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As the implications of the sad, reluctantly advanced confession swept Kerry in a stormy flood, she swallowed hard sooner than betray a sympathy which would be fiercely rejected. Athene might have strayed in the madness she described, but for a strong woman of deep, religious convictions her choice had been completely in character.
In the heavy silence, Athene took a deep breath. “He didn’t betray me, but I lost the son who loved and respected his mother that day. He never alluded to the incident again. How else could he behave?” she appealed tiredly. “His love for his father tied him to silence. He grew up that day all at once. He learnt that appearances could be deceptive. Now perhaps you may understand why Alex would find it very hard to trust a woman.”
And why he divorced me and why he wouldn’t come near me, Kerry added in inner anguish. He had been afraid to end up in the weak position he probably believed his father had held throughout his marriage. He had cut her out of his life sooner than risk that danger. “Why have you told me this?” she asked.
“For Alex. The settlement of a debt,” Athene emphasised, looking every year of her age. “Now perhaps you will go to him and tell him there is no other man in your life.”
The edge of her contempt stiffened Kerry. “It’s not as simple as that. Alex doesn’t love me.”
“Does that matter, if he needs you?” Athene turned on her like a lioness defending a cub. “If there was a cure for you I would have given it to him! You are Alex’s one weakness. I don’t know how he kept away from you for four years. And you say, ‘he doesn’t love me’,” she mimicked in a die-away echo, but her lined dark eyes were suspiciously bright. “Do you think I came here easily to ask for your help? He is on the island, and when I saw him last week he was exceedingly drunk. While you are painting your walls, my son is going to pieces!”
As Athene stalked back out to her car in high dudgeon, Kerry was picturing Alex standing in the doorway as he had that last day. Alex without words, simply taking a last look at her. Does it matter what drives him if he needs you? “You can never be here for me when I need you.” The ragged condemnation he had uttered weeks ago thickened her throat. It was three steps to the phone, and she got there in one. If there was something wrong with Alex, she would go to him. Just once more she would put her own pride on the line. Athene would not have approached her lightly.
By the time she lurched out of the helicopter late that evening, and the pilot tucked Nicky’s limp, sleeping body into her arms, her adrenalin-charged rush to Alex’s side seemed a little excessive. Nobody was expecting them. Kerry had purposely not phoned. She had not wanted Alex to have time to prepare himself for her arrival.
Sofia hurried towards her in a dressing-gown, with Spiros in her wake. Kerry settled Nicky into the manservant’s arms with a relieved sigh. She had been prepared for Alex to appear, looking his usual smooth self and embarrassingly curious about her uninvited descent. But he didn’t appear, and Sofia fussed round her, trying to persuade her to go to bed. A thin bar of light was burning below the study door. Seeing it, Kerry turned from Sofia and opened the door.
The shutters were drawn, the air rank with the pervasive fumes of whisky. Alex was slumped in a chair, and she no longer needed to wonder why he had failed to come and greet her. He hadn’t had a shave in days. He was haggard, his cheekbones protruding sharply to emphasise his unhealthy pallor. Her sleek, beautiful Alex had gone skinny, and he was viewing her with unfocused dark eyes much as a drunk uncritically accepts the presence of a parade of pink elephants.
“Oh…Alex, how could you do this to yourself?” she whispered painfully.
She threw open the shutters and the windows to let in fresh air. Something crunched under her shoe. She bent to lift a crumpled black and white photo of herself, a stolen photo taken when she was unawares some time in the past. She was emerging from the showroom, talking animatedly to Steven.
Alex muttered something incoherent. He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Kerry?” he slurred uncertainly. “Don’t go away again.”
He pulled himself up in the chair and she stood over him with folded arms. “Do you love me?” she demanded shakily, surmising that she was most likely to receive the truth in the condition he was in, and if she was taking advantage, too bad.
“You’ll disappear if I say yes,” he mumbled accusingly.
“No, I won’t. You’ve got that the wrong way round,” she protested.
He pushed unsteady fingers through his tousled black hair. “Yes.”
Her eyes watered. “Say it, then.”
His mouth curved into a shadowy smile, the sort of smile a pink elephant might inspire. “I love you,” he managed, and then, “Much too much to hold on to you.”
“No…no!” She could have kicked him. “I didn’t want the qualification. That’s just so typical of you, Alex. You can’t even say three little words the way I want to hear them. I’ve waited six years, and in six years I got it thrown at me in the past tense once, and now I get it with a qualification. If I had any pride at all, I wouldn’t be here ready to tell you that I love you…”
She retreated, shocked by her own loss of control. But Alex had finally been sprung from his lethargy. He stood up, swaying slightly. “Hallucinations don’t shout.”
“I didn’t mean to shout,” she answered shakily.
His hand lifted to touch a strand of her gleaming hair. “I’m not fussy,” he muttered hoarsely. “Did you mean it?”
“Yes.” She watched him breathe again, watched a gleam of vitality spark in his dulled eyes.
“And I have to be drunk.” Red washed his sallow complexion. He backed towards the door. “I need a shower…I need a coffee. Don’t go away.”
She wiped her eyes as he left the room. She had seen in his face what no counterfeiter could have copied. The same pain, the same fear, the same loneliness, and she was ridiculously tempted to sit down and have a good cry. If he had left her, it had not been because he wanted to leave her. It was almost an hour before he reappeared. Either a miracle potion or simple shock had sobered him up. Shaven, his long, straight legs encased in tight jeans matched to a clean white shirt, he looked like Alex again, only not quite so confident as was his wont. He strode out of the bathroom impatiently, and then wheeled round in surprise to find her seated on the end of his bed.
“I thought you’d got lost,” she said, hot-cheeked.
“And I thought you were with Steven,” he drawled tautly.
She told him quietly what she had told Athene earlier in the day.
“He cares for someone else? How is this possible?”
“They’ve known each other since they were teenagers, and sometimes they don’t see each other for months on end. He’s a friend,” she hesitated, “I wouldn’t have been attracted to him in any other way, in any case; he can be a real pain…”
His strained mouth curved helplessly with humour. “A pain…all I saw were those golden looks of his…for months.” His smile ebbed with discomfiture.
“I saw that photo. You must have spied on me. Why?”
“Is there always a sane explanation for the things we do?” he countered tautly. “I told myself that I had a right to know what you were doing when you had my son. But when you began to go out socially with Steven, I couldn’t bear it and who knows what goes on behind closed doors? I was afraid you might marry him. Then, when I saw you again, everything I had spent years denying came alive again. For a few days, I was like a man possessed. I didn’t care what I had to do to get you back, I didn’t even ask myself why I was doing it.”
A tender smile softened her lips. “You’re forgiven. If you hadn’t used pressure, we wouldn’t be here together now.”
The topaz eyes narrowed. “How can you say that? Per Dio…I behaved like the savage you said I was.”
“I love you, Alex.”
He moved closer, his dark features clenched taut. “I realised that I still loved you the first time we made love again, but I believed that
you cared for Steven. At best you seemed to tolerate me, and then after that incident on the beach, you were cold in my arms. I had even killed that,” he emphasised with hard self-derision.
“I was upset, frightened by your jealousy,” she argued warily, wondering why he had yet to put his arms around her.
“I know.” In shamed acknowledgement, he looked at her guiltily. “But I still could not have let you go. I couldn’t face losing you. In the end, I was even relieved that you were pregnant. It was another way of holding on to you. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t make love to you any more, it didn’t matter to me that you cared, as I thought, for another man. I still had you, and that was sufficient. When they came to me and told me the truth, everything came apart…” His hand sketched a movement of defeat. “Before, I believed I had rights, and I made excuses for myself. When I couldn’t any more, all I could do was let you go, and it was hardly enough in the circumstances.”
Her patience was wearing thin. Did he plan to stand here for the rest of the night, unsmilingly endeavouring to persuade her that he was an undeserving cause? She could have walked on water after seeing the love in Alex when he was too low to work at concealment. Now she did something far less dangerous. She closed the distance he was carefully maintaining from her. Her hands cupped his hard cheekbones, her green eyes clinging to his. “I didn’t want to be let go. I love you. But I wasn’t going to beg you to stay.”
The dark gaze positively shimmered. “But…”
“No buts.” Her fingertip brushed his tense lower lip softly.
He searched her face torturously and then, with a groan, he locked her tightly to him. He trembled against her, and Kerry hugged him close as he buried his face in her hair, his voice muffled and gruff. “Do you know what it was like to have to leave you? I hope you know what you are doing now. I could not leave again.”
For a long time he kept her imprisoned in his arms, and when he moved it was to back her down on to the bed with a husky sigh about the convenience of the setting she had chosen. “I should tell you something,” he confided then, abruptly. “There has never been another woman.”
Her lashes flew up in bemusement. “I don’t think I…”
His dark visage split with sudden amusement, the momentary and rare embarrassment she had seen there dissipating. “I had this…er…complication.” His fingers toyed with the buttons on her blouse as he loosed them one by one. “Every time I got that close to a woman, I would always think of you, and the desire…it would recede. Didn’t you notice how desperate I was that night in London? Four years is a very long time to feel that you are only half a man because you do not want to admit that you are still in love with your ex-wife.”
