Exorcism

She hadn’t always thought that. At eighteen, her daydreams and folly cruelly exposed by Simon’s sophisticated mockery of her, she had thought her world had ended; she had wanted it to end, unable to endure the pain of his cruelty … and he had been cruel … encouraging her to believe he returned her feelings only to turn on her with ill-concealed contempt … taunting her for her inexperience. It had been a hard lesson for her to learn, especially as she had made no attempt to hide her feelings for him.

‘Well then, I’m afraid there’s something else I must tell you.’

Her heart seemed to seize up, her body freezing and yet burning at the same time. Dear God don’t let her mother tell her he was married … in love with someone else … ‘Jeremy wants you to spend the summer working for him.’

It was several minutes before she could take in the meaning of her mother’s words, so great was the shock to her system of her overwhelming reaction. For years she had barely given Simon a thought. She had put him behind her, and yet the very mention of his name; the very thought of him being involved with someone else … Just reaction, she assured herself shakily … Of course she was over him … what she had felt for him had been an adolescent crush, nothing more.

‘Jeremy wants me to work for him?’ she repeated, trying to force her brain to work as she fought for control of her rioting emotions.

‘No, darling, not for him,’ her mother corrected patiently, ‘He wants you to work for Simon. Apparently, his latest book is going to be set in the Carribean. It’s about an Elizabethan adventurer who sailed with Drake and then turned pirate. Simon discovered a vague story about him when he was on holiday there last year. Apparently there’s a local legend about this man, and the dynasty he founded. He died in a shipwreck, apparently caused deliberately … the local legend is that it happened because a rival pirate gang had raided his home. Simon has worked out where such a wreck would be, if indeed the story is true, and he needs an experienced secretary, cum illustrator, cum diver to work with him during the summer while he tries to piece the story together.’

‘Why me?’

Her eyes were guarded, cool almost as she studied her mother.

‘I promise you it wasn’t my idea. Jeremy mentioned you first. He told Simon what an excellent job you did for Miles in India last year.’

Christy sighed. Last year she had spent four months in India with Miles Trent, another writer involved with the same publishing house as her mother. Miles had been writing a novel about the British Raj and had persuaded Christy to go to India with him as his assistant. A mild-mannered, chronically disorganised man, he had claimed that the speed with which his novel had been completed was due solely to Christy’s help. It was Christy’s personal view that the reason Miles had been so pleased with her had little to do with her professional ability, but a good deal to do with the fact that she was completely immune to his rather film-starish brand of blond good looks. Poor Miles; no one could be less equipped to deal with the feminine interest he aroused then he was. He looked every inch the blond macho hero, but in reality was an extremely serious writer, dedicated to his work—a bachelor still at thirty-odd, he had leaned heavily on Christy for protection from the many women who had tried to get involved with him. He was very fond of Christy but Georgina had been very frank in the opinion she gave to Christy which was that Miles was a man with little enjoyment of his effect on the opposite sex, and therefore unlikely to be very rewarding as a lover. Christy was inclined to think that her mother was right, and it had amused her when she came home to see the headlines in the gossip press, linking her name with his, and suggesting coyly that there was more than a working relationship between them. Two more unlikely lovers it would be harder to find, she had reflected at the time.

‘Well, there’s no need to worry about it,’ she told her mother calmly now. ‘Simon is hardly likely to want me as his research assistant. Why settle for a person who can combine all three roles in one, when he can have the variety of three separate females to choose from. You know Simon; he always did prefer variety.’

‘I’m afraid on this occasion it seems that he doesn’t,’ Georgina replied quietly. ‘He wants you to work for him, Christy. In fact he made a point of telling me so. Apparently, the timing of the diving is very important … the weather will only be suitable for a very short span of time.’

‘Tell him I can’t swim,’ Christy retorted curtly, ‘I don’t want the job Mum … I’m looking forward to my summer off.’

‘Christy …’ Georgina looked at her daughter helplessly. How could she trespass into her daughter’s privacy when she was the one who had taught her to respect it in herself and others? ‘My dear, I’m afraid he’s determined to have you …’

It was an unfortunate choice of words, and one that made Christy’s grey eyes glitter.

‘He intends to come down here to see you. I simply could not put him off … If you refuse to see him he’ll …’

‘Assume that I’m still suffering from a massive adolescent crush,’ Christy supplied bitterly. ‘Well, I can’t see why I should allow myself to be pressurised into accepting a job I don’t want, simply to prove something I don’t care about to someone I’m not interested in.’

‘Well if that’s how you feel …’

Georgina sounded so helpless and vague that Christy stared at her suspiciously. She knew her mother when she used that tone of voice, it meant she was concealing something.

‘Obviously you don’t agree with my decision.’

‘My dear, it isn’t a matter of not agreeing,’ Georgina said gently, ‘it’s more a matter of why you’re so determined not to agree. If you really do feel nothing towards Simon I can’t see why you’re refusing to accept the job. Only the other month you were saying you’d love to go to the Caribbean, but you couldn’t see how you could afford it.’

‘That was for a holiday—not to work, and you’re right, I’m not indifferent to Simon,’ she said crisply. ‘I dislike him. We wouldn’t work in harmony together.’

‘Well, you know your own mind, but I suspect that Simon will try to change it for you. This book means a lot to him, Christy. He’s done all the ground work and all he needs to do now is to make this trip out to the Caribbean.’

‘And of course nothing must stand in the way of what the great Simon Jardine wants,’ Christie said bitterly. ‘I’ve been used as a sacrifice on the altar of his ambition once Mum, I’m not letting it happen again.’

After that the subject was allowed to drop. Her mother went upstairs to unpack and Christy wandered back into the garden to enjoy the last of the afternoon sun, but found that she could not settle or relax. Of course she had made the right decision, Simon Jardine had hurt her badly once, so badly that the scars still had the power to ache, but she wasn’t vulnerable to him any longer. So why was she refusing? Forcing herself to be honest with herself, she acknowledged that if the job had meant working with someone else, Miles for instance, she would have jumped at it. Was she indifferent to Simon? Of course not; how could she be? He had hurt her deeply and of course she was wary, but that didn’t mean she still had a crush on him—far from it. She mulled the matter over in her mind, convinced that she had made the right decision. In that summer she was eighteen she had lived on the edge of her emotions all the time. She didn’t want that again. She was safe now and she enjoyed her safety, she didn’t want to have to be constantly on edge, constantly reinforcing her immunity to him. And Simon himself would never accept her indifference; he was the sort of man who demanded by right the interest of every woman who crossed his path, no matter whether he was prepared to return that interest or not.

Forget about him, she scolded herself, put him out of your mind … concentrate instead on the summer ahead. She closed her eyes, letting her thoughts drift, but annoyingly they drifted back in time not forward. At last unable to fight the crushing pressure of her memories any longer she gave up the battle. Oh very well … perhaps she ought to remember … perhaps she ought to relive those days again, if only mentally … a sort of mental spring-cleaning in effect.

She had been just eighteen and attending secretarial college, looking much as she did now, although then her movements had been coltish and uncertain, her face eager, mobile, all her emotions visible in her eyes.

Her mother had been in London for over a week and she had telephoned to say she was bringing guests back with her—her publisher and a new writer who was joining the firm. Christy hadn’t been particularly concerned. She had known Jeremy Thomas since she was five years old and this wasn’t the first time Georgina had brought visitors down to the vicarage.

She had been in the orchard when they arrived, deeply engrossed in a book. She hadn’t bothered to get up, knowing that Mrs Carver, who came in from the village once a week to clean, was there, on hand to offer the arrivals a welcome and sustenance. She would go in later when the bustle was over. She would have had to change to meet them anyway, and she wasn’t in the mood. Her shorts were grubby with grass stains, white and brief, a sign that at eighteen she was still growing; her T-shirt clinging to her taut breasts. At eighteen she was vaguely embarrassed by her body; so alien to her after years spent looking at the petite femininity of her mother. Voluptuous and sexy was how her mother described her, slightly teasingly, and at eighteen she was too young to feel entirely at home with a body that drew admiring male eyes of all ages. She squirmed a little in the long grass remembering the overt stares of the few boys she knew. Always slightly shy she had made few friends at college; most of the other girls were slightly withdrawn, as unable to cope with her open sexuality as she was herself.

She was lying on her stomach, too deeply engrossed in her book to be aware of anything else, when someone bent over her to read the printed page, his voice husky, and entirely male, infusing the words she was reading with a sexuality that her own unawakened mind had not entirely absorbed. Her immediate reaction had been to snap the book closed and roll over to glare angrily at the intruder. She hated anyone coming between her and her involvement with whatever she was reading. She was still at an age where it was easy to cast aside her own person a and slip into that of the heroine and by reading as he had done the intruder had taken on the role of hero, and his voice had stroked her skin as dexterously as the hand of any lover, causing a reaction inside her that made her tense and coil, like a wary cat.

‘At your age you should be experiencing romance, not reading about it,’ he had mocked, his clever, masculine mouth curling faintly. Tall, taller by far than most of the men she knew, he seemed to blot out the sun with shoulders so powerfully broad that she automatically flinched away from the sheer sexuality of him. Dressed in faded jeans and a checked shirt, he was so intensely masculine that Christy, unused to such maleness, automatically recoiled from it.

His eyes had gone from her face to her body, studying her in a way that brought a wave of hot colour to her skin. Where his glance lingered, it seemed almost physically to touch. She could almost feel the explorative drift of his fingers against her skin, and she had shivered violently, hearing his soft laugh.

‘So you are Georgina’s “gypsy”,’ he had said slowly, ‘a wild and passionate little savage indeed … I wonder how long it would take to tame you.’

She had stood up almost violently; angry at his intrusion and yet strangely excited by him. His hair was even darker than hers, blue black with a silky sheen, his skin faintly olive. His eyes which she had expected to be dark were a strange metallic gold; amber almost and she had stared curiously into them, forgetting her anger as she registered their slow appraisal.

‘Definitely not your mother’s daughter,’ he had said at last. And for some curious reason she had felt intensely hurt; as though in some way she did not measure up to a standard he had set her. It was the first time she had ever wished she was like Georgina. Was this man her mother’s lover?

He was younger than Georgina, perhaps somewhere in his mid-twenties, although it was hard to tell, and yet even her innocence could not protect her from being aware of his intense sexuality. It wasn’t that he was outstandingly good looking; his features were almost too hard for that, his jaw and chin stubbornly unyielding; his cheekbones high, thrusting against his tanned skin, his nose faintly crooked as though it might have once been broken; but there was something about him that made her want to stare and go on staring. He stretched his hand out to her, grasping her wrist with lean fingers. Their touch was cool and yet where they circled her skin it seemed to burn like fire.

‘Georgina sent me to get you … It seems you and I are to play together like good children while she and Jeremy discuss work. Do you think we can do that, Christy?’ he had asked her mockingly, ‘Do you think we can play nicely together?’

She had known instinctively then that he and her mother were not lovers, and in her pitiable innocence had not realised the danger the joy that knowledge brought, represented. She had looked into his amber eyes and had felt suddenly as though for the first time in her life she was truly alive. He had smiled down at her, a curious smile tinged with a knowledge she could only guess at. And that was how it had started.

‘Christy?’

Hearing her mother call her name brought her out of the past, so abruptly that she still carried its residue of pain with her as she made her way back to the house. She had thought reliving what had happened might have a cathartic effect, but perhaps for that she needed to relive every event … every moment of that brief summer.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_56469105-4dca-5aa4-8e25-ba61079f99b3)

‘I’M going up now, how about you?’

Christy shook her head lightly, ‘I’m not tired enough yet.’

She wasn’t relaxed enough to sleep; that was the truth of the matter. Although it had not been mentioned during dinner, she knew her mother still felt she should accept the job with Simon. Sighing, Christy went over to the record cabinet and selected a recording of some Handel. His music, always so relaxing, would surely help to unravel her knotted muscles and induce a desire to sleep.

Curling up in an armchair, she closed her eyes and let the sounds wash over her. Her mother’s room wasn’t directly above the sitting room and so it wouldn’t disturb her.

Simon had been faintly mocking about her love of classical music. ‘You want everything to be so romantic, don’t you?’ he had taunted her … ‘but life isn’t like that, gypsy.’ He had bought her other records; some pop, some classical … all of them containing the message that life comprised pain as well as pleasure. Her mother and Jeremy had been deeply involved in working out the details of her schedule for the coming autumn; there was an American tour to be fitted in as well as two new books, and there were also several other matters they had to discuss, so that Simon and Christy were thrown very much into one another’s company. She had finished at college for the summer, and in the early days she and Simon had made good use of the Vicarage’s rather ancient tennis court.

He was a demanding opponent, who never willingly let her win, and sometimes his driving desire to win angered her. She herself cared little about winning or losing and somehow he made her feel that this was a lack in her.

‘So unambitious,’ he had taunted her one day. ‘What do you plan to do with your life, Christy? Fall in love, get married and live happily ever after?’

He had laughed at her scarlet cheeks but his laughter had not held any amusement, rather it had had the hard edge of a man made bitter by contempt.

‘What a trap for my sex, Mother Nature has designed in you. Your looks and your body promise so much … offer so much enticement, and yet they cannot be had without the payment of a price can they, my gypsy? And that price is marriage.’