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‘No, of course not,’ snapped Kalera, who wasn’t so certain any more that Stephen didn’t intend to do exactly that. But that didn’t make him as insensitive as Duncan was implying. ‘Terri’s making things difficult right now by refusing to allow unaccompanied visits, and Stephen doesn’t want to upset Michael by turning him into a tug-of-love child—’
‘Terri’s making it difficult?’
His emphasis stung and her eyes warred with his. Of course, he would take his lover’s side, she thought nastily.
Fortunately, her father was already meandering off on another conversational track which diverted the brewing conflict, but Kalera was still brooding over Duncan’s sneering remark when they left a short time later. She had tried to object when he had chided that she needn’t bother her parents for a lift home, but after insisting on paying for their meal—an offer Silver and Kris had accepted with embarrassing alacrity—Duncan was in a position of unassailable strength.
‘We mightn’t have been able to get you all the way home, anyway,’ laughed Kris, putting the seal on his daughter’s fate. ‘The VW’s been conking out on us quite a bit, lately.’
‘Interesting people,’ said Duncan as they left the reopened shop.
‘So…you were brought up outside the mainstream of society by a couple of radical free-thinkers,’ he mused when she didn’t respond.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she snapped, having vowed that she wasn’t going to say another word to him. She might find her background embarrassing, but she wasn’t ashamed of it.
‘Nothing; it just explains some things,’ he said, unlocking her door and handing her into the car before swinging in behind the wheel. ‘Do you like them—as people, I mean?’
At the last moment Kalera couldn’t resist being honest. ‘Most of the time, yes. But their love was so freely shared around that I never felt special, or intimately connected with them, and they took so little responsibility for me that I doubt they knew I was around a lot of the time. I cope best if I try to think of them just as a screwball couple I know.’
‘Difficult?’
‘Impossible,’ she sighed. ‘But, listening to Kris, I don’t think they’ll be here much longer. As usual they’ll get bored with what they’re doing and take off to find some new fad or vessel of enlightenment, and I won’t hear from them for months—or years.’
‘Well, I liked your screwball friends,’ Duncan teased, pulling up at a red light. ‘And they seemed to like me too. I think we’re working on a majority opinion, here: your parents like me, the people who work for me like me—you like me! Stephen seems to be the only dissenter…’
Her head jerked around. ‘I wonder if your affair with his wife has anything to do with that?’ she pondered sarcastically.
The harsh sunlight streamed in through the windscreen, causing his eyes to narrow as he stared straight ahead. ‘He doesn’t hate my guts because I had an affair with his wife. He hates my guts because he thinks I did.’
It took a moment for her to realise what the quiet words implied. Cars roared across the intersection in front of them, adding to the thunder in her head.
‘Are you saying you never had an affair with Terri?’ she demanded hoarsely, willing him to look at her and yet afraid of what she would see when he did.
His fingers flexed and curled back around the compact steering wheel, his profile taking on a hawkish intensity.
‘Oh, yes, we had an affair,’ he admitted with a deep-throated passion that was like a sharp punch over the heart. ‘When we were both young, single and free we were crazy about each other for a short while. But that was over before she got engaged to Stephen. I never touched her after that. She was in love with Stephen and as far as I was concerned she was my friend’s wife. My relationship with Terri was just that—pure friendship—and I felt very sorry for her when the marriage started to turn sour because of Stephen’s suffocating jealousies…’
But sympathy could sometimes easily be mistaken for something else, Kalera thought, not only by Stephen, but Terri, too—if not before, then perhaps in the vulnerable aftermath of the break-up of the marriage…
‘But surely he must have had some reason to feel jealous in the first place…’
Duncan’s head turned at last, his expression a volatile mixture of bitterness, anger, resignation and contempt. ‘Yes, he had a reason—his own obsession! He always did have a controlling personality but it pushed him to want absolute control in his marriage. He was always demanding to know where Terri had been, expecting her to account for every moment of time she spent away from him, objecting to anything that took her attention away from him—job, friends—both male and female—shopping, family, hobbies…’
Kalera swallowed. This was all beginning to sound creepily familiar!
Duncan’s eyes went back to the road.
‘And when he couldn’t verify any of his ridiculous suspicions and Terri turned to me for advice and help he latched onto me as the most enviable and convenient target for his mistrust. That way he didn’t have to admit he was in the wrong,’ he said grimly, sliding the car into gear and accelerating away the instant the light went green, driving them both back into their seats. He drove with a controlled aggression the rest of the way through the suburbs, painting a vivid word-picture of a man caught up in a spiral of self-deceit.
‘He destroyed a friendship and a marriage for the sake of a delusion. Towards the end Terri even caught him reading her diary and opening her letters, following her in his car, and coming home at odd times of the day to try and catch us out.
‘She left him because she couldn’t cope, and he blamed me for that, too. Anyone but himself and his own self-destructive urges. Terri told him that she still loved him but she wouldn’t go back to him until he agreed to get professional help. Instead he chose to spite them both by getting a divorce, but he still can’t let her go—even now, with you in his life…He won’t admit either his own culpability, or the fact that he still loves her…’
He had stopped the car and in a blur of humiliation Kalera managed to comprehend that she was home. Soon she would be safe from this relentless emotional onslaught. She fumbled her seat belt undone, scrabbling for the door handle with a trembling hand, and Duncan’s arm shot across to detain her, trapping her against the seat-back.
‘Open your eyes, Kalera,’ he urged fiercely. ‘He’s sick—and instead of getting treatment for his illness he’s trying to substitute one obsession for another. It’s started already—he’s training you to accept his intrusion into every facet of your life—’
His arm was like an iron band across her breasts, the small cockpit of the car chokingly oppressive as Kalera struggled to gather her shattered thoughts. ‘He has a right to intrude; he’s going to be my husband.’
