CHARLOTTE overslept. Waking up was like clawing her way through sticky treacle, interspersed every now and again by sharp fragments of memory that lacerated and bruised her, so that by the time she eventually got her eyes open her skin was hot with the shocked acid self-disgust gnawing at her stomach.
How could she have done what she did? How could she have got drunk and then begged Oliver to make love to her? And not just once but…
Moaning, she rolled over on to her stomach, trying to blot out the visions tormenting her, but the unfamiliar ache in her lower body only reinforced what she was trying to ignore.
And then she saw her bedside clock, and realised that the noises she could hear were not just little men with hammers in her head, but were actually coming from downstairs.
She was out of bed before she realised she was naked, and worse, that she had no recollection of how she had got there. As she stood in the middle of her bedroom floor, trying to ignore the nauseous feeling in her stomach and the awful taste in her mouth, she heard someone knock on her bedroom door. She only just had time to dive back into bed and to pull the covers up to her chin before Oliver walked in.
Her mouth dropped open as she saw him. He looked so calm, so unaffected by what had happened.
‘The plumber has deputed me to tell you that the water’s off and likely to remain off for most of the day,’ he told her cheerfully, before putting a mug of coffee beside the bed. ‘I brought this as a peace offering.’
No water. But she had to get showered and dressed and off to work. She had several appointments, including one with Dan Pearce.
Watching the expressions haunting her face, Oliver silently cursed. He should have woken her earlier, talked to her, but he had wanted to create the right setting, the right mood in which she would listen to him.
‘Charlotte, about last night.’
Charlotte’s head came up. She glared at him, filled with self-contempt and loathing. Oh, God, what had she done? Now he was going to tell her that last night had been a mistake, that it was something they should both forget. Her stomach churned. She was going to be sick, she recognised helplessly.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she told him through tight lips. ‘And, unless you get a kick out of watching people be sick, I’d rather you went away.’
‘Sick? You feel sick? Wait.’
‘I can’t wait,’ Charlotte told him grimly, frantically wrenching the sheet off the bed, and somehow managing to wrap it around herself as she almost fell out of bed and ran for the bathroom.
Of course there was no water, other than that already in the taps, and, grimacing to herself as she tried to clean her teeth with half a glass of water, she wondered what on earth this already doomed day could possibly have in store.
Back in her bedroom, the smell of the coffee nauseated her, but she forced herself to drink it, while she dressed in clean clothes, wondering desperately why on earth the expensive French scent Sheila had given her for Christmas did nothing to blot out the subtle smell of Oliver’s body on her own.
She had half expected him to be waiting for her downstairs, wanting to reinforce the fact that last night had been some kind of mental aberration on both their parts and, as such, best forgotten.
Forgotten… She groaned to herself as she walked into the kitchen. How could she ever forget…when she had made such a fool of herself…? How could she have ever been stupid enough to think that…?
That what? That his desire had matched her own, that he had wanted her in all the ways she had wanted him, that he loved her in the way she loved him.
Fool indeed. And she had no one to blame for that folly but herself. She had been the one to initiate their intimacy, to let him see that she wanted him, to invite him virtually to make love to her…
As she walked into the kitchen, the plumber, whom she had not seen before, looked up and grunted. ‘Your husband said to tell you he’d be back in half an hour, missus.’
Her husband… Hysterical laughter bubbled up inside her. Laughter or tears—neither of them would really relieve the pain inside her.
Ignoring the plumber and the other men, Charlotte opened the door and headed for her car. Heaven alone knew what Sheila must be thinking. She had already missed her first appointment this morning.
It was only after she had narrowly avoided a collision with another motorist that she realised how recklessly she was driving. As recklessly as she had behaved last night. What was it…this unfamiliar recklessness tormenting her? Was it caused by the knowledge that her love for Oliver would never be reciprocated, that he could never feel for her what she felt for him?
She wondered if, when she returned this evening, she would find that he had moved out, and laughed bitterly at her own thoughts. She was only surprised that he had still been there this morning.
When she walked into her office half an hour later, her scalp was tight with tension; hyper-sensitively she wondered if Sheila would be as acutely aware of the changes within her as she was herself, but, apart from giving her a brief smile, Sheila seemed unaware of anything different about her.
‘Oliver rang to warn us you’d be late in,’ she said cheerfully, ‘so I sent Sophy over to show the Bramwells round number fourteen. She should be back soon.’
Charlotte managed to conceal her shock. ‘What exactly did Oliver say?’ she asked cautiously, when she felt she could.
‘Oh, just that the two of you had celebrated something together last night and indulged rather too heavily in vintage champagne.’ Sheila grinned at her. ‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise. There’s nothing worse than a hangover. What were you celebrating, by the way?’ Sheila asked her speculatively. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’
All too conscious of the hot tide of colour burning her skin, Charlotte dipped her head and said unevenly, ‘Nothing much. Oliver’s sold out his agency in London and decided to base himself permanently here.’
‘Mmm. Cause for celebration indeed,’ Sheila murmured thoughtfully, her glance resting for a moment on Charlotte’s downbent head, a small smile curving her mouth. ‘You’ve resigned yourself to it, then?’ she asked innocently.
Immediately Charlotte’s head shot up. ‘To what?’
‘To Oliver’s being here,’ Sheila responded.
‘I don’t seem to have much option, do I?’ Charlotte told her grittily. For a moment, she had actually thought that Sheila must know—but how could she? She was allowing her own feelings of remorse and self-contempt to colour everything she heard.
She was thankful to escape from the office and from Sheila’s searching gaze to keep her appointment with Dan Pearce, even though she was not really looking forward to dealing with him. She didn’t like the man at all. There was something about him…
Telling herself not to be so stupid, Charlotte got in her car and drove out in the direction of the farm. She had arranged to meet Dan Pearce at the cottages he was hoping to sell, and when she drew up outside them to find his battered Land Rover already there she suppressed a pang of disquiet.
There was no sign of the farmer outside the property, and so she opened the door to the first semi and walked in, calling his name. She could hear sounds of someone moving about upstairs and she put her hand on the worn handrail and went to investigate. She found the farmer in the first of the poky, stuffy bedrooms and realised as she approached the window that he must have watched her drive up. She frowned, recognising that he had made no attempt to come down and meet her, her unfamiliar feeling of disquiet growing as he turned round and leered at her.
‘Came, then, did you?’ he said to her. ‘That’s what you’re like, though, isn’t it, you women? Once you get a taste for it.’
Alarm bells were ringing in Charlotte’s brain. Instinctively she stepped back towards the door, but he moved faster, trapping her in the room as he closed the door and stood in front of it.
Fear knifed through her—the kind of fear she had never known could exist, the kind of fear she had deliberately closed her eyes to, just as she always preferred not to read about accounts of her sex being frightened and abused in the way that she now sensed this man wanted to frighten and abuse her.
Rape. Such a short but ugly word. A word she had never really focused on.
She tried to tell herself she was being foolish, over-imaginative, that she had misunderstood what he had said, and what he had left unsaid, but nothing could banish the panic now clawing inside her.
She tried to think, to stay calm, to lift herself past the fear blocking her ability to think and reason.
‘You wanted to discuss selling the cottages as a single unit, Mr Pearce,’ she said as firmly as she could. ‘I think that’s a sensible decision. Of course, planning permission would have—’
She heard him laugh and any hopes she might have had that she was mistaken, that he was not deliberately trying to intimidate her, that he had not brought her here for a purpose that had nothing to do with his property died.
As she stared into his unpleasant, overconfident, leering face, a feeling of intense dread washed over her. She looked desperately at the door, wondering if she could risk running past him, if she could take him off guard sufficiently for her to pull open the door, and then she saw the way he was grinning at her and she knew he was waiting for her to do just that very thing, so that he could have the pleasure of punishing her for it, and she shuddered in open revulsion.
Dear God, how had this happened? Why had she not realised? Sheila had warned her…or tried to…
Fear twisted and coiled inside her like a live thing, writhing, burning, making her want to be sick, to scream, to beat her fists against the walls entrapping her, to plead and beg for her freedom.
Fighting desperately not to give in to her panic, she said huskily, ‘Mr Pearce, it seems that we are both under a misapprehension. I thought you asked me here to discuss the sale of these houses.’
He was laughing openly at her now. ‘No, you didn’t,’ he told her. ‘You know what I want from you. I told you last time you was here I wasn’t going to sell ’em together. Like I said, living with that Londoner’s given you a taste for it. All the same, your sort—all airs and graces outside, but inside you’re no better than whores, leading a man on. Just the same as that whore I married. She was like you.’
He was mad, Charlotte thought frantically. He must be if he thought that she had actually encouraged him to believe… Where before it had been the sexual assault of her body she had feared, now she felt a sharp thrill of horror. He could rape and then murder her. No one would know. No one could help her.
As she watched him watching her, anticipating her pain, enjoying her panic, she had a fierce sensation of triumph that she had had last night—that whatever happened she had at least those memories of her time with Oliver to use as a shield against whatever this man might try to do to her.
She was afraid, yes—desperately so—but just thinking about Oliver, just remembering the pleasure he had given her, somehow steadied her and subdued her panic so that her brain started to work again, urging her to keep on talking to him, to try to distract him.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re trying to imply,’ she said as frigidly as she could, adding, ‘I don’t have a lot of time, Mr Pearce. I have another appointment in half an hour. In fact, my assistant will soon be wondering where I am, if I don’t return to the office.’
It wasn’t entirely untrue. She did have another appointment, but not for an hour. And in an hour…
‘You’re lying,’ he told her savagely. ‘But it won’t work. You came here because you’re just like all the rest.’
Charlotte tried desperately to blot out the words that spewed from his sick mind, to ignore and deny the horror of what he was threatening to do to her. He must have been like this since his wife had left him, she recognised, wondering with another thrill of horror how many other women he might have subjected to the same ordeal he was now inflicting on her.
The air in the small room was stale, putrid almost, or was that her imagination? His hands were filthy, his nails broken and black; she cringed visualising them on her skin. Nausea built up inside her. She couldn’t endure much more. Her self-control was cracking already.
‘If you’re not prepared to discuss the sale of these properties, then I’m afraid I must leave,’ she told him, trying to appear confident, as she stepped towards the door.
For a moment she thought she had succeeded, and that he would simply let her go. He actually let her reach the door, stepping aside for her, and she was trembling as she touched the handle, relief flooding her. He had simply been testing her, frightening her. Her legs felt weak, her mouth dry.
And then, just as she turned the handle, he grabbed hold of her, turning her round and slamming her back against the door. The pain winded her, depriving her of the ability to even scream in protest.
She could feel his hot breath on her face, could feel the painful bite of his fingers through her clothes. Oh, God, why hadn’t she stayed where she was?
‘Like it a bit rough, do you?’ she heard him saying thickly. ‘Like being messed around a bit, like? My wife was like that. Oh, she used to scream and cry and pretend she hated it, but I knew different.’
Charlotte shuddered as she listened to him, all too easily picturing the other woman’s agony. How on earth had she endured her marriage? No wonder she had left him.
‘Yes, she liked it so much she used to claw at my back and beg me.’
Charlotte couldn’t help it. She covered her ears with her hands and screamed helplessly. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’
It was a mistake. Her stomach lurched as she realised that her panic was only exciting him, inciting him to gaze boldly at her body, his eyes hot, his fingers kneading her flesh where he held her as he focused on her breasts…
How long had she been here? How long would her ordeal last? She dared not even risk looking at her watch. Suddenly, terrifyingly, she wanted it to be over, and illuminatingly she could quite easily see why his wife had allowed him the possession of her body. It was simply easier not to fight, to allow him what he wanted and to get it over with.
Shudder after shudder racked through her as he watched her gloatingly, telling her what he intended to do with her. With every word he was becoming more excited, more unrestrained.
He was confusing her with his wife, Charlotte recognised sickly, as he called her ‘Marlene’ not once but twice.
In another few minutes she would be unconscious. She could feel her strength ebbing, her body aching for the release from what was happening. Her head was spinning.
And then unbelievably she heard Oliver calling her name, and thought dazedly that she had actually slipped over the edge and was unconscious until Dan Pearce suddenly clamped his filthy hand over her mouth and said, ‘Don’t try and say a word. He’ll not come up here. No once he realises you want to be with me.’
Stupidly Charlotte stared at him, worn out with terror and pain, and then abruptly she realised that Oliver actually was there, that he actually had come looking for her, that he actually was calling her name, and with a strength she hadn’t known she had she struggled against her captor, sinking her teeth sharply into his palm, long enough to draw air into her lungs and to scream Oliver’s name before Dan Pearce grabbed hold of her hair and slammed her head back against the door, yelling out, ‘She wants me, not you. She’s nothing but a whore, who’ll open her legs for anyone. They’re all the same.’
Charlotte heard the words, but only distantly. Her head hurt; she felt sick and dizzy. There was something warm and sticky running down her face and someone seemed to be kicking her back. The kicking ceased abruptly when the door flew open and she was thrown to the floor. She heard herself scream as she fell, and then everything went black, although she was dimly conscious of someone touching her, soothing her, speaking to her. Someone whom it was important she reached out to…only it was all too much of an effort.
* * *
She had been having a very bad dream, Charlotte recognised, opening her eyes. Her bedroom was in darkness, but its outline was familiar. So why had she confused it with somewhere else…a hospital? And why had she woken up so often crying for Oliver, wanting desperately to be held by him, to be safe with him?
Her head was aching. She put up her hand to touch it, wincing at the pain in her shoulder and then frowning as her fingers touched the plaster she found.
Confusing memories stirred sluggishly. Images that haunted her bad dreams…fragments of sensation…of fear… ‘No!’
‘Charlotte, it’s all right. You’re quite safe.’
She lay still, her heart pounding frantically in the darkness. What was Oliver doing in bed with her? Had she gone completely crazy? Was she perhaps imagining…? But no. Impossible to imagine the tenderness of those hands touching her, turning her, drawing her into the warmth of his body, patting her back as though soothing a terrified child.
‘Oliver…what are you doing here?’ Her voice sounded rusty and strained.
‘You wanted me with you…remember?’
She wrinkled her forehead. She did have an odd hazy memory of crying out for him. That had been when she was in the hospital, hadn’t it? And suddenly her body went hot as she realised she must actually have been there, that others must actually have heard her…
‘It’s all right,’ Oliver was reassuring her, as though he had read her mind. ‘No one was shocked or surprised. I told them you were my fiancée and in the circumstances they could quite understand why you should want to be with me. That was the only reason they let me bring you home.’
‘Because you said you’d sleep with me?’ she questioned warily. ‘But—’
‘Oh, Sheila and I practically came to blows over who should take charge of you,’ he told her. ‘In the end it was the way you clung to me that persuaded the hospital staff that you should come with me. You’ll be pleased to know that there’ll be no lasting damage—at least not of the physical variety. A very unpleasant-looking collection of bruises, and a nasty bash on the head, which was the reason they kept you in in the first place.’
Abruptly she remembered. She trembled in his arms as she said stiltedly, ‘He didn’t touch me. Not…not in that way. He was going to. He thought I was his wife.’
‘Shush…we know all about it. He was a very dangerous man. A very sick man mentally.’
‘I should never have gone there. I knew inside that there was something about him.’ She twisted in his arms. ‘I wanted to sell those houses so that you wouldn’t get them. I never thought… It could have been Sophy!’ she burst out frantically. ‘I could have sent Sophy.’
She started to cry. Deep, wrenching sobs that tore at his heart and made him wish he had had just half a dozen minutes alone with her attacker before the police had arrived.
It had been Sheila who had alerted him to her potential danger. When he had discovered that she had gone to work without waiting to see him, he had driven in too and gone into the office, only to find Sheila already concerned. A chance call from someone who had already approached Dan Pearce with an offer to buy both semis from him at a fair market price and had been turned down flat had revealed to her that, whatever the farmer’s reason for luring Charlotte out to the deserted building, it could have had nothing to do with any change of heart about selling the two units as one.
She had poured out her concern to Oliver, and he had promptly offered to drive over to the buildings to check that Charlotte was all right.
Once he had gone, Sheila’s fears had increased and she had rung her husband, asking him to check as well, hence the police’s arrival within seconds of Oliver’s having broken down the door and discovered Charlotte unconscious on the floor, her blouse ripped, bruises already forming on her bare shoulders.
For a moment he had suffered a blind, fierce need to destroy the man standing over her, to rip him limb from limb, but, just as sanity was reasserting itself and he was forcing himself to recognise that his first task must be to get Charlotte away to safety, the police had arrived and taken charge.
He didn’t want to tell her yet about the gun that Dan Pearce had somehow or other got his hands on when the police had taken him back to the farmhouse, nor the fact that he had taken his own life with it. That could come later…
It had torn him apart to learn from the hospital that she was crying for him in her sleep. And, indeed, the moment he had walked up to her bed and taken hold of her hand she had become calmer.
Now she had been at home for almost forty-eight hours, although she had been so heavily sedated at first that she would have no memory of her return. Last night he had slept with her in his arms, soothing her nightmares, comforting and cherishing her, and he would continue to do so for the rest of his life if that was what she wanted.
‘You should have let me go with Sheila,’ she told him shakily. ‘Now the whole town will know we’re supposed to engaged, and when they learn that we aren’t—’
‘Need they?’
His question stunned her. She tensed, and missed the warmth of his hands on her back as he removed them to frame her face so that she couldn’t avoid his searching study of her features.
‘Yes…unless you intend to carry this farce as far as marriage,’ she said fiercely.
‘Willingly. But to me it isn’t a farce, only the realisation of a need that was born in me the first time we met.’
She stared at him in disbelief. ‘When Vanessa introduced us? You can’t mean that.’
‘I don’t. Our first meeting was in the car park, when you stole my parking spot. I saw you, watched you, knew that I should have been furious with you, and yet all I wanted to do was to get out of my car, take you in my arms and tell you that I’d fallen in love with you.’
Charlotte looked at him, searching his face for some sign that he was making it all up, but there was none.
‘I’ve done everything the wrong way round. I wanted to do this slowly, properly—to win your confidence and then your love.’
‘And that’s why you plied me with champagne and made love to me?’ she asked shakily. A tender hope was growing quickly inside her.
‘That wasn’t my intention. Oh, I wanted to make love to you all right. But I wasn’t going to—at least, only a little, but then you looked at me and asked me if I wanted to, and all I’d been able to think about all day was the sight of you in that damned flimsy cotton thing, and—Oh, God, Charlotte, how you could ever for one moment have imagined that you lacked sex appeal, I have no idea. You were the sexiest sight I have ever seen, all the more so because you yourself were so deliciously unaware of the effect you were having on me. Every time I saw you, I had to fight to keep my hands off you.’
‘But no man has ever—’
‘Because you wouldn’t let them see what you were really like. Because you froze them off and they, poor fools, couldn’t see the real woman you were concealing behind those barriers you used so effectively.’
‘Not all of them,’ Charlotte told him in a low voice, and he knew she wasn’t referring to him.
‘He was sick,’ he told her rawly. ‘You must never think that it was something you said or did. It was because of his wife.’
‘I know,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘Oh, God, I was so frightened.’ Suddenly it all came pouring out, a catharsis of what she had experienced, her need to share it with him so intense that nothing could dam up the words. ‘And do you know what I thought when I felt it was unavoidable that he would rape and probably murder me?’
Oliver shook his head, aching to hold her as tightly as he could, but terrified of hurting her…or frightening her.
‘I was glad that there’d been you,’ she told him simply. ‘So very glad and grateful, because you’d shown me such pleasure, such…’
‘Such love,’ he said for her. His throat felt raw with emotion, and when he wrapped her in his arms he knew she would feel his tears against her skin. ‘Oh, God, Charlotte. I’ve been cursing myself to hell and back for that, loathing myself for not having the self-control to wait, to talk to you, to tell you how I felt about you first. I did everything wrong. I wanted to be with you when you woke up, but those damned workmen were there. And then you were so sick; you looked so ill. I thought I’d drive into town and get you something from the chemist. It never occurred to me that you’d just go straight to work.’
‘I had to. I thought you were going to say the usual thing about its being something we should both forget, that we should behave like adults.’
‘Is that the usual thing?’
She could hear the amusement in his voice and said defensively, ‘Well, you know what I mean. I didn’t dare hope that you might love me. You see, all my life my father let me know how unsatisfactory he found me as a daughter…as a woman—’
‘Yes, I know,’ Oliver interrupted her gently. ‘Sheila told me. Parents can do such appalling damage to their children, but you are a woman, Charlotte—the only woman, as far as I’m concerned. A very, very desirable and desired woman, whom I love very much. If you can love me too, that’s all I ask. This experience you’ve had…traumatic for any woman—’
She knew what he was going to say and gently shook her head.
‘No. It was frightening, terrifyingly so, but luckily you came in time, before he could do anything more than simply tell me what he wanted to do to me, and somehow I think the knowledge of what I’d shared with you isolated me from the real horror of it. It was as though nothing he could say or do to me could come between me and the memories you’d given me. I’m not afraid to make love again, Oliver,’ she told him gravely, and then froze as he said wryly,
‘I am.’
He saw from her face that she had misunderstood him, and cursed her father silently. How long would it be before she accepted that she was desirable in every single sense of the word?
‘I don’t want our first child to be conceived outside our marriage,’ he told her firmly, ‘and I don’t want to wait any longer than I have to to make you my wife. Will you marry me, my darling?’
* * *
Sheila was delighted when they told her, as much by Charlotte’s unexpected and heartwarmingly open admission that, since Oliver refused to make love to her until they were married, she wanted the ceremony to take place just as soon as it could be arranged, as by the actual announcement of their engagement.
‘Of course, you know the only reason he’s marrying me is so that he can get his hands on the business,’ she teased.
They would merge the two businesses, of course; she would continue to work—for the time being at least. She had found she was daydreaming increasingly frequently of those two dark-blue-eyed children.
Since neither of them had any close family, the ceremony they planned was to be a quiet, simple one, which was what they both wanted.
The day before they were due to be married, Oliver returned home late in the afternoon and found Charlotte sitting in the orchard under the old apple tree. She was almost asleep, and, when she opened her eyes and saw him, she smiled lazily at him.
‘I was just daydreaming about how I felt when you made love to me here.’ She saw the way his eyes darkened, and laughed softly. ‘You were the one who imposed the ban,’ she reminded him, and then whispered wickedly, ‘We’re going to be married tomorrow—in less than twenty-four hours.’ She patted the grass beside her coaxingly and heard him groan.
There was laughter in her eyes as well as desire as he came down beside her and she whispered in his ear, ‘Thank goodness for that. For a moment I thought I was going to have to resort to this.’
Behind her, nestling in the grass, was a bottle of champagne with two glasses.
Oliver laughed with her as he rolled her beneath him but, when he kissed her, for both of them the laughter was stilled.
‘This is when we make our vows to one another,’ Charlotte told him huskily. ‘This is when we make the promises that we’ll never break. Make love to me, Oliver.’
‘All the days of my life,’ he promised huskily. ‘All the days of my life.’
* * * * *