A Little Revenge Omnibus (28 page)

Anna didn’t know; all she did know was that her emotional response to him was so strong that it defied all logic. Her body, so sensitively attuned to his touch, was already responding to him and she simply didn’t have the willpower to stop it.

And anyway, what was the point? she asked herself in aching resignation as he gently kissed her mouth, his hand slipping from her arm to her breast.

Why not add this one last memory to the others she already had? Why not really punish herself for her stupidity, her vulnerability, by giving in to the longing she could feel flooding her body like a form of sweetly venomous death?

With a small, painful sigh Anna turned towards Ward.

‘Mmm...’

Bleakly she felt the warmth of his body enveloping her as he nuzzled the soft, tender flesh of her throat.

She put out a hand defensively. Beneath it she could feel the fine silk of his body hair. Her heart started to beat very fast; in a way it was almost as she had imagined drowning might be, easier to succumb, to give in than to try to fight feelings which only grew stronger with every breath she took.

‘Oh, but I’ve missed you,’ she heard Ward telling her throatily. ‘These last few nights without you here, beside me.’

Anna forbore to mention that it had been his decision that they should sleep apart.

She gave an involuntary shudder as his thumb tip caressed her nipple... Immediately he bent his head and kissed it gently, and then less gently, until Anna was writhing achingly against him, powerless to stem the hot flood of feeling that roared through her like a forest fire. Her body, aware now of the pleasure he could give it, was way, way, beyond the control of her mind, her own desire, her own love a force that defied any kind of logic she tried to use to rein it in.

Instinctively she reached out to touch him, her body melting with pleasure as she felt his taut shudder of response. He might hate her, resent her, despise her, but he still wanted her. The savagely bitter shaft of acid pleasure that knowledge brought her told Anna just how destructive her feelings were, and as though to reinforce her own anger against herself she deliberately stroked her fingertips down the length of his body, touching him more boldly and more intimately than she had previously done without his own encouragement.

If she had expected Ward to stop her or withdraw himself from her she had been wrong. Instead he seemed to positively revel in the bold control she had taken of their lovemaking, groaning hoarsely deep in his throat, his eyes opening wide as he focused on her face.

‘That feels so good,’ he told her rawly. He was breathing heavily, his body filming with a light sweat that smelled mustily erotic. To Anna, who had always known she was almost a little too fastidious, the knowledge that her instinct was to bury her face against him and breathe in the pheromone-charged sensuality he was exuding was almost, in its way, more shocking than knowing how much she wanted him, how much her own disobedient, wanton body ached for the culmination of his lovemaking.

Beneath the soft pads of her fingertips his erection felt hard and muscular. Even without looking at him she knew how he would look, could remember the inexperienced awe with which she had first observed his body. Ralph’s body had been that of a very young man, albeit firm and well-muscled. Ward possessed a much more raw and potent masculinity, a man fully grown in every sense of the word, Anna acknowledged as she explored and then caressed him with her fingers.

If so far in their ‘relationship’ she had taken from him a pleasure she had had no right to have, then now, tonight, she intended to repay that debt in full. Her sense of pride and honour demanded it.

In the darkness Ward moaned softly.

‘I shouldn’t be letting you do this,’ he told her softly. ‘I should be the one...’

‘I want to do it,’ Anna told him truthfully. This way at least she had some control over herself—and over him. What she didn’t want to admit to herself was that there was a sharply sweet pleasure for her in what she was doing, in knowing she was giving him pleasure. Her own body was even reacting to it, responding to it, as though it too had been aroused and caressed.

‘No, Anna, no more,’ she heard Ward begging her gruffly as he took hold of her hand and gently removed it from himself, at the same time drawing her down against him and kissing her with open-mouthed passion.

Unable to stop herself from responding, Anna clung to him.

She wasn’t sure which of them it was who was trembling the harder now, Ward or herself. She only knew that her body barely needed the assistance he gave it as he moulded it to his own, and it certainly needed neither coaxing nor teaching to accommodate the urgent thrust of his flesh against her own. If anything her body was even more sensitively responsive to him than it had been before, quickening, tightening even with his first eager movement into it. Somewhere, at the back of her mind, Anna knew she was in the very gravest danger and that it was wrong for her to feel so complete, so at one with a man with whom she could not possibly have any future. The beauty of what they were creating together was nothing more than a sham and deception. The agonised pleasure she could hear in Ward’s voice was just another lie, like the love words he was whispering to her now as their bodies trembled in dizzy release.

‘I love you, Anna,’ he told her huskily as he cupped her face and kissed her. ‘I love you.’

* * *

A
NNA
WAITED
UNTIL
she was sure he was fast asleep before carefully sliding out of his bed. She knew what she had to do. Downstairs in the kitchen Whittaker and Missie were sleeping in their baskets and Ward’s car keys were on the table. It was almost as though fate had at long last decided to help her.

Anna’s final act after she had loaded her pets and her suitcase into Ward’s car was to pull out her chequebook. Five thousand pounds was a lot of money to give away in payment of a debt she didn’t even know about but it would be worth it. With the cheque she left a brief note:

‘I’ve remembered everything. I shall leave your car at York station and post the keys back to you. This cheque repays the money you believe I owe your half-brother. Last night repays any debt I might have owed you.’

As she climbed into Ward’s car and started it she blessed the manufacturer for its near-silent engine. There was no chance, of course, that Ward would come after her or try to get in touch with her.

All she had to face now was her friends at home. What a pity Mary Charles had had to call round when she had, but even harder to live with than her friends’ curiosity would be her own shame and pain.

* * *

W
ARD
WOKE
UP
at first light, automatically reaching for Anna. When he discovered she wasn’t there he waited for a few minutes, thinking initially she might be in the bathroom, and then, when there was no sign of her, he threw back the bedclothes and hurried downstairs.

He saw her note at the same time as he realised that the animals and their baskets had gone.

As he picked it up and read it, the blood left his face. His hand trembled as he picked up Anna’s cheque, but it was the line she had written about repayment of any debt she might have owed him that he concentrated on most.

He glanced at the clock. Half past six. If she had driven to York that must mean she intended to go home by train. With a fast car he could be there before her. But he didn’t have a fast car; he didn’t have any car.

Cursing under his breath, he froze as the telephone rang abruptly. As he reached for the receiver his heart slammed fiercely against his chest. It could only be Anna; it had to be, ringing at this time. She must have realised, had a change of heart. But the tearful woman on the other end of the line wasn’t Anna, it was his mother.

‘Ward, it’s Alfred; he’s in hospital with a suspected heart attack. Oh, Ward, I’m so afraid for him.’

‘Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll be with you as soon as I can,’ Ward assured his mother.

He would have to ring the local taxi firm and get them to drive him to York. Where the hell were his spare car keys? In his desk drawer!

The last thing he did before he left the house was to tear up Anna’s note—and her cheque.

CHAPTER TEN

‘I
TAKE
IT
there’s still no word from Anna?’ Dee asked crisply. She and Beth and Kelly were seated upstairs in the flat above the shop. Dee had only arrived home late the previous evening in response to Kelly’s anxious telephone call about Anna’s disappearance.

‘Nothing,’ Beth responded.

With a wary look in Beth’s direction Kelly asked uncertainly, ‘Dee, do you think this man Mary saw her with could have anything to do with Julian Cox?’

‘With Julian? Why should he have?’ Beth asked sharply.

Warningly Dee shook her head at Kelly. They had agreed that there was no point in adding to the distress Beth had suffered over Julian’s treatment of her by telling her what they had planned to do.

‘Julian tried to borrow money from Anna,’ Dee answered calmly. It was, after all, true.

Beth looked shocked.

‘Oh, but surely that doesn’t mean...’ She stopped, and then whispered shakily, ‘You don’t really think that Julian might have done something to hurt Anna, do you?’

‘He didn’t think twice when it came to hurting you, did he?’ Dee reminded her caustically.

‘Does anyone know where he’s gone?’ Beth asked worriedly. She had hardly given Julian Cox a thought since her return from Prague. Her infatuation with him and the pain he had caused her seemed unimportant now.

When was she going to hear from the factory about her crystal? She had invested far more than she could really afford in the consignment of crystal she had bought, recklessly almost quadrupling her original order, and she had used every spare bit of capital both she and Kelly had to pay for it in defiance of a warning to her that she would be well advised to give her business to the factory he had recommended to her. Did he really think she was so much of a fool? She’d known perfectly well that this man who’d been acting as her guide and interpreter was bound to be being paid by the factory owners—relatives of his—to direct potential business their way.

Her body tensed as she remembered how angry he had made her. Oh, but he had been so arrogant, so sure that he was right. She had been determined to show him that she didn’t need his advice, that she was a modern, independent woman. People were often deceived into thinking that, because her nature was essentially so gentle, Beth could be pushed around, but beneath that gentleness she possessed a fortifying streak of stubbornness. Alex had challenged her and she had met that challenge—more than met it. But at what personal cost...?

‘Beth!’

Guiltily she realised that Kelly was speaking to her and that she ought to be thinking about Anna and not her own problems.

‘I agree that Julian has behaved very badly, but if Anna has disappeared—’ She shook her head. ‘No, I can’t see him being involved in anything like that.’

Dee listened in silence. It was just as well that her aunt had been virtually recovered when she’d got Kelly’s phone call—she had been planning to return home later in the week anyway, and to come back a couple of days earlier hadn’t been any problem.

Beth might believe that Julian couldn’t be involved in Anna’s disappearance but she didn’t know him as well as Dee did, despite the fact that Beth and he had once been on the point of becoming engaged.

Julian had no regard for the feelings or the safety of others. His greed was such that he simply didn’t care who he hurt and harmed, or how. Despite all the enquiries she had made whilst she had been staying with her aunt, she had found no evidence of Julian’s whereabouts.

She had, at one stage, thought she had traced him as far as Hong Kong, which would make sense since she knew he had business dealings there, but if he was still there now there was certainly no official trace of him.

Could Anna have gone away with this mystery man Mary Charles had seen?

‘She could have,’ Beth answered, and Dee realised she had asked her question out loud. ‘But why hasn’t she told us about him if he is her lover? It’s just so out of character for her—and we’ve only Mary Charles’s word for it that they are—involved!’

‘If he isn’t her lover then who is he?’ Kelly asked practically.

‘The husband of one of her friends, perhaps?’ Beth suggested, her forehead pleating in a small frown. ‘Someone she had got round to do some work for her—a gardener or handyman, perhaps.’

‘Mmm... Mary was adamant that when Anna introduced him to her as a “friend” she meant friend with a capital
F.
’

‘Perhaps we are making too much fuss. Perhaps she just decided to go away for a few days without telling any of us,’ Beth offered, but she knew she sounded as unconvinced as she felt. Guiltily, she remembered that when she had last spoken to her godmother on the telephone she had been impatient to end the call. Perhaps if she hadn’t been Anna might have said something to her that would have given them some clue as to where she might be.

‘Her car’s still at the house,’ Kelly pointed out.

‘But Missie and Whittaker aren’t there, you said?’ Dee questioned her.

‘Well, I couldn’t see or hear them.’

‘Hmm... Well, it’s all very odd. You don’t think she could have gone to Cornwall to see your family, do you?’ she asked Beth.

Beth shook her head.

‘No, I rang home yesterday and I know that my mother would have said if Anna had been there. I didn’t ask her outright because I didn’t want to start worrying her; she and Anna have always been close.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Kelly asked the other two, but it was Dee she was looking at.

Dee pursed her lips.

‘If we haven’t heard anything by tonight, there’s only one thing we can do: we shall have to inform the police.’

‘You think it’s that serious, then, do you?’ Beth faltered. Dee’s eyes were bleak.

‘Possibly,’ was all she would allow herself to say.

Ten minutes later as she drove home, though, she was glad that Beth and Kelly couldn’t see into her mind and read her thoughts. She knew that Kelly was curious about why she, Dee, should hate Julian Cox so much, and she knew too that Kelly suspected that there was far more to her hatred of him than just his treatment of Beth.

And she was right.

But it was not Kelly but Anna whom Dee had been increasingly tempted to confide in and talk to about the private demons that drove her. Anna might lack Kelly’s vibrant immediate response to things but she possessed her own quiet brand of strength and sometimes Dee yearned to be able to lean on someone else’s.

She knew that people found her self-possessed and even a little challenging, but they didn’t know what had made her that way, nor why she had to be that way.

To confide in anyone, even Anna, would be to risk inflicting terrible damage on someone she had loved very, very dearly and there was no way she could do that, so the burden she had carried on her own for so long was one she would have to go on carrying, and if some people thought her hard and unfeeling, unfeminine, then so be it.

And now, of course, she had another burden to shoulder. If something had happened to Anna, how much responsibility did she bear for it? Was Anna’s disappearance connected with the trap they had set for Julian Cox? Had the fifty thousand pounds he had so cleverly snatched from beneath their noses not been enough? Had he come back for more, or perhaps sent someone else? She had promised no harm would come to Kelly and Anna through her plans, so the pressure and guilt were mounting by the minute.

Loath as she was to involve the police—for several reasons—Dee knew she had very little option. Surely Anna’s disappearance could have nothing whatsoever to do with Julian Cox, but that made Dee even more anxious for her safety and not less.

How often had she seen articles in the press about women—and it was nearly always women—who had disappeared under mystifying circumstances? In some cases the body was found later... In some it wasn’t. Dee’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the steering wheel of her car.

‘Please God, no,’ she whispered. ‘No.’

* * *

S
HE
COULDN
’
T
GO
home, she just could not, Anna decided tiredly as she got off the train and wearily thanked the porter who helped her with her luggage and her pets. She felt empty, drained of all emotion. The long train journey with its numerous changes and stops had given her plenty of time to think—and remember—and not just plenty, but too much.

If she went home there would be questions for her to answer, people for her to see, and she could not bear it—Ward might even try to get in touch with her, if only to charge her for the use of his car, she reflected bitterly.

There was a row of waiting taxis outside the station, and she hailed one of them.

Once she was settled inside, Missie on her knee, Whittaker in his carrying cage, the driver turned round and asked her, ‘Where to, love?’

Where to? Good question... Anna closed her eyes and then, almost as though the words were being spoken for her, she heard herself giving him Dee’s address.

Dee was upstairs lying in the bath, her eyes closed, her body still and relaxed but her mind furiously busy, when Anna’s taxi arrived. Her bath had, for Dee, always been a place of safety and retreat, a place to regroup her energies and marshal her forces. As a teenager, trying to come to terms with so many different emotions at once, so many physical changes within herself, she had found the bathroom a place in which she could be alone without feeling guilty about shutting her father out. They had always been so close, just the two of them on their own since her mother’s death, but with her teenage years had come an instinctive female awareness that now she was moving into the new territory of her own womanhood.

She had been so protective of her father, sensing his solitude, his loving absorption in her life. Where, previously, his had been the only company she had wanted, now she was increasingly experiencing a yearning for the company of her own age group, for female friends with whom she could share the mystery and excitement of what was happening to her. And yet, at the same time, she had sensed how hurt her father would be by her alienation from him. Side by side they had battled it out; her loving daughterly desire to protect him and her growing need to spread her own wings.

There had been many hours spent in the bathroom worrying about what she should do: go on to university as she so longed to do or stay at home with her father.

In the end it had been her father himself who had resolved her dilemma for her—wiser and more aware than she had guessed—telling her firmly how disappointed he would be if she did not finish her education and go to university.

Dee was lost in her thoughts and her memories of the past when the doorbell rang and, at first, she was tempted to ignore its summons. Then, reluctantly, she acknowledged that perhaps she ought to see who it was, pulling on her robe as she opened the bathroom door and padded quickly downstairs.

‘Dee.’

Frowning slightly, Dee peered through the frosted glass of her front door and then, realising just who her visitor was, she quickly unlocked and opened it, exclaiming thankfully, ‘Anna! Come in!’

Still semi-dazed with shock, Anna followed Dee into her hallway.

It was a relatively warm day but she had started to shiver, her eyes blank and unfocused as she allowed Dee to take hold of her arm and virtually guide her into the kitchen.

‘Sit down,’ Dee commanded her firmly, relieving her of Whittaker’s cat box and deftly removing Missie’s lead from her hand at the same time.

Something very distressing had obviously happened to Anna, Dee recognised as her initial relief at seeing her standing outside her front door was swiftly replaced by concern.

‘We’ve been wondering where you’d got to,’ she told Anna chattily as she filled the kettle.

Instinct was warning her not to make too much of a drama of Anna’s reappearance, nor to bully her into immediate explanations.

Instead, as she made them both a cup of tea, she kept up a stream of light, inconsequential chatter, telling Anna that she had recently seen both Beth and Kelly, watching her as she did so to see how she reacted, but apart from a brief flicker of her eyelids Anna remained almost motionless. She was not, perhaps, actually catatonic, but she had most certainly undergone some kind of severe trauma, Dee realised, and she, after all, knew all the signs of acute emotional shock.

There were some things you never forgot, some experiences that never faded.

Now, as she put Anna’s cup of tea down in front of her, she saw that the other woman was simply staring into space.

‘Anna,’ she said gently, touching her arm. ‘What is it? What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

What was wrong?

Anna focused despairingly on Dee’s face.

‘I... I...’ Slowly her face crumpled and her body started to shake.

Instinctively Dee put her arms around her, holding her comfortingly.

‘If it’s about Julian and the money...’ she guessed. She knew how distressed Anna had been about the fact that Julian had outwitted them both.

‘No. No...’ Anna shook her head and then stopped.

‘Then what is it? What’s wrong?’ Dee asked her gently.

Anna put a trembling hand up to her face. She still wasn’t sure what she was doing here in Dee’s kitchen or really why she had come. All she did know was that she simply could not go back to her own house.

‘Dee, I’ve been such a fool,’ Anna told her dully. Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘I should have known, guessed, but instead...’ She gripped her hands into angry fists, her body shuddering in self-loathing. ‘I don’t know what came over me...or why...’

Patiently Dee waited, listening to her incoherent utterances for several minutes before coaxing, ‘Anna, why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything?’

‘Everything...?’ Anna’s face changed colour, going pink and then white. ‘I can’t...tell you everything,’ she said flatly. ‘Some of it.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘Oh, Dee, I just don’t know what I’m going to do, how I’m going to get over...’

How I’m going to get over Ward, she had been about to say, Anna recognised, but she had managed to stop herself. How many times did she have to remind herself that the Ward she had believed she loved simply did not exist? In reality, there was no Ward, no lover for her to get over.