The Hidden Years (45 page)

Daniel had always known that for Scott it was not
necessary that he obtain his degree, that his time in England was more
a mind-broadening exercise than anything else, and as he waited while
Scott put a call through to his home to find out exactly what had
happened he wondered if Scott had thought yet about how Sage was likely
to react to his departure.

Infuriatingly for Scott, his telephone call yielded very
little extra information. His father's housekeeper could tell him very
little other than that the foreman had had a heart attack and that he
was at present in hospital undergoing tests. All she could tell him was
that his father expected him to make his return just as soon as he
could, since in the foreman's enforced absence Scott was needed to take
over the running of the vast sheep station.

It was a role Scott had been bred for from birth, and one
which held no fears for him—he was more than content to
follow in his father's footsteps, but now, as he promised he would be
on the first flight he could arrange and replaced the receiver, Daniel
asked him quietly, 'What about Sage?'

'Sage…'

For a moment it was almost as though Scott had forgotten
who she was, and then he frowned anxiously. 'I'll have to tell her, of
course. I must go round and see her… She'll
understand… I wish I could take her back with me,
but…'

Sage, living in the vast Australian outback…
Daniel wondered if either of them had ever given any real thought to
the future. Sage was too brittle, too finedrawn, too short of any inner
resources to sustain her to be able to endure the loneliness of that
kind of life. If she married Scott and went out to Australia with him
she would leave him within a year.

And as for Scott… Did Sage really think he
would be happy living here in this country, when all his life he had
known he must one day step into his father's shoes? Must and wanted to.
They said that love was blind… Blind and self-destructive in
Sage's case, and Daniel was nearly sure that although Scott did
undoubtedly love her, it was not with the single-minded, passionate,
blind intensity with which she loved him.

'I'll go and see her now,' Scott announced.

Daniel listened as Scott drove off in his MG. Scott had a
generous father, but perhaps a possessive one… certainly a
determined one. The kind of father who would have clear-cut, definite
ideas about the kind of girl he wanted his son to marry, and he doubted
if that girl bore any resemblance to Sage.

When midnight came and went and Scott hadn't returned,
Daniel looked up from the book he was studying and frowned. It had been
eight o'clock when Scott left-four hours was surely long enough for him
to have made his explanations and say his goodbyes, no doubt adding to
them promises that he would quickly return, that Sage would be
constantly in his thoughts and his heart during their enforced
separation.

At one o'clock, just as he was about to go to bed, the
phone rang. When he picked up the receiver, he could hear Sage on the
other end of the line, hysterically crying his name.

It took him several precious minutes to calm her down
enough to find out what had happened. When he did, he felt his heart
plummet with despair and guilt.

'Which hospital is it?' he demanded brusquely, and when
she told him he added, 'Stay there. I'll be there as fast as I can.'

As he climbed into his own car, he prayed that matters
weren't as serious as they seemed. From what Sage had said to him, they
had gone out for a drive—perhaps Scott had decided to explain
to her that he was leaving some-where where they could be on their own.
He had no idea.

What she had told him was that they had quarrelled, that
she had been angry…angry enough to distract Scott to the
extent that he had failed to see the oncoming car which had run into
them; a car apparently driven by a drunken driver—a now dead
drunken driver.

Sage herself had hardly been hurt—scratched,
bruised, and frightened out of her wits, Daniel had deduced. But
Scott… Scott was in a coma and the hospital staff were
asking her for the name of his next of kin.

It took Daniel less than half an hour to sort everything
out. He explained to the nursing staff about Scott's father being in
Australia and gave them Scott's father's telephone number and address,
having discovered that Scott had luckily doodled it down on the pad
beside the phone while waiting for his Australian call.

When the doctor told Sage that there was no need for her
to stay and that she could go home, she practically had hysterics,
crying and pleading to be allowed to stay, but the doctor remained
adamant.

It was Daniel who was left with the task of half carrying
and half dragging her away, of manhandling her into his BMW and then
swiftly locking the doors as she tried desperately to claw at the
handle and get out.

His decision to take her home to his own house instead of
dropping her off at the hall of residence was based more on a
reluctance to cope with any more hysterics and explanations than any
carnal thoughts about proximity and propinquity.

Getting her to take the tranquilliser the doctor had
handed him meant virtually forcing it down her throat, which he did as
quickly and efficiently as he had once had to feed worming tablets to
his puppy, holding her jaw tightly closed, and massaging her throat
until he felt her swallow—and all the time she was watching
him with wild green eyes blazing her bitterness and hatred.

He carried her upstairs to Scott's bedroom and dropped her
body on the bed, warning her that all the doors downstairs were locked
and that he had the keys— but in the morning when he searched
for her he discovered that she had gone… out of one of the
downstairs windows.

After that he didn't see her again for some days even
though he called regularly at the hospital to see Scott, who was still
distressingly deep in his coma.

His father had flown in almost immediately on hearing
about his son's accident, and when Daniel asked about Sage Scott's
father told him quietly, 'I've told the doctors that I can't see her.'

'Can't see her.' Daniel wondered why 'can't' and not
'won't' but he knew better than to question the Australian.

Scott's father was a tall, still dark-haired man with
green eyes and tanned skin moulded round facial bones which were
sharply pared to the kind of austerity that hinted that there had been
a good deal of suffering in his life. He was a remote man, Daniel
recognised. A man who had suffered greatly at some time in his life.
Oddly he looked as though he could possibly be a very compassionate man
but he obviously had no compassion for Sage. Did he blame her for the
accident? Daniel wondered.

'If you see her, please tell her also that she isn't to
come and see Scott. The doctors feel it would do little good.'

If he saw her… that was hardly likely, Daniel
reflected, and yet oddly that very night when he opened his front door
to an unexpected caller he discovered that it was Sage.

She looked hauntingly pale and too thin, so fragile that
she almost took his breath away. Her eyes had lost their fire and
become flat discs of banked-down pain.

Even the wild fieriness of her hair seemed tamed somehow
and subdued.

'Sage…' He stepped back to allow her to come in.

'They won't let me see Scott,' she told him, almost
wringing her hands, her voice thick with suppressed tears and anguish.
'I must see him, Daniel… I must see him… I love
him. He loves me…' Her voice had started to rise. Daniel
caught hold of her arm and guided her into his small sitting-room,
pushing her gently into a chair.

'Scott is a very sick man, Sage,' he told her quietly.
'Surely the most important thing of all is for him to get properly
well? His father believes that this can be best accomplished in his own
home. He's flying back to Australia and with the doctor's agreement
Scott is going with him.'

'No!'

The denial was ripped from her throat, the frantic wild
sound of an animal caught in a trap. It hurt his ears and savaged his
senses, but he couldn't allow himself the luxury of those emotions.

'Yes, Sage,' he repeated firmly. 'And I'm afraid there's
nothing you can do about it.'

'It's your fault…all your fault,' she suddenly
cried out, beating at his chest with her fists. 'You wanted this to
happen… you wanted to break us up.'

For a moment Daniel thought she was actually going to say
that she knew that he wanted her, and he braced himself to reject her
accusations even while he knew it was true. He had wanted her. Still
wanted her… but never at the price of Scott's accident and
this terrible grief that was now possessing her. But instead she said
furiously, 'You've never liked me… I knew that right from
the start—you've never thought I was right for Scott.'

'No, I haven't,' Daniel agreed truthfully. 'But that
doesn't mean that I've ever tried to break you up. Scott is a man,
Sage, not a boy. He makes his own decisions.'

'Not now, he doesn't… It's his father who's
insisting that he must go back to Australia… If only I could
see Scott. Get him to come out of his coma and respond to me.'

'You can't,' Daniel told her flatly. 'His condition is
still far from stable. Life goes on, you know,' he counselled her.
'You'll see—'

'No,' she denied fiercely. 'Without Scott I have no
life… without him I have nothing… I am nothing.'

Her words shocked him, but he hid both his shock and his
compassion behind his next cynical question.

'You see him as your soul mate, is that it?'

'Yes… no…' Her voice sounded harsh,
drugged, her eyes flat and unseeing. 'Not my soul mate,' she told him
jerkily. 'He
is
my soul itself, my other
half… he is a part of me and without him I cannot
exist… Don't you understand?'

Daniel stared at her, curiously moved by her passionate
outburst, feeling against his will a helpless compassion for her in her
agony and her ignorance.

Strange, when he had always known she would be capable of
intense physical passion, that he had not realised she would be capable
of equally explosive emotional passion as well, but then men never
wanted to meet danger head on… to heed such inner warnings.

'It's over, Sage,' he told her softly. 'And the sooner you
accept that, the easier your life will be.'

'No!' she screamed at him. 'No, it isn't over. It can
never be over, not while either of us lives… He loves
me… I love him…'

'No, Sage,' he corrected her. 'You love yourself. You want
him as a greedy child wants a new toy, and in your wanting you've
almost destroyed him… It was your temper that provoked the
accident, your refusal to accept that he had to return to Australia.'

She stared at him.

'I'm right, aren't I? That was how it happened. You
refused to accept that he had to go and in his attempts to placate you
and make you understand he lost his concentration… and
almost lost his life. Let him go, Sage, before you destroy him
completely.'

She had flown at him then, attacking him with her fists
and then her nails, tears pouring from her eyes as she screamed her
anguish and defiance, but he had held her off until finally, frightened
that she might actually hurt herself, he had yanked her into his arms
and bound her so tightly to him that he could actually feel the frantic
race of her heart as though it were beating within his own chest.

She was so thin, so fragile… and yet her
breasts still so surprisingly voluptuous that his body was suddenly
intensely aware of her and aroused by her.

Battling against his own conflicting
feelings—those of man the primitive ruled by his most basic
hungers, and those of man the thinker, the product of millenia of
civilisation who had learned to tame and control those hungers and to
put other things before them—he held her off from his body,
but already it was too late, already he could see the mixed emotions of
fury and outrage mingling in her eyes with her recognition of his
reaction to her.

'Traitor.'

Did she actually spit the word at him, or was he simply
imagining it? he wondered ruefully as he held her firmly a safe
distance away from his unruly flesh and spoke to her levelly and
calmly. 'Sage—'

'I'm not letting him go… I love him.'

'Yes,' Daniel heard himself agreeing, 'but you're not sure
that he loves you with the same intensity, are you, Sage?'

He didn't know what made him say it. Scott had never said
anything to him to imply that his feelings for her were not just as
strong as hers for him. True, Scott's was a different nature, calmer,
less passionate, less intense, but Daniel had never doubted the
strength of the younger man's feelings, and yet when Sage went limp in
his arms, her face suddenly ashen, her mouth trembling with a
vulnerability he had cut too deep for her to hide, he realised bleakly
that his chance remark had touched a sore spot, an Achilles' heel which
he had never known existed.

'He does love me. He does…'

She said it like a little girl, the rage, the passion
suddenly all gone from her, leaving in its place such an open expanse
of self-doubt and fear that Daniel felt his heart turn over inside his
chest in compassion and an odd, inexplicable anger, directed not just
at her for that vulnerability, but at all those people in her life who
had undermined that magnificent pride and arrogance and taught her
instead to feel pain and anguish.

'She has always felt that to her parents, especially her
father, she's a poor second best,' Scott had once told him, and he had
been amused and a little scornful, refusing to accept that she had ever
believed any such thing, comparing the luxury of her childhood with the
paucity of his own, her imagined lack of paternal love with his very
real one—but now, abruptly, he wasn't so sure.