She sucked in her breath as if about to say something, then thought better of it. ‘You changed your name? Afterwards?’
‘I use my grandfather’s name. Part of it, anyway. He emigrated from eastern Europe. Nothing as grand as Russian royalty, you understand, just a young man trying to escape poverty. They put him off the boat at the first port they came to and told him he was in America. We have a lot in common.’
‘Don’t you think—’
‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘I don’t.’ It was the last thing he wanted to think about. ‘What about you? Do you see your parents these days? Did they manage to find time for their granddaughter’s christening?’
She shook her head, then, realising that he couldn’t see, said, ‘They died in an accident years ago. When Ivo was just out of university and I was in sixth form taking my A levels.’
Jago found himself in the unusual situation of not having a clue what to say.
To offer sympathy for the loss of parents who had never been there for her would have been as hypocritical as anything his parents had ever done. Saying what was expected. Hollow words. Yet he knew there would still be an emptiness. A space that nothing could ever fill…
‘How did you cope?’ he asked finally.
Manda caught a yawn. She ached everywhere, her hands were sore, her mouth gluey. The only comfort was the heat of Jago’s shoulder beneath her head. His arm keeping her close. His low husky voice drowning out the small noises, the scuffling, that she didn’t want to think about.
‘Everything suddenly landed on Ivo’s shoulders. He’d been about to take a year off to travel. Instead, he found himself having to deal with all the consequences of unexpected death. Step up and take over. He was incredible.’
‘I don’t doubt it, but I was asking about you. Singular.’
‘Oh.’ How rare was that…? ‘I suppose the hardest thing was having to accept that, no matter what I did, how good I was, or how bad, my mother and father were never going to turn up, hold me, tell me that it was going to be all right because they loved me.’
It was all she’d ever wanted.
‘And?’ he said, dragging her back from the moment she’d stood at their graveside, loving them and hating them in the same breath.
She wished she could see him. See his eyes, read him… Cut off from all those visual signals that she could read like a book, she was lost. And in the dark she couldn’t use that cool, dismissive smile she’d perfected for when people got too close. The one that Ivo said was like running into a brick wall.
She had no mask to hide behind.
‘There must have been an “and”,’ he persisted. ‘You’re not the kind of woman who just sits back and takes it.’
‘Not only a hero but smart with it,’ she said, letting her head fall back against this unexpected warmth that had nothing to do with temperature.
No visual clues, but his voice was as rich and comforting as a mouthful of her sister-in-law’s chocolate cake. And, like that sinful confection, to be taken only in very small quantities because the comfort glow was an illusion.
She wasn’t fooling herself. The magic would fade with the dawn as such things always did in fairy stories, but for now, in the dark, with his shoulder to lean on, his arm about her, she felt safe.
‘And…’ he insisted, refusing to let her off the hook.
He really wanted to know what she’d done next, did he? Well, that would speed reality along very nicely and maybe that was a good thing. Illusions were made to be shattered, so it was best to get it over with. The sooner the better.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said. ‘There’s always an “and”.’
‘You’re stalling.’
‘Am I?’
Who wouldn’t?
‘And so I went looking for someone who would,’ she said. ‘Just one more poor little rich girl looking for someone who’d hold her and tell her that he loved her. Totally pathetic.’
Just how dumb could a girl get?
‘You were what? Eighteen?’ he guessed. ‘I don’t suppose you found it difficult.’
‘No. It wasn’t finding someone that was difficult. There were someones positively lining up to help me out. Finding them wasn’t the problem. Keeping them was something else.’ Looking back with the crystal clear vision of hindsight, it was easy to see why. ‘Needy, clinging women desperate for love frighten men to death.’
‘We’re a pitiful bunch.’
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t their fault. They were young, looking for some lighthearted fun. Sex without strings.’
Something she hadn’t understood at the time. And when, finally, it had been made clear to her, it had broken her.
‘I think you’re being a little harsh on yourself.’
‘Am I?’ She heard the longing in her voice and dismissed it. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘There’s no such thing as sex without strings, especially for women.’
‘You’re referring to that old thing about men giving love for sex, women giving sex for love, no doubt.’
‘I’m not sure anything as complex as the relationship between a man and woman can ever be reduced to a sound bite,’ he said.
‘It can when you’ve just taken your finals and the world beckons. No young man with the world at his feet wants to be saddled with a baby.’
‘You were pregnant?’ That stopped him. She’d known it would.
‘My last throw of the dice. I thought if I had his baby a man wouldn’t ever be able to leave me. Stupid. Unfair. Irresponsible beyond belief.’
‘People do crazy things when they’re unhappy,’ he said.
‘No excuses, Nick. Using a child…’ She shrugged. ‘Of course he insisted I terminate the pregnancy and, well, I’ve already told you that I’d have done anything…’
‘Where is this child now?’
‘You’re assuming I didn’t go ahead with it.’ How generous of him. How undeserved…
‘Are you saying you did?’
They were lying quite still but when, beside her, Nick Jago stopped breathing, it felt as if the world had stopped.
‘My punishment,’ Manda said, at last, ‘is not knowing. I was standing at the kerb, looking across the road to the clinic, when I collapsed in agony in front of a car and matters were taken out of my hands.’
And with that everything started again. His breathing, her heart…
‘You lost the baby?’
‘Not because of the accident. The driver saved my life twice over that day. First stopping his car. Then realising that there was something seriously wrong and calling an ambulance.’
‘You were in that much pain? Was it an ectopic pregnancy?’
She nodded. ‘By the time Ivo made it back from wherever he was, I was home and it was over. A minor traffic accident. Nothing to make a fuss over.’
‘You never told him? You lost your baby and you never told him?’
‘He already had the world on his shoulders. He didn’t need me as well. And I was so ashamed…’
‘You didn’t do anything.’
‘I thought about it, Jago. I was so desperate…’
He muttered something beneath his breath, then said, ‘And this man who could demand such a thing? Where was he when all this was happening?’
‘Keeping his fingers crossed that I’d go through with it?’ she offered. Then, with a shrug, ‘No, that’s unfair. He came rushing to the hospital to make sure I was okay, but I couldn’t bear to look at him any more. Couldn’t bear to see his relief. Face what I’d done.’
‘You hadn’t done anything,’ Jago said, reaching for her, taking her into his arms in that eternal gesture of comfort.
Did he think she would cry again? Before, her tears had been of relief. A normal, human reaction. But this was different. She had no more tears to cry for herself…
‘You would never have gone through with it,’ he said, holding her close. And he kept on saying it. Telling her that it was not her fault, that she shouldn’t blame herself. Saying over and over, that she would not have rejected her own baby.
This was the absolution she’d dreamed of. And why she’d never told anyone.
She didn’t deserve such comfort. It had been no one’s fault but her own that she’d been pregnant. It was her burden. Her loss. And she pulled away.
‘How did you guess it was ectopic?’ she asked. How many men knew what an ectopic pregnancy was, without it being explained in words of one syllable?
‘My grandfather was a doctor, wanted me to follow in his footsteps and maybe I would have, if I hadn’t been taken to Egypt at an early age…’ For a moment he drifted off somewhere else, to a memory of his own. Happier times with his family, no doubt. Then, shaking it off, he said, ‘I remember him talking about a patient of his who’d nearly died. Describing the symptoms. He said the pain was indescribable.’
It wasn’t the pain that she remembered. It was the emptiness afterwards, the lack of feeling that never ceased…
‘What happened to you, Miranda? Afterwards.’
‘The next logical step, I suppose. My parents, my boyfriend, even my baby had rejected me. All that was left was to reject myself so I stopped eating.’ Then, because she didn’t want to think about that, because she wanted to hear about Egypt and Jago as an impressionable boy, however unlikely that seemed, she said, ‘What about you?’
‘Manda…’
‘No. Enough about me. I want to hear about you,’ she insisted, telling herself that his use of the diminutive had been nothing more than a slip. It meant nothing…
‘In Egypt?’ he asked.
Yes… No… Egypt was a distraction and she refused to be distracted.
‘When you walked away from your family,’ she said.
She felt the movement of muscle, more jerk than shrug, as if she’d taken him unawares. The slight catch in his breathing as if he’d jolted some pain into life. Physical? Or deeper?
Then, realising that she was transferring her own mental pain on to him, that it had to be physical, she sat up. ‘You are hurt!’
‘It’s nothing. Lie back.’ And, when she hesitated, ‘Honestly. Just a pulled muscle. It needs warmth and you make a most acceptable hot-water bottle.’
‘Would that be “Dr” Jago talking?’
‘I don’t think you need to be a doctor to know that.’
‘I guess not.’ And, since warmth was all she had to offer, she eased gently back against him, taking care not to jar his shoulder.
‘Is that okay?’
‘Fine,’ he said, tightening his arm around her waist so that she felt as if she was a perfect fit against him.
Too perfect.
‘So?’ she said, returning to her question, determined not to get caught, dragged down by the sexual undertow of their closeness, a totally unexpected—totally unwanted—off limits desire that was nothing more than a response to fear.
She didn’t want to like Nick Jago, let alone care about him. Not easy when a man had saved your life. When his kiss had first warmed her, then heated her to the bone.
And the last thing she wanted was his pity.
CHAPTER NINE
‘TELL me about your life,’ she pressed. ‘Away from here. Are you, or have you ever been, married?’ she asked, using the interrogatory technique of the immigration form. Turning the question into something of a joke. ‘How about children?’
Jago didn’t make the mistake of shrugging a second time, just said, ‘No, no and none.’
‘None that you know of,’ she quipped.
‘None, full stop. I’m not that careless.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘It’s okay. It’s one of those hideous things that men say, isn’t it? As if it makes them look big.’
‘Some men,’ she agreed. Then, before she could stop herself, ‘What about long-term relationships?’
She was making too much of it, she knew. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow, please God, they’d be out of here and would have no reason to ever see one another again.
They’d step back into their own lives and be desperate to forget that, locked in the darkness, they’d shared the darkest secrets of their souls with a stranger.
‘What about the woman who’s been telling the world that this…’ she made a small gesture that took in their unseen surroundings ‘…was all her own work?’
‘Fliss? I was under the apparently mistaken impression that she came under the sex-without-strings heading. She was, allegedly, a postgraduate archaeology student and when she turned up on site looking for work experience I was glad to have another pair of hands. My mistake. I should have made an effort to check her credentials.’
‘As opposed to her “credentials”,’ Manda said, unable to help herself from teasing him a little. ‘Which, let’s face it, no one could fail to miss.’
‘You’ve got me.’ He laughed, taking no offence. ‘Shallow as a puddle and clearly getting no more than I deserve.’
‘Which is?’
‘Being made to look a fool? Although maybe the gods have had the last laugh after all,’ he said, no longer amused. ‘The temples, as a tourist attraction, which was the entire point of that scurrilous piece of garbage she and the Tourism Minister concocted between them, would seem to be dead in the water. And what does my reputation matter? The suffering caused by this earthquake is far more important.’
He took the bottle of brandy from her bag and offered it to her.
‘No. Thanks.’
‘Just take a mouthful to wash the dust out of your mouth,’ he suggested, ‘then maybe it really would be a good idea to try and get some sleep.’
She eased forward, took the bottle, gasping as a little of the hot liquor slid down her throat, for a moment totally unable to speak.
‘Good grief,’ she managed finally. ‘Do people actually drink this stuff?’
‘Only the desperate,’ he admitted.
‘It would be quicker—and kinder—to shoot yourself. Here,’ she said, passing it back to him. ‘Can you pass me my bag?’
He handed it to her, then eased himself carefully into a sitting position.
He was in pain.
Had he just pulled a muscle? Or had he torn something in that long, desperate moment when he’d hung on to her? When he’d helped her over the top to safety.
She didn’t ask, knew he’d deny it anyway. Instead, she dug out the nearly empty pack of wipes from the soggy interior of her bag. Then, having used one to wipe the worst of the dust from her face and hands, she took another and, lifting the big capable hand that had held her, had hung on as the earth shook beneath them, she began, very gently, to wipe it clean.
Jago stiffened at the first touch of the cool, damp cloth on his thumb.
‘Manda…’
Not a slip, then…
‘Shh…’ she said. ‘Let me do this.’
Even through the cloth, she could feel a callus along the inner edge of his thumb that she knew would be a fit for the small trowel he’d found. The result of years of carefully sifting through the layers of the past.
Pieces of bone, pottery, the occasional button or scrap of leather that had been preserved by some freak chance of nature.
Objects without emotional context. Small pieces of distant lives that wouldn’t break your heart.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t throw myself on you,’ she said as she concentrated on each of his fingers in turn. ‘I haven’t done that in years.’
‘No? Just my bad luck.’ Then, as if realising that he’d said something crass, ‘So what do you do with yourself? Now you’ve given up on men?’
‘I work. Very hard. I used to work for Ivo, but these days I’m a partner in the television production company that I set up with my sister-in-law,’ she said, smoothing the cloth over his broad palm. ‘I’m the organiser. I co-ordinate the research, find the people, the places. Keep things running smoothly behind the scenes while Belle does the touchy-feely stuff in front of the camera.’
‘Maybe you should change places,’ he said as, having finished one hand, she began on the other.
She looked up.
‘You’re doing just fine with the touchy-feely stuff,’ he assured her.
‘Oh. No. This is…’ Then, pulling herself together, ‘Actually, since we recently won an award for our first documentary, I think I’ll leave things just the way they are.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Not handbags,’ she said. ‘Or shoes.’
‘I didn’t imagine for a minute it was.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. It’s my fault for making uncalled-for comments on your handbag choices. Tell me about it.’
‘It was all tied up with one of Belle’s pet causes.’ He waited. ‘Street kids…’
‘The unwanted. You’re sure this was your sister-in-law’s pet cause?’
He was too damn quick…
‘She and her sister spent some time on the streets when they were children. Their stories put my pathetic whining in its place, I can tell you,’ she said quickly. ‘How’s your head, Jago?’
‘Still there last time I looked, Miranda.’
‘Your sense of humour is still intact, at least. Let me see,’ she said, cupping his face in her hands so that she could check it out for herself.
It had been so long since she’d touched a man’s hand, his face in this way. His lean jaw was long past the five o’clock stubble phase and she had to restrain herself from the sensuous pleasure of rubbing her palms against it. Instead, she pushed back his hair, searching out the injury on his forehead.
He’d really taken quite a crack, she discovered, remembering uncomfortably how she’d taunted him about that.
‘I’d better clean that up,’ she said, taking the last wipe from the pack.
‘I can—’
‘Tut…’ she said, slapping away his hand as he tried to take it from her.
‘I can do it myself,’ he persisted. ‘But why would I when I have a beautiful woman to tend me?’
She stopped what she was doing.
The crack on his head must have jarred his brains loose, he decided. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he wasn’t given to living dangerously, at least not where women were concerned.
Keeping it light, keeping his distance just about summed up his attitude to the entire sex, but ever since he’d woken to the sound of Miranda Grenville screaming in the dark it was as if he’d been walking on a high wire. Carelessly.
Maybe cheating death gave you the kind of reckless edge that had you saying the most outrageous things to a woman who was quite capable of responding with painful precision. A woman who, like a well-known brand of chocolate, kept her soft and vulnerable centre hidden beneath a hard, protective sugar shell.
‘You have no idea what I look like,’ she said crisply as she leaned into him, continued her careful cleaning of the abrasion. Enveloping him in her warm female scent.
Would her shell melt against the tongue, too? Dissolve into silky sweetness…
‘I know enough,’ he said, taking advantage of the fact that she had her own hands full to run the pad of his thumb across her forehead, down the length of her nose, across a well defined cheekbone. Definitely his brains had been shaken loose. ‘I know that you’ve got good bones. A strong face.’
‘A big nose, you mean,’ she said as, job done, she leaned back. ‘How does that feel now?’
That she was too far away.
‘You missed a bit just here,’ he said, taking her hand and guiding it an inch or two to the right. Then to his temple. ‘And there.’
‘Really?’ She slid her fingers across his skin. ‘I can’t feel anything. Maybe I should have the light.’
‘We should save the battery,’ he said. ‘You’re doing just fine. So, where was I? Oh, yes, your nose. Is it big? I’d have said interesting…’
‘You are full of it, Nick Jago.’
‘Brimful,’ he admitted, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Your hair is straight. It’s very dark and cut at chin-length.’
‘How do you know my hair is dark?’ She stopped dabbing at his imaginary injuries… ‘Did you take a sneaky photograph of me?’
‘As a souvenir of a special day, you mean?’ It hadn’t occurred to him down in the blackness of the temple when his entire focus had been on getting them out of there. Almost his entire focus. Miranda Grenville had a way of making you take notice of her. ‘Maybe I should do it now,’ he suggested.
‘I don’t think so.’ She moved instinctively to protect the phone tucked away in her breast pocket. ‘Who’d want a reminder of this to stick on the mantelpiece?’ She shivered. ‘Who would need one? Besides, as you said, we need to conserve what’s left of the battery.’
His mistake.
‘I was talking about the light, not the cellphone but I take your point. But, to get back to your question, I know your hair is dark because if it had been fair then the light, feeble though it was, would have reflected off it.’
‘Mmm… Well, Mr Smarty Pants, you’ve got dark hair, too. It’s definitely not straight and it needs cutting. I saw that much when you struck your one and only match.’ Then, ‘Oh, and you’re left-handed.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ he demanded.
‘There’s a callus on your thumb. Here.’ She rubbed the tender tip of her own thumb against the ridge of hard skin. ‘This is the hand you use first. The one you reached out to me when I couldn’t make it across that last gap.’ She lifted it in both of hers and said, ‘This is the hand with which you held me safe.’
It was the hand with which he’d held her when she’d cried out to him to let her fall because she was not worth dying for. Because once, young, alone, in despair and on the point of a breakdown, she’d considered terminating a pregnancy?
Had she been punishing herself for that ever since?
‘You are worth it, Manda,’ he said, his voice catching in his throat. Then, ‘No, I hate that. You deserve better than some childish pet name. You are an amazing woman, Miranda. A survivor. And, whatever it is you want, you are worth it.’
‘Thank you…’ Her words were little more than a whisper and, in the darkness, he felt the brush of silky hair against his wrist, then soft lips, the touch of warm breath against his knuckles. A kiss. No, more than a kiss, a salute, and something that had lain undisturbed inside him for aeons contracted, or expanded, he couldn’t have said which. Only that her touch had moved him beyond words.
It was Miranda who shattered the moment, removing her hands from his, putting clear air between them. Shattered the silence, rescuing them both from a moment in which he might have said, done, anything.
‘Actually, I’m not the only one around here with an interesting nose,’ she said. Her voice was too bright, her attempt at a laugh forced. ‘Yours has been broken at some time. How did that happen?’ Then, archly, deliberately breaking the spell of that brief intimacy, ‘Or, more interestingly, who did it to you?’
‘You saw all that in the flare of a match?’ he asked.
‘You were looking at your temple. I was looking at the bad-tempered drunk I was unfortunate to have been trapped with.’
‘I was not drunk,’ he protested, belatedly grabbing for the lifeline she’d flung him. Stepping back from a brink far more dangerous than the dark opening that yawned a few feet away from them.
She shook her head, then, perhaps thinking that because he couldn’t see, he didn’t know what she’d done—and how had he known?—she said, ‘I know that now, but for a while back there you didn’t seem too sure.’
‘A crack on the head will do that to you.’
‘Concussion?’
‘I hope not. The treatment is rest and plenty of fluids.’
‘Thus speaks the voice of experience?’
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘Er, no, actually, I don’t. I suspect it’s a boy thing.’ Then, presumably because there really wasn’t anything else to say about that, ‘And, actually, no, I didn’t see your nose. I felt it.’
‘Yes…’
That was it. How he’d known she’d shaken her head. He could feel the smallest movement that she made. Without sight, every little sound, every disturbance in the air was heightened beyond imagining and his brain was somehow able to translate them into a picture. Just as every tiny nuance in her voice was amplified so that he could not only hear what she was saying, he could also hear what she was not.
The air moved and he saw the quick shake of her head, the slide of glossy, sharply cut hair. He touched her face and saw a peaches and cream complexion. Kissed her and—