to his. He made her look ill and anaemic. A curious weightlessness seemed to seize her; she felt her body relaxing, moulding itself to him, sensations she had kept tightly under control for so long stirring hesitantly.
He was looking at her; and Lisa’s eyelashes lifted in obedience to that look, heedless of the consequences of what he might read in her eyes.
Rorke looked at her mouth, and Lisa felt herself quiver intensely. Then suddenly she was released and he was stepping away from her, cynicism carved deeply into the tanned features.
‘Oh no,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m not playing substitute for any man. You’ll have to do something about controlling your appetites while we’re on St Martin’s, Lisa, there’s no Mike Peters now to appease them with.’
‘For the last time, I’m not coming with you,’ Lisa said bitterly, her eyes widening betrayingly as she caught the sound she had been dreading ever since his arrival.
‘What’s that?’ Rorke frowned, as Robbie cried for a second time, his face darkening as he obviously recognised the sound. ‘You had the child, then?’
‘Did you really expect me not to?’ demanded Lisa, suddenly courageous now that the moment was upon her. ‘I wanted him even if you didn’t! And that’s why I can’t come back with you, Rorke.’ She stared provokingly at him. ‘Much as I love your father, Robbie’s needs come first. I can’t leave him here alone.’
He had his back to her, but Lisa saw him stiffen and tensed herself, dreading the outburst of contempt she was sure would follow her disclosure.
‘Then you’ll just have to bring him with you, won’t you,’ Rorke said evenly.
Lisa couldn’t hide her shock. ‘But you said… you said you’d never….’
‘My father needs you, Lisa,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘I seem to remember a time when you needed him when your mother died. You owe it to him to be there, Lisa!’
‘I can’t just leave like that. I need time,’ she pleaded.
‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours,’ Rorke announced tautly, preparing to leave. ‘And your answer had better be yes! You’ve a week to get yourselves fixed up with inoculations, etc., and then we’ll fly out to St Martin’s together.’
Lisa followed him out into the hall, too bemused to question his assumption of authority.
‘Oh, and by the way, Lisa,’ he paused and turned, the dim light in the hall concealing his expression from her. ‘In answer to your earlier question, as my WIFE. You return to St Martins as my wife.’
‘And Robbie,’ Lisa protested. ‘What…’
‘You are my wife, so it follows that Robbie could be my child, and we’ll leave it at that, Lisa. It will please my father if nothing else.’
‘But…’
‘But we both know that can’t be so; that you could never have had a child of mine, don’t we?’ he asked savagely. ‘But no one else knows that, do they, Lisa? Even Mike assumed that I had enjoyed my matrimonial rights.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘I could never understand what spell you’d worked on him. He was your lover and yet he seemed to accept that you’d married me; he even accepted that he didn’t have exclusive rights to your favours. How old is… is the child?’ he demanded suddenly.
‘Five, Robbie is nearly five.’ Her mouth had gone dry, and she saw from his expression that he had made his own valuation. ‘Mike’s child, the child you were carrying when you married me!’ he said softly, adding savagely, ‘God damn you to hell, Lisa,’ as he opened the door and walked through it.
Only when he had gone did Lisa move, going automatically upstairs to where Robbie slept in his bed. His little-boy face in sleep had an innocence and purity that tugged at her heartstrings. Mike’s child, Rorke had said, and he had flung the words at her like an accusation, but Robbie wasn’t Mike’s child, he was Rorke’s son, although Rorke himself would never believe it, would never even believe that they had been lovers! It was only after he had gone that Lisa realised that Rorke had left his gloves behind. She recoiled from their touch as she picked them up, wishing he had never come back into her life, as she prepared for bed.
She had first realised she loved him when she was sixteen; the year her mother had died and Leigh had brought her home from England.
She still had a vivid memory of her arrival at St Martin’s. They had flown British Airways to St Lucia and from there BIWA to the island, the small inter-island plane dipping low over the azure silk of the Caribbean before landing on what was virtually a levelled-out piece of ground close to the main house.
In those days it had been Leigh and not Rorke who looked after their complicated business interests; including the stake the family held in a chain of luxury hotels dotted through the Caribbean.
On St Martins, though, there was no hotel, only the graceful colonnaded Great House built during the sugar-rich years of the eighteen-hundreds when the family had sent their sons and daughters to London and had thought nothing of commissioning every luxury under the sun to be shipped out to their own small empire.
Leigh’s family had been fortunate and wise enough to make good investments, and so, unlike many of their neighbours on the other islands, there was no need for them to sell out.
As she had done the moment she first set foot on the island at the age of six following her mother’s marriage to Leigh, Lisa had felt a surge of pleasure as she stepped out of the plane; a feeling of homecoming so intense that for a few seconds it completely obliterated the pain of losing her mother.
Mama Case, who ruled the household with a rod of iron and who had been Leigh’s nurse and Rorke’s after him, had opened her arms and Lisa had run straight into them. It had been an emotional homecoming. Her mother had been more popular with the native staff than Rorke’s French mother, who, so Lisa gathered from them, had never ceased pining for the sophistication of Paris.
It was only later, adult herself and a mother, that Lisa had wondered if Rorke had perhaps resented her mother taking the place of his. If so, he had never betrayed it. Too old to adopt her mother as his own when the marriage took place, he had nevertheless developed a warm and affectionate relationship with her, just as she had with Leigh.
Her own father had died when she was six months old—meningitis, her mother had told her, but Lisa suspected that her mother’s love for Leigh was far deeper than the emotion she had felt for her first husband.
In their mutual grief it was only natural that she and Leigh should draw even closer together, but she hadn’t realised how much until Mama Case told her gently one evening that they were shutting Rorke out.
‘Leigh his daddy too,’ she reminded Lisa, ‘and that boy sure thought a lot of yor ma, Miss Lisa.’
After that Lisa had made more effort to include Rorke in their conversations, even to the extent of slipping away from the dinner table earlier than usual to give Rorke a chance to talk to his father alone.
She hadn’t realised that Rorke had seen through her ploy until he found her on the verandah one evening, swinging in the hammock that her mother had always loved, her face wet with tears.
The day had been a particularly close one. Leigh had been irritable with Rorke over
