MasterStroke (7 page)

Chapter Nine

Breakfast was bacon and poached eggs with a few slices of toasted sourdough, orange juice and, later, Earl Grey tea. It was an unusual choice; on most days, she would have something far healthier but Sandrine was ravenous and tired, both from the excitement of the previous evening and the sleeplessness that followed her nightmare.

She ate at the kitchen table, taking her time, picking through the sections of several weekend newspapers and dipping into those articles that caught her eye. Heathcliff was curled up on an adjoining chair, luxuriating in the morning sun. As she’d prepared her own breakfast, she’d finely diced raw beef and placed it in his white porcelain bowl. It was out of character to serve him such a grand meal so early in the day but Sandrine thought she’d owed him a special treat for staying out so late.

Evidently, he forgave her without preamble. Beef was his meat of choice; he had unusual tastes for a cat, especially one she’d rescued from the streets when he was just a kitten. He avoided fresh fish and even chicken, although he was more than happy with the tinned variety. Beef, however, was an entirely different matter. Even cheaper cuts, once trimmed of fat and sinew, brought him running to the bowl, eliciting a purr louder than a diesel engine.

It brought a smile to Sandrine’s face as she watched him. Afterwards, he would forgo his usual preening, jump onto the chair and fall fast asleep.

“Lucky you,” she said quietly to him. “Wish I had your ability to sleep so easily.”

She reached across and lightly stroked his sleek fur. Heathcliff huffed slightly and gave a small, barely noticeable snore.

The nightmare notwithstanding, Sandrine had other things on her mind. The events of the previous evening came back with a startling clarity and she flushed red with acute embarrassment. She was confused and ashamed.
How could it all have gotten out of control so quickly? What was I thinking?

It wasn’t the alcohol, although she undertook to watch things very carefully in the future. She felt relaxed and, as the evening progressed, increasingly mellow. She enjoyed Jack’s company immensely but something had taken over. That she was attracted to him went without saying. She’d felt it the moment he entered the shop but she’d never, never, acted on such feelings so rapidly.

It disturbed her every bit as much as it aroused her. She hated the thought that her libido had overridden her common sense and her normally steely self-control.
What does he think of me? I’m not easy. I don’t give myself to just anybody. What the hell happened?

She tried to think of a logical reason why she’d acted in this way but there was none. The panic that had gripped her when she’d awoken in the darkened room, in a strange bed with a man she hardly knew, spread through her with an even greater shame.

She’d come awake with a start, felt the heat of Jack’s body pressed against her back and his hardness nestling between her thighs, and the reality of what she’d done, what he’d done to her with her enthusiastic and noisy consent, chilled her.

She remembered that she sat up in an instant, a stark strangled cry escaping her lips. It was like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over her. A soft, dim light came from a table lamp on a dresser across the room. She was wearing her bra but no panties and a sheet pooled around her lap.

Jack was standing by the bed, tense, alert, partly in shadow. Sandrine wasn’t aware how quickly he had moved, in the split second since she had jolted upwards.

“What is it,” he whispered softly but with a barely-controlled urgency. “Are you OK?”

She was out of bed before he finished speaking, heading for the chair near the door where her clothes were neatly folded, rushing to hide her near-nakedness.

“I’m fine. I have to get home.”

“Jeeze, talk about giving a guy a fright.” He tried to gather her up in his arms but she fought him off.

“Please, no. I have to go. I’ve stayed too long.”

He pulled back, regarding her carefully.

“Sure. Of course. Would you like some coffee, maybe breakfast?”

She was flustered, uncertain.
No, I just need to get out of here now.
This was out of control and she wanted to be back in the sanctuary of her own apartment where she could work out what had just happened.

“No, thank you. I have to go. Could you please call me a taxi?”

“No, I’ll drive you home.”

She wanted not only to be gone but a long distance from Jack as well. She didn’t know what time it was or how long it would take for a taxi to arrive. She scooped up the rest of her clothes and carried them into the adjoining bathroom.

“OK, fine, thanks. I’ll just be a minute.” In the harsh light of the bathroom, she looked into the mirror and saw the wildness in her eyes, the panic, and knew she was on the verge of bursting into tears.
Not here
, she thought.
Pull yourself together. Wait till you get home.

Jack was dressed in dark jeans, a thick black turtleneck sweater and leather jacket when she emerged from the bathroom. She slid quickly into her overcoat, knotted her wool scarf tightly around her neck and grabbed her handbag in the living room, following Jack downstairs then through a long, winding passage, then up another set of stairs before emerging into a brightly-lit garage holding a number of cars and motorcycles.

At another time, she might have lingered among them for there was a beautiful old Cadillac, highly polished and gleaming under the floodlights. Jack motioned to a dark-coloured four-wheel drive near a wide roller door. The tail lights blinked as they approached.

“We’ll take this one. The doors are open.”

The drive to her apartment took fifteen minutes during which nothing was said. Sandrine tried to shrink into her seat as much as possible; it didn’t occur to her to try to gauge Jack’s mood, whether he was angry or hurt or just merely perplexed by her behaviour. At that moment, she didn’t really care how he felt. Her temper was boiling; at him, because she felt he’d taken advantage of her in some way she couldn’t explain, invading her privacy as much as her body, and at herself for so easily succumbing to whatever had happened.

She wasn’t drunk or light-headed, she was wide awake, viewing everything with a sterile clarity borne of cold rage.
What the hell happened? How did I get into this situation? I don’t understand.
Whatever it was, she blamed Jack and wanted to be as far away from him as humanly possible.

Yet there was a tiny voice inside her calling for calm.
It’s not Jack’s fault. You’re an adult and you were doing exactly what you wanted. You were enjoying yourself. Don’t make him pay for something you regret after the fact.

It wasn’t what she wanted to hear and she had no intention of letting logic get the upper hand. She was steaming, at herself more than Jack, and it was just too bad for anybody else in the way. It was a side of her that she wasn’t especially proud of, this volcanic anger that surfaced in times of deep stress.

The streets, empty of traffic at this pre-dawn hour, flashed by but Sandrine didn’t notice. She was beyond paying attention to anything but her scrambled thoughts and misplaced recriminations. She was still tired, drained physically as well as emotionally but the adrenalin firing through her veins pushed her forward.

When the car drew up outside her apartment house, she said not a word, merely grabbed her bag and launched herself across the pavement and into the foyer like she was heading into battle. She left the passenger door of the car gaping open. She didn’t see Jack’s rueful smile or hear him wish her a good night’s sleep.

It was only later that morning as she sipped her tea that she brought herself up short, stopping with the cup inches away from her lips, as the realisation struck her. She hadn’t talked to Jack the entire trip yet he drove her directly home. She was sure she hadn’t mentioned her address earlier.
How did he know where I live?

Chapter Ten

Sandrine wasn’t paying attention to the time, not at all, she was busy cleaning the bathroom but she nonetheless noted that it was 3.12pm precisely that Jack rang for the first of several times that afternoon. She let the call go through to the answering machine.

“Hi, it’s me, Jack. Just want to see how you are. You seemed a little edgy when you left here this morning and I’ve been pretty worried about you. Please give me a call when it’s convenient.”

“You’ll be waiting a damn long time,” she said with a finality she found enormously satisfying at the time. Dressed in a pair of old grey sweat pants and a Harvard t-shirt she’d bought when at college, although not at that college, she’d made good progress on a long-overdue spring clean and everything from the bath to the shower, toilet and hand basin was gleaming like new. The air was thick with the fumes from the chemical cleaners; Heathcliff had wandered in earlier to check things out, sniffed discouragingly and disappeared to another part of the apartment.

While she worked, there was little time for reflection which was exactly how she wanted it. Tchaikovsky drifted in from the living area, matching her mood and providing the necessary impetus to complete the job. From the bathroom, she moved on to the bedroom, sorting through her closet, bagging up a load of old clothes to be donated to Goodwill, and putting aside some shoes destined for the elderly Armenian who worked so diligently and at such modest cost on rejuvenating her favourite footwear.

By that time, two more hours had passed. The telephone rang again. It went to voice mail as well. No message was left and she assumed it was Jack. Almost immediately, her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognise the number in caller ID but was sure it was Jack. A message was left but she didn’t bother getting it. She pretty much knew what he’d say.

She showered, dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a vibrant earthenware-coloured cashmere sweater and brewed a pot of Earl Grey. Although not especially hungry, she made a tuna sandwich, sharing the remainder of the tin with Heathcliff who gratefully demolished it with a purring intensity that teased only the second smile of the day to her lips.

The deep soft cushions of the sofa, a warm woollen throw and the final chapters of the 2005 translation of Teresa Guiccioli’s
Lord Byron’s Life In Italy
awaited. The tea was warm and fragrant but she hardly tasted it. The sandwich didn’t interest her. She lasted barely a page of her book before she cast it aside and stared at the opposite wall.

Heathcliff sat on the coffee table and regarded her with a detached curiosity. He was doing his furry statue impression and Sandrine soon wilted under the attention.

“What? Think you know everything?” It had always amazed her how well this wonderful tortoiseshell-patterned creature could sense her moods, almost as if he could read minds. When she needed affection, he was there with a welcome snuggle and a purr that melted her heart. When she needed space, he was nowhere to be found. He leapt nimbly across the space between table and sofa and settled into her lap, twisting into a position that offered up the soft down of his belly.

“OK, I admit it,” she said soothingly. “Maybe I have been a little harsh.”

The little voice inside her had been eating away at her normally indomitable resilience all afternoon but she’d made herself too busy to pay much attention. The fury had subsided, the shame and embarrassment ebbed to a minor irritation and, when she reached inside and asked herself how she really felt, she was surprised by the answer.

She felt fine. In fact, she felt wonderful. Slightly giddy, if anything, and it was a realisation that made her extremely uncomfortable. The shock of the previous evening and the way she had so quickly given herself over to the wantonness, the unapologetic eroticism, frightened her. It had propelled her into a state of high drama where she could forgive no-one, especially not herself. This was so unlike her, she reasoned, she’d never done anything like this before.

She’d panicked but now, as she took the time to search her emotions, she’d had to admit that she’d enjoyed it. There was a line that had been crossed, into some unexplored darker aspect of her personality; she had flung aside her usually careful nature and the thrill of it, the sheer uncharacteristic abandon to which she’d capitulated, was confronting.

As she sat quietly on the sofa, there was an awareness of her body, its warmth and softness, a dawning of tension in her stomach, that she certainly didn’t want to dwell on. Her mind, with all the immutable logic that she so prided herself on, was in danger of being betrayed by her body. The physical was over-riding the mental.

No, no, no. I don’t want to feel like this.

Unfortunately, the more she thought about it, fought it, tried to find excuses for the chaos that enveloped her, the more it became plain that she not only welcomed this change, she actively sought it.

Had she been too careful all her life? Too concerned with propriety, with being a good girl that she’d neglected her emotions? That could explain her choice in partners, in always picking men who met her intellectual ideals without ever quite exciting her physically. She grimaced when the thought hit her that, while she loved sex, she’d only ever orgasmed when she masturbated. She much preferred to give herself absolute, toe-curling, heart-stopping pleasure when she was alone rather than share it with a lover. No man had ever made her come so violently as Jack. And it had been not during the traditional course of a relationship, when friendship had moved slowly and carefully into love. It had been lust, a completely physical attraction that disobeyed every rule she’d set herself in her life.

The sex, with its underlying theme of dominance and submission, had almost –
no, strike that, not almost at all, it had very much been
– dirty. Depraved, even. No wonder she had such trouble intellectualising it.

There was a certain shame, then, in admitting that her body was letting her know what it needed. As she reflected on the previous evening, reliving the way Jack had bypassed her reserves and unlocked her needs with such finesse, her breathing turned shallow and her heart raced. The temperature steadily rose and she felt that warming feeling like molten caramel in her stomach.