Another Life Page 3

  'I'm wondering,' he said at last, in a voice that was totally without expression, 'why you chose this particular time to make your decision. The night we slept together'—the words came out deliberately, as if he enjoyed seeing her flinch—'you couldn't wait for us to be married. Why now, Sara?'

  'Clyde…'

  'What happened at the party? Mother said you were fine when you got to the house, that you came in suddenly and said you weren't feeling well. Obviously that wasn't true.'

  'No…' She tried to hold his gaze. She could not tell him the truth, but she did owe him cooperation.

  'What happened at the party, Sara?' he asked.

  'The party had nothing to do with it. Not in itself…' Her voice was very low. She wondered if he heard her despair. 'This morning… Madame Olga offered me the part. It… well, it was unexpected. I was so excited…' She stopped, fighting for control. 'I didn't give her an answer. There was the party… and I had to see you.' The words were coming more easily now. She lifted her chin in an attempt to show confidence. 'You weren't there when I came. I walked in the garden, and I did some thinking. And… and I realised how much ballet means to me. I can't give it up, Clyde!, not even for you.' The last sentence emerged on a husky whisper.

  She waited for him to answer, but he did not. She found the silence unnerving. The air between them was thick with a tension more intense than anything she had ever experienced, more intense even than the strain backstage on the first night of a new ballet. Clyde's mouth, always firm, had become an inflexible line, in his eyes was a glint that was infinitely dangerous.

  Sara tried to swallow. 'Say something,' she said at last.

  'Say something,' he mocked her. 'Say what, my darling fiancée? That I condone what you're doing to us? That I forgive you for the havoc you've created in my life?'

  'Just… that you understand,' she pleaded.

  He laughed shortly, without any humour. 'You want a lot, don't you, Sara? Yes, my dear, there are things that I understand. For one, that your career means more to you than I do.'

  Nothing in the world means more to me than you do. If I had to choose between my career and you, my darling, my love, the choice would be you every time.

  Aloud she said, 'Yes.'

  The eyes that were colder and harder than she had ever imagined they could be, swept the fragile body with a gaze that was deliberately insulting. 'I also understand that you enjoyed my lovemaking. I thought it was the first time for you. Now I wonder how many other men you've had.'

  'None! I was a virgin.' She threw the words at him vehemently. Seconds later she realised that the shrewder tactic might have been to concede the accusation.

  'A very passionate virgin,' he drawled outrageously.

  She caught a soft lip between small white teeth. Was this how things ended? she wondered. With pain, and anger, and deliberate hurt? 'Do you have to be so cruel?' she asked unsteadily. 'We could still see each other. This… this doesn't have to be a final parting.'

  His lips curled. 'You're offering to be my mistress?'

  Why not? Until a few weeks ago she would have rejected the very idea out of hand. But a few weeks ago she had had no inkling of the rapture and the torment that love could bring. Principles which had been instilled in her all her life had been the ones she abided by, and she had never had reason to question them.

  Now all was changed. There would never be anybody but Clyde. Even if she never saw him again she knew that she could love nobody else. That being the case, what harm in being his mistress? There would still be the love and the togetherness she craved, which he seemed to want also. There would also be freedom, at least on his part. He would be able to pursue his future without the trappings of a wife and family to hinder him.

  Green eyes looked into blue ones. 'Yes, I'll be your mistress.'

  'Everything on a platter, with no commitments on either side.' Clyde was smiling, but as with his laughter moments earlier, without humour. 'How very satisfying! I'd like another taste of what that holds.'

  Without warning, he stood up. He was still holding one of her hands, and he yanked her up with him, his grip so hard that the slender wrist could have snapped. She was pulled up against the long wall of his body, but where before there had always been tenderness in his movements, now there was only a suggestion of force.

  She managed to draw back her head just as his own was descending. 'Not like this,' she protested, her cheeks burning, her head pounding with pain.

  'You want loving on your own terms, Sara?' His voice was a whiplash. 'You've done all the dictating up till now. Now it's my turn.'

  There was no chance to escape as he jerked her to him once more. No escaping the mouth that crushed down on hers, forcing her lips apart. No escaping the ravaging of her mouth in a kiss that was demanding and brutal.

  For a few moments his possession of her was so forceful that she was too shaken to resist. Then, as outrage surged within her, she tried to squeeze her hands between them, tried to pummel at his chest. Easily, without loosening his hold, he pushed her hands downward, and kept them both in one of his, while his other arm pulled against her back.

  Once he lifted his head for breath and looked down at her. The eyes that met his were big and wet and distressed. 'Please, stop,' she whispered.

  If the sight of her obvious unhappiness affected him, there was no indication of it in his tone. 'This is just the beginning. You made the offer, Sara. You might as well see what you'd be letting yourself in for.'

  Again the strong mouth came down, but this time the cruelty was gone, and in its place was a tantalising seductiveness that sent explosions of desire flaming through her body. His arousal of her was deliberate. In some remote part of her mind she knew that, but there was a hunger inside her that would not be denied. Her senses overruled her, letting her body act without her volition. As the mobile lips explored the sweetness of her mouth, and the long-fingered hands slid roughly beneath her dress to the bareness of her skin, she arched towards him, bringing up her hands to bury themselves in the thick hair at the back of his neck.

  Her response did not escape him. She felt the hardening of his muscles, the evidence of his own passion. There was no thought in her now, no premonition of remorse. There was only a need which ached to be fulfilled.

  She was pliant as he moulded her to him, unresistant when he pulled at her zip and ripped the dress from her shoulders. Her body was on fire. There was no memory of what had happened in the last hours, no rationalising of what was right and for the best. Only the longing to love him, to be part of him…

  When he stepped away from her and looked down at her, she met his eyes in a passion-dazed blur. It took a few seconds for her to realise that he was making no move to remove his own clothes. It took a little longer to understand that he had intended to sever the physical contact between them.

  'Clyde…' She took a step towards him, reached out her hands. 'Clyde, what's wrong?'

  'Nothing at all, except that I've lost the taste for this.'

  'You said… you wanted me… as a mistress.' She felt suddenly very ill.

  'You made the suggestion.' His breathing was only slightly heightened. His colour was higher than it had been, but his tone was deliberately flat.

  'And now… you're rejecting me.' The words emerged with difficulty.

  This was not happening, she thought wildly. This cruel interchange between two people who until today had wanted only love and who now seemed bent on hurting each other.

  'Call it what you like.' There was no mercy in the eyes that raked her half-clothed body.

  Feeling suddenly embarrassed before him, she put up her hands to cover her breasts, and saw the gleam that came into his eyes. He knew just how she felt, she thought, and he was glad. He himself must have been even more hurt by her rejection than she had realised.

  'You don't want me…'

  'As a wife, I did. You know that. As a mistress…' still that hateful flatness, 'thank you, but no.'

>   There was a pain in her chest, dull and hard. In her eyes the tears which had been threatening for the last half hour had gathered in new force. Any moment now she would cry. She longed to cry, to be released from the distress that was rapidly becoming unbearable. But she would not cry in front of Clyde. There was a time when she could have done so, secure in the fact that he would have comforted her with a love and tenderness she would find in nobody else.

  That was no longer the case. Rejection had made Clyde a stranger, a hard contemptuous man with a side to his personality which she had never suspected. There was no way she could tell him of the sacrifice she had make for his sake. Nor, it seemed, was there a way in which their relationship could continue on a different basis. In the circumstances she wanted only to be alone.

  'Go,' she said in a low voice. 'Just leave me. alone, Clyde.'

  When the door had closed behind him she threw herself on to her bed and wept with more abandon than she had done even as a child. Yet when she sat up at last, tear-stained and cold and filled with a dreadful numbness, she knew that if the tears had been a release they had nevertheless done little to make her feel better.

  Sara threw herself into her dancing with a frenzy that she had not known she possessed. Odette and Odile, two such dissimilar characters, customarily danced by the same person, was a role that tested many a dancer's capabilities. In Sara's rendition, Odette, the swan-maiden, became a girl of tantalising loveliness. Her Odile, the wicked mischief-maker, was spectacular. There was a spring in her step, an almost electric sparkle in her movement, which gave the evil character a vivacious sex appeal which drew more praise than usual in rehearsals.

  Now and then Sara found Madame Olga looking at her with puzzled eyes. The ballet teacher had accepted her change of mind with satisfaction. It was as if she had known that no dancer of talent would reject such an opportunity. Yet as the rehearsals progressed, and later as the tour began, there was almost an uneasiness in the teacher's manner. It was as if she distrusted the change in her protégée. More than once she asked Sara if something was the matter, stopping just short of mentioning Clyde and the question of whether the girl regretted ending her engagement. No, Sara assured her each time, she had never felt better. Odette-Odile was the part she had been waiting for from the moment she had watched Swan Lake as a child, and had known she herself would one day become a ballerina.

  Madame Olga was not the only one to register the change in the girl's personality. Peter Burod, choreographer of the company, a very wealthy man, and once a famous ballet dancer himself, was taken by the tiny girl with the glossy hair and the desperate fire in her sea-green eyes. He asked her to have dinner with him, a departure from his usual aloofness from the girls in the corps de ballet. Sara went with him. There was no reason not to. Since her break with Clyde one person was much like another; nobody did more than hover on the periphery of her awareness.

  It was on their third evening out together that Peter asked her to marry him. He had fallen in love with her, he told her. He was much older than she was, forty-seven to her twenty-two years, but he loved her as he had not loved any other woman since the death of his wife some years earlier.

  As gently as she could, Sara refused him. The weeks with Clyde had given her an added sensitivity. She had never been one to hurt people when she could avoid it, but such was her own hurt now that she could empathise with the feelings of another. She liked him very much, she told him, and was honoured by his proposal—the words in this instance not a cliché, for such was the personality of Peter Burod that a proposal from the man was indeed an honour—but she did not love him. Peter, who knew of her broken relationship (not the details, for there were none who knew those), did not press her. The offer was open. If she needed someone to lean on or confide in, he would not fail her.

  The gallant kindness of the man was warming. And Sara had much need of warmth and reassurance. The first performance of Swan Lake was drawing near, and with it the pressures within the company were increasing. There were new demands on the dancers, doubts and fears and insecurities. There were temper tantrums and fierce differences of opinions. Nerves were stretched to breaking point.

  In a sense Sara welcomed the crowded hours, the feverishness. She had little time for thought. Only at night, when she lay in bed, her body and her emotions throbbing with exhaustion, did she think of Clyde. Then the grief of the parting would wash over her with a pain that seemed never to grow less.

  Just two weeks before opening night Sara learned that she was pregnant. So preoccupied had she been that she had failed to recognise symptoms which ordinarily she would not have ignored.

  'You must take care of yourself.' The doctor who examined her wore an expression of concern.

  'I'm a dancer. We're going on tour…'

  'Put it off.'

  'I can't.'

  He shook his head thoughtfully. 'Pregnancy is not a state of ill health. But neither is it an endurance test. And in your case…' In his eyes was an expression of doubt, as if he sensed something without being able to quite pinpoint its nature. 'Try to take things easy, Miss Demaine.'

  In a daze she left the medical building and made for her car. Rehearsals had ended early for once, which was why she had been able to take the appointment. Instead of heading back towards the empty apartment, to rest as the doctor had advised, she took a road that ran beside the sea. Bypassing the beaches where holidaymakers sunbathed, she stopped the car at length at a lonely viewpoint, where a narrow path fell steeply to the water's edge.

  There was no beach here, just a scrambled line of jagged rocks. Sara chose one that was smoother than the rest, and leaned against it. During high tide these rocks would be submerged, but even now, when the sea was low, the waves beat ceaselessly against the farthest stone, one wave after another hitting the rocks with a roar and spurting of foam.

  The wildness of the scene was an appropriate setting for Sara's tumultuous state of mind. A baby, in less than six months. The knowledge brought a welter of emotions and questions and memories.

  Memories more than anything else. In the weeks since their parting, she had tried to shut from her mind the hours in Clyde's apartment, when she had lain in his arms and he had made love to her as a woman. She had had no wish to dwell on the ecstasy which had been with her then; that was an indulgence which only deepened the anguish that knifed and tore within her.

  Now it was a memory which she could no longer ignore. She had to come to terms with the memory of a love she would never know again, a love which had led to very real consequences.

  How naive she had been, she thought now, that the possibility of pregnancy had never occurred to her, either at the time of the lovemaking or later. There had been only two people, caught up in the rapture of their feelings for each other. Nothing else had mattered.

  What would Clyde's reaction be to this new development? she wondered. She remembered very clearly his anger on learning that she would not marry him. The violence with which he had kissed her—a violence born of anger. There had been no love in his kisses. The love he had felt for her once had been killed when he understood that her career meant more to her than he did.

  And yet, even now, if Clyde were to learn the truth, he might insist on marrying her. It was part of his nature that he would want to assume responsibility for the tiny being that was as much of his flesh as it was of hers.

  But Clyde would not know. She would never tell him. The decision not to marry him had been very difficult; it had also been made for a very definite reason. If Clyde would have found it difficult to further his career when he had only a wife to consider, the added encumbrance of a child would mean the end of his plans.

  Sara picked up a small weather-rounded pebble and threw it into the turbulent spray, watching as it whirled in a swathe of foam before being dragged seawards. The very fact that Clyde's child was growing inside her had created a new longing. She wanted Clyde so badly that the wanting was like a physical ache. But the wanting c
ould never be assuaged by a forced marriage, which was what any marriage between them could only be at this point. The loveliness that had once existed between them would be supplanted by a growing and inevitable bitterness. Belinda had said so, and Sara knew it was true. No—far better to be apart from Clyde, bringing up alone the child which would be a lasting memory of their love.

  There were also other problems to consider. Her career, more particularly her part in Swan Lake. Rest, the doctor had said; but rest was the one luxury she could not afford. Apart from the disappointment she would suffer in giving up the part of Odette-Odile, the approaching birth made finance a very real worry. Now she had been promoted to ballerina Sara would earn enough to tide her over a while. By the time her resources had dried up the baby would be a few months old and she would have regained the strength and the figure to resume dancing. Somehow she must support both her child and herself.

  Thoughtfully Sara put a hand over her stomach. There was only the slightest suggestion of a curve, so slight that until today she had not noticed it; it would not show through her costumes. She was small, the doctor had said. Perhaps she would remain so. There were women who were obviously pregnant at three months; others who were able to hide the signs very much longer. She could only hope that she belonged to the latter category.

  As she made her way back up the narrow path to the car she decided that nobody should know of her pregnancy. Not Clyde, not Madame Olga or Peter Burod or the members of the company. She would dance Odette-Odile to the best of her ability and for as long as she possibly could. In a few months she would consider further. She could only take her life one step at a time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Backstage the atmosphere was one of frenetic exhilaration. Nerves were strained to breaking point. In Sara's dressing-room there was intense quiet. She was quite alone, a figure slender to the point of fragility, clad in the delicate white costume of a swan-maiden. Her hair was a glossy coil, her face had been made up with care. Only Sara, seated at her mirror, saw the pallor beneath the greasepaint.