Exorcism. PENNY JORDAN
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years spent looking at the petite femininity of her mother. Voluptuous and sexy was how her mother described her, slightly teasingly, and at eighteen she was too young to feel entirely at home with a body that drew admiring male eyes of all ages. She squirmed a little in the long grass remembering the overt stares of the few boys she knew. Always slightly shy she had made few friends at college; most of the other girls were slightly withdrawn, as unable to cope with her open sexuality as she was herself.
She was lying on her stomach, too deeply engrossed in her book to be aware of anything else, when someone bent over her to read the printed page, his voice husky, and entirely male, infusing the words she was reading with a sexuality that her own unawakened mind had not entirely absorbed. Her immediate reaction had been to snap the book closed and roll over to glare angrily at the intruder. She hated anyone coming between her and her involvement with whatever she was reading. She was still at an age where it was easy to cast aside her own person a and slip into that of the heroine and by reading as he had done the intruder had taken on the role of hero, and his voice had stroked her skin as dexterously as the hand of any lover, causing a reaction inside her that made her tense and coil, like a wary cat.
‘At your age you should be experiencing romance, not reading about it,’ he had mocked, his clever, masculine mouth curling faintly. Tall, taller by far than most of the men she knew, he seemed to blot out the sun with shoulders so powerfully broad that she automatically flinched away from the sheer sexuality of him. Dressed in faded jeans and a checked shirt, he was so intensely masculine that Christy, unused to such maleness, automatically recoiled from it.
His eyes had gone from her face to her body, studying her in a way that brought a wave of hot colour to her skin. Where his glance lingered, it seemed almost physically to touch. She could almost feel the explorative drift of his fingers against her skin, and she had shivered violently, hearing his soft laugh.
‘So you are Georgina’s “gypsy”,’ he had said slowly, ‘a wild and passionate little savage indeed … I wonder how long it would take to tame you.’
She had stood up almost violently; angry at his intrusion and yet strangely excited by him. His hair was even darker than hers, blue black with a silky sheen, his skin faintly olive. His eyes which she had expected to be dark were a strange metallic gold; amber almost and she had stared curiously into them, forgetting her anger as she registered their slow appraisal.
‘Definitely not your mother’s daughter,’ he had said at last. And for some curious reason she had felt intensely hurt; as though in some way she did not measure up to a standard he had set her. It was the first time she had ever wished she was like Georgina. Was this man her mother’s lover?
He was younger than Georgina, perhaps somewhere in his mid-twenties, although it was hard to tell, and yet even her innocence could not protect her from being aware of his intense sexuality. It wasn’t that he was outstandingly good looking; his features were almost too hard for that, his jaw and chin stubbornly unyielding; his cheekbones high, thrusting against his tanned skin, his nose faintly crooked as though it might have once been broken; but there was something about him that made her want to stare and go on staring. He stretched his hand out to her, grasping her wrist with lean fingers. Their touch was cool and yet where they circled her skin it seemed to burn like fire.
‘Georgina sent me to get you … It seems you and I are to play together like good children while she and Jeremy discuss work. Do you think we can do that, Christy?’ he had asked her mockingly, ‘Do you think we can play nicely together?’
She had known instinctively then that he and her mother were not lovers, and in her pitiable innocence had not realised the danger the joy that knowledge brought, represented. She had looked into his amber eyes and had felt suddenly as though for the first time in her life she was truly alive. He had smiled down at her, a curious smile tinged with a knowledge she could only guess at. And that was how it had started.
‘Christy?’
Hearing her mother call her name brought her out of the past, so abruptly that she still carried its residue of pain with her as she made her way back to the house. She had thought reliving what had happened might have a cathartic effect, but perhaps for that she needed to relive every event … every moment of that brief summer.
‘I’M going up now, how about you?’
Christy shook her head lightly, ‘I’m not tired enough yet.’
She wasn’t relaxed enough to sleep; that was the truth of the matter. Although it had not been mentioned during dinner, she knew her mother still felt she should accept the job with Simon. Sighing, Christy went over to the record cabinet and selected a recording of some Handel. His music, always so relaxing, would surely help to unravel her knotted muscles and induce a desire to sleep.
Curling up in an armchair, she closed her eyes and let the sounds wash over her. Her mother’s room wasn’t directly above the sitting room and so it wouldn’t disturb her.
Simon had been faintly mocking about her love of classical music. ‘You want everything to be so romantic, don’t you?’ he had taunted her … ‘but life isn’t like that, gypsy.’ He had bought her other records; some pop, some classical … all of them containing the message that life comprised pain as well as pleasure. Her mother and Jeremy had been deeply involved in working out the details of her schedule for the coming autumn; there was an American tour to be fitted in as well as two new books, and there were also several other matters they had to discuss, so that Simon and Christy were thrown very much into one another’s company. She had finished at college for the summer, and in the early days she and Simon had made good use of the Vicarage’s rather ancient tennis court.
He was a demanding opponent, who never willingly let her win, and sometimes his driving desire to win angered her. She herself cared little about winning or losing and somehow he made her feel that this was a lack in her.
‘So unambitious,’ he had taunted her one day. ‘What do you plan to do with your life, Christy? Fall in love, get married and live happily ever after?’
He had laughed at her scarlet cheeks but his laughter had not held any amusement, rather it had had the hard edge of a man made bitter by contempt.
‘What a trap for my sex, Mother Nature has designed in you. Your looks and your body promise so much … offer so much enticement, and yet they cannot be had without the payment of a price can they, my gypsy? And that price is marriage.’
She hadn’t understood his anger; not then. She had simply thought he was mocking her and had not understood why. The frustration which someone with more experience might have recognised, was hidden from her by her own innocence.
She could vividly remember the first time he kissed her. He had taken her out for the day in his car—a small sports model; brightly scarlet. When she had admired it, he had laughed, faintly disparagingly.
‘It’s a young man’s car, something he buys before he commits himself to marriage and a family, and the inevitable saloon, but that’s not for me, Christy,’ he had told her, ‘my choice of car will always only have room for the one passenger.’
He had taken her down to the coast, and with her directions had found the sheltered, almost secret little beach she often went to with her mother. She had been wearing her swimsuit under her jeans but had felt shiveringly self-conscious about taking them off, sitting tense and curiously breathless as he removed his shirt and his own jeans. Her lack of father or brothers had not left her with any particular curiosity about the male form. There had been all the usual girlish giggled confidences at school, and her mother had matter-of-factly outlined the intimacies shared by male and female when she was old enough to understand them. There had never been any undue embarrassment between mother and daughter, and Georgina had been frank and explicit with her in their discussions about sex. Even so there was something vastly different about knowing what went to make up the male anatomy and then seeing the reality of it, barely concealed by brief black swimming