Long Cold Winter. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ she told him quietly. ‘It’s for me as well. Call it part of my therapy. I’d like to tell you that having you touch me fills me with loathing,’ she added calmly, ‘but that isn’t true.’

      She felt him stiffen and sensed that he was expecting her surrender.

      ‘You see, Yorke,’ she told him emotionlessly, ‘I feel nothing. Nothing at all, neither for you nor anyone else. You destroyed my ability to feel.’

      She moved away from him as she spoke, acutely aware of him behind her as he unlocked the door, throwing her the key.

      ‘Don’t try running out on me, Autumn,’ he warned her curtly, ‘or I’ll make you wait for eternity for divorce. The moment I’ve got the negotiations here all wrapped up, we’re leaving—together.’

      Autumn did not respond. She could not. It was taking all her will-power merely to breathe. She felt as though she had died and been born again, living through some dreadful, indescribable holocaust, to emerge from it another person.

      How long she stood staring out of the window she did not know. A soft tap on her door roused her, and Sally’s anxious face told her how concerned her friend had been.

      ‘I saw Yorke leaving,’ she said by way of explanation for her presence. ‘What happened?’

      ‘He’s promised me my divorce, provided I live with him for the next four months.’ Autumn explained the situation emotionlessly, whilst Sally listened.

      ‘You’re hoping that living with him will free you from whatever it is that haunts you from the past, aren’t you?’ she said shrewdly.

      ‘In a way,’ Autumn agreed wryly. ‘Don’t hypnotists use much the same method for freeing patients from their hang-ups? A mental regression to childhood to live through the trauma once more and come to terms with it?

      ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Sally said unhappily. ‘You could be playing with fire.’

      ‘I’m immune,’ Autumn told her. Discussing Yorke’s offer with Sally had helped to clarify her own thoughts on the subject, and confirmed her own view that the time for running was over, and yet still fear lingered, urging her to flight. That was the response of the gauche adolescent she had been, not the woman she now was.

      ‘Sure you don’t want me to stay?’ Sally asked her.

      Autumn shook her head. She wanted to be alone, to think things through slowly and carefully. When Sally had gone she stared out of her uncurtained window, the soothing movement of the sea beckoning her like a benison, then she opened the french window and walked towards it.

      For two years she had told herself that she was free, but she wasn’t, and never would be until she could lie in Yorke’s arms and feel nothing, apart from the intense satisfaction of her rejection of him!

      The beach was in darkness and deserted, the faint strains of music reaching her from the hotel fading as she walked farther away from it, her feet making delicate imprints in the damp sand.

      She loved the sea, endlessly fascinated by its ceaseless movement. Lying on it was like being rocked in a huge cradle. The tide had washed up a huge conch shell and she picked it up, shuddering a little as she glimpsed the fleshy eel-like conch inside. The sting of a conch could be particularly painful, and she made a mental note to remind the new holidaymakers of this fact in the morning. Collecting the varied shells to be found on the beaches was a favourite pastime with the visitors. The wooden beach hut which held the diving and snorkelling equipment was closed up for the night, the dinghies and windsurfers pulled up outside it; the two power boats the hotel used for water skiing drifted easily at anchor.

      The beach came to an abrupt end, the black volcanic rock from which the Five Fathoms restaurant was carved stretching skywards in a sheer, unscalable cliff, thick with luxuriant vegetation, and plunging steeply into the sea. Autumn sat down on a piece of driftwood and stared out into the darkness.

      Ever since she had left Yorke she had been hiding from her memories, but now she could hide no longer. The exorcism would have to start somewhere, and the very beginning was as good a place as any, she mused.

       CHAPTER THREE

      THE very first time she had set eyes on Yorke, Autumn had been standing behind the reception desk of the hotel where she worked, and she had been struck instantly by the hard-boned masculinity of his face and the sensual appeal of his tall, narrow-hipped body clad in a thick cream sweater and thigh-moulding dark pants.

      The only time she had ever seen men like him had been in magazines that the guests left behind or on television, and in the flesh he had an impact that sent her senses reeling.

      Mary, the girl who was officially on duty and supposed to be teaching her, stared at him in open-mouthed awe and murmured appreciatively to Autumn.

      ‘Now that’s what I call a man! And all alone. Pity he’s so dark—he’s bound to prefer blondes.’ When Autumn looked puzzled, she exclaimed in affectionate contempt,

      ‘God, you really don’t know anything, do you?’

      Autumn could have replied that she knew quite a lot, but she knew the ‘anything’ Mary referred to meant anything about the male sex, so she kept silent, colour grazing her skin as she saw that the man was watching her.

      Mary served him with ingratiating politeness, but he seemed barely aware of her, his eyes totally indifferent as he signed his name on the register and moved away while she rang for a porter.

      Who was he, Autumn wondered, and what was he doing here? Her lonely childhood had turned her into something of a daydreamer, and as though he sensed that she was curious about him, he turned to look at her, his eyes losing their cool indifference and surveying her with an intensity that brought the swift colour to her cheeks.

      She had gone off duty shortly afterwards, but the next day Mary had been full of their new visitor.

      His name was Yorke Laing, she had informed Autumn, and he had been ordered to rest by his doctor following a bout of ‘flu.

      ‘Yorke Laing.’ Autumn had savoured the name, wondering why it should have such a familiar ring until she remembered who he was. Surely the Yorke Laings of this world did not recuperate from their illnesses in tiny little hotels perched on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors? The South of France or somewhere equally glamorous seemed more in keeping.

      ‘He’s gorgeous,’ Mary breathed as Yorke walked past the desk. ‘And I bet there isn’t much he doesn’t know about women!’

      Yorke turned and smiled at them and Autumn flushed vividly, and Mary’s shrewd eyes noted her changing colour.

      The other girls in the hotel had been inclined to tease Autumn at first, when they realised how inexperienced she was, but they were on the whole kind-hearted and their teasing had given way to affectionate protection, and although at nineteen Autumn was only a couple of years their junior they tended to treat her very much as the ‘baby’ of the staff.

      It was only since she had come to work at the hotel that she had realised how old-fashioned her upbringing had been. Her parents had been killed in a road accident when she was still a baby, and she had been brought up by a spinster СКАЧАТЬ