Yesterday's Husband. Angela Devine
against her. She could feel the warmth, the heat, the tension in that body, the unmistakable virile hardness of it, and she wanted him! Oh, how she wanted him! Not just to touch her and hold her and kiss her, wonderful as that was, but to plunge deep inside her until they were fused in a total union.
‘Say it,’ he rasped again.
‘I want you, Richard,’ she breathed.
‘That’s all I needed to know,’ he said coldly.
And, to her astonishment and chagrin, he rose to his feet and stood staring down at her with a strange, ravenous mixture of desire and hatred in his eyes.
‘Goodnight, Emma.’
She lay in shocked disbelief, instinctively drawing up the sheet to cover her nakedness, and watched as he swiftly finished undressing with his back turned to her, pulled on a pair of lightweight cotton pyjamas and climbed into the other bed. Then, without another word, he switched off the light and began breathing deeply and evenly. She didn’t ask him why he was doing this. She already knew. It was an act of cold-hearted, calculating revenge. First the challenge had been to see whether he could excite her to the point where she actually wanted him and then, having demonstrated the humiliating fact that she did, he had twisted the knife by rejecting her. The bastard! The unutterable, manipulative bastard! She wanted to kill him…
Her heart was still pounding furiously and her body was hot and pulsing with the effects of unsatisfied desire so that it made her more angry than ever when a few minutes later she heard his quiet breathing deepen into the unmistakable rhythm of sleep. How could he lie there and just sleep when Emma herself wanted to cry and rage and throw things? It was inhuman! There must be some way she could get back at him for this, there must, there must! For hours she lay awake, tossing and turning, thumping her pillow and letting out occasional, low gasps of annoyance. But some time after three o’clock she fell asleep with her last conscious thought surging through her head as monotonously as the breaking surf outside. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him…
Her dreams were confused and anxious, centring not on the humiliating scene she had just endured but on the violent parting quarrel which had separated them eight years before, except that this time Richard didn’t storm out without any explanation. Instead he came back to her and told her some long and complicated rigmarole which made everything magically all right. In the dream she was filled with a happiness so quiet and profound that it was like listening to lyrical music. Then the dream changed and she was in her office at Prero’s, trying to make her father proud of her, feeling anxious and unhappy with a computer whirring in the background and the printer grinding. As she came slowly up to the surface of consciousness, she realised that it wasn’t just a dream. There was a computer whirring right in this very room. Blinking, she sat up and squinted. It seemed quite crazy, but Richard was sitting at the foldout mahogany desk in the corner of the room with a portable computer, the telephone and a tiny printer laid out in front of him. Without even stopping to think about how much she hated him, she spoke impulsively.
‘What are you doing?’
He turned around and smiled at her, then tore a document off the printer and waved it in the air.
‘Working. I’ll have to get you to sign this in a moment. It’s a faxed letter from my lawyer concerning our agreement about the office complex.’
His voice was neutral, even friendly. As the events of the previous evening came rushing back to her mind, Emma stared at him in consternation. Had she dreamt all those torrid details of what he had done to her? Her face flushed and she darted a quick, uneasy glance at him and then hastily looked away. No, she hadn’t. That cruel, superior look of amusement around the edges of his lips made her certain that he remembered everything just as clearly as she did. Yet he chose not to refer to it. Why?
‘Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go and have breakfast on the balcony?’ he suggested.
At a loss to know what else to do, Emma agreed.
‘All right,’ she said warily. ‘Will you call Room Service and order it?’
‘I already have.’
She was still naked and did not want to endure the embarrassment of climbing out of bed in front of that disconcertingly cool blue gaze. But even as she sat hesitating, with the sheet pulled up high in her armpits, Richard turned back to the computer as if he had already lost interest in her. Feeling rather affronted, Emma slid out of bed on the opposite side, groped in her suitcase for a dressing-gown and made her way to the bathroom. When she returned a few minutes later, dressed in a yellow cotton T-shirt, yellow and white daisy-patterned cotton skirt and casual sandals with her hair hanging loose, she found Richard already sitting at the table on the balcony with an array of iced juice, fresh tropical fruit, coffee and Danish pastries in front of him. Next to these was a camera, and a litter of guidebooks and maps. He smiled at her as if there had never been the slightest unpleasantness between them. The charm of that smile unnerved her.
‘ “Will you walk into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly,’ she chanted under her breath.
‘What did you say?’ asked Richard, frowning.
‘Nothing.’
‘Sit down and eat,’ he urged. ‘Then we’ll decide what we want to do with our holiday.’
The coffee was fragrant and full of flavour and the Danish pastries were unexpectedly crisp and delicious but Emma found it hard to keep her mind on her breakfast. All the time she was eating she kept darting Richard nervous, speculative glances, trying to figure out his intentions. Yet he seemed as cheerful and unruffled as if he really were just enjoying a long-awaited holiday. When at last her plate was empty, he slid one of the glossy coloured brochures across the table to her.
‘Do you fancy an excursion to Penelokan?’
Emma flinched. His question brought a rush of unwelcome memories flooding back to her as she remembered the magical blue lake set high in the mountains in the northern part of the island. Lake Batur was located in the crater of a dormant volcano and the ascent to the nearby mountain and the few days they had spent exploring the idyllic countryside around it had been the highlight of Richard and Emma’s honeymoon. For that very reason she now wanted to avoid it like a plague spot.
‘No, I don’t,’ she said in a rush.
Richard shrugged indifferently.
‘What would you like to do, then? After all, we still have quite a lot of time to kill in each other’s company.’
That casual statement touched Emma on the raw. How could anybody speak of killing time in Bali, of all places? An idyllic tropical paradise whose magic had once enchanted her so thoroughly that she had believed every minute spent there was precious and irreplaceable. And of course she had once felt the same way about any time spent in Richard’s company. Well, things had certainly changed! Her lips twisted into a cynical smile.
‘I don’t care what we do,’ she retorted. ‘Although frankly I hope we won’t have to spend too much time alone together. Perhaps we could go to see some Balinese dancing, or go shopping, or do some local sightseeing.’
She tried to keep her voice as light and indifferent as his. There was no way she wanied Richard to guess her true reason for avoiding Penelokan—the fear that she would simply crack up and weep if she had to go there in his company. Besides, if she stayed here in the south of the island, she would still be close to the airport at Tuban. If she ever got too desperate, she could always flee back to Sydney.
But Richard didn’t even seem to notice the faint tremor in her voice that marred her poise. He was leaning back in his chair with a mocking smile of triumph on his lips.
‘All right,’ he agreed lazily, picking up another pile of brochures and flicking through them. ‘We’ll do all those things. It’ll be a second honeymoon, Emma.’