incident had had such far reaching effects on her own life that even now still affected her.
Sighing faintly Lissa leaned back in her chair, willing her body to relax. She had been so excited about that party. Her parents had forbidden her to go, because they didn’t approve of her crowd of friends. Why couldn’t she have ‘nice’ friends like Amanda, her mother had constantly harped? Not that there was anything wrong with the crowd she went around with; they simply did not have the sort of moneyed background her parents approved of. This particular Saturday her parents had been dining with John’s family. John and Amanda had been on the point of announcing their engagement, and Lissa had spent the afternoon at Helen’s bewailing the fact that she was forbidden to attend Gordon’s birthday party. Gordon Salter was something of a local Romeo, and Lissa had had a mammoth crush on him for several weeks. ‘Why not go to the party anyway,’ Helen had urged her. Her parents need never know. She could leave early and be back before they even knew she had been out. Even though she knew it was wrong, Lissa had agreed. After all what did her parents really care about her, she had argued rebelliously with herself. Amanda was the one they loved not her.
It had been surprisingly easy to deceive her parents. They had left home with Amanda a good hour before the party was due to start, leaving Lissa plenty of time to get ready. She didn’t have many ‘going out’ clothes of her own, and on a reckless impulse she had raided her sister’s wardrobe, ‘borrowing’ a mini dress which was rather shorter than short on her much taller frame. Make-up had come next. Some of Amanda’s eyeshadow, and thick black liner applied with a rather unsteady hand. Lissa had thought the effect rather daring.
She had arranged to meet Helen at Gordon’s house, but when she arrived there her friend had been busy talking to several people she did not know, and feeling suddenly shy she had felt reluctant to intrude. Gordon himself had materialised from the kitchen, and had greeted her with a brief kiss on the cheek. She had been so thrilled and excited that later she could barely remember accepting the drink he had given her, or drinking it. She must have done so though; and she had compounded her folly by drinking two more glasses of Gordon’s special punch. That was why she had agreed to go upstairs with him, thrilled out of her mind that he should actually fine her desirable. She hadn’t been drunk, but what she had had to drink had been sufficient to rid her of her normally stifling inhibitions. She could remember quite vividly the thrills of excitement that had run up and down her spine when Gordon kissed her—boyish, quite inexperienced kisses really. They had been lying together on his bed, doing nothing more than exchanging explorative kisses when the door had suddenly been thrust open and a man Lissa didn’t recognise had appeared framed darkly against the light behind him. Even now she shuddered slightly remembering the sickness and fear that had then crawled down her spine. Before she could even move her father was in the room, dragging her off the bed, saying things to her, calling her names … that had numbed her senses and her tongue.
What had followed had all the trappings of the very worst kind of nightmares. Her parents had dragged her home in a thick silence, but once there, the real torment had started. What had she been doing with that boy? her mother demanded. They had questioned her in her father’s study with Joel Hargreaves standing impassively by, listening to every single word. Lissa thought now she had never hated anyone in all her life as she had hated him that night. Send him away, she had demanded tearfully of her parents, but her father had refused. ‘No Lissa. I want Joel to know what sort of girl his brother is going to get for a sister-in-law. Had you no thought for your sister when you disobeyed us?’ he demanded, adding, ‘do you think it fair that she should be tarred with the same brush as you?’
They had questioned her about what she had been doing with Gordon and in vain she had told them they had simply been kissing, blushing bright painful red to admit as much, but they had refused to believe her, saying why should they when she had already deceived them once by attending the party in the first place, and all the time Joel Hargreaves’ watchful eyes had been on her, deriding … scorning … making her feel dirty and humiliated.
And her humiliation had not ended there. There had been a visit to their doctor; an examination which had left her racked with anguish and mental agony; and then she had been sent away to school. So that Amanda wouldn’t have to bear the disgrace of a promiscuous younger sister, her parents had said.
It had taken years for Lissa to accept that she was not what her parents had called her; but the events of that night and the days which had followed had left her permanently scarred. To allow a man to so much as touch her was to relive again all that anguish; to endure the biting contempt in Joel Hargreaves’ eyes when he looked down at her lying on the narrow bed with Gordon, her brief dress exposing all the long length of her legs, her mouth swollen from Gordon’s kisses, all her tender, vulnerable adolescent emotions exposed to the cruel scrutiny of his worldliness.
‘If you’ve finished with the table …’
It was several seconds before Lissa realised the waitress was speaking to her and that people were waiting for her to vacate her table. Almost stumbling she got to her feet and hurried out into the bitter February afternoon. Strange how fate worked. If she hadn’t been such a coward about facing Joel she would never have come into the café, and then she would never have bumped into Helen; never have revived all those memories she had sought so firmly to conceal. She was literally shaking with reaction as she unlocked her car and a small moan broke from her mouth. Would it never end? Would she ever be able to put the past fully behind her and enter into a normal relationship with a man? Would she ever be able to take and give physical pleasure without the ever-present crushing guilt and self-disgust she now suffered from.
Why it was Joel Hargreaves whose face she saw every time another man touched her and not her father’s she wasn’t really sure. Her father had been the one to condemn her; to insist that she was lying … but it was the memory of Joel Hargreaves that brought her out in a cold sweat and turned her sleep into horrendous nightmares. Simon had been exultant when he accidentally hit on the fact that she was still a virgin, but he wouldn’t be exultant if he knew why. He thought she was clinging to some silly outmoded convention of purity, whereas she knew the truth … that those cataclysmic events during her fifteenth summer had frozen and destroyed some essential female part of her; the pain of her humiliation so intense that it prevented her from allowing herself to feel anything sexual for any man.
By the time she drove through the gates of Winterly, Lissa had regained control of herself. As she stepped out of her Mini and walked towards the main door with long-legged grace no one could guess at the torment of emotional agony she had just endured, least of all the man watching her.
Joel’s mouth twisted sardonically as he looked at her. She reminded him of a glossy, elegant chestnut filly he had once owned. There was pride and beauty in every movement of her graceful body, and also a wariness that warned him that she had come prepared to do battle if necessary.
Joel Hargreaves wasn’t used to women keeping him at a distance; very much the opposite. What would have intrigued him in another woman, in Lissa grated on his nerves. He had known her since she was a teenager, and throughout all the years since she had treated him as though he were some vilely contaminated life-form.
He had once tried to talk to Amanda about it, but his sister-in-law had simply shrugged and said that Lissa was an odd girl.
Odd maybe … beautiful and extremely desirable, yes. In the past she had never allowed him to get close enough to know her, but now, dramatically the situation had changed. Telling himself that he was a fool for even thinking of resurrecting what should have been no more than a passing whim he went to let her in.
‘Lissa. You decided to come then.’
Lissa inclined her head coolly, praying that she had herself well under control. She was consumed by a wholly unfamiliar and extremely dangerous desire to give vent to the turmoil of feelings bubbling
