* * *
It was just after eight when Rorke returned. Lisa had just finished putting Robbie to bed.
She refused to look at him as she let him in, but somehow his tall frame drew her eyes as he followed her into the small living room. He had changed into narrow dark cords and a checked woollen shirt which stretched tightly across his shoulders. He was carrying a leather blouson which he tossed casually on to a chair before sitting down.
‘Do make yourself at home,’ Lisa gritted sarcastically.
‘Thanks, I will.’
He seemed impervious to her anger—but then he had always been impervious, she just hadn’t recognised the fact.
‘I can’t stay long,’ he told her coolly, flicking back his cuff to study his watch, ‘I’ve got an appointment later.’
‘Who with, Helen? Is she with you?’
‘Hardly. After all, in the eyes of the world I’m still a married man.’
‘Just as you were an engaged man when you spent two days with Helen on St Lucia,’ Lisa told him huskily, ‘and you needn’t bother denying it—Helen told me herself, just as she told me why you wanted to marry me. But she was right, wasn’t she, Rorke? You didn’t love me. All you wanted to do was to possess me.’
‘Always supposing you’re right, I didn’t get what you said I wanted, did I? Although you were willing enough to give yourself to someone else, as I recall. I even found the two of you together in his bungalow. Helen was right to warn me. Perhaps she was also right to tell me I should simply have taken you, the way he did.’
‘Mike never touched me!’ Lisa objected furiously.
So it had been Helen who had hinted to Rorke that she and Mike were lovers. She had always suspected it.
‘No? But someone did, didn’t they? I asked you on our wedding night if you were coming to me a virgin, and you told me “no”.’
‘Because you and I had already been lovers,’ Lisa told him, her voice huskily taut with the need to make him see the truth.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ A cynical grimace curved his mouth downwards. ‘Don’t give me all that again! How I made love to you on board Lady, and then couldn’t remember a damn thing about it. Not remember!’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘God, if you knew how much I wanted you, you’d never say that! You were almost an obsession with me, Lisa. I tried telling myself you were just a child—my sister almost, but none of it did any good, I just had to look at you and I burned; burned up with wanting you, and you’re trying to tell me I wouldn’t remember touching you, fathering your child. Have you any idea what I put myself through in those days before the wedding, trying to protect you from myself? Nights without sleep, aching for the day, days working myself into the ground so that I could blot you out of my mind. Even promising my father that I wouldn’t rush you, wouldn’t frighten you with my need for you. And then I find out that it was all a sham; that the innocence I’d been killing myself to protect simply didn’t exist. And you try to convince me that I was the one? God, Lisa,’ he muttered, his face suddenly dark and congested with a bitter fury, ‘do you think I wouldn’t know if I’d made love to you? Do you think my body wouldn’t tell me? Do you think I’d ever forgive myself if I thought there was the slightest chance that you’re telling the truth?’
Lisa had been about to retaliate when the meaning of Rorke’s final words penetrated. She knew he was telling the truth; she could hear the anguish in his voice, see it in his eyes.
‘Don’t you think I tried to believe it?’ Rorke demanded roughly. ‘God knows I wanted to, but I swore to myself before we left St Lucia that I wouldn’t touch you. I made myself a promise that I’d wait until we were married, until I could woo you properly, without frightening or alarming you, and then you turn round and tell me that I possessed you on Lady. How the hell do you think I could live with myself if I thought for one single moment that that was true?’
There was nothing she could say. She knew he spoke the truth; it probably would destroy him if he found out that he had been wrong, and suddenly the image she had held in her mind all those years since Robbie’s birth, of Rorke coming to her, admitting that he had been wrong, telling her he wanted them both back, that he couldn’t live without them, melted, and Lisa knew agonisingly that his knowing the truth would simply make a wider gulf between them.
Rorke genuinely believed that he could not, would not have made love to her, and she could see with a mature wisdom she had lacked at the time that to discover the truth now would destroy his own faith in himself. And anyway, what did it matter? she asked herself wearily. He didn’t love her; had probably never loved her as she had him. He had wanted her. He was quite frank about that; and she, in her youthful innocence, had assumed that ‘wanting’ and ‘loving’ were synonymous. Now she knew better, and she could also see what Mike had been getting at when he had tried t
o warn her how difficult it might be to get Rorke to accept the truth.
‘Well, Lisa?’ she heard Rorke demanding roughly. ‘Are you going to come back with me?’
‘Won’t Helen have something to say about that?’
‘My relationship with Helen is strictly out of bounds as far as you’re concerned. For all that you may deride her, Lisa, at least she’s honest in what she is.’
‘Oh yes,’ she flung back at him, suddenly infuriated by his defence of the other woman. ‘And it’s all right for Helen to sleep with whoever she wants—you can’t tell me you’re the only lover she’s ever had, but simply because you think I…’
‘It wasn’t your virginity, damn you!’ Rorke gritted, a dark tide of colour creeping up under his skin, as he reached for her, fingers circling her wrists like a steel clamp.
‘No?’ Lisa said shakily, trying to twist free. ‘You’ll have to forgive me if I think differently, Rorke—after all, the facts speak for themselves. You were pretty quick to point out that you didn’t want “another man’s leavings”—that was the polite way you described me, as I remember.’
‘You were my wife!’ Rorke was breathing heavily, his eyes dark with remembered rage. ‘I’d torn myself apart trying to protect you, trying… Oh, for God’s sake what’s the use? What really galled me was not so much what you’d done, but the way you tried to deceive me, to tear me apart by telling me it was me, and then trying to foist Peters’ brat off on me.’
The sharp sound of Lisa’s open palm connecting with his jaw echoed through the small room, her face as white as milk as she stared blindly up at him.
She was trembling in fear and shock. She had never employed physical violence in all her life, and yet for one brief second of time she had found pleasure and release in the sting of her palm against Rorke’s face.