CATHY WILLIAMS - The Price Of Deceit

“You never really discussed your past with me all those years ago, did you?” murmured Dominic.

Katherine met his eyes steadily and said with utter truthfulness, “When I met you, I had no past and no future.”

“Tell me,” Dominic said, and there was a latent urgency in his voice that unsettled her.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what you’re hiding.”

She lowered her eyes. She could feel the fine prickle of perspiration. Tell him? she thought. The truth? The long, involved truth that had cost her so dear?

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three daughters.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

SUMMER had arrived. Katherine Lewis sat upright on the grass in Regent’s Park and felt with a sort of desperate anger the tentative rays of warmth hit her skin. The least the weather could have done on this day of all days was to oblige with grey skies and rain. For the past six glorious months it had rained constantly, a never-ending drizzle that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Everything, though, had a beginning and an end. It was the nature of things.

She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun and, in that passing moment, she seemed to see everything; she seemed to see her entire life flash in front of her eyes, every detail of it.

Twenty years living at home with her mother in a cramped, unimaginative little terraced house in the middle of a cramped, unimaginative little terraced street in the heart of London, an existence of trying hard not to let the complaining and never-ending criticism wear her into the ground while she ploughed on with her studies and dreamed of the day when she would be free.

Well, she had at last tasted her freedom, hadn’t she? It hadn’t come when her mother had died, all that time ago, quietly over a cup of tea in the small unattractive sitting-room, with the television on. No, that had just been release from a sort of slavery.

Freedom had come only in the past six months.

She closed her eyes briefly and remembered, as though it was yesterday, the first time she had laid eyes on Dominic Duvall. She had stepped into that crowded room, dressed in Emma’s daring clothes, with her hair in a daring style and her heart beating with terror at this new person which she had created for herself, and she had seen him standing across the room from her, tall, dark, commanding, one hand raised as he brought his glass to his lips, his other hand in his trouser pocket. Their eyes had met for a few seconds over the crowd and she had smiled and blushed and trembled in her skimpy outfit which had felt so peculiar because she had never worn anything like it in her life before.

Afterwards, he had told her that it had been the sexiest smile that he had ever seen on a woman’s lips.

She lay back on the grass with her hands clasped behind her head and stared up at the sky. It was a hard blue colour. No clouds. The sort of perfect summer day which seemed designed to remind the British public at large that there was more to the weather than rain and wind.

Dominic would be here any minute.

She had decided to come ahead of him because she had a vague idea that being able to watch him approach in the distance would give her the time she needed to get herself together and do what she had to do.

She had also chosen the spot carefully, describing to him how to find her. Regent’s Park, for some reason, was the one place they had not visited, and she felt that she needed to talk to him somewhere that held no memories for her.

Memories, she realised now, with a sadness that seemed to fill every pore of her body until it obliterated every other emotion, had no respect for time or place. She lay there frowning and trying to think how she would phrase what she had to say to him, and all she could think of was the way he made her feel.

Every word he had uttered to her had been a revelation, every smile a new world opening, a world which she had never even known existed.

As she walked on that tightrope which she had created for herself, he had reached out his hand, and for a while she could fly. The desperate game which had started out six months ago, a game which she knew had to be played before she lost the opportunity forever, had ended with more than she had ever bargained for.

All those people, she thought, sitting up, who said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, were fools.

She squinted against the sun and saw him approaching in the distance and she felt that familiar wild leap of her senses.

If someone had told her that one man could make colours seem brighter and music seem sweeter, could alter the whole tenor of her life, she would have laughed, but that was what he had done. It was as though her life had been played out in black and white and now everything was in Technicolor.

He was dressed for work. Charcoal trousers, impeccably tailored, as were all his clothes, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he was holding his jacket over one shoulder.

He was a tall man, over six feet, and with the graceful, hard build of an athlete. The sort of man who walked into a crowded room and instantly became the centre of attention. He had much more than good looks, which were no more than an accident of chance. There was something compelling about the way he carried himself, his movements unwasted and graceful, and something mesmerising about the hard lines of his face with that black hair and sea-green eyes.

In all the months they had gone out together, she had never really recovered from the wonder of knowing that he was attracted to her. Her!

But, she thought now, he wasn’t, was he? He had never been attracted to her. He had been attracted to a vibrant, vivacious girl, a make-believe person who didn’t really exist.

Katherine Lewis, she told herself with a resigned sigh, wasn’t vibrant or vivacious. She was ordinary, reserved, cautious. The persona she had borrowed for the past few months, for reasons which she could never explain to him, belonged to someone else, and now she had to give it back.

She had tasted freedom, but freedom had its price and the piper had to be paid.

As he approached her he smiled, and she saw the dark charm that could entice a response from a block of ice.

‘Katherine,’ he said, when he was still a little way away. ‘So we made it here at last.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Katherine saw the two girls who had been sunbathing a few yards away shield their eyes and covertly look at him from under their lashes. He always had that effect on the opposite sex.

‘I’m sorry if I dragged you away from something important,’ she said, by way of response, as he sprawled down next to her and tossed his jacket on the grass.

She didn’t want to get too close to him. That would be fatal.

‘Are you?’ he asked lazily, turning to face her, and she tried not to succumb to the sexual warmth of his voice. ‘It seems a shame to be confined to an office building when the weather is like this.’