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It took an hour of brisk walking to get there, and she was out of condition after all her time in London, but she got there in the end and found her familiar nook amongst the rocks, sitting herself down on a horizontal shelf of granite, facing out over the vast expanse of moorland beyond. The westerly wind keened over the land and through the gaps in the rocks, winnowing her face. Rain blew in on the wind, but her cheeks were already wet—wet with the tears she was shedding.
Tears for so much. For her mother, who had been deprived of the love and happiness she’d sought, and who’d had to make do with a constricted, unfulfilled life here when she’d once hoped for so much more.
Just like I did—so short a time ago.
But those hopes had been crushed and brutally exposed for the folly they always had been.
I should have known that I could never be part of Ian’s life—never be accepted, never tolerated.
She gazed bleakly over the bare landscape. Her mother had warned her—warned her about the world she sought—but she hadn’t believed her, hadn’t wanted to believe her. Her mother had been burnt, too, expelled and rejected, and that was why she’d sought refuge here, in this lonely place, accepting a life austere and alone, instead of the life she had once hoped for.
Her mother’s hopes had been cruelly dashed.
So, now, had her own.
Marisa’s eyes darkened. She had had days now to try and accept what Athan had done to her—to join together the two utterly different people he seemed to be, to accept that the man she’d thought she’d known, the man she’d come to trust, to give herself to, had been nothing like that at all.
Ruthless. Brutal. Lethal.
That was the true Athan Teodarkis. That was the man she had to see him as. No matter what dreams came in the night, beguiling her. No matter what memories tried to seep into her consciousness, tormenting her.
She lifted her face into the wind, the oncoming rain. Her hair was plastered to her head but she didn’t care. She was used to the weather—glad of the punishing elements battering her. She deserved them to be lashing her.
I was a fool—a trusting, self-deceiving fool—who fell for a man who was all surface, all temptation …
Just as her mother had done.
The realisation hit her like an intake of breath. She shut her eyes, rocking with the ugly, accusing truth of it. The pain of recognition scalded her.
Her mother had been a fool once, hoping for her dreams to come true—but she’d founded her hopes on a man who had made a fool of her.
Just as Athan has made a fool of me …
Pain seized her. Racking her body. She forced herself to be still, to wait it out, to let it pass. She’d been doing that for days now, every time the memory of that nightmare conversation in the apartment leapt to malevolent, vicious life in her head—his denouncement of her, telling her that he’d set up everything between them for the sole purpose of separating her from Ian.
The last of the louring clouds passed overhead and sunshine, bright through the rain-washed air, pooled over her. It was pale and had hardly any heat in it—a frail, fleeting lightening of the grim, bleak day.
Not like the hot, fierce sun of the Caribbean, beating down on my bare shoulders like a physical force, soaking into me as I lay on a sun lounger, idly chatting to Athan lying beside me. Filtering through the louvered windows when we retired to our cabana after lunch to make love …
The pain came again, but she quenched it. Quenched it by will power, by the power of the shame that she had fallen for such a ruthless, heartless masquerade. Because, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, he had lied to her from the very start, and nothing—not the slightest thing about him—had been true.
She got to her feet, scrambling down from her perch in the rocks of the tor and jumping down onto the wet ground. She paused to gaze around her at the vast expanse of open moor. On a rise a few hundred yards away she could see the low outline of stone-edged walls, almost obliterated by heather and time. It was a Bronze Age village, thousands of years old, and it was a familiar part of the landscape to her. Now, as she looked across at it, she wondered at the people who had once, so very long ago, lived there, made their lives there. They had loved and lived and worked and died, each little life as important to its owner as hers was to her. Yet all there was left of them was a few stones.
My life will be like that one day. Leaving not even a shadow on the land. So what does it matter if I am hurt or humiliated or angry or anguished? Soon the pain I feel will pass—soon I will feel nothing.
It had been true for her mother, surely, that a time had come when the man who had treated her so badly no longer had the power to wound her?
I’ll make it true of me, too. I have to.
Slowly, she made her way back down off the moor. The sunshine remained, thin and pale, but better than the rain. The wind was softer here, in the lee of the moor, and there was the scent of spring in it. Winter was nearly over.
All she needed was time. Time to let him fade like a bad dream, to let him go, to move on, forward into a life that she was yet to make. What that new life would be she didn’t know—couldn’t even envisage. She had thought when she’d left the cottage to go to London that her life was just starting—now she was stranded back here again, with no way forward that she could think of.
But I’ll find one—I can. I must. And I can be strong—I have to!
Resolution filled her. With a firmer step she headed down the trackway that led off the moor, climbing the stile that gave on to the dead end of the lane that went back past her cottage to the village a mile or so beyond. The light was fading now, the sun sunk below the tor behind her, and she wanted to get back to the cottage before evening closed in. But as she rounded the final bend of the narrow lane she stopped short.
A car was parked in front of the cottage. For a moment she thought it must be Ian, returning despite her refusal to go back to London with him, but then she realised it was another make of car, and even in the dusk she could see the colour was different. It was an expensive car, though, as Ian’s had been—sleek and powerful-looking. But it wasn’t until the driver’s door opened that she realised just who had come to call …
