The Danger Within

Twenty

Lilian had not given any proper thought to Kurt’s reluctance to sleep with her before their marriage. He’d told her his respect and love for her was such that he wanted her to be his in every way before they had sex together, and that meant he wanted her to be his wife first. She had found it touching, unusual, refreshing, and more than a little romantic. His subsequent inability to have intercourse on their honeymoon she had, to begin with, dismissed as merely a nervous blip. There had been too much of a build-up to the big moment. Neither of them had been able to relax properly.

It was only after they returned to London, to Penbourne Villas, that he had succeeded in achieving complete intimacy with her. It was after he had hit her for the first time — but only a couple of light, if perhaps overly enthusiastic, slaps on her buttocks, nothing which concerned her unduly. She had simply been delighted that their marriage had finally been consummated, and that Kurt had been suddenly more than capable of full intercourse.

Nonetheless he’d apologized profusely afterwards, and hesitantly explained how much slapping her had turned him on. For which he apologized even more. She could not now believe how unconcerned she had been. There was just nothing about Kurt, so courteous, so apparently gentle, so obviously in love with her, to prepare her for the nightmare to come.

However, the slaps became more severe every time they had sex. Always he was apologetic afterwards, but always he seemed to go a little further than the last time.

The night when he finally punched her full in the face would be engraved upon her soul forever. Her head had rocked back on her shoulders, her nose began to bleed and her lip split open. The force was such that she was momentarily concussed. Even so she could not to fail to notice the sexual frenzy evoked in Kurt. His penis was rock hard and enormous when he lunged into her, and it hurt almost as much as the punch. There was no foreplay. His foreplay had been quite simply to cause her pain. She lay sobbing beneath him, and the greater her distress became, the more enhanced, it seemed, was his pleasure.

One half of Lilian still remained unable to accept that any of this could be happening to her. After all, hadn’t she been the bright young thing of her year at school, sailing off to university to study literature, effortlessly entering the world of journalism?

But even that had not gone quite the way she had originally imagined, of course. She’d seen herself as a hard-hitting investigative journalist putting the world to rights. She’d ended up as the features editor of a monthly magazine called Keyhole, a showbiz glossy, a kind of downmarket Hello, with more smut and less airbrushing.

By the time she reached her early thirties Lilian had begun to harbour some serious regrets. She’d wondered if those other so important things in life, like a family, and having children, had passed her by.

Then she had met Kurt, at the Keyhole-sponsored wedding of a South-African-born supermodel, and when he had proposed marriage, only weeks later, she’d had no hesitation in accepting.

Lilian had found him irresistible. Not least because he seemed to want everything that she did. Neither of them had been married before. Kurt, at forty-three, was ten years older than her. They joked that they had saved themselves for each other. Only it wasn’t entirely a joke.

In the beginning it wasn’t Kurt who had pushed Lilian to walk so entirely away from her old life. It was she who’d expressed her willingness, even her eagerness, to give up her job and concentrate entirely on her forthcoming marriage and on having a family. She had no wish to be Ms Lilian Cook any more. She wanted to be Mrs Kurt St John. She wanted to take her man’s name and to be taken into his world.

Lilian resigned at once from Keyhole and her editor agreed to waive her notice period. It was perhaps the greatest irony of her life that she had felt so wonderfully free when she’d settled into the first-class apartment of an aircraft bound for South Africa on her way to marry the handsome charmer at her side.

Even now she could remember clearly how happy and excited she’d been. In stark contrast, her present plight seemed like a terrible dream. It wasn’t though. It was grim reality.