She could feel the sweat breaking out on her forehead, the numbing singing beginning in her ears that warned her that she was dangerously close to fainting.
She must not... she must not faint, she told herself as she tried to blow out the words he was saying to her, the sickening flood of invective and filth that poured from him, and to her most degrading of all the way he described in the most disgusting language there was the intimacy which she had so recently shared with Marsh.
She tried to distance herself from it, to tell herself that he was simply making assumptions, repeating things he had heard from others, and yet she could not escape from the feeling that he had actually witnessed their lovemaking, that he had somehow been there in the room with them.
Was that how Marsh had thought of her? she wondered sickly as she fought to suppress the urge to cover her ears with her hands so that she could blot out the destructive corruption pouring over her.
Did Marsh too think of her as just a body, a piece of inanimate disposable flesh?
Neither of them heard the car pull up outside. Kevin had broken in through a rear window, and so it wasn’t until he was inside the house and he heard his voice that Marsh realised what had happened.
He took the stairs two at a time, silent and lethal as a jungle cat, pushing open the door and overpowering Kevin so quickly that to Debra it all seemed to happen in a blur, in the fraction of time between one heartbeat and the next.
‘Are you all right?’ Marsh asked her tightly as he grabbed hold of him.
She managed to nod, but couldn’t look at him. Kevin’s words still filled her senses, the ugly picture, mental images he had drawn for her destroying her self-confidence and what she now saw as a naive belief that what she had shared with Marsh had been as awesome and full of wonder for him as it had been for her.
Even when Marsh had removed Kevin from the room and taken him downstairs she still couldn’t move.
She heard the front door open and continued to sit there in a frozen trance while the sickness clawed at her stomach.
Although Kevin hadn’t touched her physically, she felt as though he had verbally assaulted her, his destruction of the pleasure she had shared with Marsh worse than the threats of violence that had been made against her.
How could any woman ever know that a man really shared her emotions, that he really understood her vulnerability, that he really knew what it was for her to trust and want him enough to put aside centuries of inbred caution and to allow him the freedom to love her and with it the potential to hurt and degrade her?
Was there a part of all men that thought of women in the terms Kevin had just described?
Had Marsh secretly been thinking like that about her; had he secretly been amused by and contemptuous of the way she had so quickly and so completely succumbed to her desire for him?
Did men, all men perhaps, deep down somewhere inside them, divide women into two sharply separate categories—whores or virgins? Did giving yourself wholly and completely to a man mean a subtle shift in his judgement of you? And if it did, shouldn’t that be their problem, their guilt, their blame and not hers?
So why did she feel that if Kevin had attacked her, had attacked her physically, that somehow she would have been in part to blame because he had found her here in Marsh’s bed?
When Marsh came back upstairs and into the bedroom she kept her expression rigidly blank.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked her huskily. He was walking towards the bed, and immediately she tensed in rejection.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she told him tersely.
He stopped moving, watching her, his concentration on her making her edgy and nervous. What was he looking for? What did he see when he looked at her? A woman who had given herself to him too easily and whom he now despised?
‘Where.. .where is he?’ she asked him, her mouth dry.
‘Kevin? I’ve locked him in the car. The police are on the way. It seems he must have overheard them saying that you were staying here.’
He saw the agitated movement she made and came to the side of the bed.
Debra flinched as she felt his hands on her shoulders. Was it real
ly such a short space of time ago that she had welcomed the touch of those hands, that she had pleaded for it... begged for it?
She writhed inwardly in self-torment, rigid beneath his touch, rejecting it.
‘I’m sorry. He must have given you a hell of a fright. I should have been here.’
Debra could hear the anguish in his voice and with it the guilt, but she pushed that awareness away. She had enough burdens of her own to bear; she couldn’t carry his as well.
‘Please don’t touch me,’ she told him quietly and with immense politeness, the kind of chilly distancing politeness one used to unappealing strangers.