Unsteadily she walked into the hallway, allowing him to follow her, needing the cool retreat of its privacy and semi-darkness.
Behind her, as he closed the door, she could hear Dominic asking, ‘Are you all right?’
All right? She had to stifle the shard-like slivers of her own pain as her chest tightened and her throat threatened to close up.
‘I was!’ she told him coldly, when she felt in control enough to speak.
They had reached the end of the hall now, and through the kitchen door she could hear the kettle starting to boil. Automatically she moved towards it, tensing as she recognised that Dominic had followed her.
Don’t come in here! she wanted to scream almost childishly at him. Don’t come anywhere near me. I don’t want you here…in my home…my sanctuary.
‘Helena has been to see me,’ he told her abruptly.
Annie could feel the shock of his words as though someone had opened her vein and let her blood drain away. The feeling was immediate and sickening: a cold wash of emotional pain coupled with a sense of blind panic and shock.
She felt the kettle she had just reached for slipping from her grasp. She cried out in alarm, instinctively jumping back as she dropped it and boiling water cascaded everywhere. She could feel her arm burning where the scalding water had touched it and she could hear herself crying out too. But it felt as though it was happening to someone else, as though somehow she wasn’t really a part of what was happening.
She could see Dominic moving towards her. She could hear the way he was cursing as he demanded harshly, ‘Let me see. You’ve scalded yourself.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she denied as she fought not to give in to the fierce pull of her own emotions. ‘Just a few splashes.’ But it was too late. He was holding her arm and examining it, first his glance and then his fingers examining the long scar that ran from her wrist right up her arm. It had faded a lot now, but it was still—in her eyes, at least—something she preferred others not to notice. Her badge of courage, Helena called it.
‘Why did you leave me, Annie?’ she could hear Dominic demanding rawly, and suddenly everything was too much for her.
The shock she had been fighting to keep at bay ever since he had told her that they were married finally crashed through the barriers she had tried to erect, and she started to cry, her whole body shaking with the force of her emotions. She put her hands protectively over her face, as though somehow by covering her eyes she was concealing herself from him, and concealing too her own shame at her weakness as she sobbed helplessly.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know…I can’t remember. I can’t remember…’
It was as though just making that admission, just acknowledging that weakness, had somehow opened the floodgates to all the pain and fear she had been bottling up right from the time of the accident.
She was shivering, shaking so badly she could hardly stand up, powerless to control what was happening to her. She could hear herself crying out in denial, as though she was being tortured, and then Dominic suddenly reached for her, wrapping his arms around her so tightly that his body provided a blanket that soaked up and smothered her distress as effectively as a blanket of foam might smother a sheet of flames.
‘Right. That’s it,’ she could hear him saying as the shudders started to die out of her body and her tears subsided. ‘There’s no way you’re staying here on your own. You’re coming home with me.’
‘No!’ Annie denied immediately, pulling herself out of his embrace. ‘I’m not a child. I’m an adult…a woman…and—’
‘And you’re also my wife,’ Dominic reminded her sharply. ‘You may not be able to remember that you married me, Annie, but we are still man and wife.’
‘We can get divorced…’
‘Yes,’ Dominic agreed. ‘But so far as I am concerned, before we bring an official end to our marriage, there are questions I would like to have answered. There are things we both need to know…’ he reinforced sombrely.
Annie looked away from him. She still felt weak and semi-shocked by the unexpectedness of her emotional breakdown. Breakdown! Meltdown, more likely. The small patches of flesh the water had splashed were still stinging painfully, and she felt dangerously light-headed, almost relieved to have Dominic take control.
‘You’re in shock,’ he was telling her almost sternly. ‘We both are, I suspect. This situation between us is something we need to work through together, Annie. I have no idea why you chose to end our marriage, and neither, it seems, do you.’
‘What do you mean—it seems?’ Annie challenged him immediately. ‘Do you think I’m just pretending? Do you think I don’t want to remember? Do you think—’ She stopped as she felt fresh tears threatening her. She felt weak and exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and what she longed for more than anything else right now was to be able to curl up somewhere dark and safe, to escape from all the trauma she was experiencing.
‘That scald needs attention,’ she could hear him telling her.
Tears burned the backs of her eyes.
‘Leave me alone. I’m all right,’ she told him. But she knew it wasn’t true—she felt sick, dizzy, and her vision was starting to blur. In her head she could see Dominic’s face—hear his voice—but not as they were now. Through the mists of her own confusion and faintness she tried desperately to catch the fading images but it was too late—already they were slipping away.
There had been a time, when she was first recovering, when she’d wondered despairingly whether she would ever be properly well, whether her inability to remember perhaps signified that her brain had been damaged along with her body. Helena had been quick to reassure her on that point, however, it had remained a slightly sensitive issue for her—one that had underlain her determination to obtain her degree and hold down a proper job.
Now, as she looked away from Dominic, she suddenly saw the blisters forming on her arm and recognised that she hadn’t known she had hurt herself. Through the faintness threatening to overwhelm her she could hear Dominic saying grimly, ‘Right, that’s it. No more arguments. You are coming home with me.’
The emergency doctor they had seen at the hospital’s casualty department might have told them that Annie’s scalds were relatively minor, and that it was delayed shock which had been responsible for her near faint, but Dominic wasn’t taking any chances. At his insistence she had been given both sedation and painkilling injections.
Now, as he headed for his home, the case he had returned to her house to pack for her stowed in the boot of his car, Annie dozed groggily beside him in the passenger seat.
Loath though he was to admit it, the vulnerability he had witnessed in her today had not just shocked him but also touched a nerve, an emotion he had thought he had long ago eradicated.
Because of this he knew he was behaving brusquely and distantly t
owards her, but if he didn’t…That look of helpless pride and panic he had seen in her eyes earlier had almost been enough to…
It was because it reminded him of how she had once looked at him before, he told himself as he brought the car to a halt outside his house.
‘Don’t move,’ he told Annie curtly as she started to reach for her door handle.
‘I can walk,’ Annie protested as Dominic came round and opened her door and reached inside to lift her out bodily. But even whilst she struggled to free herself from his hold waves of lethargy and weakness were sweeping over her.
The doctor in charge of the busy casualty unit, faced with Annie’s protests that she didn’t want any kind of medication and Dominic’s implacable determination, had given in to the greater force, and now, as Dominic ignored her protests and swept Annie up into his arms to carry her into the house, she could feel herself slipping away into the comfort of a cotton-woolly world of nothingness.
Because of his impromptu decision to bring her home with him Dominic hadn’t had any time to prepare a room for Annie, which meant that he had to carry her into his own room and place her carefully in the middle of his own large bed.
Studiously avoiding looking at her, he stripped off her outer clothes and pulled the duvet up over her underwear-clad body.
She had always been fine-boned, her body when he had first known her naturally that of a young girl, but now, although his senses told him that her curves were markedly those of a woman and not a girl, he was grimly aware of the fact that she was only just on the right side of being too thin, her ribs clearly discernible against the pale sheeny flesh of her midriff.
The Annie he had known had had a healthy appetite and an innocent enjoyment of her food that had made his body ache with the certain knowledge that her appetite for sex…for him…was just as innocent and enthusiastic. And there at least he had not been wrong. The first time he had taken her to bed—