'Oh, I don't know. It always seemed to me that he had rather a soft spot for you.'
A soft spot! If only her father knew. The last thing she had expected or wanted when she came running for home and safety had been to meet up with Dominic Savage again—the very last thing. She doubted her ability to face him with equanimity and coolness even at her most self-composed, but having to face him like this, when she was feeling so vulnerable and torn… She shuddered slightly, remembering how his cold grey eyes could see through her defences, and how that deep incisive voice of his could shred through her puny arguments.
Her heart was pounding as she served the rest of the meal. If she could have, she would have got on the next train to London and stayed there, but it was too late, she had burned her bridges, and then there were her parents to consider. Her mother needed careful looking after—someone to watch over her and make sure that she didn't do too much. Christy knew her mother; she had always led an active, busy life, and she wouldn't take kindly to her restricted regime.
Dominic Savage back in Setondale; that was the last thing she had expected, or wanted.
While she cleared away after their meal, her father went upstairs to sit with her mother. Dominic was due at three o'clock, and Christy wondered cravenly if she could find some excuse not to be there when he called. Her face burned as she remembered their last horrific meeting.
It was true that at seventeen she had had a mammoth crush on him; but what her parents didn't know was that it was Dominic who had been indirectly responsible for her decision to leave home and go to college, and ultimately to work in London. After that last traumatic meeting she had not been able to endure the thought of seeing him again, and so she had virtually run away. Quite needlessly, as it turned out, for Dominic himself had left Setondale that autumn to continue his medical studies in America.
Unable to stand the pressure of the old memories surging inside her, she paced the kitchen. She needed to get out, to breathe in the cool, calm air and gather her composure.
An old anorak from her college days was still hanging on its peg in the laundry-room, and she pulled it on with jerky, uncoordinated movements.
Outside the sky had grown more leaden and menacing, the scent of snow stronger now. On the hills she could see a shepherd and his dog working the sheep, bringing them down to lower pastures. She started walking at a speed that set her hair bouncing on her shoulders, tension bracing her muscles, the cold air stinging her face. The path she took was a familiar one, climbing up towards the foothills, and gradually as she walked she felt her tension ease slightly. She passed the Vicarage, disturbing a dog that set up a clamorous barking. The house and its grounds had recently been sold, but she didn't pause to wonder about the new inhabitants of the sturdy Georgian building.
Dominic back! Her body shook with renewed tension and she expelled her breath on a pent-up sigh.
Her father had said that Dominic had had a soft spot for her. How little he knew. Savage by name and savage by nature, that was Dominic, and God, how she had suffered from that savagery!
With words that even now were engraved on her soul he had torn apart her childish fantasies and destroyed her innocence, holding up to her his contemptuous awareness of her adolescent feelings, giving her a distorted mirror-image of them that had scorched her with shame and anguish that still lived on in her soul.
It had all been her own fault, of course. She should have been content with simply worshipping him from a distance, and blissfully cherishing their longstanding friendship. Their parents had been friends, and from an early age she had attached herself to him even though he was eight years older. Dominic had lived with his parents in the house attached to the medical practice while he worked as a very junior doctor at the hospital in Alnwick. Her crush on him had developed the year she was sixteen. No doubt she would have been content with simply seeing him, and sighing over him, if it hadn't been for her school-friends.
For a reason she had never been able to define, during her last year at school she had been befriended by a crowd of girls led by the precocious daughter of their local MP. Helen Maguire was far more sophisticated and worldly than the other girls in the class, and she had sought out Christy as her best friend. How flattered and delighted she had been! Until then she hadn't had many friends. She was too quiet and shy to make friends easily, but she had glowed and relaxed in the flattering warmth of Helen's friendship, pushing aside her own doubts and natural reticence about the wisdom of joining in the giggled discussions on sex and boyfriends initiated by Helen. Naturally, since Helen was the one with the most experience, she was the one who did most of the talking, and although sometimes she had experienced a sense of revulsion when Helen described her sexual exploits, for the most part Christy had been caught too deep in the adolescent thrall of having such a wonderful friend to question too deeply Helen's values and morals.
Of course, it was as inevitable as night following day that Helen should worm out of he
r her feelings for Dominic, and that once having discovered them, she should exhort Christy not to be such a baby.
If you want him, you ought to go out and get him,' she had informed Christy, giving her a sly sideways smile as she added softly, 'it's easy when you know how. Shall I tell you?'
The stitch in her side made Christy pause and lean momentarily against a large rock. A feeling of nausea gathered in the pit of her stomach as she tried to drag her thoughts away from the past. Remembering did no good… and no matter how often she went back she couldn't change the past; she couldn't wipe out or obliterate what had happened, no matter how much she might want to. She shuddered deeply as she drew in lungfuls of air, icy cold now that she had climbed above the valley bottom, stinging the inside of her chest. She welcomed the pain, because pain meant reality, and reality was now, eight years on from that awful summer.
She ought to have forgotten it long ago. Dominic Savage's memory should have faded and been lost beneath happier memories of other men, but it stood between her and her fulfilment as a woman like some sort of revenging spirit.
She smiled without mirth as she remembered David's incredulous look of disbelief when she had told him.
'You're still a virgin? But that's impossible! God, Christy, a man only has to look at you! Those eyes… that red hair… your body… they don't belong to some chaste Victorian maiden.'
She hadn't been able to stop her mouth from trembling, and he was sensitive and intuitive enough to know that she wasn't lying. If only David hadn't been married. How willingly she would have given herself over to his sexual mastery. Physically she had found him attractive, even while she knew she didn't love him. She had wanted his lovemaking, his skill, and his expertise, like some sort of sleeping princess awaiting the awakening kiss of a prince, she thought now, dourly. But she couldn't hurt Meryl, and so the chasm of fear and self-loathing that Dominic had blasted between her and her sexuality had remained unbreached.
As she stood leaning against the stone, the first fine flakes of snow began to fall. She knew that she ought to go back, but she was unwilling to do so, unwilling to face Dominic until she had made herself relive the full horror of that awful night.
She wasn't going to blame Helen; the fault, the desire had been hers. She was the one who had listened with awed fascination to Helen's description of how easy it was to seduce a man. The other girl's voice had been edged with the contempt of an intrinsically sexually cold female for the vulnerability of the male, but then she had been too naïve to see it, and so, round-eyed, and inwardly faintly shocked, she had drunk in Helen's detailed instructions.
'But what if he doesn't… you know? What if he doesn't make love to me?'
Helen had shrugged. 'You don't need to worry about that. Once you've aroused him, he won't be able to stop himself. None of them can.'
Alarm and excitement had twisted inside her; excitement at the thought of Dominic making love to her, and alarm at the thought of her own daring in imagining that he might.
It had been quite easy to discover an evening when Dominic would be at home alone. Every fortnight her own parents and his met up to play bridge, and she only had to wait until the venue for this fortnightly get-together was her own home.
'Wear something sexy,' had been Helen's first instruction. Easy enough to say, but there was nothing in her wardrobe that remotely deserved such a description.
In the end, feeling more uncomfortable and embarrassed than sexy, she had taken off her bra, and unfastened her cotton shirt to show the taut upper swell of her breasts, before tugging it into her habitual jeans.