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This was crazy, she thought. Sheer madness. Even as she thought it, she found herself nodding, allowing him to pull her chair back and lead her through.
There was, indeed, music. To Cat it sounded like a heavenly choir. He took her into his arms, and she felt as though she’d come home after a long, long journey.
She didn’t know how long they danced for, she only knew that there had never been a dance like it. She seemed to fit so perfectly into his arms, her head gently resting against the broadness of his chest. She was floating, dreaming—she must be. Things like this just didn’t happen to girls like her.
She didn’t remember at which point he suggested they leave. She didn’t say anything as they walked through now deserted streets to his car. There was an air of magic surrounding them. He drove her through unfamiliar streets, which became more imposing and more tree-lined with each moment, drawing up at last outside a white house, where the scent of some shrub filled her senses with its fragrance.
He led her inside. She was aware of opulence and faded splendour. He didn’t put any lights on, but instead took her through to a room whose uncurtained windows let in the bright silvery light of the moon. The moonlight, with its surreal glow, only added to her feeling of unreality. Somehow she was in his arms, where she belonged, and he was whispering to her.
‘Do you want to dance some more?’
Her voice sounded heavy, drowsy. ‘No.’
‘A drink, then? Some more grappa?’
‘No.’
‘What, then? This. . .?’ And he bent his head and started to kiss her. ‘Is that what you wanted all the time, my little Cat?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she breathed against his parted lips. ‘Yes. Yes.’
The sweetness of his breath was more intoxicating than the grappa she had drunk. Cat had been kissed before, naturally, but this might just as well have been the first time, for it made every other kiss fade into insignificance.
His mouth was firm, hard, insistent yet gentle. She felt his tongue begin to explore first the warm outline of her lips, investigating every tiny pore, so that when eventually it moved inside her mouth it seemed like the most wantonly exciting invasion imaginable. She found herself wanting to run her hands through the rich, glorious thickness of his hair. He pulled her closer, so that she could feel the frantic racing of his heart through the flimsy fabric of her dress.
She was scarcely aware of how or when he took her up a long flight of stairs, to a room where there was a large bed, but she remembered feeling relief when she saw the bed, relief and a slow, relentless build-up of longing. She saw his eyes alight with a wondering fire as he lifted a hand up and began to slide the thin shoulder-straps down, one by one.
‘Cat,’ he murmured. ‘My little Cat. You’re so very beautiful.’ He made it sound like a sonnet.
‘Nico.’ She could barely gasp the word out through swollen lips, lips that longed to feel the heady pressure of his kiss once more.
He pulled the bodice of the dress down, so that her breasts in their insubstantial bra lay revealed, and she heard him catch his breath. ‘Cara,’ he whispered. ‘Mia cara.’ He kissed the hollow between them, and she shuddered as she felt his tongue trail a path to one hardened rosy nub of nipple.
Head flung back, totally uninhibited, she heard herself gasp, ‘Take it off,’ in a kind of frenzied whisper.
The wisp of bra floated its way to the floor, and he cupped each breast in almost reverential fashion, bending his head slowly to kiss each one in turn.
Driven by instinct, and a power as old as time itself, she found herself unbuttoning the fine linen of his shirt, until his chest too was bare, and she heard him give a groan of sheer delight as she kissed him there. He pulled her to him fiercely then, and she knew a sensation of both wonderment and gratification as, for the first time ever, she felt bare skin touching bare skin in the act of love.
She was aware of his shrugging off his jacket, of his other clothes being flung off his body, straight on to the floor.
That beautiful suit, she thought with lazy amusement, and then she was in his arms again, and he was laying her on the bed, pulling her dress off completely, then the filmy half-slip, and finally he hooked his fingers into the tiny lace panties and slid them off her, leaving her naked before his eyes.
He lay above her, just watching her, a mixture of awe and desire and something else on his face, something she couldn’t recognise. He lifted a hand and touched her face quite gently. ‘Are you sure you want this, my Cat? Quite sure, mia cara?’
She gave him an enchanting smile, loving him all the more because he would have stopped. Some primitive instinct told her that with absolute clarity. Yes, he wanted her very badly, she could see that, but one word and he would have stopped. One word. She put her hand up to trace the outline of his lips, and he imprisoned it there, kissing the palm with breathtaking homage. He was waiting for her answer. One word.
‘Yes,’ she told him. She scarcely recognised the voice as her own; it sounded almost slurred with the blood-stirring response he was eliciting from her.
He moved over her then, to shower her with kisses, light, butterfly kisses at first, gradually becoming deeper and more insistent.
She had never seen anything so beautiful as the physical perfection of this naked man. Each limb brown and strong, all muscle and sinew. But there was softness behind the steely strength. Tenderness, too, in the way he spoke her name, over and over again. She kissed him back, with a fervour and a passion that matched his. She was flying, like a bird newly out of the nest. The wings she had never used before were unexpectedly simple to use. She matched each stroke, each caress, each seeking gesture with movements of her own. She had never been to bed with a man before, but she felt no fear, no hesitation, no embarrassment. It was as though the instinctive way she responded to him was being guided by some force stronger than she, stronger indeed than both of them. She knew a moment of sheer pleasure as she saw his face just before he moved in to possess her utterly. A primitive joy at the sensation of his fullness, dominating her completely, before the sharp and totally unexpected spasm of pain. She had forgotten, she had actually forgotten that it might hurt. She heard him exclaim, saw his face. . .not pleasure there now, puzzlement, yes, and—surely not?—anger. His movements became fierce and strong, tinged with a kind of desperation. He moved one last time with a sudden ferocity, and then she heard him groan, before withdrawing completely, and falling on to the bed beside her.
There was a brief silence, if you could count it as silence, when the raggedness of his breathing seemed almost to deafen her. She turned to him miserably, knowing that it should not have ended like this, feeling his mental as well as physical withdrawal, knowing, just from the forbidding set of his newly tense shoulders that he was very angry, but not knowing why.
When he turned over to look at her she almost recoiled from the pure fury that lit the dark eyes with a angry glow.
‘Dio!’ he swore. ‘You little idiot—how could you? How could you?’
She felt suddenly cold. ‘How could I what? Nico—what is it? What have I done?’
He moved as far away from her as he could, as though he could taint himself by mere proximity. He sat up, the rumpled sheet at his waist, still breathing heavily. ‘What a waste!’ he exploded. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me that you were a virgin?’
Why? Why indeed? If she told him the reason she would be able to add scorn to the contempt on his face. Tell him that she had never felt anything like that in her life before? That she had felt lifted almost on to a higher plane? That their lovemaking had had, for her, a spiritual quality that had ruled her response to him? Tell him that she had foolishly mistaken lust for love? ‘Was it—I mean, did you not. . .enjoy it?’
He swore violently under his breath; the words were foreign to her, but their meaning plain enough.
‘Enjoy it?’ he asked scornfully. ‘How could I enjoy it, knowing that?’ he spat out, then, seeing her look of puzzlement, he relented. ‘Oh, I achieved—satisfaction.’ His mouth curled in distaste as he spoke the word. ‘I should have stopped. . . I would have stopped, but——’
‘But?’
‘It was too late by then,’ he said bitterly. ‘Nothing could have stopped me.’
She knew one last surge of triumph, that the tide had been strong enough to sweep him, too, out of control, and then she sat up, hugging a sheet around her nakedness, willing herself to stem the tears, for now at least. ‘Well, at least you can be sure of not catching any disease—as you were the first!’ she cried.
She saw him glance at her quickly, as if recognising the vulnerability behind the attempt at bravado.
‘It shouldn’t be like that, you know,’ he said, quite softly. ‘Your first time. It should be special.’
It was special, she wanted to scream at him. For me, anyway! But she turned her head away.
‘I would have been more. . .less. . .more gentle. . .’ His words tailed off into an embarrassed silence.
And all at once she knew that she could not tolerate one second more of this humiliating post-mortem. With a shuddering sense of realisation she remembered that she was in a strange country and a strange house, with a man who was now as far away from her as a complete stranger, ever though he lay just feet away, even though he knew her body intimately. A vestige of the Ice-Queen returned as her pride’s saviour.
‘I’d like you to take me back now, please.’
To her shame, he didn’t even try to argue. He merely nodded and stood up, and she closed her eyes to blot out the sight of the body. She still, even now, longed for him to take her in his arms again, to make everything all right, as sweetly perfect as before. . .
They dressed in silence. This time round she noticed the car; she made herself obsessively observe details. The smell of fine leather, the dazzling array of instruments. Anything that would keep her tortured thoughts away from the subject of the man who had so summarily thrust her away from him.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asked at last.
Some last scrap of self-preservation made her lie to him. She mentioned the name of a hotel she had noticed in the adjoining street to her own hotel. The drive there seemed to take forever, and when he stopped the car he turned to her, his troubled eyes betraying that he wasn’t feeling as calm as his exterior suggested.
‘Catriona. . .’ he began.
So she was Catriona now. Not Cat. His Cat. The use of her proper name became the final straw, and she wrenched the door open. ‘Thanks for the memory!’ she said on a sob, before running away down the road, as if demons were on her heel, away, far away, where he could never find her.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_49c8efdc-2ec0-5951-9136-9e66ea863362)
‘ARE you all right, Cat?’
Cat turned from the mirror, where she had been adjusting her green theatre gown, her lacklustre eyes regarding Josey Betts, her fellow staff nurse, and a good friend. ‘Sure, I’m all right,’ she answered unconvincingly. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
Josey hesitated. ‘It’s just that you’ve been so—well, so strange since you’ve got back.’
‘Strange?’ echoed Cat dully. Perhaps it was true, then, perhaps sexual awakening could be seen in a woman’s eyes. Except that it hadn’t been much of an awakening in her case, more like an ongoing nightmare.
‘I mean, I know you were ill when you came back from Italy——’
‘Yes,’ agreed Cat calmly. III? It had been no disease that her doctor had heard of, that was for sure, but she had been unable to function normally. She had stopped eating and sleeping and laughing—as the stark reality of what she had done came home to her. She had lost her virginity to a total stranger. Her doctor had diagnosed depression, and she hadn’t had the energy to argue with him, and, besides, what would he say if she told him the truth? He would be disbelieving at first, and then, if she managed to convince him of the veracity of her statement, she could imagine the disbelief changing to distaste, disgust. Knowing that the Ice-Queen was no better than a slut.
Physically, the pills had made her feel better. Soon she had stopped taking them, and now she was functioning ‘normally’, except that there was a huge gap where her heart used to be. Mentally, she just didn’t know. How on earth did she go about coming to terms with doing something so completely out of character—and doing something which felt as though it had devastated not only her heart and soul, but her whole future?
She pushed one narrow foot into the white theatre clog. ‘I don’t suppose you know which list I’m down for today?’ she queried.
‘You mean, you haven’t looked?’ Josey gave an amused smile. ‘Well, this will really cheer you up—you’ve hit the jackpot this time, Cat!’
‘Jackpot?’
Josey clicked impatiently. ‘Will you stop repeating everything I say? It makes you sound all dopey, and you’re going to need all your wits about you. You’ve landed the new visiting prof!’
Cat wondered why Josey was doing an excellent imitition of a Cheshire cat. ‘So?’
‘So?’ Josey exclaimed, hitting her hand dramatically on to her forehead. ‘So, he’s a walking dreamboat. Sensational! I tell you, Cat—this one is the business!’
‘Really?’ Cat asked absently. ‘Well, then you’ll have to get to work on him, won’t you?’
Josey crinkled up her freckled nose. ‘Oh, sure,’ she said resignedly. ‘He’s bound to fancy you—they all do.’
Cat shuddered, feeling as though she’d been offered a poisoned chalice. ‘Well, he’s safe from me. I am off men completely.’ Natural curiosity got the better of her. ‘What’s he like?’
‘Italian——’ started Josey, and then stopped when she saw her friend’s white face. ‘Cat, what’s the matter?’
Cat shook her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ No point in saying that even the gods seemed intent on compounding her misery. Everywhere she went she seemed to be invaded by images of all things Italian. Or was it simply that she couldn’t get Rome, and that dark, beautiful, cruel stranger out of her mind?
‘You can’t believe how good-looking he is,’ prattled on Josey excitedly. ‘Sister Henderson even said that he should have been a film star—and that, coming from her, well. . .’
Cat knew what she meant. Sister Henderson, only two years off retirement, had once been jilted by her fiancе, and had decided that the rest of the male sex should pay. Cat had always thought her a slightly ridiculous figure. Ironic that after what had happened to her in Rome she now felt she had more in common with the older woman than any of her peers. ‘Is he a good surgeon—that’s the question?’
‘He’s a professor—for heaven’s sake!’
Cat looked at her patiently. ‘You know as well as I do that people often get promoted because they’re brilliant fund-raisers and medical politicians. Some of them can’t operate their way out of a paper bag!’
‘Well, this one can,’ retorted Josey smugly. ‘Sister Henderson says she’s never seen such a wonderful technique. . .neat, yet fast—the ultimate combination!’
‘Good grief,’ said Cat sarcastically. ‘Has the idol got feet of clay, I wonder? Does he come complete with a halo?’
Josey’s eyes glinted. ‘The last thing he looks like is a saint, I can assure you.’
‘Sister Henderson isn’t seriously besotted, is she, Jo?’
This produced a fit of the giggles. ‘Probably. But it won’t do her the least bit of good—he’s decades younger!’
‘I’m surprised she’s put me in with him, if he’s that grand.’
‘Ah, well—you are the blue-eyed girl, aren’t you?’ asked Josey a touch bitterly. ‘Everyone knows they’ll make you sister soon.’
Was that true? wondered Cat as she made her way slowly towards Theatre One. Ironic that once she could think of nothing she’d wanted more, yet now the thought of promotion filled her with only a kind of mild curiosity. She shook her head very slightly, knowing that she was going to have to snap out of this mood very quickly indeed. Soon she would be on hand to use her skill as a scrub nurse in some of the most exacting operations known to medical science.
As she set about preparing her trolley she reflected that cardio-thoracic surgery—or heart surgery, as it was more popularly known—excited a very passionate response from the general public. All doctors and nurses knew that getting funds for this particular speciality was almost as easy as raising funds for the children’s ward. Perhaps the fact that the heart was seen as the very nub of human life was what made the public response to it so gratifying. And the heart was, of course, seen as the centre of the emotions, something which she had only recently discovered. For the first time in her life she found herself wishing that she worked on a ward, or in Out-patients, or in something, anything other than a job where the word ‘heart’ was spoken day after day, reminding her of all those terms that now seemed to accurately reflect her life, and her feelings. Heartbroken. Absolutely.
The theatre began to become a hive of humming activity. Cat had gloved and gowned up, and was placing the myriad fine instruments on to the sterile trolley. Her ‘runner’ scurried around, fetching more sutures and extra instruments. She was a student working three months in theatres, and had been dreading assisting Staff Nurse Bellman. Everyone knew that she didn’t suffer fools gladly—her high standards were the talk of the student nurses’ canteen. What she hadn’t been expecting had been someone quite so young as Catriona Bellman, or so lovely, either.
Systematically, in a routine which was now as familiar to her as washing her face, or brushing her teeth, Cat began to lay the instruments out in neat lines, in the order that they would most probably be called for. She glanced up at her runner.
‘Student Nurse Lloyd, could you find out if the professor favours any special instruments?’
‘Yes, Staff.’
She returned a couple of minutes later, bearing a set of Hanwright forceps, and opened the packets so that the contents fell out on to the sterile trolley.
‘Thanks,’ said Cat, and, seeing the girl’s keen expression, began to question her. ‘Have you done much theatre work?’ she queried. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’
‘I came while you were off sick,’ explained the student.
‘I see.’ Colour crept into Cat’s cheeks. She felt such a fraud for having been off with a sickness that was so patently self-induced—but she could never have worked in the state she’d been in, and it was only the second break for sickness she’d had in her entire career. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Melissa,’ answered the girl.
‘Well, Melissa, I’m pleased to have you on board. Have you done much running so far?’
‘This is my third time. The first two I was just observing, then today Sister Henderson said that I could help you, as we’re short-staffed.’
Cat nodded. They seemed constantly short-staffed, but she smiled encouragingly at the younger girl, recognising some of the same eagerness to learn that had first characterised her own ambition to work in Theatre. Theatre nurses were born, she had long ago decided, not made. ‘Well, Sister Henderson must be very pleased with your progress if she’s letting you run for a major operation at this stage. Well done!’
‘Why, thank you, Staff!’ Student Nurse Lloyd flushed pink with pride, thinking that this kind interest didn’t tie in with Staff Bellman’s reputation.
Cat knew immediately what the girl was thinking, her theatre mask hiding her wry expression, for yes, she had changed. She knew that she had. Work no longer seemed the prime motivating force in her life. She had tasted both pleasure and pain, and a newer, softer Cat had emerged. The question was whether or not she would ever be able to forget the man who had effected that change, or—more important still—would she ever be able to experience that fierce and overwhelming reaction with someone else?
‘Have you worked in Anaesthetics yet, Melissa?’
‘Not yet, Staff.’
‘Then I’ll tell you a little about it before the patient arrives, as we’re ready. At this moment the patient is being anaesthetised, and the anaesthetist is inserting lots of different lines into him, which will enable him to monitor his progress during the operation. What lines do you think he might use?’
‘A CVP line.’
