Authors: Penny Jordan
'No, actually, I'm a nursing aide,' Lizzie told him and
for some reason the surprise in his eyes hurt her a little. It had
never mattered when other people spoke derisively about the lowly
status of her work, but now, suddenly, for this handsome laughing young
man, she ached to be able to announce that she did something very
important…
'Well, we don't want you getting into trouble for being
late. Not when it was really my fault. Hop in… I'll strap
your cycle to the back.'
'I'm not actually working,' Lizzie told him, hesitating
beside the car. It would be breaking all Aunt Vi's rules and her own to
accept his offer of a lift, but she wanted to do so more than she had
wanted anything else in her life. 'I'm going to visit
someone…'
Immediately his glance sharpened. 'Boyfriend?' he
questioned her, making her blush and shake her head.
'No, it's one of the patients… I promised him
I'd wheel him out to see the rhododendrons now they're in flower. He
says they remind him of his grandparents' home when he was a little
boy…'
'Sensitive little thing, aren't you? A no-hoper, is he?'
Something in the careless way he spoke jarred on Lizzie's
tender conscience; even though she knew that for Edward Danvers life
could never ever be anything other than painful and lonely, she said
quickly, 'No— no, of course not…'
Perhaps it was the stark contrast between the two men:
Edward so pale and thin, old before his time, his body wasted, his
manhood destroyed by the same terrible injuries which had necessitated
the amputation of his legs.
It had happened in the frantic push to land on the
Normandy beaches. He had been helping to organise the disembarkation,
standing chest-deep in the icy cold water. Someone had got into
difficulty in the water—a young private who couldn't
swim—Edward had dived down to help him, and had been crushed
beneath some landing equipment in the rush to get the troops ashore.
Edward's life had been saved but not his legs, and even
now in his nightmares he cursed God for that cruel mercy.
In her mind's eye Lizzie saw him, so thin and wasted in
his wheelchair, and compared him to this man, so fit and healthy, so
insolently cheerful and careless of whatever dangers fate had in store
for him, and suddenly and unexpectedly she was overwhelmed by a swift
surge of protective, possessive fear, by a need to take him to herself
and keep him safe… It was the first time she had ever
experienced such an emotion and it stunned her, leaving her feeling too
vulnerable and weak to object when he insisted on helping her into his
car, and fastening her bike across its boot.
The space inside the car was so tiny that when he got in
she was immediately conscious of the heat of his body, of its warm male
scent, of all the differences of sex that separated them and stirred
exciting
frissons
of sensation in every corner of
her body, in her blood, under her skin, a tingling dangerous wave of
heat that made her cheeks burn and her heart pound.
He set the car in motion, driving it with a careless
recklessness that excited her even while it frightened her.
'I take it you don't have any people living
locally— any family,' he enlarged, taking his attention off
the road to turn and look at her. She made him feel a rare curiosity
about her with her lack of any regional accent, her shyness, her total
air not just of being unawakened but also of being completely unaware.
He doubted that any man had ever kissed her, never mind…
'No. No, I don't,' Lizzie told him huskily.
'My… my aunt.'
'So what brought you to this part of the country, then?'
He was an expert in knowing how to approach a woman, and
this one, this woman, child, green as she was, was going to drop into
his arms as easily as ripe soft fruit.
All it needed was a little care, a little flattery, a
little coaxing.
Lizzie gave him a surprised look. She was not used to
people being interested enough in her to ask her questions. A warm glow
began to spread through her body, bringing with it a dizzying surge of
self-confidence and bravery.
'My… my aunt sent me here. She knows the matron
in charge of the hospital.'
'Your aunt, you say… You don't have any other
family, then?'
'No… not now…' Her voice dropped,
her eyes darkening as she relived the shock of hearing of her parents'
death. 'There was a bomb…'
While he nodded his head and made sympathetic noises, he
was congratulating himself on having picked a real winner. No family to
speak of apart from an aunt who, by the sound of it, didn't give a damn
and anyway was too far away to be of any concern to him. He had a
couple of days' leave owing to him. There was no reason why he
shouldn't spend them here… Any longer than that and he would
be bored out of his mind with her. As he made light conversation with
her he amused himself by imagining what she would be like. She would be
nervous but malleable; she would give him whatever he asked of her,
just as long as he told her he loved her. He smiled cynically to
himself. He was well aware of the effect his handsome face had on
susceptible female hearts. He had seen that bemused, adoring look in
too many pairs of feminine eyes before not to have recognised it.
Women were such fools. Tell them you loved them and they'd
give you anything… everything…
'What a pity we can't pretend that you don't have to go in
here,' he murmured softly to her, as the hospital came in sight. 'Then
we could just keep on driving… run away together and never,
ever come back. Would you like that, my sweet? Would you like to spend
the rest of your life with me?'
Lizzie's heart thumped frantically with a mixture of shock
and delight.
She heard him laugh and knew that she was
blushing…knew that he must be able to read her feelings in
her eyes.
'Shall we do that?' he continued to tease her. 'Shall I
steal you away, take you somewhere where it would be just the two of
us…?'
His voice had developed a deep, caressing, almost mesmeric
quality. Totally unable to take her eyes off his face, Lizzie
discovered that she had virtually forgotten to breathe and that
suddenly her lungs were labouring desperately to take in air.
Taking advantage of her bemused state, he allowed the tone
of his voice to change, to deepen with regret as he told her, 'How I
wish I could do just that, but I can't, can I…? There's a
war to be won.' He allowed his eyes to darken, his whole manner to
become subtly infused with purposefulness; he had discovered very early
on in the war that if there was one thing women fell for even more than
being told he loved them, it was the suggestion that he as a man of
honour had to put his country before his feelings. This one, he could
see, was no exception.
Lizzie was aching inside. Soon they would be going their
separate ways, and she doubted that she would ever see him again,
despite what he had said. A tearing, sharp pain splintered inside her,
making her catch her breath and lose her colour.
'I think you'd better drop me off here,' she told him as
they approached the gate. The matron had very strict views about the
girls keeping their distance both from the men and from their visitors.
'Fraternisation forbidden, is it?' he guessed,
understanding at once and stopping the car.
Lizzie couldn't open the door and she watched breathlessly
as he leapt over his own and came round to help her out, not opening
the door for her as she had expected, but instead leaning down inside
the car to lift her out bodily, so that for a brief, dazzling moment of
time she was held against him, body to body, looking down into those
teasing blue eyes, feeling her chest tighten and her muscles coil in
heady excitement as he slowly lowered her to her feet, holding her
tantalisingly and dangerously just off the ground, while he looked at
her mouth and whispered to her.
'Tiny little thing, aren't you, just made to fit into a
man's arms, with a mouth just made for a man to kiss? Has anyone kissed
you before, sweetheart, or have you been saving yourself for me?'
Her heart was pounding so heavily, so noisily that she
could barely hear what he was saying. She felt both lightheaded and yet
at the same time as though everything around her had somehow become
dazzlingly clear and sharp, as though she was seeing the whole world
with new eyes.
'You know what's happening to us, don't you?' he pressed.
'You know that you and I…' He broke off, his face suddenly
tense and fierce, his hands gripping her so tightly that it almost
hurt. 'I've got to see you again,' he told her with an urgency that thrilled her. 'When will
you be free?'
Free… She struggled to hold on to her sanity,
to reason, but they had both been swept away and were no longer of any
force in her life.
This was what mattered, this sweet sharp bliss, this
delirious sensation of floating above the ground, of suddenly living
life to the full, of knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had
met the man who embodied every single facet of all her yearning
daydreams, that she had in fact fallen headily and instantly in love.
'I… after lunch,' she heard herself telling him
in a thick, unfamiliar voice. 'I was going to write to my aunt. I write
to her every week. She has arthritis and so she can't always write
back…'
'I'll pick you up here at half-past two,' he told her
softly, ignoring her flurried, strangled words.
And then, as he lowered her to the ground, his lips
brushed lightly against her own, the merest touch—a touch
which another and more aware girl would have recognised as deliberate
provocation, but which to Lizzie appeared to be a gesture of the
deepest reverence and respect, the most chaste kind of embrace, as
though he hardly dared to do more than merely allow his lips to touch
hers. So, in her reading, had the heroes hardly dared to sully their
adored ones with the male carnality of their desires, cherishing their
purity, even while they ached to possess it.
Lizzie knew nothing of the real world of real emotions, of
the careless urgency with which men like Kit Danvers physically
possessed her sex, claiming their compliance as their right as men who
daily, hourly faced death.
'And, sweetheart…'
As she looked up at him, mute and adoring, he touched her
braided hair and said, 'Wear this loose, and something pretty. I like
my girls to look pretty…'
Just for a moment a cloud seemed to obscure the sun,
chilling her skin. His
girls
, he had
said… She frowned, her dizzying, bemusing dream suddenly
darkened with reality, but then he touched her face, tracing the
delicacy of its bone-structure, and the clouds were burned away in the
intensity of the heat that shook her…
As she waited for him to unstrap her bike, Lizzie found
herself wishing that it were already half-past two, that there were no
long, tense hours to wait before she could see him again…
hours which would be shadowed with fears that he might change his
mind… that he might meet some prettier, more appealing girl
whom he might favour with his smiles instead of her, and already,
though she didn't know it, she had taken her first step into a
dangerous and unfamiliar new world.
She found Edward ready and waiting for her, his face set
and tense.
'I'm sorry I'm late,' she apologised. Some instinct that
was beginning to grow with her own maturity gave her an insight into
the feelings of others which she often wished she did not have. It was
hardly less painful to be so receptive to the emotional pain of others
at second hand than it was for them to experience it themselves. Today
she was particularly receptive to Edward's pain, her own emotional
nerve-endings curling back in sensitive reaction to his anxiety.
'I thought perhaps you'd changed your mind. You shouldn't
be spending your free time with me… Pretty girl like you
should be out having fun.'
That was the second time in one morning a man had
described her as pretty, but this time she felt none of the soaring joy
she had experienced when
he
had described her
thus, only a sharp anguished knowledge of Edward's own awareness that,
while a woman might feel compassion for him, she could never feel
desire.
As she wheeled him outside, she saw him lift his face
towards the warmth of the sun. His skin had a grey, sickly undertone,
the bones slightly shrunken under his flesh. He had lost weight in the
long months he had been with them and her heart ached compassionately
for him, as she contrasted him again with
him
.
The rhododendrons were set on a sloping bank just outside
the formal gardens, and Lizzie, who had genuinely wanted to foster the
tiny spark of interest she had seen in Edward's eyes the last time she
had taken him there, had discovered that they had originally been
planted by an owner of the house who had travelled extensively in China
before the Boxer uprising. A keen botanist, he had collected various
specimens in the wild and created this special area for them.
Where the formal gardens of the house had now gone to make
way for vegetable plots, the rhododendrons had been allowed to remain.
Lizzie was slightly out of breath by the time she had
pushed the wheelchair up the overgrown path that led to them, but her
efforts were well rewarded when she turned a corner and stopped the
wheelchair so that Edward could take in the full glory of the scene in
front of them.
She heard him catch his breath, and, when she quickly
kneeled down to look at him, she discovered that there were tears
running down his face.
'They're beautiful,' he told her quietly. 'So very much
like those at Cottingdean… My grandmother adored her garden.'
'Who lives there now?' Lizzie asked him, more because she
sensed his need to talk about the house he obviously loved so much than
out of any real curiosity.