As he moved, Maggie looked away, and then she saw Isobel’s engagement ring glittering malevolently on the desk, and all at once the realisation of what she had done hit her.
She started to shake violently, and felt Marcus reach out to touch her, but she shrugged him off as though his touch contaminated her.
‘Maggie, we have to talk…’
‘No,’ she told him shrilly. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. You’ve had your revenge, Marcus. Paid me back for what I did to you. Made me…’ She couldn’t speak for the tears thickening her voice, but when Marcus made to reach out to her a second time, she swung round violently, shaking her head.
‘No…don’t touch me. Don’t ever touch me again,’ she cried out, wrenching away from him.
‘Maggie…wait…you don’t understand!’
Didn’t she? Maggie asked herself bitterly. Of course she did, and she was just about to tell him as much when she heard the car and realised that it was probably the girls coming home. Mrs Simmonds had offered to run them back on her way to visit a friend.
‘That will be Susie and Sara,’ she told Marcus shakily. She couldn’t let them see her like this, and as she heard the kitchen door open and the car drive off she pulled away from Marcus and hurried upstairs.
CHAPTER TEN
SOMEWHERE in the distance, Maggie heard the church clock chime the hour. She moved restlessly in her bed, wondering savagely why it was that when she most needed the merciful oblivion of sleep it chose to elude her.
She had come to bed at ten-thirty, emotionally exhausted and almost haunted by her mental image of Marcus’s grim face. Twice after dinner he had told her that he needed to talk to her, but on both occasions she had been saved from that confrontation by the girls demanding her attention.
The ordeal couldn’t be put off for ever, though, and when it came she would need to have a watertight and face-saving excuse for acting as she had. Why, oh, why was it that her imagination, the cause of so much pain and anguish in the past, suddenly now deserted her, leaving her bereft of any logical reason why she should have allowed Marcus to make love to her, other than the truth?
She groaned and rolled over, acknowledging that it was impossible for her to sleep. She doubted that she would ever be able to wipe her memory clean of its image of the shock in Marcus’s face as she opened her eyes to look at him, her body lethargic and sated by their lovemaking, her brain dulled… She had known then, as she faced that look of grim disbelief, that making love to her as a person had been the last thing he’d wanted to do. She had even thought she had glimpsed a swift dawning of distaste in the darkening of his eyes, but she had looked away, not wanting to see the truth, not wanting to know.
His desire…his need…his love, they were all for Isobel, and she had simply been a…a convenient body and nothing more.
The clock chimed the quarter-hour. Quarter-past one in the morning; she couldn’t lie here like this until it was seven o’clock, going over and over what had happened, wondering how on earth she was going to endure living alongside Marcus from now on, and yet knowing at the same time that she could not break her promise to her cousins.
If only she had some sleeping tablets or something…preferably an entire bottleful, she thought grimly, acknowledging as the thought formed that ending her own life was not the answer.
When she had come to bed, Marcus was still up. She had seen his shadow falling across the desk as she passed the study. Now, much as she longed to go downstairs and make herself a hot, milky drink, the thought that Marcus might still be up kept her where she was.
Her bedside lamp was on; the book she had found and been trying to read lay discarded on the bedside table. The more she thought about the comfort of that hot drink, the more she yearned to taste it, and then, just as she had decided to take the risk of running into Marcus, she thought she heard the sound of a door closing downstairs and immediately she tensed.
Her ears, alert for the slightest sound, caught the faint creak of the stairs, so faint that it was impossible to tell if they were caused by footsteps or were simply the grumblings of an old house settling down for the night.
There were no more sounds, and her breath leaked noisily from her lungs. She was just telling herself that she was acting like a fool when her bedroom door opened and Marcus walked in.
He was carrying a tray with two mugs on it, steam and the smell of hot chocolate emanating from them.
As she looked at him in silent dismay, he leaned heavily against the wall, as though the climb up the stairs had tired him. Her bedside lamp showed her quite plainly the lines of worry and grim determination carved in
to his face.
‘I heard you moving about in bed,’ he told her emotionlessly. ‘We need to talk, Maggie, and you know it.’ He seemed so tired…so drained, that all her fear of what such a talk might reveal about her feelings for him left her.
‘Yes,’ she agreed shakily, adding with a brave attempt at humour as she looked at the mugs, ‘What’s this, Marcus? A peace offering?’
‘Well, it certainly isn’t drugged or laced with some magical aphrodisiac, if that’s what’s worrying you,’ he told her grimly.
He walked over to the bed hesitantly, putting the tray down on the small table and then looking round for a chair. As he did so, Maggie noticed him massaging the outside of his thigh as though the muscle was causing him pain.
‘I never asked you how you got on at hospital,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Well enough. Apparently it’s too soon yet to know how much residual damage there may or may not be. They tell me I’ve been very lucky. It could have meant an amputation.’
Maggie couldn’t help it. She shuddered violently, her eyes immediately registering her feelings.