to the awe-struck, lovesick Jessica.
When he had asked her out for the first time she had thought he hadn't really meant it, that he had done it as a joke, that he and his friends would have a laugh about it later. Her basic insecurity was such that she hadn't been able to acknowledge or recognise her own beauty—she still couldn't, but Andrew had been intrigued by that haunting beauty from the first.
He had started to come to the café alone after that, asking her out again and again, until she finally agreed to let him take her to the cinema, little guessing that he had taken her first refusals as simply playing hard to get. When he had kissed her in the back row of the cinema she had let him, feeling safe in amongst all those people. But when he tried to do the same thing outside her aunt's house she had shrugged off his advances.
That had been the start of a long, slow courtship, with Jessica believing she had at last found the love and tenderness she craved. She had learnt later that Andrew's thoughts were less emotional, more basic. She parried his more intimate caresses with a shyness she later learnt he thought to be an act.
By this time it had become a challenge to him to possess her, almost an obsession, and when her aunt had died suddenly just after Jessica's eighteenth birthday he had even married her to realise his obsession. Their wedding night had been a triumph for him, and a deep shock for her. She had thought that because she loved him he would be tender and understanding about her inexperience, would respect her virginity. But he had been brutal, and his lovemaking contained only self-gratification, leaving her bruised and hurting, and worst of all, humiliated.
But she had been too inexperienced, too ignorant, to realise that there was more to going to bed with a man than what Andrew gave her, and lay docilely beneath him while he satisfied himself with her.
For months she had continued to suffer his invasion of her body, knowing that he enjoyed subjugating her. But by this time she had a job of her own, a job where the intimacies of married life were discussed between the women quite openly, and being one of the married ones herself she was expected to know what they were talking about. She didn't. But it was from these women that she had began to wonder if she wasn't missing something, if perhaps there wasn't more to making love.
When she had dared to broach the subject to Andrew he had exploded in a storm of anger so fierce he had frightened her. He had taken her words as a personal attack on his manhood, had told her that her lack of pleasure was due to her own frigidness, that it had nothing to do with him, that all the other women he slept with enjoyed it as much as he did, that none of them had her prudish inhibitions.
It was the first she had known of his other women, and her humiliation had been extreme as she found there had been other women in his life almost from the day they had been married. She had been numbed by the revelation, although she had stayed with him, still loving him, and having nowhere else to go even if she did leave.
A few months later she had found out she was pregnant, and so there had been no question of leaving Andrew then. But shortly after that pregnancy the physical side of their marriage had been permanently terminated, at her instigation, and Andrew had never let her forget it. Every time they had an argument he brought the subject up, always accusing, always threatening. And she feared those threats.
‘I'm sorry, Andrew,’ she said quietly now. ‘But after Penny was born——’
‘It had nothing to do with that, and you know it,’ he scorned. ‘You were always frigid, right from the start. I should have divorced you long ago.’
‘Oh no!’ she cried her dismay, her face very white. ‘You wouldn't, would you, Andrew?’ She clutched on to his arm.
‘Don't do that when I'm driving,’ he shook off her hand angrily. ‘In fact, don't do it at all, you know I can't bear you to touch me.’
Jessica recoiled back to her own side of the car, looking down at her hands as they moved nervously in her lap. She stopped their convulsive movement, clenching them tightly together. ‘I'm sorry, Andrew,’ she said huskily.
‘So I should damn well think,’ he snapped. ‘Just who do you think you are to tell me how to behave with my own daughter?’
She could have said his wife, but she knew what his answer to that would be. Besides, she daren't antagonise him too much, not when he could ultimately use the threat of divorce, a threat which he knew would cow her once and for all.
She forced her voice to be controlled, reasoning. ‘I just don't think it's a good idea for Penny to meet—your friend Lisa,’ she chose her words carefully.
‘Her name is Alicia, actually,’ he drawled. ‘Only her—intimates, call her Lisa.’
‘Oh.’
‘And I think it's a very good idea for Penny to meet her, she could be her stepmother one day,’ he added tauntingly.
Jessica's breath caught in her throat. ‘Is——is that probable?’
He shrugged. ‘Anything is possible.’ He made no effort to reassure her.
‘Andrew——’
‘Jessica!’ he mocked, turning the low sports car into the car park of the Sinclair office building.
‘Are you——’ she swallowed hard, licking her lips nervously, ‘are you thinking of divorcing me?’
He swung out of the car, bending down to speak to her. ‘It's never far from my mind,’ he told her cruelly. ‘It's no picnic being married to a silent iceberg.’
‘I——’
‘Don't make the same grand offer to share my bed again,’ he said sneeringly. ‘I wouldn't have you as a gift. I like co-operation in my bed, not complacency.’
Sharing a bed with Andrew had been the last thing on her mind, although she knew she would do even that if it would stop him talking of divorce. Thank God she no longer held any attraction for him!
‘I just wanted to say——’
‘It can wait until later, Jessica,’ he dismissed impatiently. ‘Right now I want to go in there and make an impression on Sinclair. And you're going to help me. A beautiful wife is always an asset.’ He took hold of her elbow as she joined him on the tarmacked car park, his mouth twisting mockingly. ‘Only I will know that the provocation in those pansy-blue eyes of yours is just a façade, a lie.’
Jessica ignored his jibe, having already taken too much of a battering for one evening. ‘Will Lis——Alicia be there?’ she persisted as they entered the ultra-modern building with several other couples, who Andrew greeted as they all stepped into the lift together, making no effort to introduce her.
‘Of course,’ Andrew muttered tersely, not even looking down at her. ‘She's Sinclair's secretary. Always go to the top, I say,’ he added crudely.
Jessica felt ill, recoiling as they stepped out on to the eighth floor, the noise from the party already under way filling her with dread. She never appeared well at these sort of functions, her basic shyness holding her back from joining in the merriment, although sometimes she wished this weren't so, wished she could be the sort of woman that men were attracted to.
‘I have to go to the powder-room,’ she told Andrew in a whisper.
He
