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/> If she could react so horrendously to simply seeing him, she could barely endure the thought of what might have happened had he actually touched her.
Touched her! A small hysterical sound bubbled up in her throat. The last time he had touched her had been the last time he made love to her; less than a week before he had told her that their marriage was over.
She trembled violently, her eyes clouded with tears; only the blaring of another driver’s car horn bringing her sharply back to reality and her responsibility as a driver to pay attention to what she was doing.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Lacey got home she was actually trembling in a physical reaction to her shocked and confused emotions. She went straight upstairs, sluicing her overheated flesh with cold water, trying to jolt her body back to normality and at the same time to quench the disturbing heat twisting her insides.
How on earth was she going to explain her ridiculous behaviour to Ian? She had lied to him, a lie so obvious and ill-judged that she was sure he must have known it, and she abhorred deceit of any kind—a legacy from the past, from the knowledge that, even as he had made love to her, Lewis must have been thinking of that other woman; the woman she had never seen but whom she had known existed and for some time, for surely a man did not simply fall out of love with one woman and into love with another in the space of a single week, and she could have sworn that when he was making love to her there had been love as well as desire and passion in his touch…his possession of her.
For a long, long time after he had left her, she had not allowed herself to think about that particular betrayal; her pregnancy had helped, keeping at bay those kinds of self-destructive thoughts, but eventually there had come a time, a day when, long after Jessica’s birth, her thoughts, her time were not totally and completely absorbed by the responsibility and joy of her new daughter, and she had wondered then in revulsion and pain how Lewis had been able to make love to her with so much passion and apparent sincerity, with so much intensity and counterfeit love, when only days later he had shuddered back from her in physical revulsion, abhorring her briefest touch, the imploring plea of the hand she had stretched out towards him while she’d begged him to explain, to help her understand how his love could have died, how he could possibly tell her that he no longer loved her: that their marriage was over.
That was when they had begun, those tormenting, shocking dreams where she relived over and over again their physical communion. In those dreams there were no barriers, no pain, no sense of reality, only a shimmering, ecstatic kaleidoscope of remembered pleasures and delights, but in the morning had come the reality, the pain, and the guilt that she should continue to dream so idiotically and pathetically about a man who had forgotten her years ago.
She rang Michael’s mother, asking if she could possibly go round to see Michael earlier than they had originally arranged, so that she could at least give her lie to Ian some form of substance.
The time she spent with Michael and his family as always left her feeling both spiritually uplifted and at the same time humbled, achingly conscious of the sheer purity and shining strength that the small boy evidenced, and yet heartbreakingly aware of the mortal frailty of his physical body.
Michael was in remission, the devastating effects of his condition halted—for the time being. For the time being, but not forever…
Being with the Sullivans should have brought her own self-indulgent emotional problems into their true perspective, she told herself later on her way home, but instead she hadn’t been able to help contrasting the closeness between Michael’s parents, their shared love for their child, for their other children, with her own solitary state. They, for all the despair and heartache they had suffered, had something she had been denied.
At eighteen and twenty-one, she was fully prepared to admit now, she and Lewis had been too young to get married, and yet it had been at Lewis’s insistence that they had done so, not hers. She had been living in a hostel then with other girls in the same situation as herself. Lewis had had his own flat. His mother had died when he was nineteen, their orphaned states being something they had in common. Lacey had learned that his parents had divorced when he was very, very young and that he could barely remember his father, who had apparently emigrated immediately after the divorce. His mother had gone back to live with her parents, who had welcomed both her and her child. In contrast to hers, Lewis’s upbringing had been a comfortable, protected one, and yet he had seemed to know instinctively how much her own aloneness had hurt her.
He had shared her desire for a large family, for children, teasing her that the reason he was insisting on marrying her so quickly was because he was in a hurry to start his own dynasty. They had laughed a lot together in those days, or so it seemed in retrospect.
They had married very quietly—a church ceremony, something they had both wanted. He had taken her on honeymoon to Italy, a small secluded villa on a hilltop, overlooking the sea. She had woken every morning to the warmth of the sun against her closed eyelids, and the warmth of Lewis’s hands and mouth against her skin.
When she tried to let herself into her house she was trembling so much that she dropped the key. She could hear the phone ringing, but by the time she had unlocked the door it had stopped.
It was probably Ian, she told herself, ringing to discover what on earth had prompted her earlier behaviour.
Her head was aching, the tormenting dull pain that warned of an impending migraine. She had thankfully suffered from them less and less as the years had gone by and now had enough experience of them to know that the best thing she could do, the only thing she could do in fact, was to take her medication immediately and then go upstairs and lie down.
Hopefully in that way she might just be able to avert a full-blown attack.
No need to ask what had brought on this: stress…anxiety…call it what you liked, she knew it was as a direct result of having seen Lewis.
Her mouth twisted as she went upstairs and removed her tablets from her bathroom cabinet. They were on the top shelf and she had to stretch on tiptoe to reach them. Old habits died hard, and she still continued to observe the same rules of safety now that she had done when Jessica was only a small child. These days Jessica was the one who could reach into the highest cupboards while she needed to find a stool. Jessica…Her hand shook as she poured herself a glass of water. Whatever pain Lewis had caused her, Lacey had never been able to forget that he had given her one of her life’s most precious gifts—her daughter…their daughter.
She closed her eyes, tormented by the memory of the slurred warmth of his voice, thick with passion, his breath dragging erotically against her bare skin, her tight swollen nipples as he had told her softly, ‘Girls…I want girls…at least half a dozen daughters, all of them exactly like their delicious, desirable mama.’
‘What if we only have boys?’ she had protested, drugged on the intoxication of their love…their desire…on the sensuality he had shown her that she possessed and had given her licence to enjoy and indulge.
‘Then we’ll just have to keep on trying, won’t we?’ he had told her softly, and then his mouth had captured the tantalising peak of her breasts and all meaningful conversation had ceased for a very, very long time.
It was the sensation of the glass slipping from her fingers that brought her back to reality; that and the ache of anguish tormenting her throat, the pulse of all too easily recognisable desire invading her body.
That memory was over twenty years old and yet it was as clear and sharply cut as though it had happened only yesterday.
What was the matter with her that she was still almost obsessed with a man she ought to have dismissed from her mind and her heart years ago? Why was it that, even knowing that her image of Lewis had been a false one, that all the tenderness, all the love, all the care he had shown her had been nothing more than an illusion, she still so stubbornly persisted in using those early days with him as a measuring stick against which she jud
ged the other men, kind gentle men like Tony and Ian, who wanted her to allow them into her life? Was it because she knew that no man could ever come anywhere close to measuring up to such impossible and idealised memories, and that their failure to do so meant that she would be safe, safe from the experience of believing herself loved, only to turn round and discover that she was wrong?
Perhaps it would have been better if she could have hated Lewis; but that solace had been denied her. Instead she had suffered anguish and loss and the most viciously self-destructive sense of failure and shame; a deep-seated and very hard to eradicate belief that she had somehow not been worthy of being loved; that she had been a failure as a woman.
Over the years she had managed to get these self-destructive feelings virtually under control. Virtually. Another reason why she had been wary of becoming involved in another relationship. She had been afraid to trust her own judgement, afraid to allow herself to believe that anyone could love her, just in case the same thing happened again.
