Lost in Love

She looked pathetic, jeans scuffed, bare feet all muddied, hair a tangled mess around her face and shoulders, and hands shaking so violently that she had to clutch them together on her lap to keep them still.

Guy muttered something beneath his breath, trying to unclip the strap holding his helmet in place.

‘Dammit, Tom!’ he rasped. ‘Do this for me, will you?’

He stood impatiently while Tom struggled with the strap, both men more concerned with the state Marnie had got herself into than the car or Guy’s injuries now.

‘Shock,’ Tom muttered. ‘She must have thought—’

‘I know exactly what she thought,’ Guy cut in grimly.

The helmet came off, followed by the white flame-proof snood he always wore beneath. ‘Get back to the car,’ he said to Tom, thrusting both items at him, then dropped down on his knees in front of Marnie, shielding her from the sympathetic glances she was receiving from the rest of the team, but not attempting to touch her while he waited once again for her to cry herself out.

After a while, he sighed heavily and glanced at the burned-out remains of the car, steaming passively now. The first spot of rain hit his cheek, and even as he went to wipe it away the deluge came, drenching them all in seconds.

‘If the fire is out, then get back to the house and let my father know I am OK,’ he told the crew.

They went quickly, glad to get out of the rain but curious as to why Guy was just kneeling there in front of his wife, doing nothing in the way of either trying to comfort her or protecting them both from the deluge.

They drove away in the red van. Guy watched them go, his eyes grim and bleak. Then he turned his attention back to Marnie, and, still without attempting to touch her, began to talk, quietly, levelly, with little to no emotion sounding in his tone, and she went silent as she knelt there in front of him, listening, with her heart locked in her aching throat.

‘You know,’ he began, ‘the first time I saw you, here in the yard behind the house, I thought to myself, My God, this is it. The one I have been waiting for for so many years! I wanted to grab hold of you there and then and never let you go. But even as I stood there just drinking you in I could also see that you were about the most innocent creature I had ever laid eyes on. I knew, also, that it would be wrong of me to follow my greedy instincts, though. I was too old for you—oh, not only in years,’ he sighed out heavily, ‘but in experience. In life! I had done too much, seen too much, and, God help me, been too much to be even daring to consider contaminating you with it all. And you possessed special self-protective instincts, too. Instincts that warned you to have nothing to do with a cynical old devil like me. You disapproved of me, Marnie, from the moment our eyes clashed.’

‘I didn’t disapprove of you,’ she denied, the rain pouring on to the top of her bowed head and running down the long pelt of her hair.

Even with her face averted, she knew he smiled. ‘You did, Marnie,’ he insisted. ‘Disapproved of everything about me. My so-called friends. My arrogance. My rather notorious reputation—even my practised methods of seduction! The only glimmer of hope you ever allowed me then was the fact that you could not stop yourself responding to me despite the disapproval! And it was that—need you developed for my physical touch that I exploited ruthlessly to get you to marry me,’ he admitted, ‘then spent the next year trying to live up to the illusion I had created that it was just your body I coveted. When all the time, Marnie—’ his hand came up to lightly touch her cheek ‘—what I coveted deeply was your love.’

‘Oh, Guy,’ Marnie sighed. ‘How can such an intelligent man be so stupid?’

‘Stupid just about says it,’ he agreed. ‘I knew you were pregnant with our child, Marnie,’ he told her, swallowing down on the sudden lump which had formed in his throat. Unable to look at her, he glanced over the track to where the house stood shrouded by the pounding rain. ‘Even before you came looking for me that night, I knew.’

‘But you couldn’t have!’ she cried. ‘I didn’t even know myself!’

‘But I did not know that.’ He faced her grimly. ‘I came back from my business trip to find you standing there looking so wan and frail that it just—hit me—and I knew you were pregnant.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘It was logical to assume that you must know also. But you never said a word about it to me, and you looked so unhappy, as if a child between us was the last thing on earth you wanted, and I was hurt, enough to want to hurt you in return, so I threw some nasty little remark at you about the mess you looked, and turned round and walked out again!’

‘And didn’t come back again that night,’ she inserted painfully.

‘I sat in my car, in the basement car park,’ he confessed, smiling bleakly at her look of surprise. ‘Sat there all night just thinking, feeling rotten for speaking to you like that, and seething with my own hurt because you could not bring yourself to even tell me we had made a child! I came back into the apartment the next morning—’

‘Looking as if you’d just crawled out of someone’s bed to come straight home.’

He nodded, his expression rueful. ‘I know exactly how I must have looked to you,’ he acknowledged. ‘So we started rowing again, and, in the end—through sheer desperation more than anything else because you were actually voicing the idea of leaving me by then—I packed you off down here. Told you brutally to choose between me and your precious work. Smiled and waved arrogantly at you and drove away. Back to London and to blessed relief in a whisky bottle.’

‘Not expecting me to come chasing up to London when I eventually realised I was pregnant, wanting only to share the news with you.’

‘But instead you found me with another woman.’ He lifted his pained eyes to hers. ‘That was the night I came to realise just how much you loved me,’ he said roughly. ‘And just how much I had lost.’

‘But Guy,’ Marnie frowned, ‘if you never knew before how much I loved you, then how—?’

‘You were destroyed, Marnie,’ he said. ‘I destroyed you that night you found me in bed with Anthea. And it does not matter whether I was innocent or not, or whether I was too drunk to know anything about it or not. The simple fact of the matter was that I had been so busy hiding my own love from you that I had not even noticed you were loving me too! And when you flew at me when I got home that night you did not do it in anger, but with all the pain and anguish of one who saw their hopes and dreams lying dead and bloodied at their feet. Only a heart bleeds like that, Marnie. I know because my own heart bled along with yours.’

‘Oh, Guy,’ Marnie whispered unhappily. ‘Of course it matters! There’s a whole world of difference between seeing your husband in bed with another woman because it’s where he prefers to be, and seeing your husband in bed with another woman because his awful friends thought it a great way of having some fun with his stupid young wife while he was too drunk to do anything about it!’

‘But how did I explain that to you?’ he challenged her logic. ‘How does a man who has taken great care to make you believe that he only wants you for your delicious body—and was even guilty of threatening to take another woman to his bed when the one he wanted was making herself unavailable to him—how does a man like that defend himself in that kind of damning situation? How could you allow yourself to believe other than what you saw? I had no leg to stand on,’ he sighed, ‘and I knew, as I watched your love for me turn to hatred in front of my very eyes, that I deserved every last thing I was going to get from you. Though, God, Marnie,’ he ground out, ‘those six months you disappeared out of sight will always go down as the worst time of my life!

‘Then you came back,’ he went on hoarsely. ‘And the moment I saw your slender figure and that awful lifeless expression in your eyes I knew that the child was gone. And that I was to blame.’ He cleared his thickened throat. ‘I knew then that I was way beyond forgiveness.’

‘So all along,’ Marnie concluded, ‘when you’ve talked of penances, you’ve meant because you blamed yourself because I lost our baby, and not because of Anthea and what I believed you had done.’