The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [65]
Confidently she set off to walk back to her digs.
She had got as far as the end of the street and had just turned the corner into unwelcome darkness when she heard the sound of the Jeep being driven slowly behind her. All at once her confidence deserted her. Fear filled its place. She desperately wanted to run but she refused to let herself, despite the images now flooding her mind: Nick hitting the defenceless young man; her father laying into her mother as she curled up in a corner trying to protect herself. The entrance to a narrow passageway loomed alongside her. Quickly she turned into it. It was too narrow for the Jeep, and darkly shadowed by its buildings, except for the gap midway down where a bomb had hit two of the houses.
She couldn’t hear the Jeep any more. She started to relax and then stiffened as she heard the sharp slam of its door and then the sound of footsteps following her.
Now she really did want to run but before she could do so, Nick had reached her, his hand on her shoulder, spinning her round.
‘No dame ever walks out on me,’ he told her furiously, giving her a fierce shake. ‘And if you’re going to be my girl you’d better understand that.’ He pulled her into his arms and kissed her angrily, forcing her lips apart and grinding his mouth down on hers whilst she stood unresistingly in the darkness, feeling the heavy pounding of his heartbeat against her own body. It felt like a lifetime before he stopped kissing her.
‘I’ll pick you up at the station Tuesday evening. We’ll have dinner.’
It wasn’t a request, Myra recognised, it was a command.
‘No guy cuts me out with my girl and gets away with it,’ he told her, and then added, ‘and no girl of mine gives out to another guy if she knows what’s good for her – capisci?’
Myra nodded, too weakened by her own overwhelming relief to be able to speak. He wasn’t going to hurt her – hit her – after all. And in fact he was offering her what she had wanted.
‘I guess what happened back there in Blackpool kinda scared you, did it?’
His words caught Myra off guard. She hadn’t expected him to speak openly about what he had done. Her father certainly would not have done. He had liked to pretend that nothing had happened. There was a certain sense of extra relief in being able to tell herself that Nick wasn’t like her father.
‘Well, it was all down to you, sweet stuff. Because, you see, I’m a jealous kinda guy, Myra, and I don’t like to see another guy looking at my girl and having her look back at him, especially when she’s just made me as mad as hell and as wrought up as an angry bull.’
Her relief made her smile up at Nick and then smile again when he squeezed her hand. A heady sense of power filled her.
‘See ya Tuesday, honey bun,’ he told her, after they had walked back to the Jeep. ‘And remember, keep away from those other guys, if you don’t want to make me mad again. You’re my girl now.’
Diane sat up in bed as Myra opened the bedroom door. She had woken up when she had heard the other girl come in.
‘You’re late,’ she told her tiredly.
Myra gave a dismissive shrug. ‘So what if I am? It’s no one’s business but mine.’
‘Yours and your husband’s,’ Diane corrected her. ‘He was round here earlier. He’s on a forty-eight-hour-leave pass and he came here looking for you.’
Jim was home? Myra sat down abruptly on her own bed. ‘What did you tell him?’ she demanded sharply.
‘I said that I thought you’d gone to Blackpool with some friends and that you might be staying over,’ Diane informed her evenly. It confirmed everything she already thought about Myra when she didn’t bother to thank her for covering