Sicilian Nights Omnibus (23 page)

‘I think they were also lucky in having
you
to love and protect them,’ Annie found herself saying hesitantly, but very truthfully.

It was a new experience for her to be able to speak honestly about what she thought and felt—an empowering freedom after years of having to cautiously monitor what she said, as well as what she did, in case Colin pounced on it and used it to accuse her of some fresh wrongdoing.

His brothers had had him, Falcon acknowledged, but for Annie there had not been that all-important older someone to give her a true sense of her right to be loved and valued, to show her what true self-esteem was. That was a lack they shared, and he knew very well the effect that lack could have.

‘Your stepbrother treated you very badly.’ It was all he could trust himself to say to Annie.

‘It probably wasn’t all Colin’s fault,’ Annie felt bound to say. ‘I probably was difficult. Sometimes teenagers are. But...but when he started to criticise me, telling me what I should and shouldn’t do, what I should and shouldn’t wear, warning me about...about the consequences of my behaviour, I started to feel scared.’

Which was exactly what her stepbrother would have wanted, Falcon recognised.

The more he learned about Annie’s stepbrother the more he despised and disliked the other man—and the more challenged he felt to free Annie from the prison in which her stepbrother had put her.

‘It was the way he manipulated the truth to make it seem as though
I
was the one at fault that frightened me the most. Sometimes I even wondered if I
had
done the things he was accusing me of doing.’

‘He was trying to destroy your right to make your own moral choices and judgements.’

With every word Falcon said he was lifting from her the terrible weight she had been carrying.

‘Colin told my mother that I’d got in with a wild crowd at school—just because he’d seen me giggling with other girls and some boys when he came to collect me. It was all completely innocent, but he was awful about it. He said things that at thirteen I wasn’t really able to deal with—things about boys and sex, suggesting that I was leading boys on, and that I wanted...’

She couldn’t go on, but it seemed she didn’t need to—because Falcon understood. She knew that because he was speaking evenly.

‘He said things to you that made you feel ashamed of your sexual curiosity and of yourself?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. Falcon had put it so simply, eloquently putting into words exactly what she had felt. ‘He must have said something to my mother, as well, because she gave me a lecture about provocative behaviour and...and the danger of wearing provocative clothes. She took me out shopping and bought me longer skirts. I hated them, didn’t want to wear them—they made me look so different to the other girls. But Colin said that if I didn’t wear them it must be because I wanted boys to look at me.

‘He used to come to my room at night after I’d gone to bed, and sit on the end of the bed to question me. He’d keep asking me over and over again who I talked to at school, and if I talked to any boys, if I
wanted
to talk to them. Sometimes I lied and said no, just to make him go away, but one day he’d been watching me and he knew I was lying.’

Annie started to tremble.

‘It was awful. He was so cold, and yet so angry. He took the little china ornaments that I’d been collecting and threw them on the floor one by one, until they were all broken. He said that he didn’t want to be angry with me but that it was my fault, because I’d lied to him. He said that all he wanted to do was look after me because he cared about me, and he didn’t want boys thinking I was cheap.

‘My mother was always saying how lucky I was to have such a loving stepbrother. She didn’t understand. No one did. I wanted to go to university, and when I was offered a place at Cambridge, I was over the moon. But my mother started saying that she didn’t think I was mature enough to live away from home, that it would be much better if I did what Colin had done and went to the local university so that I could still live at home. I know it was his idea—just as I know that the dent Colin put in the car belonging to the boy who took me to the school prom wasn’t an accident at all.’

Annie couldn’t have stopped the torrent of words now even if she had wanted to. ‘Before she met Colin’s father my mother always told me that ultimately our house, which had belonged to my father’s family, would come to me. But when she and my stepfather died I found that the house had been left to Colin, and that he’d been appointed my guardian. Luckily I was well over eighteen by then, and one of my lecturers at university—I think he understood a bit of what Colin was like, because Colin had been difficult with
him
when he’d given me some extra tuition—helped me to get a job in London.

‘Colin was dreadfully upset. He begged me to go back home, but I wouldn’t. I knew he’d have to stay in Dorset because his business is there. It was wonderful, living and working in London. But somehow I still couldn’t let myself be the person I wanted to be. Every time I looked at a pretty dress or a short skirt I’d see Colin’s face inside my head, or hear his voice.’ Her own voice trailed away into drained exhaustion.

Annie recognised distantly that she felt very weak and slightly dizzy—and also, more importantly, semi-shocked and unable to fully comprehend what she had done.

‘I shouldn’t have told you any of that.’ The words slipped out before she could snatch them back.

‘Because your stepbrother wouldn’t like it? You shouldn’t have
had
to tell me. Because none of it should have happened,’ was Falcon’s response.

Did she have any idea of the grim picture she had painted of a childhood ruined by the bullying tactics of her obsessive stepbrother and her own mother’s apparent inability or unwillingness to recognise what was happening to her?

His own childhood and the childhoods of his brothers had been rendered miserable by their father’s lack of love for them, but what Annie had gone through was something of a different order altogether.

There was a sour taste in his mouth, a male anger on her behalf in his heart, and a steely determination in his head. Annie was now a member of his extended family. In Falcon’s eyes that meant that in addition to recompensing her for the damage Antonio had done to her it was also his duty to restore to her what had been taken from her.

‘After what you have just told me I can well understand why you would have ignored and tried to avoid Antonio.’

‘I knew that he was making fun of me by pretending to be interested in me. I didn’t like him at all. Thankfully I can’t remember anything about...about what happened,’ Annie told him truthfully. ‘When Susie—the wife of the author I was working for—found me, I was still half-drugged.’

‘You never reported what had happened to the police?’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I was afraid to—in case they didn’t believe me.’

Because she had been told so often by her wretched stepbrother that she was guilty of promiscuity simply by being female that she was still unable to trust men to believe her or protect her, Falcon guessed.

‘It was a terrible shock when Susie asked me if I could be pregnant. That had never occurred to me. Stupid of me, I know, but I just assumed that Antonio would have... Well, that he wouldn’t want there to be any risk of a child.’

‘As proof of what he had done, you mean? It was typical of Antonio that he didn’t think of that.’

‘Originally, when...when it had happened, Susie saw from my passport that I’d given Colin’s name as my next of kin. I begged her not to say anything to anyone but... She meant well, I know. And when Colin arrived in London he was so concerned that naturally...’

‘He worked the same trick on her that he had on your mother?’ Falcon supplied for her.

Annie nodded.

‘He wanted me to have a termination. He said it would be for the best. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. So then he started saying that I must have wanted it to happen. I told him that of course I hadn’t, but he said that if I couldn’t even remember what had happened I couldn’t say that. He said that I’d probably encouraged Antonio—otherwise I’d want to get rid of his baby. I think Susie and Tom agreed with him, although they never said so.

‘When Ollie was born Colin tried to get Antonio to acknowledge responsibility for him—even though I’d begged him not to. When Antonio refused Colin started pressuring me to have Ollie adopted. He even managed to persuade Susie to side with him.’ Annie shivered. ‘I was so afraid that somehow he’d separate us.’

As he had successfully separated her from everyone else who might have loved her or helped her, Falcon recognised. ‘That’s why, when you...’

‘That’s why you agreed to come to Sicily?’ Falcon completed her sentence for her.

‘Yes. I thought Ollie would be safe here.’

‘You thought right,’ Falcon confirmed grimly.

‘You must understand now why I don’t want to get involved with anyone,’ Annie told him tiredly.

For a few seconds she thought he wasn’t going to respond. But then, when the silence had stretched for long enough to make her feel she had said the wrong thing, he asked quietly, but with open confidence in his own correct assessment of things, ‘There’s never been anyone special for you sexually, has there? Someone who, when you look back, you recognise as the person you shared sexual intimacy with and who gave you the foundation stone of understanding and appreciating your own sexuality?’

For some reason Annie discovered that she wanted badly to cry. She had spent so many years cut off from what it meant to be a woman that she had grown to accept it as her fate. She was alone with it, and with the secret burden of its grief. Now, with a few simple words, Falcon had shone a light on that dark secret place within her, illuminating it so brightly that the brightness hurt unbearably, making her feel that she wanted to retreat back into the safety of the dark. She felt ashamed, she recognized. Ashamed and afraid.

She couldn’t answer his question. She just couldn’t. The truth hurt too much, made her feel too raw and vulnerable, and yet to her own disbelief something deep inside her was struggling against her shame and her fear, making her give Falcon an answer.

‘No. Never,’ she heard herself admitting shakily. ‘I was too young when...when Colin first started making me feel uncomfortable about...’

She had to stop now. She had already said too much, betrayed too much. It was shamefully ridiculous and humiliating that she, a woman of twenty-four, a
mother
of twenty-four, had never known what it was to experience the pleasure of good sex.

‘About being attracted to the opposite sex? About liking boys and exploring the sensations thinking about liking boys aroused?’

Annie wanted to cover her ears with her hands, just as though she was still twelve years old.

‘There is nothing to be ashamed of,’ Falcon was telling her. ‘That is how it starts for all of us. With curiosity and awareness, with excitement and a dread of making a fool of oneself.’

‘I can’t imagine
you
ever feeling like that. Worrying about making a fool of yourself, I mean,’ Annie explained hastily. She didn’t want to think about the first part of his description. It caused too much dangerous tumult inside her body, and she already had more than enough problems to deal with.

‘I can assure you that I did. Everyone does. It’s a natural and normal part of growing up—but you were denied that.’

‘I couldn’t bear the thought of someone thinking about me in the way Colin told me that boys—men—thought about women who allow them sexual intimacies. I couldn’t let myself even
think
about being attracted to anyone,’ she admitted.

It was disconcerting to realise how shocked and ashamed she would have been such a very short time ago to have said those things to him—things that now she could speak of so easily and openly.

‘So you suppressed your natural inclinations along with your desirability and your right to your own sexuality?’ Falcon prompted her.

‘I just wanted to feel safe.’

‘From boys, or from your stepbrother?’

Annie’s eyes widened in silent recognition of how well he understood just what she had felt.

‘I suppose I could have tried to...to be more normal when I came to London, but all the other young women I saw were so...so everything I knew that I wasn’t. I couldn’t imagine that anyone... That is to say I thought that if I did start to go out with someone, when they found out they’d either be put off or laugh at me. It seemed easier somehow not to bother. And now, of course, it’s too late. I couldn’t start a relationship now even if I wanted to. What man these days wants a woman like me? A single mother, who doesn’t know the first thing about how to give and receive sexual pleasure, or what it’s like to enjoy sex? How would I explain to them? I couldn’t tell them...’

‘Why not? You’ve told me?’

His words had her lifting her head to look at him, caught in the shock of her realisation not just of what she had done, but more importantly of how easy it had been.

‘That’s different,’ she told him weakly. ‘You aren’t... We aren’t... I know I can trust you because...’

Because what? Because of what he was or because of
who
he was? Annie wasn’t sure. She just knew that Falcon was different, one of a kind—a man who embodied qualities that in the modern age were very rare.

‘It must have been very hard for you to live as you have lived—to live—such an unnatural life for a young and attractive woman.’

Falcon thought she was attractive? Or was he just saying that because he felt sorry for her?

‘You needn’t feel sorry for me,’ Annie defended herself. ‘I’m perfectly happy as I am.’

‘No, you are not,’ Falcon corrected her. ‘You merely think that you are happy. But you are so afraid of being punished that you have completely disowned your sexuality. That is no way for you to live—in constant denial and fear of such an essential part of yourself.’ His voice had changed and become sternly autocratic.

‘It is the way I
have
to live,’ Annie told him. ‘I don’t have any other choice.’