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He was confusing her with his wife, Charlotte recognised sickly, as he called her ‘Marlene’ not once but twice.
In another few minutes she would be unconscious. She could feel her strength ebbing, her body aching for the release from what was happening. Her head was spinning.
And then unbelievably she heard Oliver calling her name, and thought dazedly that she had actually slipped over the edge and was unconscious until Dan Pearce suddenly clamped his filthy hand over her mouth and said, ‘Don’t try and say a word. He’ll not come up here. No once he realises you want to be with me.’
Stupidly Charlotte stared at him, worn out with terror and pain, and then abruptly she realised that Oliver actually was there, that he actually had come looking for her, that he actually was calling her name, and with a strength she hadn’t known she had she struggled against her captor, sinking her teeth sharply into his palm, long enough to draw air into her lungs and to scream Oliver’s name before Dan Pearce grabbed hold of her hair and slammed her head back against the door, yelling out, ‘She wants me, not you. She’s nothing but a whore, who’ll open her legs for anyone. They’re all the same.’
Charlotte heard the words, but only distantly. Her head hurt; she felt sick and dizzy. There was something warm and sticky running down her face and someone seemed to be kicking her back. The kicking ceased abruptly when the door flew open and she was thrown to the floor. She heard herself scream as she fell, and then everything went black, although she was dimly conscious of someone touching her, soothing her, speaking to her. Someone whom it was important she reached out to…only it was all too much of an effort.
* * *
She had been having a very bad dream, Charlotte recognised, opening her eyes. Her bedroom was in darkness, but its outline was familiar. So why had she confused it with somewhere else…a hospital? And why had she woken up so often crying for Oliver, wanting desperately to be held by him, to be safe with him?
Her head was aching. She put up her hand to touch it, wincing at the pain in her shoulder and then frowning as her fingers touched the plaster she found.
Confusing memories stirred sluggishly. Images that haunted her bad dreams…fragments of sensation…of fear… ‘No!’
‘Charlotte, it’s all right. You’re quite safe.’
She lay still, her heart pounding frantically in the darkness. What was Oliver doing in bed with her? Had she gone completely crazy? Was she perhaps imagining…? But no. Impossible to imagine the tenderness of those hands touching her, turning her, drawing her into the warmth of his body, patting her back as though soothing a terrified child.
‘Oliver…what are you doing here?’ Her voice sounded rusty and strained.
‘You wanted me with you…remember?’
She wrinkled her forehead. She did have an odd hazy memory of crying out for him. That had been when she was in the hospital, hadn’t it? And suddenly her body went hot as she realised she must actually have been there, that others must actually have heard her…
‘It’s all right,’ Oliver was reassuring her, as though he had read her mind. ‘No one was shocked or surprised. I told them you were my fiancée and in the circumstances they could quite understand why you should want to be with me. That was the only reason they let me bring you home.’
‘Because you said you’d sleep with me?’ she questioned warily. ‘But—’
‘Oh, Sheila and I practically came to blows over who should take charge of you,’ he told her. ‘In the end it was the way you clung to me that persuaded the hospital staff that you should come with me. You’ll be pleased to know that there’ll be no lasting damage—at least not of the physical variety. A very unpleasant-looking collection of bruises, and a nasty bash on the head, which was the reason they kept you in in the first place.’
Abruptly she remembered. She trembled in his arms as she said stiltedly, ‘He didn’t touch me. Not…not in that way. He was going to. He thought I was his wife.’
‘Shush…we know all about it. He was a very dangerous man. A very sick man mentally.’
‘I should never have gone there. I knew inside that there was something about him.’ She twisted in his arms. ‘I wanted to sell those houses so that you wouldn’t get them. I never thought… It could have been Sophy!’ she burst out frantically. ‘I could have sent Sophy.’
She started to cry. Deep, wrenching sobs that tore at his heart and made him wish he had had just half a dozen minutes alone with her attacker before the police had arrived.
It had been Sheila who had alerted him to her potential danger. When he had discovered that she had gone to work without waiting to see him, he had driven in too and gone into the office, only to find Sheila already concerned. A chance call from someone who had already approached Dan Pearce with an offer to buy both semis from him at a fair market price and had been turned down flat had revealed to her that, whatever the farmer’s reason for luring Charlotte out to the deserted building, it could have had nothing to do with any change of heart about selling the two units as one.
She had poured out her concern to Oliver, and he had promptly offered to drive over to the buildings to check that Charlotte was all right.
Once he had gone, Sheila’s fears had increased and she had rung her husband, asking him to check as well, hence the police’s arrival within seconds of Oliver’s having broken down the door and discovered Charlotte unconscious on the floor, her blouse ripped, bruises already forming on her ba
re shoulders.
For a moment he had suffered a blind, fierce need to destroy the man standing over her, to rip him limb from limb, but, just as sanity was reasserting itself and he was forcing himself to recognise that his first task must be to get Charlotte away to safety, the police had arrived and taken charge.
He didn’t want to tell her yet about the gun that Dan Pearce had somehow or other got his hands on when the police had taken him back to the farmhouse, nor the fact that he had taken his own life with it. That could come later…
It had torn him apart to learn from the hospital that she was crying for him in her sleep. And, indeed, the moment he had walked up to her bed and taken hold of her hand she had become calmer.
Now she had been at home for almost forty-eight hours, although she had been so heavily sedated at first that she would have no memory of her return. Last night he had slept with her in his arms, soothing her nightmares, comforting and cherishing her, and he would continue to do so for the rest of his life if that was what she wanted.
‘You should have let me go with Sheila,’ she told him shakily. ‘Now the whole town will know we’re supposed to engaged, and when they learn that we aren’t—’
