The Hidden Years. Penny Jordan
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with his smiles instead of her, and already, though she didn’t know it, she had taken her first step into a dangerous and unfamiliar new world.
She found Edward ready and waiting for her, his face set and tense.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she apologised. Some instinct that was beginning to grow with her own maturity gave her an insight into the feelings of others which she often wished she did not have. It was hardly less painful to be so receptive to the emotional pain of others at second hand than it was for them to experience it themselves. Today she was particularly receptive to Edward’s pain, her own emotional nerve-endings curling back in sensitive reaction to his anxiety.
‘I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind. You shouldn’t be spending your free time with me… Pretty girl like you should be out having fun.’
That was the second time in one morning a man had described her as pretty, but this time she felt none of the soaring joy she had experienced when he had described her thus, only a sharp anguished knowledge of Edward’s own awareness that, while a woman might feel compassion for him, she could never feel desire.
As she wheeled him outside, she saw him lift his face towards the warmth of the sun. His skin had a grey, sickly undertone, the bones slightly shrunken under his flesh. He had lost weight in the long months he had been with them and her heart ached compassionately for him, as she contrasted him again with him.
The rhododendrons were set on a sloping bank just outside the formal gardens, and Lizzie, who had genuinely wanted to foster the tiny spark of interest she had seen in Edward’s eyes the last time she had taken him there, had discovered that they had originally been planted by an owner of the house who had travelled extensively in China before the Boxer uprising. A keen botanist, he had collected various specimens in the wild and created this special area for them.
Where the formal gardens of the house had now gone to make way for vegetable plots, the rhododendrons had been allowed to remain.
Lizzie was slightly out of breath by the time she had pushed the wheelchair up the overgrown path that led to them, but her efforts were well rewarded when she turned a corner and stopped the wheelchair so that Edward could take in the full glory of the scene in front of them.
She heard him catch his breath, and, when she quickly kneeled down to look at him, she discovered that there were tears running down his face.
‘They’re beautiful,’ he told her quietly. ‘So very much like those at Cottingdean… My grandmother adored her garden.’
‘Who lives there now?’ Lizzie asked him, more because she sensed his need to talk about the house he obviously loved so much than out of any real curiosity.
‘No one. It was requisitioned during the early part of the war, but it’s empty now. It’s too remote to be of any real use—on the edge of a tiny village tucked away in the Wiltshire hills. Ultimately, I suppose, it belongs now to my cousin. His father was the elder son, mine the younger. Sometimes during the night I dream that I’m back there…’ A bitter smile twisted his face. ‘Pure escapism. If I do go back, it won’t be as a boy free to run around but as a useless cripple…’
Lizzie bit her lip, wondering if she had done the right thing in bringing him out here…wondering if she had perhaps not been kind in stirring up memories of his childhood.
Without saying a word, she turned the wheelchair round. She knew from experience that when these moods of deep despair came down on him it was best to simply let Edward speak. Rather like letting poison drain out of a wound, only for his particular wound there could never be any total cleansing and healing.
They were halfway back to the hospital when she saw the man walking down the path towards them. She recognised him immediately, her heart giving a tremendous bound of pleasure and shock. He was walking with the sun behind him, so that his dark hair had a golden nimbus, his easy, long-legged stride so male, so unconsciously arrogant that her heart bled a little for Edward, whom she could see gripping the arms of his wheelchair.
Such was her incandescent joy at the sight of him that there was no time, no room in her mind to question what he was doing. All she wanted to do was to fly towards him, to feel his arms tighten around her, his man’s body press close to hers, his mouth find hers to possess and cherish it until the tremulous joy flooding through her burst into a wild surge.
But it wasn’t her he addressed—he seemed not to notice her at all, speaking instead to Edward, saying casually, ‘Ah, there you are, old boy. They told me I’d find you down here somewhere…’
‘Christopher…’
Christopher… His name was Christopher… It suited him somehow… She savoured it silently, tasting it, rolling it around her mouth, marvelling at the foresight of parents able instinctively to choose a name so fitting.
‘I’ll push this for you, shall I?’
Engrossed in her bemusement, she hadn’t seen him move, and now suddenly he was standing beside her, her body instantly aware of his, so that she longed to move closer to him, to bathe in his body heat, to breathe in his special scent.
She tried to look at him and couldn’t, paralysed by unexpected, awkward shyness. In front of her she heard Edward saying, ‘Lizzie…this is Christopher Danvers… My cousin… Christopher, Lizzie is—’
‘I know. Lizzie and I have already met… This morning when I practically ran her down…’
He held out his hand and gripped hers. The pressure of his fingers against her own made her quiver with delight.
‘Call me Kit,’ he told her softly, while his blue eyes laughed dangerously into hers.
She was so bemused, so entranced by him that it wasn’t until several seconds after he had released her hand and she had turned away from him that she became aware of Edward’s tension.
And then, hypersensitive to a point where she almost felt as though she had stepped inside his skin, she could feel the pressure he was placing on his fragile muscles and instinctively moved towards him and then stopped, confused by her own actions.
For a moment she had wanted to place herself protectively between Edward and Kit. But why…? And why to protect Edward…? Kit was his cousin…
She was in love with him. He was wonderful, perfect. She couldn’t understand Edward’s antagonism towards him.
‘You always did drive too damn fast,’ Edward was saying curtly.
‘Well, luckily there was no harm done, and when your ministering angel told me that she was spending her time off charitably entertaining one of her patients I had no idea she meant you.’
‘What are you doing here, Kit?’
The way Edward Danvers asked the question was brusque, almost as though he disliked the other man, which startled Lizzie.
‘Felt I ought to, old chap, now that the old man’s finally gone. Duty. Head of the family and all that. Came to see how you were getting on. What plans you’ve got for when all this is over…’
‘I won’t be burdening you with my presence at Cottingdean, if that’s what’s worrying you,’ Edward said stiffly.
Lizzie was beginning to feel uncomfortable. There was something here between the two men which she felt instinctively should not be aired in front of a third party.
‘I… I think I’d better go,’ she began uncertainly, and appealed to Kit, ‘You’ve obviously got private family business to discuss…’
She started to move away down the path, but Kit followed her, standing between her and Edward and blocking her view of the wheelchair as he bent his head and murmured, ‘You haven’t forgotten about our date, have you? I shouldn’t be too long with old Edward… Half-past two, remember.’
Her heart gave a tremendous thud as happiness burst into a million tiny effervescent fragments inside her.