AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Your brother is unhappy. He feels—besmirched. Slandered.’
‘He was never supposed to know. He shouldn’t have gone to Athens. He should have gone to Devon, like he said. I told him you wouldn’t give me the money. I told him.’ Her voice was still calm.
He mirrored it back. ‘But you omitted the little detail of why.’
Her eyes flickered. ‘It wasn’t relevant.’
The tightening of his hands over the arms of the chair came again.
‘Nor relevant to your uncle, either, I presume?
‘No.’
‘Nor, of course—’ his voice was very calm now, his eyes resting on her, the glitter gone, quite expressionless ‘—to me.’
She gave a little shake of her head.
‘No,’ she said.
There was silence. Only the sound of traffic in the street below. And the thudding of her heart, beat by beat by beat.
‘Yet you wanted, that money very badly,’ he said. ‘So badly, you made a whore out of yourself.’
She met his eyes. ‘No. Whores get paid. The money was not for me. I expect Jem has told you that.’
‘Yes. He was quite discursive on the subject. You may be glad to know, if you consider it in the slightest relevant, that I have handed him a cheque that will cover the entire restoration and refurbishment costs, plus running costs for five years.’
‘That’s very good of you.’ Her voice was hollow.
‘If you had told me what you wanted the money for I would have given it to your stepbrother. And if you had told me he was your stepbrother, not your lover, I would not have thought you an adulterous slut.’
His voice was still conversational. It sliced through her like a surgeon’s blade.
‘So why did you?’ he asked. ‘Let me think you an adulterous slut? Because you did so quite deliberately. You had so many opportunities to put me straight…’
The glitter was in his eyes again.
‘You didn’t take one of them. Why?’ The softness of his voice eviscerated her, as once his fury had done.
She had thought his fury unbearable. She had been
wrong.
His dark, glittering eyes rested on her across the small space of her studio.
‘Vicky, I have flown fifteen hundred miles. It’s four in the morning for me. I scrambled my pilot when he was having dinner with his wife. So you will give me answers. Believe me, you will give me answers.’
His eyes were slicing through her. Inch by inch.
‘Why did you let me think you were a faithless bitch?’
Her fingers were pressing onto the tiled surface of the breakfast bar. Pressing so hard that at any moment, any moment now, they must surely snap.
‘I told you—I wanted out of our marriage. And it worked, didn’t it?’
‘You slandered yourself and your stepbrother, you shamed your uncle. Or wasn’t that relevant?’
‘No.’ None of that had been relevant.
