The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [116]
‘If that’s what you want?’
She could hear the heaviness in his voice and she could feel it too in her own heart, but she had to do the right thing.
‘Yes…yes. It is what I want…’
She couldn’t look at him. If she did he would see that her heart was breaking. Why did this have to happen to her? Wasn’t it enough that she had lost Kit? Did fate have to compound that blow by making her fall in love with a married man?
‘I…I want you to take me back to Liverpool.’
It was only just gone six o’clock and the long light summer evening stretched ahead of them, but Diane knew she couldn’t trust herself to spend it with Lee. Not and keep the vow she had made to herself. How could this have happened? How could she have gone from thinking of him as someone whose dislike for her she returned, to someone she ached for and longed for, heart and body? It was the war that had done it, of course; the war, and the knowledge that life was frighteningly brief, that the man you held in your arms tonight might be dead tomorrow, that happiness had to be snatched from the jaws of fear and death and taken on the run before it was lost.
She bent down to start packing away the remains of their picnic, stiffening as she felt Lee kneel down next to her.
‘Tell me something,’ he demanded as he folded up the rug. ‘If you hadn’t known that I was married, what would your answer have been then?’
‘Whatever it would have been, it wouldn’t have altered the fact that I was still helping you to break your marriage vows,’ Diane told him quietly. ‘The only difference is that you would have been deceiving me as well as your wife.’
Myra lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling. It was over, thankfully. She could hear the sound of Nick showering in the adjoining bathroom, cursing without any heat at the inefficiency of the shower, and then starting to whistle cheerfully.
There would be bruises on her body tomorrow, her arms where he had gripped her too tightly and her breasts where he had squeezed and kneaded them, convinced that he was giving her pleasure. A ‘gift’ he had made her pay back with interest. She grimaced and wiped her hand across her mouth. She had been too startled to refuse when he had grabbed hold of her hair and pushed her face down towards his groin. Jim would never have expected her to do anything like that. Her whole body had stiffened in rejection. He had obviously not sensed how she was feeling, though, too carried away by his own arousal either to notice or, she suspected, care how she felt. But then Myra had grown up with a father who, via his treatment of her mother, had taught her that men were selfish and did not care about the women they professed to love, wanting only to have their own needs met.
She watched now as he came into the bedroom, naked from his shower. His body was heavily muscled and dark with body hair. There were scars on his arms and one low down on his belly.
‘Don’t worry, baby cakes,’ he had told her when he had seen her looking at them. ‘I’m still alive, but the guys who left me aren’t. They’re lying in New York harbour in a block of cement. No one double-crosses the Mancini family and gets away with it.
‘Still feeling hungry?’ he asked her now suggestively.
Myra shielded her eyes with her lashes so that he wouldn’t see the look of angry rejection in them. Forcing a pout she reminded him, ‘You promised to take me out dancing.’
‘Sure, and so I am, but you gotta get dressed first.’ He picked up his wallet and removed several five-pound notes.
‘I want my girl to be the best-looking girl on that dance floor tonight, sugar plum, so you go down to the beauty shop and get yourself the works. Take as much time as you want. I’ve got a guy I need to meet up with to talk over a bit of business.’
And he wanted her out of the way whilst he did so, Myra recognised. Well, if that was what he wanted, he could have it – at a price.
‘It will take more than a visit to the hairdresser to make me look as glamorous as the other women staying here,’ she told him, with a deliberate sigh.
As she had hoped, Nick peeled off several