Forgotten Passion

He stood up suddenly, towering above Lisa for all her five foot eight, his skin darkly tanned from the Caribbean sun; his hair sleek and dark. There was Moorish blood somewhere in his ancestry, Leigh had once told her. The family had owned St Martin’s since the sixteenth century. It had been given to them by Elizabeth the First, and rumour had it that one of their buccaneering ancestors had taken prisoner the daughter of a rich Moorish trader and had kept her as his own prize.

Certainly Rorke’s taut bone structure hinted that the rumour could be right, and Lisa remembered how as a child she had been fascinated by his family history—fascinated by him, so dark and forbiddingly mysterious, at twenty-four to her thirteen so much more adult…

‘Leigh,’ she asked painfully, dragging her mind away from the past, ‘what…’

‘He developed a critical heart condition shortly after you left,’ Rorke told her grimly. ‘It’s gradually grown worse and worse—there’s an operation with a fifty-fifty chance of success, but he refused to consider it unless you come back.’

Lisa moistened her lips. Go back? But that was impossible. There was no going back!

‘I’m telling you, not asking you, Lisa,’ Rorke warned her softly. ‘You’re coming with me, even if I have to kidnap you.’

‘I can’t!’ Her eyes betrayed her, lifting to the ceiling. Above them was Robbie’s room. Robbie who was the reason she could never go back to St Martins. Robbie, who meant the world to her, but whose birth had barred her for ever from her home.

‘Can’t, or won’t? Whichever it is, you’re wrong. You’re coming back with me.’

Lisa glanced across the room at him, forcing herself to meet the icy scrutiny of his eyes. There was still one card she could play, one knife she could turn, and hurt her though it did not to be able to go to Leigh, she had to protect Robbie.

‘If I did come back, Rorke, what would it be as? Your stepsister, or your wife?’ For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to speak, and then he moved, and she could tell from the snarling curl of his mouth that he was furiously angry.

‘My wife! But you were never that, were you, Lisa? Oh, we went through the ceremony all right, but you already belonged to someone else, and marriage to me was just a shield to hide behind, wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Lisa managed shakily, ‘and if you don’t mind, Rorke, I’d like you to leave. I’d like to be with Leigh, but it really isn’t possible.’

‘What are you frightened of?’ He was really angry now. ‘Losing your lover? If that’s all that’s bothering you I’ll make it worth your while… financially, of course. Physically, I wouldn’t touch you if you were the only woman left on earth!’

She lifted her hand instinctively and bit back a gasping protest of pain as Rork’s finger curled round her wrist, threatening to crack her bones with the ferocity of his grip.

‘Oh no, you don’t!’ she heard him grate harshly above her. ‘Your lover might let you get away with behaviour like that, but I won’t!’

She read his intention in his eyes and backed away like a terrified animal, but the wall was behind her, and there was no escape from the bitter hatred in his eyes, or the hard pressure of his arms as they tightened round her, his breath fanning her hair as he fought to control his rage. There was no way he was going to let her go, Lisa knew that, but rather than plead and betray her fear, she lifted her head proudly, her eyes defying him to do his worst.

Her courage only served to increase his anger; Lisa could feel it in the fierce beat of his heart and the tension that emanated from him.

She felt as though her nerves were stretched like steel wire, her breath locking painfully in her throat.

Get it over with, damn you! she screamed silently inwards, knowing that he was deliberately drawing out her punishment. Did he know what it did to her to be so close to him, to be reminded of how innocently she had looked forward to their marriage; had wanted his possession; and how shattered she had been when…

His mouth was a mere breath away from hers. Faintness crept through her as she remembered against her will the subtle mastery of those lips. Without her knowing it her own softened and parted, her thick, long eyelashes quivering against her skin—so pale in contrast to his. He made her look ill and anaemic. A curious weightlessness seemed to seize her; she felt her body relaxing, moulding itself to him, sensations she had kept tightly under control for so long stirring hesitantly.

He was looking at her; and Lisa’s eyelashes lifted in obedience to that look, heedless of the consequences of what he might read in her eyes.

Rorke looked at her mouth, and Lisa felt herself quiver intensely. Then suddenly she was released and he was stepping away from her, cynicism carved deeply into the tanned features.

‘Oh no,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m not playing substitute for any man. You’ll have to do something about controlling your appetites while we’re on St Martin’s, Lisa, there’s no Mike Peters now to appease them with.’

‘For the last time, I’m not coming with you,’ Lisa said bitterly, her eyes widening betrayingly as she caught the sound she had been dreading ever since his arrival.

‘What’s that?’ Rorke frowned, as Robbie cried for a second time, his face darkening as he obviously recognised the sound. ‘You had the child, then?’

‘Did you really expect me not to?’ demanded Lisa, suddenly courageous now that the moment was upon her. ‘I wanted him even if you didn’t! And that’s why I can’t come back with you, Rorke.’ She stared provokingly at him. ‘Much as I love your father, Robbie’s needs come first. I can’t leave him here alone.’

He had his back to her, but Lisa saw him stiffen and tensed herself, dreading the outburst of contempt she was sure would follow her disclosure.

‘Then you’ll just have to bring him with you, won’t you,’ Rorke said evenly.

Lisa couldn’t hide her shock. ‘But you said… you said you’d never….’

‘My father needs you, Lisa,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘I seem to remember a time when you needed him when your mother died. You owe it to him to be there, Lisa!’

‘I can’t just leave like that. I need time,’ she pleaded.

‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours,’ Rorke announced tautly, preparing to leave. ‘And your answer had better be yes! You’ve a week to get yourselves fixed up with inoculations, etc., and then we’ll fly out to St Martin’s together.’

Lisa followed him out into the hall, too bemused to question his assumption of authority.

‘Oh, and by the way, Lisa,’ he paused and turned, the dim light in the hall concealing his expression from her. ‘In answer to your earlier question, as my WIFE. You return to St Martins as my wife.’

‘And Robbie,’ Lisa protested. ‘What…’

‘You are my wife, so it follows that Robbie could be my child, and we’ll leave it at that, Lisa. It will please my father if nothing else.’

‘But…’

‘But we both know that can’t be so; that you could never have had a child of mine, don’t we?’ he asked savagely. ‘But no one else knows that, do they, Lisa? Even Mike assumed that I had enjoyed my matrimonial rights.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘I could never understand what spell you’d worked on him. He was your lover and yet he seemed to accept that you’d married me; he even accepted that he didn’t have exclusive rights to your favours. How old is… is the child?’ he demanded suddenly.

‘Five, Robbie is nearly five.’ Her mouth had gone dry, and she saw from his expression that he had made his own valuation. ‘Mike’s child, the child you were carrying when you married me!’ he said softly, adding savagely, ‘God damn you to hell, Lisa,’ as he opened the door and walked through it.

Only when he had gone did Lisa move, going automatically upstairs to where Robbie slept in his bed. His little-boy face in sleep had an innocence and purity that tugged at her heartstrings. Mike’s child, Rorke had said, and he had flung the words at her like an accusation, but Robbie wasn’t Mike’s child, he was Rorke’s son, although Rorke himself would never believe it, would never even believe that they had been lovers! It was only after he had gone that Lisa realised that Rorke had left his gloves behind. She recoiled from their touch as she picked them up, wishing he had never come back into her life, as she prepared for bed.

She had first realised she loved him when she was sixteen; the year her mother had died and Leigh had brought her home from England.

She still had a vivid memory of her arrival at St Martin’s. They had flown British Airways to St Lucia and from there BIWA to the island, the small inter-island plane dipping low over the azure silk of the Caribbean before landing on what was virtually a levelled-out piece of ground close to the main house.

In those days it had been Leigh and not Rorke who looked after their complicated business interests; including the stake the family held in a chain of luxury hotels dotted through the Caribbean.

On St Martins, though, there was no hotel, only the graceful colonnaded Great House built during the sugar-rich years of the eighteen-hundreds when the family had sent their sons and daughters to London and had thought nothing of commissioning every luxury under the sun to be shipped out to their own small empire.

Leigh’s family had been fortunate and wise enough to make good investments, and so, unlike many of their neighbours on the other islands, there was no need for them to sell out.

As she had done the moment she first set foot on the island at the age of six following her mother’s marriage to Leigh, Lisa had felt a surge of pleasure as she stepped out of the plane; a feeling of homecoming so intense that for a few seconds it completely obliterated the pain of losing her mother.

Mama Case, who ruled the household with a rod of iron and who had been Leigh’s nurse and Rorke’s after him, had opened her arms and Lisa had run straight into them. It had been an emotional homecoming. Her mother had been more popular with the native staff than Rorke’s French mother, who, so Lisa gathered from them, had never ceased pining for the sophistication of Paris.

It was only later, adult herself and a mother, that Lisa had wondered if Rorke had perhaps resented her mother taking the place of his. If so, he had never betrayed it. Too old to adopt her mother as his own when the marriage took place, he had nevertheless developed a warm and affectionate relationship with her, just as she had with Leigh.

Her own father had died when she was six months old—meningitis, her mother had told her, but Lisa suspected that her mother’s love for Leigh was far deeper than the emotion she had felt for her first husband.

In their mutual grief it was only natural that she and Leigh should draw even closer together, but she hadn’t realised how much until Mama Case told her gently one evening that they were shutting Rorke out.