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‘No, prior to our marriage, I had no dealings with Tasha beyond sharing a dinner table with her occasionally in her father’s company. She was only seventeen and I haven’t dated a teenager since I was one myself,’ Eros countered drily. ‘I was simply a regular visitor to her home and a close friend of her father’s. Without any encouragement from me, Tasha decided that she had fallen in love with me and she convinced Filipe that it was a lasting love while I believed it was only a teenage infatuation. Her father, however, wanted her to be happy and he trusted me to look after her.’
‘Naturally, but—’
‘He knew I wasn’t in love with Tasha but neither was I in love with anyone else. He asked me to marry her and give the relationship a chance,’ Eros volunteered grimly. ‘He was dying. I couldn’t say no to him. Because I wanted him to leave this world in peace, I agreed and a wedding was arranged before Filipe’s condition deteriorated.’
‘You should’ve said no if you didn’t have feelings for her!’ Winnie argued helplessly. ‘It was emotional blackmail.’
Eros tensed even more. ‘It wasn’t like that. I believed that I knew what I was doing. I didn’t love Tasha but I did care what happened to her. She was a very emotional teenager and I didn’t want her to be alone and unprotected as I had once been myself. There are a lot of sharks in the world, particularly if you have money. And Filipe left Tasha very well provided for.’
‘If she was only seventeen, what age were you?’ Winnie pressed.
‘Twenty-five.’ Eros paced restively across to the windows, his discomfort at the subject he was talking about painfully apparent to her. ‘But it was a huge gap. She was a very young seventeen year old because her father had spoiled her and shielded her from real life. I was a very serious twenty five year old because my childhood had been less than idyllic and I knew how hard I would have to work to overcome my father’s bad reputation in business. Tasha and I had very little in common.’
Winnie released her pent-up breath in a slow hiss. ‘I think you were crazy to marry her. She would’ve been far too immature for you at that age and if she thought she loved you, marrying her was only encouraging her expectations.’
‘I didn’t encourage her.’ Eros’s proud dark head reared up and back and he sent her a reproving glance from glittering green eyes. ‘I didn’t take her to bed either. In fact, we never had sex.’
Brown eyes locked hard to his lean, darkly handsome features, Winnie stared back at him. ‘Never?’ she stressed in wonderment.
‘Never,’ Eros confirmed. ‘Tasha wanted us to have a normal marriage from the start but I disagreed. She wasn’t ready for an adult relationship and she deserved a husband who loved her. She also needed to have the freedom her father had denied her to enjoy all the usual youthful experiences. I hurt her pride a lot when I turned her down but I didn’t think there was an alternative.’
‘So, what happened after that?’ Winnie pressed, hanging on his every word, her mind buzzing with conjecture and shock and bewilderment. Whatever she had believed of Eros’s marriage, she had always assumed that it was a normal marriage between two people who had, at least, started out loving each other.
‘We made an agreement. Tasha wanted to study design and set up her own interiors business. She transferred to a student course in London and I told her that she was free to date anyone she wanted, which she duly did. Unfortunately, however, she couldn’t bring herself to extend the same freedom to me. She was too jealous, too possessive to accept the idea of me being with another woman,’ he admitted tautly. ‘And I did promise her that if she still felt the same way about me after she had graduated, I would give our marriage a try.’
‘Why on earth would you make a promise like that when you didn’t want her in the first place?’
Eros vented a groan. ‘Because she was heartbroken that I wouldn’t agree to have a normal relationship with her. Although I was convinced that she’d grow out of her infatuation, she refused to accept it. I was trying to let her down gently and allow her to save face. Thee mou... I assumed she’d grow out of thinking she loved me!’
‘It was still a promise too far. It left your life in limbo,’ Winnie pointed out, reckoning that it had been very short-sighted of him to agree to such unequal terms.
A grim look tautened Eros’s strong face. ‘You have no idea how guilty I felt because I couldn’t return her feelings,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘At one stage, she was crying and threatening to harm herself. I would have said anything, promised almost anything to calm her down.’
‘Oh...’ Winnie swallowed hard, picturing Eros struggling to calm and control a teenage drama queen and wincing in sympathy.
‘But you’re right. It was the wrong thing to promise because, naturally, both of us were likely to change. But for several years, our unconventional arrangement did work,’ Eros told her wryly. ‘Just as her father had hoped I was able to watch over her, control her finances and ensure that nobody took advantage of her. We would see each other occasionally for dinner but we never occupied the same house and we lived entirely separate lives. Tasha moved from luxury student accommodation into her own apartment above her first design studio.’
‘No wonder you seemed to be single when I met you,’ Winnie muttered. ‘No wonder there was no sign of a woman in your life. Why didn’t you tell me that you were trapped in a marriage that you never wanted?’
‘It wouldn’t have been fair to Tasha to admit that I felt trapped. She was my wife and I did try to be loyal to her. In fact, I kept my promise to her until I met you because there were no other women before you,’ Eros admitted with a twist of his sensual mouth. ‘And then with you around suddenly, life became very, very complicated in all sorts of ways. I was married but in my own mind I was still single...and then there was that stupid promise I’d made to her.’
‘But presumably she took advantage of the freedom you offered her?’
‘Of course, she did. In fact at the time I was involved with you, she was actually living with one of her boyfriends. And then that broke up very messily and she came running back to me for support, convinced that it was the perfect time for us to try having a normal marriage. That was when you met her, when she turned up at the country house without warning,’ he revealed impatiently. ‘But by that stage, I knew that I wanted out and that I needed my freedom back. Ultimately she agreed to the divorce.’
‘She is very beautiful,’ Winnie remarked uneasily, an image of Tasha’s Scandinavian fairness and endless legs still haunting her. ‘Why didn’t you want to give her that final chance?’
‘Because I felt more like her big brother and when I finally admitted that to her, she realised that that was unlikely to change,’ he confessed wryly. ‘I didn’t tell her about you though. I didn’t want to hurt her.’
A dawning awareness of certain unwelcome facts was keeping Winnie quiet and unresponsive. Right from the outset Eros had put Tasha’s needs before her own, she concluded unhappily. He had sent Winnie down to his country house, where Tasha was less likely to see her or learn about her existence. He had continually protected Tasha’s feelings and had tried to remain loyal to her in mind, if not in body. When he had finally gone for a divorce, Winnie had already disappeared from his life and even after he had regained his freedom, he hadn’t come looking for her. Those truths hurt. He might not have loved his wife but she had received a level of caring and loyalty from him that Winnie had never commanded. In short, Winnie had only ever been runner-up on Eros’s scale of who was most important to him, at least until he had discovered that she had given birth to his son.
As the silence stretched to an uneasy length, Eros breathed in deep. ‘I should have told you the truth when we first met. I regret keeping quiet but while I was with you, I was an emotional mess. Our affair was so intense it unnerved me and the more I thought about it, the more wrong it felt but I couldn’t make myself walk away.’
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nbsp; ‘Then it’s probably a good thing that I did the walking away for you,’ Winnie pronounced in a tone of finality.
‘Winnie?’ Eros prompted with a frown of incomprehension.
Stiff with discomfiture at the wounding thoughts flaying her like knives, Winnie stood up, too hurt and proud to do anything other than conceal her true feelings. ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve finally told me the whole story,’ she muttered hastily as she frantically thought about how best to quickly escape an even more awkward conversation. ‘But, you know, all I can think about right now is food.’
‘Food?’ Eros repeated in astonishment, for he had been bracing himself for questions, comments and further condemnation of the choices he had made.
