‘I’m sorry.’
The humble apology that once would have made her cringe with self-contempt was a plea for understanding as well as forgiveness.
‘You’re sorry! I shouldn’t have let you go with him. I should have…’ He broke off and said quietly, ‘Listen to me, Heather, because I think I can only say this once. God knows, neither of us is able to be detached about this. If Hartley…if he raped you, it’s a matter for the police. You must tell me…’
She shook her head vehemently.
‘No…no, he didn’t, although I’ve no doubt that was what he intended once he realised that I wasn’t…’ She broke off and shuddered, her body going hot and then cold with the reality of how easily she could have been saying exactly the opposite.
‘I…I managed to fool him into getting out of the Land Rover…I started to drive off.’ She shuddered again, more tensely this time, the mental image of how he had clung and torn at her flesh still too real.
‘He tried to drag me out of the Land Rover…I…I thought he was going to…and then he let go. I heard him fall.’ She struggled to sit up, burying her head against Kyle’s shoulder, her voice shaking with remembered fear. ‘Kyle
, I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t think I ran over him or…’
‘He’ll be all right,’ Kyle told her curtly. ‘His kind always are.’ His hand slipped round her throat, tilting her chin so that he could look at her face, and then, as his thumb brushed against the spot where she was bleeding, he frowned.
‘It’s nothing…just a scratch.’
‘I ought to take you to hospital.’
‘No…no, please.’ She shrank from the suggestion like a night creature from the light. She couldn’t bear to be questioned and pulled this way and that. ‘I’ll be all right once I’ve had a bath.’
She tried to get off the bed, but Kyle restrained her.
‘Heather,’ he said soberly. ‘If Hartley did…if he did rape you, you have nothing to feel ashamed about, you know that, don’t you? You…’
‘Kyle, I’ve already told you I’m still the same boring twenty-three-year-old virgin I was before…’ She broke off, her face going white as she recognised the shock in his eyes. Her skin burned, her body frozen into tension. What had she said? Oh, that stupid, idiotic tongue of hers. What on earth had possessed her to make that flip, acid response without thinking about what she was saying?
She waited for what seemed to be a lifetime, already anticipating Kyle’s sarcastic remark, her tension increasing when he said nothing. Either he didn’t believe her and didn’t want to say so, or he did believe her and pitied her so much that he was passing up on the opportunity to mock her. Neither alternative pleased her.
‘Kyle…’
‘We’d better get those cuts and bruises seen to,’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘Can you make it to the bathroom, or would you like a hand?’
How frightening that should feel so bereft, so forlorn. What had she expected, that he would pick her up tenderly and carry her there?
‘I can manage on my own.’
She hated the way he stepped back from her, almost as though he disliked the thought of being in physical contact with her. In another man she might have suspected his withdrawal sprang from a distaste of touching her because of David Hartley, but Kyle wasn’t like that. Already he had exhibited his compassion and understanding. Too weary to analyse his reaction, Heather stumbled towards the bathroom door.
‘Heather, let me…’
She rounded on him fiercely. ‘I’m all right. I can manage.’
She slammed the door behind her, leaving him on the other side. Her head was swimming and her body felt so weak; an after-effect of the shock and fear she had experienced, she suspected.
She showered quickly, grimacing over the scratches and bruises marring her skin. She was unfortunate in that she bruised easily. Too easily, she thought, dismayed by the purpling patches of swollen skin. No wonder Kyle had doubted her assertion that David had barely touched her.
He was waiting for her when she opened the door, a grim expression on his face and a tray with a glass of water and two tablets on it in his hand.
‘These are very mild sleeping tablets. My doctor prescribed them for me last year.’
‘For you? But…’
‘Too many flights across the Atlantic,’ he told her brusquely. ‘I got too wound up and couldn’t wind down.’
There was no point in telling her the rest of it, in describing that sickening sensation of desolation that had undermined his physical strength and had left him feeling as though life was little more than a dreary round of duty and obligation. There had even been a time… He grimaced faintly. There was little point in dwelling on life’s ironic and often unkind twists. He held out the glass to Heather. ‘Here, drink this.’