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‘You not putting on a pretty dress to visit Rorke?’ Mama Case questioned disapprovingly as she watched Lisa comb her hair and add a coating of soft pink gloss to her lips.
‘I doubt if he’ll care what I’m wearing,’ Lisa told her wryly, checking her appearance in the full-length mirror, while Mama Case shook her head disapprovingly.
This time Lisa drove to the hospital alone. Dr James assured her that Robbie was doing fine. ‘He’ll be able to come home in a day or two—if just to give my nurses a rest, although Rorke has been with him this morning. He’s been asking when you were coming.’ Dr James didn’t add anything, but Lisa could tell that he was a little surprised that she hadn’t mentioned Rorke or asked after him. She had been too busy feverishly working out when to order the plane for. No one apart from herself need know. She could telephone from the house and then make some excuse to get Robbie and herself out of the house at the requisite time. They would just have to leave their luggage behind—it was better to do that than risk someone guessing what she was doing.
Realising that Dr James was still watching her, Lisa said hurriedly, ‘Oh yes, of course, I’ll go and see him now. I wasn’t sure if he was allowed visitors yet.’
‘He tends to have a mind of his own,’ Dr James told her dryly, ‘and he doesn’t like being confined to bed. Although I must say I’ve found him a far more docile patient than I expected. He seems to have a great deal of interest in the subject of concussion and its after-effects. He told me that he hadn’t realised that it could cause lapses of memory.’
Lisa refused to be drawn. She was sure Dr James suspected something, but she wasn’t going to enlighten him.
‘I’ll just go and see Rorke. Where is he?’
‘We’ve put him in a private room just down the corridor. First on your left.’
The door was open and as Lisa approached she could hear raised voices—Rorke’s and Helen’s. She hesitated, not wanting to intrude and yet wondering what they were discussing.
‘You know my views on the subject,’ she heard Rorke saying tersely. ‘I’ve told you often enough before, Helen…’
Lisa didn’t stay to hear Helen’s reply. She wasn’t sure what they were discussing, but suddenly it was more than her frail self-control could bear to stand there listening to her husband talking to his mistress. They sounded as though they were quarrelling, but she could vividly imagine how the quarrel would end—with Helen in Rorke’s arms, and his mouth silencing her protests. She remembered Leigh telling her quietly that Rorke had bought the books she had illustrated—Why? To feed his resentment of her?
When she left the hospital Lisa didn’t go straight back to the house. She needed time to think—to plan, and she parked the car on a lonely stretch of road, leaving it while she walked along the sand, listening to the breeze stirring the palms. She must have walked miles, she realised later as she climbed back into the car. Her thigh muscles were aching and she felt very tired. It was growing dark too—she tended to forget how swiftly dusk fell out here, and she paused before starting the engine, watching the crimson and orange glory of the dying sun, acknowledging that there would be few opportunities to do so again.
She loved St Martins, she loved the peace and solitude; London had never really held any allure for her, it was simply a place where she could work and earn enough money to keep herself and Robbie. Robbie! Her heart thudded guiltily. Did she have the right to take him away from all this? Of course she did, she assured herself firmly, squashing all her doubts. She was his mother!
It was dark when she drove up to the house. She knew that Leigh had gone to visit his friend across the other side of the island and that they would be playing chess together. It was also the evening that Mama Case visited her family in the village. Lisa knew she ought to go and have something to eat—she had barely touched her lunch, but she had no appetite. Instead she decided to go upstairs and have a bath. She could read in bed for a couple of hours, it might help her unwind. Her nerves felt like over-wound springs, her shoulder muscles tense and sensitive to every movement around her.
As she opened the bedroom door she sensed that all was not as it should be, but she was inside before she realised what was wrong—inside and confronting her was a furiously angry Rorke who was sitting up in their bed, his face contorted into a mask of rage.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ he breathed softly. His body was bare to the waist, and in spite of her resolution Lisa was powerless to stop the frisson of awareness coursing through her as she looked at the smooth tanned skin, roughened by the dark body hair covering his chest and arrowing down past his navel.
‘Rorke! What are you doing here?’ The words jerked out past grimly compressed lips, and she could tell from the look in his eyes that Rorke had caught the note of hysterical despair underlying them.
‘Dr James said I could come home.’ As he spoke he was flinging back the bedclothes, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was completely naked, and Lisa averted her eyes hurriedly, looking round for his robe and saying huskily, ‘Rorke, I don’t think you should be out of bed.’
‘Then don’t make it so damned difficult for me to talk to you! Ever since I learned the truth you’ve been so bloody elusive. Why, Lisa? I should have thought you’d have enjoyed the opportunity to gloat, to fling it all back in my face—well, here’s something else you can gloat about,’ he told her savagely. ‘When I was hit by that car, everything came back to me—don’t ask me to explain how or why, it just did; a small series of haunting but very real pictures. I remembered everything,’ he said flatly, breathing heavily, ‘Every damn thing.’
There was no way she could avoid looking at him. He seemed to will her into doing so, and her breath caught as she saw the anguish in the over-bright eyes, the pain that the locked muscles and tensed jaw couldn’t quite control. All at once, for no good reason at all she was overwhelmed by compassion and love. She ought to be gloating, she recognised; she ought at the very least to use this moment of weakness to force Rorke to give up all claim to Robbie, but somehow she found herself saying gently, as though he were in fact Robbie in pain and needing her comfort, ‘Rorke, it’s not your fault. Mike explained it to me at the time.’ She went towards him, terrified when she saw him sway slightly, her arms going out to support him as she urged him back towards the bed. Only somehow he wasn’t moving. In fact his arms were going round her, his mouth, hot and shaking slightly, burning into her skin as he buried his face in the curve of her shoulder.
‘I remember this, Lisa,’ he muttered thickly, pushing aside the neck of her tee-shirt and caressing the skin he had bared with undisguised passion, ‘and this…’ His hands were under her tee-shirt, cupping the burgeoning fullness of her breasts, his groan of mingled anguish and need melting the barriers she had raised against him.
Somehow they were both on the bed, Rorke trembling and shivering as he pulled her against him, tugging impatiently at her tee-shirt, releasing the zip on her jeans, huskily muttering his need as he wrenched aside her tee-shirt and unclipped her bra, his touch burning into her skin as he caressed her exposed breasts with a hunger that seemed to take her backwards in time.
His body seemed to burn to her touch as though he had a fever, his eyes brilliant and over-bright in the darkness, closing briefly as she touched him, tentatively as first and
then more surely as he murmured his pleasure and need before burying his hot face between her breasts, then caressing them with his lips until she was aroused as he was himself; touching his body as urgently as he touched hers, the night air full of their incoherent murmurs.
He raised his head and Lisa could feel him watching her through the darkness. Her heart pounded unsteadily, everything forgotten but the fact that this was the man she loved; and she did love him, with her heart and her mind as well as her body.
‘I remember this,’ Rorke whispered softly, touching his lips to one tautly aroused nipple, ‘and this…’ He caressed the other in the same fashion, his hands stroking down to her hips. ‘I remember exactly how much I wanted you, and how sweetly you gave yourself to me. I hurt you, Lisa, and you cried, and I hated myself for breaking all the vows I’d made to myself and my father. You were seventeen…’ He was breathing heavily, his eyes glittering in a face suddenly stripped of every defence. ‘God, how I wanted you… and God, how I hated myself afterwards! Perhaps I didn’t want to remember, Lisa, but that gives me no excuse, and to accuse you of taking Peters as your lover…’ He moved restlessly. ‘If you want the truth, I was always jealous of him. You seemed to enjoy his company; I’d seen the two of you together, found you together in his bungalow…’
‘He knew I wasn’t well,’ Lisa told him. ‘He suspected I might be pregnant. He was just checking. He warned me to tell you, Rorke. I had to tell him about what had happened—how you couldn’t remember. He warned me to tell you, but the opportunity never came…’
‘And I rejected you when you did try to tell me. I couldn’t let myself believe it, but I paid a heavy price for my pride, Lisa!
His voice was filled with self-hatred, and once again Lisa felt compassion fill her. What was it about loving someone that made you able to accept all their faults? Perhaps he was right, perhaps then she had put him on a pedestal. Now she loved him as an equal, but he didn’t love her, no matter how much he might desire her.
