Cruel Legacy

It was the combination of sexuality and security which he represented to her that had made it possible for her to express her own sexuality with far greater freedom than she had ever known before.

Now, watching him sitting there in front of her, legs apart as he leaned forward, watching her earnestly, she could feel the aching need flooding her body.

Funny how easy she had found it to resist Ryan, she reflected absently, and how very, very hard it was to stop herself from going over to Mark and…

‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently, Deb, a lot of heart-searching and trying to be honest with myself. When I left it was because I’d convinced myself that you were the one who was responsible for my problems.’

He shook his head.

‘I suppose the truth is that I couldn’t bear to admit, even to myself, what was so obvious to you: that I felt threatened by your success, jealous of it and afraid that it would take you away from me.

‘I resented the fact that your success demeaned me in the eyes of the other men, and because of that…’ He paused.

‘I thought that by walking away from you I was being a man, proving myself… and in reality all I was proving was that I was a fool, throwing away something of irreplaceable value… someone of irreplaceable value.

He looked up at her.

‘I still love you,’ he told her emotionally.

Deborah closed her eyes. The longing to go over to him, to touch him, to hold him, to be touched and held by him was so strong that it rocked her body like a giant hand trying physically to propel her towards him.

‘You said you didn’t want me,’ she reminded him quietly. ‘You didn’t want to make love to me…’

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘You were punishing me, Mark, withholding sex from me… using sex and my need for you to try and control me… We can’t go back,’ she told him, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘It wouldn’t work… Sooner or later we’d be facing the same problems all over again. I can’t live with that fear hanging over me; you know how important my career is to me… That won’t change. I can’t change, and I can’t live with the fear of wanting professional success and yet dreading how you’ll react to it:

‘Can’t you see what would happen… how I’d be compelled to start pretending… playing down my career… creating an unreal persona, a disguise for myself in case the real me threatened or upset you…?

‘You’ve always known what I am, Mark, what I want from life… I’ve never tried to deceive you about that…’

‘No,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’m the only one who’s been guilty of deception… not just of you, but of myself as well… But not deliberately, Deb—never that… It’s different now, though—I’ve——’

‘How can it be different?’ Deborah demanded painfully. ‘It’s only been a few weeks. People don’t change just like that…’

‘No, they don’t,’ he agreed. ‘I’m not trying to claim that I’ve changed, only that I think I’ve come to terms with myself, with what I am and what I’m not, with what’s important to me and what isn’t… with whose definition of what it takes to be a real man is most important to me—mine, or that of people like the Ryan Bridgeses of this world. I’m not competitive, Deb. I never have been, but these last few months I’ve felt as though that lack of competitiveness made me a failure as a man…’

‘Oh, Mark,’ Deborah protested sadly. ‘I thought you knew that in my eyes it made you more of a man, not less of one, that you never needed me to put you up on some kind of pedestal, to make a false pretence of deferring to you, to boost your ego at the expense of my own, to have to hide from you how I felt about my career. To me those kinds of needs are a male weakness, not a male strength, and most other women feel the same.

‘I admired and respected you more because you didn’t need those false trappings of manhood, because you didn’t follow the herd, bow down to the rules men have imposed on society… I loved you because of what you are, not in spite of it,’ she told him.

‘Loved me?’ he repeated quietly.

Deborah turned away from him. What point was there in allowing him to know that she still loved him? What point could there be in their love if it was always going to be in conflict with her other needs? There was no point in deceiving either herself or Mark; she could not make him the whole focus of her life, become dependent on him and live only for him, and she had thought that he understood; that his love for her was like hers for him; that he loved the person she was and had no desire to

change her.

‘I can’t give up my ambitions, my career…’

‘No… How are things going, by the way…?’

‘Fine,’ she told him.

‘Liar.’

Deborah stared at him.

‘I had a phone call this morning from Gil Bennett and he wanted to know why I hadn’t been in touch to let him know we were coming back to London. He’d heard on the grapevine that you were looking for a new job…’