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.’‘Leave me to you?’ Katherine turned to him as soon as the nurse had left the room.‘Leave me to you? I would rather be left to a pit of vipers.The last time I saw you, you informed me that you never wanted to lay eyes on me again.Now you turn up here and start giving orders and you expect me…you expect me to just fall in with you?’ She was so angry that she had to stop speaking, because she knew that anything she said would just degenerate into a series of inarticulate splutters.And she hadn’t even got round to the topic of Gail whatever-her-last-name-was as yet.‘Yes.’ He didn’t elaborate on that.He just scooped her off the bed, deposited her on to the wheelchair, eyed her grey cardigan and tracksuit bottoms dubiously, and asked, ‘Will you be warm enough in that?’‘Dominic,’ she said, ‘why are you doing this?’ She wished that she was more mobile, mobile enough to head off down the hospital corridor at a running pace, so fast that he would never catch up with her.‘Do you feel guilty? Because the last time you saw me we parted in anger, and now here I am, bedbound? Is that it?’‘Don’t be stupid,’ he muttered under his breath.He took her coat and placed it over her legs.‘Stop telling me not to be stupid!’‘Stop arguing with me.You won’t win.I’ve come to take you home and nothing you say is going to stop me.’She felt a curious excitement spread through her at the way he said that, in that darkly, angrily possessive voice, and she just as quickly resented her wayward emotions.For a moment, she had felt a wild surge of hope fill her, and hope was something she never wanted to feel in her life again.Hope ignored too many unavoidable questions; it ignored his real feelings towards her, the dislike, the disillusionment, and it ignored the woman he was now seeing, making love to and—who knew?—perhaps even falling in love with.So she maintained a tight-lipped silence through the formalities of departure and in the car, which was chauffeur-driven and waiting outside the hospital for her, and was only swamped in confusion once again as the car drew up outside his house and she was lifted inside, even though she informed Dominic that she could walk, that she wasn’t a complete invalid.‘You can be a maddening person,’ he said, placing her on the sofa in the living-room and then sitting next to her, so close that her breathing became all erratic.‘I can’t stay here,’ she answered, lowering her eyes.‘You can’t stay anywhere else,’ he muttered.‘I’ve discovered that not having you around is bad for my health.’Hope reared its head again and she fought it down, but it was getting harder.There was a look in his eyes that was telling her things that he wasn’t saying with his mouth and that she desperately didn’t want to believe.‘I’ve been a fool,’ he said.‘I was a fool to let you walk out six years ago; I was a fool not to have raced back to try and find you.’She didn’t think that she could say anything even if she wanted to, which she didn’t.‘When you turned me away, I felt as though my world had collapsed.I’d never let myself get close to anyone the way I’d let myself get close to you, and when you told me that it had all been a game, that there was someone else involved, I could have killed you.I went back to France and did the worst possible thing.I got involved with someone else, and then everything that followed was just a series of complications.’ He pressed his thumbs against his eyes and sighed.‘The marriage was a farce from the word go, and at the end of it I was left with such a bitter taste in my mouth when it came to women that I never stopped to wonder how it was that for all that time I still kept on thinking about you.You just hung around like a miasma.’‘It all went wrong,’ Katherine said, with a wonderful, frightening feeling of standing on the edge of a precipice.‘I’m so sorry I never told you the truth, Dominic, but it was so very hard.When I went to London, I never thought that I would become involved with anyone.You weren’t a situation that I courted.’‘I know that,’ he said heavily.He traced his finger along her collarbone and her skin tingled where he touched it.‘I don’t think I let myself see the dangers.I was just so happy, really for the very first time in my entire life.I felt as though I had chanced upon the secret of the universe and I forgot everything for a while.I forgot about the death-sentence hanging over my head, or at any rate I shoved it to the back of my mind until I couldn’t keep it there any longer, but I couldn’t tell you, Dominic.I suppose partly that was for selfish reasons, but mostly it was because I wanted to spare you.Afterwards, when I returned here and read that letter and had to readjust all my perspectives, I realised that ours was a relationship that was not meant to be.I thought that you had fallen in love with someone who didn’t really exist and that if you saw me, saw me for what I really was, which was a very ordinary person with very ordinary hang-ups, then you would run a mile.And I couldn’t bear the thought of that, of your disillusionment.’‘Oh, Katherine.’ Two words that made her heart soar.He undid the buttons of her cardigan, then unclasped her bra at the front and drew it aside, and his finger trailed over her breast in ever-decreasing circles until he was touching the hard nub of her nipple, although his eyes were still focused on hers.‘When you told me the reasons why you had left,’ he murmured in a voice that was barely audible, ‘I was angry.I had somehow convinced myself that, after you said that there had been no man involved, the reasons left, by some weird process of elimination, must be simple.I thought that you left me because you had felt at the time that you couldn’t cope.Do you know, when I saw you again at that school, I managed to tell myself that I was still deeply angry with you, but the need to see you became compulsive? Just knowing that you were around, in the area, drove me mad.I couldn’t get you out of my head, and then, slowly, when you began disclosing bits of your past, I thought I had it all worked out.I thought you had walked out on me all that time ago because of insecurities which went back into your childhood, and that made me feel stupidly better.’He stopped what he was doing and looked her directly in the eyes, and then he said, ‘You may know that I love you, but I can never tell you just how much.’Katherine didn’t say anything.She had fallen off the precipice but, instead of hurtling down, she was high up in the clouds, floating in a land she had only ever dreamt of.‘You love me?’ she asked hesitantly, and he threw her a dry grimace.‘Always and forever.I just never stopped.’ His eyes roamed over her body.‘I was stupid and blind.’ He threw her a sheepish look.‘I even made the mistake of thinking that I could replace you with someone else.A most unappealing woman called Gail, who did everything she could to try and convince me that she could become indispensable if only I’d let her.’She had been waiting for him to mention her, debating in her mind whether she should spoil the magic of the moment with questions, or whether she shouldn’t simply let the matter rest and wait for it to crop up in the natural course of things
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