to her—she wanted him, she thought about him when he wasn’t there—but she didn’t understand him the way she understood Philip. She didn’t know him the way she knew Philip. The wordless, warm, certain love she had for Philip was a world away from the disturbing power Ben had over her.
If she could have married Philip…Her heart winced at the thought of how different her life would have been.
But fate had played a savage trick on them; they had been wrenched apart forever, with no hope of any future for them.
‘How long have you been here?’ Ben asked curtly, sitting down on the edge of her bed.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. After a moment she whispered, ‘Since the day you left for The Hague.’
A silence, then he bit out, ‘They rang and told you about the accident after I’d left?’
She swallowed, cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘No, they rang me the day before.’
He didn’t move or speak but the silence vibrated with violence. She sat there, trembling, afraid to look at him.
‘And you didn’t tell me.’ His voice grated on her nerves; she wanted to scream, and couldn’t. ‘You let me leave, without saying a word, and as soon as I was out of the way you rushed up here without even leaving a note to tell me where you had gone.’ He got up suddenly, walked across the room and back, and she picked up the simmering rage inside him.
This was the reaction she had been expecting. She knew how Ben felt about betrayal. His first wife had had an affair with his best friend for a year before Ben had found out. He had come home one day to find them in bed together. There had been a fight between the two men; Ben had put his ‘friend’ into hospital with a broken nose. Ben’s wife had gone with the ‘friend’ in the ambulance after screaming abuse at Ben. Two years later Ben had divorced her; it had been another six years before he met Nerissa.
Nerissa knew he still carried the scars of disillusion and bitterness. Whatever he had been like before the day he’d come home to find his wife in bed with someone else, he was now a hard, remorseless man, determined never to let himself fall in love again. All he wanted from her was pleasure in bed. Love did not enter into their bargain.
He stopped at the bed and looked down at her, his eyes a blaze of rage. ‘What were you going to do at the end of the week? Come back to me without ever mentioning that you had been away? Did you really think you could get away with it?’
‘No, of course not! I knew you would find out but, anyway, Philip might be like this for weeks, months, and I—’ She broke off, biting her lip.
‘Didn’t mean to come back at all,’ Ben finished for her, his voice slow, his mind working all the time as he watched her. ‘You’re going to stay here,’ he thought aloud. ‘You never intended to come back to me.’
She clutched the quilt tighter, her small hands white-knuckled, her chin lifted and defiance in her eyes.
‘He needs me,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t leave him now, not like this, and it isn’t just Philip—Aunt Grace and Uncle John need me, too. This has hit them pretty badly.’
Ben’s mouth curled coldly, cruelty in the lines of it. ‘Uncle John!’ he repeated, and laughed.
‘Don’t!’ she said, dark red invading her pale face, her eyes stricken.
Ben muttered under his breath and swung away again, walked back to the window, pulled aside the old tapestry curtain and looked out. A shaft of grey, rainy light entered the bedroom.
‘Where are they both? I knocked on the front door but nobody answered, so I went round the back and the kitchen door was open, but there was no sign of anyone downstairs.’
‘Aunt Grace is still at the hospital with Philip. Uncle John’s somewhere on the farm, working. He has to spend so much time at the hospital, he has got behind with his work. He says he’ll have to get someone to help out for a while, but the farm only just pays enough for the three of them to live on—it will be a drain on their budget to have to pay wages to an outsider.’
‘And they hate outsiders, too,’ Ben said in that cold, angry voice, swinging to face her.
She bit her lip. ‘That’s a bit over the top. I wouldn’t say that; it’s just that they…they are conservative.’
‘They hated me from the minute they saw me!’
She pleated the quilt hem with her shaking fingers. ‘That isn’t true; they didn’t hate you! They were…taken aback…when I brought you here. They hadn’t expected—’
‘You to find another man?’
‘I was going to say someone like you!’ she retorted, very flushed. ‘Life here is so different from life in London. People like them…you just don’t understand them; they’re not like anyone you know.’ Her eyes softened, her voice filled with affection and Ben watched her intently, frowning. ‘They rarely meet strangers,’ she said. ‘They never go anywhere very much. Oh, they go to market once a month, they go to Durham to do Christmas shopping, but otherwise they almost never leave the farm. The furthest I can remember them going is to Scarborough, for a seaside holiday, and they don’t do that every year even now, when Philip can take over and run things while they’re away. They couldn’t afford to go abroad. Hill farmers don’t make enough money for foreign holidays. I don’t think Uncle John has even been to London.’
Ben flared suddenly, his voice harsh. ‘Why do you go on with this pretence? Isn’t it time it all came out into the open? What the hell is the point in going on with these lies and half-truths? This whole business is so ingrown and contorted—if you once faced up to facts you might actually work out a few things about yourself.’
‘Do you think I haven’t?’ she huskily threw back, looking up then, her eyes almost black with emotion in that white face. ‘Once I knew…I realised I had to go away, and I did—you know that!’
Ben brooded on her, his face grim. ‘How could they lie to you all these years? That’s what I don’t understand. The lies. Why couldn’t they come out and tell you, years ago?’
‘Pride,’ she said, sadness in the line of her mouth, in her eyes. ‘I said you didn’t understand them. Can’t you see? It was their pride that kept them from telling me.’
‘Their pride?’ exploded Ben. ‘They cheated you for their own selfish reasons—you grew up unaware that you had a living father, not a dead one! If they had told you when you were small…’
‘They couldn’t bear to!’
‘To hell with what they couldn’t bear! What about you? Look what they did to you, with their pride and their lies! If they had ever cared twopence for you they’d have told you the truth years ago, and you would have been spared a lot of grief.’
‘If they had known it was ever going to matter they’d have told me, but how could they guess? They couldn’t see the future; they didn’t have second sight.’
Ben’s grey eyes flashed contemptuously. ‘You’re a born victim, aren’t you? No matter what they did, you forgive them. Where’s your pride, for heaven’s sake? Where’s your self-respect?’
Nerissa
