The Last Resort (13 page)

Now he was right in front of me. We stood within range of each other’s body heat, and I realised I could feel the slow rhythm of his breath dance lightly on my skin. So close. So close.

“You’re not going home,” he murmured as he reached for my hair, loosened it from its band, grasped it like a rope and twisted it once around his hand. Now he’d trapped me completely—he held me in place with this primitive gesture, as if I was handcuffed—but it was unnecessary. The weakness of desire, that feeling I would soon come to know so well, had taken hold.

“Don’t,” I said, not meaning it—my body already knowing what was coming, but my mind unable to fathom it.

I realised I was trembling. Time froze. And he kissed me.

My heartbeat roared, crashed, like a waterfall in my ears, my blood sang, and adrenalin shot through me like I’d put my hand on an electric fence. I could have just jumped off a bridge for all my body knew.

After a long time, he bit my lip gently. Then he kissed me once, almost chastely, and pulled away, letting my hair fall from his grasp. My mouth felt red and swollen, and I noticed I was panting.

He was staring into my eyes as if he might read something in them, if he looked hard enough.

“Come on,” he said, hoarsely, almost in a whisper, and I saw the hint of a smile on his face.

He didn’t switch the lights on in his bedroom. I could see silhouettes of the bed, the chaise longue, then doorways leading to the bathroom and dressing room.

By the time that he pushed me facedown onto the bed, I was shivering with arousal and fear. With complete coolness, without saying a word, he unzipped the back of my dress, turned me over, and pulled it off me. I lay there in my underwear and high heels, exquisitely conscious of the fact that I hadn’t washed in 24 hours. I could feel the thin, grimy sheen of sweat all over me.

He was standing over the bed, chest rising and falling, only his dark outline visible; his face was obscured.

He reached down and, cupping my heel in his hand, removed first one shoe, then the other. They dropped to the floor with a thud of finality. Then he pushed his thumbs into the soft arches of my feet, pushed them hard. My legs, stiff with fear, instantly gave way as I groaned—half with pain, half with desire. As they bent against my chest, he climbed towards me onto the bed, and in a single motion, he pulled my knickers out from under me and threw them to one side.

“Please let me have a shower,” I said, hoarsely, my voice sounding like a sob. “Please. It’ll only take a minute.” He didn’t answer; scooping me upright, he peeled off my camisole, then my bra, and I was naked.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And
then
what?”

“Well, and then we—had sex. And then Matthew took me home.”

Sharon shook her head as we walked down the beach. “You’re impossible. OK, fine. If you want me to interrogate you, I will. So, what happened after that?”

“Well, after that it was the weekend.”

“Did he ring you? Over that weekend, I mean.”

“No.”

“And on Monday? You went back to work, or what?”

“Of course I went back to work.”

“And
then
?” There was a vein bulging out of Sharon’s forehead now. This called for a summary.

“And then I carried on working for him, except we had sex every afternoon after Mary Hazel went home, and twice on Fridays and on the days when we worked at night, and sometimes on Sundays if he asked me to come in.”

That sounds crass, but it wasn’t just about sex. I loved him quickly, even then, even though we didn’t say it out loud. More than once, I wrapped myself against him and begged him to stay a moment longer.

“You must have been exhausted.”

“Shut up,” I scowled, kicking up a plume of sand in frustration.

“You know,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, “I just can’t imagine it. Little Miss Abstinence, going at it with her rich, sexy boss. With some light S&M thrown in. Scandalous!”

“I was never abstinent. You just thought I was, compared to you,” I shot back acidly.

She ignored me. “You still haven’t told me how you ended up married to him, though. Forgot about that bit, did you? With all the underwear flying around?”

“Bitch.”

She laughed. “Just tell me what happened.”

I let out a huge, long, painful sigh, and for a wobbly moment I thought I might cry. “He had a business trip to Paris. He took me with him. We got married there.”

I explained it all to her. He proposed to me as we stood on the Pont-Neuf, over the Seine. (Yes, I know that’s cheesy. But trust me, if it were you being proposed to, you wouldn’t think it was cheesy at all.) To be honest with you, I can’t even really remember it properly—the exact words, I mean. I only remember his face, his scent, the unstoppable gallop of my heart when I realised what he was saying. I knew that there was no point pretending that I was going to refuse.

Not that I felt forced to say yes; don’t misunderstand me. It wasn’t that at all. It was that I felt like it was fated, written in the stars. If my life before was a peaceful, boring place, Jack was the cataclysm that turned everything upside down. After he appeared in my life, there was just no turning back. It was as if the Earth had been pushed from its axis.

Would you dare say no in my position? Would you let go of the opportunity? I certainly couldn’t.

I deeply loathed my memories of the wedding itself. He took me to the city hall that very afternoon, bubbling over with happiness. Although it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, how could I deny him the pleasure? It pleased me to please him.

I can recall my awkwardness at not understanding the registrar, the silence of the bare room, the scratch of the fountain pen as I signed the papers. My disappointment at being married in flat shoes, an ordinary skirt and blouse, without my mum or my sister there.

But I was marrying him, and that was what was important. I had a throb of irrepressible joy when the papers were signed: we had known each other for three short months. Who would have guessed my life would turn out like this? When I turned to him for the kiss (the only bit of the ceremony that was easy to follow), I could see he felt the same. It was magical. Our first kiss as a wedded couple—in Paris. Although it wasn’t what I’d envisioned as a little girl for my wedding, it was perfect in its own way. It was
us—
flighty, impulsive, intoxicating.

She looked at me carefully. “That sounds lovely.”

“I suppose.” I thought that by getting married we would make the good things great, and the bad things disappear.

There was a moment too long of silence before she said, “Why did you decide to marry him?”

“Because I loved him. He made me happy.” Past tense.

“But he couldn’t have made you all that happy if you left him after”—she counted on her fingers—“two months.”

“Three.” A surge of anger, blind and desperate, surfaced in my heart. “And you don’t know what it was like. You don’t know how it was living with him.”

“You’re right,” she said mildly. “I don’t.”

Then I felt guilty for my disloyalty. Jack wasn’t the problem; it was me that was the problem. He couldn’t help it that I was wrong for him. I turned my face away from her, shamed by my own fickleness.

That was when I saw him.

“Fuck!” I yelped, involuntarily, whipping my head back around and ducking down in an attempt to become as inconspicuous as possible.

Several young families, innocently enjoying a day at the beach, looked around disapprovingly to find out why delinquents were swearing loudly in front of small children.

“What is it?” Sharon demanded, alarmed—she’d assumed I had hurt myself, and stepped forward to help me up.

“Stay there!” I commanded. “Look around.”

Sharon, nonplussed, did as she was told. “Daft cow,” she muttered to herself.

“Do you see a blond man? Dark blond? In a white shirt.”

“That really doesn’t narrow it down much,” she said, scanning the knots of people who dotted the beach and the promenade.

I was sure it was him. It was Tam. What was that bastard doing here? Surely it would have been too much of a coincidence for him to turn up in the same foreign city as me, on the same
beach
,
two days after I’d skipped out on his brother?

Should I stand up and face him? The idea left me wracked with nausea. Should I crouch here, like a pathetic wretch, hiding from him? Despite how tempting that sounded, I couldn’t do it forever.

What if (and this was a stretch, to be sure) he had word on Jack? Should I ask?

I gathered up the shards of my sanity and prepared to look around. When I did, he wasn’t there. I surprised myself by being unable to control the devastation I felt; the idea that he might help me gauge how Jack was reacting had given me a surge of hope, without which I felt completely deflated and desperate.

“Are you sure you didn’t see a blond bloke with a white top on? Are you certain?”

“No, I’m not certain, for heaven’s sake. There’s hundreds of people around. What the hell just happened?”

I brought my hand up to my face to look at it. It was shaking. In fact, I was shaking all over.

Sharon saw it too. “Don’t move. Just sit there for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

I sat cross-legged on the sand, leaning against one of the massive, rough-hewn boulders that dotted the edges of the beach. The sun was climbing, but at least I had a patch of shade. I listened to my ragged breathing and fought back tears. If he was here—worse, if he had followed me to Cape Town for some reason—I had to leave, and sharpish.

“Here,” said Sharon, producing a bottle of Lucozade from her handbag. “I thought one of us might need this after last night.”

Gratefully, I drank it. “I think that was Tam,” I said after a bit. “Jack’s brother.”

“The horrid one who interviewed you? What’s he doing here?”

“I’m not sure it was him. But if it was—I don’t know what he’s doing here.” Helpless tears bubbled out of my eyes. “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to be anywhere near where he is.”

Sharon looked even more alarmed. “Who cares if he’s here, anyway? What difference would it make?”

I cried. There was so much to say and I didn’t have the strength to say any of it.

She was crouched next to me, patting my hair ineffectually. Poor Shaz. “Did you sleep with him? Did you cheat? Is that why you ran off?”

“Of course I didn’t sleep with him!” I cried, indignant. “Sleeping with Tam. Ugh!”

“Stop being so sanctimonious, Ava, for goodness’ sake. Stuff like that happens all the time.”

“Well, it didn’t happen to me.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Now tell me what is going on. No more dodging the subject.”

I glared at her. She looked impassively at me, arms folded, waiting patiently. It was no use—Sharon had decided it was time for me to talk. “Tam’s part of the reason I left. But it wasn’t because we slept together—nothing like that.”

“Why, then?”

My voice cracked. “Because he hates me.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

I rubbed my temples. It felt as if I’d had concrete poured into my skull and now it was drying. “He disapproved of us getting married. He—made things difficult.”

“What do you mean, ‘he made things difficult’?”

It was hard to explain how he did it day-to-day, but it was easy to identify how it all started. Tam’s campaign of hate, I mean.

Tam never came by to see Jack at the office. They talked on the phone at times, and their relationship seemed civil, but not exactly amiable. Once or twice, Jack had stopped off for lunch with Tam, but it was understood that I would go and find my own amusement during those encounters. Which was more than fine by me. I’d have rather pulled out my own fingernails with a pair of pliers than spend a second with Tam.

So I was extremely surprised when, the day after we got back from Paris, and I was reeling in shock at being Mrs. John Rudolph Rutherford-West, Tam turned up at the flat.

I can’t pretend I hadn’t thought about what Tam would say about me being his new sister-in-law. I’d turned it over gleefully in my mind many a time. Would he apologise nervously to me? Would he refuse to believe it, necessitating Jack’s gallant intervention to set him straight? Would he ignore it altogether? If he did, at least I could be smug in the knowledge that it must really, really bother him.

When I actually came face-to-face with him, as he thundered into the office, I didn’t have time to think about any of these scenarios. He was grey with rage, his eyes wide and the veins bulging dangerously out of his forehead, and the sight of him plunged me instantly into terror.

For a horrible split-second, I thought he was going to walk right up and hit me.

But instead, he marched straight past, up to Jack, who had been sitting placidly at his desk but now stood with his hands in his pockets, with a look of faint amusement on his face.

“What were you thinking, you stupid bastard?”