The Love Battle by Violet Winspear

Author:Violet Winspear [Winspear, Violet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1977-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Fate was such a powerful force, thought Wilda; it had swung her from Monte Carlo to the Florida Keys and then made it impossible for her to leave because a woman had undergone surgery and was slowly recovering her health and strength in the tall white hospital that was one of the proud possessions of Key Laguda.

The operation had been successfully carried out five days ago and there had been no complications. Wilda was thankful for that, but there was little else for her to take pleasure in, for even when she came to the beach she brought with her the constant edginess of the conflict smouldering between Damien and herself. Their cool politeness, their long silences were always on the edge of a sudden eruption, and the atmosphere was wearing Wilda to a shadow. She had lost her appetite and her face looked fine-boned and haunted.

If only he would let her go! But he seemed to take a perverse pleasure in making sure she stayed. He had charge of the key to the desk in which Charmides kept private and important documents, and Wilda’s work permit was among them, contained in an envelope with her passport and her health certificate. It had seemed quite reasonable at the time to let Charmides keep them in her desk, where they would be secure, but Wilda was cursing herself for not looking ahead; for not making allowance for the fact that she might yet again meet a man from whom she would wish to flee.

Whenever Damien was absent from Moonside, she thought seriously about breaking the lock of her employer’s desk, a pretty rosewood one that stood between the windows of the sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. But such an action constituted a crime and Wilda shrank from injuring the principles which her father had taught her. But her distress was so acute at times that she almost believed she could break into the pretty desk and take what was hers, and one afternoon she had approached it with a hammer she had found in the cellar, but her resolve fled away when she tried to bring that hammer down on the lock. She shrank away from a mental image of the shattered rosewood … the grim and dangerous look that would come over Damien’s face when he found the desk had been broken into.

Wilda had suffered through one scandal and couldn’t face another, and she believed that Damien was ruthless enough to report her to the police. His kind of integrity was nail-hard, and he found it so unforgivable that she had got under his skin … perhaps like a jigger worm that delved deeper each time he tried to dig her out of himself. It would give him satisfaction, she told herself, to see her driven off in the sheriff’s car.

Damn him! She pounded the firm, sunlit sand where she lay. If only she could dig him out of her thoughts … her innermost self, but he wouldn’t be dislodged and the torment of him was always there, right inside her.

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