The Ultimate Betrayal

‘Lydia,’ she chanted instantly. ‘Lydia—Lydia—Lydia!’

Something flared in his eyes—anguish?—gone before it could be proved. Then he was reaching for her again, top lip curling bitterly as he pulled her hard against him.

‘No,’ he muttered. ‘You—you—you!’

And in a single swift movement he had turned them both and tipped them off balance so that they landed in a tangle of limbs on the bed behind them.

What followed was less loving than anything c

ould be. It was a battle. A battle to see who could arouse whom more. A battle of the senses where each deliberate caress was answered by a matching one, each clash of their hot angry eyes taunted—scorned. The more aroused the one became, the more the other fed it, driving each other on some crazy helter-skelter ride of pained, fractured emotions.

There was a moment within it all when Daniel seemed to make a flailing grab for sanity, snatching at his self-control and making to move away from her. But Rachel saw it coming, and on a flash of blinding panic which seemed to have its roots in a terrible fear of losing him altogether, she reached for him, her mouth finding his with an urgency that made him groan out her name in a wretched plea against her marauding lips. But she took no notice. And it was suddenly Rachel playing the seducer, Rachel conducting things from desperate beginning to wild tumultuous end, leaving the man beneath her shaken and spent while she could only crawl away to huddle in a ball of miserable frustration, her senses clawing for a release they had been denied. And she felt appalled, disgusted with herself.

So who won the battle? she asked herself bleakly. Neither had won, she concluded. She just felt sickened by her own wanton behaviour and the knowledge that she had been driven to it by a fear of losing him—no matter what he had done—and another driving need to feel him lose himself completely in her. It had been essential—essential to her sanity to know that, no matter how many Lydias there had been for him, she, little boring Rachel, could still turn him inside out with desire for her.

And, she had to acknowledge finally, she had wanted him, wanted him with a need which had left no room for pride or self-respect. But in the end even that had not been enough to help her find at least some release from the pressures that had been culminating inside her over the last terrible week. It was as though her wounded soul refused to let her give him that final conquest. Would it ever again?

A single tear slid out from the corner of each staring eye and ran their slow meandering way down her pale cheeks. She, in her twisted need to prove some obscure point to herself, had lost in the end, because what she had gained in discovering she could still rock him she had lost in her own failure to respond. Her blind trust in him had gone, and taken with it her right to love and respond freely.

It hurt, it frightened her, and it left her feeling more lonely than she could have felt if he’d just walked out and left her. Because she didn’t know how she was ever going to be any different with him now.

‘Rachel?’ She turned her head on the pillow to find him watching her, his eyes two dark and sombre points in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly.

Sorry for failing her just now in this bed? she wondered. Or sorry for the whole damned blasted mess in its entirety? In the end, she decided, it didn’t really matter. Nothing seemed to matter any more. She was an empty husk, lost and alone, and no amount of sorrys was ever going to make her feel any better.

The tears glazed her eyes again, seeping in a wretched spill on to her lashes. ‘I’m ashamed of myself,’ she told him, in a voice thick and quivering.

Something suspiciously like moisture swam across his eyes and his answering sigh was decidedly shaky. ‘Come here,’ he said, and reached out to pull her to him. His arms enfolded her, his body drawing into a curve which almost totally cocooned her. ‘On the vow of a man who has never felt so wretched in his life, Rachel,’ he murmured into the tangled silk of her hair, ‘I swear I will never do anything that could hurt you like this again.’

Could she afford to believe him? she wondered bleakly. It would be easy enough to let herself believe him. Forgive and forget and shove it all to the back of her mind in the hope that it would take the hurt with it.

‘I love you,’ he told her huskily. ‘I do love you, Rachel.’

‘No!’ She stiffened violently at that, all thoughts of forgiving gone with the utterance of those three false words. She had believed them once before and look where it had got her! ‘Don’t speak of love to me,’ she choked out angrily. ‘Love had nothing to do with what happened just now—or why you married me at all for that matter!’

Breakfast the next morning was an awkward affair. The twins kept sending her glances which were both troubled and curious. She knew they must be wondering about her sudden disappearance yesterday, but it was obvious they were under orders from Daniel not to question her. She even allowed herself a small smile when Kate opened her mouth to ask something, only to close it again with a mutinous snap at the warning look Daniel sent her. Sam was different. He kept frowning at her but otherwise said nothing, and that was the worry—he hadn’t spoken a single word since coming down to breakfast.

‘Eat up, Sammy,’ Rachel said gently to him after watching him toy with his Weetabix for long enough. ‘You’ll be complaining of being hungry by mid-morning if you don’t.’

Those eyes beneath their frowning brows, so like his father’s, glanced at her. ‘Where did you go yesterday!’ he burst out suddenly, sending a wary look towards his father’s pink newspaper.

Rachel glanced at it too. ‘I—took the day off,’ she answered lightly, smiling at him to show him everything was all right. ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’

He shifted uncomfortably, and Rachel felt her heart squeeze for him. He wasn’t like his irrepressible twin, who did her worrying all up front. Sammy did it all within himself, and for him to speak out like this meant he had to be really bothered about her sudden out-ofcharacter move. ‘But—where did you go?’ he persisted.

Rachel sighed inwardly, instinctively reaching across the table to comb her fingers through his ruthlessly flattened-down hair. He did not jerk away or protest at her messing him about, as he would usually have done.

‘I was—tired,’ she explained, floundering in her effort to offer a reason fit for a six-year-old to understand. ‘Feeling—all shut-in and restless. So I went out on my own for a while, that’s all.’

‘But you aren’t used to going out without one of us to look after you!’ he said, glaring at the lowering pink paper, almost warning his father to stay out of this.

‘Who says?’ she teased, trying to make a joke of it when in actual fact she was appalled to realise that even her six-year-old son thought her incapable of looking after herself! ‘I am all grown-up, you know. And quite capable of looking after myself.’

‘But Daddy said you weren’t,’ chipped in Kate. ‘He told Grandma. He stormed around the house. Up and down, in and out.’ As blithe as can be, Kate spoke about the forbidden and brought the newspaper all the way down. ‘And he kept on shouting down the phone at Aunty Mandy.’

‘That’s enough, Kate,’ Daniel said quietly, but his tone was enough to bring those wide innocent eyes around to his in surprise.

‘But you did!’ she insisted. ‘You were behaving like a—a mad bull!’