In the kitchen she made herself a cup of tea and then walked back into the hallway, stopping as she reached the open door to the sitting room.
It had been in there that she and Dominic had cuddled up together in the evenings. Reading…talking…
Shakily she walked into the room, heading, not for the sofa but for the large chair alongside it, carefully placing her tea on the coffee table and then sitting down facing the sofa, staring searchingly at it.
What was she looking for? Some inner vision of Dominic and herself seated there?
She was, she discovered, holding her breath, willing herself almost to see them…to remember more…But already the memory was fading, stubbornly refusing to metamorphose into anything more meaningful.
Angrily Annie subsided into her chair. She felt as though her own memory was playing a deliberately tormenting game with her, feeding her just enough information to lead her on but then refusing to give her something more substantial.
There was a notepad and a pen on the table, and on an impulse she reached out and picked them up, settling back in the chair, curling her legs beneath her as she started to doodle idly.
Stiff, spiky-branched trees…a little house, four-square to the world, with curtained windows and smoke coming out of its chimney. She gave it a garden, picket-fenced and secure. Well, it didn’t take much imagination to know what that represented. But what about the river she had also drawn, and the car? A large, boxy vehicle, not totally unlike a four-wheel drive—Dominic’s Range Rover?
‘Think…Think…’ Annie urged herself. ‘Remember…’
She started to write. Dominic’s name, she realised when she had finished, with little sketched hearts over the ‘i’s instead of dots. Now why had she done that? She wrote down the word ‘marriage’, and then under it she started to write another list of words, her pen moving faster and faster as she did so.
When she finally stopped she was breathing as though she had physically exerted herself and her heart was pounding.
Nervously she studied the list.
Love. Trust. Respect. Joy. Sharing. Acceptance. Dominic.
Tears blurred her eyes.
Dominic grimaced as he stared at his alarm clock. He had woken up abruptly several minutes ago, as alertly and totally awake as though it was seven in the morning and not still three.
He knew there was no way he was going to go back to sleep. He might as well use the time to do some work. Slipping out of bed, he pulled on his robe.
Annie was concentrating so hard on her list that she failed to see or hear Dominic until he was in the sitting room, and her face burned bright pink with self-consciousness when she looked up and saw him.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she told him, almost defensively. ‘So I came downstairs to make a drink…’
‘Mmm…Me too…’ Dominic told her, going to stand beside her so that he could look down at the list she wasn’t quite quick enough to conceal.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked curiously.
‘It’s nothing…just…I just thought if I wrote down whatever came into my head it might somehow…’
‘May I see?’ Dominic asked her, sitting down on the sofa.
Reluctantly Annie handed over the piece of paper. ‘I don’t know why I bothered,’ she told him. ‘It was a silly idea and…What is it?’ she demanded as she saw the way he was frowning as he concentrated on the paper.
‘Nothing,’ he told her shortly, and then, as though he recognised how curt he had been, he explained, ‘It’s the little hearts…above the “i”s. Like these on your robe,’ he added, pointing out a similarity that Annie herself hadn’t recognised. ‘That’s the way you always used to write my name. You used to say that the hearts were ours.’
He looked back at the list and Annie studiously avoided meeting his eyes when he eventually finished. She was aware of a very special subtle aura of intimacy and closeness enclosing them, as though both of them had briefly let down their defences.
‘What went wrong between us?’ she asked Dominic helplessly. ‘Why…?’ She stopped and took a deep breath before admitting shakily to him, ‘Sometimes I feel I’m destined to have unanswered questions in my life, empty spaces…’
Her eyes clouded and Dominic guessed intuitively what she was thinking. Like her, he too was conscious of an unexpected closeness between them, a sense of them sharing their need to discover her lost past.
‘You mean your parents?’ he asked her.
Numbly Annie nodded her head.
‘I often wonder if she, my mother, ever thinks of me.’
Her unguarded admission touched Dominic’s feelings in a way he hadn’t expected. He was in danger of responding to her as though he still loved her, he warned himself, and then proceeded to ignore his self-warning as he told her gently, ‘I’m sure she does.’
It was and always had been his personal opinion that the mother who had abandoned Annie as a very new baby must have been a very young and very frightened girl, too immature and too afraid to admit that she had given birth, and Dominic felt equally sure that as she had grown up and matured she must have spent many sad hours wondering about the baby girl she had abandoned.
‘I could never do that to my child,’ Annie burst out passionately. ‘Never. Not under any circumstances. Not for anyone…’ She stopped and flushed. What on earth had provoked such an outburst from her?
‘Can I ask…?’ she began, and then stopped, before speaking again and very quickly, so she didn’t lose her courage or change her mind. ‘Will you tell me what it was like for us…being married?’ she asked Dominic huskily. ‘Perhaps it might help me to remember. I don’t know…’
‘It was…it was very good,’ Dominic told her sombrely. ‘In fact…’ He paused and looked past her, as though he was able to see something she could not. ‘It was more than very good, Annie,’ he told her. ‘It was…we were…’
As she heard the emotion in his voice and saw the brief sheen on remembered pain in his eyes Annie was overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse.
‘Oh, Dominic,’ she protested. ‘I…’
She stopped and looked at him, his eyes…his mouth…his…Her heart lurched as her gaze was drawn inextricably back to his mouth.
‘Annie…’
She could hear the protest in his voice, and the need, and then suddenly they were reaching for one another, touching, kissing, with an inevitability that Annie knew nothing could have prevented.
Annie felt herself being lifted tenderly out of her chair and drawn down against Dominic’s body. She had no will to resist him; she could find no need, no reason. She felt his hand tremble slightly as he smoothed her hair off her face. They might have made love a hundred times before, but instinctively Annie knew that this was different, that this was special; what they were feeling, sharing, was not merely a re-enactment of their shared past.
This Dominic, who held and touched her now, was not a figment of her imagination, nor even her husband from the past. This Dominic was the man he was in the here and now.
In the light of the lamp she had switched on she could see his face, shadowed and mysterious and yet at the same time familiar. She traced the shape of his jaw, the curve of his cheekbone, and then stopped as she saw the way he was watching her. Time itself seemed to rock to a standstill—no sound, no movement, no breath even breaking the intensity of their silent communication with one another.
Very slowly and carefully Dominic lowered his head towards her. Automatically her lips parted, her eyes closing in sweet, sensual anticipation. His lips felt warm against hers, their caress so sensitising and arousing that she started to quiver. A soft moan broke the silence between them as his hands slid down her body, shaping the nakedness of her curves beneath her thin robe.
Now she understood why she had been so drawn to its small printed hearts. They were almost an exact replica of the ones she had drawn in Dominic’s name. She pressed closer to him, her mouth softening enticingly beneath his.
> Dominic shuddered as he felt the response of her mouth and her body. Beneath his touch her nipples had flowered into life, and he could see as well as feel their sharp outline beneath her robe. His body was even more flagrantly proclaiming its own arousal, and his tongue was pushing against the flimsy resistance of her softened lips.
What had begun as an attempt to show her just how good their love had been had turned swiftly into something far more potently dangerous, and rooted in the present. The woman he was holding, kissing…caressing…wanting…wasn’t the Annie of the past, the girl he had married. The woman he was holding now…wanting now…was Annie as she now was, and the way he wanted her, the intensity with which he wanted her, faded into insignificance his memories of the way they had once been.
He had known already of the danger he was in, and now it couldn’t be denied any longer. He was falling in love with her all over again, abusing the power his position in her life gave him to use, what on her part had been an innocent and anguished plea for his help to satisfy his own need.
He had to stop before it was too late…before he…
Annie tensed in loss and bemusement as Dominic tore his mouth from hers. He was breathing heavily, and she could feel her own heart pumping fast in aroused response.