Secret Obsession. CHARLOTTE LAMB
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in hospital!’ she shouted, sitting up, dragging the quilt with her to cover herself. ‘He’s in a coma; he doesn’t even know I’m here.’
Silence. Ben stared fixedly.
She shrank back against the bedhead, went on flatly, ‘He crashed his car nearly a week ago. His injuries were pretty bad. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt; his head was…’ She swallowed, not bearing the idea of what had happened to his head. ‘He had to have surgery to relieve pressure on the brain and he’s been in a coma ever since. They can’t say if…when…he’ll wake up. It could be days, or weeks, or months—they just don’t know.’
Ben’s mouth indented. ‘I’m sorry, I’d no idea,’ he said in a low, harsh voice. ‘No wonder you look like grim death.’
‘We’re all very worried, obviously,’ she muttered, pushing back a strand of her dark hair which had strayed across her face. ‘His mother’s at the hospital with him, now—we’ve all been there, we go every day—but she sent me home early because she thought I looked tired.’
Ben’s grey eyes roamed over her delicate face, bone-white at the moment except for the smoky shadows under her great blue eyes.
‘That’s why I was in bed at this time of day; I’ve been sleeping,’ she added, very aware of his gaze and feeling her skin prickle with a familiar slow, sensual response. From the minute they’d met she had felt this unwanted reaction to him—not to the man himself, whom she had not even known at first, but to the male animal inside his expensive designer suit, to that powerful sexual mix of bone, muscle, flesh and dominating drive. Women always noticed Ben; she had seen it happen over and over again. The insistence of his personality made them gravitate towards him even in a crowded room. Nerissa had felt a strange pang many times as she’d watched his effect on other women, recognising it from her own first reaction to him.
It wasn’t love, after all—how could it be? No, what she had felt—and still felt—was pure sexual desire, and she despised herself because it happened every time she saw him—even now, when she was so worried and unhappy over Philip.
She had always believed that you only felt like that about a man you loved. She wasn’t sure yet exactly what she did feel about Ben, but she didn’t think you could call it love.
Oh, he had become necessary to her—she wanted him, she thought about him when he wasn’t there—but she didn’t understand him the way she understood Philip. She didn’t know him the way she knew Philip. The wordless, warm, certain love she had for Philip was a world away from the disturbing power Ben had over her.
If she could have married Philip…Her heart winced at the thought of how different her life would have been.
But fate had played a savage trick on them; they had been wrenched apart forever, with no hope of any future for them.
‘How long have you been here?’ Ben asked curtly, sitting down on the edge of her bed.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. After a moment she whispered, ‘Since the day you left for The Hague.’
A silence, then he bit out, ‘They rang and told you about the accident after I’d left?’
She swallowed, cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘No, they rang me the day before.’
He didn’t move or speak but the silence vibrated with violence. She sat there, trembling, afraid to look at him.
‘And you didn’t tell me.’ His voice grated on her nerves; she wanted to scream, and couldn’t. ‘You let me leave, without saying a word, and as soon as I was out of the way you rushed up here without even leaving a note to tell me where you had gone.’ He got up suddenly, walked across the room and back, and she picked up the simmering rage inside him.
This was the reaction she had been expecting. She knew how Ben felt about betrayal. His first wife had had an affair with his best friend for a year before Ben had found out. He had come home one day to find them in bed together. There had been a fight between the two men; Ben had put his ‘friend’ into hospital with a broken nose. Ben’s wife had gone with the ‘friend’ in the ambulance after screaming abuse at Ben. Two years later Ben had divorced her; it had been another six years before he met Nerissa.
Nerissa knew he still carried the scars of disillusion and bitterness. Whatever he had been like before the day he’d come home to find his wife in bed with someone else, he was now a hard, remorseless man, determined never to let himself fall in love again. All he wanted from her was pleasure in bed. Love did not enter into their bargain.
He stopped at the bed and looked down at her, his eyes a blaze of rage. ‘What were you going to do at the end of the week? Come back to me without ever mentioning that you had been away? Did you really think you could get away with it?’
‘No, of course not! I knew you would find out but, anyway, Philip might be like this for weeks, months, and I—’ She broke off, biting her lip.
‘Didn’t mean to come back at all,’ Ben finished for her, his voice slow, his mind working all the time as he watched her. ‘You’re going to stay here,’ he thought aloud. ‘You never intended to come back to me.’
She clutched the quilt tighter, her small hands white-knuckled, her chin lifted and defiance in her eyes.
‘He needs me,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t leave him now, not like this, and it isn’t just Philip—Aunt Grace and Uncle John need me, too. This has hit them pretty badly.’
Ben’s mouth curled coldly, cruelty in the lines of it. ‘Uncle John!’ he repeated, and laughed.
‘Don’t!’ she said, dark red invading her pale face, her eyes stricken.
Ben muttered under his breath and swung away again, walked back to the window, pulled aside the old tapestry curtain and looked out. A shaft of grey, rainy light entered the bedroom.
‘Where are they both? I knocked on the front door but nobody answered, so I went round the back and the kitchen door was open, but there was no sign of anyone downstairs.’
‘Aunt Grace is still at the hospital with Philip. Uncle John’s somewhere on the farm, working. He has to spend so much time at the hospital, he has got behind with his work. He says he’ll have to get someone to help out for a while, but the farm only just pays enough for the three of them to live on—it will be a drain on their budget to have to pay wages to an outsider.’
‘And they hate outsiders, too,’ Ben said in that cold, angry voice, swinging to face her.
She bit her lip. ‘That’s a bit over the top. I wouldn’t say that; it’s just that they…they are conservative.’
‘They hated me from the minute they saw me!’
She pleated the quilt hem with her shaking fingers. ‘That isn’t true; they didn’t hate you! They were…taken aback…when I brought you here. They hadn’t expected—’
‘You to find another man?’
‘I was going to say someone like you!’ she retorted, very flushed. ‘Life here is so different from life in London. People like them…you just don’t understand them; they’re not like anyone you know.’ Her eyes softened, her voice filled with affection and Ben watched her intently, frowning. ‘They rarely meet strangers,’ she said. ‘They never go anywhere very much. Oh, they go to market once a month, they go to Durham to do Christmas shopping, but otherwise they almost never leave the farm. The furthest I can remember them going is to Scarborough, for a seaside holiday, and they don’t do that every year even now, when Philip can take over and run things while they’re away. They couldn’t afford to go abroad. Hill farmers don’t make enough money for foreign holidays. I don’t think Uncle John has even been to London.’
Ben flared suddenly, his voice harsh. ‘Why do you go on with this pretence? Isn’t it time it all came out into the open? What the hell is the point in