Fugitive Wife (20 page)

It was easier to walk on the rough surface of the track, although the path which Logan had cleared was only narrow. When it petered out, she paused for a moment, gauging the depth of the snow with some dismay. She wished now that she had not brought her case, but only

what she could carry in her pockets.

Cautiously she moved forward on to the snow. She had tucked her cord jeans into the top of her boots, and immediately she was in over her knees. She swore silently. When she had been a child at Branthwaite, snow had been fun to play in. She’d forgotten what hel it was to walk in. She took another tentative step and then another and gave a little startled cry as she sank up to her thighs, She must have encountered one of the track’s many potholes.

She floundered forward, panting as she pushed against the weight of the snow, then came to a standstil to consider her predicament. The first thing she had to do was get rid of her suitcase; she would just have to leave it at the side of the track for the time being. She leaned across the crisp frozen surface of the snow pushing the case away from her with al her strength.

Then she began to move forward again, very slowly, trying desperately to ignore her soaked and freezing legs. She had covered perhaps twenty yards, and already she was exhausted. It wasn’t a pothole after al, she realised. It was just that the snow had drifted deeper on the slope of the track. At any moment she could find herself up to her waist.

Her breath sobbing in her throat, she began to push forward again, but the weight of the snow was suddenly too much for her to dislodge and she fel forward ignominiously on to her face. Gasping, she dragged herself back on to her feet. She was wet through now, and her coat felt like a ton weight on her slender shoulders. As she stood motionless, trying to catch her breath and nerve herself for the next stage of the onslaught, she felt a wet drop on her face, then another, and yet another.

For a moment she thought it was snowing again, and her heart sank, then as the drops started to increase and gather in momentum, the truth dawned upon her. It was raining.

She stood, stunned in disbelief, watching the dark marks appear on the crisp powdery surface. The wind had risen slightly, and she could hear it sighing mournfuly in the trees which bordered the track. Briony could have moaned with it.

She wanted to weep with frustration. If only she had been patient for a little while longer! As it was she was now faced with the choice of either pressing on becoming wetter and more cold and uncomfortable with every laborious step she took or returning to the cottage and having to face Logan.

Gritting her teeth, she took another step, but her searching foot encountered an unknown obstacle, buried deep in the snow, and she fel forward on to her face again. And as she lay there wincing from the pain in her wrenched ankle and wondering dazedly where she was

going to find the strength to get up again, she heard Logan cal her name. This time she groaned aloud. She had to move-she must, even if she had to crawl on her hands and knees. She couldn’t let him come down the track and find her lying there, stricken and helpless.

She struggled to rise, to at least pul herself up on to her hands and knees, but the weight of her soaking clothes were an added

encumbrance.

‘You damned little fool!’ His voice was bleak with rage. ‘Wil you never learn?’

Briony succumbed unresisting as he lifted her bodily out of the drift. The rain had turned suddenly into a downpour and his tawny hair was plastered to the shape of his head. She wanted suddenly to tel him she was sorry, but the words would not come.

Al she managed to say was, ‘My case.’

‘It wil have to stay there.’ he said. ‘I have enough on my hands with you.’

When they reached the path he had dug, she asked in a whisper to be put down. Logan hesitated before complying, then set her on her feet very gently. But her numbed legs would not support her, and she had to cling to him.

He said harshly, ‘From now on we do this my way,’ and swung her up into his arms again.

She was amazed to see lights coming from the cottage.

Logan smiled grimly as he encountered her questioning look.

‘Yes, the power’s on again, by some miracle.’ he said.‘Perhaps the rain’s taken longer to get here than anywhere else.’

He carried her up the path and shouldered his way in through the front door. The living room fire had been replenished and was roaring up the chimney and he set Briony down on the rug in front of it, then disappeared when he returned some time later he was carrying an armful of towels, and her housecoat. So he’d been to fetch her case.

She had been struggling to unfasten her coat, but her frozen fingers would not obey her. She looked at him mutely as he came over to her, dropping the towels on to the rug. Pushing her hands away, he unfastened her coat, and tossed it on to the chair, then tugged her damp sweater over her head.

She began to say, ‘I can manage now .. .’ but he told her to shut up in a voice so molten with rage that she thought it was best to do as he said. She stood shivering while he stripped the sodden clothes from her body and wrapped her in a bath towel. Then he began to rub her dry. He was brisk, efficient and none too gentle, and gradualy she felt warmth stealing painfuly back into her body. When he had finished toweling her hair he tossed her housecoat to her.

He said, ‘Put this on, and don’t stir away from that fire.’

Meekly she complied, sinking down on to the rug and arranging the damp towels on the fender to dry off.

Presently Logan returned with a steaming mug of coffee.

‘There’s brandy in it; he said. ‘I shal have to re-stock your aunt’s drinks cupboard before we leave.’ Briony murmured something and sipped at the coffee, and soon the trembling inside her stopped, and the warm seemed to penetrate inwards, spreading along her veins.

She said at last, ‘Logan, you’re wet too.’

‘I’m going to take care of that now; he said. ‘And then I’m going to bring your mattress and bedding down here. You're going to sleep by the fire tonight. I’m not taking any chances with possible pneumonia.’

When she was alone again, it would have been very easy to have put, her head down and howled in misery.

Her headlong flight had achieved nothing. Her head ached and it was difficult even to remember why it had seemed ,so important that she should try to get away.

Everything she did seemed to turn against her, she thought despairingly.

She heard the mattress bumping down the stairs and Jumped up to help Logan with it. He had changed into a pair of dark slacks and a

black rol-neck sweater and though he looked weary and terrifyingly angry, his attraction stil reached out and took her by the throat as it had done the first time she had ever seen him. She found herself wishing with al her heart that she was that girl again, with the world at her feet, but with the wisdom that the misery of the past year had taught her.

She thought of Karen Welesley and anger shook her.

I should have fought her, she thought. I should have insisted on seeing him that day. My pride might have suffered, but it could have been worth it. I might have fought her and won. After al, it was me that he married.

No one can take that away from me. And no one had. She had relinquished her part in his life, her role, her rights; without a struggle because she had been young and confused and bitter.

And they were stil apart at this moment because she’d had no real idea how to regain the ground she had lost.

Because they were stil, to al intents and purposes, strangers to each other, and therefore wary.

So many times she had sworn she would never forgive him―for the way he had deliberately aroused and humiliated her on their wedding

night, for cynicaly resuming his relationship with his mistress as soon as they had returned to London. So often she had tried to hate him.

But it didn’t work, she thought. It had never worked because in spite of everything she had never ceased to want him. Even her attempts to revive old memories and old resentments had failed to stil the clamour of her senses.

Each time I’ve run away, she told herself, I’ve been running from myself as much as I have from him, only I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to admit it. And now it’s too late.

Too late. The words toled in her brain like a mourning bel, while the wind-driven rain lashed at the windows in ironic emphasis.

She was suddenly desperate to break the silence which stretched between them. She said, ‘The rain―did you know it was going to start?’

He said abruptly, ‘I’d wondered. There was that sudden rise in temperature, and the fact that the wind had veered round to the west. But it seemed too much to hope for’ He gave her a long steady look. ‘It’s thanks to the rain that you're here now, and not stil lying out in the snow. I came to find you―to tel you it was raining. I looked al over the house before I could make myself believe that you’d gone. I didn’t think that even you could be such a fool.’

She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ And, ‘In one way or another I cause you nothing but trouble, don’t I?’

He said tightly, ‘Wel, don’t worry about it. If this rain continues, It shouldn’t be for much longer.’ The silence closed in on them again, and she fought it back.

‘What wil you do when your book is finished?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said. ‘1 have a number of offers to consider.’

‘Wil you go on being a foreign correspondent?’

‘1don t know. ’ His voice was impatient. ‘That depends on a lot of things.’

Briony wanted very much to ask just what those things were, and if Karen Welesley was among them but her courage failed her, and she sat silent, drinking her cooling coffee and listening to the hiss and splatter of rain drops coming down the chimney and faling on to the blazing logs in the hearth.

She tried again. ‘Is the book going wel? Is it doing what you wanted to do?’

He glanced at her frowning. ‘Which was?’

‘You said you hoped it would be a kind of exorcism’ she reminded him.

‘I don’t think I bargained for quite how many demons there were.’ he said drily. ‘I think it’s going to work up to a point. And it’s taught me a number of things as wel. For instance, I never realised before what a wel developed instinct for self-preservation I have. You’d think that working for your father would have shown me that.’

‘And marrying me.’ She tried for a smile.

His mouth twisted. ‘I think I’d probably categorise that as a self-destructive impulse. But I’d tried to tel myself that at least we’d gone beyond the stage where we could inflict any more damage on each other. Writing the book has told me differently.’

Another blast of rain attacked the window.

‘Your salvation,’ Logan said bitterly, and dragged the curtains closed with unnecessary violence.

He moved away from the window and stood looking down at her, as she knelt on the rug.

‘Another of life’s little ironies,’ he said. His voice altered, deepened slightly as he quoted, ‘ "Western wind, when wilt thou blow The smal rain down can rain? Christ if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again."’ His face was bitter and brooding as he looked at her. ‘Only for us the reverse is true, isn’t it, Briony? The western wind is going to blow you away from me―from my arms, from my bed, from my life.

I didn’t believe it at first, when the rain started. I’d thought that I had at least two more days to try and unravel this desperate mess we were in.’

He dropped to his knees beside her, cupping her face between his hands and turning her towards him.

‘And suddenly there’s no time any more.’ he said, and there was a note in his voice which triggered off answering tremors in her innermost being. ‘I’ve tried to fight it, Briony, I’ve reminded myself a hundred times that you don’t belong to me. That you never did in any real sense, and that now there’s someone else in your life. But it’s no good. I can’t fight any more.’

His hands reached round, caressing the nape of her neck, lifting the fal of copper hair clear of it, letting it slide through his fingers like silk.

‘It wasn’t just self-preservation which kept me running in Azabia,’ he said. ‘I was always on the move, one step ahead of Ben Yusef’s thugs, passed from hand to hand, from house to house by people who were even more frightened than I was. I didn’t sleep much, but I

used to have this dream. You were with me, Briony,’ ―his hands were unutterably gentle as they loosened the belt of her housecoat, and slid it from her shoulders― ‘and your hair was spread across my pilow. Even when I was awake I could stil see you. I swore then that if I got clear and came back to the United Kingdom, I’d make that dream into reality.’

She tried to say something past the tightness in her throat, but he laid a finger on her lips as if he was forbidding her to speak, and then he began to touch her, lightly and delicately as if she were the most fragile porcelain, and he a blind man whose only source of knowledge was through his fingertips, and speech was not only impossible suddenly, but unnecessary.

His voice was almost reflective, but there was a ragged note in it which made Briony realise how tenuous a thing his apparent self-control was.

He said, ‘But it al went sour on me when I did get back. For one thing I had to see you in your father’s house. I didn’t dare ask you to meet me somewhere else in case you refused. I needed to see you so badly―and there you were, standing on the stairs, al dressed-up and very definitely had somewhere to go. And I realised suddenly that you’d made a whole new life for yourself which I had no part in, and it would be better if I went. I hung around for days on end, hoping that you’d get in touch, and eventualy London became intolerable, and I decided to come here.’ He drew a long breath and she was aware that he was trembling. ‘And there you were.’ His voice was suddenly

harsh. ‘And here you are.’

His mouth burned on her, and the flame he lit was al-encompassing and merciless, and there was no drawing back for either of them as they were engulfed. Her parted lips returned his kisses with an eagerness she did not even pretend to conceal. The time for pretence was long past, and she heard herself whimpering with delight as the long, languorous passage of his hands and mouth over her body aroused her almost to madness. And then the languor changed to urgency as he pushed her back on to the rough material of the mattress and his body covered hers.