Savage Atonement

‘Leggy’ was how her grandmother had been wont to describe her, and at five foot eight, Laurel did have a length of leg that smaller girls openly envied. Indignation flashed in her eyes as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw their new client bend towards the floor, supposedly to remove some papers form the briefcase he had placed there, but Laurel knew that she was the focus of his attention, and a dark, smouldering anger burned up inside her; her voice was icy with dislike as she asked him whether he preferred milk or lemon in his tea.

He lifted his head and turned towards her, and Laurel felt the blood draining from her face, a low buzzing sound in her ears. It couldn’t be… but it was… every single detail of that face was burned into her mind with acid; there was no way she could forget or mistake it.

From a distance she heard Mr Marshall saying her name testily, and from somewhere she found the strength of will to lift the cup and saucer, proffering it to the man who called himself Jonathan Graves, but whom she knew by the name of Oliver Savage. And he had recognised her. She had seen it momentarily in his eyes before he had concealed his shock. She was bitterly glad that he had been shocked; what had he expected, or had he simply dismissed her from his mind, after he had destroyed her and left her feeling that death would be a merciful release from the only alternative life now offered her.

‘Sit down, Laurel,’ Mr Marshall instructed her when she had passed him his tea. ‘Mr Graves, or Mr Savage, as I believe he prefers to be called, would like to take away with him some brief notes on our discussion. Mr Savage, as you may know, is a writer,’ he explained pedantically. ‘He has been living and working abroad for some time, writing under the pen-name of Jonathan Graves, but he now intends to return to this country and is seeking advice as regards tax matters.’

Jonathan Graves and Oliver Savage, one and the same man; what sort of books did he write? Laurel’s lips curled fastidiously. She could make a fair guess. They would be tainted with the same sort of sensationalism he had brought to his work as a journalist. Men like him shouldn’t be allowed to write, to condition the minds of others with their skilfully manipulative lies. Truth to them was simply something to be twisted and warped until it was a broken unrecognisable thing, just as she.…

Only the superhuman strength of will that had carried her through the last six years enabled her to sit down and make notes of the discussion that ensued between her employer and Oliver Savage. Although she refused to betray it, she was aware of every nuance of his voice, every inflection behind the words. The sickness she had experienced on first seeing him so unexpectedly had faded, leaving in its place an anguished fear. What if he should try to talk to her, to.… But no, she couldn’t bear that. All the time her pencil skimmed busily over the lined paper of her shorthand notebook her thoughts collided and entwined, writhing formlessly like snakes inside her head, confusing and bewildering her. She had deliberately angled her chair so that she wouldn’t have to look at him, and it came as a shock, when she raised her head for a momentary respite, to discover that he had shifted his and that he was searching her face, as though he wanted to lay bare the bones beneath the skin and delve into the secret recesses of her mind. He had always instilled fear in her, but now her fear was greater. It gripped her, stifling her, tensing her body, leaving her face pale and her eyes strained.

It was a relief when Mr Marshall started speaking again and she was free to bend over the notebook, blotting out the image of his face. A sexy face, Sally had called it on more than one occasion, when trying to persuade her to study his dust jackets. She hadn’t been interested enough to even glance at them—an omission she regretted now, because had she done so she would have been prepared for this meeting, would in fact have been able to avoid it. He moved, the long line of his thigh intruding on her vision. Sickness clawed at her stomach, and her fingers slackened over the pencil, so that it slid from them on to the floor.

They both bent to retrieve it together, and because his arm was the longer, expensively encased in dark suiting, a gleaming white shirt cuff circling the sinewy masculine wrist, he reached it first, his arm brushing against the exposed flesh of Laurel’s for the merest fraction of a second—but it was long enough to have her cringing away from him, her eyes dark with terror and loathing, emotions which he registered with hooded grey eyes before handing her her pencil.

He had not changed, Laurel thought sickeningly, or if he had it was simply to become more intensely male, even more dominant and powerful. She had sensed the power in him right from the first; sensed and feared it, and because of what had gone before her rawly scraped nerves had responded badly to it, and because of that he had trapped her in the nightmare web of questions he had thrown at her. Questions which had eventually destroyed her and killed her mother, while he and.…

With an almost physical effort she wrenched her thoughts away from the past and back to the present. Why should he have changed, after all? Six years in the life of a man of twenty-seven were hardly likely to have the same cataclysmic effect as six years tacked on to the life of a girl of fifteen, for whom they represented a flowering and growing such as she would never experience again. Only Laurel had never experienced that flowering; it had withered and died. In six short months she had grown from a child to a woman, with a burden of knowledge she had found too heavy to carry. Mechanically she took down Mr Marshall’s careful speech. Sally was always complaining that working for Marshall and Marshall was dull and boring, but Laurel didn’t find it so. To her it represented security and safety, just as her old-fashioned clothes and primly repressive appearance did. Once, like Sally, she had delighted in pretty clothes and even tentative experimenting with make-up. But all her femininity had been frozen inside her and nothing could ever thaw it now.

She was glad when Mr Marshall signified that she could leave. There had been a look in Oliver Savage’s eyes when he recognised her that she remembered; a questioning, searching look that said that he wouldn’t simply leave matters where they stood. Perhaps he was no longer an investigative reporter; but he had obviously never lost the instinct of hounding people; of questioning and badgering them until they gave him what he wanted, just as she had done.… But he would never get the opportunity to question her again. He had destroyed her once, and the woman who had emerged from the ashes of that destruction was impervious to the Oliver Savages of this world.

‘Goodness, you look pale—are you all right?’ Sally questioned when she emerged into her own office. When Laurel nodded her head, she added in a more enthusiastic tone, ‘Well, come on, tell me all about him. Is he as incredibly sexy close up as he is in his pictures?’

‘I didn’t look.’

Sally grimaced, obviously not surprised by the lie. And it was a lie, for she had looked, searching that all male face for some tinge of compassion or regret, but there had been none. Only arrogant maleness.

‘I suppose they’ll be in there hours yet,’ Sally protested, ‘You know what old Marshall’s like once he gets going. Have you got much to do?’

‘Only these notes. They shouldn’t take long. I’m leaving early tonight,’ Laurel announced, averting her face so that Sally wouldn’t guess how sudden this decision was. ‘I’ll leave the notes on my desk before I go, but I’m going to have to rush.’

‘Okay, I get the message,’ Sally told her, taking the hint and sliding off her desk. ‘It’s time I was rounding up the mail anyway.’

Once she had gone Laurel concentrated on typing back her shorthand, glad of the solitude of her office which offered no outside distractions. It took her just over an hour, and towards the end of it she was holding her breath as she raced to get the work finished before the meeting inside her boss’s office came to a close. Some deep instinct was urging her to get away, to leave the office before Oliver Savage walked in and found her there. Savage by name and savage by nature, she thought numbly. And she had been savaged once by his merciless talent for destruction, she wasn’t going to let it happen again.

She had just pulled the last sheet from her machine, and was reaching for the cover, when Sally suddenly burst in, her curls tangled, a smudge of ink on one cheek.

‘Thank goodness you haven’t gone!’ she exclaimed. ‘Laurel, it’s the photocopier. The wretched thing just won’t work, and John Lever wants a dozen copies of some document running off before I leave. He wants to send them out in tonight’s post.…’

‘I’ll come and have a look at it.’

Laurel was halfway down the corridor before she remembered that she had left her handbag in her office and that she would have to go back for it. She hesitated, and Sally, suddenly impatient, grasped her arm, tugging her towards the general office. ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘He’s going mad with me, you know what he’s like’.

It took longer than Laurel had anticipated to find the problem—a piece of paper jammed inside the copier, but eventually she managed to get it working again, and at Sally’s insistence remained at her side while it ran off a dozen perfect copies of the requisite document.

Her hand was on the door of her office when she heard voices inside, and she was just about to retreat when Mr Marshall opened it, his frown relaxing as he saw her.

‘Ah, Laurel, I was just telling Oliver that it isn’t like you to leave early. You’ve done the notes?’

Skirting her desk and carefully avoiding so much as glancing at the tall male figure standing by the window, Laurel proffered the typescript to her boss. Her handbag was by her desk, and she reached for it, her voice hesitant as she asked if she might leave.

Mr Marshall looked slightly surprised at such unusual behaviour on the part of his perfect secretary. The phone rang before he replied and Laurel answered it. It was Mrs Marshall, and her boss excused himself to Oliver Savage to take the call in his own office.

Hastily grabbing her handbag, Laurel made for the door, but inexplicably Oliver Savage was there before, her, blocking her exit.

‘Laurel… it is you, isn’t it?’

His eyes held her mesmerised, unable either to deny or accept his question.

‘I want to talk to you. I’ll drive you home.’

‘No!’

The word jerked past her lips, her eyes dilating in her pale face.

The grey eyes narrowed, studying her slowly, missing nothing of her clothes or appearance. Like someone on the threshold of a nightmare Laurel saw his hand reach out to her, touching her face. She cringed back, seeing but not understanding the hardening of his mouth.

‘You’ve got a smudge on your face. Ink.’

He turned his hand towards her, showing her the ink on his own fingers from the contact with her skin.

‘It’s the photocopier. I.…’ I must get out of here, her mind screamed wildly, but she managed to subdue the impulse to give way to her emotions. Emotions trapped and betrayed. She had learned that lesson by now, surely? She had learned that screaming and panic achieved nothing, and coldly incisive questioning and lies all.

Laurel?’

The warmly tender way he said her name sickened her. He had said it like that before… before.

‘I must talk to you.…’

‘No!’

It was a low animal cry of pain, regretted as soon as she had uttered it, and she saw from the sudden darkening of his eyes that Oliver Savage had registered it.

She heard the faint click as Mr Marshall replaced his receiver and came out to join them. Quickly picking up her bag, she hurried towards the door, and then to her horror she heard Oliver Savage drawling coolly, ‘You’ll excuse us if we rush off, Marshall, but I’ve promised to give your secretary a lift. It seems she has an important date this evening.’

Mr Marshall positively goggled, and if she had been in a mood to appreciate it, Laurel must have been struck with the humour of the situation. Mr Marshall was plainly not used to thinking that his secretary might have a life outside the firm that she was anxious to run home to every night. Instead, she stammered a bitter protest, stifled beneath the coolly measured tones of Oliver Savage’s voice as he murmured something about getting in touch and studying the notes, and then, her arm in his imprisoning grip Laurel was forced to endure the disbelieving stares of the girls in reception as she was marched past them and out into the late autumn evening.

Once outside she tried to tug herself free, anger lending a faint colour to her otherwise pale face.

‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed angrily at her captor. ‘I have no intention of going anywhere with you or saying anything to you.…’

‘Well, at least that’s an improvement on the ice-cold maiden I saw back in that office. It’s a relief to know you’re not entirely subhuman, Laurel.’

‘Is it?’ Her wrist was caught in his free hand, the intimate contact of his flesh against hers shocking her into silence. No man had touched her since… since.… She made a small whimper of protest in the back of her throat, her eyes giving away more than she knew.

‘Don’t touch me!’ She got the words out between clenched teeth, surprised to see how white he had gone.

‘You don’t like being touched, do you, Laurel?’ he asked with quiet emphasis, reading his answer in the sudden tightening of her features. ‘Dear God! I’ve been looking for you for five years, do you know that?’