Idiotically, by the time he came, the attack was over, and she had all but managed to make it back to bed.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ were the words with which he greeted her as he burst into the room, the twins behind him. ‘Do you want to kill yourself?’
He saw the open wardrobe and the clothes spilling from it and his mouth tightened ominously.
‘You’re a fool, do you know that?’ he demanded as he walked across the floor and unceremoniously picked her up.
Now, with her eyes on a level with his and his heart beating oddly unsteadily beneath the hand she had placed on his chest to push herself away from him, Rebecca found it impossible to speak. She was far too aware of all the subtle messages her body was giving her; and some of them not so subtle, she recognised in cringing mortification as she felt the unmistakable surge of arousal flood her body.
‘What do you think it would do to Aunt Maud if she found out you’d half killed yourself trying to leave? Have you no consideration?’
Had she no consideration!
She gritted her teeth against all the bitter accusatory words she wanted to fling at him as she remembered that they had an interested audience. Well, at least the twins must be in no doubt now about the true nature of her relationship with Frazer.
As though he picked up on her thoughts, Frazer turned to them and said firmly, ‘OK, you two, it’s well past your bedtime. Baths, please…at once…and then I’ll be up to read your story.’
They obeyed him immediately, Rebecca noticed wryly.
As he placed her back on her bed with more urgency than finesse he said brusquely, ‘No more heroics, if you don’t mind. I might be able to see through them, but Maud can’t.’
If she had ever once hoped that a miracle might occur, that he might somehow see through his own prejudices and perceive the truth, or, even more unlikely, that he would mentally lay waste to the barriers he had erected between them and, metaphorically at least, welcome her back with open arms into the circle of those he trusted and loved, Rebecca realised now the extent of her self-indulgent folly.
Frazer would never allow her to forget the past—for one very good reason. He himself did not want to forget it. It was almost as though in some way he actually took a certain bitter pleasure in remembering it.
She told herself that the tears stinging her eyes came more from exhaustion and physical weakness than from emotional pain, turning her head away from him so that he wouldn’t see them as she muttered defiantly, ‘You wanted me to leave.’
What was it about him that drove her into reacting like a recalcitrant child? Far better to have simply ignored his comment and let him go. Far better, far more mature, far safer. Because now he had turned and was looking back at the bed, his eyes narrowing speculatively as though he too was wondering why she was prolonging their intimacy.
‘Yes,’ he agreed unequivocally. ‘But only when you’re physically well enough to do so. You can turn yourself into a martyr if you want to, Rebecca, but don’t expect me to help you do it.’
‘You still hate me, don’t you?’ she burst out unwisely, overwrought and dangerously close to the edge of losing her self-control.
‘Hate you? He smiled at her, a cold, taunting smile that made her feel sick inside. ‘No, I don’t hate you at all, Rebecca. Hatred, after all, is a very powerful emotion. If I feel anything for you, I suppose it’s a mixture of pity and contempt. Pity because you were silly enough to fall for Rory and contempt because you allowed yourself to become involved with him even though you knew he was married.’
‘Allowed myself? People don’t allow themselves to fall in love, Frazer!’
‘Yes, they do,’ he countered coolly. ‘There’s always a point early on in such a relationship where one has the option to draw back or go on. That point should have come for you the moment you realised what Rory was doing. You knew he wasn’t free.’
‘I should have drawn back! I knew! So it was all my fault, was it?’ she demanded recklessly.
For a moment something dark and painful touched his face and a feeling unlike anything she had ever known before hit the pit of her stomach, a mingling of yearning, rage, and helpless, hopeless love.
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘it wasn’t all your fault. I blame myself just as much. I should have seen what was happening, but I…’
‘You were too involved in your own love life,’ she supplied for him.
The look he gave her shocked her, it was so bitter and acid.
‘Yes,’he agreed grittily. ‘So involved that I was virtually blind to what was going on under my nose. You’ve never married, nor been seriously involved with anyone else, if family gossip is to be believed,’ he added curtly. ‘If that means that you’re still carrying a torch for Rory…’
‘That’s my affair, and I’m not prepared to discuss it with you!’ Rebecca interrupted him sharply. She had endured enough, and even if it was her own fault for instituting the argument in the first place, she felt she had been punished sufficiently. To hear Frazer telling her of his pity and contempt for her…
She knew that if he didn’t leave her soon she was likely to disgrace herself by bursting into tears in front of him.
‘I’m tired, Frazer,’ she told him unnecessarily, unaware of the haunting fragility of her face and the shadows that lay like bruises against her skin, making the man watching her suddenly aware of how very slender she had become and how very vulnerable she looked.
He walked to the door in silence and opened it, pausing only when Rebecca said shakily, ‘And you needn’t worry—the moment the doctor tells me I’m well enough to leave, I’ll be ready to go.’
It was only after he had gone that she acknowledged the shock it must have given him to come home and find her here. No wonder he had been so furious with her when he fished her out of the pool! She wondered if he had been tempted to simply let her drown, and then she acknowledged that such behaviour was not and could never be a part of his character. Frazer believed in confronting the problems in his life, not sidestepping them or, even worse, ignoring them as Rory was inclined to do.
The two brothers could not really have been more different. Rory so lightweight and beneath his surface charm so deeply selfish; Frazer on the surface the harsher and far less appealing of the two, but in reality, at least where others who were not herself were concerned, so deeply compassionate and aware.
She wondered if he still loved Michelle. He must do, since he had never made any attempt to build a commitment with anyone else. When, months after the débâcle of her confrontation with Frazer, she had finally managed to pluck up the courage to say vaguely to her mother that she supposed Frazer and Michelle must soon be setting a date for the wedding, her mother had looked astonished and announced that the relationship was over and that Michelle had apparently gone to work in New York.
Rebecca had not been entirely surprised. After all, if Michelle had secretly been having an affair with Rory she had obviously not been wholly committed to Frazer, and yet even so Rebecca had ached for him, imagining his pain and loss.
It had been then that she had been most hopeful that he would somehow or other divine the truth…that he would appear on her doorstep abject with apology and remorse, begging her to allow him
to make it up to her.
She had been very young then, too young to see that Frazer had never really shared her deep, almost compulsive need to preserve their friendship, but then Frazer was not in love with her as she was with him; their friendship had never meant to him what it did to her, and so gradually she had come to accept that, even if he did learn the truth, it would make very little difference.
Now a new dimension was added to that knowledge: the awareness that for some reason Frazer seemed to positively enjoy holding her at a distance.
She moved restlessly in the bed, struggling to cough as she felt her chest tighten, cursing fate as she acknowledged that it was going to be several days before she was well enough to leave.
She comforted herself with the knowledge that Frazer was hardly likely to see her out during that time and that, if she was careful and exercised every particle of her imagination, it might almost be possible for her to pretend that he wasn’t in the house at all, but still safely in America.
Unfortunately this admirable plan received a severe setback in the early hours of the morning when she woke from a restless sleep, aching from head to foot, her body slick with a feverish sweat, her chest ominously tight.
Someone had thoughtfully opened the windows to their fullest extent so that she could breathe in the clear pure mountain air, but as she turned to do so she saw the low shape of the camp bed on the floor between her and the windows.
Someone was lying on it, and her heart gave a confused, shattering leap as she realised it was Frazer. Frazer sleeping here in her room…but why?
In her shock she sat up, then shivered as the night air touched her overheated skin. Her shivers brought on an increase in the tightness of her chest, making her cough and then gasp as the all too familiar pain gripped her.
Instantly Frazer was awake, but this time she managed to control the agonising spasm before he reached her.