The Hidden Years (49 page)

Anger boiled up inside him. Anger against himself, anger
against Scott and most of all anger against her. What the hell was she
playing at? Why…?

'Don't you make love to virgins? Is that it?'

Her taunt scalded him, and he reacted immediately to it,
saying acidly, 'No, I bloody well do not. For one thing, if I'm going
to make love to a woman it's a
woman
I want, not
a frightened little girl. A woman who can give me as much pleasure as I
can give her, not a little girl who tightens up her muscles and says
"don't". For another…' He paused, knowing that he was being
unnecessarily brutal, wanting to call back the words, but driven by
something he couldn't control, something he didn't want to call sexual
frustration because to do so lowered him in his own estimation as a
civilised human being.

'For another, I don't suppose you're on the Pill and I
certainly wasn't about to take any precautions. Have you no sense?' He
got hold of her, dragging her to her knees, practically shaking her as
reaction set in and his anger overwhelmed him.

'Or was that it?' he demanded unforgivably. 'Did you
hope that I might make you pregnant? What is it you want from me, Sage?
A child, a substitute for Scott? Because you damn sure don't want me as
a man. My God, you wouldn't even know what to do with a real man. All
that noise about loving Scott…all that fuss… Why
didn't he make love to you, you—?'

'Well, it wasn't because I was a virgin…'

The words were laced with acid, belying the tremble in her
voice and the tears he was nearly sure he could see shining in her eyes.

Now, when it was too late, he understood what he had done
and ached to call back his cruel words.

As she scrambled to her feet, he reached for her, but she
evaded him, snatching up his robe and pulling it protectively around
her.

'Scott did love me. He respected me. He wanted…
he wanted us to wait… until our families… He
did
love me…' She practically screamed the words at him, and Daniel, noting the past tense, hearing her terror and the
panic in her voice and recognising the doubts now tormenting her, felt
his heart turn over with pain and compassion.

Dear God, if only he had been able to see beyond his own
need—if only he had not allowed his physical desire for her
to rule him. If only he had listened, waited, questioned.

'Why did you come to me?' he asked her soberly, knowing
she would know what he meant.

'Why?' The face she turned to him was contorted into a
mask-like grimace of hatred and bitterness. 'Why? Do you really need to
ask? I've lost Scott. He's the only one I'll ever love, and you're
right about one thing—the accident was my fault. I could have
killed him… Afterwards I prayed for him to be safe. I
promised I'd do anything, pay a price if only he might live…
I never guessed what that price might be, that that price would be
Scott himself. Don't you understand?' she cried out desperately. 'I
wanted to punish myself, I wanted to suffer the way I deserve to
suffer. That's why I came to you, because I knew there could be no
greater self-betrayal, no worse physical degradation, no more emotional
humiliation and pain than giving you what I wanted to give Scott.
That's why I came to you…' She started to laugh, the sound
too high-pitched, grating painfully on his ears as he tried to
assimilate what she was saying to him… as, through his
outrage, through the blow to his pride and his maleness, he heard the
hatred and the scorn she was pouring out over him. In that moment he
knew that if he touched her he would probably destroy her, and because
of that he stepped back from her, turning his back on her so that he
wouldn't have to look into the wildness of her face and see in that
wildness all the false promise of the passion he had thought they would
share.

'Daniel!'

He heard her call his name and felt his lungs contract;
there was so much uncertainty in her voice, so much pain, so much need,
like a child confused by the violence of her own emotions crying out
for comfort and reassurance, but he hardened his heart against her,
keeping his back to her as he said coldly, 'Whatever it is, I don't
want to hear it. I pity you, Sage. I suppose you think I should be
grateful for being made a gift—no, a sacrifice of your body.
But I don't wish to accept it. You can stay for the rest of the night,
but first thing tomorrow I want you to leave.'

'Daniel, please—'

'No, Sage… whatever it is you want I can't give
it to you, sexually, emotionally or any other way. You're trouble with
a capital T, and if you want my opinion Scott has had a lucky escape.
You'll destroy every man who ever comes anywhere near you. You're that
type.'

'You wanted me…'

'No. I wanted the use of your body,' he told her brutally
and untruthfully. 'I didn't want
you
, Sage. Now
go back to bed.'

Unbelievably she did, but in the morning predictably she
had gone. Not just from his house, but from the campus as well. It took
him several days to discover that she had just simply locked herself
away in her room, without telling anyone why, although most of those
who knew her seemed to assume that it was because of Scott.

After a week of indecision he had telephoned her home. Her
mother, he had learned, was on a prolonged business tour and not due
back until the end of the month, but they would pass his message on as
soon as Mrs Danvers returned.

He tried to alleviate his guilt by submerging himself in
his work, but it lingered, and festered, and it still festered today,
Daniel acknowledged, staring frowning at his empty glass. It still
festered today.

Daniel
had time and plenty to spare in order to prepare for his meeting with
Sage and to drive down to Cottingdean, and yet he discovered that he
was deliberately delaying himself, deliberately, almost, trying to make
himself late… So late that Sage might grow tired of waiting
for him and cancel their meeting?

The trouble was that if he'd known, if he'd had the
remotest idea that she was going to be involved in this thing in any
way at all, he'd have found someone else to stand in for the company;
Dale Hughes for instance, the head of their PR department, or Matthew
Petrie, his deputy. There had been no real reason for him to get
personally involved… not really, and yet when he had seen
the first outline plans for the proposed routes, when he had read the
name Cottingdean, he had told himself that he was simply following
sound business practice, that his reasons for driving down to
Cottingdean, long before the proposed route had become public, had
simply been business curiosity, nothing more.

He had been surprised to discover it so much a village
still and yet at the same time so obviously thriving, a small rural
backwater, and yet not so much of a backwater really since the wool
produced by its mill found markets virtually all over the world, or at
least in those parts of it where people were rich enough and discerning
enough to appreciate the quality of cloth spun from the wool from the
best of English flocks, in a combination of methods which comprised the
best of both the old and the new.

For the woman who had masterminded and breathed life into
this profitable industry he heard nothing but praise; for her
daughter… He had been surprised how few local people knew
anything about Sage, far less in most cases than he knew himself, but
then in many ways London was a series of small villages whose permanent
occupants soon became familiar to one another, especially when they
lived as high profile a life as Sage.

It was true that the tales of her wildness, her lovers,
her unpredictability had grown less over the years, just as her
reputation as a gifted muralist had grown.

He had seen one of her murals last summer in the home of a
friend of a friend who had a villa on a still remote part of Ibiza. He
had been startled by it, stunned by its creativity, its depth and
intensity—without knowing her, just from looking at her work,
he would have known that here was a person who had intuition,
compassion, intensity and vulnerability; and he hadn't been able to
stop himself from thinking how much he would have liked to commission
her to do some work for himself and how impossible it was that he
should.

The most recent news in the Press was of how Sage was
being pursued by some Australian Greek who had followed her as far as
London. Whoever he was, he . didn't seem to be part of her life now.

He often wondered how different the course of both their
lives might have been if he had given in to his need that
night… if he had gone ahead and made love to her, been her
first lover…perhaps even impregnated her with his child.

His mouth twisted in self-mockery as he picked up his
papers and walked out of his flat.

Then the last thing he had wanted to do was to have a
child by any woman, so why should he now suddenly be able to picture so
comprehensively and so disturbingly the child they might have had?

As he climbed into his car and started the engine he knew
he would have to drive fast if he wasn't going to be late. If he'd
known before he'd taken on this thing that he was going to have to
confront Sage over it on a one-to-one basis, he'd have moved heaven and
earth to ensure that he didn't have to do so. The trouble
was… the trouble was that he still wanted her…

He swore suddenly, putting his foot sharply on the brake
pedal, half inclined to turn back and pick up the phone and tell her
the meeting was off, and yet knowing that he wasn't going to do so;
that something stronger than logic and common sense was driving him.

He cursed under his breath. He was thirty-seven years old,
and the thought of her still made him feel like a raw boy of seventeen.
He, who was so fastidious, so aware not merely of the health dangers of
sharing his life with any woman who had had a variety of sexual
partners, but also of the potential emotional paucity of such a
relationship, the lack of any real intimacy; he who found nothing to
appeal to him in any relationship which was based merely on mutual
sexual excitement and need. It was perhaps a weakness in him that when
he shared his body with a woman, he wanted to share his
mind… his thoughts… the small intimacies of his
life as well as the large ones—and yet there had never been a
woman he had ever come close to wanting to have permanently in his
life. He had never even invited one of his lovers to move in with him.

One of his lovers… He grimaced wryly to
himself. During recent years there had been no one; oh, he had dated a
variety of women, enjoyed their company, known that if he had wished to
do so he could have taken these relationships further, but sex for
sex's sake had never really appealed to him.

At present there was no one in his life; Helen Ordman had
made it discreetly plain that she would like to take their business
relationship a stage further, but while he admired her business acumen
he felt no real desire for her. Was it true that the price of success
in today's high-powered and stressful world was an automatic loss of
libido? He had only to think of Sage to know that it wasn't, and
annoyingly he was finding that he was spending more and more time doing
just that. He had been surprised to discover just how much she was
prepared to involve herself in their business… Sage was
essentially a loner—an individualist, someone who guarded her
privacy almost ferociously. Her mother was the philanthropist of the
family, and nothing he knew about Sage had ever given him to believe
that she would step so willingly or so competently into her mother's
shoes. The fact that she had done so disturbed him and yet why
shouldn't she have changed? People did. Why shouldn't she have matured?
He had himself. Why should his awareness that Sage had done so rub at
him like a piece of grit against his skin? No more than irritating at
first, but gradually becoming more and more acutely painful.

He had never really shed his guilt over the way he had
treated her that night—never really forgiven himself for not
handling the situation with more finesse, never really stopped wishing
that things might have been different, never really stopped himself
from feeling that he, with his greater maturity, should have been able
to find a way through the thicket of emotional thorns she had thrown up
around herself, and been able to lead her out of it, to set her free
from the trauma of loving Scott and losing him, to establish with her
enough rapport, enough trust for her to treat him at least as a friend,
for her to come to him in her need. That night, when she had so clearly
betrayed her hatred and loathing of him, he had been too completely
thrown to react rationally, to question why she should feel such
violent and intense emotions towards him, to wonder if perhaps he had
been right all along and she had felt desire for him—a
reluctant desire, an unwanted desire, a desire that terrified and
infuriated her maybe, but a desire none the less.

It was too late now to wish he had handled things
differently, and he had enough of his parents' Celtic inheritance to
believe beneath the logic of education that there were perhaps some
things which were decreed by fate and which no amount of human
endeavour could change.

The moment he reached the motorway he put his foot down;
God—and the traffic police—willing, he wasn't going
to be late after all, and suddenly it was important to him that he
shouldn't be.

Half-past eight; Sage was .starting to panic. Not
outwardly. Outwardly she had long ago learned to control any visible
sign of her inner emotions, but inside her stomach was a turmoil of
terrified, fluttering butterflies, her muscles already tensing,
closing, the strain of the ordeal ahead beginning to break through her
outer control.