Injured Innocent

‘No, you don’t. You just want to take them away from me.’

Her voice was high and strained, hysteria edging in under her self-control. She could see Joel looking at her, and she could feel his anger.

‘Don’t be such a bloody fool,’ he flung at her. ‘You seem to be developing a persecution complex where I’m concerned, Lissa. Oh yes,’ he gritted grimly watching her with cold eyes. ‘I’m well aware of the extraordinary lengths you go to avoid my company. I know quite well that Amanda had strict instructions never to invite you to the house when there was any chance that I might be around. Just what have I ever done to warrant such antipathy Lissa. Tell me?’

She shrugged lightly, struggling for self-control. It seemed impossible that the events that were burned so painfully into her memory should not exist for him. But perhaps it was safer for her that he did not remember, she told herself, her nerve endings jumping tensely when the next minute, he said with silky softness, ‘Or can I guess? Does all this haughty disdain you exhibit towards me spring from the fact that I once caught you in bed with your boyfriend?’

The brilliant wave of scarlet flooding her skin gave her away, and she watched his mouth twist in wry mockery, hating him with all the intense passion of her nature when he drawled tauntingly, ‘You should be grateful that you were stopped when you were. A teenage pregnancy is no fun …’

God, how she hated him, Lissa thought feeling the nauseous loathing rise up inside her. She wanted to scream and cry … to tear that smooth smile from his face with her nails. She hated him … hated him … Her attention was deflected from her own inner turmoil when she heard Joel saying calmly, ‘No Lissa, I don’t think the best thing for the girls is for them to be constantly shuttled between us, as though we were divorced parents. Children, especially children such as Louise and Emma who had already suffered the loss of their parents, need security and stability, and in an attempt to give them both, I’ve decided that what I need is not a nanny, but a wife.’

Lissa could only stare at him, but hard on the heels of her shock came the knowledge that if he did marry, she would lose her nieces, because surely a judge was bound to favour the suit of a man who had not only wealth but also a wife, above the claims of a girl, struggling alone on a little more than adequate salary.

‘No comment?’ she heard Joel saying, the words reaching her through a fog of thoughts. ‘You don’t want to know the identity of my wife-to-be?’

‘Why should I?’ Lissa managed to croak the denial. ‘It’s nothing to do with me?’

‘On the contrary,’ Joel assured her with smooth silkiness. ‘It has everything to do with you my dear. You see, I’ve decided that the very best solution to Louise and Emma’s problem would be for you and I to marry thus uniting both their guardians and providing them with a stable background.’

Lissa barely heard his last words. ‘You and I …?’ She stared at him, the colour leaving her face on an ebb tide of shock. ‘No, I …’

‘Lissa, neither of us are foolish teenagers any longer.’

‘We don’t love one another … we don’t even like one another,’ Lissa interrupted harshly. ‘How can you even think of a marriage between us?’

‘Oh quite easily.’ He was smiling at her in a way that told her that little though he might like her, he found the shape of her sexually desirable. Shock hit her on a tidal wave, swamping her. Joel desired her.

‘You see,’ he mocked her softly, ‘we could have a lot more in common than you think. There is no need for our marriage to be a sterile one Lissa. On the contrary …’

Lissa felt as though she were drowning in some whirlpool far too frenzied for her to fight. ‘But you’ve always avoided marriage,’ she whispered huskily, ‘I remember Amanda once saying that she thought you’d never marry.’

‘At one time I thought that myself,’ he agreed laconically, ‘but that was before John died.’

‘And if I refuse …?’ What did she mean ‘if’. Of course she was going to refuse … but a thought had taken possession of her brain … the seed of an idea, that at last she might have found a way to make Joel pay for all the agony and shame he had caused her.

‘Then I’ll have to look around for someone else,’ he told her calmly. ‘Make no mistake about it Lissa. For the girls’ sake I intend to marry. I should prefer that my wife is you, but if you refuse, then I shall simply marry someone else.’

‘And I’ll lose the girls.’ She breathed the words softly, but he heard them and shrugged.

‘The choice is yours. I’m not, after all, asking you to make any sacrifice I’m not prepared to make myself. We’ll both be giving up our freedom … and one thing more Lissa.’ He came towards her standing only feet away, but making no move to reach out and touch her. She felt almost suffocated by his proximity but refused to step back, making herself endure it. ‘Our marriage will not be an empty legal bond only, but very real, in every sense of the word.’

‘But I don’t want you.’ She said it through stiff lips forcing them to frame the words, half of her praying that he would take back his proposal; and the other half, the bitter, angry half hoping that he would not.

‘How can you know that,’ he taunted softly. ‘We haven’t been lovers yet.’

Nor ever will be, the bitter half of her exulted. Let him marry her … let him think he was going to have it all his own way, but when she lay in his bed and in his arms she would be as cold as ice; as devoid of the ability to give and take pleasure as she had always been, since he had destroyed the feminine core of her. Ignoring all the urgings of common sense Lissa faced him, praying that he wouldn’t see the bitterness in her eyes, and that he wouldn’t guess exactly why she was marrying him. He was using her affection for the girls to force her into this marriage … a marriage she was sure that would not stop him continuing with his many affairs, but what he did not know was that she was also going to use him … as the instrument of her revenge.

‘Very well Joel … I agree to marry you.’

She was surprised to see the heated flicker of triumph burn dark gold in his eyes. He took a step towards her and she backed away, but before either of them could speak the door burst open and the elder of their nieces came rushing in.

‘Auntie Lissa … Auntie Lissa … I heard you talking.’ The petite four year old ran up to Lissa, clinging tightly to her legs, the blonde head buried in her skirt. ‘Are you going to stay here for ever,’ Louise demanded when Lissa bent down to pick her up. ‘I want you to … so does Emma …’

‘Yes, Louise, she’s going to stay here for ever,’ Lissa heard Joel saying from a distance, and just for a moment she felt a twinge of apprehension at the deep note of triumph in his voice, but then she banished it, telling herself she was imagining things. She was the one who should be feeling triumphant. She had got her nieces, and she had also got the means of repaying Joel for all the years of anguish and pain he had caused her. He might think their marriage was going to be a ‘normal’ one, but she knew different.

CHAPTER THREE

LISSA WOKE UP the next morning feeling totally disorientated; initially by the strangeness of her room, and then by the huge weight of depression which seemed to have descended upon her out of nowhere. And then she remembered.

She had agreed to marry Joel! She closed her eyes and groaned, her head falling back against her pillow. How could she have been so stupid? She would have to tell him she had changed her mind. It was her own silly temper and pride that had led into folly; the old burning anger cum anguish she always experienced whenever she was with him. Why oh why after all these years, should Joel still be the one whose contempt and rejection of her hurt so badly? Was it because he had been the one to thrust open that bedroom door and see her? Was it because somehow in her innermost mind she had because of that confused him in some way with her father? They were questions Lissa could not answer; all she did know was that whenever she came in contact with him she was reminded of the way he had looked at her that night … and how for one weak minute she had longed to cry out to him to understand and forgive her … Shivering faintly despite the centrally heated warmth of her bedroom, she was just contemplating how best to tell him that she had changed her mind and that she was certainly not prepared to marry him; even for the sake of her nieces when the door burst open and the two little girls rushed in, both still in their nightdresses.

Louise reached her first, flinging herself on to the bed and cuddling up next to her. Emma, still very much a toddler needed a helping hand, but there was no mistaking the enthusiasm in her hug when she was finally on the bed with Lissa and her sister.

‘You’re going to marry Uncle Joel and then you’ll be our new mummy and daddy,’ Louise announced importantly.

Lissa’s heart sank. She felt trapped and desperate. How could she have been so crazy as to allow those old hurts to trap her into her present position. It seemed mediaeval and archaic now, in the cold clear light of a February morning that she should actually have contemplated marrying Joel, simply to even punish him for the pain he had once caused her. That was all over and done with now. But Joel … why did he want to marry her?

That was simple Lissa told herself; he wanted someone to look after the children who was not going to walk out on him. If she backed out she would lose the girls, Lissa reminded herself, looking at the two blonde heads, nestled together against her warmth. As she watched them, a melting, aching wave of love for them suffused her. If she didn’t marry Joel, he would find someone who would and the girls would be lost to her for ever. Could she endure that? Looking at them Lissa knew she could not. This deeply maternal feeling she felt towards them was something she had always kept well hidden from others. Only Amanda had been aware of it, wryly amused by her sister’s passionate love for her daughters, warning Lissa that when she married she would soon discover the drawbacks to being a mother. ‘You want them because this way you can satisfy your mothering instincts without having to endure someone’s lovemaking’, an inner voice warned her, but Lissa refused to listen, her fingers curling slightly into the bedclothes as she tried to deny the thoughts. Whose fault was it that she froze every time a man touched her she asked herself, trying to whip up some of the anger she had that had consumed her last night. Not hers!

Her bedroom door opened again, and she blinked in stunned disbelief as Joel strolled in carrying a breakfast tray, which he put down on the table by the bed.

‘Who said you two could come in here?’ he demanded of the girls, ruffling the blonde curls and drawing stifled giggles form Louise.

‘You and Lissa are going to be our new mummy and daddy, aren’t you?’ Louise demanded importantly of him, and yet Lissa could see that beyond the child’s self-importance was a shadow of uncertainty and fear, and all her inner arguments against what they were doing melted. If for no other reason surely the sacrifice demanded of her was not too great when she thought of what it would mean to the girls. Joel was right; they needed the security and stability of a proper family unit, and if she didn’t marry him, Joel would stand by his threat to find someone who would. She loved them too much to let someone else take her place with them, Lissa knew, and as she raised stormy hazel eyes to meet the mocking gold of Joel’s, she knew that he had faithfully monitored each and every single thought that had passed through her head since he walked in the room.