The Hidden Years (44 page)

When she eventually became a woman she would need a man
who challenged her; led her, matched her and evoked the deepest
intensity of her passion.

She would find none of those things with Scott, and when
she eventually made that discovery she would be the one to be the more
badly hurt, he recognised. Scott's very temperament would protect him
always from the highs and lows of emotions which would torment her.

He stepped back to allow her to precede him as they
changed direction and headed for the pub, Scott apparently sublimely
unaware of the tension crackling between them as he talked
enthusiastically to Daniel about a lecture he had recently attended.

Though he listened to Scott, it was Sage on whom his
attention was fixed. She moved like a young colt, he thought wryly, all
jerky, uncoordinated movements which curiously had their own peculiar
grace. As they passed people turned their heads to look at them. To
look at her.

She was not beautiful in the strictest sense, but there
was something about her: a clear message composed of sensuality,
vulnerability, danger and that air of wildness that had first struck
him. Temptation to any man, a dangerous temptation arousing his
instinctive need to stalk and hunt, to capture and tame… He
had never seen a woman who aroused his most basic male instincts as
this one did, he acknowledged, finding the knowledge both amusing and
enlightening.

He wondered what she was like in bed, and didn't even
apologise to Scott in his mind for doing so. This was a woman whom no
man could look at without asking himself that question. And yet there
was nothing about her that was overtly sexual. No contrived come-ons,
or deliberate underlining of her sexuality. Rather she almost seemed
ashamed of it, and angered by it. Was that why she had chosen
Scott—was she perhaps secretly afraid of what might happen to
her if she allowed herself to want a man who matched her passion for
passion, need for need, desire for desire…?

With Scott, all that was wanton and reckless within her
would be safely damped down, cooled and controlled, because Scott's was
not a nature that would ever reach those haunting and tormenting
heights and depths of intensity. Scott would never know the almost
divine sensation, the almost too painfully heightened state of
awareness of self and oneness that came from such passion, and neither,
mercifully, would he ever know the depths of degradation it could drag
its victims down into.

But she would know those things, maybe already did, for
all that she looked so clean and scrubbed, so fresh, and in some odd
way almost innocent. Until one looked into those Lilith-given eyes and
at that violently passionate mouth.

He wanted her, Daniel recognised. He had seen her, known
her for only five minutes and yet it was more than long enough for him
to recognise what was causing the deep gut-ache burning his body.

That wanting both amused and amazed him. She was not his
type—too turbulent, too troublesome, too much like hard work.
He liked his women sleek and complaisant, and he made no apology for
doing so.

When the time eventually came for him to find a wife and
settle down, it wouldn't be passion that motivated him. That was
something he had already decided. He had seen what passion brought, how
it destroyed and maimed. John Ryan must have loved his mother once,
must perhaps also have sensed that she did not love him, must have
found himself caught in a trap that constantly chafed at him. It had
made him violent… abusive… He might not be John Ryan's natural son, but he was deeply
conscious of the effects of witnessing such behaviour, of the seeds of
destruction it might have sown within himself… Given the
same kind of circumstances, put in a situation where he loved too much
and was not loved in return, might not he too resort to violence, to
the social conditioning of his early years? It wasn't a risk he was
prepared to take. He would marry—he had no roving bachelor
instincts; he enjoyed sex but he also enjoyed cerebral foreplay just as
much as physical. When he married it would be to a woman he could
respect and who would respect him in return. Perhaps there would always
be between them the kind of distance that came when two people married
for reasons that were sensible rather than passionate, but they would
have a good life together; a home, children, security… and
in the meantime he satisfied the sexual hunger of his body with
relationships designed to give both him and his partner pleasure
without any emotional pain.

This woman would never in a thousand years understand any
of that. She would be as rapacious as a famine and twice as deadly. She
would want everything a man had to give and then some more. She would
demand his exclusive attention, his total concentration, and she would
probably drive him out of his mind into the bargain.

And despite knowing all that, Daniel recognised as he held
open the pub door for her, right now, standing within two feet of her,
breathing in the female scents of her skin and hair, he would take
every risk there was simply out of his need to take her to his bed, and
make love to her until those feral green eyes no longer glowered at
him, but grew huge and soft with satiation, until her body tensed in
sexual ecstasy beneath his, until she cried out his name in anger and
passion, until he had made her want him with the same intensity with
which he wanted her.

Luckily, he was experienced enough to conceal what he was
thinking from her and from Scott.

It shocked him a little that he should so easily and so
casually dismiss the claims of loyalty to his younger friend. He had
never been the type to take pleasure or find a thrill in poaching on
other men's preserves, especially when those men were his friends.
Besides, there had never been any need. Daniel was the kind of man to
whom women were instinctively attracted. So much so, that he had long
ago developed a method of deflecting them without hurting or damaging
them.

He liked women, but not this one… He didn't
like her, and she most certainly did not like him. Sardonically he
wondered how long it would take her to recognise that beneath her
antipathy towards him ran this sexual awareness and need. And, when she
did, whether she would admit it even to herself.

He was not an unkind man; she couldn't be much over
eighteen, but he doubted that Scott was her first lover.

A girl like that would have matured early, become aware of
her own potent sexuality early. Unless she had been immured in a
convent for the last four years, he doubted that she could have been an
innocent untried virgin when she came to Scott's bed, and yet curiously
she seemed not to recognise, as he would have thought a woman with any
sexual experience would have recognised, that beneath the surface of
her antagonism and his bland response to it lay this deeper, darker
vein of emotion.

He deliberately kept them both in the pub with him for
longer than he had intended, insisting on buying them lunch, and then
suppressing the laughter that sprang to his eyes as she looked at him
as though she wanted to rake her nails down his face, or throw her
unwanted lunch at him.

Scott, oblivious to all this, was genuinely pleased to
have his company, and he felt the first sharp spiralling of irritation
with his friend. If he didn't watch out he was very quickly going to
lose his girlfriend—other men wouldn't be as reluctant to
take her from him as he was.

Or would it after all be so easy? he wondered, frowning as
he saw the almost desperate way Sage had pulled her chair closer to
Scott's, nestling up against him as though he was her only protection,
her only security, in a world which terrified her. Sage,
terrified… Impossible—she wasn't the type, and yet
for a moment he had glimpsed something vulnerable and afraid in her
eyes as she looked at her lover.

Observing them, he recognised how reluctant she was to so
much as allow Scott out of her sight… how her whole face lit
up when he came back to her side after going to the bar… how
she forcibly had to stop herself from reaching out and touching
him… how the whole of her fiery pride and arrogance became
tamed and dimmed when she looked at the young Australian.

It was almost as though he had alone satisfied some deep
psychological need within her, as though Scott and only Scott could
complete her and make her whole, as though she herself felt that
without him her life had no pivot on which it could turn, as though
without him she was only a shadow of reality…

To recognise in someone else that depth of insecurity,
that level of dependence, made his frown deepen. For the first time he
wondered about her background, about her life, about what had shaped
and moulded her to give rise to those vulnerabilities, and why in
someone like Scott she should apparently have found the antidote to
them.

He needed, he discovered, to know more about
her… Much, much more.

He waited until he could get Scott on his own. The younger
man had been commenting that he was not entirely happy with his room,
and although in the past Daniel had been wholly against inviting
another student to share with him, not even allowing his lovers to move
into the small house, he invited Scott round one evening, with the
suggestion that since he had a bedroom to spare Scott might like to
consider moving in with him.

It was the evening they attended their debating society.
Scott had thanked him eagerly, and then added a little uncomfortably,
'I mustn't stay too long, though. I promised I'd see Sage
later…'

'Possessive, is she?' Daniel asked him, already knowing
the answer. 'Careful, Scott, possessive women can be the very devil.
Even ones as attractive as Sage. If you'll take my advice you'll tread
warily there—she's a very turbulent lady.'

'She… she hasn't had an entirely happy home
life,' Scott countered quickly. 'It makes her prickly and defensive,
but underneath…underneath she's the sweetest girl really.'

Sweet… Daniel wondered how on earth Scott could
deceive himself. Sage was pure gall and brimstone—the only
sweetness about her was the aftertaste you got from drinking poison.

When he deliberately kept Scott longer than the younger
man had intended he told himself that he was in reality doing them both
a favour; that Sage would have to learn sooner or later that everything
in life couldn't run her way. Despite Scott's claims that she had had
an unhappy childhood Daniel still perceived her as an indulged,
cosseted child who had never known either emotional or material
hardship or paucity.

When Scott moved in with him, he waited half impatiently,
half cynically—the .latter emotion directed at himself for
his almost obsessive interest in her—to see how Sage would
react.

They had met several times now, meetings carefully
stage-managed by him although neither she nor Scott was aware of it,
and Daniel knew that she resented his influence over Scott.

She wanted Scott to be all in all to her and she to him,
Daniel recognised, but Scott did not have her passionate nature, her
fierce possessive desire, and he doubted that the romance would last.
When it eventually did end… He frowned to
himself—Scott was his friend, but Sage, he was beginning to
recognise, was a woman he desired with an intensity he could rarely
remember ever feeling before.

One weekend at the beginning of the third term she took
Scott home with her to introduce him to Cottingdean. When they came
back Scott talked enthusiastically of her home and her mother. 'A
truly wonderful woman, although she and Sage don't seem able to get
on… A pity—she's so very special in some
way…'

Daniel watched him. Surely Scott wasn't falling out of
love with Sage to fall in love with her mother? He could well believe
that any woman who had produced Sage must be both beautiful and strong,
and Scott, who had never had a mother, could be fatally attracted to
that kind of woman.

'Does she have red hair?' he asked Scott flippantly. The
latter shook his head.

'No, she's blonde. We were lucky to find her at home.
She'd just come back from Hong Kong. She's been out there selling the
wool they make. It's unbelievable really what she's achieved, and all
through her own endeavours. By all accounts Sage's father has been an
invalid all through their marriage.'

'Not that much of an invalid if he managed to father
Sage,' Daniel pointed out drily.

Scott shook his head.

'No, no, he didn't… Sage did have a brother,
ten years older than her, but he died when she was in her last year at
school. He was killed in an accident, but Sage told me herself that she
was conceived through artificial insemination. Sage doesn't say much
about it—understandably she's a little sensitive on the
subject. She says she feels that her father has never really accepted
her, never really considered her his child…'

Daniel frowned, wondering irritably if Scott was aware of
how much Sage would resent him passing on her confidences, how very
hurt she would be if she knew he had shared her secret with someone
else, and then he reminded himself that it was not his role to protect
the woman—that she was perfectly capable of doing that for
herself.

It had piqued him a little that Sage never called at the
house, that she always arranged to meet Scott outside it. What he did
know, though, was that Scott never spent the night with her. He tried
to visualise himself, if he was her lover, leaving her alone in her
bed, to return to sleep alone in his own, and failed.

If he was her lover…but he wasn't. She loved
Scott… or thought she did.

Four days after Scott and Sage returned from their visit
to her family home, Scott received a telegram from Australia,
announcing that an emergency on the sheep station meant that he would
have to return home almost immediately.