order champagne,’ Annie began as the waiter suddenly appeared with a bottle and three glasses, and then stopped as she saw the look of smiling complicity Helena and Bob were exchanging.
‘This was supposed to be my treat,’ she reproached them as the waiter filled their champagne flutes.
‘Yes, I know, but it is our celebration,’ Bob reminded her fondly.
Annie agreed quietly, her eyes large and dark with the emotional intensity of her thoughts, tears just beginning to film them as she turned to Helena and told her huskily, ‘If it hadn’t been for you…’ She stopped, unable to go on, and the three of them sat in silence as they each shared the others’ emotions.
It was Bob who broke the emotional intensity of the moment, picking up his glass and lifting it, announcing in a firm voice, ‘To you, Annie…’
‘Yes, my love. To you,’ Helena joined in the toast.
As she looked at Annie’s flushed face Helena marvelled at the recuperative powers of the human body and its capacity for endurance. Looking at Annie, it was hard to equate the healthy young woman she was now with the comatose, badly injured accident victim she had seen lying inert on the hospital trolley as she’d hurried through the Accident and Emergency unit.
Later, whilst they were waiting for their pudding course, Annie excused herself to the other two.
‘I’m just going to the loo,’ she announced, getting up and walking towards the cloakrooms in the foyer. She was just about to walk past the entrance to the conservatory when the door opened and a party of four men came out. Two of them Annie recognised as executives from the company she worked for, the third she didn’t know, and the fourth…
Her heart gave a stunned leap inside her chest wall, shock rooting her to the floor where she stood as she stared open-mouthed at the fourth member of the quartet in total disbelief.
It was him! He…The man…From her dreams…So exactly identical to him that she could only stand and stare in silent shock. Her dream lover come to life! But how could that be possible when he was only a figment of her own imagination, a creature she had conjured up within her own mind? No, it wasn’t possible. She must be imagining it…hallucinating…She had drunk too much champagne she decided dizzily.
Quickly she closed her eyes and counted to ten, and then she opened them. He was still there, and what was more he was looking at her. She felt as though her blood was quite literally draining from her veins, leaving her empty, her body cold and in danger. Panic filled her. She tried to move and couldn’t. She tried to speak but no sound emerged from her paralysed throat…A hideous, horrible sensation of fear invaded her. She wanted to move. She wanted to speak. But she couldn’t. With horrible certainty Annie knew that she was going to faint.
When she came round she was in Liz’s private quarters and Bob and Helena were hovering anxiously over her.
‘Darling, what is it…what happened?’ Helena was asking her worriedly as she chafed her hand. Helen’s fingers were on her pulse, Annie recognised shakily, and she could see the professional beginning to take over from the concerned friend. Determinedly she forced herself to sit up.
‘I’m all right,’ she insisted. ‘I just felt faint, that’s all,’ she whispered, still too much in shock to be able to tell Helena what had actually happened.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised to Liz as she ignored Helena’s protests and swung her feet to the floor, gritting her teeth against her giddiness as she made herself stand up. ‘I don’t really have much of a head for vintage champagne,’ she excused herself, giving the other woman a brief smile.
Of course there was no question of either Helena or Bob allowing her to drive home, nor of her being allowed to return home on her own. Instead she was put to bed in the bedroom which had been hers whilst she was recuperating, with Helena fussing round her and announcing that she felt it might be a good idea if she were to have a full check-up.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Annie insisted. ‘I just had a bit of a shock, that’s all.’
‘A shock? What kind of shock?’ Helena demanded anxiously.
‘I…I thought I saw someone I…’ Annie paused and shook her head, her mouth dry as she told her, ‘I must have made a mistake, imagined it. I know, because it just isn’t possible that…’
‘Who was it? Who did you think you saw, Annie?’ Helena probed.
‘It…it wasn’t anyone. It was…just…just a mistake,’ Annie repeated stubbornly, but as she reached for the cup of tea Bob had brought her she started to tremble so violently that she had to put it down again.
Covering her face with her hands she admitted shakily, ‘Oh, Helena…it was so…so surreal. I don’t…I saw him…the man…from my dreams…He was…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘I know that I can’t have done, that he just doesn’t exist, but…’
‘You’re getting yourself all worked up,’ Helena told her firmly. ‘I’ll give you something to help you relax and go to sleep, and then in the morning we can talk about it properly.’
As she lay back against the pillows Annie gave her a small weak smile. She knew that her friend was right, of course.
Several minutes later Helena, who had left the room, came back with a glass of water and two tablets for her to take. She watched with maternal tenderness as Annie dutifully swallowed them down.
‘I’m sorry if I spoiled your evening,’ she whispered drowsily to Helena as the tablets started to work.
Now that she was beginning to feel calmer she couldn’t understand why she had overreacted so foolishly, just because of some minor and no doubt imagined similarity between the man she had seen in the restaurant and her own fantasy lover. And anyway, now that she really thought about it, there was no way her dream lover would ever have looked at her the way the man in the restaurant had, with that look of implacable cold hostility in his dense, darkly blue eyes, that blanked-out look of icy contempt and banked-down anger.
Wearily Annie felt her eyes starting to close, and ten minutes later, when Helena quietly shut the bedroom door behind herself, Annie was deeply and completely asleep.
‘I suspect that the emotion of the evening and the memories it stirred up are the root cause of what happened,’ Helena announced to her husband Bob as she went back downstairs to join him.
‘Mmm…There’s no way the man she saw could be someone she knew, is there?’ Bob asked her curiously.
‘Well, it is a possibility I suppose,’ Helena agreed. ‘After all, as you know, there are still some missing pieces from her memory. She can remember arriving here in Wryminster, but she can’t remember when she arrived. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone who was involved with her to the extent they would have had to be involved with her to be responsible for dreams of the intensity of those that Annie has been having could ever be cold-hearted enough, uncaring enough, not to get in touch after the accident. After all, it was reported in the local papers.’
‘No, it does seem improbable,’ Bob agreed.
Upstairs in her sleep Annie started to smile, her body quivering with a mixture of nervousness and excitement.
‘God, but you feel so good…Will you let me look at you as well as hold you, little Annie? I want to so much…’
Annie tensed a little as the warm, knowing male hands began to gently undress her, nervous at first, her heart thumping anxiously, but then, as pleasure and excitement took over from her initial apprehension, her tension started to fade, her body beginning to relax as she started to respond to the soft verbal praise of her lover whilst he, oh, so slowly and carefully, laid her body bare to his gaze, peeling back the protective layers of her clothing, freeing her flesh to the warmth of his hands, their warmth, like their strength, a benediction as well as a nerve-thrilling wonderful new sensation.