, something that fuelled her adrenalin and banished the pain from her temples.

‘Thanks for the lift.’

‘You’re welcome.’

His face was in the shadows, but as he turned away from her to walk back to the driver’s door his expression was briefly illuminated by the moon, and for an instant he might have been the old Daniel she had once known so well, only to discover she had not really known him at all.

Daniel Cavanagh… Why had he come back into her life, and now of all times, reopening doors—wounds—she had thought long since sealed?

Daniel Cavanagh… She discovered she was shivering again as she walked towards the house, fighting against the threatening avalanche of memories she was only just managing to keep at bay.

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