CHARLOTTE LAMB - Secret Obsession

She hadn’t thought she would ever see him again, but a few days later he had rung her at work and asked if they could have dinner. A little uncertainly she had accepted, and spent an evening with him at a well-known restaurant in Mayfair. They had talked—or rather, Ben had talked and she’d listened. Ben had asked questions and she’d given husky answers. Nerissa was not a talkative girl, but that didn’t seem to worry him.

Ben Havelock, she discovered, was a very successful and wealthy barrister. He had very little spare time, so they hadn’t seen much of each other during those early months. Last spring, however, he had managed to get a fortnight’s holiday and they had spent it together up in Northumberland, where she had been born and had spent most of her life.

That had been Ben’s idea. He wanted to get to know her better against her own background, he said. He already knew that London was not Nerissa’s territory; she had a lost look at times—she lacked the necessary skills for city life and wasn’t street-wise or sophisticated. Ben was a Londoner, a city man, with all that that implied of shrewd, hard-headed sophistication. Not much surprised him, but Nerissa was different. She intrigued him; he wanted to find out what lay behind her façade, where she came from, what people had bred her.

He had achieved his aim. She hadn’t wanted him to visit her home but he had insisted, and he had discovered a lot about her during those two weeks—more than she had meant him to know.

She had secrets she had wanted to keep; Ben had guessed at them within hours of their arrival. He worried her, disturbed her, but he had persuaded her to marry him all the same, in spite of her doubts and reservations.

‘It will work,’ he had promised her. ‘All you have to do is forget the past. This is a new beginning. For both of us.’

He had memories he wanted to forget, too. He had told her about them freely enough, yet she still felt uneasily that she did not really know him very well. She had thought that once they were man and wife she would really know and understand him, but there was a darkness in Ben which still locked her out. She was beginning to be afraid it would always be there—a wall around him through which she could not pass and which hid a side of him which worried her.

The taxi hooted and she jumped. ‘He’s getting impatient!’

‘Let him!’ Ben turned her round and lowered his head. His mouth was possessive. She felt her pulses quicken, her body begin to burn. That was one side of their marriage which worked; they were passionate lovers. In bed she could forget her uncertainties—she might not yet have the key to Ben’s mind, but his body was as familiar to her as her own.

Ben abruptly ended the kiss and, lifting his head, framed her face between his hands for a moment, staring at her as if trying to memorise the way she looked.

‘Is there something on your mind?’

The curt question made her heart do a back-flip. She had known it would be hard to deceive him; his training in court made him too accustomed to reading expressions, picking up nuances.

‘I’m not looking forward to being here alone, that’s all,’ she lied.

That was true enough and he knew it; she always felt uneasy about being in the house alone at night. London was a dangerous city, especially to a girl from a peaceful little village miles from anywhere.

He frowned but accepted the excuse. ‘Why don’t you ask one of the girls from work to stay with you while I’m away?’

‘I might do that,’ she murmured, knowing she wouldn’t because she wasn’t going to be here.

The taxi hooted again and Ben’s mouth indented impatiently. ‘I’d better go or I’ll miss my plane! If I don’t talk to you tonight I’ll ring tomorrow.’

He kissed her again, quickly, then he was gone. She heard his feet on the stairs, the front door opening, slamming shut.

Leaning her face on the cold glass of the window, she watched him walk rapidly across the pavement and get into the back of the taxi. He leaned sideways to look out and up at her, his face briefly visible before the taxi vanished—a hard-boned, sparefleshed face, cool grey eyes, a wide, controlled mouth, black hair springing from a window’s peak on his high forehead.

He would be a bad enemy, she thought, and her nerves tightened. When he found out that she had lied, discovered where she had gone, she was going to find out just how dangerous an enemy Ben could be.

His hand lifted for a second; she waved back, then the taxi turned the corner and Nerissa hurried away from the window. She packed her case first, not caring what she folded into it—it wouldn’t matter what she looked like so long as she took warm clothes with her; it would be cold up there.

Downstairs in the kitchen she left a note on the table for the girl who did their cleaning and had her own key to the house. Then she went into Ben’s study, rang for another taxi, then switched on the answering machine to record phone calls, including those from Ben later, or any from his secretary, Helen Manners, a slim blonde woman in her late twenties who had made her dislike for Nerissa clear from the minute they had met.

As she leaned over the desk Nerissa’s eye was caught by their wedding photo, half buried among a pile of law books.

They had been married on a summer morning—a civil ceremony with only a few guests—some family and a handful of friends. It hadn’t felt like a real wedding, somehow; Nerissa had always believed that when she married it would be in her local village church, among the people with whom she had grown up. That brisk, businesslike exchange of vows in London had had no romance, no sense of joy. She had gone through it numbly, with a sense of disbelief.

Helen Manners had been there, very elegant in an olive-green silk dress, her blonde hair piled on her head in a French pleat and pinned there by a large bow made of the same material as her dress. She had long, shapely legs and displayed her tiny feet in handmade black high-heels; she had expensive tastes.

Nerissa didn’t like her and it was mutual. Helen had raised one perfectly drawn black brow as she’d run her scornful eyes over Nerissa’s plain, creamcoloured dress and the Victorian posy of summer flowers she carried in a silver holder.

Ben had seemed oblivious of his secretary’s hostility to his new wife, just as he was indifferent to his sister’s dislike of Nerissa. Ben’s sister hadn’t even come to the wedding, in fact. But then neither had any of Nerissa’s family.

It had been an odd wedding.

Nerissa stared at Ben’s face in the photo—tough and uncompromising, his eyes locked and hiding secrets.

Nerissa turned away, biting her lip. When he found out…She couldn’t even bear to imagine what he would do to her. He was capable of killing; she was convinced of that. The dark vein in his nature ran deep, and his pride was stony, unbending. Any injury to that pride was never forgiven.

She shivered, which reminded her that she was going north—the weather at this time of the year would be cool if not downright chilly. She went back upstairs and found a warm, heather-coloured tweed coat, a purple woollen scarf and knitted gloves that matched—a Christmas present from Aunt Grace last year. Aunt Grace always made the presents she gave; she was very good with her hands, could sew and knit expertly. For much of Nerissa’s life Aunt Grace had made most of her clothes on the sewing-machine in the little sewing-room looking out over the farm orchard.

Nerissa stiffened as she heard the unmistakable sound of a taxi throbbing away outside.

She ran downstairs and picked up her case, opened the front door and hurried out—a slightly built, almost fragile girl, with a wild cloud of dark hair around a pale, triangular face, dominated by those huge, cornflower-blue eyes.