A Man Possessed

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘KATE, for goodness’ sake, it’s a dinner party I’m inviting you to, not a Roman orgy!’

With wry exasperation, Sue reflected that her husband John had been right when he said that Kate would dig her heels in and prove to be as intractable about refusing this invitation as she had been in refusing all their others.

She and Kate had been friendly ever since their High School days; they had grown up together, and yet despite that, there was a barrier between them now, that Kate used as a drawbridge, to pull up and hide herself behind.

Sue knew why, of course, and she sighed inwardly, reflecting how perverse and cruel fate could be. No woman gifted with Kate’s looks and sensuality should live as she did, completely cutting herself off from almost all human contact. At least she had agreed now to put the farmhouse up for sale, Sue reflected. The land that had once gone with it was long gone, sold after Ricky’s death to pay off his gambling and other debts. Kate refused to blame Ricky for the wasteland their marriage had been, but Sue’s quick temper and loyalty to her friend were fired every time she thought about him. It was all very well for Kate to say that she was equally to blame; that she should never have married him. But she had been a naïve eighteen to his twenty-eight; still shocked by the sudden death of her father and the totally unexpected arrival into her life of the mother she had not seen since she was ten years old.

Perhaps Kate was right, and Ricky was not to blame; it had after all been Kate’s mother who had been so eager for the marriage. The land Kate had inherited from her father had run alongside the farm Ricky had inherited from his grandfather, and he hadn’t taken much persuading that in marrying Kate he would be gaining far more than a docile, biddable wife. Even then there had been rumours about his gambling, and Kate’s mother must have known about them, but it had still not stopped her from marrying her daughter off to him, with what Sue, now a mother herself, recognised as extremely unmaternal haste. But then, at only seventeen and a half, Kate was still under age, and her mother would have had to take her back to the States with her, if she had not been able to leave her with Ricky.

Sue knew enough about Valerie Patton to know how unwelcome an addition a beautiful teenage daughter would have been to her Los Angeles lifestyle. Following her divorce from Kate’s father, Valerie had resumed her acting career, landing a part in an American television ‘soap’, eventually giving up that role in order to take up the far more financially rewarding one of becoming Mrs Harold Patton the Third.

She had been frankly staggered when she saw Valerie at her ex-husband’s funeral; she had looked barely half a dozen years older than her own teenage daughter, and almost as beautiful. But unlike Kate, Valerie’s beauty was barely even skin deep; her charm as brittle and delicate as the mask that a clever plastic surgeon had fashioned on her face. No, there had been no room in Valerie Patton’s life for a grown-up daughter, and so while she was still suffering from the shock of her father’s death, Kate had been hustled into marriage with Ricky.

Only once in the ten years since then had Kate ever mentioned the subject of her marriage to Sue; and that had been six years ago, just after Ricky’s death. What she had confided then had both appalled and stunned Sue. Even then Kate would not blame Ricky, claiming that she herself was as much to blame; that she had married him of her own free will believing herself in love with him, and that admission more than anything else had made Sue’s sympathetic heart ache, especially now from the vantage point of her own maturity. What could a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old, who had only known the distant and ill-expressed love of a much older father, know of adult emotions? In Sue’s opinion, if Kate had believed herself in love with Ricky, it had been because both Ricky himself and her mother had taken good care that she should do so. Although Kate had never confirmed it to her, Sue had a strong suspicion that knowing of Ricky’s predilection for gambling, Valerie had offered him more than just her ex-husband’s land when he married her daughter. After all, Valerie Patton was an extremely wealthy woman.

A soft, faintly mocking cough drew Sue back from the past to the present. Kate was standing in front of the window and the light from it framed the darkly turbulent beauty of which she herself was so unaware.

Once again Sue sighed. It was all such a waste. Kate should be going out, meeting people, enjoying life, not living here alone in this remote farmhouse. She had tried again and again to get her friend more interested in life … in men, but Kate had changed over the years. She was no longer the shy, vulnerable adolescent she had once been. In fact nowadays she was surprisingly firm, self-possessed and stubborn; sometimes maddeningly so, like now.

‘Look, Kate, I promise you I’m not trying to matchmake,’ Sue told her firmly. ‘I want you to come to dinner with us, that’s all.’

‘Only with you and John?’

Humour curved her full bottom lip, her densely blue eyes gleaming knowingly as Kate looked back at her friend.

‘No, not just John and me,’ Sue admitted. ‘There’ll be others there … But, Kate, can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?’ She sounded exasperated now, and she was. She had talked this over with John again and again, and her husband who was a G.P. in local practice agreed with her that because of the isolation of her home, and her habit of cutting herself off from other people, Kate was in real danger of becoming too solitary. ‘You’re young … only twenty-seven,’ Sue persisted doggedly. ‘You’re clever, beautiful … Kate, you can’t possibly want to spend the rest of your life alone!’

Just for a moment a faintly brooding, haunted expression touched the blue eyes, and then they hardened to mocking flippancy as Kate responded teasingly, ‘Why not?’

‘Oh, you …! Well, you’re coming to this dinner party, even if it means driving out here to drag you back myself. You’ve got to start living again some time, Kate.’

Across the room their eyes met, and then suddenly, almost wearily, Kate gave in.

‘Okay, I’ll come,’ she smiled wryly, ‘who knows, I might be able to persuade one of your guests to buy the farm.’

Sue smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re selling it, although I know you’ve always loved it.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Kate smiled evenly at her and said with chilly truthfulness, ‘I sometimes wonder if it was Ricky I married, or this place. I fell in love with it when I was six years old. I could just see the rooftops from our cottage. I can’t afford to keep it on though, Sue—it costs a fortune to run.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sure it’s no secret locally how Ricky left me financially. What was left of the land had to go to meet his debts. Next winter the roof is going to need repairing. It’s a listed building and can only be repaired with original or expensively hand-made roof tiles, and that’s just the start of it …’

‘But what do you plan to do! Where will you go?’

‘There’s still the cottage,’ Kate reminded her. ‘It’s been let as a weekend base to a couple from London for the past few years, but their tenancy runs out this year, and I’ve decided to move back there myself. It’s plenty large enough for me after all, and it will be much cheaper to run.’

‘And the money you get from this place, carefully invested, will bring you in enough to manage on, I suppose,’ Sue mused, able to see the logic of what her friend was suggesting.

‘It might do, but that’s not what I’ve got in mind. I’m thinking of starting up my own business.’

Sue stared at her totally bemused for several seconds before exlaiming, ‘Doing what?’

‘Working in stained glass,’ Kate told her calmly, amusement gleaming in her eyes as she surveyed her friend’s stunned face. ‘It was one of the crafts I studied at art school, and it fascinated me. I was only there six months, not long enough to learn very much, but I’ve been spending a couple of days each week over the last few months at a craft workshop in London learning more about it. The whole subject’s one that intrigues me, and more and more markets are opening up for it—not just for restoration work in churches either.’

‘But … but you’ve never said a word!’

Kate shrugged and then smiled. ‘Until now there was nothing to say. Although I’ve enjoyed what I’ve been doing, until Harry suggested we went into partnership last week, it never really occurred to me that it might be a way in which I could make a living.’

‘Harry!’ The stunned, almost inarticulate way in which Sue repeated the name of her mentor and proposed partner made Kate grin mischievously.

‘Don’t get excited,’ she cautioned, chuckling. ‘He’s fifty, happily married and a grandfather.’

‘But, Kate——! I’m amazed … you’ve been making all these plans and never said a word!’

Kate could tell that her friend was hurt and hurriedly made amends.

‘To be honest with you, Sue, until Harry mentioned us going into partnership last week, I hadn’t thought of what I was doing as anything other than an enjoyable hobby, but now that he has mentioned it, I really feel that it’s something I want to do. Of course we’re only talking about it at this stage, but Harry’s very enthusiastic. He likes my designs and he’s keen for me to develop that side of my work.’

Sue sat down in a chair and stared up at her. ‘Kate, I’m so pleased. This is just what you need to take you out of yourself. I’m sorry you’ve got to sell the house, of course, but it’s time you had a fresh start.’

‘Mmm … maybe. But keep it to yourself, would you, Sue? My plans are far too tentative at the moment to become the subject of village gossip.’ Kate made a rueful moue. ‘You know what this place is like.’

‘Only too well! Don’t worry, I shan’t breathe a word.’

The grandfather clock in the hall suddenly struck the hour and Sue jumped up, grimacing. ‘God, is it that time? I’ve got to pick the kids up from school in half an hour. I’d better go … but before I do, I want your promise that you’ll come to my dinner party.’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘Good, because I meant what I said, you know. I’ll come and drag you away from this place forcibly if you try and wriggle out of it now.’

‘Oh, yeah!’ Glancing from the vantage point of her five-feet-eight to her friend’s petite five-foot-nothing, Kate grinned, reviving a taunt from their mutual schooldays as she teased, ‘You and whose army?’

Ten minutes later, bowling down the lane in her small car heading in the direction of the village, Sue reflected warmly that at long last Kate was showing some signs of rejoining the human race. She couldn’t wait to get home and share her pleasure with her family. Her husband was almost as fond of Kate as she was herself, and her widowed mother loved Kate almost as a second daughter. It was so good to see her smiling again; reverting to the lovely laughing girl she had been before her father’s death, and then again, if only briefly, in those weeks before her marriage. How long after that marriage had it been before she stopped smiling? A month … six weeks? Over and over again Kate had denied that her unhappiness was Ricky’s fault, but in the shocked aftermath of his death she had broken down completely and admitted to her what a travesty their marriage had been.

Sexually Ricky had been completely indifferent to her; had made love to her less than half a dozen times, always perfunctorily, from what Sue had been able to gather from Kate’s weepy outpourings; and then once they had been married a couple of months, never touching her, but turning instead for sexual pleasure to a succession of girl-friends. He had been with one of them when he died in a horrifying head-on crash with another car. Kate had wanted to divorce him, she had confided, but she had been too ashamed of admitting to anyone what a travesty their marriage was to do anything about it.

What her friend had experienced would be enough to put any woman off the male sex for life, Sue admitted, but although Ricky had apparently constantly jeered at her for being sexually cold, that was not how Sue saw her friend. On the contrary, she had always thought there was an aura of warm sensuality about Kate … an air of womanliness and warmth, spiced with sexuality, and she knew that her husband John agreed with her. Even so … physical rejection from one’s husband must be a terrible burden to carry …

Although she wasn’t aware of it, as she stood by the drawing-room window looking out on to the mellow countryside Kate’s thoughts were following a similar path to her friend’s, although it was not the bitterness of the burden of her husband’s rejection that was occupying her thoughts, but that of another man.

Strange how, even now, after all this time, eight years in fact, that memory still had the power to torment her. She sighed, and tried to push it away, turning her back on the scenery outside and turning instead to survey the familiar surroundings of her home, but that was a mistake.

Nothing had changed in this room in over ten years. It was still the same now as it had been when she came to the house as a new bride. Although she hadn’t known it at the time, the décor had been chosen by one of Ricky’s girl-friends. Whoever she was, she had had excellent taste, Kate mused, her glance taking in the soft lemony-gold washed walls and ceiling; the dark stained beams which were part of the original Elizabethan house. From the parish records they knew that this house had once belonged to a prosperous buccaneer, who had made his money with Drake, and who had bought this land with the Queen’s goodwill, building a home on it for the bride he had brought here from London.

A soft blue-grey velvety carpet covered the floor, the cottagey atmosphere of the drawing-room reinforced by the two large sofas upholstered in a beautiful Colefax and Fowler print of blues and greys on a soft yellow background. An antique ladies’ writing desk was set against one wall beneath an attractive group of prints. The room retained an open fireplace and was large enough to take a collection of antique occasional tables, and a couple of easy chairs upholstered in soft yellow fabric to contrast slightly with the florals of the sofas. Matching curtains hung at the windows at either end of the room, the whole effect a careful blending of colours that harmonised, seemingly casual and slightly shabby and yet epitomising a country house style of furnishing that was wholly English. Which made it all the more disruptive that she should be able to so easily imagine standing within this background a man who was most definitely not the slightest bit English—at least not in looks—and one, moreover, who had spent no more than a mere weekend at most here. And yet it was easier to recapture his image than it was to recapture Ricky’s. But then, of course, the rejection she had suffered at Dominic Harland’s hands had been far more savagely painful than that she had known with Ricky.

She shivered, suddenly cold despite the afternoon sun pouring into the room. Even now she couldn’t bear to think about that weekend.

But perhaps she should, she told herself hardily; perhaps it was time she stopped hiding away from the past and faced up to it. She was after all about to make a new start in life … a fitting point at which to give one final look at the past and then shut it away for ever.

Almost dreamily she walked into the large hall, glancing automatically up to what had originally been the minstrels’ gallery and what was now the landing. He had been standing up there the first time she saw him. She had been in bed when he arrived … had known nothing about him until Ricky, whom she had not expected home that weekend, told her that he was an old friend whom he had met in London and invited down for the weekend.

Numbly Kate tore her attention away from the gallery, shocked by the unexpected pallor of her own face as she caught sight of it in the mirror hanging on the hall wall. She looked drained of all colour, her hair stark black, although in reality it was very dark brown, the curling thick mass of it in stark contrast to her face, as though somehow her hair had drained all the colour and energy from her skin. Even her mouth looked pale, almost bloodless, only her eyes possessing colour.

Her colouring was Irish, her father had once told her, which was why he had chosen to call her Kate, but Kate could see no beauty in her vibrantly sensual colouring; she would have preferred to have been blonde like her mother. Ricky had always preferred blondes too. The girl he had died with had been blonde … bleached apparently, but blonde nevertheless.

Slowly Kate went upstairs, her feet automatically finding the shallow indentations on the stairs made by the feet of many generations. One of the things she loved most about the house was its age.

She found it soothing to remind herself that these walls and rooms had seen every facet of human life both happy and miserable, and in the past it had often given her a sense of perspective on her own problems to think of this.

Once upstairs she made for her bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. It was not the room she had shared with Ricky during their marriage. She went in there these days only when she had to. Ricky had insisted that she continue to share the huge fourposter with him even when he had made it plain that he had no interest in her as a woman—how galling that had been, to know that her husband, who would turn in the street and look lustfully at almost every girl who walked past him, had absolutely no sexual interest in her.

She closed her eyes, automatically letting the past wash over her, remembering how confused and uncertain she had been after her father’s death. Her mother might have pushed her into Ricky’s arms, but she hadn’t had to push too hard. The trouble was that she had been in desperate need of someone to love and be loved by in return. Ricky had been attractive enough to make any naïve girl’s heart beat faster; tall, fair-haired, and indolently languid in a way which Kate had misinterpreted as being sophisticatedly exciting—she had been all too eager to believe herself in love with him.

Her full lips twisted slightly. God, what a fool she had been! Well, she had soon learned the truth. Ricky had refused to take her away on honeymoon, claiming that he was too busy, but she soon realised that Ricky used those words to cloak his heavy gambling. He had gone gaming the night they were married, leaving her alone in the house after the few guests who had attended their register office wedding had gone. He had come back late—and drunk. Weeks later when she had accused him of this he had sneered at her in open contempt and told her that that was the only way he had been able to bring himself to make love to her. Although she hadn’t known it when they married he had been heavily involved with someone else, a woman whose tastes were much more in accord with his than her own.

It was when, after a tearful fight, she had accused him of not loving her that he had told her this, and much more besides, jeering at her for ever believing he might have done.

He had never wanted her, he told her then, and never would; she was too cold … too inexperienced. No, the reason he had married her was because the addition of her father’s land to his own had made it much easier for him to raise a mortgage on the land, and that plus the fact that her mother had been willing to pay him to take her off her hands had made marriage to her an attractive proposition.

They had been married exactly two months when he told her that, and at first she had been too shocked to take it in.

Convinced that his hurtful words were just born out of temper, she had made several clumsy attempts to approach him and to bridge the gap between them, but he had rebuffed her so callously that she was soon forced to realise what he had said was the truth and that he did not desire her as his wife in any physical sense at all.

At first she had been too shocked to think of divorce; to do anything other than live through each agonising day as best she could. The discovery that he did not love her, coming so soon after the blow of her father’s death, numbed her to such an extent that for months she had simply drifted through life.

But then two years after she and Ricky were married had come that dreadful, fateful weekend when she had met Dominic Harland.

Ricky had arrived home late one Friday evening with him.

Kate had been in bed when they arrived. The sound of Ricky’s car had woken her and she had gone out on to the landing in just her cotton nightdress, not expecting Ricky to have anyone with him. He had not been home at all the previous night and she was rigid with tension and anguish, only registering the other man’s presence when he stepped out from behind her husband. The light on the landing threw his profile into strong relief and she had literally gasped out loud, stunned by the masculine perfection of his features. Honey-gold skin stretched tautly over strong bones, tawny-gold eyes, the colour of a lion’s pelt, stared mockingly into her own, thick black hair curling down over the collar of his shirt.

Even in her ignorance and innocence Kate had recognised the powerful sexual aura of the man, and a curious, twisting sensation curled through her body, making her eyes widen and her lips part as she stared down into his face like someone possessed. Her heartbeat quickened, her whole body pulsing with a deep, aching sensation hard to define. As she watched, transfixed, the hard male mouth twisted, the golden eyes narrowing, hardening, disengaging from her own with cool indifference making her uncomfortably aware of the long schoolgirlish plait of her hair, and the little girlish cotton nightdress she was wearing. No doubt his women wore silks and satins to bed; their appearance as sophisticated as his own. As she stumbled back to the bedroom she had a momentary and tormenting mental picture of his naked body, tanned and hard; very sure and knowing as it reached out to claim the filmy image of a woman, in the act of love.

Her skin hot with shame, Kate dived into bed and curled up beneath the bedclothes. There must be something wrong with her, thinking like that about a complete stranger. There was something wrong with her, she decided distractedly minutes later as an uncomfortable heat pervaded her body, followed by a tight, coiling tension. She could hear the two men moving about in the adjacent bedroom. The door opened and closed, she heard footsteps along the landing and then her door opened and Ricky came in.

She knew better now than to make any approach to him. He undressed quickly, throwing his clothes on to the floor before heading for their bathroom. He was gone for over half an hour, but when he returned Kate was still awake. She felt the bed depress as he got in beside her, turning his back on her. She closed her eyes, but it was not her husband’s image that danced tormentingly behind her shuttered lids. It was Dominic Harland’s.