Fugitive Wife Page 17

  She struggled to rise, to at least pull herself up on to her hands and knees, but the weight of her soaking clothes were an added encumbrance.

  ‘You damned little fool!’ His voice was bleak with rage. ‘Will you never learn?’

  Briony succumbed unresisting as he lifted her bodily out of the drift. The rain had turned suddenly into a downpour and his tawny hair was plastered to the shape of his head. She wanted suddenly to tell him she was sorry, but the words would not come.

  All she managed to say was, ‘My case.’

  ‘It will have to stay there.’ he said. ‘I have enough on my hands with you.’

  When they reached the path he had dug, she asked in a whisper to be put down. Logan hesitated before complying, then set her on her feet very gently. But her numbed legs would not support her, and she had to cling to him.

  He said harshly, ‘From now on we do this my way,’ and swung her up into his arms again.

  She was amazed to see lights coming from the cottage.

  Logan smiled grimly as he encountered her questioning look.

  ‘Yes, the power’s on again, by some miracle.’ he said.‘Perhaps the rain’s taken longer to get here than anywhere else.’

  He carried her up the path and shouldered his way in through the front door. The living room fire had been replenished and was roaring up the chimney and he set Briony down on the rug in front of it, then disappeared when he returned some time later he was carrying an armful of towels, and her housecoat. So he’d been to fetch her case.

  She had been struggling to unfasten her coat, but her frozen fingers would not obey her. She looked at him mutely as he came over to her, dropping the towels on to the rug. Pushing her hands away, he unfastened her coat, and tossed it on to the chair, then tugged her damp sweater over her head.

  She began to say, ‘I can manage now .. .’ but he told her to shut up in a voice so molten with rage that she thought it was best to do as he said. She stood shivering while he stripped the sodden clothes from her body and wrapped her in a bath towel. Then he began to rub her dry. He was brisk, efficient and none too gentle, and gradually she felt warmth stealing painfully back into her body. When he had finished towelling her hair he tossed her housecoat to her.

  He said, ‘Put this on, and don’t stir away from that fire.’

  Meekly she complied, sinking down on to the rug and arranging the damp towels on the fender to dry off.

  Presently Logan returned with a steaming mug of coffee.

  ‘There’s brandy in it; he said. ‘I shall have to re-stock your aunt’s drinks cupboard before we leave.’ Briony murmured something and sipped at the coffee, and soon the trembling inside her stopped, and the warm seemed to penetrate inwards, spreading along her veins.

  She said at last, ‘Logan, you’re wet too.’

  ‘I’m going to take care of that now; he said. ‘And then I’m going to bring your mattress and bedding down here. You're going to sleep by the fire tonight. I’m not taking any chances with possible pneumonia.’

  When she was alone again, it would have been very easy to have put, her head down and howled in misery.

  Her headlong flight had achieved nothing. Her head ached and it was difficult even to remember why it had seemed ,so important that she should try to get away.

  Everything she did seemed to turn against her, she thought despairingly.

  She heard the mattress bumping down the stairs and Jumped up to help Logan with it. He had changed into a pair of dark slacks and a black roll-neck sweater and though he looked weary and terrifyingly angry, his attraction still reached out and took her by the throat as it had done the first time she had ever seen him. She found herself wishing with all her heart that she was that girl again, with the world at her feet, but with the wisdom that the misery of the past year had taught her.

  She thought of Karen Wellesley and anger shook her.

  I should have fought her, she thought. I should have insisted on seeing him that day. My pride might have suffered, but it could have been worth it. I might have fought her and won. After all, it was me that he married.

  No one can take that away from me. And no one had. She had relinquished her part in his life, her role, her rights; without a struggle because she had been young and confused and bitter.

  And they were still apart at this moment because she’d had no real idea how to regain the ground she had lost.

  Because they were still, to all intents and purposes, strangers to each other, and therefore wary.

  So many times she had sworn she would never forgive him―for the way he had deliberately aroused and humiliated her on their wedding night, for cynically resuming his relationship with his mistress as soon as they had returned to London. So often she had tried to hate him. But it didn’t work, she thought. It had never worked because in spite of everything she had never ceased to want him. Even her attempts to revive old memories and old resentments had failed to still the clamour of her senses.

  Each time I’ve run away, she told herself, I’ve been running from myself as much as I have from him, only I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to admit it. And now it’s too late.

  Too late. The words tolled in her brain like a mourning bell, while the wind-driven rain lashed at the windows in ironic emphasis.

  She was suddenly desperate to break the silence which stretched between them. She said, ‘The rain―did you know it was going to start?’

  He said abruptly, ‘I’d wondered. There was that sudden rise in temperature, and the fact that the wind had veered round to the west. But it seemed too much to hope for’ He gave her a long steady look. ‘It’s thanks to the rain that you're here now, and not still lying out in the snow. I came to find you―to tell you it was raining. I looked all over the house before I could make myself believe that you’d gone. I didn’t think that even you could be such a fool.’

  She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ And, ‘In one way or another I cause you nothing but trouble, don’t I?’

  He said tightly, ‘Well, don’t worry about it. If this rain continues, It shouldn’t be for much longer.’ The silence closed in on them again, and she fought it back.

  ‘What will you do when your book is finished?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said. ‘1 have a number of offers to consider.’

  ‘Will you go on being a foreign correspondent?’

  ‘1don t know. ’ His voice was impatient. ‘That depends on a lot of things.’

  Briony wanted very much to ask just what those things were, and if Karen Wellesley was among them but her courage failed her, and she sat silent, drinking her cooling coffee and listening to the hiss and splatter of rain drops coming down the chimney and falling on to the blazing logs in the hearth.

  She tried again. ‘Is the book going well? Is it doing what you wanted to do?’

  He glanced at her frowning. ‘Which was?’

  ‘You said you hoped it would be a kind of exorcism’ she reminded him.

  ‘I don’t think I bargained for quite how many demons there were.’ he said drily. ‘I think it’s going to work up to a point. And it’s taught me a number of things as well. For instance, I never realised before what a well developed instinct for self-preservation I have. You’d think that working for your father would have shown me that.’

  ‘And marrying me.’ She tried for a smile.

  His mouth twisted. ‘I think I’d probably categorise that as a self-destructive impulse. But I’d tried to tell myself that at least we’d gone beyond the stage where we could inflict any more damage on each other. Writing the book has told me differently.’

  Another blast of rain attacked the window.

  ‘Your salvation,’ Logan said bitterly, and dragged the curtains closed with unnecessary violence.

  He moved away from the window and stood looking down at her, as she knelt on the rug.

  ‘Another of life’s little ironies,’ he said. His voice altered, deepened slightly as he quoted, ‘
"Western wind, when wilt thou blow The small rain down can rain? Christ if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again."’ His face was bitter and brooding as he looked at her. ‘Only for us the reverse is true, isn’t it, Briony? The western wind is going to blow you away from me―from my arms, from my bed, from my life. I didn’t believe it at first, when the rain started. I’d thought that I had at least two more days to try and unravel this desperate mess we were in.’

  He dropped to his knees beside her, cupping her face between his hands and turning her towards him.

  ‘And suddenly there’s no time any more.’ he said, and there was a note in his voice which triggered off answering tremors in her innermost being. ‘I’ve tried to fight it, Briony, I’ve reminded myself a hundred times that you don’t belong to me. That you never did in any real sense, and that now there’s someone else in your life. But it’s no good. I can’t fight any more.’

  His hands reached round, caressing the nape of her neck, lifting the fall of copper hair clear of it, letting it slide through his fingers like silk.

  ‘It wasn’t just self-preservation which kept me running in Azabia,’ he said. ‘I was always on the move, one step ahead of Ben Yusef’s thugs, passed from hand to hand, from house to house by people who were even more frightened than I was. I didn’t sleep much, but I used to have this dream. You were with me, Briony,’ ―his hands were unutterably gentle as they loosened the belt of her housecoat, and slid it from her shoulders― ‘and your hair was spread across my pillow. Even when I was awake I could still see you. I swore then that if I got clear and came back to the United Kingdom, I’d make that dream into reality.’

  She tried to say something past the tightness in her throat, but he laid a finger on her lips as if he was forbidding her to speak, and then he began to touch her, lightly and delicately as if she were the most fragile porcelain, and he a blind man whose only source of knowledge was through his fingertips, and speech was not only impossible suddenly, but unnecessary.

  His voice was almost reflective, but there was a ragged note in it which made Briony realise how tenuous a thing his apparent self-control was.

  He said, ‘But it all went sour on me when I did get back. For one thing I had to see you in your father’s house. I didn’t dare ask you to meet me somewhere else in case you refused. I needed to see you so badly―and there you were, standing on the stairs, all dressed-up and very definitely had somewhere to go. And I realised suddenly that you’d made a whole new life for yourself which I had no part in, and it would be better if I went. I hung around for days on end, hoping that you’d get in touch, and eventually London became intolerable, and I decided to come here.’ He drew a long breath and she was aware that he was trembling. ‘And there you were.’ His voice was suddenly harsh. ‘And here you are.’

  His mouth burned on her, and the flame he lit was all-encompassing and merciless, and there was no drawing back for either of them as they were engulfed. Her parted lips returned his kisses with an eagerness she did not even pretend to conceal. The time for pretence was long past, and she heard herself whimpering with delight as the long, languorous passage of his hands and mouth over her body aroused her almost to madness. And then the languor changed to urgency as he pushed her back on to the rough material of the mattress and his body covered hers.

  She cried out once, half in pain and half in surprise at the unfamiliarity of this new and ultimate intimacy, then instinct took over and the mystery disappeared for ever, to be replaced by the certainty of this giving and taking which seemed at once endless and, yet, with her last coherent thought before she was claimed and consumed by pleasure, over much too soon.

  ‘Much too soon,’ she murmured later, lying in Logan’s arms in the drowsy aftermath of that shattering culmination, and heard him laugh deep in his throat.

  ‘You’re forgetting.’ He put his lips hungrily to the pulse in her throat, then feathered a long line of kisses down to her breast. ‘We have the whole night ahead of us.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BRIONY awoke the next morning to a feeling of wellbeing which was not immediately dissipated by the realisation that she was alone. She wriggled down into her covering of blankets and let her mind roam back over the preceding night, while her physical being assimilated certain facts, the first of which was that she ached rather pleasantly.

  There was a new sensuality in the reminiscent smile which curled round the swollen softness of her mouth, as she remembered the heights and the depths of passion which Logan had taught her.And yet nothing had seemed sufficient to assuage their fierce and mutual need.

  She turned her head, listening for sounds of movement in the kitchen, but all was silent. Yet he couldn’t be far away because the fire had been made up and the hearth swept at some time.

  She got up, draping a blanket round her body like a toga, and wandered over to the window. It was still raining, although the wind had dropped, and the unceasing monotonous torrent had transformed the pristine untrodden whiteness of the snow into unappealing slush.

  Briony wrinkled her nose and turned away. She dropped her covering blanket on to the tangled covers and stretched luxuriously in the warmth from the fire before reaching for her housecoat. Then she went into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make herself some coffee. She heard an anxious mewing at the back door, and when she opened it, the bedraggled cat shot past her into the living room. Briony chuckled. The cat had held aloof, during the snow, occupying’ an empty box in the woodshed. Now the rain had forced it to seek shelter and human companionship again. Cats didn’t mind being cold, but they hated being wet, she thought, as she opened a tin of corned beef and chopped some on to a saucer for it. She carried the saucer through to the living room and set it down on the rug, where the cat was grooming itself.

  ‘You’ll get no better service anywhere,’ she assured it, as it turned surprised green eyes upon her, and she laughed out loud in irrepressible jubilation.

  She knelt down and began to fold the sheets and blankets which Logan had brought down the night before.

  Tonight, she thought, they would sleep together in the bed upstairs where their marriage should have begun all those months before, and the wheel would come full circle.

  She bent and pressed her lips to the pillow they had shared, then snatched it up, hugging it almost fiercely to her breasts. It’s all right, she told herself. Everything is going to be all right―particularly when she solved the growing mystery of where Logan had got to.

  On her way upstairs with the bedding, she paused to glance in at the parlour door. The typewriter stood in the centre of the table with the unfinished page still held in its rollers, and she could not explain the curious feeling of relief that she experienced on still seeing it there.

  She tried to rally herself, to shake off the slight feeling of depression that was beginning to invade her.

  The euphoria of her first waking moments had worn off completely by now.

  On an impulse, she went into the bathroom and ran herself a steaming tub. There was some French bath essence belonging to Aunt Hes in the bathroom cupboard and she splashed it generously into the water.

  She hoped a long hot soak would cheer her up and help banish some of her apprehensions, but she could not relax. She kept listening for the sound of Logan’s return, and asking herself where he had gone. He must have gone down to the village, she reasoned, wondering what state the track was in, probably to try and get hold of some fresh bread and milk. But if Kirkby Scar itself had been cut off, would there have been any deliveries? She sighed in perplexity, submerging herself up to the chin in the warmth of the water.

  She was humming a little tune as she went into the bedroom. After some thought she decided against the various pairs of jeans she had been wearing over the past few days, and put on a calf-length russet velvet skirt with a matching shirt top. She brushed her hair until it crackled with electricity and let it hang loose on her shoulders. She pulled a little face at the shadows un
der her eyes, then smiled as she remembered the reason for them.

  She hummed again as she ran downstairs and turned into the living room, then paused in astonishment as her eyes took in Logan’s coat, draped across the back of a chair to dry. So he’d come back, then―without a word, She stood, conscious of a sudden chill, and heard the sound of the typewriter coming from the parlour; She turned slowly and went across the passage. The door was closed, and she opened it without knocking and went in.

  He as sitting, his head bent, typing furiously, all his attention, all his concentration on the words appearing on the page in front of him.

  Briony said his name, and knew that he had heard her because she saw him stiffen slightly, but he did not look up at once, and she stood there in front of him vulnerable and defenceless.

  At last he did look at her and his eyes were cool and remote. She waited breathlessly for him to get up and come round the table to her. Her mouth was dry, and her inside was churning, and only his arms around her would give her the peace and reassurance she wanted.