Robbie seemed to have a thing about saving her and at that time she was happy to be rescued. He told her how he planned to follow his father into the hotel business. Wait until she saw the desert lights, she’d scarcely believe her eyes. In Vegas they could live happily together. Lester Fallon could never come near them again.
On Robbie’s eighteenth birthday he told Laura he wanted her to come with him: he was quitting Belleville to study for a business degree and refused to leave her behind. She would turn sixteen in a month and a horrible instinct told him that Lester, with all his sick perversions, wouldn’t wait much longer. Robbie had seen the look in Laura’s brother’s eyes and he didn’t like it one bit. Lester was a hungry man, a twisted man. Hungry for his own sister.
‘I can’t …’ protested Laura.
‘Why?’ He took her in his arms. ‘Why can’t you? ‘
She couldn’t think of a reason, except for a misguided sense of loyalty to the brother who had hit her, abused her and caused her such misery. She knew Robbie Lewis was the love of her life. They hadn’t used that word yet but there was no doubting how she felt.
Weeks later, on the night she turned sixteen, everything changed.
Lester was out drinking, unaware what day it was, and she and Robbie were in their usual place, beside the felled tree, on a blanket under the stars. There, finally, she had given herself to him.
Robbie was gentle, taking his time, not wanting to hurt her. As she lay back and whispered, ‘I want you,’ a low groan escaped his lips and he moved himself on top of her. Unbuttoning her blouse, he slid a hand on to the skin there, feeling the steady beat beneath his palm. She shook from deep within.
They stayed like that, his hand over her heart.
‘I love you,’ he said.
It was like finding the answer to a great mystery and realising it was something so simple all along.
‘I love you, too.‘
‘Be with me,’ he said. ‘Always.’
She raised her head to kiss him, tracing the line of his jaw with her finger. ‘Always.’
His hand found her breast and she moaned softly, her nipple hardening under his touch. He wrapped an arm underneath her and pulled her body up towards him. On instinct she felt for his hardness and freed him from his jeans, and that part of him wasn’t a frightening, threatening thing but a warm, familiar part of the boy she loved.
Her body was ablaze, every fibre wanting him inside. When he entered her she felt a brief, sharp pain, but it was a wonderful, exquisite kind of pain and she savoured it, slowly easing into the rhythm of his movements, fitting with him, until they were just one person. As the pleasure mounted and a hot prickliness began at the point where they joined and then swelled within her, she gave herself up to the most blinding, body-shattering feeling she had ever known. She wrapped her legs tight around him and pulled him further in, wanting him, needing him, loving him and never wanting him to stop.
Afterwards, as they lay naked in each other’s arms, he asked her again. Except this time it wasn’t a question.
‘Come away with me.’
She looked into his eyes and brushed away a lock of dark hair. ‘You know I will.’
Once more they made love, and this time it was slower, more passionate, and even though it was dark she could see him watching her all the while. This time there was no pain, just that indescribable heat that surged through her. She could never have guessed that pleasure like it existed.
She should have known it couldn’t last.
‘Well, well, well,’ said a rasping voice, the light from a battered torch bathing their bodies in yellow light. It was Lester, drunk and swaying, his lank hair in a thin rope down his back and his lips split and cracked.
Laura grabbed her clothes. Robbie pulled on his jeans, eyes fixed on the other man.
Lester fumbled in his belt for something. In the bald light they saw it was a gun. He waved it in their faces, his eyes manic.
In her heart Laura knew something terrible was going to happen.
‘Somebody better tell me what the hell’s going on,’ he growled, ‘or I swear to Christ I’ll blow both your brains out.’
33
Las Vegas
The MGM Grand Garden Arena was a pit of clamour and excitement. Thousands filled the space, surging up