Penny Jordan (18 page)

'You just don't understand, do you?' Olivia exploded, her face white and her eyes nearly black with temper. 'You just don't understand
anything.

I am
not
going to your brother's wedding and you can go and complain about me as much as you like to Maddy, because I'm
not
changing my mind. I
hate
men,' she cried furiously. 'You're all the same...you all want your own way regardless of what or whom you damage to get it—Gramps, my father, Max, you—'

'I'm not listening to any more of this,' Caspar told her tersely. 'I'm not responsible for what your father did or for the fact that Max is your grandfather's favourite.
None
of it's my fault!

'Oh, God,' Caspar seethed as Olivia rushed past him and slammed the door behind her.

A
LITTLE HESITANTLY
, Annalise looked from the open kitchen door of Patti's parents' home into the hallway behind it, which was crammed with an excited press of teenagers.

'Are you sure your parents won't mind us being here?' she asked Patti uneasily. 'There's a lot of people I don't recognise. They could be gate-crashers.'

'So what? The more the merrier,' Patti drawled, giving a sultry pout in the direction of Joss and Jack Crighton as they came in.

'Why did you invite those two?' Annalise hissed at her.

'Because they're sexy,' Patti responded.

Annalise gave Jack a longer look, remembering the pity she had seen in his eyes the previous evening.

'Patti, I don't think we should be here,' she repeated to the other girl, wincing as she heard the high-pitched, excited scream of laughter coming from one of the other rooms, followed by the appearance in the doorway of an obviously very drunk girl with a bottle in her hand. 'Who is she?'

Annalise demanded anxiously.

'Dunno,' Patti admitted. 'She came with a gang from Chester.'

'Chester!' Annalise protested. 'How did
they

know about a party here?'

Patti gave a careless shrug. 'Word gets round.'

She went over to drape herself against the body of the thickset youth who had just walked in.

'Here, Toby,' she demanded. 'Aren't you going to kiss me?'

As he obliged, Annalise looked away. The all too sexual way in which Patti was pressing herself against Toby Horley's body and the cheers of the onlookers calling out a variety of openly suggestive comments were making her feel very uncomfortable.

She had come early to help Patti prepare for the party and now, as she searched all the new arrivals, she wondered why Pete was so late. The other members of the band were here. She could, of course, ask one of them where Pete was, but for some reason she felt reluctant to do so.

'Mmm...not bad...' Patti drawled as Toby released her.

'If you liked that, wait until you find out what I can
really
do.'

Annalise heard his boasting as he slid his hand very deliberately the length of Patti's body and let it rest between her legs. Squealing with laughter, Patti moved provocatively towards him, her expression suddenly changing as she saw what Annalise, who was too preoccupied, still hadn't seen.

'Pete. Look what Toby's doing to me,' Patti purred.

'Lucky guy.' Annalise heard Pete's response as she turned round just in time to see the admiring look he was giving Patti's skimpily clad body.

'Pete.'

Why did her own voice sound so hesitant and nervous? Perhaps Pete hadn't heard her and that was why he was ignoring her. Or perhaps—her heart thudded painfully—perhaps he was still angry with her about this afternoon.

'Pete...' she tried huskily again.

'I need a drink, doll,' she heard him saying to Patti as he kept his back to her. 'Where is it?'

'Come with me and I'll show you,' Patti responded, laughing as she ignored the cheers of the group that had gathered around her. 'It's this way,' she told him, taking hold of his hand and smiling up into his eyes as she led him away from Annalise.

It was a long time before Patti and Pete came back, and when they did, Annalise saw with sickly apprehension that Patti's lipstick was smudged.

She waited until she could see that Pete was on his own and then went over to him, touching him uncertainly on his arm and enduring the humiliation of being ignored by him for several minutes before he finally turned to look at her.

'What do you want?' he asked her truculently.

Annalise could smell the drink on his breath and she recoiled slightly from it. He was swaying, his eyes hot and glazed, and he smelt of something else, as well, something her deepest feminine instincts told her was the scent of another woman. Patti? Even so...

'I thought that you and I...' she began hesitantly, but he cut her off before she could finish.

'Well, you thought wrong, didn't you, babe?'

he sneered arrogantly. 'It's
over.
What there was of it...which wasn't very much. I need a real woman...one who knows what it's all about. Go back and play with your dolls, little girl.'

It was over. He had dumped her and soon everyone would know. Hot tears of shame and anguish scalding her eyes, Annalise stumbled towards the front door. She couldn't stay here now.

At the door she turned round. She could see Pete standing with Patti at his side. He was openly caressing her breast as she leaned against him, and as though Patti sensed that Annalise was watching them, she turned and gave her a triumphant look.

Half-blinded by her tears, Annalise stumbled out into the night.

'COME ON
, I
THINK
it's time we made tracks.'

Joss looked questioningly at Jack.

'I thought you
wanted
to come,' he protested.

The party was a good deal more rowdy than Jack had expected. There was an atmosphere here that he didn't trust or like. He winced as he heard the crashing of glass from somewhere inside the house.

'Let's get out of here,' he urged Joss. 'I smell trouble.'

Joss, who had only come out of curiosity, nodded his head amicably. It took Jack several minutes of careful negotiating to extricate Jenny's car from the carelessly parked vehicles around it, but miraculously, he eventually managed to do so.

'I don't envy whoever's going to have to clear up back there tomorrow,' he said, shuddering as they drove down the dark lane that led to the main road.

'It was a bit wild, wasn't it?' Joss agreed.

'A bit!' Jack lifted his eyebrows. 'My guess is that the whole house is sure to end up trashed.

Half the people there weren't from around here.'

'I certainly didn't know them,' Joss acknowledged. 'I tell you what I did see, though. Patti and Pete. Did you?'

'Yes, I did,' Jack said tersely, cursing as he suddenly had to swerve to avoid the girl who stepped blindly out onto the road in front of them.

Braking, he stopped the car and wrenched open the door, yelling as he got out angrily, 'What the hell are you trying to do? Kill yourself?'

As she recognised Jack's voice, Annalise knew then that her humiliation was complete. Stiffening, she turned away from him, refusing to say anything, praying for him to just go away.

'Jack,' she heard Joss Crighton calling from the passenger seat of the car, but instead of turning away from her, Jack came up and grabbed hold of her arm, forcing her round to face him.

'Answer me, dammit,' he demanded. 'Are you...?' He stopped the moment he saw her face and her tears.

'Let me go,' Annalise demanded, mortified. He was the
last
person she wanted to see her like this.

Jack looked at her and then at the empty road.

It was a good three-mile walk to Haslewich, and to leave her here alone at this time of night...a girl and in such a distressed state...

'Get in the car,' he told her abruptly. 'We'll give you a lift back to town.' When she refused to move, he told her impatiently, 'Come on. You

can't
stay out here. It isn't safe.'

Curious to find out what was going on, Joss got out of the car and came across to them, his voice warm with sympathy as he recognised Annalise and asked her in concern, 'What is it? What's wrong?'

'What the hell do you think's wrong?' Jack answered him shortly. 'You saw what was going on back there.'

'Oh, yes, of course,' Joss affirmed.

It had started to rain and heavily, and Annalise began to shiver as it penetrated her thin dress.

'Get in the car,' Jack repeated.

'Yes,' Joss added gently. 'Come back to town with us.'

Annalise wanted to refuse. Her pride demanded that she refuse, but suddenly, there was a burst of noise from the house behind them and the sound of car engines being started up and revved. She trembled a little to think of being found walking on her own by some of the drunken youths she had seen at the party.

'You can't be thinking of going back there,'

Jack remonstrated, misinterpreting the anxious look she was giving the youths. 'You must be mad. What for? You saw what was happening.

He doesn't—'

'Want me,' Annalise supplied for him, tight-lipped.

Jack looked away. 'He doesn't deserve you,'

he had been about to say.

'Come on, let's get in the car,' Joss suggested, giving her an engaging smile. 'I'm getting soaked.'

Somehow or other it was much easier to accede to Joss's suggestion than it had been to Jack's demand.

'Where is it exactly you live?' Jack asked her as he drove down Haslewich's main street a little later.

'Oh, you can drop me here in the main square,'

Annalise told him swiftly.

'Oh, it's no bother to take you home,' Joss assured her warmly. 'Is it, Jack?'

'None at all, once we know where home
is,'

Jack agreed grimly.

Tersely, she gave them her address. She could see how much Jack Crighton despised her and no wonder. No doubt, like Pete, he would have preferred to be with Patti.

They were outside her house now, but to her mortification as she got out of the car, so did Jack.

'What are you doing?' she asked him in a stifled voice as he came to her side.

'Seeing you safely to your front door,' he informed her curtly. 'It's considered the polite thing to do...to see a girl home safely.'

'That's if you're out on a date,' Annalise retorted. 'And we're...' Quickly, she looked away, telling him ungraciously, 'You didn't have to bring me home, you know. I could have walked.'

'You could have,' Jack agreed, adding, 'Look, don't take it out on me just because—'

'Because what? Because Pete dumped me?' she challenged him furiously.

'You're better off without him,' Jack blurted out, then wished he hadn't said anything as he saw the tears welling in her eyes. 'If he has any sense...' he began and then hesitated.

Shakily, Annalise found her key and opened the door, fleeing inside before Jack could say anything else. Now her humiliation was
totally
complete. He had seen her tears, known just how she felt.

Slowly, Jack made his way back to the car.

'She was very upset,' Joss commented as Jack restarted the car.

'Yes,' Jack said grimly. 'She was.'

AUTOMATICALLY, DAVID
turned his head and ducked slightly out of view to avoid being seen by the driver of the car on the opposite side of the road as he turned into the lane leading to Foxdean. It was unlikely that he would be recognised, not by a casual passer-by at this time on a Sunday morning, who probably, like him, was going to buy the Sunday papers.

'Oh...freshly baked croissants
and
the Sunday papers. Wonderful...' Honor had enthused. 'I can't think of any more enjoyable accoutrements to a blissful Sunday morning in bed. Well, at least I
couldn't'
she amended with a twinkle of naughtiness in her eyes.

'I'll go and buy the croissants and papers,' David had volunteered.

'And I'll make the coffee,' Honor had offered.

This harmony that seemed to flow so naturally between them made David feel that he had been given one of life's richest gifts, richer even in some ways than the surprising intensity of the sexual urgency they were sharing.

The previous day's storm had died away and the sky was fresh and clear, a low mist lying over the fields.

In Jamaica, Father Ignatius would already have been awake for several hours, making the most of the coolest part of the day.

David yearned to be able to talk to Honor about him, but he didn't know how she would feel about the work they had done. Sometimes even the most intelligent and educated people expressed fear and distaste when they learned the manner of sick people the priest was caring for. David had seen it in their faces when he had accompanied Father Ignatius to Kingston to attempt to persuade those with wealth or power to do something more than simply tell him that he was doing a wonderful job.

AIDS, leprosy, unbeatable cancer—David had seen them all and, had his own reactions not initially been dulled and muted by the apathy of his own self-pity, he suspected he might very well have turned away in revulsion, too.

He could still recall the way he had reacted—

the way he had felt—when he had found Tiggy indulging in one of her orgies of eating and then the period of self-mutilation that would follow it, when the bedroom and bathroom and sometimes the whole house seemed tainted by the smell of her self-induced sickness.

He had seen and smelled far worse than that since then. He had choked back tears sometimes of anger and sometimes of pain but most often of anguish for the suffering of the afflicted, knowing that no matter what they did, it was impossible to save them.

'We all have to die,' the priest would tell him.

'To die, yes...but
not
like this,' David remembered protesting. He had known full well that the

'herbal' concoctions the priest made up for those who were in the last throes of their agonising illnesses were nothing less than the powerful nar-cotic drugs that were so readily available on the island. They were used for recreational purposes by those who could afford them, and even in medicinal form they were still too expensive for the poor to obtain.