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For a second—fleetingly—he thought he saw something move in her eyes, but then it was gone. The same closed, tight expression was back. He could see that her hands were clenched by her sides.
But why? None of this made sense—none of it!
The words broke from him suddenly. ‘None of this makes sense, Talia! Waiting tables when you could be using your talents—’
Something flashed across her face as her head whipped round. ‘Which talent are you referring to, Luke? My interior design skills or being good enough in bed to be your mistress?’
‘What?’ Now the flash of black fire was in his eyes, not hers.
Her expression contorted and, like a dam shattering under impossible pressure, her self-control broke. She could take no more of this.
‘You heard me. Tossing a ruby bracelet at me...telling me there was plenty more where that came from. What else did that make me but your mistress? Payment for services rendered.’
Luke’s hands clenched over the steering wheel, an oath escaping him. ‘That is not how I was thinking of you. I was simply trying to make it clear that I would look after you. That I understood—that I still do understand—just how hard it is for you without your father to look after you the way you’re used to...the way he always did. That I would take his place—’
A noise came from her—a harsh, ugly sound that had shock in it and something more, too.
Horror.
Her eyes were sparking fury, her cheekbones stark against suddenly hollow cheeks as the breath was sucked out of her.
Emotion was running like a black tide in him now, and it was unstoppable. He heard himself speaking again. The words bitten from him, each one as sharp as a dagger.
‘It’s taken me a long time, Talia, to forgive you for walking out on me after that first night without a word of explanation. Not until I discovered whose daughter you were did I understand why you’d walked. It took me a while to work out what I had to offer you to get you to be mine—the same luxury lifestyle you got from your father. That’s what you went running back to—why you left me. That was the choice you made, wasn’t it?’
She slewed round towards him, the suddenness of her movement cutting across him, and in her face was a fury that was like a blow across his cheek.
‘No, it was not! It was not the choice I made! The choice I made, Luke, was the choice I have had to make all my life!’
Her features convulsed, and her eyes were pinpoints of anger. They skewered him like daggers. Her hands were fisted and he saw her lift them and bring them down sharply, vehemently, on the dashboard.
‘You keep talking on and on about how I was a pampered princess, Daddy’s doted-on darling! Showered with designer clothes and jewellery, given some toy job to preen my inflated ego, given a free deluxe apartment to live in, a flash car to drive. Everything a spoiled little brat could ever want. Well, I was, Luke. Yes, I was a pampered princess. But I lived in a cage, Luke.’ Suddenly her voice was not vehement, but hollow, bleak. ‘In a cage that had bars of gold that my father had welded around me. And I hated it.’
His lips thinned. The black tide was still running.
‘You could have walked out, Talia, at any time. Made your own way in the world. You’re a talented designer—you could have done real work...work you could have been proud of. You’ve shown you can with your designs for the hotel. Why didn’t you have the guts to leave your gilded cage?’
She could hear the condemnation in his voice and a deadly familiar hollowness opened inside her. She let her hands fall limply to her lap again and slumped back in the seat. She ran a weary hand over her eyes. Tiredness ate at her. It broke her heart to be here with Luke, who was as harsh and as utterly uncomprehending as everyone else. He saw her the same way everyone else did.
Right from the very moment she’d walked into his office—when they’d both realised the coincidental connection between them—he had treated her as so much less than the person she knew she could be. The person she was in her heart—the one she wanted to be, tried to be. The person she thought he had seen that one incredible night when they had first met and again in their Caribbean paradise.
But all that time on the island this is what he thought of me. I worked so hard on my designs and he didn’t even look at them. He was just working out how to buy me, how to drape me in jewels and fly me in jets to exotic places so he could own me, control me, just like my father. I thought he was offering me freedom, but he was just building his own gilded cage around me.
He would not understand, and she hardly knew why she was bothering to say it—knew only that she might as well, because she was here, now, in this car with him, high above the Costas, looking down from afar. Below, in the town, her mother was in the hospital. In a day or so she would move her out to a nursing home, and then back to the tiny apartment above the café. And she would go on working—waiting on tables, mopping floors, and getting by.
Luke would be gone. Back to his own life—a rich man’s life that had nothing to do with her—and she would never see him again.
‘No, Luke, I didn’t have the guts to leave—just as you say.?
? She heard herself sigh, defeat in every word. ‘I only had the guts to stay.’
She didn’t bother looking at him. What would be the point of that?
‘I don’t understand...’
There was an audible frown in his voice so now she did turn her head to look at him. A great weariness of spirit weighed her down.
She heard her voice answering him...weary, defeated. ‘Luke, my father gave me everything, just like you said, but he made me pay for it. He made my mother pay, too. Oh, not in ways that anyone would notice, but we paid, all the same. We had to live our lives exactly as he wanted us to. We had to wear the clothes he wanted us to, live where he wanted, entertain the guests he wanted us to—had to be the ornaments in his hugely successful life that he wanted us to be. That was our purpose. To be his trophy wife and his trophy daughter.’
