No Escape Read Online Free

crash in her early thirties had left Angela Piper with ugly scarring on her
left breast and abdomen. The priority at the time of the accident had been to keep her alive, after which no one had seemed to understand how desperately the pretty brunette had felt about her
disfigurement – not even Maurice Piper, her husband, who had frankly been too busy rejoicing at having his wife still with him and nine-year-old Lizzie. But Angela had found herself unable to
cope with what she regarded as great ugliness and, ashamed for what she saw as her own ingratitude and superficiality, she had stumbled into deep, long-term clinical depression, during which time
Lizzie had grown into an isolated teenager, looking forward to escaping to university.
    Ten years later, Maurice had suffered a fatal heart attack, Angela had gone into free-fall and Lizzie, reading English and enjoying freedom in Sussex, had felt compelled to return home.
Bleakness had spread out before her like fog; an end, she had felt, to learning and fun and friends, until Angela’s psychologist, Stuart Bride, had suggested that perhaps if someone were able
to improve the old scars that clearly still disturbed his patient, it might do more for her mind than years of therapy.
    Christopher Wade – tall, impressive, with shaggy blond hair and piercing grey eyes behind round steel spectacles, a man who wore hats and doffed them regularly for ladies – had swept
into the Pipers’ world with a blast of kindness and, in the fullness of time, at least a degree of healing. And Lizzie, thirteen years younger, had been there to witness it all, the
gentleness, commonsense and skill, as well as the charm, so that when the surgeon had first asked her to lunch, soon after her mother’s second successful operation, she had been intensely
pleased to accept.
    ‘Be careful,’ Angela had said when Lizzie had told her about it.
    ‘It’s only lunch,’ Lizzie had said.
    ‘No such thing between an attractive older man and a beautiful innocent.’
    ‘Not quite innocent, Mum, and hardly beautiful.’ Lizzie liked her blue eyes and blond hair well enough, but her nose was rather sharp and her legs, in her opinion, too short.
‘Certainly not when you consider what he must be used to.’
    ‘Damaged goods,’ Angela had said, wry yet serene, ‘is what he’s used to.’
    Lizzie and Christopher had married the following year, the bride, back at her studies, now at London University, the groom proud and happy, guiding his young wife out of St
Paul’s, Knightsbridge into their new life in his large garden flat in Holland Park. An almost undiluted marital joy that had lasted until first son Edward was three, baby Jack was one, they
had just bought the house, and the nearest thing to an imperfection in Lizzie’s world was Edward’s allergy to dogs and cats.
    The other – very much less attractive – side of her husband of which Lizzie would, in time, become all too aware, had manifested itself the first time in little more than a glint of
darkness, like a small warning slick of brake fluid beneath a car, an alert of trouble to come.
    It had happened in the summer of 1993, following an evening spent celebrating the news that, after several years of writing magazine articles, Lizzie’s first book,
Fooling Around . . .
In the Kitchen
had been accepted for publication by Vicuna Press.
    Christopher had come home from London, drained by hours in the operating theatres at the Beauchamp Clinic (of which he was a director) and St Clare’s Hospital, but bearing a bouquet of
white roses, and had told Lizzie how very clever she was, how proud of her he was, and what a brilliant career she was going to have. And he’d insisted, despite his fatigue, on taking her out
to dinner in Bray, and it had all been wonderful.
    Until about three in the morning, when he had woken Lizzie by switching on his bedside light, pulling up her nightdress and determinedly fondling her between her thighs