Wild Hunger

‘No,’ she wailed, but he ignored the protest, carrying her through into the bedroom. He lowered her gently on to the bed, sat her on the edge of it, still holding her with one hand while he pulled her thin blue silky tunic dress up over her head with the other.

She tried to fight him off, to stop him. ‘What are you doing?’ she gasped in panic.

He got the dress off, however, and threw it into a corner of the room. Under it she was wearing a one-piece garment, white silk, the top of it held up by fine thin straps over her bare shoulders, the deep white lace frothing over her breasts, matching lace ending at the pale thighs.

‘Bastard,’ she spat out, the green eyes flashing as she saw him looking down at her body curiously. ‘Get your hands off me. I’m not in such a bad way that I can’t stop you raping me.’ Her fingers curled into claws; she had long, pale, pearl-vanished nails which looked lethal. ‘I’ll have your eyes out if you try it!’

‘You must be joking!’ snapped Gerard, suddenly angry with her for what she was doing to herself. ‘You don’t think any man could find you sexy, looking like this?’

Her green eyes widened; she gave him a stricken look.

He grimaced, wishing he hadn’t said that. More gently, he told her, ‘I took your dress off because I thought you’d feel better in something clean.’

She took that on board and flinched as she realised what he meant. ‘Oh, God,’ she groaned, covering her face with her hands. ‘What do I look like? Don’t look at me. Go away; please go away.’

He laid her down on the bed and went over to the wall-to-wall fitted wardrobe. He pulled out a warm blue wool dressing-gown and brought it back to her.

She was lying on the bed with closed eyes, curled into the foetal position again as if wishing to retreat back into a time before birth, back to the safety of the womb. The wild red hair spilled over the pillow; her skin was like buttermilk; the small breasts with their dark pink nipples had the budlike look of a very young girl’s. Her bra was clearly padded. But those legs…His eyes followed the graceful length of them down to those thin, highinstepped feet. She was far too thin, but she was hauntingly lovely. A faery child, he thought; not quite of this world.

How old was she? he wondered, guessing her to be not much past twenty. Maybe twenty-one or two? A good ten years younger than himself.

‘You’d better put this on,’ he told her, and her eyes snapped open. She sat up and he held the dressing-gown for her while she weakly pushed her arms into it; Gerard knelt down to tie the wide blue belt around her tiny waist. She was so fragile it made him almost afraid to touch her, and he grew angry again.

‘How can you do such stupid things to yourself?’ he asked her, looking up into her face. ‘You don’t need to diet, you have a beautiful body; why are you trying to destroy it for the sake of vanity?’

‘Vanity?’ She laughed with a rising edge that made him frown. He didn’t think he could cope with female hysteria. ‘You think I like myself?’ she asked him wildly. ‘Don’t tell me I have a beautiful body; I know how fat I am. I have eyes; I can see myself in a mirror.’

He looked his amazement, his eyes widening and his jaw dropping. ‘Fat? You aren’t fat! You can’t honestly believe that. If anything, you’re too skinny.’

‘Don’t lie to me! Oh, I know you mean well, but there’s no point in pretending. I’m not a fool.’

‘You may not be a fool but you’re definitely crazy,’ said Gerard grimly. ‘I’m going to ring your doctor, get you some help.’

‘No!’ She gripped his arm with fingers that dug into him. ‘I won’t see him!’ Her voice was hoarse but insistent.

Gerard had no idea what to do in this situation; he didn’t really know what he was dealing with. Sara Ounissi had been so urgent, so scared. And his first reaction when he’d seen Keira had been one of shock and dismay. Yet now he wasn’t sure how serious this was—she was very pale, admittedly, and everything she said disturbed him, yet he didn’t get the feeling that this was a silly girl, a butterfly with nothing much in her head. Her green eyes were far too intelligent, her mouth full and warm, yet determined.

He had better wait for Sara to get back; she would know what to do.

As if picking up his thoughts and echoing them, Keira moistened her bruised mouth with the tip of her tongue and said huskily, ‘You said…Sara was here? Where…?’

‘She went to get a key from the agent; I can’t think what’s taking her so long. Would you like a glass of water? Or is there any medication you take?’

‘Water would be wonderful, please,’ she whispered.

There was a sound of running feet on the stairs at that instant and Sara Ounissi appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. She stopped dead, her long black hair tumbled around her white face, and looked at her friend hurriedly.

‘Oh, Keira…are you OK?’

Keira’s white mouth trembled into a faint smile. ‘I’m just fine,’ she said, and tried to get up. A second later she fainted. Gerard was just too late to catch her. She lay face down on the floor while he was still leaping to interrupt her fall.

‘Call her doctor!’ he ordered Sara before he picked Keira up again and put her back on the bed.

Sara didn’t argue. She hurried out without a word. Gerard thought wryly, Her husband must be a very happy man; I hope he knows how lucky he is! Why don’t I ever meet girls like her? Well, I did meet her, of course, and never tried to get to know her. How was I to know she was perfect wife material? But then I wasn’t looking for a wife. I’m still not, in fact.

Marriage was not part of Gerard’s game plan.

He turned back to look at the other girl, his brows dark, his eyes smouldering. He was desperately sorry for her, and yet he was affronted by her too. When he thought of the desperate struggle to survive in spite of everything which he had seen in other places it made him deeply angry to think that this stupid girl, with everything to live for, in a safe, sheltered country, was busy trying to kill herself over silly vanity.

What was her family doing, allowing her to get into this state? He glanced around the room as if looking for clues and saw some photographs on a chest by the window. He went over to look hard at them.

One was of Keira and a woman in a bikini who from a distance looked young, not much older than Keira herself—until you looked more closely, and saw that the tanned skin was faintly wrinkled on the neck, and the face too tight. A face-lift? he thought. Was this her mother? Red hair, green eyes, a tall, very slim woman—who else could it be? He saw the same woman in another photo, again with Keira, but a lot of other people gathered around them, in a luxuriously furnished reception-room with marble floors and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

This time they were with a much older man-grey-haired, heavily tanned, wearing a tropical lightweight suit in a pale colour. He had his arm around the red-headed woman and was smiling into the camera.

I know him! thought Gerard. The face was very familiar. But he couldn’t remember where he had seen it before. He closely examined the room in the photo—people in Britain didn’t go in for marble floors in their homes. That usually meant a Mediterranean setting, which fitted with the blue skies you saw through the open French windows, and the sunlight flooding the room, but the furniture had an Arab look to it.

Tangier? Wasn’t that where Keira’s stepfather was supposed to be at the moment? Perhaps he had a villa there?

There were pictures crowded together on the walls of the room in the photo. He looked closer, curious, and was impressed as he recognised some well-known, contemporary artists. Gerard was something of an expert on twentieth-century art. He had an art degree and had chosen the artists of post Second World War Europe as the subject of his degree thesis.

These paintings could be copies, of course, but somehow he didn’t think it likely. The home in which they hung was far too luxurious. If they were originals, the owner of the villa must either be very wealthy or knowledgeable enough to pick up young artists before their work was highly priced.

Why on earth weren’t Keira’s parents doing something about her illness? They obviously had money. Didn’t they care what happened to her? Or didn’t they know? Had she managed to keep her bulimia a secret from them?

Keira stirred a moment later, black lashes flickering against pale cheeks, a little sigh escaping.

He quickly went back to her. ‘Just lie still; don’t move again,’ Gerard told her quite gently as the lashes rose and he found himself looking into those slanting green eyes. His finger and thumb gripped her wrist, taking her pulse. It was faint and faraway; her skin felt icy.

‘Where’s Sara?’ she whispered. Her gaze moved from his downbent face, flicked around the rest of the room.

‘She’s gone to call your doctor.’

‘No!’ She tried to sit up but he pushed her back against the pillows, holding her shoulders down, leaning over.

‘Be sensible. For God’s sake, girl, do you want to die?’

If it was possible, she turned whiter, her lips quivering, then she tried to laugh.

‘Don’t be so melodramatic! Oh, will you stop interfering? You may think you’re trying to help me but you’re only making things ten times worse.’

‘You don’t know what’s best for you,’ Gerard said obstinately.

She gave him a sarcastic look. ‘And you do, of course! You men are all the same. Sara has married one who treats her like a cross between a doll and a slave. I can’t believe she actually seems to enjoy it; I think she’s temporarily insane. Well, I’m not letting you run my life for me, so get out of my home and mind your own business.’

He hadn’t been able to do anything to stop the death and misery he had seen during the civil war, but he wasn’t going to stand aside and let this girl destroy herself without trying to stop her.

‘You’ll see a doctor if I have to tie you to that bed,’ he insisted.

Sara came back into the room with a glass of water. Gerard lifted Keira and she took the glass, sipped some of the water very slowly, as if allowing it to trickle down her sore throat.

‘Dr Patel will be here any minute,’ Sara told them.

Keira looked at her furiously. ‘You shouldn’t have rung him. You know what he’ll say. He’ll only go through the old routine again, trying to persuade me to go into that stupid clinic, and I’m not going, so you will both have wasted your time. The attack’s over, OK? I’m fine; I just had a little hiccup, nothing serious.’

‘It looked damned serious to me!’ exploded Gerard. ‘Your kitchen looks like a bomb’s hit it! You need help.’

She flinched, gave him that stricken look again, then turned crossly on her friend. ‘What’s he doing here? You didn’t ask him in, did you? Come to that, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you back home with Rashid? How did you both get in here?’

‘Benny rang me,’ Sara said uneasily. ‘He was worried about you.’

‘Benny!’ The green eyes glittered. ‘I might have known! Wait till I get hold of him!’

‘He cares about you.’ Sara looked pleadingly at her. ‘So do I, Keira. I’m sorry you lost the contract.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ She threw Gerard a hostile look. ‘And you still haven’t told me why he’s here—what on earth possessed you to involve him?’

‘I couldn’t get in, but I knew you were in there; I heard you at one point. I was desperate, Keira; I thought his front door key might fit your door.’

‘You can be so daft!’ muttered Keira, scowling.

‘Sorry,’ Sara said softly. ‘I was upset. Gerard was very helpful; he suggested I got another key from the agent—that hadn’t occurred to me; I was too upset to think properly. Men always seem to be able to think clearly, however upset they get.’ She gave Gerard an admiring smile.

Keira snorted. ‘Don’t butter him up! He’ll be purring in a minute.’

‘It was clever of him,’ Sara said. ‘I drove round to the agent’s, but when I got back Gerard had already managed to open the door and was up here with you.’

Keira turned her eyes back to Gerard. ‘How…?’

‘I slipped the lock with a credit card,’ he admitted coolly.

She was outraged. ‘I could call the police and have you arrested for that! That’s burglary.’

‘I thought I might be saving your life! Your friend gave me the impression you could be dying.’

A voice called from downstairs and Sara said with relief, ‘Dr Patel!’ She went out, called, ‘Come up, please, Doctor.’

Keira looked coldly at Gerard. ‘Thank you for all your help,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Goodbye. Shut the front door behind you and if you ever burgle my house again I really will call the police, however good an excuse you think up!’

He got up. ‘Thanks for the gratitude. Next time you try to kill yourself I’ll just let you go ahead, don’t worry.’

He passed the doctor on the landing. ‘The best of luck; you’ll need it, with her,’ he told him, and the startled man gave him a stare, then a sudden, amused grin.

‘Oh, don’t worry, I know what to expect. She is a very stubborn young lady.’

Gerard headed for work ten minutes later, to have his interview with the news editor, but as he drove through heavy traffic he couldn’t get her image out of his head—the wild tangle of red curls around that delicate white face, the bud-like breasts and long, long legs. She haunted him for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER TWO

KEIRA was thinking about him too, hardly listening to the doctor as he examined her, sighing.

‘You’ve stopped putting on weight, haven’t you? Have you lost some more? You were doing so well, too. You must not let yourself slide backwards, my dear girl.’ His sing-song voice was gently sad; he never became angry, he just got sadder and sadder. Trying to make me feel guilty, thought Keira. And succeeding a lot of the time! Dr Patel was a great psychologist.

‘It just happened,’ was all Keira could say to him. She felt like death, and knew she must look it. She had seen the distaste in Gerard Findlay’s eyes and felt sick herself. He was the very last man in the world she would have wanted to see her in that condition. It had been a deep shock to find herself looking into his eyes. For a second she had almost thought she was imagining him, and then she had realised he was not a figment of her imagination, he was really there, and she had been shaken to her depths.

‘Just happened?’ the doctor repeated, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Oh, please, Keira! We both know there is more to it than that!’

Keira looked at him helplessly, her face white, her eyes smudged and shadowy in that whiteness. ‘All right! I couldn’t cope. When I knew I’d lost that contract I felt so bad. I didn’t mean to let it happen. I came home and I was hungry; I started to eat, and the next minute…’

‘It triggered an attack.’ Dr Patel nodded. ‘It is insidious. Something makes you unhappy, you need the comfort of food, you start to eat and you can’t stop, but you are afraid of putting on weight, so you make yourself throw up. It is an endless circle. The only way out of it is understanding yourself and why it happens. As soon as you feel yourself losing control you must stop, go for a walk, go to see a film, ring up friends, visit people, do anything to distract yourself.’

‘I know, I know. Oh, and I tried so hard this last year; it hasn’t happened for months and months; I kept it under tight control, put on lots of weight.’

‘You needed to,’ the doctor said quickly, frowning at her. ‘Don’t start telling yourself you’re fat! You know that’s another trigger. The truth is, you’re still underweight for your height.’

He saw the evasion in her face and knew she didn’t really believe him; that was the problem with all bulimia sufferers—they couldn’t trust in what they saw in the mirror. They saw a very different reflection and they never believed what other people told them, either. Their obsession was too deep, as deep as their need for love and reassurance.

‘Keira, Keira,’ he said, shaking his head at her. ‘Believe me, you are too thin. My wife is a very sexy woman, most beautiful, and she would make two of you!’

That made her laugh and her face relaxed a little. ‘She wouldn’t thank you for that if she could hear you!’

Dr Patel’s eyes twinkled. ‘Oh, she would be flattered—in my culture being thin is not so prized as it is in yours. I like women to have round hips and breasts like watermelons. I don’t want to go to bed with someone with the figure of a boy. That doesn’t excite me at all.’ He grinned at her. ‘I am sorry, Keira, but you would have to put on a lot of weight before I would think you were as beautiful as my wife!’

Keira giggled, then said wryly, ‘But I’m a model, Doctor. I have to stay slim or I won’t get work. The camera puts pounds on you. That’s why I lost that Rexel contract—they thought I had put on too much weight.’

He looked irritated. ‘Then they are very silly people. You are much more beautiful now than you were a year ago! A little weight has improved you.’

‘Tell that to Rexel’s ad men,’ Keira said bitterly.

The doctor watched her shadowed face and sighed.

‘I wish I could have the chance! I would box their ears for them. Believe me, you have been looking much better lately. It is a great pity to ruin it now; you don’t want to have to go back to the clinic, do you?’

She shook her head, grimacing, remembering the regime in the private clinic to which her stepfather had sent her when her weight had got down so far that it had shocked her mother when she’d seen Keira again after a gap of eighteen months.

Keira had agreed to have medical help only because her mother was so distraught. Keira hadn’t really believed she was ill. The first month in the clinic had been a long struggle between her and the medical staff. It had taken some time before she had begun to listen to them, begun to understand what she had been doing to herself. Since then she had been through a bitter battle to start living a very different life, and she was angry with herself for having fallen back again.

‘That’s the last thing I want! I couldn’t stand going through that again!’ she assured the doctor, who smiled.

‘Good girl. Then what you must do now is break this pattern before it starts. I think you should take a holiday, get away from the problems that have caused the recurrence.’

‘But now I’ve lost Rexel I’ll have to get other work, which means I must be in London.’

‘That can wait, my dear, believe me. The most important thing at the moment is for you to get back to the position you were in a year ago, feeling strong and sure of yourself. Going away will help you see things more clearly; from a distance everything will look different. Go somewhere sunny. Just relax and have fun, forget everything else. Eat three meals a day, never eat alone, don’t eat in between meals, but above all if you feel an attack threatening do something. Get a friend to go with you, stop you going near food. That little girl out thereSara, is it? Get her to go with you. And while you’re there go out all the time, keep busy, surround yourself with lots of people.’ He smiled at her. ‘You have broken the cycle once, my dear. Don’t let it re-establish itself.’

‘I won’t. Thank you, Dr Patel.’ Keira smiled at him. His soothing manner and understanding had made her feel more human.

When he had gone Sara came into the bedroom and sat on her bed. ‘What did he say?’

Keira told her and Sara nodded. ‘I think that’s very good advice. You haven’t had a holiday for ages, you’ve been working so hard.’

‘Rexel kept me busy,’ Keira said, her mouth turning down at the corners as she was reminded of the lost contract. She had hoped for so much from it—the constant appearance on TV had been making her face instantly recognisable everywhere she went. Being seen on magazine covers, or inside magazines, never had that sort of impact. Of course, she had known it couldn’t last forever, but she had hoped for another year, at least.

Sara gave her a sympathetic look. ‘I’m sorry, Keira—it must have been a terrible blow. But at least now you’re free to take other work, and after you’ve been the Rexel girl and on TV all the time for a year your face is famous—you’re bound to be offered lots of jobs.’

‘For a while, maybe. But I’m getting too old! You know how young you have to be in this business. In a few years the place will be overrun with girls of seventeen who’ll get all the jobs, and I’ll be out, finished. I’ll be lucky to get a job modelling clothes for home-shopping catalogues.’

‘You’re just depressed. You’ve got plenty of time to make it into the big league; you’re only twentytwo.’

‘I feel a lot older.’ Keira grimaced, her mouth turning down at the edges, then shot Sara an accusing look. ‘By the way, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

‘A bone?’ For once Sara’s brilliant grasp of English failed her; she stared blankly.

‘Gerard Findlay!’

‘Oh…’ Sara put one of her elegant little hands up to her mouth, giggling helplessly.

‘It isn’t funny! You know I hate the man—I certainly didn’t want him to see me looking like that! I could kill you!’

Sara looked apologetically at her. ‘Sorry, I was in a panic. I just needed…’

‘A man to tell you what to do!’ Keira finished for her, eyeing her with half-impatient amusement. ‘I know you; when a problem comes up you always scream for a man.’

‘They are so useful! I wasn’t brought up to break down doors; think what it would do to my nails!’

Keira looked at Sara’s long, beautiful manicured fingernails and laughed. Sara was smart, lively, very shrewd and down-to-earth, when she was with her own sex; but let a man walk into the room and she threw a switch, started fluttering her lashes, using a soft, sweet voice, acting dumb and helpless. And the really maddening thing, thought Keira, was that it always seemed to work; men loved it. Had Gerard Findlay liked it?

Sara added triumphantly, ‘And I was right: he got in here, didn’t he? And without having to break the door down. He is clever…’ She grinned. ‘As well as very sexy.’

Keira wished she could deny it, but much as she might dislike Gerard Findlay she couldn’t ignore his smouldering sexuality. The first time she’d seen him he had made an indelible impact with his black hair and angry grey eyes, that lean and powerful body. He was intensely male, and he made Keira deeply aware of her own sexuality. Everything female in her vibrated in response, as if buried deep inside her was a magnetic needle which quivered and swung towards the north pole of his masculinity.

‘I hate the man,’ she repeated, and Sara gave her a glinting, teasing smile.

‘That’s what you say.’

To her own fury, Keira felt her skin colour, glow hot. At that second the telephone rang. Deeply relieved to be able to change the subject, she said, ‘Could you answer that? Ask whoever it is to leave a name and number and I’ll call them back later.’

‘OK,’ Sara said, then, with a mocking flick of her lashes added, ‘Saved by the bell!’

Keira did not ask her what she meant. Sara was intensely intuitive, unfortunately. She picked up feelings and thoughts Keira did not want her to guess at; it was part of Sara’s strongly developed femininity, which was half instinctive, half learnt at her mother’s knee.

It was the merest accident that Sara came to be in London, let alone working as a model. Her Arab parents had brought her to London when she was four because her father got a job with an Arab bank in Mayfair. When Sara was six, he had died, and her ravishing, still very young mother had stayed on in London because her brother worked in the same bank and was at hand to take care of his sister and her child.

Sara’s mother was young and beautiful; within a year she had married again, a client of the bank with an enormous fortune. Sara had lived in England ever since. At seventeen she had become a model and had been very successful. Her family made sure she never took her clothes off in front of a man, never modelled underclothes or swimwear, but that had not hindered her career. She had begun by working with one of her cousins, a talented young designer who modelled his clothes on her: Arab-inspired caftans and evening dresses, hooded cloaks that swirled around you as you walked, filmy loose white gauze trousers tied at the ankles. His clothes were romantic, visually exciting; he had helped make Sara’s reputation, she had begun to appear on magazine covers and was soon in great demand. When she’d retired from the profession to get married, aged twenty-one, a wail of regrets had gone up from the photographers and designers who liked to have her work for them.