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The chalets were in sight and Rosalind shortened her steps to a dawdle, forcing Luke to do the same as she tried to keep him talking. ‘So how long were you married?’
‘A year.’ The casualness with which he spoke belied the horror of what he was saying as he added matter-of-factly, ‘Although we only spent five days actually living together as husband and wife. Christie was critically injured in a car accident on the way back from our honeymoon. A man had a heart attack at the wheel and slammed into us from a side-road. Christie never regained consciousness.’
Rosalind felt some vital yet nameless defence crumble inside her, his words issuing from a well of loneliness that echoed in the empty chambers of her heart. ‘Oh, Luke, no...’
They had reached his door, but he made no attempt to use the fact as an excuse to bring the conversation to a polite conclusion. He used his key and ushered Rosalind inside, then continued in that mildly detached voice, as if the tragic story related to an acquaintance rather than himself.
‘What we had was so brief, yet so special... Christie and I always seemed to be utterly attuned to each other—heart, mind and soul. I knew I wouldn’t find that kind of perfection with anyone else, so I never bothered to try. I just wasn’t interested in platonic female companionship or empty physical release. Neither seemed to matter. If I ever looked at another woman in lust it was only because she reminded me in some way of Christie—’
‘And me? Do I remind you of Christie?’ she interrupted as he sat her down on the bamboo couch and handed her a tissue from the hotel-branded box on the coffee-table. How could she be expected to worry about something as mundane as a minor scrape on her knee when he was performing open-heart surgery?
Her mouth went dry as she waited for him to tell her that, yes, Christie had been a slim, green-eyed redhead.
‘There’s no resemblance whatsoever.’
But as she started to breathe again his brutal scalpel of truth continued to flash. ‘Yet I find myself wanting to have sex with you. I can’t seem to stop myself thinking about it. Whenever I look at you, I imagine you—’ He clenched his teeth and his hands at his sides, forcing the difficult words out. ‘I think of how it would be with you...I think of doing things with you that I—’ A light sheen of sweat that had nothing to do with their run had broken out on his upper lip. ‘And at night I have dreams—’
He broke off, but he didn’t need to go on. Rosalind’s hand trembled as she dabbed the tissue ineffectually against her knee, trying to look her most blasé when inside she was turning cartwheels like a giddy teenager. She had had a few fairly intense dreams herself...
‘I see.’
He swept the hair impatiently off his forehead. ‘I wish I did.’ He looked angry, bewildered by his inability to explain his own behaviour, aggressive in his vulnerability.
Rosalind’s defences dropped even further.
‘Maybe it’s because I’m so very different,’ she offered gently. ‘Maybe you’ve allowed yourself to feel desire for me because you know I’m not a threat to your memories of Christie.’
‘But you are. I told you, Christie is the only woman I’ve ever made love to—’
‘But it would be only sex with me, wouldn’t it?’ She proudly pointed out what he himself had made very clear. ‘You can’t make love with someone you don’t love.’
‘“Only sex”,’ he mimicked roughly. ‘Is that all it is to you, Roz—“only” another incidental encounter with a person you fleetingly fancy?’
‘As a matter of fact, no,’ she said steadily, noting his careful use of language. ‘I won’t deny I did go through a brief period in my life when I wasn’t very discriminating about men—’ she hoped he noticed the special stress ‘—but I’d just been terribly hurt by someone whom I believed was the love of my life, and in typically flamboyant style I decided to show everyone how much I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be pitied. I thought that if I acted like Justin had it would somehow make me feel better. It didn’t, so I stopped. I may flirt, but I don’t sleep around.’
Her tilted chin and the thread of steely pride in her voice told him that he could take or leave it—she wasn’t going to beg for his respect.
‘I’ll get that ointment for your knee,’ he said quietly, and went up the stairs to his bathroom without further comment.
Rosalind brushed at the stupid blurring in her eyes and got up, thinking that a little flexing would stop her caked knee from hardening over and making it more difficult to treat. She walked over to the small dining table where Luke’s computer lay open, plugged into the electrical outlet in the wall, a screen-saver busily at work. Maybe Luke had left it on because he was expecting a fax or some electronic mail, she thought.
The computer looked highly sophisticated, but appeared to have no mouse or trackball. Rosalind leaned over and ran her finger over the flat pad where she had expected the trackball to be. The screen-saver suddenly dissolved and she realised that the pad was a miniature touch-sensitive screen. She dragged her finger across it again and sure enough the little cursor arrow moved in a parallel course. She tapped and a file opened full-screen.
Guiltily, because she hadn’t realised that the cursor was hovering over any particular icon, she dragged the arrow up to the ‘close’ box, and was about to tap when a name leapt out at her from the mass of single-spaced text.
Her own name...things that she had said...things that she had done.
Luke, it seemed, had been making detailed notes of their association from the day they had first met.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘SPECTACULAR, isn’t it?’
Rosalind didn’t turn as the shadowy figure materialised on the ground beside her. Deep in the inky shadows of the casuarina tree, in her midnight-blue dress, she had thought she was invisible, but Luke evidently had eyes like a cat.
She kept her gaze fixed on the dark horizon. On Tioman the night was star-studded and clear but far out across the sea a distant electrical storm played out its fury. Sheet lightning flickered incessantly, brilliant flashes of varying intensity illuminating the rim of the world, throwing the billowing clouds high above the horizon into pulsating relief. There was no thunder, only the hushed breath of the sea to accompany the theatrical light-show, the violence of nature seeming all the more impressive for its silence.
When she didn’t respond to his opening question she heard Luke shift on the soft carpet of dried casuarina needles scattered across the sandy soil.
