Savage Atonement Read online

  ‘Not half as much as you enjoyed destroying the main character,’ she told him acidly, ignoring his small frown. ‘But I won’t let you do that to me—not again. You aren’t going to use me for one of your novels!’

  ‘That’s what you think I intend to do?’ He shook his head as though he couldn’t believe her. ‘Laurel, it isn’t like that. Look, come and sit down.’

  He reached towards her and she backed away, her eyes unknowingly petrified, her voice high-pitched with fear and raised her hands to ward him off. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he told her tautly, ‘at least, not in the way that you mean. Laurel, hasn’t anyone ever told you that saying that to a man is the biggest come-on there is?’

  She blenched and moaned a husky denial, all her normal reserve stripped from her by the combination of Oliver Savage’s unexpected appearance and her own journey back to the past. He was telling her as he had told the world that she had willingly and knowingly encouraged her stepfather, and it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true!’

  ‘Laurel.’ He ignored her cowering rejection and gripped her shoulders, his face almost as pale as her own. ‘God, no, I didn’t mean what you think.’

  He was the first man to touch her in six years, and her body screamed a bitter protest and she tried to wrench herself free, panicking like a trapped animal.

  ‘Laurel, listen to me.’ One hand left her shoulder to circle her throat, tipping her head backwards so that she was forced to look up at him. She struggled to subdue her panic, the fear that his touch aroused.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.’

  He bent towards her, his face shadowed, ignoring her frantic attempt to break free. The touch of his lips on hers transported her instanteously back through time. She was in the bathroom of her home with Bill Trenchard leaning over her, sickening her with the wine-sour scent of his breath. She opened her mouth to scream, her body rigid with terror, but Oliver Savage’s mouth smothered the sound, his hand caressing her shoulders, his lips leaving her mouth to whisper against her ear, as though he had seen into her mind. ‘Laurel, I’m not Trenchard. I won’t hurt you.’

  He released her slowly and carefully, drawing her with him towards the small sofa.

  ‘I suppose now that you’ve discovered I’m frigid it rather spoils your story line,’ she managed to get out in the thick silence that followed. ‘No doubt it would suit you better to discover that I turned into a raving nymphomaniac!’

  His quiet, ‘I don’t believe you’re frigid, but I can see that you’ve done an excellent job of convincing yourself that you are,’ cut through her bitter words.

  ‘Why?’ he asked her. ‘For protection?’

  He saw and guessed too much. Suddenly even breathing was a painful effort. She wanted to close her eyes and blot out the sight of his face; a face that had haunted her nightmares long after she had begun to forget Bill Trenchard’s. Why he should have such a cataclysmic effect upon her she wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was because he had caught her at her most vulnerable, offered her comfort and understanding, only to betray her and reveal all her innermost fears and thoughts in his article.

  ‘Don’t you think I need it?’ she asked huskily at last. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to be me? To be rejected by your own mother; to be treated like a whore? I hope you’re proud of what you’ve done!’

  ‘What I’ve done?’ The grey eyes were blank. ‘I can’t give you back the lost years, Laurel, I didn’t even think I could make atonement, but after tonight.…’ He seemed lost in his thoughts, his eyes resting for several seconds on his book, and then he said abruptly, ‘Have you anything to drink? Anything other than tea or coffee, I mean,’ he elaborated sardonically.

  ‘There’s a bottle of sherry.’ She coloured as he pulled a wry face, and said defensively, ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘and you don’t entertain gentlemen callers,’ he added for her. ‘Very well, perhaps I should have thought of that and had a couple before I came here,’

  So there were some things that even the Oliver Savages of this world needed Dutch courage for!

  ‘I won’t allow you to use me as the basis for one of your books, Mr Savage,’ she told him primly.

  ‘Who’s asking you to? Oh, for God’s sake!’ Angry fingers disturbed the thickness of his dark hair. ‘Laurel, I haven’t come here to coerce you into agreeing to feature in one of my books. It’s got nothing to do with anything like that. I’ve been looking for you for the last five years—I’ve had notices in the papers; everything. Understandably perhaps, the social services wouldn’t tell me where you were, but I thought once you’d left whatever home they’d sent you to, you might be curious or angry enough to get in touch with me.’

  ‘Home?’ she queried cynically, anger spilling past her fear and reserve to colour her eyes dark amber. ‘Don’t you mean institution, because that’s what they are. Places where they send difficult or damaged children; places.…’

  ‘Laurel!’

  For one incredible moment she thought she saw bitter anguish in his eyes and it was enough to stop her in mid-sentence, her eyes widening slightly. He was quick to take advantage of her silence.

  ‘Laurel, I know the truth.’

  ‘I know you do,’ she agreed bitterly. I told it to you, but that didn’t stop you distorting it to make a name for yourself, did it?’

  ‘Please, just listen to me, will you? Nothing can excuse what I did to you—I admit that. I tried to get a different side of your story published, but by that time it was old news and my paper wouldn’t take it, and anyway, by that time your stepfather was dead and with him any proof that he’d lied.

  ‘When I saw you coming out of your house that day I was waiting for him. We had an appointment. We’d already talked once and I’d got an exclusive from him—My sympathies lay with him at that time, I’m not going to deny that. You see, a young cousin of mine had got himself involved with a girl a couple of years before—his parents were very strict; very moral.

  ‘Lisa was an opportunist. She met him, seduced him and then tried to blackmail him when he told her the affair was over. You see, she knew he came from a wealthy background; she wanted to force him into marrying her and when he wouldn’t she accused him of rape. She won the case, by lying through her teeth, but she was an excellent actress, and Bobby didn’t come across well at all. His parents refused to have anything to do with him. They were shocked and disgusted. He was sentenced to gaol, but he committed suicide before his sentence started. He told me everything the night before the trial, and later, when he was dead, Lisa admitted the truth to me.’

  Glancing up into his shuttered face, Laurel shivered, trying to imagine just how he had dragged the truth from the other girl, who sounded as hard and selfish as her stepfather.

  ‘So rightly or wrongly, what happened to him made me biased against the victims of rape cases. It isn’t exactly unheard-of for a girl to use the threat as a means of getting money out of some poor male.’

  ‘Meaning you thought I wanted money from my stepfather?’ Laurel demanded disbelievingly.

  ‘Not money—but I thought you might be using the threat as a weapon. Look at it from another angle, Laurel. Your mother marries again, and you become a third in the family triangle. Naturally you’re jealous; naturally also as a teenager you’re becoming more and more aware of yourself as a woman; it’s only natural that you should want to test those burgeoning powers; all girls do, and what could be more natural than that you should test them on your stepfather; tease him a little, perhaps?’

  ‘No!’

  The husky denial and the shudder that followed it darkened his eyes.

  ‘No,’ Oliver agreed sombrely, ‘but I didn’t know that until it was too late. When I saw you that afternoon and you accepted a lift in my car without even knowing who I was——’

  ‘I’d left my bus fare in the house,’ Laurel broke in briefly. ‘My mother had just told me… just said that she neve
r wanted to see me again. I couldn’t go back, and.…’ She closed her mouth firmly. She wasn’t going to betray to him the fact that she had felt drawn to him, had trusted him. A fierce wave of hatred washed over her. Six years ago he had been instrumental in destroying her life, as much to blame in her eyes as her stepfather. Bill Trenchard was now dead and beyond reach, but this man.… Feverish thoughts chased one another through her mind as she listened to him, her lips burning where his had touched them. How dared he presume to touch her, to walk into her life calmly saying that he was wrong and expecting her to accept his apology? All the emotions she had dammed up for so long welled to the surface and she was consumed by a violent need to make Oliver Savage suffer as she had done; to hold him to public ridicule and private torment.

  ‘Laurel, are you listening to me?’

  She had had six long years to perfect the ability to conceal her emotions, and nothing of her thoughts showed in her expression as she nodded her head.

  ‘Just after your stepfather had completed his sentence I ran into him in a Fleet Street pub—just one of those odd quirks of fate. He’d been drinking heavily, and he recognised me. I suppose when I first interviewed him he had sensed that my sympathies lay with him, because it wasn’t long before he was boasting to me how he’d fooled the court; how he’d deliberately lied about you.’

  It was no more than Laurel had known instinctively all along, but instead of feeling vindicated, all she could feel was a terrible burning anger.

  ‘He was killed three days later,’ Oliver Savage told her broodingly, ‘Before I could get him to sign any statement.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have done any good anyway,’ Laurel said lightly. ‘My life could never have been the same. You see, it was my mother who found him with me, and she preferred to believe that the fault lay with me rather than him. I was taken into care for my own protection, not punishment—all that was carefully explained to me, but it amounts to the same thing in the end.’

  She wasn’t going to tell him of her mental anguish; of her pain and self-hatred, all engendered by the belief that somehow she had invited what had happened to her; that somehow she was wicked and sinful and that she was to blame. They had explained carefully to her that she was not, that she was punishing herself for a crime she had never committed and that one day she would be able to accept this. But she hadn’t done. The tiny seeds of doubt had been sown and they had grown into weeds of monstrous proportions, and now the man who was directly responsible for some of them was sitting here calmly in her sitting room telling her that he was sorry and that it had been a mistake!

  She looked up at him, on the point of asking him to leave, surprising an expression in his eyes and a tautness of his mouth that was like a red rag to a bull. Pity! How dared he pity her! Pity was the thing she had come to loathe and resent the most in the long lonely years. Pity was not always what it seemed. How often had she discovered it masked prurient, avid curiosity about what had happened.

  Her throat thick with anger that threatened to choke her, she felt the black, swirling mists of the past possess her. A rage she could almost taste and smell enveloped her, burning through her body. How dared he sit there so arrogantly saying he had made a mistake, and expecting her simply to forgive and forget? Was he blind? Obtuse? Didn’t he realise that he had helped to virtually destroy her life? Her pain was like a living, caged animal straining for release. How could she convey with mere words the depths of the anguish and humiliation she had known? The degradation of self-doubt and self-hatred she had lived with? To understand he would have to experience them for himself.

  He reached out towards her, covering her clenched folded hands with the warmth of his, and his touch was like burning acid. A murderous fury exploded inside her. How dared he patronise her with his compassion, with the pity she could see quite plainly in his eyes?

  She wanted to lash out; to hurt and degrade him as he had done her.

  ‘Laurel, if there’s anything I can do to make amends?’

  Had she actually heard those quiet, calm words? Did he honestly think there was anything he could do to right the wrongs of the past? Was he a magician, could he turn back time and make her the innocent happy teenager she had once been?

  She opened her mouth to tell him hotly that there was nothing; nothing he could do; nothing she would ever accept from him; that she would die rather than accept so much as a crust from him, when a tiny ice-cold inner voice stilled the hot words.

  What if it were not mere chance that had brought them together again, but—for want of a better word—fate! Fate giving her a chance to turn the tables on him, to exact from him payment for all that she had endured.

  As soon as the thought was born she dismissed it as sheer impossibility. How could she possibly do anything that could make him suffer a tithe of what she had endured? He was a man of thirty-odd, fully armoured and protected against whatever puny blows she could deal him, but the mad urge to escape from the pity she had seen so fleetingly in his glance fuelled her imagination, lending it a potency that she barely recognised. There must be a way, it insisted; everyone had their Achilles heel, and Oliver Savage would be no different. All she had to do was find it. But how? What did he cherish most in his life? A woman? She dismissed the thought almost immediately. He was too self-contained, too much in control to be vulnerable in that way. Then what?

  In a Machiavellian flash of enlightenment it came to her. His career. His precious career! The career which he had furthered by using her! She expelled her pent-up breath, slowly, her mouth curving in a smile which brought a frown to the eyes of the man watching her. Poetic justice! Almost she breathed the words out aloud. A strange fevered urgency had taken possession of her, almost at the exact moment his hand had closed over hers, awakening memories she refused to admit were still there; memories that were encapsulated in the dreams she sometimes still had of being held safe and warm in arms that held the rest of the world at bay; but those dreams always gave way to the same nightmare; the same terror that engulfed her, plunging her into pain and fear.

  Tension spiralled nervously through her, her mind working overtime as it raced to discover a means of putting into action her plan. With cool clarity a thought took root in her mind and grew. Oliver Savage had written lies about her, had twisted the truth and used her. She must find a way of subjecting him to the same humiliation; of destroying his credibility among his colleagues. For several months she had been attending a creative writing course at her local night-school. She enjoyed the classes, and had been told she showed promise. What if she could find some way of discrediting her enemy in an article?

  Several pitfalls leapt to mind almost immediately. First she would have to discover something she could use against Oliver Savage, and secondly she would have to persuade someone to publish it. The gutter-press were always anxious to publish articles about well-known personalities she realised quickly, she could.…

  What? an inner voice mocked. Make something up? No, that would never do; there were laws about such things, and besides, she wanted the satisfaction of knowing she had used the truth. There must be something in the life of a man like Oliver Savage that he wouldn’t want made public, surely, but what? And how was she likely to discover it? Simply by asking him? No, to learn something of real value meant getting a lot closer to her quarry than she was now. Her glance flickered over him. He was watching her, and prickles of awareness shivered over her skin, almost as though he had physically reached out and touched her. Laurel shuddered, feeling her hatred of him burning her skin. For years she had almost been successful in putting him out of her mind and now, suddenly, all her hatred and bitterness had come boiling to the surface, demanding satisfaction.

  ‘There is something,’ she said huskily, at last. ‘I’m very anxious to further my career. If I work as your secretary for a few months, then I’m sure with your recommendation I could get a first-class job.…’

  He was watching her closely, frowning, and her heart pounded
with fear that he might have guessed her underlying motive.

  ‘Why bother working for me?’ he demanded. ‘Why not simply ask me for a recommendation?’

  Her face tight, she said coldly, ‘Because that would be dishonest, but if you didn’t mean what you said.…’

  She was amazed at her own ability; her hitherto unknown talent for finding a raw spot.

  ‘I don’t normally employ a secretary,’ he told her curtly, ‘I use a dictating machine, and besides.…’

  ‘You don’t want a frigid female like me working for you?’ Laurel suggested acidly, knowing that her accusation would remind him of just why she was frigid.

  ‘Frigid? I’ve already told you, I don’t believe.…’ He broke off and seemed lost in a brown study for several seconds. Laurel wondered what he was thinking; if he was regretting his offer to make reparation. Perhaps he had expected her simply to accept his apology and then let him leave.

  ‘That’s really what you want? To work for me?’

  ‘To work for you with a view to getting some useful references for the future,’ Laurel corrected, again marvelling at her ability to act.

  ‘You’re obviously a good secretary, and I am just about to start on a new book. Besides.… Very well,’ he said curtly. ‘But I hope you have a passport.’

  ‘A passport?’ She was stunned. ‘But.…’

  ‘I have a farmhouse in Provence where I do my writing,’ he told her blandly. ‘It’s extremely remote and there’ll just be the two of us there. Think you can cope?’

  Could she? Could she cope with the physical presence of this man on an intimate daily basis? Intimacy worked two ways, she reminded herself, there was no knowing what confidences Oliver Savage might make as they worked, not guessing what he might reveal. He had not led the life of a monk; she was aware of that. Already in her mind’s eye she could see the headlines, ‘Well-known writer’s secret life’—and there must be a secret, something she could find and twist as he had done with her. There must be!