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With extreme reluctance and a very apologetic smile, she spoke. ‘Alicia, dear, I’m afraid there’s a very nasty rumour going around … about you.’
Her chest felt tight and hard. ‘Let me guess. Serena Gore-Black.’
Patricia nodded. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s nobody’s business what your history is, but there is the fear that the paparazzi will get a hold of the story. Gossip will always flourish where money, power and the media are prevalent …’ Her voice trailed away and now Alicia felt doubly
sick.
‘My goodness, I never thought—’
‘That your misdeeds would catch up with you?’ Dante asked harshly.
Patricia jumped to her defence. ‘Dante, that’s no way to talk—’
Alicia put out a shaky hand, her head pounding with the implications of this hitting her like a truck. ‘Patricia, please. The truth is … the truth is … it is true.’
Alicia knew she couldn’t act the martyr—didn’t want to. Dante would believe the worst of her in connection with Melanie until that baby was born, but this. she could try and do something about.
‘In one way,’ she said, her voice strong.
Everyone looked at her and she decided to focus on Patricia, her ally.
‘The truth is yes, I did have an affair with a married man, Dr Raul Carro. But the other side of it—’ her voice became bitter ‘—is that I had no idea he was married.’
She felt Dante go still beside her and couldn’t bear to look and see blatant disbelief on his face. She continued, faltering. ‘He came over for just a couple of months from Spain. No wedding ring, no mention of a wife and family …’
She shrugged minutely, bitterly aware of the glaring parallels between that situation and now this one when she said, ‘He was tall, dark and handsome. In grim and grey January, in a bleak part of Oxford, he seemed like some kind of god, and when he asked me out …’
‘You couldn’t resist …’ Patricia smiled with innate feminine understanding and she reached for Alicia’s hand. ‘Oh, my dear, you must have been devastated when you found out.’
Alicia sent a quick glance to Dante but he was staring into his drink.
‘It was pretty horrendous.’ She forced a hard smile. ‘Especially when it turned out that he’d been seeing not only me, but half of the hospital staff, it seemed. I only found out at the very end. Serena Cox, as she was then, was one of his casualties and the first one to find out he was married. She made the phone call to his wife … but was very careful to absolve herself of any crime. She always denied her affair with him.’
Alicia felt icy-cold. It became actually potentially even worse. She continued faintly, avoiding Dante’s eyes, ‘Serena even leaked the story to a local rag and named people in an effort to deflect attention from herself.’
Alicia didn’t have to remind herself that she had been one of those most prominently named and shamed. ‘It didn’t make the nationals … but …’ In her mind’s eye she could still see the lurid headline:
Dirty Doc does it with half the hospital while poor wifey waits at home …
Dante muttered caustically, ‘This just gets better and better.’
For the first time, Alicia thought of how this would affect Derek too, with the welfare of his own company hinging on this merger, and had an image of their four children. She felt as if she were going to vomit.
Derek’s voice boomed and he gasped with comic affront, ‘And now that cow is trying to make you look bad!’
Alicia shrugged, barely keeping her panic contained. She could feel an icy wind coming from Dante’s direction—no doubt he didn’t believe a word of this. ‘We’d never got on working together; it was obviously too good an opportunity for her to miss.’
Derek mopped his sweaty brow with a napkin and said forcibly, ‘I don’t have a problem with Gore-Black; he’s a good man, just married to an unfortunate wife. She’ll have to go home, of course. We do not need people here who want to distract and disrupt proceedings with foul play, do we, Dante?’
Dante looked at Alicia and his eyes were hard. She barely registered Derek’s words. After a long moment he said, ‘No. No, we don’t.’
He was obviously regretting his decision to bring her after all and, as much as she would have welcomed a scenario which would have given her an out, Alicia was sickened to be the cause of creating a scandal within the negotiations—the very kind of scandal that could cause their collapse.
Later, as they said goodnight to the other couple, Patricia said, ‘Alicia, don’t worry, Derek is so angry that I wouldn’t be surprised if that woman will be on a plane home tomorrow.’
Alicia grasped her hand, her face going pale. ‘Oh, no, please; that’ll just made things ten times worse.’
But Patricia just patted her cheek and said goodnight, telling her not to worry.
